It does however have a 4 color fileter in front of it. BTW, Nikon had that for about 4-5 years now.
So....theoretically, it would be possible to perform multispectral imagery with this camera by including spectral filters of preference....Say, different IR filters or what have you. Processing these data are of course the next problem, but I seem to remember a DARPA proposal recently asking about this very problem for portable use. Hmmmm, so little time, so many questions to ask, so many possible experiements.....
So, my first question is.....How is color management done with this thing given color profile usage in Colorsync and other approaches in say Adobe software? Are there going to be color profile matching algorithms included so I can manage color with this camera?
So, the deal is that the school IT folks have been sold down the river on the concept that a single platform will save them money. Furthermore, they have been sold on the concept that Windows will save them money.
The reality is quite different. For example, a good friend of mine's wife is a grade school teacher. Their school last year had a bunch of LCIII's and IIsi's that they wanted to replace with new Macs. The district IT said no, and they would be replaced with Wintel based machines. So, not only did the Macs work with only a single teacher administering them for over ten years on his own time, they now have a staff of four administering the Wintel machines, their costs have gone up 600% for administration alone and the district tells them the machines will be replaced in four years.
I ask you. How has this scenario saved the district, the school or the taxpayer any money? Administration costs have skyrocketed and the computers will have to be replaced more often. Rather as Cringley and others have stated, it sounds like a consipiracy to maintain IT jobs and expand their budget.
If you make a perfect application that does the job then there's no incentive to upgrade. Build bugs in to products but no so severe that user won't use it. You can buy a lot more mini vans with bug laden code.
Geez, this statement is what is wrong with our software industry and why the software industry is stagnating with Microsoft heading things up. What kind of attitude is that? How about create quality software that has as few bugs as possible and create innovative new features to get people to upgrade? I know that is harder, but it is the reason why Apple has driven innovation in the personal computer market since the Apple ][. It's a different ethos....one of craftsmanship and pride in your work and doing things to the best of your ability pushing technology, science and the arts forward. You know, making a difference.
Care to give a url of a nice iMac web server to slashdot, and we'll see what OS is superior?
Here you go, as requested, an iMac server. This one happens to be an older G3 iMac running OS X, so......Do your worst, but know that all IP's are logged.:-)
This little iMac get about 30k hits/day and is rock solid. One of the best $600 I ever spent.
What about moonlight? On a clear night the moon can light up the countryside pretty brightly; if our eyes are so sensitive to light at night, wouldn't moonlight be hugely disruptive?
So, the question is what exactly are the photoreceptor mediated circuits that inform the ciracadian rhythm system. We do not know exactly which circuits are responsible for setting the circadian rhythm, however from "dose/response" studies, moonlight is apparently not enough to set our circadian system. In other organisms it is plenty though. Look at coral and their breeding patterns for an example here.
Now in all fairness it could be that they are simply testing it out. *snicker......snort.......guffaw!* Seriously though, it is not uncommon for lots of companies to have multiple platforms serving up their needs. For instance, Apple.com has in the past had their servers running a combination of Netscape, Solaris etc.... But given the success of OS X, they are moving wholesale over to their own product which says something about their faith in what they make. In fact, the Quicktime site and the iTMS are running OS X on Macintosh hardware. In the case of Microsoft, it appears they are either relying on Linux to get them through this little thing or they are experimenting with Linux. One does wonder what that says about their militant anti-linux stance though.
Although, this is one of the proposed cyber attack strategies given the electrical grid through supervisory control and data acquisition points. It is difficult but not impossible.
This is actually a few years old in concept and the impetus behind a lot of supercomputer projects funded by the DOE and DOD to study explosions and high energy phenomena. There has been a move to miniaturize nuclear weapons for some time now for a couple of reasons 1) easier to transport and carry and 2) extremely low yeild small tactical nukes can be very effective and potentially tuneable. (General only wants damage limited to 5 sq miles and nothing beyond.) The other advantage that these folks are talking about with gamma ray based weapons is that the infrastructure is relatively spared (and why the Communists wanted these things allowing them to move into cities after an explosion and co-opt the infrastructure. However radioactive it may be).
Hrmmm. Given that the CEO of Nvidia has made comments discussing his "platform on a chip" concept for the company, it makes me wonder if Microsoft views him as a potential future competitor?
You must not be into the bodybuilding/weightlifting/athletic world AT ALL.
Actually, I am very much into the athletic world, but prefer hiking, biking and natural body building instead of taking "supplements" to make me bigger, faster.
And almost all of them have shown that it's a safe, and VERY EFFECTIVE supplement.
No, NOT almost all of them have shown it is safe and effective. Rather, a number of well designed and controlled, though not extensive, studies have indicated problems with creatine. Creatine has not gone through FDA testing and in fact, a 1998 report to the FDA indicates a number of problems associated with creatine use including seizures, nausea, diarrhea, anxiety, cardiac myopathy, cardiac arrhythmia along with other issues such as deep vein thromboses and even death. Other issues are renal damage and dehydration. Now, given the poor controls over the supplement industry, it could be argued that it may have been formulation that caused these problems, but then that would be difficult to assess given the supplement industry in its current state. Additionally, while mechanisms of damage can be hypothesized, they are not worked out at this time, especially since there have been no properly controlled studies of its use, mechanism and dosage.
It's a natural amino acid.
You know, the argument that something is natural is bogus. Tryptophan is a natural amino acid and look at the problems that has caused. And as far as other "natural" things botulinum is "natural" along with ebola and tetrodotoxin and those molecules and organisms are most certainly not compatible with normal function when ingested.
Creatine does wonders, and I love it.
That's great, and it should be your choice to partake or not. However, if it is sold on the American market, it's composition should be defined so there are fewer snake oil sales people out there and impure formulations that could harm the unwary.
Oh, and it's been around for long enough to know if it gives many long term side effects, and it doesn't.
That is an opinion. Not scientific fact.
Go check out google before you condemn creatine, the studies are out there.
Well, if I can Google it, it must be real or OK then right? Rethink that statement in light of what can be Googled. In addition, I can search Google for pages of independant studies on the dangers of creatine use.
And get independent ones, not ones from people who sell it to you. I can list some soruces if you're really interested
I do appreciate your advocacy and willingness to provide information, but I have looked into supplements and am not really interested given what I view as a poor history of documentation and study. Thanks though.
I may be stepping out of bounds, as a journalist, but it is not our job to be authorities on the subjects we write about. It is our job to report facts.
You are most correct, however, I might also add that it is the job of scientists to report the facts as accurately as possible.
Spongeoform encephalopathies (including Mad Cow disease) result, it is thought, from prions which, when present, can be found in large concentrations in nervous tissue (including the pineal gland which is located in the center of the mammalian brain). The problem with prion disorders is that they spread via contact (via touch and transfection or consumption of tissue containing them) and it is very hard to "disenfect" things with prions in/on them. Prions are small, notoriously resilient to heat, detergents and other methods of disenfection.
So, by consuming melatonin extracted from bovine pineal glands certainly could be seen to increase your risk (given the supplements industries poor controls and lack of product composition controls) of contracting a prion disease if those pineal glands came from infected cows.
Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own.
Ha.....thbbbt!.....Mwaaa haaa haaa haaa haa ha ha!
Heeeee he haa ha ha ha. *sniff*
*snort!* Ha ha ha ha hee ha ha.......
He wipes the tears from his eyes as he says, "you know, allowing an application to crash the OS should not happen no matter how bad the application crash. Allowing that to happen is the fault of the OS."
So, when their customer who has just been involved in an auto accident calls and reports the accident to the insurance, their voice will not in the least be affected by stress?
Just what we need. Another fairly simple study looking at a supplement that has not been tested adequately. Anyone remember the problems folks had when they were rushing out to purchase tryptophan? What about all the people dropping melatonin like there is no tomorrow? (most melatonin is derived from bovine pineal glands.....ever hear of spongeoform encephalitis?)
Look, the food supplements industry is not well regulated and thus the ingredients or amounts of active compounds in each of these supplements is not always known.
The patches have been available for a LOOOOONG time now.
What, three or four weeks? Here is the problem with Microsoft patches. Folks have been screwed more than once due to poor testing on Microsoft's part when the patches completely screw up your system forcing you to spend hours rolling things back to where they were or even completely reinstalling Windows. So, many IT folks are understandibly reluctant to employ these "patches" before adequate testing on their own systems. This may take a number of weeks.
My wife's entire 1500 plus employee company was instructed today to not turn on their computers until IT came around to look at them. I guess a few computers were infected with this worm and they wanted to ensure things were taken care of. So, here's the deal: I figure that today alone, due to lost productivity, salaries, benefits etc.... this company lost $250k from this worm. So, I ask: When are companies going to wake up and realize that the fundamental foundations that Windows are built on are flawed when it comes to security? There have got to be studies out there examining total cost of ownership of the various platforms. For instance, I spent a couple days of my time updating our remaining Wintel systems to guard against this virus and am soooo happy 95% of my work is done on OS X.
I suspect, given the subject matter of your site, the chosen backgrounds and text colors are designed to test a theory that extreme garishness may cause blindness? Mac people are supposed to have style!
Yeah, so the deal is this site is essentially as it was back in 1993. I am recreating the whole site as we speak.
Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!
Oh, come on. Even my little old G3 iMac is capable of handling quite a load from Slashdot and this site is serving up graphics intensive stuff. What you need to prevent a good Slashdotting is bandwidth that universities provide. T3 backbone connections are a wonderful thing.:-)
No, but what is new with this administration is the extent of creation of policy based upon and filtered through pre-determined morality and financial interest. My letter to Sen. Waxman follows:
Regarding your website: Politics and Science. http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscience/index.htm
As a scientist beginning my career, I can certainly applaud your efforts to create such a page. We need more science education for the general public to ensure that people can reach appropriate decisions based upon factual and unbiased information provided by the scientific community.
There will always be spin in politics and science, but the goal should be a search for the truth unencumbered by political ideologies or financial influence. Maintenance of this pure environment for scientific research is untenable, but the approach the Bush administration has taken has skewed scientific efforts in the name of pre-determined scientific results filtered through this administrations morality. Political decisions that guide the course of this country should not be made upon unilateral priorities. Rather, they need to be made through rigorous application of question, study and answer.
Efforts to educate the scientific and lawmaking community through proper scientific procedure and questioning along with public education and critical thinking requires publicly funded peer-reviewed science. Your staff has done an admirable job in preparing this site based upon these principles and I would encourage the dissemination of these efforts to other lawmakers via a more intimate relationship with the scientific community. Ultimately, I would like to see in government fewer scientific cabals and more open discussions of current issues by a rotating group of scientists who advise this countries policy makers.
we see a very rich world that they cannot as well - the world of figures and space. Humans are extremely good at mapping patterns out of specifics and matching them to previously seen objects and figures. We're very good at detecting relationships.
True, but this is cognition, and that requires cortex which humans have in abundance. I guess I was speaking from retinal and optical perspectives for which humans are relatively recent evolutionarily speaking.
Your post seemed to indicate that you have done such isolation of humans.
I've actually only done one such study for a gene isolation project back when I was doing sleep studies.
was just wondering how *your* lab specifically found that a number of subjects with overexposure to light had significant decline in function.
I am actually a retinal scientist now and my time spent running the sleep lab was a few years ago. However, when I was doing the sleep studies, we were not involved in temporal isolation studies. Rather, we were a clinical lab that specialized in helping folks with sleep disordered breathing, parasomnias, nocturnal epilepsies etc....
If human beings are finding negative consequences in the long term for overexposure to light and light-related activities, why do we continue to persue them?
Because of the way our society works, it would be extremely difficult to test people who have no exposure to light during the non-naturally-lit hours. Almost everyone in America uses artificial lighting. How did you find people to test your theories on?
There are a number of labs in the world that utilize temporal isolation environments to isolate their human subjects for long periods of time (three months has been the limit I think). All temporal cues are eliminated including sunlight, food, clocks, etc... for these subjects so they have no real idea for the time. In these cases, we find that humans run on a nominal 25 hour clock, meaning we tend to drift a little every 24 hour period.
I would guess that you did your studies on other animals, as it would be extremely difficult to regulate someone's lifestyle so that they only had daytime exposure to light.
Animal studies are also performed and they back up the human studies. And, yes, it is difficult in human temporal isolation studies, but quite possible.
do you find it hard to generalize your results to humans, who have specifically evolved tetra-chromatic vision to allow for better light-sight (remember, at one point in our evolutionary line, mammals were mostly nocturnal)?
Most humans are tri-chromic (red, green and blue cones subserving photopic color vision). However, there are a couple cases in the literature of non-human primate and human tetra-chromacy. But these cases appear aberrant, and I do not have references handy, but a simple search on Medline should bring them up. If you are interested in higher dimensionality of vision however, you should check out avians, reptiles and fish who see a much richer world than we could ever hope to perceive due to their much more complex retinal circuitry and spectral detection.
Slashdot Mirror
It does however have a 4 color fileter in front of it. BTW, Nikon had that for about 4-5 years now.
So....theoretically, it would be possible to perform multispectral imagery with this camera by including spectral filters of preference....Say, different IR filters or what have you. Processing these data are of course the next problem, but I seem to remember a DARPA proposal recently asking about this very problem for portable use. Hmmmm, so little time, so many questions to ask, so many possible experiements.....
So, my first question is.....How is color management done with this thing given color profile usage in Colorsync and other approaches in say Adobe software? Are there going to be color profile matching algorithms included so I can manage color with this camera?
So, the deal is that the school IT folks have been sold down the river on the concept that a single platform will save them money. Furthermore, they have been sold on the concept that Windows will save them money.
The reality is quite different. For example, a good friend of mine's wife is a grade school teacher. Their school last year had a bunch of LCIII's and IIsi's that they wanted to replace with new Macs. The district IT said no, and they would be replaced with Wintel based machines. So, not only did the Macs work with only a single teacher administering them for over ten years on his own time, they now have a staff of four administering the Wintel machines, their costs have gone up 600% for administration alone and the district tells them the machines will be replaced in four years.
I ask you. How has this scenario saved the district, the school or the taxpayer any money? Administration costs have skyrocketed and the computers will have to be replaced more often. Rather as Cringley and others have stated, it sounds like a consipiracy to maintain IT jobs and expand their budget.
If you make a perfect application that does the job then there's no incentive to upgrade. Build bugs in to products but no so severe that user won't use it. You can buy a lot more mini vans with bug laden code.
Geez, this statement is what is wrong with our software industry and why the software industry is stagnating with Microsoft heading things up. What kind of attitude is that? How about create quality software that has as few bugs as possible and create innovative new features to get people to upgrade? I know that is harder, but it is the reason why Apple has driven innovation in the personal computer market since the Apple ][. It's a different ethos....one of craftsmanship and pride in your work and doing things to the best of your ability pushing technology, science and the arts forward. You know, making a difference.
Care to give a url of a nice iMac web server to slashdot, and we'll see what OS is superior?
:-)
Here you go, as requested, an iMac server. This one happens to be an older G3 iMac running OS X, so......Do your worst, but know that all IP's are logged.
This little iMac get about 30k hits/day and is rock solid. One of the best $600 I ever spent.
What about moonlight? On a clear night the moon can light up the countryside pretty brightly; if our eyes are so sensitive to light at night, wouldn't moonlight be hugely disruptive?
So, the question is what exactly are the photoreceptor mediated circuits that inform the ciracadian rhythm system. We do not know exactly which circuits are responsible for setting the circadian rhythm, however from "dose/response" studies, moonlight is apparently not enough to set our circadian system. In other organisms it is plenty though. Look at coral and their breeding patterns for an example here.
Now in all fairness it could be that they are simply testing it out. *snicker......snort.......guffaw!* Seriously though, it is not uncommon for lots of companies to have multiple platforms serving up their needs. For instance, Apple.com has in the past had their servers running a combination of Netscape, Solaris etc.... But given the success of OS X, they are moving wholesale over to their own product which says something about their faith in what they make. In fact, the Quicktime site and the iTMS are running OS X on Macintosh hardware. In the case of Microsoft, it appears they are either relying on Linux to get them through this little thing or they are experimenting with Linux. One does wonder what that says about their militant anti-linux stance though.
I see your trying to write a letter....
Noooooooo! Bill! Stop trying to help me.
Although, this is one of the proposed cyber attack strategies given the electrical grid through supervisory control and data acquisition points. It is difficult but not impossible.
This is actually a few years old in concept and the impetus behind a lot of supercomputer projects funded by the DOE and DOD to study explosions and high energy phenomena. There has been a move to miniaturize nuclear weapons for some time now for a couple of reasons 1) easier to transport and carry and 2) extremely low yeild small tactical nukes can be very effective and potentially tuneable. (General only wants damage limited to 5 sq miles and nothing beyond.) The other advantage that these folks are talking about with gamma ray based weapons is that the infrastructure is relatively spared (and why the Communists wanted these things allowing them to move into cities after an explosion and co-opt the infrastructure. However radioactive it may be).
Hrmmm. Given that the CEO of Nvidia has made comments discussing his "platform on a chip" concept for the company, it makes me wonder if Microsoft views him as a potential future competitor?
Creatine hasn't been adequately studied?
That is what I said.
You must not be into the bodybuilding/weightlifting/athletic world AT ALL.
Actually, I am very much into the athletic world, but prefer hiking, biking and natural body building instead of taking "supplements" to make me bigger, faster.
And almost all of them have shown that it's a safe, and VERY EFFECTIVE supplement.
No, NOT almost all of them have shown it is safe and effective. Rather, a number of well designed and controlled, though not extensive, studies have indicated problems with creatine. Creatine has not gone through FDA testing and in fact, a 1998 report to the FDA indicates a number of problems associated with creatine use including seizures, nausea, diarrhea, anxiety, cardiac myopathy, cardiac arrhythmia along with other issues such as deep vein thromboses and even death. Other issues are renal damage and dehydration. Now, given the poor controls over the supplement industry, it could be argued that it may have been formulation that caused these problems, but then that would be difficult to assess given the supplement industry in its current state. Additionally, while mechanisms of damage can be hypothesized, they are not worked out at this time, especially since there have been no properly controlled studies of its use, mechanism and dosage.
It's a natural amino acid.
You know, the argument that something is natural is bogus. Tryptophan is a natural amino acid and look at the problems that has caused. And as far as other "natural" things botulinum is "natural" along with ebola and tetrodotoxin and those molecules and organisms are most certainly not compatible with normal function when ingested.
Creatine does wonders, and I love it.
That's great, and it should be your choice to partake or not. However, if it is sold on the American market, it's composition should be defined so there are fewer snake oil sales people out there and impure formulations that could harm the unwary.
Oh, and it's been around for long enough to know if it gives many long term side effects, and it doesn't.
That is an opinion. Not scientific fact.
Go check out google before you condemn creatine, the studies are out there.
Well, if I can Google it, it must be real or OK then right? Rethink that statement in light of what can be Googled. In addition, I can search Google for pages of independant studies on the dangers of creatine use.
And get independent ones, not ones from people who sell it to you. I can list some soruces if you're really interested
I do appreciate your advocacy and willingness to provide information, but I have looked into supplements and am not really interested given what I view as a poor history of documentation and study. Thanks though.
I may be stepping out of bounds, as a journalist, but it is not our job to be authorities on the subjects we write about. It is our job to report facts.
You are most correct, however, I might also add that it is the job of scientists to report the facts as accurately as possible.
Mad cow doesn't come from cow's pineal glands.
Hrmmm. Disclaimer: yes, I am a neuroscientist.
Spongeoform encephalopathies (including Mad Cow disease) result, it is thought, from prions which, when present, can be found in large concentrations in nervous tissue (including the pineal gland which is located in the center of the mammalian brain). The problem with prion disorders is that they spread via contact (via touch and transfection or consumption of tissue containing them) and it is very hard to "disenfect" things with prions in/on them. Prions are small, notoriously resilient to heat, detergents and other methods of disenfection.
So, by consuming melatonin extracted from bovine pineal glands certainly could be seen to increase your risk (given the supplements industries poor controls and lack of product composition controls) of contracting a prion disease if those pineal glands came from infected cows.
Microsoft is claiming that half of all MS Windows crashes are the fault of third party code, not their own.
Ha.....thbbbt!.....Mwaaa haaa haaa haaa haa ha ha!
Heeeee he haa ha ha ha. *sniff*
*snort!* Ha ha ha ha hee ha ha.......
He wipes the tears from his eyes as he says, "you know, allowing an application to crash the OS should not happen no matter how bad the application crash. Allowing that to happen is the fault of the OS."
So, when their customer who has just been involved in an auto accident calls and reports the accident to the insurance, their voice will not in the least be affected by stress?
Just what we need. Another fairly simple study looking at a supplement that has not been tested adequately. Anyone remember the problems folks had when they were rushing out to purchase tryptophan? What about all the people dropping melatonin like there is no tomorrow? (most melatonin is derived from bovine pineal glands.....ever hear of spongeoform encephalitis?)
Look, the food supplements industry is not well regulated and thus the ingredients or amounts of active compounds in each of these supplements is not always known.
The patches have been available for a LOOOOONG time now.
What, three or four weeks? Here is the problem with Microsoft patches. Folks have been screwed more than once due to poor testing on Microsoft's part when the patches completely screw up your system forcing you to spend hours rolling things back to where they were or even completely reinstalling Windows. So, many IT folks are understandibly reluctant to employ these "patches" before adequate testing on their own systems. This may take a number of weeks.
My wife's entire 1500 plus employee company was instructed today to not turn on their computers until IT came around to look at them. I guess a few computers were infected with this worm and they wanted to ensure things were taken care of. So, here's the deal: I figure that today alone, due to lost productivity, salaries, benefits etc.... this company lost $250k from this worm. So, I ask: When are companies going to wake up and realize that the fundamental foundations that Windows are built on are flawed when it comes to security? There have got to be studies out there examining total cost of ownership of the various platforms. For instance, I spent a couple days of my time updating our remaining Wintel systems to guard against this virus and am soooo happy 95% of my work is done on OS X.
I suspect, given the subject matter of your site, the chosen backgrounds and text colors are designed to test a theory that extreme garishness may cause blindness?
Mac people are supposed to have style!
Yeah, so the deal is this site is essentially as it was back in 1993. I am recreating the whole site as we speak.
Our little departmental server has been slashdotted twice in the last year and survived!
:-)
Oh, come on. Even my little old G3 iMac is capable of handling quite a load from Slashdot and this site is serving up graphics intensive stuff. What you need to prevent a good Slashdotting is bandwidth that universities provide. T3 backbone connections are a wonderful thing.
Go ahead click all you want.
I should have said Rep. Waxman.
This is nothing new with this administration.
e /index.htm
No, but what is new with this administration is the extent of creation of policy based upon and filtered through pre-determined morality and financial interest. My letter to Sen. Waxman follows:
Regarding your website: Politics and Science. http://www.house.gov/reform/min/politicsandscienc
As a scientist beginning my career, I can certainly applaud your efforts to create such a page. We need more science education for the general public to ensure that people can reach appropriate decisions based upon factual and unbiased information provided by the scientific community.
There will always be spin in politics and science, but the goal should be a search for the truth unencumbered by political ideologies or financial influence. Maintenance of this pure environment for scientific research is untenable, but the approach the Bush administration has taken has skewed scientific efforts in the name of pre-determined scientific results filtered through this administrations morality. Political decisions that guide the course of this country should not be made upon unilateral priorities. Rather, they need to be made through rigorous application of question, study and answer.
Efforts to educate the scientific and lawmaking community through proper scientific procedure and questioning along with public education and critical thinking requires publicly funded peer-reviewed science. Your staff has done an admirable job in preparing this site based upon these principles and I would encourage the dissemination of these efforts to other lawmakers via a more intimate relationship with the scientific community. Ultimately, I would like to see in government fewer scientific cabals and more open discussions of current issues by a rotating group of scientists who advise this countries policy makers.
Best Regards,
I work in an avian visual cognition lab. :)
Cool. A fellow vision scientist.
we see a very rich world that they cannot as well - the world of figures and space. Humans are extremely good at mapping patterns out of specifics and matching them to previously seen objects and figures. We're very good at detecting relationships.
True, but this is cognition, and that requires cortex which humans have in abundance. I guess I was speaking from retinal and optical perspectives for which humans are relatively recent evolutionarily speaking.
Your post seemed to indicate that you have done such isolation of humans.
I've actually only done one such study for a gene isolation project back when I was doing sleep studies.
was just wondering how *your* lab specifically found that a number of subjects with overexposure to light had significant decline in function.
I am actually a retinal scientist now and my time spent running the sleep lab was a few years ago. However, when I was doing the sleep studies, we were not involved in temporal isolation studies. Rather, we were a clinical lab that specialized in helping folks with sleep disordered breathing, parasomnias, nocturnal epilepsies etc....
If human beings are finding negative consequences in the long term for overexposure to light and light-related activities, why do we continue to persue them?
Money.
Because of the way our society works, it would be extremely difficult to test people who have no exposure to light during the non-naturally-lit hours. Almost everyone in America uses artificial lighting. How did you find people to test your theories on?
There are a number of labs in the world that utilize temporal isolation environments to isolate their human subjects for long periods of time (three months has been the limit I think). All temporal cues are eliminated including sunlight, food, clocks, etc... for these subjects so they have no real idea for the time. In these cases, we find that humans run on a nominal 25 hour clock, meaning we tend to drift a little every 24 hour period.
I would guess that you did your studies on other animals, as it would be extremely difficult to regulate someone's lifestyle so that they only had daytime exposure to light.
Animal studies are also performed and they back up the human studies. And, yes, it is difficult in human temporal isolation studies, but quite possible.
do you find it hard to generalize your results to humans, who have specifically evolved tetra-chromatic vision to allow for better light-sight (remember, at one point in our evolutionary line, mammals were mostly nocturnal)?
Most humans are tri-chromic (red, green and blue cones subserving photopic color vision). However, there are a couple cases in the literature of non-human primate and human tetra-chromacy. But these cases appear aberrant, and I do not have references handy, but a simple search on Medline should bring them up. If you are interested in higher dimensionality of vision however, you should check out avians, reptiles and fish who see a much richer world than we could ever hope to perceive due to their much more complex retinal circuitry and spectral detection.