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anonymous

Beautycheck - characteristics of beautiful faces - 0 views

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    "What is it that makes a face look beautiful? What are the differences between very attractive and less appealing faces? For every historical period and every human culture, people have always had their own ideal of beauty. But this ideal has never been constant and is still subject to changes. In our research project we adopted an empirical approach and created prototypes for unattractive and attractive faces for each sex by using the morphing technique. For example, the prototype for an unattractive face ("unsexy face") was created by blending together four faces that had previously been rated as very unattractive. The "sexy face" was created by blending together four of the most attractive faces, respectively (see report). In order to find out the characteristic differences between attractive and unattractive faces, we presented pairs of one "sexy" and one "unsexy" image for both sexes to test subjects. The task was to report which facial features were perceived to be different between the two faces. For the results see the list below. "
anonymous

Average is Beautiful: A test of Attractiveness | SharpBrains - 1 views

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    Think we all have dif­fer­ent tastes where beauty is con­cerned? Well, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy shows us that an aver­age face (made from sev­eral other faces) is almost always judged as more attrac­tive than its con­stituent faces… Why? It may be for the sim­ple rea­son that an aver­age face is closer to the men­tal idea we have of a pro­to­typ­i­cal face and thus eas­ier for the brain to process. Want to expe­ri­ence it? Fol­low this link to the the Face Research Lab and cre­ate your own aver­age faces. Enjoy.
anonymous

Face Research » Psychology experiments about preferences for faces and voices - 0 views

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    "FaceResearch.org allows you to participate in short online psychology experiments looking at the traits people find attractive in faces and voices. Register to participate in experiments if this is your first time at FaceResearch.org or login if you have been here before. Make your own average faces with our interactive demos! In addition to participating in facial attractiveness experiments, you can also complete lifestyle and personality questionnaires about characteristics that may be associated with face and voice preferences and see how you compare to others. We post all our study results after we have finished collecting data. You can also learn about our computer-graphic technology and read about some of the findings of our previous studies."
anonymous

Vandals lash out at Zuma painting | Herald Sun - 0 views

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    "VANDALS have struck a painting that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals hanging out. Two men defaced the picture with gobs of paint, as Mr Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order yesterday to have the painting removed from an art gallery. The case is spiced with freedom of expression on the one hand and the right to dignity on the other. It took centre stage after the painting by Brett Murray went on display in a Johannesburg gallery this month and was reported on in local media. Mr Zuma, who has a reputation for promiscuity, took the depiction of him with his private parts exposed very personally and compared himself to a rape victim. Mr Zuma himself was put on trial for rape, and acquitted, in 2006. "The portrayal has ridiculed and caused me humiliation and indignity," Mr Zuma contended in an affidavit filed yesterday with the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. Presiding over the hearing in a courtroom a few kilometres from the gallery, Judge Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane said the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake. South Africa's constitution protects the right to dignity as well as to freedom of expression. She said the hearing would recommence tomorrow. Mr Zuma and the ANC sought to have the painting, titled "The Spear," removed from the Goodman Gallery and to stop the newspaper City Press from displaying a photo of it on its website. Just before the hearing was scheduled to begin, two men wielding cans of red and black paint calmly walked up to the painting hanging on a gallery wall and took turns defacing it. "Now it's completely and utterly destroyed," said Iman Rappetti, a reporter for a South African TV channel who happened to be on the scene at the time as her camera rolled. Her channel showed a man in a tweed jacket painting a red X over the president's genital area and then his face. Next, a man in a hoodie smeared bl
anonymous

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise: Scientific American - 0 views

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    "Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver.\n1\nConspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it "patternicity," or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise."
anonymous

The Moral Instinct - New York Times - 1 views

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    "Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug? And which do you think is the least admirable? For most people, it's an easy question. Mother Teresa, famous for ministering to the poor in Calcutta, has been beatified by the Vatican, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and ranked in an American poll as the most admired person of the 20th century. Bill Gates, infamous for giving us the Microsoft dancing paper clip and the blue screen of death, has been decapitated in effigy in "I Hate Gates" Web sites and hit with a pie in the face. As for Norman Borlaug . . . who the heck is Norman Borlaug? Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care. It's not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd's nerd and the world's richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle's eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all. "
anonymous

Where's Mao? Chinese Revise History Books - New York Times - 1 views

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    "When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization. Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once - in a chapter on etiquette. Nearly overnight the country's most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950's. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today's economic and political goals. Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. The old textbooks, not unlike the ruling Communist Party, changed relatively little in the last quarter-century of market-oriented economic reforms. They were glaringly out of sync with realities students face outside the classroom. But critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another. They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it. The one-party state, having largely abandoned its official ideology, prefers people to think more about the future than the past."
anonymous

The Curse Of Certainty In Science And Religion : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 1 views

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    "The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem. It might even be THE problem. Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained. Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty. It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other. But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false de
anonymous

BBC News - Iran stoning woman 'to be lashed over photograph' - 0 views

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    "An Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery now faces being whipped for indecency, her son says."
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    Can one be a moral relativist in this situation?
anonymous

BBC News - 'Elation and unease' at helping Pakistan flood child - 1 views

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    "When covering disasters, reporters can face the ethical question of whether they should help, or remain detached. When is it right for a journalist to help a weak and possibly dying baby?"
anonymous

The Great Deflation - Japan Goes From Dynamic to Disheartened - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "Now, as the United States and other Western nations struggle to recover from a debt and property bubble of their own, a growing number of economists are pointing to Japan as a dark vision of the future. Even as the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, prepares a fresh round of unconventional measures to stimulate the economy, there are growing fears that the United States and many European economies could face a prolonged period of slow growth or even, in the worst case, deflation, something not seen on a sustained basis outside Japan since the Great Depression. "
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    The TOK question here is can you compare Japan of the 1990s with the US and Western Europe of today? To what degree can economists, or any human scientists, suggest that one complex situation is "like" another one?
anonymous

LA Schools to use fingerprint scans for school lunches - LA Daily News - 0 views

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    "Los Angeles Unified officials hope a new plan allowing students to purchase school meals with a simple press of a finger will save money, speed up long cafeteria lines and reduce the headaches caused by forgotten lunch money. But the controversial finger scan ID system, already tested and dropped by at least one school district in California and banned in some states, has faced opposition from parents and civil liberties groups worried about student privacy. "Making school children submit to fingerprinting, and risking the misuse of biometric information before they are old enough to drive a car seems like an absurdly risky and invasive way to get slightly faster lunch lines," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union. "
anonymous

PTC: Sexualized GQ Photo Shoot of Glee Cast Crosses the Line - 1 views

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    "LOS ANGELES (October 20, 2010) - The Parents Television Council™ denounced the makers of the TV show "Glee" for a hyper-sexualized GQ photo shoot that will be featured in the November issue. "Glee" airs on Tuesdays at 8:00 pm ET/PT (7:00 pm CT/MT) on Fox. "It is disturbing that GQ, which is explicitly written for adult men, is sexualizing the actresses who play high school-aged characters on 'Glee' in this way. It borders on pedophilia. Sadly, this is just the latest example of the overt sexualization of young girls in entertainment," said PTC President Tim Winter. "Many children who flocked to 'High School Musical' have grown into 'Glee' fans. They are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters posing in front of school lockers, one of them opting for a full-frontal crotch shot. By authorizing this kind of near-pornographic display, the creators of the program have established their intentions on the show's direction. And it isn't good for families."
anonymous

The Way We Live Now - Little Brother is Watching - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    "In George Orwell's "1984," that novel of totalitarian politics whose great mistake was to emphasize the villainy of society's masters while playing down the mischief of the masses, the goal of communications technology was brutal and direct: to ensure the dominance of the state. The sinister "telescreens" placed in people's homes spewed propaganda and conducted surveillance, keeping the population passive and the leadership firmly in control. In the face of constant monitoring, all people could do was sterilize their behavior, conceal their thoughts and carry on like model citizens.\n\nThis was, it turns out, a quaint scenario, grossly simplistic and deeply melodramatic. As the Internet proves every day, it isn't some stern and monolithic Big Brother that we have to reckon with as we go about our daily lives, it's a vast cohort of prankish Little Brothers equipped with devices that Orwell, writing 60 years ago, never dreamed of and who are loyal to no organized authority. The invasion of privacy - of others' privacy but also our own, as we turn our lenses on ourselves in the quest for attention by any means - has been democratized. "
anonymous

Tuning In To The Brain's 'Cocktail Party Effect' : NPR - 1 views

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    "Scientists are beginning to understand how the human brain accomplishes a remarkable trick known as the cocktail party effect. It's what allows us to pick out the words from just one speaker even when we're in a room full of other voices that are just as loud. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how our brain is able to focus on certain sounds while filtering out others. Now they say they're finding clues, thanks to new research on birds and bats. Birds don't spend much time at cocktail parties, but they do face a similar auditory challenge, says Frederic Theunissen of the University of California, Berkeley. "Take a walk in the forest," Theunissen says. "It's clear that these animals are very vocal, and sometimes when there are large groups of them it becomes a cacophony of sounds - just like when there's large groups of humans." And just like humans, some birds need to pick out just one voice in the crowd, Theunissen says. "In the species that I study, the zebra finch, they make lifelong couples, and it's very important for them to recognize their mate," he says."
anonymous

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction - NYTimes.com - 1 views

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    "Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning. Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks - and less able to sustain attention. "Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently." But even as some parents and educators express unease about students' digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students' technological territory. "
anonymous

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: THE EQ FACTOR - TIME - 0 views

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    "When we think of brilliance we see Einstein, deep-eyed, woolly haired, a thinking machine with skin and mismatched socks. High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others. This is where the marshmallows come in. It seems that the ability to delay gratification is a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. It is a sign, in short, of emotional intelligence. And it doesn't show up on an IQ test. For most of this century, scientists have worshipped the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind; the messy powers of the heart were left to the poets. But cognitive theory could simply not explain the questions we wonder about most: why some people just seem to have a gift for living well; why the smartest kid in the class will probably not end up the richest; why we like some people virtually on sight and distrust others; why some people remain buoyant in the face of troubles that would sink a less resilient soul. What qualities of the mind or spirit, in short, determine who succeeds?"
anonymous

gladwell dot com - the naked face - 1 views

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    "Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much information--words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth--and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all happening so quickly that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-- people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and again-- roughly one time in a thousand--someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists, an arbitrator, a vice cop-- and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook
anonymous

Reading Your Baby's Mind - 0 views

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    "The helpless, seemingly clueless infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions-happy, sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy, frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood. They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences, especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your sib has a long memory-and she can hold a grudge."
anonymous

Tiananmen 2.0? Freedom is coming to China - one way or another. - CSMonitor.com - 1 views

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    "For the second time in just over two decades, China's Communist leaders watch anxiously as a series of popular revolutions in another critical area of the world sweep out entrenched dictators and threaten to reverberate in the People's Republic. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was fellow Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that toppled under people power. Now it is Arab and Persian tyrants who face the wrath of the people they have oppressed for generations. Events have seemed to reach the critical tipping-point when the regime's fear of the people exceeds the people's fear of the regime. Chinese bloggers have been quick to raise the obvious question - could it happen in China? - and to begin testing the waters. Internet postings have called for silent protests in several Chinese cities to emulate Tunisia's "jasmine revolution." They have spawned a few sporadic gatherings that the authorities quickly snuffed out before they could grow - but it was a surprisingly early indication that the spark of hope for freedom in China is not extinguished."
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