Three pixels walk into a bar together. They met outside and the bartender knows that each pixel can only be red, green or blue. (Multispectrals are welcome, of course, but they wear hats and none are visible.) She also knows that, being noisy pixels, there is an equal chance of  any individual pixel being red, green or blue, 1/3. They are wearing coats.

When one pixel removes his coat, the bartender can see that he is red. She wonders about the other pixels and their beverage preferences (e.g., blue pixels often prefer lager). She has no other information, and knows better than to infer from stereotypes.

What is the chance that the group will be neutral (or is it, diverse?), having three different pixels; red, green and blue?

For the two-child family, the possible (first, second) outcomes are (BG, GB, GG, BB). Note that the question does not say that the boy you know about is the elder, just that (at least*) one child is male. Order does not matter.

Therefore the last outcome, (G, G) is not possible. The remaining first three outcomes are possible, but only one results in two boys. Therefore the answer is 1/3,

So, if you find out the sex of one child in a two-child family, you can guess that the other child is of the opposite sex and have a better than even chance of being correct.

* Thanks, David

You can assume that at least one child is a boy. Hint: order does not matter. Thanks to  David Lieberman for his comment via LinkedIn.

“The best thing about Standards is that there are so many of them”.

As part of our course, Camera and Scanner Imaging Performance, at the Electronic Imaging Symposium on 2 Feb. 2014, Don will present Standards Rodeo, to bring some kind of order* to current imaging standards.

Course Info.  here
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*I almost wrote, corral the current ISO activities, but I am cutting back on disastrous puns.

For those of us involved with (2D, 3D) color image capture for, e.g., medical and dental applications, this article from IEEE Spectrum about ‘creepy’ prosthetics might give pause. Too realistic?

Prosthetic Hands Trigger Uncanny Valley Sense of Creepiness

After I read the article, it seemed that the accompanying picture, probably captured under florescent lighting, was less than flattering. I changed the color balance to give a somewhat more realistic rendering. Is the version on the right more or less ‘creepy’. Is this result consistent with the concluding sentence of the article? 

… and speaking of image metadata, the IPTC (Internal. Press Telecommunications Council) studied the preservation of information, including copyrights, by various social media services. Flying colours: Google. Worst offenders: Facebook and Twitter.

Here are the results: http://www.embeddedmetadata.org/social-media-test-results.php

Client: Serveur! Qu’est-ce que cette mouche fait dans ma soupe alphabet?
Serveur: Elle apprend à lire, Monsieur.

(This is a test post … or is it?)