Just as going live still. Okay, so it looks like we're live. Excellent, okay, so hi everyone and welcome to another Sussex Vision Talk. My name is Tessa Herzog and I'm a PhD student in the labs of Tom Barden and Leon Lanyardo. I'm really pleased to host today's seminar which is a collaboration between the highly successful Worldwide Neuro Talks and the Sussex Libi-Hume Seminar Series. The latter is run by the Libi-Hume doctoral students here at Sussex University where we host speakers exploring topics from sensation to perception and awareness. You can check the schedule for the upcoming talks for both the WWN Talks and the Libi-Hume Seminar Series at the links in the video description below. So today I'm very happy to welcome Dr Bevel Conway who's going to be talking about the neuroscience of colour. Dr Conway is a senior investigator at the National Eye Institute in the laboratory of sensory motor research. So his lab aims to understand the brain processes by which sensory data are transformed into perceptions, thoughts and actions. The work in his lab has been especially focused on developing colour as a model system and the lab uses a combination of techniques including psychophysics and non-invasive brain imaging including MRI and MEG in humans alongside experimental fMRI guided microelectrode recording, fMRI guided pharmacological blockade and computational modeling. Dr Conway is also a visual artist and he's written on the intersection between art practice and neuroscience. So I'm really happy to hand over to you Bevel so you can start screen sharing. Great thanks so much here we go let's see if this works okay and now all right which screen do you guys see we've got your notes screen still okay and yeah there we are yeah are we good all righty okay thanks so much um it's a super wonderful privilege to be here I'm just gonna start a clock here because I don't want to try and keep on time um there we are all right so um yeah thanks so much for the invitation Tessa it's nice to meet you and I'm looking forward to a discussion afterwards before I launch in I do want to just acknowledge um the folks in my lab over the last few years who've contributed to the work I'll describe I'll point out specific contributions throughout my talk um so a broad goal of visual neuroscience is to understand how the brain generates knowledge and as you heard my labs especially interested in using color to approach this question and I admit that it might seem on the surface to be a bit silly because it's widely assumed that color does not really require much brain processing as you guys all know in Sussex fish do it pretty well um and it um and in any event it's often thought to just be a low-level stimulus feature of limited utility division uh so why would we use this as a model system um it has been surprisingly difficult to quantitatively determine the benefit of of color division uh so I'm gonna go through a little background to try and motivate why why we're doing this why we use color in this way okay so in a famous study Beederman and June showed that for most objects color doesn't afford much recognition benefit if anything color uh recognition error rates actually higher for colored images than for line drawings uh Gagan Fertner and Rieger pushed back against this idea that uh color was completely useless they used an image recognition task and showed that um if both the test and the probe images are colored that um you recognize and you get a slight recognition benefit so that this supports the idea that that color helps you recognize things faster and remember them better but as you'll see from those graphs the benefit is really modest and it's not clear that this benefit actually relates to object vision per se it could be a kind of an intentional mechanism indeed for most objects such as faces colors neither sufficient nor necessary by itself for recognition so it's very hard in this uh image to tell the identity of the face because it's an equiluminate picture there's no luminance contrast in fact luminance cues are almost entirely sufficient to recognize most objects and this is really why computational models of object vision such as the original h max very influential algorithm don't incorporate color because you just don't really need color to recognize objects now there are some data on the fringes color can aid face recognition under but under very degraded image conditions so this benefit is conferred for example by enhancing feature segmentation making the eyes and hairline more visible and not because the specific color itself is diagnostic of the particular face so as yippen sinna pointed out in this paper from 2002 you get the same recognition benefit uh in a false colored image um and again this benefit is pretty modest so most people can tell that that's lady diana even in the black and white picture but with the color either of the colored versions you get a tiny little boost okay so the upshot is that color doesn't really seem to be critical for object recognition but instead seems to support a range of behaviors of indirect relevance to object vision these include low level visual abilities such as scene segmentation so being able to parse objects from backgrounds using color cues and high level processes such as attentional capture grouping categorization memory communication emotion and reward and social cognition so it's a vast array of behaviors and i think this array of behaviors expands the potential objectives of vision that is when we think what is vision for we often go to object recognition and i think color sort of blows open that uh that range of possibilities and says color does a lot more and for me at least i i think these these objectives of vision are at least as important as object recognition itself the problem is we have very little idea how these and other behaviors of vision uh are enabled by the brain uh and give rise to knowledge okay so to make this overarching question tractable how does the brain generate knowledge i think it might be useful to sort of take a step back and break the question down into its two component parts make them explicit first what are the computational objectives of vision let's not take it for granted that we know what vision is for let's try and spell it out and then let let's figure out how those objectives are implemented in the brain when we have an idea about what vision is for i think it's a lot easier to hunt for neural implementations but as i hope to show you today the reverse is also true sometimes uh the quest to understand how the brain works can prompt a reevaluation of ideas about what vision is for okay let's dive in so a few years ago uh we ran some imaging experiments in monkeys to test alternative hypotheses about the organization of the visual brain this is a side view of the macaque brain that has been computationally inflated to reveal the cortical sheet that would otherwise be buried in the cell seat now a considerable amount of the macaque cerebral cortex is implicated in vision indicated by this dashed ellipse the tissue towards the back can be carved up by the meridian representations into the classic retinotopic areas of v1 v2 v3 and v4 but there's this large swath of tissue anterior to v4 the infrotemporal cortex whose organization is poorly understood and we were interested in trying to figure out how that bit of brain is organized there are two proposals for it organization at least uh among the set are the swiss army knife proposal championed by nancy canwisher that calls for specialized modules embedded in multipurpose tissue so you might have an island of face processing tissue inside this tissue that's more general purpose and the distributed concept processing model uh championed by uh jim haxby which argued that basically all parts of it are contributing more or less to to most of object vision so a few years ago rosa lay for susan i tested these ideas by mapping the relative activation patterns in the same individual animals to a battery of stimuli and we found a large network of color bias domains in it so uh they're shown in the cool colors in this lateral view from the cac brain what's more these regions these color bias domains were systematically positioned next to face patches shown in warm colors uh the activation patterns seem to carve up it into four sub areas each defined by its own complete set of functional activation patterns so these and other data we obtain suggests that infrotemporal cortex is organized according to parallel multi-stage processing streams for faces colors places and objects and perhaps other stimulus attributes so instead of just being a big mush it's actually got these rather discrete stages to it now the hypothesis is supported by anatomical connectivity data in a large meta analysis by cravitz et al of track tracing data they discovered that the predominant pattern of connectivity in it is parallel connections running along the posterior anterior axis and they identified these four main nodes teod te pd te ad and tgv what's super cool is these anatomical nodes align with the functional domains suggestive of a beautiful form functional association that the anatomy is supporting this functional architecture that we discovered um so taken together these results suggest that the face patches are not some unique weird set of islands of very specialized tissue but they're instead one manifestation of a canonical set of computations performed in parallel streams along it and i think that's a really powerful way of thinking about it and it reconciles these two theories i introduced earlier borrowing key elements of both the distributed model and the specialized model the the the framework is appealing not only because it matches the empirical data but also because it comes with a hypothesis for how it develops and how it evolved which became apparent except in experiments we did to try and figure out the underlying organizing principle and i'll talk about those in a second i think it's also powerful when they're converging lines of evidence and there are new papers from uh sri hasam et al from nature neuroscience and baudel and nature that really support this this architectural model this parallel multi-stage framework model okay so what's the underlying organizing principle that determines this structure well a key clue came from rafael malik's group who found a coarse eccentricity bias across higher order object areas in humans now we ran experiments to determine whether monkeys have a similar eccentricity bias they did and in a very precise pattern so besides the foveal representation in early areas just i outlined it there with that big star and in area mt that's that dorsal area there there were a sequence of foveal representations along it there are three here one two and three and these representations line up with the functional domains discovered using colors and faces so you can see them on the other hemisphere there so that suggests that it is organized by repeated eccentricity templates perhaps inherited from uh v1 recent work from arcaro and livingstone suggests that this proto eccentricity template structure we discovered is present in primates from birth so the eccentricity template results recall alman and casus reminder that a common mechanism of evolution is the replication of body parts so we see this uh in lots of domain the vertebral column or the segments in drosophila or the genetics of color vision the replication hypothesis has also been used to explain the expansion of retinotopic areas so this is in alman and casus framework how we got v1 v2 v3 and v4 all with a shared foveal and peripheral representation so our discovery of a series of eccentricity maps down it suggests that the theory can be expanded so according to this hypothesis an ancestral v4 duplicated to create primitive it which itself duplicated several times carrying forward this eccentricity representation it inherits from v1 so the idea is that foveal biases within it took on a role in computing faces peripheral representations took on a role in computing scenes and para foveal regions in between took on a role in computing colors and i i think that this hypothesis is quirky and interesting for for lots of reasons but one of them is it sort of relates to this weird question what's the cognitive scale of color so if foveal representations are taking on a role in face processing that makes sense because face perception requires the ability to parse objects finer than the scale of the object so you got to look at the features within the object whereas the far peripheral regions taking on a role in computing scenes makes sense because scene perception requires us to take in the entire visual field the color bias regions are situated in between which suggests that color is really serving this role on the level of an object and and and we've done some informal work just polling people if you ask them what's the cognitive scale of colors people are like huh but if you show them a multicolored object and you say what's its color or what are the colors or how would you describe it people will typically pick one color that's the kind of handle that they've used to describe the whole thing yeah so sorry to interrupt you the right hand side of your screen is slightly cropped and it wasn't too much of a problem before but now it's interfering with some of the is that still crop there yes it is yeah i'm wondering if the format of your slides is slightly is it wide screen i don't know are you zoomed in not sure we can't we can continue it's just a very small portion in the right hand side okay on the right hand side all right well so does it does it go through all of the in terms of the evolutionary time arrow can you see the arrowhead no we can't how much of the a i t c i t can you see so in the fifth globe there we see up to the letters p i t okay yeah all right i'll keep that in mind hopefully we can have a go at changing the slides sizes now if you'd like or you can just press on it's up to you i'm not sure how to do that do you know um yeah i can all right let's try okay pause we get to pause now give everybody a chance it's just one it's gone full screen now so i'm hoping it's full screen for everybody else as well okay here is that all right yeah that's perfect that's great you can see there ahead all right thank you so much okay so um it's good to be forced to take a little break anyway okay so before we get too exotic you might be wondering if the relationship of face patches and color bias regions we see in macaques is also evident in humans as you might predict if the activation patterns reflect some kind of ancestral homology the answer is yes so in a collaboration with Nancy can we're shown Rosalie for Susa we showed that humans have the same tripartite organization of color bias domains sandwiched between face domains and place domains this was published in a paper in 2016 in J Neuroside so the results suggest that the macaque is a good model of the human case and they're also consistent with this idea that color plays an important role in high level vision recall it in fro temporal cortex this large swath of tissue and both the human and the monkey has been implicated in object recognition in fact we also found color bias domains in prefrontal cortex of the macaque so this is just stimulus driven these beautiful domains again adjacent to face patches in the frontal in the frontal cortex so take a step back there's like as much tissue about as much tissue involved in color processing in parts of the brain implicated in high level vision as there is involved in face recognition what's all this color bias tissue doing i mean for one thing it's a strongly suggests that color is not simply just a low level stimulus feature and it returns us back to this question what is color for so the boundary between retinotopic areas in it reflects a transition from retinotopic or retina centric organizational systems to a cognitive one in other words the there's a transition in the brain from the back to the front that goes from how retinal information is encoded to how visual information is used in behavior so it's this critical transition that turns light information into knowledge you then care about and can use so given the literature implicating in fro temporal cortex and object vision we wondered if there was some statistical pattern in the colors of the parts of scenes that people care about as distinguished simply from the statistics in the environment so my colleague at MIT the linguist Ted Gibson taught me that one way of determining what people care about as opposed to just the statistics in the environment is to ask them what they label so we wondered about specifically the statistical distribution of the parts of scenes that participants label as objects and surprisingly there were no data on the color statistics of objects to address this gap sieve at nassingham in my lab analyzed a large database of photographs labeled with label object labels and these panels show random pixels from objects and backgrounds you can see right away as striking results the objects tend to be warmer colored compared to the backgrounds this plot quantifies the results to orient you u prime and v prime are the dimensions of the standard chromaticity space so our results show that objects differ from backgrounds along the u prime dimension and animate objects differ from inanimate objects along the perpendicular v prime dimension so I find this result really striking because it suggests that the dimensions of color space itself u prime and v prime do not derive from how color is encoded but instead reflect the high level use to which we put our color system namely the detection of parts of scenes that are likely to be relevant objects versus backgrounds and animate versus inanimate isabel rosenthal uh in my lab related the object color statistics to the color tuning responses measured with fmri so in this lateral view region showing high correlation of fmri color responses and object colors are depicted in yellow and they form this band along it so the results suggest that color provides us with semantic information that is contributing to the knowledge about the stuff in the world and this idea that color reflects the youthfulness of visual information as opposed to just the scene statistics is supported by the color naming studies we did together with tid gibson's lab so here's the question how many guesses does it take you to identify in a color array the chip i've picked out if all you know is the word that i use to label the color so we both have the same array i pick a chip you don't i'm not pointing at it i use a word how many guesses does it take you the answer is an indication of the communication efficiency of our language and it turns out that across all languages there is a striking universal pattern so this tapestry shows color chips for each language arranged in a row and they're arranged from left to right according to the rank order of the communication efficiency of that color within the language and the languages themselves are ordered top to bottom according to the overall efficiency of their language so at the top you have western languages that have very high communication efficiency regarding color very sophisticated color color naming systems and at the bottom you have less efficient languages that have fewer consensus color terms in the population but you can see despite how fancy your color naming system is there's this universal pattern that is warm colors are communicated more effectively than cool colors across all languages and those statistics are actually related or that pattern is actually related correlated with the object color statistics so the results suggest that the extent to which color is useful drives the color naming patterns which helps resolve a long-standing debate in the color naming literature but for our purposes the results provide insight into the role that color plays in how we acquire knowledge color doesn't just tell you so much about the specific identity of what you're looking at but rather the likelihood that it's something you'll care about that it'll be an object okay so there seems to be elements of a story emerging that it uses color for object recognition by becoming especially sensitive to the color statistics of objects but there's a hitch to this tidy account the band of it indicated by the yellow arrow that is most highly correlated with the color statistics of objects that band does not coincide with the color bias domains they tend to be ventral in fact if anything the band in it encompasses face patches more so than color bias regions which is peculiar why because face recognition doesn't need color you can test yourself with the selection of grayscale photographs of some luminaries in the neuroscience of color you can easily tell them apart even if you've never met them the fmri results show that the color signals influence many if not all parts of intro temporal cortex so we've got those color bias domains they they were identified because they show and i've an overt bias to color over luminance contrast but you also have this band of tissue with a bias for the colors of objects that encompasses the face patches so color is too simple of a term it's entering it in lots of different ways so marien duicke in the lab and others in my groups a group of post backs confirmed the mri was not misleading by doing fmri guided recording of the face patches so they used a clever stimulus set that preserves the luminance contrast relationships of the faces while parametrically varying hue i can walk you through how you make the stimulus set but the upshot is that any given face in the stimulus set still has the rich luminance contrast that the face system needs in order to respond to faces but we can make green faces and red faces and so on and sure enough the population of faces on average was biased for warm colors so there's the distribution of the population cell response you can see it peaks to the warm colors and has dips to the cool colors for reference the dashed curve shows the distribution of face colors from sophie werger's large sample of spectral measurements of faces across multiple ethnic ethnicities so the color tuning data are consistent with an earlier report by edwards et al that just measured the responses of face selective cells to natural versus unnaturally colored faces and showed that it cells face cells are often respond a little bit better to the naturally colored faces the complete color tuning functions that we obtained allow us to compute the fissure information for the population so the fissure information shows what colors are most readily discriminated by the population so so can these face selective cells with their color tuning actually distinguish between different face colors well there's a dip in the fissure information that coincides with the peak of the distribution of colors of faces which shows that the population is not actually optimally tuned to discriminate the colors of faces so to summarize face cells do not seem to be wired up to discriminate face colors they're using that color information to do something else instead i suspect the color tuning of it and of the face cells reflects this other key organizing principle so several reports have argued that infrotemple cortex is organized by responses to animacy measured using shape cues so this is work by nasa laris et al Shah et al and compland caramatsa they've really argued quite strongly that it is organized by this response to animacy and there are a number of other papers as well so our results suggest that color could contribute to this organizational structure by playing a role in animacy judgments especially those related to faces this returns us back to this question what is all that color bias tissue doing they don't seem to be encoding the colors of objects at least not in a generic way so it returns us to the cycle of questions one behavioral piece of evidence in favor of the notion of of of the role of color and object recognition comes from that earlier study by dagan furtner and reger i mentioned earlier that color helps us recognize things faster and to remember them better and and a big piece of data in support of that idea is that color and shape are somehow inextricably bound and the evidence for this comes from this kind of a demonstration where where we might ask what is the color of a banana there's a number of studies now that suggests that the color you associate with a banana isn't just an association the the gray banana actually looks like it's tinged with yellow and this is taken as evidence that the color and shape are processed together as two cues to object identity now we decided to test for these effects for both inanimate and animate objects using very rich shape cues and the reason really was that these effects the so-called cognitive penetrance of color the yellow tinging of the gray banana is thought to depend on the richness of the shape cues so if you make the shape cues really really rich as as you know lots of shading and so on you get a better effect than you do if you just use a line drawing well the richest shape cues we could imagine can be can be sort of created by looking at the world under monochromatic sodium light low pressure sodium light so mariam hasantash and rosalie for susa asked people to match the appearance of real objects and real people while immersed in this room lit with low pressure sodium light the monochromatic sodium light it has sort of very narrow bandwidth and you can think of it as a kind of knockout experiment it doesn't it prevents the retina from actually encoding color and the question is what colors do you see under this very peculiar circumstance where everything is essentially monochromatic or kind of weirdly colorless so if memory modulates the colors of objects then when retinal color encoding is impaired or disabled then the color matches should reflect the normal colors for color diagnostic objects just like the the gray banana should appear tinged with yellow but so so and we made that prediction that this should be the case for for objects that have a diagnostic color but not for objects like toys that don't have a diagnostic color so we have a little selection of toys and then we had an orange fruit a strawberry and a tomato and you can see those at the bottom and those tapas that tapestry there shows the color matches that people made 20 different subjects made to all of that array of different objects or samples under white light and it recovers basically what you expect now in addition and we'll get to that in a minute we also had people color match skin samples of real-life human models a Caucasian woman and an African-American woman we had two of each and we'll get to those results in a minute but for now what we noticed right away was that the matches under the low pressure sodium light did not really distinguish between the toys and the the naturally colored objects they all appeared the same kind of washed out brownie yellow color that's really just a color reflecting the illuminant so we didn't find very compelling evidence for this cognitive penetrance of color on on objects but there was one exception and that was faces so of the two races tested African-Americans and Caucasians every single subject matched their faces with a striking green so it wasn't the natural color it was this paradoxical color the effect was abolished when the face context was masked showing that this really isn't just about something about the skin it's actually the face context that's creating this paradoxical memory color now we did a detailed analysis of the color matches to determine the extent to which they modulated the long versus middle or the red greenish axis versus the scone systems and i'll dive into that now so under these plots show the multi-dimensional scaling relating the first dimension of the of the representational dissimilarity matrix for the s component along the s along the y-axis and along the m axis is the lm component so under white light the skin of faces and non-faces so face skin is shown as black symbols and non-face skin is shown as open symbols they're fully overlapping they're indistinguishable under white light people make the same matches to face skin and non-face skin what separates the populations is the race so Caucasians are in the upper left and African Americans are under in on the lower right what's quirky is under the low pressure sodium light you see a separation and that separation is selective for the lm dimension so this is regardless of race what we're now pulling out is a distinction based solely on the extent to which that memory color is modulating the red green or lm axis so i think this provides really quite a deep clue about the role of color and behavior it doesn't tell us about identity that is race but rather about behavioral state now although Yip and Sina do not describe it i think their original observations or the figure from their paper provides a kind of clue and don't you think Diana looks sick in the false colored picture i mean it the most striking feature to me of this image is not that color is helping us recognize her but that that false color she just looks really really ill and in fact many of the subjects surprisingly more women than men that was the only sex difference we found spontaneously reported that the faces under low pressure sodium light looked sick so males and females both gave the same color matches they both dialed it in to show green but the females were much more likely to spontaneously report there was something wrong about the face so um these results suggest that there is some kind of prior that your that your brain has some very rich information about the normal colors of faces but we've already seen that these face cells although they're tuned for warm colors they're not actually capable of discriminating the colors of faces but the behavioral results the color matching data i just presented they argue that it's not about discriminating colors around the color circle of faces but rather colors across the lm axis that's what the face selective cells are wired up for and if we replot our face selective our color tuning data from the fmri guided micro electrode recording you can see that the cells on average have this ramp shaped tuning function that is they respond more to faces if they have higher l versus m content and these ramp shaped tuning functions are very similar to the ones that doris tau and finrich frywald and market livingstone have discovered in face cells for other face parameters like the eye position or the spacing of the eyes to the nose and so on and so it looks like this is one parameter that the face selective cells are sensitive to that gives them their tuning and taken together the results then suggest that the cells the face selective cells they're not discriminating the face colors but instead they're encoding a prior about just the lm component and that lm component is the dynamic component of faces it's the component that varies with hemoglobin or oxygen saturation that tells you about emotion and health and so on so we return to where we started what are the computational objectives that vision and how are they implemented so we haven't really addressed this question yet we've still stuck the color bias regions sitting ventral to the face patches what are they really doing and i think at this point we can go back to the proposition that what is the color of a banana now when i ask you what's the color of a banana we reflexively answer that it's yellow and it's widely believed that yellow is somehow inextricably tied to object shape so much so that the gray bananas are thought to appear tinged with yellow those are the memory color experiments of hunts and and and alconon and dagenford and i described earlier so i don't challenge those results they're empirical findings there are some quirky features of those results namely that they seem to those memory colors seem to be most strongly evident for objects that have colors that align with the daylight access with the natural colors of the illuminant and and so it seems like the memory color effects recovered in those experiments may actually relate more to uncertainty about the illuminant than they do to the the inextricable yoking of color and shape information when i ask you what's the color of a banana i think really what we're asking is this kind of implied question what's the color of the bananas that you care about and i i think that particular clause that you care about is especially useful or important because it tells us that um that the color isn't relating to the identity but rather to the behavioral state of the object so as a banana ages it undergoes a number of color changes and those color changes don't really tell you much about the change in the identity the identity is evident in all of them and in the grayscale object the changes in color tell you about the changing state of the of the banana and the extent to which the banana is likely to be meaningful to you so when we ask what color is the banana we're drawing on this implicit role of color as it relates to use that is the cognitive function of color which we all take for granted is to tell us about whether or not something is likely to be relevant and i think this then provides a good formal argument for why object recognition and color biased regions are decoupled in the brain they serve different functions so the shape biased regions such as face patches enable object recognition and the color biased regions constitute this trainable system that promotes the computational efficiency efficient by connecting objects with their likely relevance and if color and shape were inextricably tied to each other and yoked to each other then they couldn't serve these independent functions so to test the implementation of this kind of broad hypothesis i think it's useful to break the problem down into mechanisms that encode color which we hypothesize are implemented in retinotopic cortex and mechanisms that decode what color means which i suspect depends on array of areas in infrotemple cortex and prefrontal cortex the human lesion literature provides some tantalizing clues to this these decoding mechanisms and we can discuss that at the end of the talk in a minute if that's of interest but it's a larger topic okay so to sum up i've shown you a bunch of data and i want to try and stitch it all together so we we used color as a tool to try and uncover the essentially the organizational structure of infrotemple cortex and we discovered that there's this parallel multi-stage processing of colors faces places and objects down the length of it and those results suggest not only that it comprises the set of somewhat discrete stages but it also strongly suggests that the face patch system or any system within it isn't unique but one exemplar one example of a canonical set of operations that take place down it and i think that's really useful as a framework because it means that whatever we learn from one of these systems we can use it to try and understand or create hypotheses in the other system and in fact this is one of the things we're doing at the moment is trying to figure out you know for specific hypotheses of what these stages in it are doing we're trying to use the the full array of of of tools that we have at our disposal and information about face processing place processing and color color processing importantly i refer to these domains these color bias regions in infrotemple cortex by this cumbersome term color bias regions because i don't think they're they're involved specifically in processing color i think that is done by the encoding stages already by the time we get to the v4 complex so we don't we actually know very little about what these domains are doing and i think there's lots of very exciting work yet to be done to figure out how they work and how they afford this range of cognitive features that are behaviors that we use color for one loose idea is that maybe infrotemple cortex is actually parallel streams where you've got one stream or set of streams that are telling you what stuff is the identity of stuff out there and another stream that's computing whether or not you should care about that stuff maybe that's what the color bias domains are feeding into so then we also went through data showing that the organizational structure in the infrotemple cortex is predicted by the set of eccentricity templates that are inherited from v1 and that then predict the organization so that the foveal bias for regions take on a role in playing in processing faces and peripheral regions take on a role in processing places and mid peripheral regions take on a role in processing colors and that quirky question of what's the cognitive scale of of color might relate to objects which i think is interesting because all of the work i've described about color is about objects at a graspable scale that is we use color to identify that which we can then touch or interact with and that may be partly why we don't or languages typically don't develop color terms for blue until relatively late in the languages evolution because they're despite the fact that the statistics of the environment are flooded with lots of blue and water and sky and so on there's very little blue we actually touch you try and reach out and grab the sky its color disappears or same with water and then we talked about the high correlation between the fmry color tuning functions of voxels down it and object color probability which indicates or suggests that it is organized by this color but using color information towards animacy judgments and that color is sort of feeding into it in lots of different ways one of which is for that sort of animacy or or coarse scale object and maybe an intentional mechanism and then these color bias domains that are really privileging color over luminance contrast that seem to be using color to do something slightly different and those results then relate to the moving around the slide to the bottom right going kind of clockwise to the color statistics of objects and that the observation that that they are not uniform that the colors of objects are actually quite specific that objects tend to be warmer colored compared to backgrounds and animate objects tend to be distinguished based on the the prime or the yellow blue axis and those color statistics data interestingly enough are similar for for artificially colored objects which is I think instructive because it tells us that when you go about making the color of an object you borrow on this kind of implicit knowledge of what colors objects should be in order to paint those objects so we make stop signs red because natural objects tend to be warmer colored and we want that to be a salient object then we did these fmri guided microelectrode recording experiments to test the predictions made by the fmri and discovered that face selective cells do have this warm color bias have this ramp tuning function through the lm axis which suggests that these cells are specifically using the lm ratio to tell us something about the dynamic or changing character of of of faces chromatic color faces and then finally I talked about the paradoxical impact of memory on face color appearance under these conditions where retinal mechanisms for color are impaired people see faces as green and that and that that color match is selected really for the lm axis and I think tells us something important about the special role that color plays in social communication and with that I want to thank all of the people that have contributed to the work over the years I've listed them next to the specific projects I didn't talk about our magneto encephalography work or our work in in v4 if you're interested in reading up more on the right top right of the slide is the selection of papers that I drew upon to create the talk and of course I want to thank our funding agencies especially the national institutes of health the national eye institute intramural research program and you for your attention thank you so much thank you so much bevel that was absolutely fascinating and I'm sure you're getting lots of virtual applause across the globe um yeah that was really fascinating I really enjoyed hearing about um sort of language development and the behavioral relevance to color as well so there have been a few questions dropped into the chat which you may have covered as your talk went on but I'll bring them up anyway in case you wanted to add anything so the first question was from Wei Li asking are the three failure representing patches in it sequential or do they parallel parallelily receive inputs from v4 oh that's a good question yeah so the track tracing data indicate that there's lots of interconnection between the patches so we have we're right now in the process that's gearing up to do some functional connectivity data collection we've done a little bit of you know if you sort of look at the patterns of fmri activity in without driving it with visual stimuli you can look at which voxels are correlated with other voxels just in a kind of resting state and we've used that kind of an analysis to look at whether or not these bits of brain are connected to each other or at least driving correlated patterns of activity but um Wei Li's question is specific about whether or not that pattern of connectivity is hierarchical in the way that we that may may be assumed given um they're sort of our organization along the putative hierarchical visual processing streamed MIT and my suspicion is that the answer is they're not organized strictly hierarchically that there's lots of feedback connecting between the between them and there is evidence uh from track tracing data not guided by uh the functional data showing what the what the pattern of connections is and it does look like you get v4 input through a lot of it maybe not quite as far as interior it but certainly um through central it okay great thank you very much so the next one's from Tom Barden and Tom asks could the warm color bias be linked to the fact that it's the midget system providing the information which is numerically dominant especially in the phobia i.e the brain simply gets way more warm color information than information about blues or short wavelengths um that's potentially true that the problem with that kind of a theory is that we know in primary visual cortex at least develop kataras and devaloy have argued that there's an amplification of the escom system and that there's quite a lot of there's much more uh um there's much more responses to escom stimuli in primary visual cortex than you would expect simply given the relative ratio of escoms to lm cones so to the extent that the warm color bias we find is outside of primary visual cortex beyond primary visual cortex it i think reflects something active that the visual system is trying to do to recover that information um that said um super team re and colleagues have shown that there's very high gamma in primary visual cortex to warm colors to long wavelength sensitive long wavelength colors um which is consistent with the idea that you've got a lot of drive to you know red the problem with that hypothesis is that the midget system is not driving simply um the l axis of the lm uh uh sort of you know that in your cone opponent axis the midget system isn't responding selectively just to the l pole it's actually l versus m and they're not two independent midget systems and m minus l and an l minus m they're actually feeding in in parallel to the cortex so there's no reason to suspect that the midget system by itself would give you a warm bias it would give you the ability to distinguish warm versus cool and uh that i think is true i think that is in fact where these evident where these data lead us is down the idea that that what evolution has done in primates is created a midget system that gives us access to that specific access the lm axis um and the the piece about the color statistics of objects was really to underscore the point that that the um the color space reflects the extent to which we use color information and that is probably not an independent force from the force that drove the evolution of l and m cones um for obvious reasons the selective pressures are the things that made us get that cone system um great thank you um so we've got a few more so i'll keep going and then we'll we'll move into the zoom room um so the next one is from phil bartel and he says great talk have you plotted your data against wilkins and sario's vividness should we all become highly morphists and stick to the four causes um what was the end have we plotted it again to vividness and what was the last part of the question should we all become highly morphists and stick to the four causes i don't know what that means okay i'm i so i'm going to take interpret the question as something to do with saturation that's usually what people mean when they mean vividness saturation is a very so i haven't talked at all today about saturation and how saturation is encoded and in part it's because of the three standard dimensions of color that we appeal to you know hue that is the thing that you use for a color term red orange yellow green blue and so on luminance contrast the lighter blackness uh and saturation saturation is the least well defined um so it seems like saturation is the thing that maybe the brain is sort of most squishily adaptable to put another put another way i can take a given patch that looks very desaturated under one condition change your adaptation state and have it appear very very saturated um and this is nowhere more evident than in memory colors themselves where you know the the colors you imagine in your mind's eye are extremely vivid um and yet there's no saturation that you can measure at all um i think you know for those people who are interested in black and white photography i have a feeling that that's one of the compelling things behind black and white photography is that it allows the coloring of those photographs to be left up to your imagination which allows the colors to be really really saturated um in the development of color photography one of the things that drives photography technology most strongly is the desire for more and more and more saturated colors so we see this for hd televisions that now have you know more than three color primaries because they're giving you so much more saturation so there seems to be a kind of almost insatiable appetite for saturation but that itself confounds the ability to measure it great thank you um so the next question is from george and he asks does the separation of objects and backgrounds and animate and inanimate objects reflect primate visual space statistics or is it supposed to be a universal principle um so the distinction of uh that's so the object color statistics analysis we did um reflects primates in so far as primates humans specifically were the ones who labeled the images so um i i actually think you know if there's this quirky irony that we call these things objects they're the least objectives thing you can imagine they require a human observer to define what it is you know they're when i look out you know at the garden there's not you know a set of discrete objects that are isolated from each other that i can be like that's objectively defined it's like no i've decided to call that thing an object even though half of it is occluded and i don't know what the texture is on this side and so on um and that in fact was the point of using human observers to parse the images to label the images was to figure out you know if we're dealing with uh infrotemple cortex a part of the brain we think is involved in cognition that is in using visual information to connect to behavior then we need to have some some lever on behavior and um and so the answer to your question is it's specific to primates specific to humans in so far as humans were the ones that defined what an object was um and i suspect you could do the same analysis and people uh have done similar sorts of analyses where you look at you know what does a be considered to be an object and then you relate what it considers to be an object given its foraging behavior to the spectral sensitivity of its photoreceptors for example and it's a similar kind of spirit that's kind of what we're doing except instead of relating it back to the photoreceptors we're trying to relate it back to infrotemple cortex and the reason we're doing that is that we know that the photoreceptors in primates are not just for color vision they're supporting all vision you know cone photoreceptors are supporting black and white vision and motion perception and face perception and everything and so to ask the question about the relationship to statistics of statistics in behavior to brain activity we have to go to the right part of the brain where we think that relationship may be meaningful and that i think is in infrotemple cortex great thank you okay and the final question before we move over to the zoom room it's from jenny boston jenny asks for the color bias regions in it do you find any differences in color bias or other preferences between the posterior and anterior regions um we so the anterior regions what's interesting about the anterior regions is that they tend to show more overlap with face patches so the further anterior you get the less isolated are the color bias domains from the face patches they sort of seem to kind of have a little corner of them that overlaps and that's consistent with with the color tuning that we measure with fmri that shows that as you move for further anterior you might get more of a warm color bias in the in the in the color bias domains we don't see any difference in the face patches between that posterior and anterior so so what's happening in the more anterior domain seems to be maybe inheriting that color biased color bias for warm coloring warm color bias that we see in the face patches um i should say that um the resolution of the fmri especially in that temp anterior temporal lobe gets weaker and weaker because it's quite far down and it's a small chunk of tissue and so um our signal to noise also goes down uh and so you know there's a bunch more work to to be done and i would be curious to talk to jenny to figure out if she's got a specific hypothesis about what she expects to be happening down there but yeah good all right thank you so much that's all the questions um pleasure so far so i just want to say huge thank you um to bevel for that fantastic talk and also to the audience for attending and asking all those questions that was great um so as i mentioned in the chat bevel's available for a more informal chat so you can join us on the zoom link which has been dropped in the chat um and i also wanted to mention that the next lever hum seminar will be Joel Pearson on wednesday the 26th of may so i hope to see as many of you there as possible all right thank you so much great all right well i'll stick around for a little


Hey traders, this is Tosh I go by T Bradley 90 in the my investing club chat a general reminder for those who do not know MIC is having a one-year anniversary event where bow is going to be trading live in front of our members It's coming up August 17th mark your calendars as an added benefit for our members The event is 100% and exclusively free for annual and lifetime members While lifetime on top of that get extra coaching before the event and guaranteed front-row seating While most charged for these events We show our support by making it again free for annual and lifetime members if you are interested in signing up for this event Dm t Bradley 90 in M. I see slack chat and or email myself at Tosh at my invest in club calm Now we have a very special video for you guys this week as Joe Kelly one of our head Moderators in chat reprises his role of his trading basics video series every Sunday And this is episode 35 in which case he's doing going to do a live trade of RKDA with a failed Deathline and a failed stop-loss and while today is just a preview of the full-length video If you want to watch the full length or any of our exclusive content then become a member of M. I. C. How's it going everybody? So I want to talk about RKDA This is a live trade from Friday August 9th 2019 now this particular trade Let me just walk you through the plan here real quick If you look at the bottom right of your screen, you'll see That I've highlighted these key areas that I want to trade Based on the daily chart. Okay. These are key technical resistance levels That I see on the chart first one being three and then 350 Based on this level is here and then around 390 You could argue 390 to four since four is a whole dollar And then to me from there you you jump right to five here in the gap-fill area now there's There's some support here that is around 450 that I mean you could potentially play that there But you know it's 450 and then five you've got a lot of levels Overhead that when it starts running into these it's going to start selling Hard so at the open The plan was that it pushed to the four dollar level. Okay is 350 was the pre-market high the 350 line Ended up working to the penny perfect during pre-market so what I like to see is On these particular setups is I like to see them break the pre-market highs Get some longs in there and then start to run into technical resistance levels and That's that's the opportunities to short So right here. I start considering an Order because I see that $3 is broken and it can't reclaim three. Okay So the tape was very heavy there You could see that the ask was 295 several times and it could not break above 295 So to me that was that was that was the indication that this is very very weak Granted there is support here at 280 So the plan was take a small starter With risk above the lap in this case, which is around 315 So if you notice here shortly, there'll be a fill So I've got rid of 295 seller went up to 297 but 295 to Right back over and then here we are again 295 297 again same three line all over the place And then three three three can't break three can't break three So once I see that That is when I start to consider That I probably need to put a feeler on and there's my feeler so it filled at 290 Again the stop is above the lap here on that starter This is just a trade to kind of curb my FOMO and make me pay attention I don't really recommend starters to anyone Now one thing I want to show you here real quick. I'm going to rewind it real fast You see those barriers right there that 22 K routed to Arca Nasdaq edge and VATS That right there is clearly someone trying to prop this stock Okay, and Remember it's a 292. Okay So now you see the reaction it immediately pops everybody's gone. Oh There's there's a big block here. Now watch what happens Okay Where's your bidders From 292 tests again, where's the bidders? But out there. Here's the three break. Okay, so remember the stop is a V-wap. So right here Breaks about V-wap, I'm gonna take it off, but it didn't notice what happens here Okay, let's slow this down and rewind real fast here Real nice and slow. Let's see if we can catch where the exact spot is So you see his prints at 292, so it's like a minute 37 right there So notice how there's no bidder anymore. There's no one trying to manipulate the price If you look at the tape, you can see 292 these share these prints They're they're definitely not 20,000 shares worth, but you do have a bidder here 13k So notice he gets taken real fast 286 sells and then you get a 286 seller that pops up Right Here Hey traders, this is Tosh. I go by T Bradley 90 in the my investing club chat Just wanted to reach out and say if you have any questions about M. I see joining M. I see maybe you're a member already You have three ways to contact myself personally and through M. I see you can hit our social media You can hit me through pms in chat or you can contact us through my email at Tosh at my investing club comm That's T. O. S. H at my investing club comm I will get back to you in a timely manner And I'm saying this because I'm here to help and I don't want anybody to be afraid to reach out and ask any Question that they have we are here for you guys. All right. See you guys


Nygirio's Commercial Nerve Centre Legos dropped 22 places to rank 93rd in the 2021 global ffintech rankings. The ranking identifies emerging hubs, ffintech companies and trends. While Legos slumped in the report, Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya jumped 26 places upwards to rank 37th on the global ranking. Nairobi is the only African city in the top 50 categories of cities across the globe. Acra, Garnes capital city, dropped 28 places to rank 151 on the global ranking of cities. Within the year, over 15 new cities and 20 new countries were added to the index, meaning that they host the headquarters of at least 10 privately owned ffintech companies. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


To be entitled to copyright protection, something must be original. That term encompasses two distinct requirements. The first is independent creation. If you copy your work from someone else, you can't assert a copyright in it. Suppose, for example, that you read a poem and like it. You memorize it, then you write it down verbatim. Someone photocopies the piece of paper on which you have written down the poem. Do you have a copyright claim against the person who makes the photocopy? No. The author who first created the poem might, but you don't. That's certainly true if the poem is recent and still covered by copyright. But what if the poem is old and no longer covered by copyright? You still have no claim against the person who makes the photocopy because your work is not original. Here's a more plausible example. Rodin's famous sculpture, The Thinker, was created in 1902 and thus, as we will see, is no longer subject to copyright protection. Suppose that you make a perfect replica of The Thinker. Do you have a copyright in your replica? In other words, if someone copies your replica, do they have a legal claim? Do you have a legal claim against the copyist? No. The same principle applies, certainly in the United States and probably in other countries. If you take a photograph of an old painting, like the Mona Lisa, trying to recreate the painting exactly. This is not a hypothetical example. A few years ago, there was a sharp-edged controversy between the National Portrait Gallery in England and one Derek Kotsy, who uploaded to Wikipedia some 3,000 high-resolution photos taken by the Portrait Gallery of old paintings in its collection. Kotsy invoked this principle when resisting successfully the gallery's copyright claims. Because the photos lacked originality, they were not shielded by copyright. As we will see later, the question becomes more complicated if your replica of a public domain work is not perfect. In other words, if you have made changes to The Thinker or altered the colors of the Mona Lisa.  So, to repeat, the first of the two requirements, encompassed by the term originality, is independent creation. The second requirement is creativity. To be entitled to copyright protection, a work must embody a modest amount of creativity. Not much, but some. This is the more interesting and subtle of the meanings of originality, and we'll spend a fair amount of time exploring it. Before doing so, however, we need to identify some related characteristics that are not required for copyright protection and consider why not. Once we have cleared away this underbrush, we'll return to the question of creativity. The first thing not encompassed by the originality requirement is novelty. To be protected in the United States, a work does not have to be new. In this respect, copyright law is very different from patent law. To be patentable, an invention must be new. To be protected by copyright, a literary or artistic work need not. The classic statement of this principle in U.S. law appears in the Sheldon case, decided by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Because Judge Han's language is involuted, I'll put it up on the screen. Borrowed the work must indeed not be. For a plagiarist is not himself protanto and author, but if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose a new Keats owed on the Grecian urn, he would be an author. And, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats. In other words, if your creation is identical to an already existing work, but you are genuinely unaware of that existing work, your creation is original and you get the benefit of copyright protection. Novelty is not necessary. To be sure, as Professor Paul Goldstein observes, lack of novelty, though not itself fatal, may sometimes be introduced in litigation to undermine other aspects of a plaintiff's case. For example, it can be used to rebut a presumption that the plaintiff's work was independently created, which, as we've seen, is required for copyright protection. Or a defendant can sometimes use the fact that the plaintiff's work is not novel to argue that the defendant did not copy the plaintiff's work, but instead copied the pre-existing work. That's the import of the last clause and Judge Han's statement, though they might of course copy Keats. If true, that would get the defendant off the hook. The upshot is that in practice, novelty helps a plaintiff and lack of novelty can hurt, but strictly speaking, novelty is not required for copyright protection. Another thing that's not required, at least in the United States, is intent to be original. To get the benefit of copyright protection, it's not necessary that you, the author, try to create something of your own. It's only necessary that you do so. The classic statement of this principle in U.S. law comes in an opinion by Judge Jerome Frank in the 1951 Alfred Bell case, which held that even if mezzotent engravings of old, so public domain paintings, differed from the originals only inadvertently, they were still copyrightable. Here's his language. A copyist's bad eyesight or defective musculature or a shock caused by a clap of thunder may yield sufficiently distinguishable variations. Having hit upon such a variation unintentionally, the author may adopt it as his and copyright it. As you might imagine, this issue doesn't arise often and one can find some judicial opinions that seem to cast doubt upon it. But the principle expressed by Judge Hand is the canonical view in the United States. A third thing not required for copyright protection is that the work in question be artistic. If your creation is bad art or not all art at all, you still get a copyright in it. The classic statement of this principle comes in the 1903 Blystein case, which involved a copyright claim to three circus posters, one of which is shown on the screen. In some famous passages in the majority opinion in that case, Justice Holmes rejected the defendant's argument that these posters did not enjoy copyright protection because they did not constitute fine art. In US law, Blystein has come to stand for the principle sometimes referred to as aesthetic neutrality. When applying copyright law, the quality or artistic character of both the plaintiff's work and the defendant's work are said to be irrelevant. A child's finger paintings are as deserving of copyright protection as the Mona Lisa. Why? What might justify this stance of strict aesthetic neutrality? Defenders of the principle commonly make four arguments. The first is that judges or juries who would be called upon to assess the merit of either the plaintiff's or the defendant's works lack the expertise to do so. Justice Holmes emphasizes this point in Blystein. It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only in the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke. It may be more than doubted, for example, whether the etchings of Goya or the paintings of Manet would have been sure of protection when seen for the first time. At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge. The second argument, latent in the last sentence of Holmes' passage, is fear of elitism. Worry that an upper class would use the opportunity to assess artistic quality to impose its tastes on the rest of the population. The third related argument is fear of paternalism or what has come more recently to be called parentalism. This argument is tied to the political theory of liberalism, which continues to have considerable sway, at least in western democratic societies. The basic idea is that governments should not impose on their citizens any particular conception of the good, or the good life in particular, but rather should create conditions in which people are free to formulate and pursue their own conceptions of the good. One implication of that idea, it is sometimes argued, is that the law, and specifically copyright law, should not promulgate a particular conception of what counts as worthy art. In the United States, this attitude finds expression in periodic campaigns to abolish the national endowment for the arts, which distributes government funds to artists. Most other countries are less hostile to government support for the arts. The final argument in favor of the principle of aesthetic neutrality is that to decide what constitutes good art, one needs to know what art is, and there's deep disagreement on that crucial question. As Professor Fred Yan has pointed out, at least three different conceptions of art are in widespread circulation. Formalism, exemplified by the work of Clive Bell, defines art as things capable of provoking insensitive people the aesthetic emotion. Some objects have formal qualities that enable them to cause this reaction, while others don't. Only the former count as art. By contrast, intentionalism, exemplified by the work of Monroe Beardsley, defines art as something produced with the intention of giving it the capacity to satisfy the aesthetic interest. So, for example, whether people moving in a circle are engaged in a form of art depends on the nature of their motivation. Their purpose might be religious, as in a ceremony, it might be a political or economic, as in a picket line, or it might be artistic, as in a dance. Only if their intention falls into the last category does their behavior constitute art. Finally, institutionalism, exemplified by the work of George Dickey, emphasizes the role of the art world, the broad social institution in which works of art have their place. The members of this world include artists and viewers who participate in the traditional social practice of creating, presenting, and appreciating art. Against this backdrop, quote, objects become art when someone who believes that he is a member of the art world invites others to view the object aesthetically, end quote. In the simplest case, an object constitutes art if a museum chooses to display it. These three approaches, formalism, intentionalism, and institutionalism, are in obvious tension. Some objects or activities qualify as art under one approach, but not under the others. If aesthetic theorists cannot resolve this crucial question, surely it would be foolish for the law to attempt to do so. So, those are the four arguments commonly deployed in support of the principle of aesthetic neutrality. Lack of expertise, unease about elitism, hostility to governmental involvement in art, and uncertainty concerning what constitutes art in the first place. However, as we will see, the principle of aesthetic neutrality is frequently violated, tacitly and occasionally expressly, even in the United States, which purports to adhere to the principle most faithfully. Judges and juries find ways to favor plaintiffs who have created what they consider meritorious works, and to disfavor plaintiffs who have created what they consider bad or unimpressive material. On the other side of the ledger, judges and juries find ways to penalize defendants whose work seems poor and to give extra latitude to defendants whose work seems worthy of respect. Professor Yen and others argue that if judges and juries are going to be making such judgments, they should do so expressly and should be obliged to justify their judgments. This is a fairly fundamental issue on which, as we will see, countries differ sharply. By the end of this lecture series, I hope you are in a position to form your own opinion concerning the scope and merits of the principle of aesthetic neutrality. Yet another characteristic not required for copyright protection is that a work be non-commercial. This is not quite as obvious as it might seem. For example, Justice Harlan, in a dissenting opinion in the Blystein case, suggested that advertisements will be produced in at least optimal quantities, regardless of whether they are protected by copyright. In other words, copyright protection for ads is unnecessary. Whatever the merits of Harlan's position, it's been rejected. Today, advertisements definitely enjoy the protection of the copyright law. A final characteristic not required for copyright protection in the United States is that the content of a work be lawful. So, for example, it's now reasonably clear that in the U.S. obscene, libelous or fraudulent material enjoys copyright protection. In this respect, U.S. copyright law differs sharply from U.S. trademark law, which denies protection to immoral or scandalous marks. Copyright law purports to have no such exclusions. Having listed the things that copyright does not require, let's now return to what it does require. As I mentioned earlier, to satisfy the requirement of originality, a work must pass two tests. It must be independently created, and it must embody some degree of creativity. The more important and slippery of these tests relates to creativity. How much do you need? In the United States, very little. In its 1991 decision in the Feist case, the Supreme Court put it this way. A work must possess at least some minimal degree of creativity to be sure the requisite level of creativity is extremely low, even a slight amount will suffice. The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily as they possess some creative spark, no matter how crude, humble or obvious it might be. As the court notes, it's pretty easy to pass the test formulated in this way. Take photographs, for example. In 1884, the Supreme Court ruled that this stage studio photo of Oscar Wilde enjoyed copyright protection, emphasizing the many forms of creativity that went into setting up and producing the photo. Today, it's clear that nothing so elaborate is necessary. In the U.S., a snapshot taken with a modern automated point-and-shoot camera contains enough creativity to satisfy the Feist standard. The modest creativity involving deciding where to point the camera and when to activate the shutter is considered plenty. But to repeat, some degree of creativity is necessary. The most important effect of this requirement is to withdraw copyright protection from works whose form is entirely conventional, even if they required lots of effort or skill to create. At one point, courts in the United States and in other common law countries extended copyright protection to such works under the auspices of the so-called sweat-of-the-brow theory. Since the 1991 Feist decision, however, that doctrine has been formally rejected by U.S. courts. Now, I hasten to add that, in practice, it's not so clear that a place of labor does him no good when seeking copyright protection. Despite the formal repudiation of the sweat-of-the-brow theory, in borderline cases, some courts still pay attention to the effort that authors have invested in their works. Again, this is a general theme we'll return to in lecture number two, when we take up the fairness and personality theories of intellectual property. Thus far, I've confined my attention to the interpretation of the originality requirement in the United States. Now, let's examine some other jurisdictions. Today, every country in the world treats originality as an essential requirement for copyright protection, but not all define originality the same way. A few decades ago, courts' disagreement on this issue was sharp. Generally speaking, countries influenced by the common law tradition set the bar very low, while countries influenced by the civil law tradition were more demanding. The two fields where this disagreement mattered most were photography and software. As I mentioned a minute ago, in the United States and its cousins, virtually all photos taken by people have long enjoyed copyright protection. By contrast, as Roman Heininger has observed, in Austria photographs were given copyright protection only if they differed substantially from pre-existing photographs. Applying that standard, a conventional photo showing some bikers in a landscape failed to qualify. Likewise, as we'll see in lecture number three, software programs received generous protection in the United States and its cousins. In Germany, by contrast, software programs were accorded copyright protection only if they embodied degrees of creativity greater than that exercised by average programmers. Recently, the divergence among countries on these and related issues has decreased. As you can see from the map, most common law countries have now repudiated the permissive sweat-of-the-brow approach and adopted stances similar, though not always identical, to the approach taken by the U.S. Supreme Court and Feist. Meanwhile, harmonization within the European Union has resulted in a modest softening of the requirements that some member countries previously enforced. In a series of decisions, the European Court of Justice has announced and then refined a new general definition of originality. Under this new approach, two related things, in addition to independent creation, seem both necessary and sufficient. The creation reflects the author's personality and the author, when creating the work, was able to express her creative ability by making unconstrained choices and thus impressed her personal touch on the work. The articulation of the standard by the European Court of Justice has caused some courts in the member countries of the EU to adjust their originality thresholds, in most cases downward. In Austria, for example, it's now easier than it once was to secure copyright protection for modestly creative photos. And in Germany, a larger set of software programs are now eligible for copyright protection. The only things now excluded are simple routine programs that ordinary programmers would write the same way. In combination, the harmonization process in Europe and the trend among common law countries to abandon the sweat of the brow theory has reduced the divergence among the countries of the world concerning the meaning of originality. But some divergence remains. For example, the European standard alludes to a theme that US lawmakers generally ignore, namely the degree to which a work reflects the personality of the creator. And there remain outlier countries. For example, South Africa and New Zealand still seem to adhere to the sweat of the brow approach. At the other extreme, courts in Switzerland pay attention, when considering originality, to the degree of quote, statistical uniqueness and quote of the working question, an approach that suggests concern with the novelty of a work, a consideration ignored in the overwhelming majority of countries. The upshot is that some works are more likely to secure copyright protection in some countries than in others.


Slinkies make great demos of transverse mechanical waves. You can generate a transverse wave by displacing one end of the slinky. A single pulse is generated by displacing your hand up and down. Notice that the up-down pulse travels from left to right. Notice that any particular coil in the slinky goes up and down, but the wave travels from left to right. That is the medium the spring oscillates perpendicular to the direction or propagation of the wave. Also note that to generate a pulse, the person puts energy into the slinky or does work to displace the slinky and in his hand. That energy is transferred progressively along the slinky to displace it and is used in displacing the other end of the slinky. So no matter has been transported down the length of the spring, but energy has been transferred down the length of the spring. Hey, you can create another type of mechanical wave with a slinky. Look at this. Here a single pulse is generated by displacing one end right and left. Notice that the left pulse causes a compression of the spring which travels from left to right. Notice that any particular coil in the slinky goes right and left. The medium, the spring, oscillates parallel to the direction or propagation of the wave. Again, to generate the pulse, the person puts energy into the slinky or does work to displace the slinky and in his hand. The energy is transferred progressively along the slinky to displace it. And at the end of the slinky, some distance from the person's hand, the energy is expended in displacing the opposite end. Again, no matter has been transported down the length of the spring, but energy has been transferred down the length of the slinky. The compressive waves of a slinky spring are longitudinal mechanical waves. Longitudinal because parts of the spring are displaced parallel or longitudinal to the direction of the waves. And mechanical because the wave is a mechanical disturbance of the spring. Let's look at this a little more closely, considering the motion of only a few points on the spring uniformly or evenly spaced on the spring at rest. When we introduce a compressive pulse, you see that some of the points are brought closer together or compressed. But their position in spacing is restored with the compression traveling down the line. The points only oscillates about the resting position in the direction of the wave. They do not travel with the wave. You can see this by following the blue point. Now let me add consecutive pulses. If I freeze the simulation, you see regions of compression where the points are closer together and regions of rarefaction where the points are farther apart. In the compressed regions, the slinky spring force pushes the points away to restore their spacing. In the rarefied regions, the slinky spring force pulls to restore uniform spacing. And if we plot the local force as a function of distance for a time frozen slinky, we can recognize characteristics of a wave. The wavelength is the distance between consecutive compressive regions or consecutive rarefied regions. The amplitude is half the distance between the maximum compressive and maximum rarefaction forces. Unfreeze the spring and we see that the time that it takes for a compressive region to travel one wavelength is the period. The frequency is one on the period and the speed of the wave is the wavelength divided by the period.


The latest developments in One Piece lore may have just revealed so much more than you realize. Ichiro Oda's clues about devil fruits may actually mean much more than the origins about these mystical abilities, but also tell us the truth about the ancient kingdom, the will of Di, and the increasingly mysterious figure, Imu. All of this from just a few sentences that Vega Punk uttered about his personal theory about the development of devil fruits. As in classic Oda fashion, we do have a break now that this huge bomb has been revealed, but fear not, as I will be filling your One Piece void with more of these discussions so please do subscribe to this channel. After chapter after chapter where more and more information about the lore of One Piece have been revealed, this recent development may be the biggest clue yet. Vega Punk theorizes that devil fruits are the manifestation of one's visions about human evolution, that they bring to life different possibilities about human development. And this has some crazy implications about the weird ways in which people wish to see how the human form could develop, but more importantly, Vega Punk's theory potentially has some huge implications about the greater lore and mysteries of the One Piece world. Because although Vega Punk doesn't go as far as to explain who the devil fruits could have been developed by, and he also doesn't necessarily confirm that this means all devil fruits are indeed man-made and were artificially created for this purpose of road testing some different types of human evolution. However, when we consider all the information and lore reveals that we've been receiving as of late, all clues, of course, lead back to the ancient kingdom. We now know that the ancient kingdom was an incredibly technologically advanced society, a kingdom that possessed both knowledge and the technology well ahead of its time. So if there was a population toying around with the possibilities of human forms and developments, it's likely to have been this kingdom who had the technical capabilities to experiment and bring about such dreams and visions into fruition. And by that, I mean quite literal fruits. Vega Punk also suggests that because devil fruits are then perversions of nature, this is why mother nature has struck back in the form of the sea being the devil fruit user's kryptonite. And this is where things get really interesting. I've actually been working on another video for quite some time, and I think the information that I found whilst researching for that video is actually very relevant for this discussion, ever since Imu's crazy showing of power and abilities very early on in this arc. The truth behind Imu's character has been one of the most curious mysteries for me. And something I've found with Oda's storytelling and his mysteries is that the names of his characters often tell us a great deal about that individual. For example, Usopp. His name being a play on the words of Asopp's fables and the Japanese word Usopp, which means lie, Usopp's name is then a great nod to his personality. And one of the first character traits we were introduced to in Syrup Village. So naturally, there's reason to suspect that Imu's name may also mean something. And now with the latest developments, we may know exactly what it means. Imu is a name that seems to have quite a lot of different meanings, especially if you consider different languages and across cultures. For example, I even discovered that Imu may be slang for the word anus, according to Urban Dictionary at least. But one of the more prominent meanings we could look at is actually if we consider what Imu may mean when pronounced backwards. So not Imu, but Umi. Because Umi in Japanese can mean sea and in Arabic means mother. The sea and mother. Doesn't this ring some bells? The sea being a prominent representation of nature in the series and the form that vagabunct supposes nature takes to repel or punish devil fruit users. So when put together with Umi's Arabic meaning, that's exactly what Imu's name could represent, mother nature. But this isn't the only relevant interpretation of Imu's name. Because of course, it's important to note that Imu is actually only one pronunciation. And otherwise, it could also be pronounced as Im. And in this form, there are even more possible meanings. One of which is Im from Norse mythology. The fact that Oda has been heavily inspired by Nordic culture doesn't need any further explanation by now. And so it just so happens that Im was the name of a Yotun. The Yotun being supernatural beings who live in Yotunima. One of the nine worlds in Norse mythology. In modern times, the Yotun are commonly thought to be giants or trolls. But this wasn't necessarily the case in ancient mythology. The Yotun was simply one of the other supernatural beings that existed in the world. Being like gods in terms of their strength and abilities. But an important detail being that they were generally portrayed as evil or as the bad guys. Becoming increasingly demonized in literature over time. But even more interestingly is that again, the Yotun or Yotna have an intrinsic connection to the idea of nature. This is because Ymir, one of the two beings to whom all creation can be attributed to in Norse mythology, was also a Yotna. And this idea of nature or creation seems to be common to other cultures as well. Because Im when spelt in Japanese looks like this. And not only does this look like the Kanji character for Buddha. But also it's what you get when you take the first Kanji character for Eve. And then the last character for Adam. And then put them together as an Adam and Eve from the Bible. Now there are loads of biblical references in one piece. But it's worth noting that Adam and Eve are again very closely linked to the idea of creation. Adam and Eve being the first man and woman that God created. Who were ultimately cast out of paradise for committing the first sin. The sin being these humans eating from the tree of knowledge. Which was a metaphor of these first humans wanting to become like God. That sounds awfully familiar. Because something that all of these different meanings seem to have in common is the idea of nature. And another recurring theme is the idea of God. Or at least supernatural status and abilities. And all of these meanings fit in really well with the latest information about devil fruits. The idea that devil fruits challenge the natural course of Mother Nature. Define humanity's natural evolution by allowing its users supernatural abilities. And so putting all of this together. It gives rise to the question is Imu the representation of Mother Nature. Was the great war against the ancient kingdom an effort to curb them from carrying out further experimentation that defied the laws of nature? And this is a really interesting idea because it muddies the water in terms of the morality of the ancient kingdom. While we've been generally led to believe that ancient kingdom good and Imu and world government bad. It's not quite so black and white anymore when you consider the negative consequences that may indeed arise from people developing such great powers. Not everyone will have used their abilities for good. And it's easy to imagine that this sort of development created a lot of conflict. It's even possible that the ancient weapons were created for this very purpose. To neutralize the threat of devil fruit users. Suppose all of this got two out of hand. Then there were these great big weapons of mass destruction that the kingdom could use as a counter to their own creations and developments.  If Imu really is the manifestation of mother nature. Imu may just be concerned about the developments that were negatively affecting the human world. And the efforts to stop the ancient kingdom may have been necessary or at the least could have seemed to have been necessary. Sort of similar to Hanami in Jujutsu Kaisen who arguably had a point when it came to humans treatment of the natural environment. Or even more recently when Jinbei questions the adverse effects that technological and scientific developments may bring about the world. And these sort of morally gray scenarios or questions may have been exactly what Reili was referring to all those years ago in his discussion with the straw hats. That the truth that the straw hats may find at Laugh Tale can result in different conclusions. Because on one hand defying the laws of nature blindly pursuing technological advancements can certainly result in perhaps unintended but nevertheless dangerous consequences. Disastrous results that do indeed need to be restrained. But on the other hand, does this reason justify blocking all scientific developments entirely and killing those who threaten to shake up the balance between the forces of nature to preserve the natural cause? And is it justified especially now? Now where it seems like Imu is just a megalomaniac concerned with oppressing any sort of challenge to the status quo rather than legitimate threats to the world balance or nature's safety. Because Imu's name isn't the only source of curiosity or mystery. Another name that may be of interest and certainly of importance is that of the D clan. One of the very first mysteries presented to us in the series which now continues to plague the theorists. While the meaning behind the illustrious will of D is still yet to be confirmed. You may remember that I've discussed this in another video because it seems like Oda may have been heavily inspired by a real life use of the initial or rather symbol D and has then incorporated it into his work. An ancient Mesopotamia, which is a culture which seems to have also inspired many other ideas for Oda such as the Polniglyphs and the Sun God. Again, watch the video if you want to understand these connections in greater context. But in ancient Mesopotamia, the initial D was used as a symbol to mark someone's divinity. This symbol, called Dingi, would indicate whether someone was a god or goddess. So building on from the idea that Imu may be the manifestation of mother nature, is it possible that the ancient kingdom were actually made up of supernatural beings? Supernatural beings that came from different planets or other worlds or dimensions. Similar to Norse mythology, how there are nine realms or worlds, this could exist in one piece as well. We already know that other species have existed outside of the planet in which one piece is set because of the Birken, Shandorians and Skypeans originating from the moon. Perhaps those of the ancient kingdom were also from outer space. And this is why they had the advanced technology. Similar to the advanced technology we've seen on the moon, this could also explain why the Shandorians were allies of the ancient kingdom, and this could add another layer to the great battle between the ancient kingdom and Imu and the world government. If Imu is the manifestation of mother nature, then Imu would represent the mother nature of just one world or one planet, the planet where one piece is currently set. Whereas the ancient kingdom with all of their knowledge and their technology were supernatural beings from outside of this world. In a sense, those of the ancient kingdom were like gods, divine, deities, the will of deities, the will of God. A very common phrase used in our real world, which Oda may have adopted and adapted fit for his story. And in this way, the question about morality and values isn't only about technology and defying the laws of nature, but also one about tolerance and acceptance and the idea of everyone just living together in harmony. Imu didn't like the presence of these otherworldly beings who threatened the status quo. Whereas the ancient kingdom and the decline just wanted to explore the future of humanity or life, a life that involved all sorts of beings living together in peace and in harmony and in freedom. An idea which I think you would agree seems to be a theme much more fitting to One Piece and its overall story. But these are just some of my thoughts, so let me know yours by leaving a comment below. Please do subscribe for more One Piece discussions. You can also join our George Fleet Discord server or even become a Patreon or channel member. And I do want to thank all our executive officers for help supporting the channel. And in case you missed it, I do encourage you to watch these videos because I do have to say these connections and inspirations for Oda's seems to link up very, very nicely. But anyways, this is Joygirl and I'll see you again soon.


I think it's a great experience. We've got some really interesting sessions here in and if you look at connected TV, I think it is the future and it's high time that you know we raise awareness about this issue because connected TV you know is going to scale up in a very big way in India. I think brands definitely are moving to digital in a very big way. We have seen a shift you know from traditional advertising to digital advertising in the post-COVID era and some of the trends have sustained. As far as connected TV is concerned, I think the number of households and the numbers there in terms of advertising is very small but as we move up the curve you know as we see better data, as we see better penetration opportunity, I think the ads trends of connected TV will also scale up in a very big way.