An online color naming experiment in Russian using Munsell color samples

Russian color naming was explored in a web‐based experiment. The purpose was 3‐fold: to examine (1) CIELAB coordinates of centroids for 12 Russian basic color terms (BCTs), including 2 Russian terms for “blue”, sinij “dark blue”, and goluboj “light blue”, and compare these with coordinates for the 11 English BCTs obtained in earlier studies; (2) frequent nonBCTs; and (3) gender differences in color naming. Native Russian speakers participated in the experiment using an unconstrained color‐naming method. Each participant named 20 colors, selected from 600 colors densely sampling the Munsell Color Solid. Color names and response times of typing onset were registered. Several deviations between centroids of the Russian and English BCTs were found. The 2 “Russian blues”, as expected, divided the BLUE area along the lightness dimension; their centroids deviated from a centroid of English blue. Further minor departures were found between centroids of Russian and English counterparts of “brown” and “red”. The Russian color inventory confirmed the linguistic refinement of the PURPLE area, with high frequencies of nonBCTs. In addition, Russian speakers revealed elaborated naming strategies and use of a rich inventory of nonBCTs. Elicitation frequencies of the 12 BCTs were comparable for both genders; however, linguistic segmentation of color space, employing a synthetic observer, revealed gender differences in naming colors, with more refined naming of the “warm” colors from females. We conclude that, along with universal perceptual factors, that govern categorical partition of color space, Russian speakers’ color naming reflects language‐specific factors, supporting the weak relativity hypothesis.     

Probing Protein Folding with Sequence-Reversed α-Helical Bundles

Recurrent protein folding motifs include various types of helical bundles formed by α-helices that supercoil around each other. While specific patterns of amino acid residues (heptad repeats) characterize the highly versatile folding motif of four-α-helical bundles, the significance of the polypeptide chain directionality is not sufficiently understood, although it determines sequence patterns, helical dipoles, and other parameters for the folding and oligomerization processes of bundles. To investigate directionality aspects in sequence-structure relationships, we reversed the amino acid sequences of two well-characterized, highly regular four-α-helical bundle proteins and studied the folding, oligomerization, and structural properties of the retro-proteins, using Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy (CD), Size Exclusion Chromatography combined with Multi-Angle Laser Light Scattering (SEC-MALS), and Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS). The comparison of the parent proteins with their retro-counterparts reveals that while the α-helical character of the parents is affected to varying degrees by sequence reversal, the folding states, oligomerization propensities, structural stabilities, and shapes of the new molecules strongly depend on the characteristics of the heptad repeat patterns. The highest similarities between parent and retro-proteins are associated with the presence of uninterrupted heptad patterns in helical bundles sequences.     

The show must go on:1 Problems of tagging performance texts

A dramatic work may be seen either as an event or as a text; the TEI guidelines make it possible to encode a dramatic work in either way, but do not attempt to solve the difficult problem of doing both at once. The basic element of a dramatic work, when seen as a text, is the speech; the guidelines also provide elements for encoding other familiar parts of dramatic texts (such as stage directions and cast lists), as well as for encoding analytic information on various aspects of texts and performances that is not normally included in printed dramatic texts. There are often other formal structures in dramatic works that intersect with the structure of speeches — metrical structures, for example; we discuss approaches for encoding these structures.John Lavagnino is a graduate student in English and American Literature at Brandeis University. His fields of interest include Renaissance drama, modern literature, textual scholarship, and electronic textuality. He is Electronics Editor ofThe Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).Elli Mylonas is a Lead Project Analyst for the Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University. Formerly she was the Managing Editor of the Perseus Project. Her areas of interest are Roman poetry, textual markup and SGML, and hypertext.The work described in this paper is the outcome of the discussions of the Performance Working Group, whose members are Elli Mylonas (chair), Rosanne G. Potter, John Lavagnino, and Lou Burnard. The authors wish to thank the other two members for their contributions.     

Transform-based graph topology similarity metrics

Neural Computing and Applications - Graph signal processing has recently emerged as a field with applications across a broad spectrum of fields including brain connectivity networks, logistics and...     

Unique hue data for colour appearance models. Part II: Chromatic adaptation transform

Unique hue settings of 185 observers under three room‐lighting conditions were used to evaluate the accuracy of full and mixed chromatic adaptation transform models of CIECAM02 in terms of unique hue reproduction. Perceptual hue shifts in CIECAM02 were evaluated for both models with no clear difference using the current Commission Internationale de l'Éclairage (CIE) recommendation for mixed chromatic adaptation ratio. Using our large dataset of unique hue data as a benchmark, an optimised parameter is proposed for chromatic adaptation under mixed illumination conditions that produces more accurate results in unique hue reproduction. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 2013