From: J. Wayde Allen (wallen@lug.boulder.co.us)
Date: 11/06/00-09:47:43 PM Z
On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Judy Seigel wrote:
> Wayde says "the whole idea is to get more information from the same amount
> of work." I'd say you probably don't get more "information," or useful
> information. More likely busywork to fill in on a chart. Of course what
> you will DEFINITELY get more of is work.
Let's see, based on the last few posts I have to say I'm rather amazed.
One person says that we have no data or measurable values. This seems
rather strange to me since we seem to have many discussions about relative
amounts of chemistry, step tablets, and sensitometry. It seems to me that
there is a lot of quantitative testing going on here.
Everything I've ever read about any of the photographic processes
indicates that these are highly non-linear and complex processes. Even
Judy has posted a fair amount about the problems with the old gum staining
test and noted that it can't work because it leaves out the dichromate and
that the staining "depends" on the presence of the dichromate. This is
exactly the problem - many of the variables do depend on each other, and
often in a very non-linear way. I think Judy, that if you read our posts
carefully you will find we are saying the same thing. I'm just trying to
offer a way around this problem.
No one is saying that you have to use any of these tools. I just wanted
the group to be aware of the problem and to know what the scientific
community has done to work around it. These same methods are also used to
winnow through very large variable sets with the least number of tests
possible. Since we have large variable spaces here, it seems that this
might be of some use to help make this problem more tractable.
One-variable-at-a-time testing forces the researcher to try every possible
combination of a set of variables to get results, and this clearly isn't
possible. The tools I'm suggesting try to get at this information without
needing to run every test combination.
If theories and models are bogus concepts, then why do we talk about how
any of these processes work? We've all listened to Judy's theories about
gum printing. Katherine Thayer has also offered theories of her own. If
theories aren't worth discussing then do we throw these out too? Sure
theories fail, but they do give one something to work from. What is
particularly amazing is that I've not given any offer of a printing theory
here at all. I've also not specified any particular printing model
either. What I've tried to do is offer a different framework to hang the
information we've already been gathering on. The idea is to try and give
us some hopefully better insight into these processes so that we can
improve on, and help develop new and/or better models.
Anyway, if you feel that what I've said doesn't apply to alt process work,
that is certainly your prerogative. Those of you who might be interested
have some starting references.
(Oh, and by the way Judy, there is a theoretical explanation for why
bumblebee's fly. The problem wasn't so much that it couldn't be
explained. It just doesn't follow the classical Bernoulli principle like
airplanes do. You have to resort to turbulence theory.)
- Wayde
(wallen@lug.boulder.co.us)
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