The dictionary of photography: for the amateur and professional photographer (7th edition)

The present edition contains about one hundred and fifty pages of new matter, and three hundred fresh headings ; also between twenty and thirty new diagrams these additions being necessitated by the rapid advance of photographic technics. Notwithstanding these considerable additions, the bulk of the volume has not been considerably increased, as much overlapping matter-or partially overlapping matter -has been eliminated; and this without disadvantage to the reader, as cross-references have been inserted where required. The Appendix, which, in the sixth edition, formed nearly one-third of the whole book, has been incorporated with the alphabetical portion-a change which will facilitate reference, as it brings all matter into one sequence. The omission of metric equivalents from the formula! may appear at first sight to be an undesirable retrogression; but, if so, it is a retrogression which will make the book more convenient for that very large majority who only use the British weights and measures ; an additional column of figures not unfrequently leading to confusion and error. Those who prefer to use the metric system in compounding their photographic preparations, will probably rather gain than lose by the change, as the tables given in the article weighing and measuring will enable them to effect the necessary conversions with any required degree of accuracy. In giving equivalents of the English weights and measures according to the metric system, very inconvenient quantities, expressed by many figures, are generally necessary if exact equivalence or strict proportion is to be secured ; while, on the other hand, the giving of approximate figures may be adopted for the sake of. simplicity of expression. Each course is about equally undesirable, and liable to cause inconvenience. In very few cases, where work of considerable delicacy is involved, and the original instructions were given according to the metric system (e.g., in case of emulsion for the Lippmann process), the original figures have been retained. THOMAS BOLA

Alternative display and interaction devices

While virtual environment systems are typically thought to consist of a head mounted display and a flex-sensing glove, alternative peripheral devices are beginning to be developed in response to application requirements. Three such alternatives are discussed: fingertip sensing gloves, fixed stereoscopic viewers, and counterbalanced head mounted displays. A subset of commercial examples that highlight each alternative is presented as well as a brief discussion of interesting engineering and implementation issues

Cosmic cookery : making a stereoscopic 3D animated movie.

This paper describes our experience making a short stereoscopic movie visualizing the development of structure in the universe during the 13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to the present day. Aimed at a general audience for the Royal Society's 2005 Summer Science Exhibition, the movie illustrates how the latest cosmological theories based on dark matter and dark energy are capable of producing structures as complex as spiral galaxies and allows the viewer to directly compare observations from the real universe with theoretical results. 3D is an inherent feature of the cosmology data sets and stereoscopic visualization provides a natural way to present the images to the viewer, in addition to allowing researchers to visualize these vast, complex data sets. The presentation of the movie used passive, linearly polarized projection onto a 2m wide screen but it was also required to playback on a Sharp RD3D display and in anaglyph projection at venues without dedicated stereoscopic display equipment. Additionally lenticular prints were made from key images in the movie. We discuss the following technical challenges during the stereoscopic production process; 1) Controlling the depth presentation, 2) Editing the stereoscopic sequences, 3) Generating compressed movies in display speci¯c formats. We conclude that the generation of high quality stereoscopic movie content using desktop tools and equipment is feasible. This does require careful quality control and manual intervention but we believe these overheads are worthwhile when presenting inherently 3D data as the result is signi¯cantly increased impact and better understanding of complex 3D scenes

The Values of Tangible User Interfaces: How to discover, assess and evaluate them?

Since the introduction of Tangible User Interfaces, in the beginning of the 90s, a generation grew up interacting with computers. At the same time the context of computing changed dramatically: from a device used almost exclusively by specialists, it evolved to a general device that plays a dominant role in our societies. But where does this leave TUI? In many respects, the idea of tangibility plays a marginal role in Human Computer Interaction. It makes sense to re-evaluate the intrinsic values of TUI design. This paper proposes to research the appropriate metrics to do so

Exploring the coupled ocean and atmosphere system with a data science approach applied to observations from the Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition

The Southern Ocean is a critical component of Earth's climate system, but its remoteness makes it challenging to develop a holistic understanding of its processes from the small scale to the large scale. As a result, our knowledge of this vast region remains largely incomplete. The Antarctic Circumnavigation Expedition (ACE, austral summer 2016/2017) surveyed a large number of variables describing the state of the ocean and the atmosphere, the freshwater cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and ocean biogeochemistry and microbiology. This circumpolar cruise included visits to 12 remote islands, the marginal ice zone, and the Antarctic coast. Here, we use 111 of the observed variables to study the latitudinal gradients, seasonality, shorter-term variations, geographic setting of environmental processes, and interactions between them over the duration of 90ĝ€¯d. To reduce the dimensionality and complexity of the dataset and make the relations between variables interpretable we applied an unsupervised machine learning method, the sparse principal component analysis (sPCA), which describes environmental processes through 14 latent variables. To derive a robust statistical perspective on these processes and to estimate the uncertainty in the sPCA decomposition, we have developed a bootstrap approach. Our results provide a proof of concept that sPCA with uncertainty analysis is able to identify temporal patterns from diurnal to seasonal cycles, as well as geographical gradients and "hotspots"of interaction between environmental compartments. While confirming many well known processes, our analysis provides novel insights into the Southern Ocean water cycle (freshwater fluxes), trace gases (interplay between seasonality, sources, and sinks), and microbial communities (nutrient limitation and island mass effects at the largest scale ever reported). More specifically, we identify the important role of the oceanic circulations, frontal zones, and islands in shaping the nutrient availability that controls biological community composition and productivity; the fact that sea ice controls sea water salinity, dampens the wave field, and is associated with increased phytoplankton growth and net community productivity possibly due to iron fertilisation and reduced light limitation; and the clear regional patterns of aerosol characteristics that have emerged, stressing the role of the sea state, atmospheric chemical processing, and source processes near hotspots for the availability of cloud condensation nuclei and hence cloud formation. A set of key variables and their combinations, such as the difference between the air and sea surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, sea surface height, geostrophic currents, upper-ocean layer light intensity, surface wind speed and relative humidity played an important role in our analysis, highlighting the necessity for Earth system models to represent them adequately. In conclusion, our study highlights the use of sPCA to identify key ocean-atmosphere interactions across physical, chemical, and biological processes and their associated spatio-temporal scales. It thereby fills an important gap between simple correlation analyses and complex Earth system models. The sPCA processing code is available as open-access from the following link: https://renkulab.io/gitlab/ACE-ASAID/spca-decomposition (last access: 29 March 2021). As we show here, it can be used for an exploration of environmental data that is less prone to cognitive biases (and confirmation biases in particular) compared to traditional regression analysis that might be affected by the underlying research question