Daily Archives: March 2, 2017

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Panthers GM not a fan of talk of offensive evolution NBCSports.com I know our coaches are bright men and they can evolve, . . . I hate that word, Gettleman said. They can change. Stick a needle in my eye, I'm different than the first time you guys saw me up here. The bottom line is the responsibility of the coaches ... and more »

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Panthers GM not a fan of talk of offensive evolution - NBCSports.com

March 2, 2017 (Top) color samples were used in the present study. (Bottom) optimal number of clusters in Japanese color names derived by k-means analysis with Gap statistic. Credit: Ichiro Kuriki

Color plays an important role in conveying visual information. For example, color can help the observer find an object in a cluttered environment. Although the human eye can distinguish millions of colors, human languages have only a few color terms, such as "red," "green," "blue" and "yellow," which speakers can use to communicate about colors in everyday life. These color terms change over time as a language evolves, and the Japanese language is no exception.

This became clear through the work of an international collaboration between researchers at Tohoku University, their colleagues at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Ohio State University.

The researchers investigated the number of color categories (such as aka, midori, ao, ki, etc.) that are commonly used by native Japanese speakers. They asked 52 participants to name 320 color samples of various hues and lightness (plus black, white and several grays) using only single color words without modifiers (no "greenish yellow" or "light purple").

Statistical analysis of the results revealed 19 common Japanese categories. There were the 11 basic color categories common to most modern industrialized cultures (red, green, blue, yellow, purple, pink, brown, orange, white, gray and black), plus eight additional named color categories. These were: mizu ("water")/light blue, hada ("skin tone")/peach, matcha ("ceremonial green tea")/yellow-green, oudo ("mud")/mustard, enji/maroon, yamabuki ("goldflower")/gold and cream. Of these additional terms, mizu was used by 98% of informants, making it a strong candidate for a 12th Japanese basic color category.

Thirty years ago, a study of Japanese color categories (Uchikawa & Boynton, 1987) did not reveal mizu as a basic color category, because the informants in that earlier study often used mizu ("water") and ao (blue) interchangeably. Conversely, Uchikawa & Boynton found that kusa ("grass") was a very popular term for yellow-green, whereas, in the present study, kusa has been largely replaced with matcha ("ceremonial green tea"). These results illustrate that color terms, like many other aspects of language, change over time.

In contrast to these recent changes, there is one tradition that has not changed over the past millennium: the mixed use of green and blue. Careful study of classic Japanese poems before the 10th century showed that ao ("blue") was used to name both things that were clearly blue and also things that were clearly green; the same was true of midori ("green"). Even today, modern Japanese people refer to the color of the green traffic light, lush green leaves and green vegetables, as ao ("blue"). However, the use of ao and midori are otherwise quite distinct.

The transition from a single category encompassing both blue and green ("grue") to distinct blue and green categories is considered to be a landmark in the typical evolution of color lexicons around the world. For example, the Middle English term "hwen" was used to denote a grue category until 13th century, but modern English, like modern Japanese, has distinct terms for separate blue and green color categories. These investigators showed that, in addition to distinct color terms for blue and green, modern Japanese has recently added a new intermediate color term "mizu" for lighter bluish and greenish samples.

This study showed that although modern Japanese is not a "grue" language - since blue and green are distinct color categories - Japanese people have nonetheless retained traditional expressions from the classic poetic tradition of a thousand years ago.

Explore further: Blue or green? United Kingdom split over color of swatch

More information: Ichiro Kuriki et al, The modern Japanese color lexicon, Journal of Vision (2017). DOI: 10.1167/17.3.1

A survey from a Scottish eye care company could be sparking a color controversy similar to last year's debate over the color of a dress.

How do we remember colors? What makes green... green?

From Abidji to English to Zapoteco, the perception and naming of color is remarkably consistent in the worlds languages.

Would a color by any other name be thought of in the same way, regardless of the language used to describe it?

Though people can distinguish among millions of colors, we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we've seen as one of just a few basic hues, a Johns Hopkins University-led team discovered.

A joint group of researchers from Chuo University, Japan Women's University and Tohoku University has revealed that infants aged between 5 and 7 months hold the representation of color categories in their brain, even before ...

Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature's age-old solution for information-storageDNA.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have managed to create a structure resembling a mouse embryo in culture, using two types of stem cells - the body's 'master cells' - and a 3D scaffold on which they can grow.

Until recently, genomics was a "read-only" science, but scientists have developed a tool for quick and easy deletion of DNA in living cells. This software, published in PLOS Computational Biology, will boost efforts to understand ...

Out of the more than 300,000 plant species in existence, only three speciesrice, wheat, and maizeaccount for most of the plant matter that humans consume, partly because in the history of agriculture, mutations arose ...

A core set of genes involved in the responses of honey bees to multiple diseases caused by viruses and parasites has been identified by an international team of researchers. The findings provide a better-defined starting ...

While it was once believed that genes regulated biological functions almost exclusively by being transcribed to coding RNAs that were then translated into proteins, it is now known that the picture is much more complex. In ...

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The evolution of Japanese color vocabulary over the past 30 years - Phys.Org

Last June, Vanity Fair launched The Hive, its first verticaloutside the storied magazine, with a roster of star writers and social-first strategy. But to Mike Hogan, the magazines digital director, the brand was significantin another, less obvious way.

To launch it all internally and have it happen on time and without major glitches is a new experience for us, he said.

If Cond Nasts glossy magazines arefirst-class, its digital operation for years has been a distant second. With its strength in print ads, digital wasnt a priority. Forget about being ahead of the curve: It took years just to get magazines their own websites; Vogue.com didnt launchin earnest until 2010. For the most part, Cond titles treated their sites as promotional vehicles for driving print subscriptions. It continued this approach even as other magazine companies like Hearst and Time Inc.were beefing up their digital capabilities and talking ambitiously about going toe-to-toe with digital natives like BuzzFeed and Vox Media.

The lack of investment made it hard to keep what digital talent the company had and to attract digital ad dollars.John Wagner, group director of published media at PHD, said that Cond Nast saw its competition as other legacy print publishers, and it led with print even when the advertiser was asking for digital.

The company has quietly been catching up, though. In 2014 it named its first chief digital officer, Fred Santarpia. In the two years since, Cond Nasts digital audience grew 76 percent while time spent on the sites has increased 132 percent, per the company. Its a great start, he said.

Pop-up on top of pop-up Collaboration is a matter of survival for modern publishers. Digital is a scale game,and the silos that worked fine for print magazines would hold them back online. The companys brands were losing ground to faster-growing, nimbler digital pure-plays like BuzzFeed. At a point, there were as many as 15 content management systems in use, which made it hard to distribute large volumes of editorial content to partners like Facebook or Yahoo and sell advertising across titles.Employeeswho moved from one brand to another often had to be retrained in the new system.

We were incredibly hard to work with, said Santarpia, who had come from the same position at Cond Nast Entertainment, the companys video arm. Not only were our sites incredibly slow, but youd get pop-up on top of pop-up on top of pop-up. The digital staff was complacent and lacking in mobile skills. I didnt have experienced designers. I didnt have data scientists.

Other legacy publishers Time Inc. and Hearst have modernized bypooling editorial resources and pushing titles to share stories. But forcing that kind of collaboration would be tricky at Cond Nast, whose famous print titles including Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired had long run as staunchly independent businesses. The challenge for Santarpia was to balance the need for efficiency without cramping the brands individuality.

Balancing scale with independence Santarpia decided that there should be certain principles every site would have to adhere to there would be no more annoying pop-up ads, for example, and sites had to load fast, a requirement that he said led to many fights with editors on a new product because it didnt meet a site speed.

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Hecentralizedfunctions like audience development, research and social media but dedicated experts in those areas tothe individual brands. All21 brands would be migrated to a homegrowncontent management system called Copilot, which would help sitespublish and innovate faster. All in all, hes turned over 65 percent of the digital staff.

Being on a common platformmade iteasier for brands to syndicate their articles outside the company. There were more platforms than ever demanding publishers content, and while it was up to each brand to decide their distributed strategy, they would all use the same Copilot interface to plug into Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles and Googles Accelerated Mobile Pages. Its also made it easier for brands to sharetools and features. A tool Vanity Fair created that lets it A/B test personalized article recommendationsis now used company-wide.

We wanted the individual brand strategy to choose what theyre going to focus on, Santarpia said. Its very easy to get to templatizing everything. Thats not who we are. We very much value the individuality of brand voices. At the same time, he said, scale and quality are not mutually exclusive goals.

Cooperation is still largely left up to the brands themselves. Theres no mandate that brands publish stories from sister brands,but if they want to, Copilot is supposed to make that easier, too.

Vanity Fairs Hogan said there was concern about how the transition to Copilot would go, but Santarpia played the partof football coach, saying, in effect, Im not going to mess with your content vision, Im going to provide the support necessary to have success in digital. That was the right answer.

Beyond cutting load time and growing traffic, Copilots benefits have differed from site to site. For GQ, Copilot made it easy to test different content recirculation modules, said Mike Hofman, GQs executive digital director. Changes like that have helped increase time spent on GQ.com 117 percent year over year.

The best CMSs make everyday tasks easy and out-of-the-ordinary ones possible, Hofman said. What you see is a lot of brands experimenting and sharing their learnings and the actual features themselves.

Going for engagement, not clicks The timing for these stridesis good, as advertisers growing increasingly aware ofthe problems that a scale-obsessed digital media model has wrought and are becoming more interested in how sites areengaging with audiences instead of just their sheer volume of clicks. Cond Nasts digital revenue increased 22 percent in 2016 and now accounts for 30 percent of total revenue, according to the company.

Buyers said the company has done a lot to improve its digital sales talent, their pitch and the products themselves. Greg Smith, head of investment at MEC, said the company is still too print-centric and expensive and their ideas often feel prepackaged, but that its done a good job of wrangling the brands so agencies can buy ads on multiple brands at once. Their pride, sense of entitlement can be off-putting, but at least theyre not seeing themselves as a commodity, he said.

PHDs Wagner said the publisher has done well to use its first-party data to match ad campaigns to their target audiences, position itself against digital-only competitors and increase its traffic without sacrificing editorial quality.

Theyre definitely staying pure to who they are as a company, Wagner said. Theyre not going down that, lets get the click.

Cond Nast needs to do more to show younger planners and buyers that it should be thought of the same as digital-only publishers, though, Wagner said. Having a seat at the table is more important for them when their pure-play competition is champing at the bit to come in every day.

Going forward, the massive audience gains of the past couple of years are expectedto taper off, and the challenges will be for the company to find growth through personalization and new product launches like The Hive. Later this year, the company will also face another big taskas it migrates itsinternational editionsto Copilot, one Santarpia doesnt take lightly.

It is exponentially harder because you have each country doing their own thing and within each country, each brand doing its own thing, he said. Its a couple years behind, but the good news is, theyll benefit from the things weve learned.

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Playing catch-up, Conde Nast navigates a tricky digital evolution - Digiday

The Orioles farm system is not very good, just about everyone who isnt paid by the Orioles agrees. This has been the case for a few years now. The team has maintained success every other year at the big league level, so it hasnt mattered yet, but they havent had much success in getting mid-tier prospects to turn into MLB-caliber players.

You can see this clearly in the evolution of the annual Orioles top 10 prospects list over the past several seasons. While the Orioles have had some prospects that everybody really liked, including Manny Machado, Dylan Bundy, and Kevin Gausman, these same players were about all the value that the Orioles have gotten at the MLB level from their top 10 guys.

The folks at MLB Pipeline, who do the top 100 prospects in baseball and the top 10 prospects in each organization for MLB.com, helpfully put each list from 2011 onward in one graphic on Twitter:

The strength of the top names kept the Orioles at least in the middle of the pack for a number of these years. Along with the players the Orioles got when they were still picking in the top 5 every year, Jonathan Schoop has proved to be a success story from the farm. There are some others rounding out these top 10 rankings where about all one can do is give a grim shake of the head.

I mean, really, was Xavier Avery and Joe Mahoney really the best they could do prior to the 2011 season? Nick Delmonico and Jason Esposito before the 2012 season? It remains something of a miracle that the 2012 team won 93 games. Other than Machado, they sure didnt get much help from the farm. Outside of Schoop and Gausman, neither did the 2014 team.

That 2011 ranking is so long ago that it still has Mychal Givens the shortstop, and the fact that he re-emerged as a reliever prior to the 2016 rankings was a poor sign for the system anyway. Givens has had some big league success, but for the most part, if one of your best prospects is already a reliever, thats not a good thing.

To be fair to the Orioles, and to any failed prospect anywhere, its hard to get to MLB and stay there. Most minor leaguers, even some that get themselves proclaimed as top 100 prospects in all of MLB, arent good enough. Of the ones who are good enough, many will get hurt and not be what they were supposed to be.

There are a lot of failures that can be laid at the Orioles feet. They havent developed an outfielder since Nick Markakis. All we need to know about their success in developing starting pitchers is that they thought it was a good idea to give up a first round pick to sign Yovani Gallardo and later trade for Wade Miley last year.

Some of these are self-inflicted wounds. Trading Eduardo Rodriguez cost the Orioles, though they did at least have the value of Andrew Miller down the stretch run and in the playoffs that year. Trading Zach Davies cost them more, because Gerardo Parra was awful. The two have combined to start 75 games over the past two seasons.

Still, a starting rotation consisting of Chris Tillman, Gausman, Bundy, Rodriguez, and Davies probably wouldnt leave you feeling much better than you might about the current rotation. This stuff isnt easy to do, and its harder still now that the team is good and theyre not picking in the top 5-10 spots of every round any more.

The thing is, everyones old top 10 prospect lists look pretty bad. Most people in Birdland, myself included, would probably agree that the Boston farm system is always getting hyped. Here is their top prospect lists over the last decade:

Will Middlebrooks had a good half-season in his rookie year and was terrible afterwards. Brentz is 28 and has 90 MLB plate appearances under his belt.

There are success stories, much like the Orioles had. Xander Bogaerts is good. Jackie Bradley Jr., after an abysmal rookie year, is looking good, much to the chagrin of Os fans. So is Mookie Betts, whose ranking below some of those other guys now looks hilarious.

Others, like Yoan Moncada and Manuel Margot, were used as trade bait to fetch top quality MLB talent: Chris Sale and Craig Kimbrel.

Ryan Lavarnway was going to be the Red Sox catcher of the future. Then it was going to be Blake Swihart. Neither one proved to be that. Henry Owens has spent three years as a top 100 prospect in MLB. He also walked 81 batters in 137.2 innings at Triple-A last year. All the prospect people liked Allen Webster, at least until he came up to the MLB level and was bad, and so on.

Ranking prospects isnt a pointless endeavor. The people with expertise still do better than if a bunch of random schmucks were rating prospects. Its something to talk about. Its not an ironclad prophecy received from a blind hermit living on top of a mountain.

Maybe one lesson with the above is that Red Sox prospects get hyped more than they should. But the bigger lesson is just that its hard to find and develop big league talent, even if you have gobs of money and can afford to fail sometimes. Boston still owes Rusney Castillo another $46 million, for crying out loud.

If the Orioles are lucky, another four or five years down the road, the success rate of their top 10 prospects will be better than their ones from four or five years ago. Theyre really going to need it.

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The evolution of the Orioles top 10 prospects - Camden Chat

Macroevolution and Its Complaints Discovery Institute The term macroevolution has problems. Why? Among other things, because it's a term that means different things to different people. Case in point: an email correspondent points out a random usage on a BioLogos Forum thread, Is evolution continuing?

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Macroevolution and Its Complaints - Discovery Institute

Fifth Harmony may have had its ups and downs, but member Normani Kordei is here to assure fans that the group is better and stronger than ever.

"We have seen each other at our highest points and our lowest," the singer told Rolling Out magazine. "You will definitely get a new sense of who we are, and that is stepping into womanhood."

From Ally Brooke Hernandez headlining a show in Brazil to Normani officially being part of the new season of Dancing With the Stars, Harmonizers are certainly seeing more sides of the girls than they've ever seen before. But don't think that it's a sign that there will be more fragmentation in the power group. "Ever since I was little, I looked up to Destinys Child so much; I looked up to the Spice Girls and En Vogue. A piece of me wanted to be in a girl group," Normani explains. A benefit to working as a team? "I think that its taught me to learn people, and just be respectful," she notes.

The singer and now-DTWS contestant does note, however, that being part of a girl group was an "adjustment" given that "we auditioned for X Factor as solo artists, meaning we had the mentality of pursuing a career individually." Though Normani couldn't be happier with how everything came together, she's still itching to do more things on her own. "I just feel like I havent been able to showcase my full potential. I hate the fact that people can judge based on something that isnt fully given to them. Like this isnt the full product," she said. "This isnt all I have to offer, so dont judge based on this little piece of what youre given. I have so much in me that people dont even know, and I cant wait to offer it to them."

Normani would describe her solo tracks as, "definitely more R&B... I kind of have to take pieces of myself to fit what it is that radio wants." She truly believes the time is now to actually live out her potential and grow as an artist, but the group is still her "number one priority," and added, "I think that its just about balance, keeping myself centered, and being happy and healthy."

Related: Listen to Normani Kordei Cover TWO Solange Knowles Songs

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Normani Kordei on Fifth Harmony's Musical Evolution - TeenVogue.com