Pioneers 10 and 11, which preceded Voyager, both carried small metal plaques identifying their time and place of origin for the benefit of any other spacefarers that might find them in the distant future. With this example before them, NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
In this very wet climate, the prospecting pits appear as hundreds of tightly packed water-filled basins. Likely dug by garimperos (independent miners), each pit is surrounded by de-vegetated areas of muddy spoil. These deforested tracts follow the courses of ancient rivers that deposited sediments, including gold. For scale, the western tract at image center is 15 kilometers (10 miles) long.
Peru is the sixth largest producer of gold in the world, and Madre de Dios is home to one of the largest independent gold mining industries in the world. Mining is the main cause of deforestation in the region, and it also can cause mercury pollution from the gold-extraction process. Yet tens of thousands of people earn their living from this unregistered mining.
The dress was a 2015 online viral phenomenon centred on a photograph of a dress. Viewers disagreed on whether the dress was blue and black, or white and gold. The phenomenon revealed differences in human colour perception and became the subject of scientific investigations into neuroscience and vision science.
The phenomenon originated in a photograph of a dress posted on the social networking service Facebook. The dress was black and blue, but the conditions of the photograph caused many to perceive it as white and gold, creating debate. Within a week, more than ten million tweets had mentioned the dress. The retailer of the dress, Roman Originals, reported a surge in sales and produced a one-off version in white and gold sold for charity.
In February 2015, about a week before the wedding of Grace and Keir Johnston, of Colonsay, Scotland, the bride's mother, Cecilia Bleasdale, took a photograph of a dress at Cheshire Oaks Designer Outlet north of Chester, England. Bleasdale intended to wear the dress at the wedding and sent the photograph to Grace. The dress was coloured blue with black lace. However, Grace told her mother she perceived it in the photograph as white with gold lace.[1]
After Grace posted the photograph on Facebook, her friends also disagreed; some saw it as white with gold, while others saw it as blue with black.[2][3] For a week, the debate became well known in Colonsay, a small island community.[4]
The image became a worldwide Internet meme across social media. On Twitter, users created the hashtags "#whiteandgold", "#blueandblack", and "#dressgate" to discuss their opinions on what the colour of the dress was, and theories surrounding their arguments.[7] The number of tweets about the dress increased throughout the night; at 11:36 pm GMT, when the first increase in the number of tweets about the dress occurred, there were five thousand tweets per minute using the hashtag "#TheDress", increasing to 11,000 tweets per minute with the hashtag by 1:31 am GMT.[5] The photo also attracted discussion relating to the triviality of the matter as a whole; The Washington Post described the dispute as "[the] drama that divided a planet".[2][8][9] Some articles humorously suggested that the dress could prompt an existential crisis over the nature of sight and reality, or that the debate could harm interpersonal relationships.[2][10] Others examined why people were making such a big argument over a seemingly trivial matter.[11]
Businesses that had nothing to do with the dress, or even the clothing industry, devoted social media attention to the phenomenon. Adobe retweeted another Twitter user who had used some of the company's apps to isolate the dress's colours. "We jumped in the conversation and thought, Let's see what happens," recalled Karen Do, the company's senior manager for social media. Jenna Bromberg, a digital brand manager for Pizza Hut, saw the dress as white and gold and quickly sent out a tweet with a picture of pizza noting that it, too, was the same colours. Do called it "literally a tweet heard around the world".[5]
The dress was confirmed as a royal blue "Lace Bodycon Dress" from the retailer, Roman Originals.[24] The dress is black and blue;[25][26] although it was available in three other colours (red, pink, and ivory, each with black lace), a white and gold version was not available at the time. The day after McNeill's post, Roman Originals' website experienced a major surge in traffic and sold out of the dress within 30 minutes.[27] On 28 February, Roman Originals announced that they would make a single white and gold dress for a Comic Relief charity auction.[28]
By 1 March, over two thirds of BuzzFeed users polled responded that the dress was white and gold.[29] Some people have suggested that the dress changes colours on its own.[2] Media outlets noted that the photo was overexposed and had poor white balance, causing its colours to be washed out, giving rise to the perception by some that the dress is white and gold.[2][30]
There is no consensus on why the dress elicits such discordant perceptions.[31] The neuroscientists Bevil Conway and Jay Neitz believe they are a result of how the human brain perceives colour and chromatic adaptation. Conway believes it is connected to how the brain processes the various hues of a daylight sky: "Your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis ... people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."[32][33] Neitz said:
The Journal of Vision, a scientific journal about vision research, announced in March 2015 that a special issue about the dress would be published with the title A Dress Rehearsal for Vision Science.[42][43] The first large-scale scientific study on the dress was published in Current Biology three months after the image went viral. The study, which involved 1,400 respondents, found that 57 per cent saw the dress as blue and black, 30 per cent saw it as white and gold, 11 per cent saw it as blue and brown, and two per cent reported it as "other".[44] Women and older people disproportionately saw the dress as white and gold. The researchers further found that if the dress was shown in artificial yellow-coloured lighting almost all respondents saw the dress as black and blue, while they saw it as white and gold if the simulated lighting had a blue bias.[33][44][45][46] Another study in the Journal of Vision, by Pascal Wallisch, found that people who were early risers were more likely to think the dress was lit by natural light, perceiving it as white and gold, and that "night owls" saw the dress as blue and black.[47][48]
A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception.[49][50]
This photograph was taken by the Brazilian social documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado at the Serra Pelada gold mine in north-west Brazil in 1986. It is part of Serra Pelada, a group of twenty-eight photographs that Salgado took of the mine in that year, when he spent several weeks living there and observing the workers (Ken Light, Witness in Our Time: The Lives of Documentary Photographers, Washington 2000, p.7). Around fifty thousand workers laboured at Serra Pelada while Salgado was there, each making as many as sixty trips down the cliff and back per day while carrying sacks that weighed between thirty and sixty kilograms, and they were paid twenty cents for each of these journeys (Stallabrass 1997, p.131).
To create a golden image, an administrator first sets up the computing environment with the exact specifications needed and then saves the disk image as a pattern for future copies. Using golden images can save time and ensure consistency by eliminating the need for repetitive configuration changes and performance tweaks.
This article will walk you through how to use the Azure portal to create a custom image to use for your Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts. This custom image, which we'll call a "golden image," contains all apps and configuration settings you want to apply to your deployment.There are other approaches to customizing your session hosts, such as using device management tools like Microsoft Intune or automating your image build using tools like Azure Image Builder with Azure DevOps. Which strategy works best depends on the complexity and size of your planned Azure Virtual Desktop environment and your current application deployment processes.
When creating a new VM for your golden image, make sure to choose an OS that's in the list of supported virtual machine OS images. We recommend using a Windows 10 or 11 multi-session (with or without Microsoft 365) or Windows Server image for pooled host pools. We recommend using Windows 10 or 11 Enterprise images for personal host pools. You can use either Generation 1 or Generation 2 VMs; Gen 2 VMs support features that aren't supported for Gen 1 machines. Learn more about Generation 1 and Generation 2 VMs at Support for generation 2 VMs on Azure.
Do not join your golden image VM to a host pool, by deploying the Azure Virtual Desktop Agent. If you do this when you create additional session hosts from this image at a later time, they will fail to join the host pool as the Registration token will have expired. The host pool deployment process will automatically join the session hosts to the required host pool during the provisioning process.
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