No abstract

The current study aims to answer two main questions. First, is there a difference between the representations of the numerical and the physical properties of visually presented numbers? Second, can the relevancy of the dimension change its representation? In a numerical Stroop task, participants were asked to indicate either the physically or the numerically larger value of two digits. The ratio between the physical sizes and the numerical values changed orthogonally from 0.1 (the largest difference) to 0.8. Reaction times (RT) were plotted as a function of both physical and numerical ratios. Trend analysis revealed that while the numerical dimension followed Weber's law regardless of task demands, the physical ratio deviated from linearity. Our results suggest that discrete and continuous magnitudes are represented by different yet interactive systems rather than by a shared representation.

We present Brown Dog, two highly extensible services that aim to leverage any existing pieces of code, libraries, services, or standalone software (past or present) towards providing users with a simple to use and programmable means of automated aid in the curation and indexing of distributed collections of uncurated and/or unstructured data. Data collections such as these encompassing large varieties of data, in addition to large amounts of data, pose a significant challenge within modern day "Big Data" efforts. The two services, the Data Access Proxy (DAP) and the Data Tilling Service (DTS), focusing on format conversions and content based analysis/extraction respectively, wrap relevant conversion and extraction operations within arbitrary software, manages their deployment in an elastic manner, and manages job execution from behind a deliberately compact REST API. We describe both the motivation and need/scientific drivers for such services, the constituent components that allow for arbitrary software/code to be used and managed, and lastly an evaluation of the systems capabilities and scalability.

Abstract-We describe our efforts with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to provide a form of automated search of handwritten content within large digitized document archives. With a growing push towards the digitization of paper archives there is an imminent need to develop tools capable of searching the resulting unstructured image data as data from such collections offer valuable historical records that can be mined for information pertinent a number of fields from the geosciences to the humanities. To carry out the search we use a Computer Vision technique called Word Spotting. A form of content based image retrieval, it avoids the still difficult task of directly recognizing the text by allowing a user to search using a query image containing handwritten text and ranking a database of images in terms of those that contain more similar looking content. In order to make this search capability available on an archive three computationally expensive pre-processing steps are required. We describe these steps, the open source framework we have developed, and how it can be used not only on the recently released 1940 Census data containing nearly 4 million high resolution scanned forms, but also on other collections of forms. With a growing demand to digitize our wealth of paper archives we see this type of automated search as a low cost scalable alternative to the costly manual transcription that would otherwise be required.