Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness sounds a bit dull at first, but consider what that means: an automated software approach to actually making faces more attractive. I must provide a picture illustrating the results (originals on the top, computer-enhanced results on the bottom):
A quick summary of how this is done actually makes a lot of sense:
The key component in our approach is an automatic facial
attractiveness engine trained on datasets of faces with
accompanying facial attractiveness ratings collected from
groups of human raters. Given a new face, we extract a
set of distances between a variety of facial feature
locations, which define a point in a high-dimensional
“face space”. We then search the face space for a nearby
point with a higher predicted attractiveness rating. Once
such a point is found, the corresponding facial distances
are embedded in the plane and serve as a target to define
a 2D warp field which maps the original facial features
to their adjusted locations.
To my eyes, this looks like an automated approach to accomplishing the same thing that professional retouchers do to magazine photos. It starts to explain how actors & actresses can resemble but not really look like themselves on the cover of these mags. Apparently, a demonstration application will be issued by this team, so it may be interesting to try the program out on faces we know. (via Waxy)
“The majority of American adults find work cutting into
the middle of their days—exactly when leisure is most
effective,” said Adam Bernhardt, the Boston University
sociology professor who headed the study. “The hours
between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. are ideally suited to browsing
stores, dozing in front of the television, and finishing
the morning paper. Daytime hours are also the warmest and
sunniest of the day, making them perfect for outdoor
activities. Unfortunately, most Americans can’t enjoy
leisure during this time, for the simple reason that
they’re ‘at work.’”
It is truly unfortunate that America can’t keep pace with the “European leisure force.” The Onion is awesome.
I’ve been working on this version of tumbledry since January of this year — there were times I never thought it would be finished — and yet, we’re almost there now. During the next few days, there will be a short beta period in which I will add a few features and iron out any remaining kinks; leave comments here with your thoughts.
There’s an adage in the web development industry — don’t overhaul different parts of a website simultaneously. I only found out about this little piece of wisdom mid-way through trying to overhaul every single goll-darn last component of this website. Ultimately, my approach was a bad, but quite fruitful, method.
I’d like to reserve this paragraph for Mr. Justin Gehring. First, Justin and Amber got married this past weekend — congrats, you guys! Second, Justin has been kind enough to host tumbledry since before it was even called tumbledry. Yes, my writing space used to be at alex.jrcorps.com — five years have passed since then. In addition to hosting me, Justin has helped me with web-design for, well, about a decade now. Nothing you see here would exist were it not for Justin’s boundless patience and generosity.
I now politely say “farewell” to hosting with Justin, as he is cycling himself out of the hosting and into the web design and management business. So, tumbledry no longer lives in Minnesota. We reside at Joyent, in Sausalito, California.
Thanks for visiting, and allow me to raise a virtual glass to the entertaining years of tumbledry ahead. I’m excited.
Because it burns calories so quickly, aerobic exercise is a threat to the body’s energy reserves. Heeding this danger, the body acts to protect one of its most precious, and energy-demanding, organs: the brain.
…
By acting as a mild stressor, exercise is an alternative way to spur many of the protective benefits associated with calorie restriction and the release of brain-building growth factors, said Carl Cotman, director of the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at the University of California in Irvine.
What kind of exercise? Well, running is quite effective:
Even when we are sitting or lying down, our bodies send our brains regular updates about how our limbs are positioned. When we, say, stand and begin walking, these electric messages need to be sent more often. (Knee is bent, straight, bent, straight …) Move fast enough and the electrical activity doesn’t have time to dissipate between each message. It begins building up in the brain and eventually triggers a release of chemicals called growth factors.
Growth factors are like manna for neurons. “They make neurons stronger, healthier and improve their ability to learn,” Cotman said.
Anaerobic activity does little to aid the brain via this mechanism, but aerobic activity seems to do the trick.
Our Sheriff’s department uses it (along with other services by the same company), and it’s downright scary the ammount of stuff they can pull.
Want all the blue and gray SUV’s that have a 9 and an F within a 100 mile radius of a given location? It can pull that up. Want to find out if a particular person has ANY connection to the owner of that vehicle. It can do that. As a demonstration it was able to connect our sherrif to a woman that his wife had been roomates with over 20 years ago (before they were even married).
It was astonishing how much information it could coordinate on any person in the room that we plugged into it.
I wonder what they know about me. Then again, Facebook and the internet probably make their job pretty simple for my generation.
A canned drink called “Unagi Nobori,” or “Surging Eel,” made by Japan Tobacco Inc., hit the nation’s stores this month just ahead of Japan’s annual eel-eating season, company spokesman Kazunori Hayashi said Monday.
“It’s mainly for men who are exhausted by the summer’s heat,” Hayashi said of the beverage, believed to be the first mass-produced eel drink in Japan.
Mykala sent me an email about it, asking if you knew anything — it certainly piqued my curiosity. Your input and deep Japanese reservoirs of understanding are requested. Thank you.
Mykala recently commented about the doping substance EPO… and I started writing a comment in response. Unfortunately, the comment got so long that, well, it turned into a full post. I recently revisited a first-person account of EPO and other chemicals for enhancing human performance — we now join this comment already in progress…
Those blood test blots remind me of the DNA gels we ran in biochemistry lab. Very interesting stuff, how they try to detect this doping — though the fact that some of it is essentially undetectable is amazing. It looks likes there’s a significant problem with detection accuracy… or at least consistency.
So let’s see, we have antagonistic pollution and agonist EPO… perhaps the net effect will be, as they say, “a wash”! :)
Reminds me of an amazing article about a guy who, for the purposes of writing about it, tries (under the direction of a doctor) different growth hormones, steroids, etc. for half a year.
About EPO:
Also high on my list was that powerful stuff called erythropoietin, better known as EPO, a hormone that boosts oxygen levels in the blood by prompting the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. EPO is known to have amazing endurance-boosting effects…
Another excerpt from the article:
EPO occurs naturally in the body, but only in tiny amounts. Researchers at Amgen Inc., a California pharmaceutical company, figured out how to synthesize it in quantities that could help people who weren’t producing enough red blood cells, like cancer patients suffering from anemia. EPO was also a gift from the gods for athletes looking to cheat. It was easy to administer—a clear liquid injected with simple shots—always effective, and, until recently, impossible to identify, because there was no chemical test to alert doctors to its presence.
The difficulties of detecting EPO finally drove anti-doping officials to decree that they would disqualify any athlete found with a red-blood-cell concentration—known as the hematocrit level—of more than 50 percent. (The hematocrit level for an ordinary, active person is between 34 and 46 percent.) Of course, the 50 percent mark only gave athletes a defined limit. You could use EPO to jack up your levels higher than that while training, and as long as you competed with a level of 49.9 percent, you’d be fine.
It wasn’t until the Sydney Olympics in 2000 that anti-doping experts, led by Françoise Lasne, a researcher at the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory, had come up with a method to distinguish the red blood cells produced by EPO from those produced naturally—enabling chemical detection of the drug. But each year, with new generations of drugs, cheating becomes more sophisticated, and EPO isn’t the only substance that boosts red-blood-cell production.
But there’s also human growth hormone:
If lower HGH levels hurt performance, the reasoning went, then higher levels would help it. And while there are sophisticated tests for steroids, there is still no means to detect HGH. It was so widely abused at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta that athletes joked about renaming them “the Human Growth Hormone Olympics.”
And then it gets really interesting:
After a few weeks of the HGH, I began to notice subtle changes. My skin started getting… better. Sun blotches that I’d had on my arms for a year faded away. One morning I woke up and a scar on my forehead—which I’d gotten from a mountain-bike endo two years earlier—was more or less gone. Even though I was training like a madman, I looked more rested. Younger. A little fresher.
Then I started to realize that my eyesight really was improving. I’d been thinking about getting glasses to read fine print on maps, but now there was no need. The glasses I used for night driving stayed in the glove compartment, unused, unnecessary.
On taking EPO:
Despite these measurements, I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I’d been training hard, but I’d done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders—good, strong riders—who looked as worn out as you’d expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles. The last time I’d ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I’d been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I’d entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I’ll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.
After this, things get crazy-dangerous what with anabolic steroids, etc. This entire anti-aging performance-enhancing world is crazy (like, batshit insane)… but reading this first-hand account really gives these acronyms some meaning.
