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Updated 41 Days ago
SciFest08: Did Your Mom Lie? Does it Matter if You're Ugly?
I'm reporting live, once again, from St. Louis' SciFest 08, and things are getting ugly. Well, kind-of. According to Nichola Rumsey, PhD and Dr. Martin Persson, we should be shifting from our current obsession with celeb-like bodies and embrace more diverse appearances.
It's considered "fact" by the masses that better looking people are happier, get better jobs, have advantages in education and even get out of more tickets when they're caught by the police, but that isn't completely true. It's essentially folklore that advertisers and the editor of Vogue have created.
These days, those of us in Western Civilization are striving more and more to look like Ken and Barbie. So much so that even Ken and Barbie can't keep up. He keeps getting more muscular and enhanced in "certain areas," while she gets blonder, skinier, and...you know. In actuality, it's almost physically impossible to hold your body to these standards. One in every 100,000 women is naturally proportional to the plastic bimbo, so where does that leave the other 99,999 of us? Victims of the media.
Five seconds after flipping open a fashion magazine, you're bombarded with ads promoting plastic surgery. Rumsey pointed out that they make it seem like Botox will help you land a sexy, smart significant other in a tuxedo/short cocktail dress, all because you got your face stabbed with this age-freezing elixir. Maybe that's why there has been a 465-percent increase in plastic surgery in the past decade. But it just aint so; Botox doesn't equal a happy ending.
Click on the Video tab to see an example of what Rumsey and Persson were talking about. It really, really surprised me.
It's become a phenomenon that's known as the cult of the celebrity. Kids, teens and adults of all ages are using actors, models and athletes as role models, and with such unrealistic ideals to begin with, it's no wonder that everyone's self esteem is going downhill.
In another example that the presenters used, they created a series of avatars (realistic computer generated images of people) and submitted their head shots to a modeling agency. Of the 16 models that the agency invited back for the job, 14 of them were avatars. What this means is hugely significant; modeling agencies are trying too hard to present a perfect body image to American culture. So perfect in fact, that this perfect body doesn't even exist.
Beauty isn't in the eye of the beholder, it's in the eye of what the media tells the beholder it should be. So have a cookie, drink a non-diet soda, hold your head a little higher and stop trying to look like Kate Moss.
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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So, let people have their little prejudices while we eat a Twinkie & be our charismatic best. The good-looking will meet thermo-dynamics laws 1 & 2 before they know whats hit them. Who & what we are is all that's left at the end of the day.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.