Is stress good or bad? It’s actually both…
www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191212-is-stress-good-or-bad-its-both
Can stress really help you do better and if so, how much is the right amount?
Ultimately stress is a way for your body and mind to communicate impending needs or events which require attention. Once you have recognized and acknowledged the message, there should not be any need to… stress over it.
“…having some stress helps my decision-making, because it helps to maintain a focus on the situation,”
“…Too much stress causes what we call cognitive overload and then impairs your ability to make decisions because you’ve lost that situational awareness,”
“…stress is really importantly implicated in performance and in health,” “It’s very helpful for legitimate emergencies, and to achieve peak achievement in high-performance events.”
“…in physiological terms, (stress) arousal might take the form of an increased heart rate, redirected blood flow to the brain and large muscle groups, and release of glucose to act as fuel. The body’s resources are reallocated to be most useful for an emergency, from greater mental alertness to higher muscle tension. The brain and body are essentially bracing themselves.”
“While the Yerkes-Dodson principle appears to resonate with many, there has been plenty of criticism of it too. Detractors suggest it is applied too broadly. For instance, some people may be galvanised by pressure because they’re “defensive pessimists” who perform better when they worry a bit. Others find positive reinforcement more motivating. Sleep deprivation might harm speed, but not accuracy (so a sprinter shouldn’t stay out late every night). Noise might hurt accuracy, but not speed (so a reporter should try to find a quiet space).”
“…any stress can cause (extreme) harm when it’s prolonged. To take just one example, a chronically high heart rate is linked to cardiovascular risk.”
“One key factor is to avoid, where possible, the tipping point when stress leads to burnout. Burnout, with its physical and mental harms, is especially likely when stress is chronic. ”
“Another factor is the presence of control. For those who feel powerless over their situation, stress is unlikely to be beneficial.”
“Studies show that acute, uncontrollable stress limits the functions managed by the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for working memory. So the test-takers should try not to deplete their precious working memory by worrying, and the athletes should focus on outcomes (e.g. where the ball should be going) rather than on their bodies.”
“When it comes to stress and how it affects your performance, it’s helpful to recognise the variations in personality, type of stress and task that affect where you sit on the bell curve, as well as understanding tools you can use to control or harness that stress.”
Capturing textures albedo
Building a Portable PBR Texture Scanner by Stephane Lb
http://rtgfx.com/pbr-texture-scanner/
How To Split Specular And Diffuse In Real Images, by John Hable
http://filmicworlds.com/blog/how-to-split-specular-and-diffuse-in-real-images/
Capturing albedo using a Spectralon
https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf
Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf
Spectralon is a teflon-based pressed powderthat comes closest to being a pure Lambertian diffuse material that reflects 100% of all light. If we take an HDR photograph of the Spectralon alongside the material to be measured, we can derive thediffuse albedo of that material.
The process to capture diffuse reflectance is very similar to the one outlined by Hable.
1. We put a linear polarizing filter in front of the camera lens and a second linear polarizing filterin front of a modeling light or a flash such that the two filters are oriented perpendicular to eachother, i.e. cross polarized.
2. We place Spectralon close to and parallel with the material we are capturing and take brack-eted shots of the setup7. Typically, we’ll take nine photographs, from -4EV to +4EV in 1EVincrements.
3. We convert the bracketed shots to a linear HDR image. We found that many HDR packagesdo not produce an HDR image in which the pixel values are linear. PTGui is an example of apackage which does generate a linear HDR image. At this point, because of the cross polarization,the image is one of surface diffuse response.
4. We open the file in Photoshop and normalize the image by color picking the Spectralon, filling anew layer with that color and setting that layer to “Divide”. This sets the Spectralon to 1 in theimage. All other color values are relative to this so we can consider them as diffuse albedo.
Best A.I. Image Upscaler? Top 7 Software Compared
- 1. imglarger.com
- 2. letsenhance.io
- 3. bigjpg.com
- 4. deep-image.ai
- 5. imageupscaler.com
- 6. GigaPixel AI
- 7. Photoshop
MPC closing Vancouver in favor of other locations
dailyhive.com/vancouver/mpc-studio-vancouver-shut-down
vancouversun.com/news/local-news/moving-picture-company-closes-vancouver-studio-report
The letter states that MPC’s Vancouver studio will “cease operations effective immediately and refocus its geographical presence to other locations.”
“This decision has not been taken lightly,” states the letter, noting that “more attractive opportunities in other locations have created a challenging environment” for the company to sustain its Vancouver office.
MPC is owned by French multinational corporation Technicolor, which provides various services in the media and entertainment industries.
Technicolor operates several other VFX brands including The Mill, Mr.X, and Mikros.
The letter also states that MPC and the other Technicolor brands will continue to expand in other cities including Montreal, Paris, Adelaide, LA, and Toronto.
What the Boeing 737 MAX’s crashes can teach us about production business – the effects of commoditisation
Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.
There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”
Weta Digital Head of Facial Motion Department Stuart Adcock Talks Will Smith at 23 and 50 in ‘Gemini Man’
www.awn.com/vfxworld/eyes-have-it-stuart-adcock-talks-will-smith-23-and-50-gemini-man
Further approaches to de-aging processes, 2D vs 3D
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gemini-man-irishman-dawn-de-aged-actor-1246022
Abrasion holography
amasci.com/amateur/holohint.html#0
Each surface scratch acts as a bent mirror and reflects sunlight. Each reflection looks like a small white highlight on the shiny scratch. Each of your eyes sees a DIFFERENT REFLECTION. Your brain thinks the two different reflections are really one white dot located deep behind the scratch. It’s like a “viewmaster” stereo viewer.
If a blind person gained sight, could they recognize objects previously touched?
Blind people who regain their sight may find themselves in a world they don’t immediately comprehend. “It would be more like a sighted person trying to rely on tactile information,” Moore says.
Learning to see is a developmental process, just like learning language, Prof Cathleen Moore continues. “As far as vision goes, a three-and-a-half year old child is already a well-calibrated system.”
OpenShot free cross-platform Video Editor
Use OpenShot to insert videos into LibreOffice presentations:
www.techrepublic.com/blog/smb-technologist/embed-video-into-a-libreoffice-impress-presentation/
Note, the only format that is readily supported by LibreOffice Impress is the free Ogg Vorbis video.
You will still need to install codes for your OS to be able to insert the video.
Windows codecs can be found here: http://codecguide.com/download_kl.htm
MacOS: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/66277/codec-pack-for-mac#post_961756
Space bodies’ components and light spectroscopy
www.plutorules.com/page-111-space-rocks.html
This help’s us understand the composition of components in/on solar system bodies.
Dips in the observed light spectrum, also known as, lines of absorption occur as gasses absorb energy from light at specific points along the light spectrum.
These dips or darkened zones (lines of absorption) leave a finger print which identify elements and compounds.
In this image the dark absorption bands appear as lines of emission which occur as the result of emitted not reflected (absorbed) light.
Lines of absorption
What light is best to illuminate gems for resale
www.palagems.com/gem-lighting2
Artificial light sources, not unlike the diverse phases of natural light, vary considerably in their properties. As a result, some lamps render an object’s color better than others do.
The most important criterion for assessing the color-rendering ability of any lamp is its spectral power distribution curve.
Natural daylight varies too much in strength and spectral composition to be taken seriously as a lighting standard for grading and dealing colored stones. For anything to be a standard, it must be constant in its properties, which natural light is not.
For dealers in particular to make the transition from natural light to an artificial light source, that source must offer:
1- A degree of illuminance at least as strong as the common phases of natural daylight.
2- Spectral properties identical or comparable to a phase of natural daylight.
A source combining these two things makes gems appear much the same as when viewed under a given phase of natural light. From the viewpoint of many dealers, this corresponds to a naturalappearance.
The 6000° Kelvin xenon short-arc lamp appears closest to meeting the criteria for a standard light source. Besides the strong illuminance this lamp affords, its spectrum is very similar to CIE standard illuminants of similar color temperature.
What Is The Resolution and view coverage Of The human Eye. And what distance is TV at best?
https://www.discovery.com/science/mexapixels-in-human-eye
About 576 megapixels for the entire field of view.
Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be:
90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).
At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let’s be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see:
120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.
Or.
7 megapixels for the 2 degree focus arc… + 1 megapixel for the rest.
https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-resolution.html
How many megapixels do you really need?
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-many-megapixels-you-need,review-1974.html
Single vs Dual Processor Servers – CPUs, cores and threads
phoenixnap.com/kb/single-vs-dual-processors-server
The backbone of any server is the number of CPUs that will power it, as well as the actual model and the type of the CPU. From that point, you add the needed amount of RAM, storage and other options that your use case requires.
A CPU (Central Processing Unit) is a piece of hardware responsible for executing tasks from other parts of a computer.
A Core is a physical part of a CPU. Cores act like processors within a single CPU chip. The more cores a CPU has, the more tasks it can perform simultaneously. Virtually all modern CPUs contain multiple cores now. This enables the execution of multiple tasks at the same time.
Threads are like paths your computer can take to process information.
If a CPU has six cores with two threads per core, that means there are twelve paths for information to be processed. The main difference between threads and physical cores is that two threads cannot operate in parallel. While two physical cores can simultaneously perform two tasks, one core alternates between the threads. This happens fast so that it appears that true multitasking takes place. Threads basically help the cores process information in a more efficient manner. That being said, CPU threads bring actual, visible performance in very specific tasks, so a hyper-threaded CPU might not always help you achieve better results.
Single processor servers run on a motherboard with one socket for a CPU. This means that the highest core count CPU available on the market determines the maximum core count per server. RAM capacity constraints with single CPU configurations remain one of their biggest drawbacks.
The most apparent distinction between single and dual-processor servers is that the motherboard has two CPU sockets instead of one. This is followed by additional benefits such as the massive amount of PCI lanes, two separate sets of cache memory and two sets of RAM slots. If the specific motherboard has 24 memory slots, 12 slots belong to the first CPU and the other 12 to the other CPU. In cases where only one CPU slot occupied, the CPU cannot use the other set of RAM sticks. This rarely happens since dual processor servers always have both slots occupied. Dual processor servers and multiprocessor systems, in general, are the best options for space-restricted environments.
While dual CPU setups pack enormous core counts and outshine single processor servers by a large margin, some tests have shown only a marginal performance increase over single CPU configurations with similar core count and clock speeds per chip. This refers to the circumstances where two CPUs worked on the same data at the same time.
On the other hand, we see immense performance boosts in dual processor servers when the workload is optimized for setups like these. This is especially true when CPUs carry out intensive multi-threaded tasks.
www.techsiting.com/cores-vs-threads/
Material X – an open standard for transfer of rich material and look-development content
MaterialX is an open standard for transfer of rich material and look-development content between applications and renderers.
Originated at Lucasfilm in 2012, MaterialX has been used by Industrial Light & Magic in feature films such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and by ILMxLAB in real-time experiences such as Trials On Tatooine.
MaterialX addresses the need for a common, open standard to represent the data values and relationships required to transfer the complete look of a computer graphics model from one application or rendering platform to another, including shading networks, patterns and texturing, complex nested materials and geometric assignments.
To further encourage interchangeable CG look setups, MaterialX also defines a complete set of data creation and processing nodes with a precise mechanism for functional extensibility.
Open Source Nvidia Omniverse
blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/03/18/omniverse-collaboration-platform/
developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-omniverse
An open, Interactive 3D Design Collaboration Platform for Multi-Tool Workflows to simplify studio workflows for real-time graphics.
It supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects and rendering across multiple applications.
It also supports NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.
With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time.
For example an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application.
Double Negative pulls plans of listing on Stock Exchange
DNEG said last month it was looking to raise £150m from a float on the LSE’s Main Market. This valued the firm at more than £600m.
But yesterday it said it has decided to postpone the listing due to ‘ongoing market uncertainty’.
The London-based group added that it had received ‘a strong level of interest from investors’ and still intends to go public once market conditions improve.
Magic Leap looking for 9th round of investments
Having burned through $2.6bn – that’s billion – on its way to producing an AR headset that has so many limitations it seemingly has zero chance of becoming a consumer device, the upstart has announced it is now part way through series E funding.
That’s just a Silicon Valley way of saying it’s on a fifth formal round of begging to banks and venture capitalists to help it keep going before the biz finally starts making money. In reality, it is the manufacturer’s eighth funding round, with the most recent being a cash influx of $280m in April this year. That money appears to be running out, or just simply not enough, just six months later.
www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/14/magic_leap_imoney/
MagicLeap loses cfo Scott Henry and effects wizard John Gaeta following news of funding woes
