vector - How to show the coordinates of point handles in Adobe Illustrator?

When I move cursor on an anchor point, Illustrator shows me the coordinates of the anchor. But how can I find the [x, y] coordinates of the handles (in red circles)?

terminology - How to explain to my client the difference between Front End and Back End?

I'm currently managing a project to bring a medium-sized shop into the online world for the first time.

The very non-technical shop owner is failing to understand what "front-end" and "back-end" means, and I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas.

He currently understands front-end to mean the part of the website that normal users will see and use, and back-end as being the admin part of the website. But of course, the admin system is still front end — he just doesn't understand this.

He also thinks that the front-end can be created by anyone, in the same way anyone can put together a newsletter using MS publisher.

Answer

First off, it's not wrong of the client to refer to the admin side as back-end. It's actually fairly common terminology to call any aspects of a content management system that aren't publicly available the "back end." This confusion between the front and back end of a CMS and the front and back end of code may be a large part of the problem you're encountering.

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If you need to explain the difference between front-end code and back-end code, try explaining that it's a difference in where the code exists.

To explain where the code exists, you'll need to explain the concept of a server. In explaining these concepts to ten-to-fourteen-year-old children (whom I assume have a technology skill level similar to your client), I've done this by saying something like:

You have a monitor [point to the monitor]. Usually it just displays the information on your computer here [point to the rest of the computer, or base of the laptop] but it can display information from any computer it's connected to [point to an ethernet cable if possible]. That's what the internet is; it's just a bunch of computers wired together where you can get information from any of them.

Some computers aren't used by individual people, and don't have monitors of their own connected. They spend all the time sending out information. We call them servers because they're like a servers in a restaurant. You ask the server for food and he gives you back whatever you ordered.
[I realize this analogy is inaccurate because the computer server is more akin to the restaurant chef, while the restaurant server is like whatever medium is bringing you the information, but I've found it's best not to overcomplicate things.]
Your computer asks the server for information, and it gets the right information from a database and sends it back to you. We call code on the server "back-end" code because it's like the back part of a restaurant. You don't see what's going on in the kitchen, but you know that they're pulling together the right food for you.

(At this point, you may find it helpful to explain the concept of a database. I've found it effective to say that it's basically just a large spreadsheet containing the information you need and to open up an Excel spreadsheet and fill in a couple of columns to demonstrate.)

So if you want to see a website, you type in the address of the website. That sends a request for information from that address out to a server, and it sends back the information you want, just like if you asked a server in a restaurant for a menu.

There's a big difference between a restaurant menu, and a webpage. On a webpage you have to be able to click on things to interact with them. You can do this because the server has sent your computer some code that tells the computer what to do when you click on various things. We call this code the "front-end" code.

On a website, when you want to know more about something, you click on it to request information. That's just like if you select something from a menu in a restaurant and ask the server to get it for you. The front end (menu/webpage) lets you request something (food/information) from the server.

How do you remove expected returns from asset allocation strategies?

The classic mean-variance optimization problem tries to minimize variance of a portfolio for a given expected return:

$$ \underset{w}{\arg \min} \quad w^T \Sigma w \quad \text{s.t} \quad \mu^Tw \geq \bar{\mu} $$

However the expected returns $\mu$ are can be computed in many different ways, but many use very subjective estimations. The problem is that the result of the optimization is very sensitive to these expected returns.

What asset allocation strategies exist where the expected returns are removed from the framework or where the sensitivity of the result (to changes in expected returns) is limited?

For example, the "min-variance" optimization removes the expected returns by return only the portfolio with minimum variance as follows:

$$ \underset{w}{\arg \min} \quad w^T \Sigma w$$

Answer

There is a vast, growing body of literature on risk parity, much of which is predicated on this idea (i.e. of optimizing a portfolio allocation without including expected return). As an example, The Journal of Investing put out an entire issue dedicated to the subject last year: see "Latest Approaches to Risk Parity and Diversification".

From "Risk Parity – Rewards, Risks and Research Opportunities" (2011):

Risk Parity (RP) is a relatively simple idea. Very loosely defined, RP attempts to create a portfolio in which the various asset classes contribute equally to the overall risk of the portfolio.

This is typically viewed against a 60/40 portfolio, and the argument is made that a 60/40 allocation actually allocates 90% of the risk to stocks. There is a some amount of disagreement over whether risk parity is the best approach, as will be clear from reading a selection of these papers. Some argue that there is no theoretical basis for why an RP portfolio should outperform an MVO-portfolio, and that it is inherently inefficient; "Leverage Aversion and Risk Parity" (2011) lays out a positive case based on leverage aversion. There are also many different implementations of this idea (see "Risk Parity for the Masses" for an example).

Some blog posts which have further references:

A related idea is the Most Diversified Portfolio (see, for example, "Properties of the Most Diversified Portfolio", 2011). This optimizes the portfolio based on the diversification ratio, which is simply the sum of the individual asset volatilities over the portfolio volatility.

navigation - In Android application, when to use View control instead of Tab

I develop a shopping application for one company. First time I design to use Tab to categorize product in shop. But I am not sure Ishould use "View control" instead of "Tab" or not.

Tab and View Control have the same functionality to allow users to explore and switch between View. It should have a better reason than "It's looking good when use View Control"

If It has some principle on Android. It will be easy to design application next time. :-)

Answer

Strictly speaking, both tabs and spinners are view controls in the Android Design Guidelines. To quote from them:

However, dealing with when you should use tabs vs spinners, it is primarily a question of space and design.

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  Spinners take up less space and allow the user to (usually) see all of the options at once.

  
  
  


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  Fixed tabs display all items concurrently, but take up more space and are only workable with a few categories with short titles.

  
  


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  Scrolling tab controls take up less space and can contain a larger number of items than a standard tab control, but don't let a user see all of the items at the same time, and so requires more exploration. Technically you can have many sections, but practically it is not a good idea to have more than about 4 of them.

  
  

InDesign: Resetting character style after end of paragraph

Is there a way (a setting or a shortcut) in InDesign to reset a character style to None after the end of a paragraph? Paragraph styles have the option for Next Style, but this does not apply to character styling.

Currently I'm using Quick Apply (ctrl+return+None) after each paragraph to reset the character style, but it is very time consuming if you have many lines with two or more different character styles.

NOTE: I'm using character styling because as far as I know you cannot have two different paragraph styles on the same line. See screenshot below for use example.

Choosing colors appropriately for red-green colorblindness

I want a green for "correct answer" and a red for "wrong answer". My current choice is rgb(144, 238, 144) for the green and rgb(250, 128, 114) for the red. (See wikilearner.net/wiki for the colours in action.)

I have been told that these colors are very close in contrast, making it difficult for a person with red-green color-blindness. What would be a better choice?

Answer

Whenever I have concerns about colour contrasts/accessibility for colour blindness, I head over here: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=628.

Steve Faulkner's Colour Contrast Analyser has been eternally helpful to me.

color - Normalizing hematoxylin and eosin-stained histology images

This is a medically related question...Most pathology slides are stained with hematoxylin (blue) and eosin (red). However, every lab does it differently. I would like to take a bunch of images from various sources and get the staining properties to all be about the same--with some automatable process, since I have 100's of images to deal with.

Any theories?

Thanks,

r