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Awesome visual Prezi-like demonstration of the universal macro and the subatomic micro as a comparative scale. Very cool!

"The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic - shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe's Photoshop software, the photo retoucher's magic wand. "Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie," said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth. And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to "discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image." Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said. Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "

"True art would never be mistaken for a crude, paint-by-the-numbers copy. But a researcher has developed a statistical tool for determining whether a purported masterpiece is only a skilled imitation, suggesting that art may be a numbers game after all. Using high-resolution digital images and complex mathematical formulas, associate professor Hany Farid of Dartmouth College analyzed works by Renaissance artists to determine their authenticity. His computer program was able to accurately separate eight drawings by 16th century Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder from five drawings by imitators. It also found that portions of a painting by Italian artist Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, known as Perugino, were probably done by Perugino's apprentices. Farid described his work, presented Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, as "simply another tool that is contributing to the dialogue of art authenticating" and said more work is needed before digital analysis of art could be done on a wider scale. Art experts reacted warily to the prospect that a masterpiece could be reduced to the sum of its digital parts. "