ABOUT THIS WEBSITE

This Multilingual Teaching website, now called Precision and Accuracy with Three Psychophysical Methods, is based on Precision and Accuracy in Perception (H. Ono, 1993), which in turn was based on two other packages, namely, Psychophysical I: Classical Psychophysical Methods (M. Wagner, H. Ono, & K. Ono, 1987) and Psychophysical II: Accuracy and Precision (H. Ono, M. Wagner, & K. Ono, 1989). The first mentioned was distributed by Intellimation (now defunct) and the original two by Conduit. Some parts of the English website are the same as parts of the two original packages, and the contributions of Mark Wagner and Kenneth Ono, the co-authors of the two original packages, are acknowledged for this website. Kenzo Sakurai with the team of NEC’s (originally of Nippon Electric Company) programmers, Sadanobu Kashiwai, Hitomi Onoue, and Naoko Tanno, made possible the multilingual website. (The NEC donated the programmers’ time to Tohoku Gakuin University during April 2002 to March 2003 to upgrade the educational computer programs the University was then using.) The team used JAVA programming to enable us to paste the texts of different languages into it. Earlier English web version was tested in Al Mapp’s perception class and the early Japanese web version was tested in Kenzo Sakurai’s class.

Josée Rivest and Claude Tatilon translated Precision and Accuracy in Perception into French, and Kenzo Sakurai and Masaaki Okura translated it into Japanese. Both these translations required the knowledge of psychophysics, something that the best machine translation does not have. Crystal Chang Su translated it into Chinese first and Chia-huei Tseng edited the translation with the knowledge of psychophysics. To acknowledge that their efforts were time consuming and required creativity, the term “Adapted by …” is used, although the underlying computer program is identical. Hiroshi Ono and Kenzo Sakurai modified some parts of the user manual for the Precision and Accuracy in Perception to add to this website. Julien Lacaille, Kenzo Sakurai and Steven Ziling Zhang translated the modifications into French, Japanese and Chinese, respectively.

Derek Harnanansingh (Arietis Software Innovations) created the new layout that made the navigation from and to different part easy and coordinated the pasting of the texts of the three different languages. Although the content of this website is very close to that of Precision and Accuracy in Perception (H. Ono, 1993), the layout is quite different. The different layout was made possible by the bigger computer screens in use today relative to the 9-inch Macintosh computer screen, for which the previous package was programmed. The important parts of the layout for the website are (a) the main menu and its submenus are available on the left side of the screen, (b) the dictionary and formula panels are available on the right side, and (c) the content area is always in the middle. This layout has advantages in students’ being able to navigate within the website easily and knowing what part they are working on with respect to the overall scheme for the website. It allows student to consult the dictionary and to check the formula while the content area is still visible. Each page of the different teaching module follows that standard layout and the organization of the website should be obvious to students. We hope that the rest of the website is fairly self-explanatory in terms of choices the students need to make, but we elaborate on each part in the link: Organization of the Website.

More recently, William Beaudot (KyberVision Japan LLC) and Kenzo Sakurai have upgraded the package so that it can be used by smartphones and tablets, which have become common ICT tools for education. They replaced a large portion of the package originally written in Java with JavaScript to support the more modern HTML5.

The preparation of this website was supported by (in alphabetical order) ATR-HIS Department of Vision Dynamics, Izumi Information Processing Center of Tohoku Gakuin University, NEC, NSERC MFA grant to York Centre of Vision Research, NSERC Grant A0296, Contract Faculty Teaching Development Grant, York University, and Vice President (Research and Innovation), York University.

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