Re: Color names and the 10 elementary colors?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg67627] Re: Color names and the 10 elementary colors?
- From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
- Date: Sun, 2 Jul 2006 06:28:28 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: Stanford University
- References: <200606300813.EAA27221@smc.vnet.net> <e85hag$kq6$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
In the original posting AES wrote: > > As a challenge, try invoking online Help on "Color" or "Colors" or any > > one of the elementary color names, and see if, using no more than 5 > > subsequent mouse clicks within the Help screen, no typing, and no > > pre-existing expert knowledge, just "common sense", you can find your > > way to the list of those colors. and "Chris Chiasson" <chris at chiasson.name> replied: > Accepting your challenge (somewhat), the first thing I did was type > > Green Red Blue Brown Orange site:wolfram.com > > into Google. The sixth result was > > http://documents.wolfram.com/mathematica/Built-inFunctions/GraphicsAndSound/Gr > aphicsPrimitives/Colors/ > > [which immediately solved the problem]. Ah, fascinating. Major scientific societies maintain huge online databases of bibliographic information on the scientific literature which members can access and search on the society websites, either through personal subscriptions or through subscriptions that their company or university libraries take out with the societies. A few weeks ago I participated in a meeting of a working group on Information Classification and Retrieval for one of these societies. During this meeting the society's IT staff presented data on focus groups they had held with younger researchers (working scientists, academics, and grad students) as to how they searched for this kind of information, and also detailed data on where the links into the society's online databases were coming from. Bottom line: Younger researchers overwhelming go straight to Google, not to the society sites, when looking for scientific information and bibliographic data; and a vast majority of the incoming links into the societies' online databases come in through Google, not through the individual researchers' sites or their company or university subscriptions to the society databases. Interesting times . . .