Data production for no real purpose As a patient what is most irritating to you

"What’s truly needed is a consolidated ability to capture and process all of the data and convert it into meaningful insights."
*Jack Gold, Network World | Jul 9, 2018 11:02 AM PT 
 
If you are a patient what is most irritating to you.
I think the first thing is the number of forms you need to fill when you go to a doctor's office.
Who designs theses forms ?
What exactly happens to these forms?
What about  those bulky pre-visit information packets sent to you from specialist offices which you are expected to fill before the visit.

What is the second,third,fourth irritating thing. the same questions asked by the CNA, PA and the doctor.

Who designs theses forms ? Brainless morons
What exactly happens to these forms?  Either they are shredded or they become part of your bulky but useless patient file.
 
What about  those bulky pre-visit information packets sent to you from specialist offices which you are expected to fill before the visit. Ditto

What is the second,third,fourth irritating thing. the same questions asked by the CNA, PA and the doctor. Except for one or two things like "allergies and  your medications" Mostly Useless Data.

Then why the FRACK they keep doing this? 
Mostly because of advise by Ivory tower academics,third parties like, CMS,Insurance,Lawyers.

Data production for no real purpose.NEVER,NEVER,EVER hand a two page single spaced neatly typed complaint list to your doctor

"Data production for no real purpose."

 When any Patient whips up a a written list of complaints,there is a groan and a sigh from the doctor.
usually after the second item the doctor's mind is wondering.
This is a real world example of "Data production for no real purpose"
Many consumer advice sites keep advising  patients to prepare well before each visit.
 My advise stop doing this. What is bothering you will definitely be remembered by you unless you have memory problems or you are mentally retarded" even if you  make a list as a memory aid  keep it short 3 to 4 items long.Consult it  before  your  visit  ends  not at the beginning. NEVER,NEVER,EVER hand  a two page single spaced neatly typed complaint list to your  doctor.
this is a big problem in Computer science and  has become one  in primary care after  Computers started  interfering  with doctor patient relations.

The problem is research indicates that 75 to 85 percent of all data gathered in organizations is never fully utilized. It may prove useful in specific targeted solutions, but it’s not helping the overall organization become more productive and/or competitive. And as more sensors are deployed, more data is generated, compounding the problem.

What is a favicon

Favorite icons (browser tabs—what we're used to)  Tthe  e,G,Y  or the  Play on a red back ground  to the left of the  URL

http://www.jonathantneal.com/blog/understand-the-favicon/

Jonathan T. Neal

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Understand the Favicon

written by jonathantneal on January 16, 2013 in HTML5 with 92 Comments

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When Alec Rust asked the HTML5 Boilerplate project to switch to a HiDPI favicon,

 HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) displays, also known by Apple's "Retina Display" marketing name, are screens with a high resolution in a relatively small format.They are mostly found in high-end laptops and monitors.


 I realized how little I knew about favorite icons, touch icons, and tile icons. When I decided to dive in a little deeper, things got interesting.
Since they were first introduced by Internet Explorer in 1999, almost nothing about favicons has changed. They have almost-always been ICO files, either nested in the root of the domain as /favicon.ico, or organized by a CMS into a theme or images directory and displayed with:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/favicon.ico">

The classic favicon.ico is a 16×16 ICO file, often served in either 16-color or 24bit alpha-transparency format. More recently, favicons have been served as 32×32, which is appropriately scaled down in all major and popular-legacy browsers. In IE10 Metro, the 32×32 icon is used in the address bar.

The rel attribute of a favicon is a product of evolution. Internet Explorer 5 intended shortcut icon to represent the relationship between the page and the icon, but when the specification separated relationships by space, this theoretically created two relationships, shortcut and icon. It wasn’t until 2010 when the HTML5 specification declared icon alone to be the standard identifier. In non-IE browsers, favicons can be served without the shortcut property.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico"> <link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico">

The type attribute of a favicon is about as useful as the type attribute of a

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">

 

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

 

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico">

Good news, everyone! Good browsers can use PNG favicons.

Bad news, everyone! Chrome and Safari will use the ICO favicons anyway.

This really depresses me, because Chrome, Firefox, Opera 7+, and Safari 4+ all accept the PNG favicon, but Chrome and Safari will opt to use the ICO favicon when both are presented, regardless of the order in which they are declared. On the other hand, Internet Explorer does not support PNG favicons, but it will ignore the PNG favicon and use the ICO favicon, regardless of the order in which they are declared.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="path/to/favicon.ico">   <link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.png">

Since PNG favicon files do not include multiple resolutions like ICO favicons, we can write out several favicon declarations and use the sizes attribute to target each resolution.

<link rel="icon" href="favicon-16.png" sizes="16x16"> <link rel="icon" href="favicon-32.png" sizes="32x32"> <link rel="icon" href="favicon-48.png" sizes="48x48"> <link rel="icon" href="favicon-64.png" sizes="64x64"> <link rel="icon" href="favicon-128.png" sizes="128x128">

How do these PNG-favicon-compatible browsers determine which favicon should be used? Firefox and Safari will use the favicon that comes last. Chrome for Mac will use whichever favicon is ICO formatted, otherwise the 32×32 favicon. Chrome for Windows will use the favicon that comes first if it is 16×16, otherwise the ICO. If none of the aforementioned options are available, both Chromes will use whichever favicon comes first, exactly the opposite of Firefox and Safari. Indeed, Chrome for Mac will ignore the 16×16 favicon and use the 32×32 version if only to scale it back down to 16×16 on non-retina devices. Opera, not wanting to take sides, will choose from any of the available icons at complete random. I love that Opera does this.
And that’s just the beginning. Now it’s time to learn about the Internet Explorer caveats.
While IE8-10 will display the favicon on first load of the page, IE7 will skip the first load and display the favicon during repeat visits. Worse yet, IE6 will only display the favicon once the site has been bookmarked and reopened in the browser. IE6 will also drop the favicon whenever the browser cache is cleared, and it will not display the favicon again until the site is either re-bookmarked, or the favicon is somehow reloaded. If IE6 and favicons mean a lot to you, you can force this reload with a little JavaScript snippet, preferably wrapped in a conditional comment.

<![endif]-->

---

Back to HiDPI; have you asked yourself this question yet?

If all good browsers support PNG favicons, and IE browsers need ICO favicons, but ICO favicons throw off Chrome and Safari, why not wrap the ICO favicon in IE conditional commments?

That is a great question, and it leads to a great idea. PNG files are a fraction the size of ICO files. We could serve a classic 32×32 ICO favicon to IE, and a super sleek 96×96 PNG favicon to everybody else.

<link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.png">

One. Big. Problem. IE10 does not support conditional comments, and it does not support PNG favicons. Yes, with the code above, legacy IE would get a better experience than Microsoft’s brightest flagship.

Hey, hey — what if we stick the ICO favicon in the root directory and use to assign the PNG favicon?

You. Win. The Internet! Given the limitations of Chrome, Safari, and IE, this method will give every browser the best favicon experience. IE will ignore the and use the ICO favicon found in the root of the domain as /favicon.ico. All other browsers will use the PNG favicon displayed with:

<link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.png">

But what if I want multiple favicons or my CMS doesn’t like to do things this way? Is there … another way?

Yea, but you’re not gonna like it.

<script> navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer" && (function (i, d, s, l) {    i.src = "favicon.ico";    s = d.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];    l = s.parentNode.insertBefore(d.createElement("link"), s);    l.rel = "shortcut icon";    l.href = i.src; })(new Image, document); </script> <link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.png">

Unsatisfied with either solution? All is not lost. IE10 users are mostly Windows 8 users for now, and Windows 8 introduces a new kind of display icon for websites — tile icons.

With IE10 Metro we can display a unique tile icon when the visitor pins our site to their Start screen. These tile icons are 144×144 PNG files, and for best results they use a transparent background. A background tile color can be specified using a hex RGB color (using the six-character #RRGGBB notation), a CSS color name, or the CSS rgb() function. The markup is pretty simple.

<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#D83434"> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="path/to/tileicon.png">

Okay, so let’s put it all together, accepting the potential limitation of IE10, and keeping the sane parts of everything else.

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="path/to/touchicon.png"> <link rel="icon" href="path/to/favicon.png"> <meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content="#D83434"> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="path/to/tileicon.png">

It’s a start, at least.
If you want to learn more about creating favicons, I recommend Create the perfect favicon from Jon Hicks’ The Icon Handbook, and Making a good favicon by Jonathan Snook. Also, I want to thank @alrra for telling me about tile icons.

Wait, I came here for touch icons.

If you want to learn more about embedding touch icons, read Mathias Bynens’ Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Touch Icons. Or, follow this summary of his article:

It’s perfectly possible to just create one high-resolution icon. Lower display resolutions automatically resize the icon. The downside is, this affects performance negatively whenever the site is added to the home screen.
As of March 2013, if you’re lazy and don’t really care about performance when the site is added to the home screen, just use a single 152×152 icon.

Moreover: Deconsecrating Gandhi

Anonymous.The Economist; London Vol. 348, Iss. 8083,  (Aug 29, 1998): 73-74.

something interesting 

Moreover: Deconsecrating Gandhi

Anonymous.The Economist; London Vol. 348, Iss. 8083,  (Aug 29, 1998): 73-74.

Unlike the US and the Soviet Union, India was founded by genuine saints: Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Much Indian writing about India dwells today on the gulf between the vision of its founders and what their country has become - not that Gandhi and Nehru has the same vision: Gandhi had no use for industrialization or the state, both of which the westernized Nehru thought indispensable. Iconoclasm is one of the more fashionable voices. A more cynical age seems to demand a steelier look at India's founding saints, particularly Gandhi. Yogesh Chadha's new biography of Gandhi purports to rescue the man from the myth. The Insider, a novel by a former prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, makes it clear that self-seeking and venality were the order of the day in India's politics from the first days of Nehru's rule.

Full Text

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Headnote

Does fashionable muckraking about modem India's founding heroes say more about them or about India's disappointment with itself?

"AT THIS supremely dangerous moment in history," wrote Arnold Toynbee in the shadow of Soviet and American nuclear weapons, "the only salvation for mankind is the Indian way." His faith in India was once as commonplace as his despair over the superpowers. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, India was founded by genuine saints: Mohandas Gandhi, who broke the British empire with hunger strikes and a spinning wheel, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, who made democracy, socialism, religious tolerance and non-alignment the pillars of the new state. Westerners from EM. Forster to the Beatles trooped to India for decades in search of virtues they could not find at home. While Gandhi and Nehru were alive, it seemed possible to believe that India would be great because she was good.

Alas, the dream of greatness proved hardier than dedication to goodness. The bloody partition that carved Islamic Pakistan out of Hindu-dominated India was the first and greatest insult to Nehru's sectblind creed. Over the next half century the affronts to that and other ideals hardly ceased. Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, temporarily assumed dictatorial powers in 1975. It was she who injected into mainstream politics the notion that "Indian" and "Hindu" were synonyms, an idea that animates the current ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (Bjp, Economic planning and non-alignment, Nehru's other two axioms, were finally demolished along with the Berlin Wall. And now India has exploded a nuclear bomb, making its neighbourhood the likeliest venue on earth for a war of mass destruction. The tremors at the Rajasthan testing ground must have set Toynbee spinning.

Much Indian writing about India dwells today on the gulf between the vision of its founders and what their country has become-not that Gandhi and Nehru had the same vision: Gandhi had no use for industrialisation or the state, both of which the westernised Nehru thought indispensable. Some of that writing is celebratory or defiant; much of it finds fault with the founders, and some looks wistfully back to an age of relative innocence and wonders how it can be relived.

Iconoclasm is one of the more fashionable voices. A more cynical age seems to demand a steelier look at India's founding saints, especially Mohandas Gandhi, the ideal freedom-fighter, perhaps, but certainly not the model husband or father. Gandhi expected his long-suffering wife and children to be as self-de- nying as he was, an illiberal trait that is a central theme of a spate of recent works about the Mahatma ("great soul"). A play by Ajit Dalvi, "Mahatma v Gandhi", focuses on Gandhi's troubled relationship with his eldest son, Harilal, who boozed, whored and converted to Islam; a biography of his wife, Kasturba, written by their grandson, recounts Gandhi's sudden vow of chastity at the age of 37, an early example of many unsought sacrifices heaped upon her.

Yogesh Chadha's new biography, published last year by John Wiley, purports to "rescue the man from the myth" with the aid of tales from the Gandhi household. This kind of domestic muckraking is never difficult, whoever the subject. Gandhi himself confessed that "I have a strain of cruelty in me . . . such that people force themselves to do things, even to attempt impossible things, in order to please me." He threatened to evict his wife from the house for refusing to clean an untouchable's chamber pot and temporarily disowned his son, Harilal, for marrying without his permission. Mr Chadha gives us both the heroism and the cruelty, but, in a book that reads more like chronology than biography, fails to give either its due weight.

Such myth-smudging seems inevitably beside the point. Revisionism is unlikely to rob Gandhi of what made him unique: his refusal to conceive of independence as the mere recovery of the stolen national property of sovereignty, though it was also that. In the midst of the struggle Gandhi was fasting to the point of death to stop untouchability from being enshrined in the constitution; obliging officials in the Indian National Congress to spin cloth for half an hour a day to show their commitment to cottage industry and the eradication of caste distinction in dress; and bending over backwards to make common cause with the Muslim minority-distractions at best to any nationalist not consumed as Gandhi was by the question of what sort of nation would an independent India be.

Much as they differed, Gandhi and Nehru both had answers that bade India to be at once various and singular, to celebrate the invasions and conversions that left it a jumble of languages and religions. To Nehru India was "an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden . . . what had been written previously."

Almost at once, though, the sordid and the ordinary claimed their places. "The Insider" (Viking India), a novel by a former prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, makes it clear that self-seeking and venality were the order of the day in Indian politics right from the first days of Pandit Nehru's enlightened rule. The main interest in this clunky, semi-fictional tale is the apparent contrast between the hero, an incorruptible socialist, and the author, who as prime minister gave India its first real dose of freemarket reform in the early 199os but left of fice amidst scandal.

A far better guide to India's fall from grace is Sunil Khilnani's bracing study, "The Idea of India" (Penguin; 7.99). Mr Khilnani pins much ofthe blame on Indira Gandhi, who promoted a populist brand of democracy that ended up inciting castes, states and religious groups against each other. One piece of shrapnel killed her-she was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984; another destroyed the Babri Masjid mosque eight years later, an act of religious vandalism by Hindu fanatics, blessed by the BJP.

And now the BJP heads the government. It has softened in office, it is true, and may anyway not last long atop a fractious 13party coalition. Yet its election in February heralds the arrival of a dark horse in the idea-of-India stakes, one largely unnoticed behind the Gandhian and Nehruvian entries. The BJP's India is not non-aligned but a power in its own right, with the nuclear bombs to prove it. In its rainbow of cultures one-Hindutva, "Hinduness"-is unmistakably the strongest. It is an India that can even find a warm spot for Nathuram Godse, who killed Gandhi in 1948 in a rage at his insistence that India honour a debt to Pakistan while the two countries were at war. "This is Nathuram Godse Speaking", a play based on the assassin's trial self-defence, drew such crowds recently in Bombay that a nervous sIr persuaded the state government of Maharashtra to ban it.

To many thoughtful Indians, the idea of their country embracing an armed-to-theteeth chauvinism seems both banal and appalling. To Arundhati Roy, who wrote the bestselling novel, "The God of Small Things", that threat marks "The End of Imagination", the title of her lament this month in Frontline, a fortnightly magazine. "The air is thick with ugliness," she writes, "and there's the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze" That is indeed alarming, if true. But against it there are hopeful signs: the decrepitude of the Bjp's government suggests that India's multitudes are not willing to accept Hindutva or any other mono-vision. There may be life yet in the Indian way.

Word count: 1295

Copyright Economist Newspaper Group, Incorporated Aug 29, 1998

science driven by curiosity is virtually written off as conspicuous consumption.

Pitroda was sidelined upon the defeat of the Manmohan Singh regime. But the IT idea of innovation continued in the lionizing of Nandan Nilekani and Narayan Murthy of Infosys, both of whom played out the technological mana of IT. In his convocation speech to the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, Murthy challenged Indian science by asking whether institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science or the Indian Institute of Technology have created even one invention that has become a household name around the globe.

Murthy was clear that success in science needed a technological project, that discovery and invention were less major than innovation, the commercialization of a product. Success was now to be measured in money and social impact, and the older ideas of creativity in science looked outmoded. Even the research paper had to be measured in terms of bibliometric impact factors rather than the sheer creativity of the idea. Success, and success in science, is now seen through corporate eyes, and science driven by curiosity is virtually written off as conspicuous consumption. The impact of Murthy's speech was confusing. First, the idea of public good now yielded to corporate projects. More critically, it created a schizophrenic split in the idea of Bangalore as a science center. The old legacy of the Raman era seems remote. Bangalore now evokes a corporate world where science as the pursuit of ideas is as obsolete as the Bakelite insulator. Murthy was seeing success as a return on investment while ignoring the creative sense of science as a knowledge-producing activity.

Panopticism and the Adhar card

Panopticism I refers to Jeremy Bentham's original conceptualization of the panopticon, and is it the model of panopticism that Foucault responds to in his 1975 Discipline and Punish. Panopticism II refers to an Orwellian 'Big Brother' ideal of surveillance.

Panopticism - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism

Panopticism id this the Camel in Arabs tent ?In  a society where  Dissent 

 is  suppressed with Violence is the  panopticon of Adhar really a desirable thing ?

The examination as a rite of passage in India and unemployable Engineering Graduates

Failure in middle-class India, in an everyday sense, is best captured as failure in exams. As an astute observer once put it, if agriculture in India is a gamble with the rains, middle-class life in India is a gamble with exams.

The examination as a rite of passage defines failure and success in middle-class Indian society. Entrance exams to various institutions are virtually the central ritual of Indian education, and childhood is devoted to entering one of these institutions. The very epidemic of tutorial colleges and coaching institutions testifies to the fear of failure. I have heard many a student sigh over missing the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) entrance-qualifying mark by 1 percent. The logic of the exam has taken over the definition of failure and success. Ramchandra Gandhi, the distinguished Indian philosopher, once related a story about his uncle introducing three of his distant cousins to each other. The uncle said, "This is Ramu, gold medalist," then turned and said, "This is Murthy, first-class-first." He then paused eloquently and said, "This is Shambhu." The silence that followed was deafening and self-explanatory. Exams-and success or failure in them-define the identity of the Indian middle class. They identify the grammar of failure and achievement.

The examination as a metaphor defines the logic of success and failure. A scientist explained the success and the limits of Indian science in terms of the metaphor of the exam: "The exam," he said, "demands the one correct answer. There is no place for doubt and ambiguity. Indians are successful exam givers. As a result we have become a nation of convergent rather than divergent brains. We love the right answer, whether it is the spelling bee or the science problem." Dissent, difference, and discordance do not quite fit into our picture of science. Another scientist, an astronomer, commenting on our sense of success, said, "Indian scientists succeed as summarizers, never as inventers. We produce the perfect synthesis, the brilliant summary, but never raise the interesting or unorthodox question. Indians were rarely original." Another scientist listening to the conversation told me that "the tragedy of Indian science is that there is no idea of the mistake. Indians produced that immaculate conception of science, a science without mistake. You can read all the annual reports of the Council for Scientific Industrial Research and you will never see a reference to a single mistake."

The recent epidemic of concern about the fact that not one Indian university or research institute ranks among the world's best captures the official sense of failure. President Pranab Mukherjee himself testified to this sense of failure when he mourned the fact that no Indian institute of technology or management qualified for the list of the top 100 institutions in the world. The Indian response to failure is to immediately set up a committee of enquiry, and the spate of committees that followed was an index of the concern about failure in science. Unfortunately, sociology speaks of failure in systemic terms of cause and effect. Our sociology looks at systems. Folklore looks at lifeworlds. A lifeworld has an element of subjectivity, of humor, of ambiguity and irony that make failure something deeply livable. One's evocation of the joys of failure is caught in the very classification of people in terms of exam results. A successful person has always been referred to as a "first-class-first." Mediocre people carry the stigma of "B.A. pass" in terms of the world of exams.

Glorious Third Class !

 How many of today's _Pizzahut, McDonald, Tacobell, Starbucks oriented Indian youth can relate to this

"My socialist childhood taught me that most of India is delightfully, wonderfully third class. As a child and a student, I loved the word "third class." While travelling in trains, I always felt that first class was distant, second class was prim and aspirational, but third class was a celebration of its own resilience, a miraculous space. A third-class compartment, despite scarcity, always conveyed a sense of surplus, a readiness to absorb more. If first class was exclusive, third class was socialist and hospitable. Even in school, I loved all the third-class minds in class. They huddled in the back creating a wonderfully esoteric culture of their own. Failure was a livable ecology that the first-class minds never understood. Third class as a category provided a sense of a lived democracy, popular but never populist. For me, third class captured the very idea of socialism, the Indian notion of justice that always believed that every man deserved one more "chance." The idea of justice, in fact, was captured in the notion of giving everyone that one chance. People claimed that third class emerges when people have little. Today, third class sounds like a death sentence, a denial of possibilities. In an aspirational world, a third class is an also-ran. Yet, in the socialist world, at the level of folklore, third class was an ecology of tolerance, providing a sense that most people would not succeed and yet life was worth living. Yet oddly, even the world of third class celebrated the first-class-first. An occasional success story provided a shared fraternity for all those who failed to make it. Third class was a domain of storytelling, an ArabianNights world where every struggle, every exam, every test you took to keep your neck above water acquired a heroic quality.

Third class was livable, but the idea of the third world was not. I believe economists and development experts coined the term "third world." It took the fun out of third class. Now third class was mediocre, backward, and underdeveloped. Deep down, there was a sense that an exam was not merely a sociological fact-it was also a political construct, a social way of defining success and failure. The idea of failure was not about success but whether you were a failed society. Dharampal, in his study of the British archives, showed that colonialism was an attempt to establish the epistemology of failure. For their power to be legitimate, the British had to prove that India was a defeated society. Dharampal argued that education and colonialism created totalizing fictions of examination success and failure. Charles Macaulay defined the colonial idea of examination in India (Sharp 1919). When he claimed that all the civilization of India is not worth a shelf of western books, he defined the rules of the game. By creating a "Mandarin Babu" system as the democracy of the exam, Macaulay outlined the future of Indian society. We became a nation of clerks, of exam givers, where success and failure in giving exams determined the future of our society. Macaulay's Minute, followed by Wood's Despatch of 1854 (Mahamood 1906, 84-5), created the basis of India as an examination society. A wag once called it the dictatorship of the "filariat" rather than the proletariat.

One has to realize there is not much difference between Macaulay's Minute and President Mukherjee's concern for the failure of science today. It was as if an accountant had turned epistemologist to explain the success and failure of our society. Macaulay was Mukherjee's forerunner in the rankings game."

Photography Glossary

Glossary

Aliasing	The display of a digital image where a curved line appears jagged due to the square pixels.
Ambient light	The natural or artificial continuous light that exists before the additional lighting is introduced.
Analyse/Analysis	To examine in detail.
Anti-aliasing	The process of smoothing the appearance of a curved line in a digital image.
Aperture	A circular opening in the lens that controls light reaching the sensor.
Backlit	A subject illuminated from behind.
Balance	A harmonious relationship between elements within the frame.
Bit	Short for binary digit, the basic unit of the binary language.
Blurred	An image or sections of an image that are not sharp. This can be caused through inaccurate focusing, shallow depth of field or a slow shutter speed.
Bounced light	Lighting that is reflected off a surface before reaching the subject.
Bracketing	Over- and underexposure either side of a meter-indicated exposure.
Byte	8 bits. The standard unit of binary data storage containing a value between 0 and 255.
Cable release	A cable that allows the shutter to be released without shaking the camera when using slow shutter speeds.
Camera shake	Blurred image caused by camera movement during the exposure.
CCD	Charge-coupled device. A type of image sensor used in digital image capture.
Channels	A method of separating a digital color image into primary or secondary colors.
Cloning tool	A tool used for replicating pixels in digital photography.
Close down	A term referring to the action of making the lens aperture smaller.
Close-up lens	A one-element lens that is attached to the camera’s lens allowing the image to be focused when the camera is close to a subject.
CMYK	Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and blacK. Inks used in four-color printing.
Composition	The arrangement of shape, tone, line and color within the boundaries of the image area.
Compression	A method of reducing the file size when a digital image is closed.
Constrain proportions	Retain the proportional dimensions of an image when changing the image size.
Context	The circumstances relevant to something under consideration.
Contrast	The difference in brightness between the darkest and lightest areas of the image or subject.
CPU	Central processing unit - the ‘brains’ of a digital camera or computer.
Crop	Reduce image size to enhance composition or limit information.
Curves	Control for adjusting tonality and color in Photoshop.
Decisive moment	The moment when the arrangement of the moving subject matter in the viewfinder of the camera is composed to the photographer’s satisfaction.
Dedicated flash	A flash unit that is fully linked to the camera’s electronics and uses the camera’s own TTL light meter to calculate correct exposure.
Depth of field	The zone of sharpness variable by aperture, focal length or subject distance.
Diagonal	A slanting straight line that is neither horizontal nor vertical.
Differential focusing	Use of focus to highlight specific subject areas.
Diffused light	Light that is dispersed (spreads out) and is not focused.
Diffuser	Material used to disperse light.
Digital image	A computer-generated photograph composed of pixels (picture elements) rather than film grain.
Diminishing perspective	A sense of depth in a two-dimensional image provided by the reduced size of subjects as they recede into the distance.
Dioptres	Unit of power for close-up lenses.
Dissect	To cut into pieces. The edge of the frame can dissect a familiar subject into an unfamiliar section.
Dpi	Dots per inch. A measurement of print resolution.
Dynamic tension	An image which lacks either balance or harmony and where visual elements cause the eye to move out of the image.
Edit	To either reduce the number of images from a larger collection or to enhance or manipulate a digital image.
Evaluate	Assess the value or quality of a piece of work.
Exposure	Combined effect of volume of light hitting a sensor and its duration.
Exposure compensation	To increase or decrease the exposure from a meter-indicated exposure to obtain an appropriate exposure.
Exposure meter	Device for the measurement of light.
Extreme contrast	A subject brightness range that exceeds the image sensor’s ability to record detail in all tones.
F-numbers	A sequence of numbers given to the relative sizes of aperture opening. F-numbers are standard on all lenses. The largest number corresponds to the smallest aperture and vice versa.
Feather	The action of softening the edge of a digital selection.
Field of view	The area visible through the camera’s viewing system.
Figure and ground	The relationship between subject and background.
Fill	Use of light to increase detail in shadow area.
Fill flash	Flash used at a reduced output to lower subject brightness range.
Filter	Either a treated or colored piece of glass or plastic placed in front of the camera lens or a preset software action that applies an effect to a digital image.
Filter factor	A number used to indicate the effect of the filter’s density on exposure.
Flare	Unwanted light, scattered or reflected within the lens assembly, creating patches of light and degrading image contrast.
Focal length	Distance from the optical centre of the lens to the image plane when the lens is focused on infinity. A long focal length lens (telephoto) will increase the image size of the subject being photographed. A short focal length lens (wide-angle) will decrease the image size of the subject.
Focal plane shutter	A shutter directly in front of the image plane.
Focal point	Point of focus at the image plane or point of interest in the image.
Focusing	The action of creating a sharp image by adjusting either the distance of the lens from the sensor or altering the position of lens elements.
Format	The size of the camera or the orientation/shape of the image.
Frame	The act of composing an image. See ‘Composition’.
Golden section	A classical method of composing subject matter within the frame.
Gray card	Neutral colored card which reflects incident light at a known percentage.
Half-tone	A system of reproducing the continuous tone of a photographic print by a pattern of dots printed by offset litho.
Hard copy	A print.
Hard drive	Memory facility which is capable of retaining information after the computer is switched off.
Hard light	A light source which appears small to the human eye and produces directional light giving well-defined shadows, e.g. direct sunlight or a naked light bulb.
High key	An image where light tones dominate.
Highlight	Area of subject receiving highest exposure value.
Histogram	A graphical representation of a digital image indicating the pixels allocated to each level.
Horizontal	A line that is parallel to the horizon.
Hot shoe	Plug-in socket for on-camera flash.
Incident light reading	A measurement of the intensity of light falling on a subject.
Interpolation	A method of increasing the apparent resolution of an image by adding pixels of an average value to adjacent pixels within the image.
ISO	International Standards Organization. A numerical system for rating the speed or relative light sensitivity of an image sensor.
JPEG (.jpg)	Joint Photographic Experts Group. Image compression file format.
Juxtapose	Placing objects or subjects within a frame to allow comparison.
Key light	The main light casting the most prominent shadows.
Kilobyte	1024 bytes.
Lasso Tool	Selection tool used in digital editing.
Latitude	Ability of the film to record the brightness range of the subject.
Layers	A composite digital image where each element is on a separate layer or level.
LCD	Liquid crystal display.
LED	Light-emitting diode. Used in the viewfinder to inform the photographer of exposure settings.
Lens	An optical device usually made from glass that focuses light rays to form an image on a surface.
Levels	The method of assigning a shade of lightness or brightness to a pixel.
Light meter	A device that measures the intensity of light so that the optimum exposure for the image sensor can be obtained.
Long lens	Lens with a large focal length and thus a reduced field of view.
Low key	An image where dark tones dominate.
Macro	Extreme close-up.
Magic Wand Tool	Selection tool used in digital editing.
Marching ants	A moving broken line indicating a digital selection of pixels.
Marquee Tool	Selection tool used in digital editing.
Matrix metering	A meter reading which averages the exposure from a pattern of segments over the subject area.
Maximum aperture
Megabyte	Largest lens opening.
Megapixels	A unit of measurement for digital files. 1024 kilobytes.
MIE	More than a million pixels.
Minimum aperture	Meter-indicated exposure.
Mode (digital image)	Smallest lens opening.
Multiple exposure	RGB, CMYK, etc. The mode describes the tonal and color range of the captured or scanned image.
Negative	Several exposures made onto the same image frame.
Neutral density filter	An image where the tones are reversed, e.g. dark tones are recorded as light tones and vice versa.
	A filter that reduces the amount of light reaching the image sensor.
Objective
ODR	A factual and non-subjective analysis of information.
Opaque	Output device resolution.
Open up	Not transmitting light. Increasing the lens aperture to let more light reach the image sensor.
Pan	To follow a moving subject.
Perspective	The apparent relationship of distance between visible objects, thereby creating the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional image.
Perspective compression	Flattened perspective created by the use of a telephoto lens and distant viewpoint.
Photoflood	Tungsten studio lamp with a color temperature of approximately 3400K.
Pixel	The smallest square picture element in a digital image.
Polarizing filter	A gray-looking filter used to block polarized light. It can remove or reduce unwanted reflections from some surfaces and can increase the color saturation and darken blue skies.
Portrait lens	A telephoto lens used to capture non-distorted head and shoulder portraits with shallow depth of field.
Portrait mode	A programmed exposure mode that ensures shallow depth of field.
Previsualize	The ability to decide what the photographic image will look like before exposure.
Processor speed	The capability of the computer’s CPU measured in megahertz.
Pushing film	The film speed on the camera’s dial is increased to a higher number for the entire film. This enables the film to be used in low light conditions. The film must be developed for a longer time to compensate for the underexposure.
Push processing	Increasing development to increase contrast or to compensate for underexposure of films that have been rated at a higher speed than recommended.
RAM	Random access memory, the computer’s short-term or working memory.
Reflector	A surface used to reflect light in order to soften harsh shadows.
Refraction	The change in direction of light as it passes through a transparent surface at an angle.
Resample image	Alter the total number of pixels describing a digital image.
Resolution	A measure of the degree of definition, also called sharpness.
RGB	Red, green and blue. The three primary colors used to display images on a color monitor.
Rubber stamp	A tool used for replicating pixels in digital imaging.
Rule of thirds	An imaginary grid that divides the frame into three equal sections vertically and horizontally. The lines and intersections of this grid are used to design an orderly composition.
Saturation (color)	Intensity or richness of color hue.
Scale	A ratio of size.
Selective focus	The technique of isolating a particular subject from others by using a shallow depth of field, also known as differential focus.
Self-timer	A device which delays the action of the shutter release. This can be used for extended exposures when a cable release is unavailable.
Sharp	In focus. Not blurred.
Shutter	A mechanism that controls the accurate duration of the exposure.
Shutter priority	Semi-automatic exposure mode. The photographer selects the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture.
Silhouette	The outline of a subject seen against a bright background.
Skylight filter	Used to reduce or eliminate the blue haze seen in landscapes. It does not affect overall exposure so it is often used to protect the front lens element from damage.
Sliders	A sliding control in digital editing software used to adjust color, tone, opacity, etc.
SLR camera	Single lens reflex camera. The image in the viewfinder is viewed via a mirror behind the lens which moves out of the way when the shutter release is pressed.
Soft light	This is another way of describing diffused light which comes from a broad light source and creates shadows that are not clearly defined.
Software	A computer program.
Standard lens	A lens that gives a view that is close to normal visual perception.
Steep perspective	Exaggerated diminishing perspective created by a viewpoint in close proximity to the subject with a wide-angle lens.
Stop down	Decreasing the aperture of the lens to reduce the exposure.
Straight photography	Photographic images that have not been manipulated.
Subjective analysis	Personal opinions or views concerning the perceived communication and aesthetic value of an image.
Symmetry	Duplication of information either side of a central line to give an image balance and harmony.
Sync lead	A lead from the camera to the flash unit which synchronizes the firing of the flash and the opening of the shutter.
Sync speed	The fastest shutter speed available, for use with flash, on a camera with a focal plane shutter. If the sync speed of the camera is exceeded when using flash the image will not be fully exposed.
System software	Computer operating program, e.g. Windows or Mac OS.
Telephoto lens	A long focal length lens. Often used to photograph distant subjects which the photographer is unable to get close to. Also used to flatten apparent perspective and decrease depth of field.
Thematic images	A set of images with a unifying idea.
TIFF	Tagged Image File Format. Popular image file format for desktop publishing applications.
Tone	A tint of color or shade of gray.
Transparent	Allowing light to pass through.
TTL meter	Through-the-lens reflective light meter. This is a convenient way to measure the brightness of a scene as the meter is behind the camera lens.
Tungsten light	A common type of electric light such as that produced by household bulbs and photographic lamps. An 80A blue filter may be used to prevent an orange cast.
Unsharp Mask	A filter for increasing apparent sharpness of a digital image.
UV filter	A filter used to absorb ultraviolet radiation. The filter appears colorless and may be left on the lens permanently for protection.
Vantage point	A position in relation to the subject which enables the photographer to compose a good shot.
Vertical	At right angles to the horizontal plane.
Virtual memory	Hard drive memory allocated to function as RAM.
Visualize	To imagine how something will look once it has been completed.
Wide-angle lens	A lens with an angle of view greater than 60o. Used when the photographer is unable to move further away or wishes to move closer to create steep perspective.
X	Synchronization setting for electronic flash.
X-sync (PC socket)	A socket on the camera or flash unit which enables a sync lead to be attached. When this lead is connected the flash will fire in synchronization with the shutter opening.
Zooming	This is a technique where the focal length of a zoom lens is altered during a long exposure. The effect creates movement blur which radiates from the centre of the image.
Zoom lens	A variable focal length lens. Zoom lenses have comparatively smaller maximum apertures than fixed focal length lenses.