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This article was created on Saturday the 15th of July 2006 at 11:29 AM
This article was updated on Sunday the 16th of July 2006 at 19:18 PM
This article has been read 75000 times since it's posting this morning at 11:29 AM
…100000 times @ 17:51 PM
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It has made this blog #2 of WordPress growing blogs, it is the #3 post on WordPress right now and The Memoirs are #4 blog on WordPress.
This post is #6 on Reddit.com and #7 on del.icio.us's most popular saves for today. Also, diggdot.us and Popurls, sites that aggregate news from sites such as Reddit, have generated traffic towards this post. If you liked this post, please reddit through Reddit.com. I am currently writing an analysis on this whole phenomenon and will continue posting articles on HDR and photography.
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This article is the first in a series of articles on HDR photography
- Modern HDR photography, a how-to <- You are here
- How The Memoirs got 167000 hits in a few hours… a photographical HDR revue
- The Memoirs got viewed 170000 times in a day, an analysis
- Understanding modern HDR Photography, a set of tools, links, examples and explanations
In this Saturday morning post, I explain HDR photography with the help of some articles. This post includes step by step ways to create your own HDR images. Be advised that they can be quite hard for beginners to get interesting results. But where there is a will, there is a way! And by experimenting, you will get some good pictures. Also, remember that to see the end result, you have to get through some initial steps.
I have received some questions about certain photographs, so I've decided to include three articles that explains HDR photography in detail. I had added this to the comments, but I felt this deserved to be included in a post by its own. I have found a few different articles to explain this to everyone. The first one dwelves in the theory behind. The second one is an easy way to to HDR and the third one goes in to more detail on the process of HDR photography. The source of the first article is from cybergrain. The second article is from HDR 101. And the third is from Cambridgeincolour.This post also include step by step ways to create your own HDR images.
If you want anymore information, research the sites that I have mentioned or ask questions in the HDR Pool on flickr.
Update @ 17:54 EST, Saturday the 15th of July 2006
This is by no means the only pool on flickr for this type of photography. Check out here for more groups.
To begin using HDR photography, you need a few simple things.
- A digital camera, preferably a DSLR but a good point and shoot will do the job. Remember, you need to be able to change the shutter speed manually. The focus can stay auto but if you can set it on manual do so
- A tripod; to function correctly, HDR needs to take different pictures of the same scene. If you do not want any motion flow, take pictures of stationary objects.
- Latest edition of Photoshop
- Photomatix, available free here through their new beta release for Windows. A Mac version is also available on their website.
- For simple step by step instructions, scroll down to the second article and follow the steps.
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The following article is by Jon Meyer from one of his articles on HDR Photography. You can find the source article here. Due to the interest, he has updated his article as of Sunday, the 16th of July. I have made the changes accordingly. Thanks Jon Meyer!
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The Future of Digital Imaging – High Dynamic Range Photography
Today's digital cameras match or slightly exceed the performance of silver halide film. Computer graphics has achieved the goal of photorealism. Now the goal is to go beyond simply matching paper and silver halide – to create display technologies which can present any visual stimuli our eyes are capable of seeing.
One area of rapid development is in dynamic range. A new crop of technologies using High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR or HDRI) aim to extend the dynamic range of digital imaging technologies way beyond traditional media.
In this article, I'll look at recent advances in the field of high dynamic range imaging. I will cover the basic concepts of dynamic range, and talk about new HDR technologies.
The Problem
Here's the problem in a nutshell:
- Real-world scenes contain light ranges that exceed a 50,000:1 dynamic range.
- For over a thousand years, media has been limited to around a 300:1 dynamic range.
- So you have a mapping issue: how do you represent light values in a scene using a much more limited set of light values for a particular media?
If you are not careful, you end up with results like this:
You can see the chair but nothing out of the window.
Old Solutions
Master painters were very clever about mapping scene intensities to canvas. They used a large number of tricks. Look at El Greco's La Agoria en el Jardin from 1590:
El Greco used saturated colors of opposing hues to increase the apparent dynamic range of the scene. He also painted black or white lines around the edges of contours. Our eyes determine contrast locally, so increasing the contrast at local edges increases the overall perceived contrast of the scene.
(Generally, the phrase "dynamic range" in imaging refers to the measured ratio between high and low extremes in a set of intensity values. The word "contrast" is often used interchangeably with dynamic range, though I prefer to use "contrast" to refer to the perceived contrast of a scene, which may be different from the measured dynamic range. For example, El Greco's edge contours increase perceived contrast but don't change the actual dynamic range of canvas).
Here is an example from Monet. The red sun in his famous Impressions at Sunrise really leaps off the canvas (maybe not on your web browser!). The sun is actually the same brightness value as the surrounding clouds. However, since the sun is a saturated red placed over a saturated blue cloud, it creates a color vibration, and the sun looks much brighter than it is:
Check out webexhibits way-cool Flash illustration of this.
Dynamic Range in Photography
Photography involves a capture device (the camera), a storage medium (e.g. film), and a display or output device (e.g. paper).
The dynamic range of each stage (capture, storage and output) plays a crucial role in the quality of the results. In general, technologies with greater dynamic range produce more realistic results. But photography is a compound process, and the dynamic range of each stage must be considered. When the dynamic range of the source scene is too great for any one stage of the process, something must be sacrified: you must either give up detail in the shadows or the highlights. Photographers have to know and work withing the limitations of their camera, storage and output devices.
W. Eugene Smith spent five days in the darkroom until he came up with a print of Albert Schweitzer that he was happy with:
Smith was dealing with the issue that silver halide negatives have a greater dynamic range than photographic paper – so he had to "dodge and burn" different areas of the image to get a result where both the lamp and sitter are visible.
Perhaps the greatest master of dynamic range in photography was Ansel Adams. He was the first to systematically measure the sensitivity range of all of the equipment he used. His "zone system" let him predict precisely what details he could capture on film and paper, so he could make decisions before pressing the shutter:
Color Photography
Color negative films have less dynamic range (or "latitude") than black and white films. My understanding is that the multiple layers and dies in color film result in reduced sensitivity. The first color films had very poor latitude, so film manufacturers added more layers – each color layer was split in two, a high-sensitivity and a low-sensitivity layer, using different crystal formations:
(I'm not an expert, but maybe color positive film doesn't use this trick, hence the difference in latitude between positive and negative film?)
One way to get really great dynamic range with color film photography is to use black-and-white film together with color filters. You have to take three exposures on separate sheets of black and white film: one with a red filter, one with a green, and one with a blue – and then composite the three images together. If you use glass plate negatives, you end up with images that have incredible colors and resolution. See below:
The most amazing thing about this image is that it was taken in around 1915 by Prokudin Gorskii. While it is true that this image was digitally enhanced in Photoshop, in my own experiments with a 4×5 and red/green/blue filters I achieved an extended non-kodachrome tonal scale.
The Next Horizon: Digital HDR
Over the next decade, the imaging industry will inevitably transition to high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, creating devices that provide a latitude range far greater than traditional silver halide film. This change will affect all aspects of image making. Each of the systems in the image workflow will be modified, including capture, storage, editing and output.
Let's look at each of these workflow stages in turn.
Today's cameras have ample resolution. So the next area of product differentiation for camera manufacturers will be the quality of the pixels, rather than the number of pixels. This shift is starting to happen already.
For example, Fuji's SuperCCD S3 Pro camera has a chip with high and low sensitivity sensors per pixel location to increase dynamic range (the same trick as used in color film to achieve broader latitude).
Although the resulting chip has lower overall resolution, it captures greater dynamic range. This tradeoff of resolution for dynamic range is the beginning of an important trend.
A second alternative is to merge multiple images to increase dynamic range. Paul Debevec at SIGGRAPH 97 showed how to take multiple photographs at different exposures and merge them together to create a single high-dynamic range image. This technique is now incorporated in products such as Photogenics and Photoshop. For now, the technique works best if the camera is mounted on a tripod. But researchers have already built HDR image "stitchers" which merge multiple images and automatically account for camera motion between snaps.
For most consumers, "HDR" will simply mean that the camera records more details in shadows and in highlights. Just as RAW images extended the detail held in digital images, HDR will further increase the available tonal range.
Consumers will benefit from the true point-and-shoot ability that broader latitude offers, because HDR cameras will produce usable images from a much wider range of lighting situations.
Eventually point-and-shoot cameras will lose their built-in flash. Anyone who uses a camera with a cheap flash soon learns that the pictures generally look better if you turn the flash off. Sensors are becoming more sensitive, cameras are getting smaller, and light metering is getting smarter. Add three or four stops of dynamic range, and the flash becomes a creative ad-on rather than a requirement.
Professional photographers will also benefit from HDR. With HDR technologies, photographers can really push the creative envelope, exploring the extremes of high-key and low-key effects.
Professional cameras will offer a multitude of HDR image-taking modes. For example, they will automatically blend multiple images taken with different exposures, with and without flash, possibly using multiple light sources, to produce a single and extremely maliable master image.
All image file formats have range limitations. Formats such as JPEG and GIF provide eight bits per color channel (often referred to as 24 bit color). Using 8 bits, you can represent 256 different intensities per channel. Most 8 bit formats use a "perceptual" mapping, meaning that they use a gamma (exponential) curve rather than a linear map of intensities. See Human vision and tonal levels or the venerable Gamma FAQ for an explanation of this. While JPEG and GIF are great for moderate dynamic range images, banding becomes apparent if you edit the image extensively, and the formats cannot store high-dynamic-range scenes.
Newer formats including JPEG2000, RAW and PNG offer up to 16 bits per color channel, which is plenty for most purposes. However, there is no support for "underage" or "overage" – these image formats state that "0" should be mapped to the darkest black of the display, and "65536" (or the equivalent) should be mapped to the whitest white. If you want to represent images that contain brightnesses beyond what your monitor can currently display (e.g. as produced by HDRShop), you need to look elsewhere.
The most exciting HDR image format today is OpenEXR, developed by Industrial Light & Magic.
I say this partly because their documentation includes photos from Star Wars (see above). But it also supports both 16-bit and 32-bit float representations, lossy and lossless codecs, and has a great definition for underage and overage.
Other examples of High Dynamic Range formats include SGI's TIFF LogLuv format, Floating Point TIFF format, Radiance's RGBE format, and Portable Float Maps (PFMs).
HDR image formats are especially significant for archival and stock uses, since they store data with enough precision to record what we can see, rather than what our displays can show.
There are a range of proprietary formats that offer medium or high dynamic range. The various RAW formats support whatever dynamic range the underlying device associated with the RAW file uses. Personally, I am not a fan of RAW formats for long term image stoage, since they are too device and vendor specific. However, that's a whole other debate.
I don't yet know if OpenEXR will become a consumer standard, or if it will remain a file format used only by Hollywood. Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Canon and others will no doubt have a big hand in shaping that decision.
Of all imaging tasks, editing is the one that demands the highest dynamic range. Editing operations need high precision to avoid aliasing artifacts such as banding and jaggies.
Audio professionals know this. Editing tools like ProTools already use 48 bits per sample internally, even though the common CD output format only supports 16. Why should we image makers accept anything less?
Recently, Adobe announced supports for 32-bit-per-channel HDR images in Photoshop CS2, a great step forward.
Idruna Software is another company doing interesting HDR software. I played with their PhotogenicsHDR when it first came out, but I found it a little hard to use. Perhaps the newest PocketPC version is different…
Photoshop users are familiar with the issues of low dynamic range today. With 8 bit channels, if you brighten an image, information is lost irretrievably: darkening the image after brightening does not restore the original appearance. Instead, all of the highlights appear flat and washed out. To avoid this problem, you must work in a carefully planned workflow.
With a true HDR tool, if you brighten an image and then darken it, you should see something very close to the original image. True HDR editing tools will enable image workers to follow a much more flexible and simplified workflow, using fewer adjustment layers, with fewer aliasing artifacts. I expect HDR software will lead to increases in productivity and greater expressiveness.
It will take the imaging software industry some time to retool and retrain. There are plenty of unsolved issues.
With HDR, for example, you run into the issue of representing brightness values present in the image but beyond what your current monitor can show. Do you clamp to the monitor's gamut, show zembra stripes, map the colors some other way?
Another issue is how to create graphical user interfaces for HDR editing. Many designers are familiar with the RGB 0-255 color values, and can type in RGB color numbers directly using this system. e.g. 128,128,128 is a mid gray. But what happens when intensities go from 0 to several million? Where is mid gray? And how do you represent that in a graphical interface? If the tonal range goes from 0 to something close to the brightness of the sun, where is "white" on that scale? Do you mean monitor white, paper white, 3200k white, 5600k white …?
A third unsolved issue is image size: If each channel of an image is 32 instead of 8 bits, the image becomes four times larger. Switching to HDR therefore makes a 100mb image take up 400mb. Not surprisingly, editing operations take about four times longer. Software will need to become smarter about scheduling work. Live Picture, an early image compositing tool, did a good job of this, but is no longer available. I expect to see a revival of these techniques as people grapple with 10GB images.
Tone Mapping
Most LCD/CRT displays (and of course printed paper) have low dynamic range.
So if you want to output an HDR image on paper or on a display, you must somehow convert the wide intensity range in the image to the lower range supported by the display. This process is called tone mapping.
One old tone-mapping method is the manual dodge-and-burn technique familiar to photographers – where you manually select different tonal ranges for different regions of the image, using a dodging or a burning tool. HDR software will of course support manual dodge and burn.
Another solution is to use an automated tone mapping filter to reduce the dynamic range of an HDR image. There are already several filters to choose from.
The left image above shows what you get if you display Paul Debevec's HDR photo of Stanford Memorial Church using a very basic tone mapping technique (simply clamping to the nearest available color on the monitor). Some areas of the image are "blown out", and the shadow areas are muddy and lack detail.
The right image show's Fattal, Lischinkski, and Werman's tone mapping algorithm, which uses a more sophisticated adaptive approach – you see more details in the shadows and the highlights (look at the stained glass windows), though the image also has a somewhat "flat" or "computerish" quality.
Tone mapping is a hot area of research in computer graphics. As with HDR file formats, there is currently no clear winner. Several techniques are listed in the resource section. I expect the major companies to each champion their own tone-mapping technologies in service bureaus and print finishing.
Over the past decade, display companies have steadily improved the dynamic range of LCD and DLP displays. Today many digital displays have a 2000:1 dynamic range, unheard of ten years ago. This trend of increasing dynamic range will continue.
A few displays available today indicate where the market is going. The most astonishing is the BrightSide HDR display with a claimed contrast ratio of 60,000:1, good enough to reproduce the effect of a sunlit scene. They achieve this using high-power white LEDs.
The only bad thing about the BrightSide display is that once you look at it for a few minutes you just assume that this is how images are supposed to look – it is such a transparently great technology that until you see a normal image on a normal display you don't really think of the HDR display as that exciting. The display is still in the very-expensive bracket, but this will change quickly.
Of course, HDR displays work best if you have lots of HDR images. I anticipate a huge market for stock HDR imagery. See the Flickr HDR group for starters.
Today, the main users of HDR imaging devices are specialized professionals working in the film, animation and VR industries. Some applications are listed below (see the Resources page for links).
Film – Tools such as HDRShop by Paul Debevec enable you to convert a series of photographs into a light probe – a special image that represents the lighting environment in a room. You can then use the light probe to light virtual objects, so that the virtual objects actually appear to be lit by the light from the room. This technique is especially useful for compositing computer graphic objects into images of real scenes. Hollywood films use light maps extensively to blend CGI into a scene.
Panoramas – Another use for HDR is in panoramic images. Panoramas often have a wide dynamic range, e.g. one part of the panorama may contain the sun, another part may be in deep shadow. Online web panoramas constructed from HDR images look much better than non-HDR equivalents.
Games – A third use for HDR is in computer games. Recent computer graphics cards support HDR texture maps. With HDR texture maps, you can render objects using light probes, in real time, yielding much more dynamic and interesting lighting effects. "High Dynamic Range Lighting Effects" are now all the range in high-end games.
As more consumer-oriented HDR products arrive, I believe the largest application of HDR will be in consumer photography, though the term HDR is unlikely to be seen – instead you will see branding terminology, e.g. companies will make up words like "DynaChrome", "MaxBright", "SuperColor" etc.
Do we really need HDR?
I recently read this comment from Sam Berry:
… the whole article has no mention of the fact that the reason most controlled lighting is almost always done to ratio of less than 8:1 even with neg film /modern digital capable of much more is because that's what looks good. HDR technology now means you can reproduce your harsh midday sunlit scene perfectly, and it will look identically awful compared to the original.
The debate boils down to this: Does an image with a 300:1 dynamic range look good because it represents a physical sweetspot — something to do with our perceptual system that works well at that ratio? Or is it that all we've had access to for hundreds of years are reflective images with a roughly 300:1 dynamic range, so we are accustomed to that?
I had a similar question in my mind before seeing the BrightSide HDR display. Now, after looking at a HDR image on a 50,000:1 HDR display, I am no longer concerned about over-brightness, 50,000:1 is still way less than the brightness of looking directly at the sun. It wasn't blinding. It isn't a question of harsh. Images simply looks better when they look more real.
In the coming decade, HDR digital imaging technology will arrive, and change how we take, manipulate, store, use and display images forever.
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This next article explains how exactly to do an HDR image with digital technology. It is written by Fabo from hdr101. His site contains further HDR resources.
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HDR Tutorial (Photomatix) (English)
This is a basic, standard, step by step tutorial of how to make an HDR Image.(Note: this tutorial is based on building an HDR image from 7 differents shots. My camara doesn't shoot RAW. More on building an HDR image from a single RAW file, soon!)
The materials for this process are as follows:
* Digital Camera (Obvius, but hey you never know )
* Tripod
* Photomatix (used for Generating HDR and Tone Mapping)
* Photoshop CS2. (But for this tutorial any version of Photoshop will do. We'll be using it for retouching only)
Ok, let's get going!
Taking the pictures:
Put your camera in the tripod. Place it firmly because you'll have to touch the camera to change the speed and this can make you move it, and then, well you wont be able to get the HDR you were hoping for.
After selecting the subject you wish to shoot, prepare everything as if you were only going to take one picture. Prepare it to your taste or what ever is you want to acomplish.
Set your primary exposure and speed. We are going to call this master setting 0. After this is complete and you have everything set up you are going to take let's say 7 pictures:
3 pictures up from 0 and 3 pictures down.
Dude what do you mean?? Don't panic is quite easy:
If the settings for picture 0 is: 1/125 and f/4.5
The settings for the remaining pictures are as follows:
* Picture +3: 1/250 f/4.5
* Picture +2: 1/200 f/4.5
* Picture +1: 1/160 f/4.5
* Picture 0: 1/125 f/4.5 (YOUR MASTER SETTING)
* Picture -1: 1/100 f/4.5
* Picture -2: 1/80 f/4.5
* Picture -3: 1/60 f/4.5
You've may noticed that the F/ stays the same. This is quite simple: if that value changes also will you Depth of Field which will cause you focus to change also.
Now that you have taken all your pictures is time to go and kick some Photomatix but!
Ok, so you got to your computer, opened up Photomatix, and oh well you have no idea what to do. No problem becouse this part of the process has litle pictures in it, so you wont have any excuse not to make HDR pictures!!
Open Photomatix and look for the HDRI tab. Click on it. After you will see GENERATE HDR. Go ahead click some more.
When you do that something like this comes up:
Now you click on the BROWSE button and select the pictures you want:
After you you click the SELECT button a screen like this come along:
Ok. Now your pictures are selected and you click OK. Now you have to choices: to Align Input Images or not to let the software do it. I personally always let the software do it. Is up to you:
Now you'll get this screen. Depending on you computer memory this may take a while, but not to long. I've notice that when one of the picture is to dark or to bright, in Auto Align, Photomatix has a hard time aligning the images. I usually cancel and deselect the image I think is causing the problem:
If everything is ok, this should come up:
After Photomatix is done, it shows you your new Generated HDR Image:
But you want it like does cool ones out there! Wait, there's more: ToneMapping!
Now you go to the HDRI tab and select Tone Mapping. Here is where the fun begins!
The first thing you may notice is the difference in the picture. Here you have 7 important options:
- Luminosity
- Strength
- Color Saturation
- White Clip
- Black Clip
- Smoothing
- MicroContrast
I could go on and explain what all those sliders and buttons do, but we'll do something better: You try!
Move them up, down, put some more here, take some less there. The idea is for you to experience it for yourself. Trust me, is really fun that way!
So after moving around the sliders i get to a point where i like the results:
I go click on OK, and we go back to the first screen but with the final version of the photo:
Now i want to take it to Photoshop for aditional retouching but first i have to save it. I preffer TIFF format:
Choose your name, location and format:
Now go open Photoshop, and open the TIFF you just saved:
Now go to the IMAGE tab, ADJUSTMENTS. Now you have to play and have fun with each and every other option in there. Try everything and if you do something you don't like, don't worry UNDO! (Also play with some filters, they can help to!)
After playing a litle bit, i got to this point which i like:
Now save it again in any format you like. I always save them on TIFF:
Voila! Your first HDR Image. Kind a cool, insn't?
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And the last one is by Sean T. McHugh from his photographic tutorials located on Cambrigdeincolour.
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High dynamic range (HDR) images enable photographers to record a greater range of tonal detail than a given camera could capture in a single photo. This opens up a whole new set of lighting possibilities which one might have previously avoided—for purely technical reasons. The new "merge to HDR" feature of Photoshop CS2 allows the photographer to combine a series of bracketed exposures into a single image which encompasses the tonal detail of the entire series. There is no free lunch however; trying to broaden the tonal range will inevitably come at the expense of decreased contrast in some tones. Learning to use the merge to HDR feature in Photoshop CS2 can help you make the most of your dynamic range under tricky lighting—while still balancing this trade-off with contrast.
As digital sensors attain progressively higher resolutions, and thereby successively smaller pixel sizes, the one quality of an image which does not benefit is its dynamic range. This is particularly apparent in compact cameras with resolutions near 8 megapixels, as these are more susceptible than ever to blow highlights or noisy shadow detail. Further, some scenes simply contain a greater brightness range than can be captured by current digital cameras– of any type.
The "bright side" is that nearly any camera can actually capture a vast dynamic range– just not in a single photo. By varying the shutter speed alone, most digital cameras can change how much light they let in by a factor of 50,000 or more. High dynamic range imaging attempts to utilize this characteristic by creating images composed of multiple exposures, which can far surpass the dynamic range of a single exposure.
I would suggest only using HDR images when the scene's brightness distribution can no longer be easily blended using a graduated neutral density (GND) filter. This is because GND filters extend dynamic range while still maintaining local contrast. Scenes which are ideally suited for GND filters are those with simple lighting geometries, such as the linear blend from dark to light encountered commonly in landscape photography (corresponding to the relatively dark land transitioning into bright sky).
In contrast, a scene whose brightness distribution is no longer easily blended using a GND filter is the doorway scene shown below.
|Brightness Distribution
We note that the above scene contains roughly three tonal regions with abrupt transitions at their edges– therefore requiring a custom-made GND filter. If we were to look at this in person, we would be able to discern detail both inside and outside the doorway, because our eyes would adjust to changing brightness. The goal of HDR use in this article is to better approximate what we would see with our own eyes through the use of a technique called tonal mapping.
Photoshop creates an HDR file by using the EXIF information from each of your bracketed images to determine their shutter speed, aperture and ISO settings. It then uses this information to assess how much light came from each image region. Since this light may vary greatly in its intensity, Photoshop creates the HDR file using 32-bits to describe each color channel (as opposed to the usual 16 or 8-bits, as discussed in the tutorial on "Understanding Bit Depth"). The real benefit is that HDR files use these extra bits to create a relatively open-ended brightness scale, which can adjust to fit the needs of your image. The important distinction is that these extra bits are used differently than the extra bits in 16-bit images, which instead just define tones more precisely (see tutorials on the "RAW File Format" and "Posterization"). We refer to the usual 8 and 16-bit files as being low dynamic range (LDR) images, relatively speaking.
The 32-bit HDR file format describes a greater dynamic range by using its bits to specify floating point numbers, also referred to as exponential notation. A floating point number is represented by a fractional numerical value raised to some power of 10, such as 5.467×103, as opposed to the usual 0-255 (for 8-bit) or 0-65535 (for 16-bit) integer color specifications. This way, an image file can specify a brightness of 4,300,000,000 simply as 4.3x109, which would be too large even with 32-bit integers.
We see that the floating point notation certainly looks neater and more concise, but how does this help a computer? Why not just keep adding more bits to specify successively larger numbers, and therefore a larger dynamic range? Recall that for ordinary LDR files, far more bits are used to distinguish lighter tones than darker tones (from the tutorial on gamma correction, tonal levels and exposure – to be added). As a result, as more bits are added, an exponentially greater fraction of these bits are used to specify color more precisely, instead of extending dynamic range.
The more closely spaced bits for brighter values is a result of the fact that ordinary 8 and 16-bit JPEG files are gamma-encoded, which can actually help increase dynamic range for low-bit files; gamma-encoding just becomes more and more inefficient as the bit depth increases.
HDR files get around this LDR dilemma of diminishing returns by using floating point numbers which are proportional to the actual brightness values of the subject matter (gamma equals one, or linear). This ensures that bits are equally spaced throughout the dynamic range, and not just concentrated in the brighter tones– allowing for greater bit efficiency. Further, the use of floating point numbers ensure that all tones are recorded with the same relative precision, since the base (mantissa) in numbers such as 2.576×103 and 8.924×109 each have the same number of significant figures (four), even though the second number is more than a million times larger.
Note: just as how using high bit depth images do not necessarily mean your image contains more color, a high dynamic range file does not guarantee greater dynamic range unless this is also present in the actual subject matter.
All of these extra bits provided by the HDR format are great, and effectively allow for a nearly infinite brightness range to be described. The problem is that your computer display (or the final photographic print) can only show a fixed brightness scale. This tutorial therefore focuses on how to create and convert HDR files into an ordinary 8 or 16-bit image, which can be displayed on a monitor, or will look great as a photographic print. This process is also commonly referred to as tonal mapping.
Since creating a HDR image requires capturing a series of identically-positioned exposures, a sturdy tripod is essential. Photoshop has a feature which attempts to align the images when the camera may have moved between shots, however best results are achieved when this is not relied upon.
Make sure to take at least three exposures, although five or more is recommended for optimum accuracy. More exposures allow the HDR algorithm to better approximate how your camera translates light into digital values (a.k.a. the digital sensor's response curve)– creating a more even tonal distribution. The doorway example is best-suited with several intermediate exposures, in addition to the two shown previously.
|-1 Stops
|-2 Stops
|-3 Stops
It is essential that the darkest of these exposures includes no blown highlights in areas where you want to capture detail. The darkest exposure should show the darkest regions of the image with enough brightness that they are relatively noise-free and clearly visible. Each exposure should be separated by one to two stops, and these are ideally set by varying the shutter speed (as opposed to aperture or ISO speed). Recall that each "stop" refers to a doubling (+1 stop) or halving (-1 stop) of the light captured from an exposure.
We also note another disadvantage of HDR images: they require relatively static subject matter, due to the necessity of several separate exposures. Our previous ocean sunset example would therefore not be well-suited for the HDR technique, as the waves would have moved significantly between each exposure.
Here we use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to convert the sequence of exposures into a single image, which uses tonal mapping to approximate what we would see with our eye. Before tonal mapping can be performed, we first need to combine all exposures into a single 32-bit HDR file.
Open the HDR tool (File>Automate>Merge to HDR…), and load all photographs in the exposure sequence; for this example it would be the four images shown in the previous section. If your images were not taken on a stable tripod, this step may require checking "Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images" (which greatly increases processing time). After pressing OK, you will soon see a "Computing Camera Response Curves" message.
Once your computer has stopped processing, it will show a window with their combined histogram. Photoshop has estimated the white point, but this value often clips the highlights. You may wish to move the white point slider to the rightmost edge of the histogram peaks in order to see all highlight detail. This value is for preview purposes only and will require setting more precisely later. After pressing OK, this leaves you with a 32-bit HDR image, which can now be saved if required. Note how the image may still appear quite dark; only once it has been converted into a 16 or 8-bit image (using tonal mapping) will it begin to look more like the desired result.
At this stage, very few image processing functions can be applied to a 32-bit HDR file, so it is of little use other than for archival purposes. One function which is available is exposure adjustment (Image>Adjustments>Exposure). You may wish to try increasing the exposure to see any hidden shadow detail, or decreasing the exposure to see any hidden highlight detail.
Here we use Adobe Photoshop CS2 to convert the 32-bit HDR image into a 16 or 8-bit LDR file using tonal mapping. This requires interpretive decisions about the type of tonal mapping, depending on the subject matter and brightness distribution within the photograph.
Convert into a regular 16-bit image (Image>Mode>16 Bits/Channel…) and you will see the HDR Conversion tool. The tonal mapping method can be chosen from one of four options, described below.
|Exposure and Gamma
|This method lets you manually adjust the exposure and gamma, which serve as the equivalent to brightness and contrast adjustment, respectively.
|Highlight Compression
|This method has no options and applies a custom tonal curve, which greatly reduces highlight contrast in order to brighten and restore contrast in the rest of the image.
|Equalize Histogram
|This method attempts to redistribute the HDR histogram into the contrast range of a normal 16 or 8-bit image. This uses a custom tonal curve which spreads out histogram peaks so that the histogram becomes more homogenous. It generally works best for image histograms which have several relatively narrow peaks with no pixels in between.
|Local Adaptation
|This is the most flexible method and probably the one which is of most use to photographers. Unlike the other three methods, this one changes how much it brightens or darkens regions on a per-pixel basis (similar to local contrast enhancement). This has the effect of tricking the eye into thinking that the image has more contrast, which is often critical in contrast-deprived HDR images. This method also allows changing the tonal curve to better suit the image.
Before using any of the above methods, one may first wish to set the black and white points on the image histogram sliders (see "Using Levels in Photoshop" for a background on this concept). Click on the double arrow next to "Toning Curve and Histogram" to show the image histogram and sliders.
The remainder of this tutorial focuses on settings related to the "local adaptation" method, as this is likely the most-used, and provides the greatest degree of flexibility.
In contrast to the other three conversion methods, the local adaptation method does not necessarily retain the overall hierarchy of tones. It translates pixel intensities not just with a single tonal curve, but instead also based on the surrounding pixel values. This means that unlike using a tonal curve, tones on the histogram are not just stretched and compressed, but may instead cross positions. Visually, this would mean that some part of the subject matter which was initially darker than some other part could later acquire the same brightness or become lighter than that other part– if even by a small amount.
|Underexposed Photo
|Overexposed Photo
|Final Composite that Violates Large-Scale Tonal Hierarchy
A clear example where global tonal hierarchy is not violated is the example used in the page on using a GND to extend dynamic range (although this is not how local adaptation works). In this example, even though the foreground sea foam and rock reflections are actually darker than the distant ocean surface, the final image renders the distant ocean as being darker. The key concept here is that over larger image regions our eyes adjust to changing brightness (such as looking up at a bright sky), while over smaller distances our eyes do not. Mimicking this characteristic of vision can be thought of as a goal of the local adaptive method– particularly for brightness distributions which are more complex than the simple vertical blend in the ocean sunset above.
An example of a more complex brightness distribution is shown below for three statue images. We refer to contrast over larger image distances as global contrast, whereas contrast changes over smaller image distances are termed local contrast. The local adaptation method attempts to maintain local contrast, while decreasing global contrast (similar to that performed with the ocean sunset example).
The above example illustrates visually how local and global contrast impact an image. Note how the large-scale (global) patches of light and dark are exaggerated for the case of high global contrast. Conversely, for the case of low global contrast the front of the statue's face is virtually the same brightness as it's side.
The original image looks fine since all tonal regions are clearly visible, and shown with sufficient contrast to give it a three-dimensional appearance. Now imagine that we started with the middle image, which would be an ideal candidate for HDR conversion. Tonal mapping using local adaptation would likely produce an image similar to the far right image (although perhaps not as exaggerated), since it retains local contrast while still decreasing global contrast (thereby retaining texture in the darkest and lightest regions).
The distance which distinguishes between local and global contrast is set using the radius value. Radius and threshold are similar to the settings for an unsharp mask used for local contrast enhancement. A high threshold improves local contrast, but also risks inducing halo artifacts, whereas too low of a radius can make the image appear washed out. For any given image, it is recommended to adjust each of these to see their effect, since their ideal combination varies depending on image content.
In addition to the radius and threshold values, images almost always require adjustments to the tonal curve. This technique is identical to that described in the Photoshop curves tutorial, where small and gradual changes in the curve's slope are nearly always ideal. This curve is shown for our doorway example below, yielding the final result.
HDR images which have been converted into 8 or 16-bit often require touching up in order to improve their color accuracy. Subtle use of levels and saturation can drastically improve problem areas in the image. In general, regions which have increased in contrast (a large slope in the tonal curve) will exhibit an increase in color saturation, whereas the opposite occurs for a decrease in contrast. Changes in saturation may sometimes be desirable when brightening shadows, but in most other instances this should be avoided.
The main problem with the local adaptation method is that it cannot distinguish between incident and reflected light. As a result, it may unnecessarily darken naturally white textures and brighten darker ones. Be aware of this when choosing the radius and threshold settings so that this effect can be minimized.
Even if your scene does not require more dynamic range, your final photo may still improve from a side benefit: decreased shadow noise. Ever noticed how digital images always have more noise in the shadows than in brighter tones? This is because the image's signal to noise ratio is higher where the image has collected more of a light signal. You can take advantage of this by combining a properly exposed image with one which has been overexposed. Photoshop always uses the most exposed image to represent a given tone—thereby collecting more light in the shadow detail (but without overexposing).
Keep in mind that HDR images are extremely new– particularly in the field of digital photography. Existing tools are therefore likely to improve significantly; there is currently, and may never be, an automated single-step process which converts all HDR images into those which look pleasing on screen, or in a print. Good HDR conversions therefore require significant work and experimentation in order to achieve realistic and pleasing final images.
Additionally, incorrectly converted or problematic HDR images may appear washed out after conversion. While re-investigating the conversion settings is recommended as the first corrective step, touch-up with local contrast enhancement may also yield a more pleasing result.
As with all new tools, be careful not to overdo their use. Use care when violating the image's original tonal hierarchy; do not expect deep shadows to become nearly as light as a bright sky. In our doorway example, the sunlit building and sky are the brightest objects, and they stayed that way in our final image. Overdoing editing during HDR conversion easily can cause the image to lose its sense of realism. Furthermore, HDR should only be used when necessary; best results can always be achieved by having good lighting to begin with.
* * * * *
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TelemetryConfiguration.Active will not be initialized - you'll need to use dependency injection instead.
This article describes how to use Application Insights SDK for classic ASP.NET applications today. Code you'll typically write looks like this:
var tc = new TelemetryClient(); tc.TrackEvent("Order complete");This code assumes some magic. Specifically that
TelemetryClient will be initialized with the proper Instrumentation Key so it will know where to send event. Technically it is equivalent to this code when global singleton
TelemetryConfiguration.Active passed to constructor:
var tc = new TelemetryClient(TelemetryConfiguration.Active); tc.TrackEvent("Order complete");This code will NOT work with ASP.NET 5 Application Insights SDK. The very nature of ASP.NET 5 is to avoid singletons and use dependency injection instead. This wiki page explains how you can get
TelemetryClient class using dependency injection to track your events.
First, you'll need to get an instance of
TelemetryClient. Suppose you need to track event from your home controller. You'll need to create a constructor that accepts
TelemetryClient as an argument:
public class HomeController : Controller { private TelemetryClient telemetry; public HomeController(TelemetryClient telemetry) { this.telemetry = telemetry; }Now you can use this telemetry client to track events and other custom telemetry:
public IActionResult Index() { this.telemetry.TrackEvent("HomePageRequested"); return View(); }As all the source code and history of this SDK development is available on GitHub you may find how implementation of SDK evolved over time moving from singleton-based approach to the one based on dependency injection. We will be happy to hear your ideas, and feedback. Just file an issue and tell us what you think.

subset: commoncrawl


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Dear Abby: Woman's fear hinders romance
DEAR ABBY: I'm a 27-year-old woman who has never had a boyfriend or been kissed. I was never interested in romance or having a significant other. I felt strong being independent and taking care of myself. Now that I have a degree, a career and a house, I feel ready to try to let a man into my life.
I met a really nice guy a month ago. "Brian" and I have gone out several times and have a lot in common. He's a gentleman, and he says he's willing to wait for me.
I have been having a difficult time letting myself be physical with him. Even hugging is uncomfortable for me. I know it's because I have been a shy loner my whole life and I'm unaccustomed to being close to people.
Even though Brian says he'll be patient, I can sense his frustration. Physical closeness should come easily if you like and are attracted to someone. I feel abnormal. I don't know if I'll be this way forever or get more comfortable the more I know him.
I'm afraid Brian — and most men — won't be willing to wait that long. I'm afraid if I don't move faster I'll lose a great guy and never get another chance. What do you think?
DEAR BLOCKED: Being intimate with someone because you're afraid you'll lose him or it will be your last chance is the wrong reason. I think that the sooner you talk with a licensed therapist about your lifelong shyness and discomfort, the quicker you can understand the reasons for it and overcome it. Your doctor should be able to refer you to someone.
If Brian is the right man for you, he will stand by you. But if he doesn't, you'll be able to more easily relate to someone else.
DEAR ABBY: I am planning my wedding in the fall. My fiance and I are paying for the wedding and reception.
I have worked at my job for a year, and I haven't always been treated well by a few co-workers. I am reluctant to invite these people because I'm worried about the repercussions if I do. I know they will judge every aspect because they did it to another co-worker.
I like a few of the people I work with, but I don't know if I can invite only them. What do I do?
DEAR WEDDING PLANNER: What you do is invite only those people you truly want to attend your wedding. It's not necessary to apologize for it or to explain why. If you are put on the spot and feel you must give a reason, say that your guest list is limited because of financial constraints. It's far more tactful than saying they are being excluded because they are rude, awful people, and you don't want them anywhere near you on such an important occasion.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Write Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, Calif. 90069.


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Quick view
Price $17.00
Books may have scratched covers, dented corners, discolorations, or other minor imperfections.
Since 8 out of 10 animals on earth are insects, what children's library on science would be complete without a volume on bugs? Great photos of insects from around the world, both weird and wonderful, cover every page of this captivating book. Constantly attributing unique design features of these sometimes-strange creatures to the Creator, the author also works in a few comments regarding the Bible's big picture of creation, the Fall and redemption.
You might also like
Creation Magazine
Issue 45:2
Journal of Creation
Issue 37:1


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One hundred years ago this winter, two polar expeditions disembarked on the northern edges of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica with the goal of reaching the South Pole. One party, led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, reached 90º S on 14 December 1911. The second party, led by British officer Robert Falcon Scott, arrived a month later on 17 January 1912. Amundsen and his men returned to announce their victory, while Scott and his party of four men died on the trek back, succumbing to starvation and cold.
The meaning of Antarctic exploration has been cast in the forge of the Scott-Amundsen race ever since. There are good reasons for this. The event was significant geographically: representing the attempt to erase the last, substantive terra incognita from the modern world. It was also important politically: highlighting the competition between different Western powers on the eve of the Great War. For historians, it offered a way to demarcate the eras of exploration: signaling the key event in Antarctica's "Heroic Age" and capping the end of a century of intense polar exploration. Lastly, it offered a great story: in the great race to the South Pole, writers have found heroes, villains, experts, and bumblers toiling on a landscape both severe and sublime.
Yet Scott and Amundsen were not the first to understand Antarctica's power as a canvas of the imagination. Three hundred and forty years before Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced across Antarctica, this southern world filled the mind of Abraham Ortelius as he crafted his magisterial atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (The Theater of the World). Terra Australis, as Antarctica was then called, sprawled over the page of Ortelius's world map. Its ragged coastline reached South America and brushed up against the shores of New Guinea and the Spice Islands. It was a polar continent, but it was also a tropical one, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn in the western Pacific to come within twenty degrees of the equator. Even accounting for the distortions of map projection, Terra Australis was a vast place, dwarfing the other continents of the world.
Despite its imposing form, however, Terra Australis was built on fragile empirical foundations, something that Ortelius knew when he published the atlas. The title page of Theatrum, which depicts the continents in allegorical form as goddesses, expresses his ambivalence about the southern continent. At the top of the page, Europe sits on her throne, while Asia and Africa, semi-clothed and semi-barbarous, stand beneath her. At the bottom of the page reclines America the cannibal, naked except for her loin cloth. Terra Australis stands next to her, a figure incompletely revealed in a block of marble, a continent glimpsed but still unknown.
In seeing explorers as sculptors, Ortelius was probably thinking about the sculptors of his day, artists like Michelangelo who had been moved by the spirit of Neo-Platonism and who saw it as their task to "liberate the figure imprisoned in marble." From this perspective, the congruence between the artist and explorer was easy to see: they were both the messengers of objective truth, vectors of knowledge rather than its creators. Terra Australis waited for the explorer to chisel her out of the hard whiteness of high latitudes, revealing her true form to the world.
Yet Ortelius's allegory of Antarctica carries different meanings today, a time when artists do not often describe their work as the liberation of perfect forms or pre-existing ideas, but as creative and subjective acts. If sculptors fashion their figures rather than reveal them, the half-rendered figure of Terra Australis has a different message. In order to bring this continent to life, the allegory suggests, the explorer must envision it and give it shape. Its storms, mountains, and coastlines – its very identity as a place – emerge as the vision of its creator, subject to ideas, expectations, and beliefs. The marble is not silent, of course. The continent of Antarctica, like every artistic medium, carries its own powerful agency (as Scott and his party would attest) imposing its own limits on the form revealed.
Had Ortelius been alive in 1912, the year of Scott and Amundsen's great race to the South Pole, I suspect he would have felt the impulse to finish his Antarctic goddess, to give the continent her final unchanging and eternal form, installing her in his allegorical pantheon like a stone deity in the temple of Olympus. Yet the continent of Antarctica is not so fixed. While its coastlines and topography are now stable enough to secure within the pages of the modern Atlas, its meanings are not.


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Over the past decade, the University of Colorado Boulder has established itself as a national leader in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or STEM, education.
Through its Learning Assistant and CU Teach programs and Integrating STEM initiative, CU-Boulder is making great progress on its goal of improving introductory math and science classes and recruiting and training future K-12 science teachers.
The Learning Assistant program, which was created in 2003 and is now a model for schools throughout the nation, hires dozens of undergraduate learning assistants each semester. The assistants help faculty in departments such as physics, chemistry, astrophysical and planetary sciences and mathematics to make changes in their large undergraduate classes, some of which have as many as 200 students in them.
By employing undergraduate students as learning assistants, the program aims to both improve introductory math and science classes and recruit and train future K-12 science and math teachers.
"One exciting aspect of this program is that these undergraduate learning assistants are the pool from which we recruit new teachers, which is one of the four main goals of our Learning Assistant model," said Valerie Otero, director of the Learning Assistant program and an associate professor in the School of Education.
Learning assistants have helped transform nearly 60 courses on campus, she said. One thing they do is break the large classes into smaller learning groups that are led by learning assistants.
One of those assistants, Emily Quinty, is now a teacher at Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts in Thornton. She worked as an assistant in the LA program for two semesters before graduating from CU-Boulder with an astrophysics degree in May 2007.
"Teaching was not on my radar at all," Quinty said. "But after I was introduced to the Learning Assistant program and became involved in the process of teaching, I decided that I wanted to go into teaching after college. The program really sparked that interest in me."
As an LA program assistant, Quinty worked as what she described as a "facilitator" in class rather than standing up in the front of the room teaching. It was really a different model for her, she said, and it was hard for the other students too.
"At first the students were really uncomfortable," Quinty said. "They said, 'you want me to work with three students who I don't know and talk about physics? I'm here because I don't understand it.'"
Seeing the students overcome that fear and really gain from it was rewarding for Quinty, and she saw a new model for teaching that she really believed in and wanted to try.
"I saw their understanding of physics explode, while my understanding of physics concepts also improved tremendously," she said. "I became a big believer that teaching as a student helps you understand the material better because when you have to articulate something all of the holes in your understanding become clear, and you have to figure out other ways to explain it, so you have to have a solid understanding of it."
It's a model she now uses in her own high school classroom.
"One of the most significant things I learned from the Learning Assistant program is that my role as a teacher is not the traditional stereotype of a teacher who stands up at the front of the classroom and dumps knowledge on kids and they learn it," Quinty said. "Rather, it's me facilitating interactions with the kids so they can create their own understanding of a topic, whether it's through an activity or a simulation in a lab. The important thing is they are able to bounce their ideas off each other, teach each other and really hone their understanding based on their interactions with each other."


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Vero Software Appoints Perry Boyett ALPHACAM Director of Sales & Services - North AmericaVero Software is excited to announce that Perry Boyett, a talented existing member of its ALPHACAM team, has been appointed ALPHACAM Director of Sales & Services – North America, a change that will take effect on April 1, 2016.
ALPHACAM has enjoyed consistent and sustained growth for the last four years.
"I'm fortunate to inherit such a strong ALPHACAM team and am enthusiastic about the opportunity to direct our efforts as we continue to grow and expand our software and service offerings," he said. "ALPHACAM's ability to automate and integrate into the fabric of a company's manufacturing environment is a core strength of our success that we will continue to build upon."
Boyett began his career as a specialist in manufacturing software 33 years ago as a tool and die designer working with automotive, appliance and aerospace clients. He joined the ALPHACAM team as channel sales manager in June of 2003, and has been a key factor in increasing ALPHACAM's channel distribution ever since. Since 2012, Boyett served as ALPHACAM sales manager, delivering significant sales growth to the entire sales operation of ALPHACAM in North America.
About ALPHACAM
Part of the Vero Software Group, ALPHACAM is a leading CAM solution for wood, stone, composites and metal components from 2-axis through 5-axis NC programming applications. The emphasis behind the development of ALPHACAM is to provide our customers with productivity, reliability and flexibility.
About Vero Software
Headquartered in England, Vero Software designs, develops, and supplies CAD/CAM/CAE software radically enhancing the efficiency of design and manufacturing processes, providing its customers with exceptional value through high productivity gains and significantly reducing time to market.
The company's world-renowned brands include ALPHACAM, Cabinet Vision, Edgecam, Machining STRATEGIST, PEPS, Radan, SMIRT, Surfcam, WorkNC and VISI, along with the production control MRP system Javelin. Despite the diversity of application, these solutions have one thing in common: they all address the rising challenges of achieving manufacturing efficiencies and bring huge value to the operations in which they are deployed.
Vero has direct offices in the UK, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, USA, Brazil, Netherlands, China, South Korea, Spain and India supplying products to more than 45 countries through its wholly owned subsidiaries and reseller network.
Vero is part of Hexagon (Nordic exchange: HEXA B), a leading global provider of information technologies that drive quality and productivity across geospatial and industrial enterprise applications.
For more information, please visit verosoftware.com.


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Hoi An
This album focuses on Hoi An (meaning peaceful meeting place), also known as the Lantern City. for It was indeed a very peaceful, quiet and colorful place to visit/explore. Hoi An is well known for thee picturesque Japanese bridge, wooden shop-houses, French-colonial houses, handcrafted lanterns, and old canals. It might be worth to mention that Hoi An has been successful in preserving and restoring its so charming roots and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site 1999. Last but not least, I thank all the friendly local people I met there who allowed/invited me to photograph them.Read More
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Kevin Federline Welcomes His Sixth Child
Kevin Federline and wife Victoria Prince have welcomed a new baby daughter, Britney Spears' former beau announced Sunday on his Instagram account. Unfortunately, K-Fed did not announce the new baby's name so your office pool will just have to wait.
"Words cannot express the joy my children bring me. We are very excited to welcome the newest member of our family.. I love you with all my heart [Victoria Prince] #thefedz #sixthman I mean #sixthwoman," Federline, 36, wrote.
The craziest celebrity baby names
It's the sixth child for the tabloid magnet, and his second with Prince. The couple, who married in August 2013, are also parents to two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Jordan Kay. Federline has two kids with Spears, Jayden James, 7, and Sean Preston, 8, and another pair of spawn, Kaleb, 9, and Kori, 13, with ex-girlfriend Shar Jackson.
Do you think Kevin Federline has too many kids, not enough, or just the right amount?
View original Kevin Federline Welcomes His Sixth Child at TVGuide.com
Other Links From TVGuide.com


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This is what happens when I listen to Reise Reise by Rammstein
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Old gray-beard: Ross lifts Red Sox to verge
Red Sox hold 3-2 series lead
Davis Ross, a gray-bearded baseball journeyman, has nearly completed his long-and-winding trek to a World Series title.
The very definition of a bench player — a backup catcher who has never gotten more than 311 at-bats in a season — Ross got the biggest hit of the year thus far for the Boston Red Sox.
Ross pulled a hanging curveball down the left-field line that landed just a few inches fair in the seventh inning, driving in the go-ahead run and boosting the Red Sox over the St. Louis Cardinals 3-1 for a 3-2 World Series lead.
Now 36, Ross's sandy-colored beard makes him look more aging rocker than dashing athlete. A veteran of six major league organizations, he signed last November for his second tour with the Red Sox, his team for part of 2008. And in a season interrupted by a concussion that sidelined him for more than two months, he emerged as Jon Lester's catcher in October.
With Jarrod Saltalamacchia slumping at the plate, Ross got the opportunity of his 12-year major league career.
The bottom of Boston's batting order had been a bust in the first four games: the Nos. 7-9 hitters were 2 for 43 (.047) with two walks and three RBIs.
With the back end of the Red Sox rotation in shaky condition, Boston didn't want to have to return to Fenway Park needing to sweep two games.
Ross was 1 for 9 in the Series before his fifth-inning single. He stepped to the plate in the seventh against Adam Wainwright following a single by rookie Xander Bogaerts and a walk by Stephen Drew, took a called strike, watched a ball and then fouled off a pitch. When Wainwright left a 79-mph hanger up, he pounced. If the ball hadn't bounced into the stands, Drew would have scored, too, but he came around on Jacoby Ellsbury's single as Ross was thrown out by Shane Robinson.
Ross isn't out there for his speed. He's usually not on the field for his bat.
In an October of unexpected surprises, Ross provided the biggest one for Boston.


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Talk:Liberal quotient
What a fabulous Encyclopedia entry, with entries like this I don't see why no one is using this site?
Fantastic!! This means we now have a wonderful new method of assessing Conservative Bias, and for the first time it is measurable. To calculate the Conservative Quotient (CQ), all one has to do is to know the Liberal Quotient (LQ), then apply the formula: CQ = 1 - LQ.
A rating above zero presumably means that there is Conservative Bias?
Shurely Shome mishtake?
--CatWatcher 13:39, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
- 1 80%?
- 2 Liberal quotient of Conservapedia
- 3 Fox News
- 4 Formula
- 5 Mathematics
- 6 A new term coined by Conservapedia?
- 7 Why does formula not matter?
- 8 Black protestants
- 9 Dumbest file imaginable.
- 10 LQ = zero
- 11 Innumeracy
- 13 Who's "Liberal", anyway?
- 14 Where did "12" come from??
- 15 An X for a Y, for an L, for a C
- 16 Update
- 17 How conservative is the US?
- 18 References
- 19 Is the denominator the total number of individuals in a population or the number of non-liberals?
- 20 Are these figures out of date?
- 21 Identical criticisms
- 22 Technically…
A source for that might do nicely. DrLib 14:08, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
- There is a poll under journalism students suggesting that 80% have liberal opinions. I will look it up when I have time. I saw another research suggesting that journalists are socially liberal, but economically more conservative. Few oppose NAFTA, for example. So its a well-off kind of liberalism. User:Order 7 April 00:45 (AEST)
Liberal quotient of Conservapedia
Not counting the vandals, I'm genuinely curious what our liberal quotient is. MountainDew 14:13, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
Most of the liberals here have been pretty disenfranchised, a few still prawl around the talk pages but they are not really "part of the group" so I don't think its very high. There is what, about 40 active users, maybe a dozen or so are liberals, but I think they have been pretty effectively shut down by bans, warnings, and condescending and insulting sysops. Etaroced 14:23, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
- (Inserted comment) I'm opposed to most condescension and nearly all insults. Please help me develop guidelines for a standard of Conservapedia:Civility. --Ed Poor 10:49, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
Sneaky and deceptive as they are by nature, I suspect many liberals are unlikely to freely admit to being liberals, therefore making an accurate measurement of the liberal quotient here difficult to obtain. --Jeremiah4-22 16:22, 5 April 2007 (EDT)
- Technically, and I don't expect some people on here to understand this, I think you would have to say everyone on here is moderately liberal. We allow for the addition of material that might question our beliefs, could contribute to free and open debate. Those are classicly liberal ideas. Don't like that--go to Saudi Arabia where they aren't so liberal. Flippin 10:26, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
- I think that liberals 'decorate' our project rather nicely when they aren't making sly digs. As far as I'm concerned, they are welcome to stay and particapate as equals. I think some of the syosops are liberals, not that I want to out anyone.
- But if they are here to disrupt and play tricks, like the Seattle WTO protesters who provoked the police into "excessive force" just so that they could accuse 'the establishment' of 'not listening to them' then they aren't helping anyone. Serious thinkers see right throught that kind of malarkey.
- Any liberals who want to preserve their franchise would do well to couch their suggestions in polite terms. Any idea can be brought up, if done in (1) the right way (2) in the right venue (3) at the right time. (My talk page is always open. :-) --Ed Poor 10:30, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
Liberal Quotient will always be a subjective factor, of course. If one assigned an LQ based purely on party association, and started digging into American history a little bit, one would find Democrats who went around lynching blacks, and Republicans who went around trust busting. Teresita 11:15, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
- 'But if they are here to disrupt and play tricks, like the Seattle WTO protesters who provoked the police into "excessive force" just so that they could accuse 'the establishment' of 'not listening to them' then they aren't helping anyone. Serious thinkers see right throught that kind of malarkey. ' But the police still used excessive force. That is a legal fact. You keep bringing up this accusation, Ed Poor; scared?
Oh, and I've made this. Wikinterpreter
Fox News
Quoting from article: Television news anchors on the major networks had a 100 percent liberal quotient until Fox emerged
Does this mean that Fox News is a Bad Thing as it upset the finely balanced (and therefore unbiased) 50:50 distribution of liberal and conservative anchors?
I'd rather define it so that 100 percent is all Liberal, 50 percent is half and half, and 0 percent is no Liberals. --Ed Poor 10:21, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
- I don't think Order's changes helped the article:
- The liberal quotient is defined simply as the ratio of liberals to conservatives in a group. Thus the liberal quotient is zero when there are no liberals in the group.
It is infinity if there are no conservatives.A quotient of 100% corresponds a group that has as many liberals as conservatives, while a quotient below 100% means that there are fewer liberals than conservatives. The same number of conservatives and liberals will always result in the same liberal quotient, regardless of the size of other groups, such as moderates or independents. [I marked up the part I didn't like with strikeoutformatting. --Ed Poor 10:46, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
- The liberal quotient is defined simply as the ratio of liberals to conservatives in a group. Thus the liberal quotient is zero when there are no liberals in the group.
- You may not like it, but that's how it's defined in the article. If the quotient is ratio of liberals to conservatives in a group, then the liberal quotient is infinity if there are no conservatives. And liberal quotient of 1 amongst news anchors means that there were equal numbers of liberals and conservatives Chrysogonus 13:49, 8 April 2007 (EDT)
Why didn't my changes help. I just tried to clarify the definition. User:Order 7 April, 1:00 (AEST)
- You changed the definition. I think 100% Liberal is all liberals, no conservatives; and 0% liberal is no liberals and all conservatives. Using infinity would make the quotient too cumbersome to use. --Ed Poor 11:01, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
I agree w/ Ed. But I also think that we should present 0% as ideal. --BenjaminS 11:04, 6 April 2007 (EDT)
- I disagree with the fact that I changed the definition. But for the moment we can keep it like it is. User:Order 7 April, 1:10 (AEST)
- I put this in two places, oops. Here is the "correct and useful" formula: Liberal Quotient = L/(L+C), that is, the number of identified Liberals divided by the sum of identified Liberals and Conservatives. Likewise, the CQ = C/(L+C). This results in a number from zero to one in either case, which can be expressed, as in the original definition, as a percentage.
- I just edited the article to reflect this. I hope no one minds. Human 17:37, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
There are, obviously, so many flaws in this whole idea that it is hard to know where to begin. First with definitions of Lib and Cons. I suspect than many of us are not simply one or the other. Also, if LQ=L/C then the LQ of, for instance, the Democratic Party is LQ=1000/0=undefinable.
My 2 cents, just dont make me divide them by zero.--PalMDtalk 14:13, 8 April 2007 (EDT)
- One thing to begin with would be to use the definition in the article itself, rather than the alternative that it tries to replace. User:Order 9 April, 21:25 (AEST)
- What do you mean? The definition in the article is liberals/conservatives, which gives an undefinable answer when there are no conservatives. Chrysogonus 08:15, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Oh, dividing by zero is a minor problem. It has a few other problems, such as that 997 moderates, 2 liberals, and 1 conservative have the same liberal quotient, as 1 moderate, 666 liberals and 333 conservatives. To avoid dividing by zero, we can agree that the value is then infinity.
- What bothers me most is it that of all the Liberal quotients mentioned in the article none of them was computed according to the definition. And this is the article defining the liberal quotient. And if you look an this talk page, you see that few people do actually understand the definition. Most think its the fraction of liberals or something similar. User:Order 9 April, 22:45 (AEST)
- I have to agree with User:Order's assessment. I mean, are people just making these up? That doesn't sound very useful, and it certainly undermines Conservapedia's usefulness as a source! Sterile 13:44, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Why can't we have people self-identify? I know Richard tried this at one point and got into some hot water (which I won't expand on)but the underlying principle was valid--if this wiki is supposed to contain only conservative content how can we not ask people to tell us the truth about where their allegiance lies? Flippin 13:55, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Self-identifying won't work, especially not on this site. Andy and his crew are so conservative that almost everyone is a liberal to them (if you don't believe me, look at Andy's posts and how everyone who disagrees with him is labeled a liberal). In most circles I'd be considered a conservative, but here I'm nothing but a dirty liberal hippie (and that's a good thing as I'd rather not be grouped with some of the wingnuts here). Jrssr5 14:03, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Here is the "correct and useful" formula: Liberal Quotient = L/(L+C), that is, the number of identified Liberals divided by the sum of identified Liberals and Conservatives. Likewise, the CQ = C/(L+C). This results in a number from zero to one in either case, which can be expressed, as in the original definition, as a percentage. Human 17:05, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Self-identifying won't work, especially not on this site. Andy and his crew are so conservative that almost everyone is a liberal to them (if you don't believe me, look at Andy's posts and how everyone who disagrees with him is labeled a liberal). In most circles I'd be considered a conservative, but here I'm nothing but a dirty liberal hippie (and that's a good thing as I'd rather not be grouped with some of the wingnuts here). Jrssr5 14:03, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Why do you ask people to self-identify in this context? The problem is that Aschalfy first defines the liberal quotient as Liberals/Conservatives and then doesn't use it when he computes e.g. the LQ of news anchors. This is not a matter of liberal or conservative, it is a matter of math. User:Order 10 April, 8:25 (AEST)
- Why can't we have people self-identify? I know Richard tried this at one point and got into some hot water (which I won't expand on)but the underlying principle was valid--if this wiki is supposed to contain only conservative content how can we not ask people to tell us the truth about where their allegiance lies? Flippin 13:55, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- I have to agree with User:Order's assessment. I mean, are people just making these up? That doesn't sound very useful, and it certainly undermines Conservapedia's usefulness as a source! Sterile 13:44, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
A new term coined by Conservapedia?
A new term coined by Conservapedia? I find that hard to believe and suspect it was infact Aschlafly who coined the term. WhatIsG0ing0n 13:59, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- The term definitely existed before. Simple google search proves that. However, I assume that the term has its own, special meaning on this site. Not sure, but it's possible. --Sid 3050 14:04, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
Andy got a lot of comments on the way he arrived at his measure of Liberal bias of Wikipedia; one main point was that using liberal/conservatives to measure bias is confusing. Research uses typically other measures. So, Andy decided to declare his alternative way to compute bias an 'innovation'. User:Order 10 April, 8:35 (AEST)
- Is it actually possible to classify individuals as being absolutely Conservative or Liberal? With the exception of a few especially pure characters (and I salute your dedication, guys) most people are hopelessly flawed and (at best) somewhat intermediate. So to calculate the LQ of a group accurately, a method is first needed of assessing the Liberality of all individuals included in the party. Otherwise a further level of inaccuracy is necessarily introduced into the calculation.
- (As an example, although George W Bush is considered Conservative by most people, any good Conservative can see right through him to his pernicious Liberal tendencies - to call him a true Conservative is clearly erroneous, when in fact he is probably only 70-75% Conservative (Just a wild guess here on my part...).)
- If the LQ is to be a useful measure, it needs to be calculated with rigor; a roomful of right-leaning people clearly shouldn't have the same LQ as a roomful of true Conservatives, which seems to be the situation at present. --Jeremiah4-22 21:06, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
Why does formula not matter?
Ed Poor just deleted the section on calculating the LQ and said "(formula is not the point)" in his comment. I don't see why not, especially when numbers are quoted in the last paragraph. Please justify this removal. To call something a "quotient" by definition means that some numbers are being divided. If there is a good reason to leave it out, fine. If not, I will replace it, and, if I can find good examples, add a few references. User:human 21:15, 9 April 2007 (sig added aroound 02:15, 10 Apr.)
- If you can come up with a formula as precise as IQ, fine. Otherwise, please let's all stop teasing Andy about this. --Ed Poor 22:17, 9 April 2007 (EDT)
- Andy came up with a definition. And Human too. They were both very precise. Or do you claim otherwise? You cannot hide the defintion, just because few understand it, and few use it correctly. User:Order 10 April, 12:22 (AEST)
This article gets better and better. Now it states that the definition is not clear (which is fair enough) yet still has figures for the liberal quotient of journalists and news anchors. I guess that at least makes it clear that these numbers were more or less plucked out of thin air. Chrysogonus 16:24, 10 April 2007 (EDT)
- Responding to User:Ed Poor above, I have a couple of questions.
- First, and simplest, is what does any of this have to do with "teasing Andy"? I'm really lost on that one.
- Second, do you know how IQ numbers are determined? You give a large group of developmentally "equal" people (like a given grade in school, or age) a standardized test, that is set up so all of them will get some of it right, but none of them can get it all correct. Then you take the raw scores and create a transfer function to map them to a Gaussian distribution curve (bell curve). The peak of the curve is marked as "100", and the score scale is created by picking a numerical increment to be equal to each standard deviation (sigma). This is typically 15-16 points = one sigma, making it so five sigmas each way yields IQs of 20-25 and 175-180 - very rare figures indeed, since five sigmas corresponds to less than 0.0001% of the population (I forget the exact number, it's actually even smaller).
- I do think that the formula presented (which "explains" the numbers in the last paragraph exactly) is simpler. Using it, for example, on the number of self identified liberals and conservatives on wikipedia (212 vs 75 today), the LQ = 212/(212+75) = 212/287 = 73.9% or 0.739. The CQ is 75/287 = 26.1% or 0.261. The network news example starts off pre-Fox at 3 liberal and no conservatives, LQ = 3/(3+0) = 1 or 100%. You can apply this formula to any group where you have a number for each preference (i.e., registered Republicans and Democrats out of all registered voters).
- I really don't care whether or not this article makes "sense", but since it is so easy to have it make sense, why not do it? The original text just wasn't thought all the way through, as numerous mathematically astute editors have mentioned above, in an attempt to make this a better article. Human 13:06, 11 April 2007 (EDT)
Black protestants
I'm glad to see that sterotyping is allowed here (see Federal Reserve) Czolgolz 10:24, 10 April 2007 (EDT)
- That black protestants are overwhelimingly "liberal" is actually true as this PEW report shows.[6] Order 11 April, 9:50 (AEST)
Dumbest file imaginable.
Until there is a metric for determining the "liberal quotient" (which is not hard to come up with), it is really embarrassing (to conscientious contributors to this site, and its "owner") and stupid to offer numbers that supposedly represent the LQ of certain groups. Check my previous comments, and deleted edit of 4/9/07 AD ([7]) to see what I mean. I mean, come on. I have no problem with the concept, as a bit of a geek I kind of think it's cool. But as that same geek, I think the formula should be presented. Along with more examples. Andrew, I ask you, you made an accident of language in your first formulation, feathers to chickens*, we all make mistakes, it was obvious what you meant. I (and other contributors) just wanted to get it right. Human 02:04, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
- *Every disarming epithet I thought of to use here (heck, darn, drat, doggone) I realized were "nice" ways of using profanity, so I made up my own. Human 02:04, 19 April 2007 (EDT)
LQ = zero
I know some people's palms sweat when they imagine the concept. Human 23:05, 27 April 2007 (EDT)
As I have said, it doesn't matter to me one way or another what this article (or anything on this blog) says, but, I would I would expect those publicly associated with it to strive for relatively sensible versions of their, um, version of reality. (There are precisely
57 six times as many liberals on Wp as in America!)
- No one said "precisely."--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
1. The metric of "six times" depends on an incredibly small number of self-identified Wpdians.
- Not that small. Several hundred at least. Probably a higher percentage than most polls of the American public.--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
- Sampling error isn't significantly affected by the percentage of the population included in the sample -- a representative sample of 1000 is as reliable in the USA as it is in Monaco. The problem in this case is that it's difficult to justify the assumption that those who self identify as liberal or conservative are representative of the community of Wikipedia editors. It may well be true that there are six times as many liberal Wikipedians than conservative, but it's not statistically reasonable to conclude that from a self-selected sample such as this.--Jalapeno 04:52, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
- The last time I looked at Wikipedia, the same size was 274 (for conservatives + liberals). This is not a large sample. The total percent sample size is about half that for a Harris poll (that it admits that it has errors that gives that it cannot give a good confidence[8]), however the sample for wikipedia is self selected meaning that you cannot use it to make statistically responsible statements.[9] --Mtur 22:30, 9 May 2007 (EDT)
2. In the absence of its inverse, the conservative quotient, defining the Lq is silly knee-jerk reactionism.
- It's baffling, and a bit amusing, how liberals just won't admit they are liberal.--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
- It is baffling that Aschlafly won't admit that he did bad math. He prefers to call people liberals instead, proving that he ran out of proper arguments. --User:Order 10 May.
3. Judging by what Ashfly calls "liberal" on this site, the US is about 60% or so liberal and 30% or so conservative. Leaving 10% "sheep".
- This is false and doesn't make any sense.--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
4. An appropriate acale for a measure like this would create a middle point of "1" or "0", with a clear reflection about that point in each direction. So it should run form infinity to minus infinity, or 10 to -10, or 1 to -1. or, gee, 0 to 1.
- No, the sensible "middle point" is unity, or 1. Do you have your same objection to the scientific (Kelvin) scale for temperature?--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
5. This is a really dumb article
- You didn't help your cause with that conclusion.--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
Discuss amongst yourselves. Human 23:43, 27 April 2007 (EDT)
- Ah, the Parthian Shot. Fine, I hope you honor it.--Aschlafly 01:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
- I presume that means I relinquished the right to quibble with your responses. I'll honor that. if there is anything, however, that you want further comment on, feel free to ask me here or on my user talk page. Human 02:35, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
Andy, I appreciate that you are discussing the formulation in the article. I think it adds a real measure of accountability and honesty. I have one quick comment though - X+Y is not the whole population, it is only the "self identified" portion, so it does not dilute the results with moderates. Multiplied by 100, it makes a percentage. Remembering older edits, the major networks would be at 1 (100%), (3/3+0), then came Fox - making it 75% (3/3+1).
It is a perfectly useful metric, and does not bias anything one way or another. Anything over 50% is "suspect" of liberal bias, and anything under is imbued with conservative trustworthiness (see, I didn't even get mean and say "trusworthiness" - remember who was first to point out the typo to get the logo fixed!).
Please, I ask you, run some numbers from various groups to see how it works (the formula). I think you will see that it works very nicely, and is also very clear and understandable.
Oh, and one last thing, us math geeks would tend to use L and C as the variables, for simple clarity (LQ=(L/L+C)). Using lambda and gamma would hurt our keyboards, but believe me, if it was easy, we'd use the Greek! Human 02:35, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
Who's "Liberal", anyway?
Are Libertarians the equivalent of the square-root of negative one in this formula? How about LaRouchites? Log Cabin Republicans? Natural Law Party activists? Tories? Bull Moosers? Anti-Masonic Revivalists? Pat Buchanan?
In a world of rainbow colors, it can be hard to decide with are "black" and which are "white". <SARCASM>Strangely, it's been my experience that no more than about 5% of Democrats actually have Mark-of-the-Beast tattoos and smell like brimstone, and only about 2% of Republicans actually have wings and a halo.</SARCASM> --Gulik2 03:36, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
Gulik2 is absolutely right. See Perry (1970) 'Forms of Intellectual Development in the College Year: A scheme'. Perry says that intellectual development occurs as follows:
- 'Dualism' - a simple interpretation of the world as black/white, us/them , good/bad etc.
- 'Multiplicity'; -= an acceptance that there are different points of view and they cannot be simply labelled good/bad etc.
- 'Relativism' - requires that the different points of view are contextualiised, and that knowledge/behaviour in one context may be perfectly acceptable and correct, may not be appropriate in another.
for a source see: http://www.csub.edu/TLC/options/resources/handouts/scholarship_teaching/perrystheory.html
What occurs to me is all that if Perry is correct, with the obsession with Liberals/Conservative points of view, many contributors on this site do not seem to have developed intellectually much further than their freshman year. Hm. Think I'll write an article about this...--CatWatcher 03:55, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
See Perry Theory for the article --CatWatcher 19:55, 29 April 2007 (EDT)
Where did "12" come from??
Ed, where did your "12" come from?--Aschlafly 09:22, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
- It would be informative if somebody with access to the appropriate data could calculate the LQ for Conservapedia, for purposes of comparison? --Jeremiah4-22 12:16, 28 April 2007 (EDT)
An X for a Y, for an L, for a C
This article has a few problems.
- X is defined as number of liberals, and Y is defined as number of conservatives. X/(X+Y) is the same as L/(L+C). The article argues that they are different, proving that the author doesn't know how to work with variables. And it proves that the author doesn't read his own definitions.
- The criticism that a measure is between 0 and 1, shows that the critic doesn't know that such a measure is equivalent to a measure that ranges between 0 and infinity. Take for example the negative logarithm of the first measure. It just show that the author has not the faintest idea about functions over an infinite domain.
- The remark that an increase from 90% to 99% is just a 10% increase, shows that the author doesn't know how to interpreter percentages. People who do work with percentages know that the difference between 90% and 99% is an order of magnitude.
- The comparison with other metrics is flawed, because the author didn't compare it with any metric that is actually used in literature. Earlier versions of this article pointed to alternative definitions of liberal bias. None of them is mentioned.
- Finally, this article repeats the old misinformation that the ratio liberal in the wikipedia is 3:1, while it is 1:2 in the American public. It doesn't mention the sources, nor that, if you look at the sources, this comparison is based on nothing but quick sand. It just shows that the author has no idea about statistics.
As a summary, this article proves nicely that in conservapedia conservative bias is more important than facts. Even basic mathematics, which is neither liberal or conservative, is canned to make a poor argument. User:Order 10 May
I saw that Aschlafly fixed some optinionated part of the article, without actually fixing any of the fundamental flaws. I would suggest to fix the fundamental flaws first. It, for example, still argues that X/(X+Y), where X are Liberals, and Y Conservatives, is different from L/(L+C), where L stands for Liberals, and C for Conservatives. If you want to fix something, fix that first. User:Order 11 May.
I extended and updated the article on liberal quotient. If you find typos or factual errors, please feel free to fix it. User:Order May 13.
How conservative is the US?
The article says "According to a Harris Poll from 2005 [1], 40% of all Americans identify as moderates, 35% as conservatives, and 18% as liberals. This gives a liberal quotient of about 1:2. These numbers have been fairly constant during the last decades.", but according to Aschlafly, Jack Abramoff wasn't a conservative[1], despite his ties to Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Oliver North; his membership on G. W. Bush's transition team, etc. Rudy Giuliani made a statement held up as a "liberal falsehood of the day"[2], so is presumably not a conservative either. Given this, it certainly doesn't appear to me that merely self-identifying as such is enough to be considered a 'conservative' for this site, and the Harris Poll shouldn't be used to determine how conservative the country is. --Jtl 00:42, 13 May 2007 (EDT)
- You make a good point, that will go ignored here. Human 01:17, 13 May 2007 (EDT)
this may be picky, but wouldnt' this liberal quotient be more accurately called a liberal conservative ratio? Something about this jangles the statistics part of my brain.Prof0705 13:09, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
- That's redundant. It would be like requiring everyone to say how hot versus cold it is outside, rather than simply "how hot is it?"--Aschlafly 13:15, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
Not really: temperature is the correct term. And while heat is real, cold is just the absent of heat (absence of energy).
While Conservatism and Liberalism are both real political movements: there is no reason why this couldn't be called the conservative quotient, or the liberal/conservative ratio.
Anyone ever considered that wikipedia might be more liberal than the American public, because it has a lot of non-American editors? And despite the gossip on wikipedia, a large part of its edits are scientific/mathematical in nature, and highly educated people simply tend to be more liberal than average Joe... MiddleMan
- This why the liberal quotient is considered so useful. If wikipedia would have for 99.6% articles that are NPOV, for 0.3% with a liberal POV, and 0.1% articles with a conservative POV, its liberal quotient would still be 3:1. It doesn't matter how neutral Wikipedia is, as long as the biased fraction is biased towards liberals. You might argue that if Wikipedia's articles would be for 99.6% NPOV, Conservapedia would have no reason to complain, but Conservapedia thinks differently. And it should indeed be called liberal/conservative quotient, to be precise. User:Order May 16, 9:50 am (AEST)
- If that was to be the measure, then conservapedia would have an infinite conservative quotient which means that it is also infinitely more conservative than the American populace because there are no articles that have a liberal bias. --Mtur 20:03, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
- ↑ http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk:Deceit&diff=158024&oldid=158009
- ↑ http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Template:Tfa&diff=154374&oldid=153131
Is the denominator the total number of individuals in a population or the number of non-liberals?
I see people don't agree on the definition of this term. When I hear the term for the first time, I imagine the denominator is the total number of individuals, which is the sum of the number of non-liberals and the number of liberals. Otherwise I'd see it as a confusing term. --Pepsi-Cola 22:44, 26 June 2007 (EDT)
- The moderates add nothing to the mix. Including the moderates in the denominator results in the loss of information, as 1 liberal and 99 moderates is very different from 1 liberal and 99 conservatives.--Aschlafly 23:20, 26 June 2007 (EDT)
- Hence moderates do add to the mix. You say it yourself, it matters if there are 99 conservatives, or 99 moderates. User:Order July 3
Are these figures out of date?
I followed the links in the article, and it seems there are now 81 Liberal Wikipedians and 71 Conservative Wikipedians, with 26 moderates. This reduces Wikipedia's liberal quotient from 3:1 to a mere 1.15:1. If these statistics are so prone to change, can they really be trusted? --JonathanDrain 18:48, 24 July 2007 (EDT)
Identical criticisms
Although most of the stuff under "Criticism" relates to different things, there are two parts whihc appear to be the same:
- Critics of the liberal quotient point out that it discounts groups identifying neither as liberal nor conservative, such as the 40% of moderates in the American public. A group with 97 moderates, 2 liberals, and 1 conservative has the same liberal quotient as a group with 1 moderate, 66 Liberals and 33 conservatives, although some might claim the latter group is more liberal.
And this:
- An encyclopedia with 99.7% unbiased articles, 0.2% liberally biased articles, and 0.1% conservatively biased articles, has the same liberal bias as a product with 66.6% liberally biased articles, 33.3% conservative articles , 0.1% unbiased articles. However, the first would be considered a reliable source of information, while the second would be highly unreliable. And this despite having the same liberal quotient.
Both make the point that the use of ratios can distort the data range. Merge them? PeterS 20:33, 30 September 2007 (EDT)
- Sure, you can merge them, but both criticisms are defective. The first fails to recognize that only "undecideds" are in the true middle, and they should be discounted because they will just follow the stronger side. The second fails because the liberal quotient is about people, not articles or things. But go ahead and merge as you like. Godspeed.--Aschlafly 20:49, 30 September 2007 (EDT)
- They are different, because articles that are unbiased do not follow the stronger side. The points it criticizes are (1) that it discounts in groups the influence of the middle group, and (2) that the middle group in an encyclopedia, the unbiased articles doesn't swing. If the latter wasn't made sufficiently clear we can try to make the difference more obvious. Order 06:20, 1 October 2007 (EDT)
A quotient does range from 0-1. Sorry. --SimonA 16:48, 18 December 2007 (EST)
- Actually, it can be any value, however, in the context… --AngryCommunist 17:49, 2 January 2008 (EST) (approx.)


text:
regenerative 2005 by eugenio tisselli.
regenerative is the second part of the degenerative experiment, in which a web page became increasingly corrupted each time it was visited. in the regenerative web page, text degenerates with each visit, but it also attempts to regenerate itself by trying to extract some text from the refering page. if extraction succeeds, the new text is implanted within the degenerating text and becomes part of it. new texts are shown in red. click here to view the original regenerative text. ***broken link***


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