suchow

Yours is a definition of contrast, but not the one used in design or vision science [1, 2], where contrast is defined as a difference in luminance or color between regions of an image that makes objects and textures visible. If an image has no contrast, it is a solid patch. If an image has low contrast, the brightest or most colorful regions are not too different from the other regions, as if seen through a dense fog. If an image has high contrast, the brightest or most colorful regions are quite different from the other regions.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision)

2. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/09/design-principles-c...

I have a slight correction to my earlier comment, in which I said "Using this design, a bias that systematically selects one response more often than the other will lead to performance below chance." A bias of this kind will drive performance closer to chance. Performance that is significantly below chance would be evidence that observers can see single photons, but that they have the response labels reversed in their minds.

It's reasonable to be skeptical, but it is even more reasonable to evaluate a peer-reviewed publication in one of the most rigorous subfields of psychology (sensation & perception) after having read at least its abstract, ideally the whole paper.

You might be interested in Elizabeth Kiersted's work with Denis Pelli (NYU) about a circumstance where people can see their own "internal" noise, based on Ramachandran and Gregory (1991)'s phantasm illusion:

http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/docs/kierstead2007intel.pdf

In the typical psychophysical study on perceptual thresholds, participants are given a two-alternative forced-choice test: a stimulus (here, a photon) is placed in one of two intervals at random, and the participant guesses which interval had the photon. Using this design, a bias that systematically selects one response more often than the other will lead to performance below chance. Finding that performance is significantly better than chance is evidence that the observer can detect a single photon. Demonstrating that performance is reliably above chance requires many trials because the level of performance is close to chance. Compare this to a yes/no design, where a bias can create the appearance of an ability to detect a single photon where there is none.

The reason for waiting 40 minutes is that the eye and brain adapt to darkness. If this experiment were performed outside in daylight, it would be impossible to detect a difference of 1 photon. Only when the observer sits in a room without light can the brain adapt and have its greatest sensitivity to light.

Finally, note that the logic of this study is an existence proof that people can detect single photons. Selecting three normal observers and finding that all of them have this capability is reasonable evidence that most normal observers can do the same, unless you have some specific reason to believe that these observers are unrepresentative of the population (as the researcher in the press release did re gender differences).

You might find this 1996 Nature paper by Olshausen & Field interesting. In it, they describe how a coding strategy that maximizes spareness when representing natural scenes is enough to produce a family of localized, oriented, bandpass receptive fields, like those found in the early visual system of humans.

https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse528/11sp/Olshau...

Similarly, in the U.S. there is the Plain Writing Act of 2010 (http://www.plainlanguage.gov/plLaw/).

Thanks for the feedback. These are issues we've thought about, and we came to different conclusions:

re 2, you'll see at http://proselint.com/approach/ that one of the guiding principles of Proselint is that we defer to experts. In practice, that's meant almost all the advice comes from Bryan Garner's usage guide, Garner's Modern American Usage. He is a careful compiler of advice and you'll find that he is almost never "totally wrong", and when his advice is debated, he knows it, notes it, and provides a thoughtful discussion.

re 1, we think of Proselint as eventually being useful as a training tool, a way to learn the conventions. Note that natural languages are large, with so many low-frequency terms that nobody can learn the whole language. Why err if an automated tool can help? Consider for example demonyms, what you call people from a certain place. How many people know, for example, that people from Manchester are Mancunians, not Manchesterians? Rather than call someone by the wrong name, with Proselint the voice of an expert gently corrects you, and you learn a cool new word.

We aren't a mob of programmers, we are three people who love language, respect it, and think we're 2% of the way to making a great tool, one that The New Yorker could run over its stories to flag issues that its own editors would flag anyways. (In fact, we've done this, running Proselint over a corpus of highly vetted text, and have found numerous issues.)

It's out of scope for now, but only because we don't have any native speakers of other languages helping us out with the project, and this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue; otherwise it's on the table. Interested?

Good idea. If you run `proselint` without specifying a document, it'll run on the demo text, which you can also access here: https://gist.github.com/suchow/c7856f21128aee89ad55. Also, there's a live demo available at: http://proselint.com/write. It's been tested only on the latest version of Chrome, and I doubt it will handle the load here, but give it a try.

We are. Even so, opening issues on Github and submitting PRs is appreciated.

You're right, but the problem is much worse than that. Examining 200 entries from Garner's Modern American Usage at random reveals that half of them are easy to implement, the kind of thing that could be assigned as a homework problem (e.g., recognizing that “$10 USD” is redundant, that “very unique” is comparing an uncomparable adjective, or that people from Michigan are called “Michiganders”, not “Michiganites”). Thirty percent are moderately challenging, requiring a week’s effort. Fifteen percent are hard — they are entire projects, requiring advances in AI. And the remaining advice (around five percent), the best kind, is AI-complete. Consider, e.g., "John hit Peter only in the nose". Does this mean that, of all Peter's body parts that could have been hit, John hit only Peter's nose? Or is it a grammatical error that was suppose to convey that, of all the people John could have hit, it was only Peter who he did hit.

We're interested in incorporating deeper NLP. In particular, we've been eyeing https://github.com/spacy-io/spaCy.

See our discussion of this at http://proselint.com/approach/. I'll note that we do not consider Proselint a complete product — it's in its earliest stages, perhaps at 2% of its final capacity. That number has steadily decreased as we learn more, which we take to be a good sign.

How then do you explain the popularity of SF, where the cost of living is higher than in NY?

Done: "Colloquial salutational oral gesticulations in Ibero-Romance languages".

This logic is similar to that of Larry Summers in his remarks about diversity in science and engineering, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.....

The parent's claim was not that changing the wordmark was easy to do, but that it wasn't worth doing.

If you're interested in the human side of age perception, we're running a study at http://testmybrain.org ("Understanding other people") where you judge people's age based on a photograph. We're looking at individual differences in face perception — how your age, race, and experience affect your judgment of others.

Though I find it hard to relate to, many people consider their bodies to be essential to their identity — they wouldn't be them without it. These people find our intuition about what is essential similarly foreign.

It wasn't until I saw the faux comments in the screenshot on the about page that I realized this was software for organizing college frats. Between the image of a cloud and the word "Brother", I thought it might be software for organizing groups of men committed to Christ.

How about "We handle the logistics of organizing your fraternity and connecting its members."

A ship whose captain would rather it sink than change course.

If there were a word that you regularly substituted in for a swear word, wouldn't it then become a swear word? Do you mean words like "heck" or "freakin"?

This kind of language change can't really be accomplished by fiat, so it makes sense to look for the direction the language is heading in and push. More and more we see people using "they" as a singular pronoun. But a large proportion of people find this usage strongly ungrammatical, which is preventing it from becoming mainstream. Eventually it will win out though.

Hope this isn't pedantic, but I think you meant "1/1000th the blood". A 0.1% improvement isn't nearly as impressive as what you all have accomplished ;)

Be careful with the phrase "feed the world", lest someone get the impression that the world includes people outside American tech companies.

Your analysis is interesting, but it doesn't make sense to "prove" that an image is a certain color. Color is a construct of the mind. Given that so many people claim to see black and blue, you analysis proves only that your model of vision is insufficient to explain human experience.

> The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda.

This is true only of some media. For example, The New Yorker has a fact-checking department that holds their journalists to high standards. Reading their long-form articles, it is clear that the writers have taken the time to understand things deeply. Nobody writes a 10,000-word essay on science the night before on a deadline.

It's quite reasonable to expect a journalist reporting on science to read dozens of articles (or review papers) about a field and to interview many scientists. It's not hard to find people with that level of understanding in a field who would be happy to write public-facing magazine articles. Many of the best science writers do.

Soylent has a bigger vision. Here's a recent statement of it by its founder, Rob Rhinehart. Start 5 paragraphs in.

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1192

Does anyone know of a good demo of different frame rates that I can view on a laptop? Is this even possible with LCDs?

That's surprising because if you pick up any professionally typeset book or magazine, you'll find ligatures all over. Some of them are quite subtle (e.g., the fi -> fi ligature). I have to imagine then that your colleagues are getting distracted not by the presence of ligatures in general, but by a few decorative ligatures or characters present in the Slack font, which looks to be Lato. For example, Lato's ampersand is missing a chunk in the upper loop (https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato).