wev's What? Again? 366/2016

wev

Senior Member
Contributor
Junco4.jpg


Junco5.jpg
 

wev

Senior Member
Contributor
14 November

Well, am interesting morning. I took part in a birder visual acuity test at the local university psycho department. It lasted two hours and I feel like my eyes have been put through a wringer. The testing was in two, plus a memory quiz and life survey. In the first test I got a diagonally divided square with a bird's head on one side and a bird's body on the other. This was flashed for three seconds, then three seconds of gray, then another square with one of the halves highlighted. I had to say if it was the same or different. That ran four sections of 30 questions each. The second part was longer and not as easy. This time I got a whole bird for three second, gray, and then a different bird shot. I had to say if they were the same species. The problem was that the images were small, clumsily lift from the original picture, and, at best, of mediocre quality. In some cases the image was so bad I doubt even a real dedicated birder could have picked right. I thought this might be part of the test, but they said it wasn't -- they just didn't have better pictures. At any rate, that lasted another four sections, but with a second test interspersed -- same procedure, but using pictures of cars. I did very badly on that part, as I have almost no interest in cars, especially modern compacts and sedans. I suspect, however, that this part was the actual point to the whole exercise. One of the big areas of automotive research is how to make cars appear less visually generic and more iconic. Birders were used simply because they generally have a higher level of visual acuity and attention to minutia. If that is the case, then they didn't get much for my $30 worth of button pushing.

At any rate, I got a few shots in before hand.

This is part of an installation on campus I helped work on called "Fallen David." The statue, a full size marble copy, used to be at Forest Lawn Cemetery. When it toppled and smashed in an earthquake back in the 80's, the we got permission to collect the pieces and set them out on what was then an open field.

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