That rights exist only within the law is an opinion mostly held by lawyers. Many of us hold that instead many rights exist independently of the law, and thus we may argue that we have these rights whether the law says we do or not.
As an example: when slavery was legal, slaves still had a right to be free, but the law disagreed.
And that's pretty much my point. It's all perception, none of it is provable.
All you can know for sure is summed up by descartes: cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. The mind that thinks must exist to do so. But in what form, you can never know for sure.
Also, there's an obvious disparity in hidden vs outward cross dressing. IE, it may occur in equal rates behind closed doors, but go to a gay pride march and look at the rate there vs a heterosexual pride march (ie sons of the irish or some such).
How do you know I breathe, or that you breathe for that matter? It's all a perception. You could be a brain in a vat being fed perception that feels like breathing. You could be an interdimensional energy creature imagineing what it would be like to be human and breathe, never having actually encountered real matter (perhaps matter doesn't exist at all).
I agree with you, and I certainly also prefer harder sciences where the reliance on statistical significance is lower, but I do think that this stuff is rigorous enough to have real value (particularly the most useful kind: predictive value).
No, it doesn't imply, though you might notice that there is a correlation between the two which is higher for homosexuals than for straights. Therefore (were this modern times) the conclusion that he was gay would lead to a higher than average chance of crossdressing. As you say, back then such a conclusion would be comparatively irrelevant.
They remove the bias specific to the mona lisa by training on images which have no such bias.
IE consider the difference in bias of reporting you might get if asking 10 random people if the mona lisa is happy vs asking 10 random people if a random photograph of some person they've never seen before is happy.
Well, you may be unsure, but there's a ton of peer reviewed published literature on the subject. It certainly has as wide an acceptance as say, evolution, which is another slashdot favorite topic.:-)
Yep, Microsoft is crying about that decision, alright, as it lies awake at night, bitterly depressed on its big bed made of solid gold padded with cash.
You use and open MRI, and you have them watch a movie while you MRI them. You find a widely agreed upon sad moment in the movie. You ask them: what were you feeling at this point in the movie. They say sad. You encode that facial expression as sadness.
This study is essentially only vulnerable to demand threat (ie the subject thinks you expected them to be sad, so you say you were sad). You can do a fairly good job of eliminating the threat by having a large enough sample size, varying the input (which sad movie) and verifying that the MRI's are still consistent.
It's not invulnerable, but statistics says it is very likely to be accurate. As an aside, this is essentially how all of the soft sciences do their work, so if you want to throw this specific area out, you're going to lose a lot of other well respected science at the same time.
Interestingly enough, my wife does this work. It works quite well, actually. The agreements get into the 80-90% range. And of course you store all the data: If you get 9 happies and 1 tired from your research population, your software might be considered accurate if it comes up with 90% happy, 10% tired (you can look at this in different ways, which way you prefer is just that, a preference).
You also don't have to trust the emotions of the subjects in a couple of ways:
1) You can sample a large enough population to weed out liars statistically. 2) You can sample the subjects and MRI them to verify the consistency of what is going on in their brains.
There are also well established ways to elicit common emotions: as one example, you can show people sad movies, and get them fairly easily to become sad and show a sad expression. Again, you can verify your reliability fairly well by MRI.
Well, a lot of people think he was gay, so that doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.
It would also be easy to imagine him dressing up as part of the prank (regardless of whether he was gay, he was clearly creative enough to do this).
It would also be easy to imagine. He was pretty creative, so his imagination was likely pretty good, maybe he just pictured himself in women's clothes and drew that.
Are you kidding? Having a computer that is able to judge facial expressions accurately? It adds value in all kinds of ways:
1) In the specific context, it provides for an analysis unbiased by human emotion attached to a famous work. 2) In a general context, a computer which can judge facial expressions may be able to interact more accurately or effectively with you without resorting to primitive mouse/keyboard work. 3) In an alternative context, a computer able to analyze facial emotion may be able to improve anti-terrorism security measures.
I could add dozens more i'm sure, but I hope the value is now obvious.
Not much chance that facial expression has changed significantly over time. One of the things psychologists have studied fairly extensively is emotion in isolated cultures. Smile==happy no matter where you go. Given that such cultures have often been isolated on the 1000 year range, it seems unlikely that a uniform evolutionary change happened everywhere, and so it is probably fairly safe to conclude that the meaning of facial expressions isn't changing much over time.
1) train a bunch of humans to accurately identify facial emotions. (train to some target level of competence) 2) have your human facial emotion identifiers look at a lot of faces, keep track of statistics 3) improve your software until it agrees with #2 on a sufficiently large sample set 4) verify the accuracy of your software by checking for agreement with #2 on a new set of previously untested images 5) have great statistical confidence that your analysis of further images is accurate
Falsification is simple and derives from #5: prove that the software is inaccurate on a statistically significant percentage of new images presented to it.
It's not really about the subjects expression, it's about the painting's expression. People find the smile very interesting in this painting, and that is most of the reason for the painting's particularly great fame. Why is the smile so interesting to people? Perhaps it is the 9% disgust. That's what this kind of analysis can hope to tell us about our response to this painting.
Slashdot Mirror
Shh! Never tell management about the downside, they'll shoot the messenger. :-)
That rights exist only within the law is an opinion mostly held by lawyers. Many of us hold that instead many rights exist independently of the law, and thus we may argue that we have these rights whether the law says we do or not.
As an example: when slavery was legal, slaves still had a right to be free, but the law disagreed.
... in unemployment! Younger IT workers are cheaper, and more familiar with newer technologies at the same time!
Ah, well that would explain it, your link is much better than the submitters, mod parent up!
AOL appears to be circling the drain, why not wait 3 or 4 months and get 20% for the same price?
And that's pretty much my point. It's all perception, none of it is provable.
All you can know for sure is summed up by descartes: cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. The mind that thinks must exist to do so. But in what form, you can never know for sure.
Here's a couple:x ident.htmlm .htm
http://www.susans.org/reference/psych/childhoodse
http://gendertree.com/transvestism__transsexualis
Also, there's an obvious disparity in hidden vs outward cross dressing. IE, it may occur in equal rates behind closed doors, but go to a gay pride march and look at the rate there vs a heterosexual pride march (ie sons of the irish or some such).
How do you know I breathe, or that you breathe for that matter? It's all a perception. You could be a brain in a vat being fed perception that feels like breathing. You could be an interdimensional energy creature imagineing what it would be like to be human and breathe, never having actually encountered real matter (perhaps matter doesn't exist at all).
I agree with you, and I certainly also prefer harder sciences where the reliance on statistical significance is lower, but I do think that this stuff is rigorous enough to have real value (particularly the most useful kind: predictive value).
No, it doesn't imply, though you might notice that there is a correlation between the two which is higher for homosexuals than for straights. Therefore (were this modern times) the conclusion that he was gay would lead to a higher than average chance of crossdressing. As you say, back then such a conclusion would be comparatively irrelevant.
They remove the bias specific to the mona lisa by training on images which have no such bias.
IE consider the difference in bias of reporting you might get if asking 10 random people if the mona lisa is happy vs asking 10 random people if a random photograph of some person they've never seen before is happy.
Well, you may be unsure, but there's a ton of peer reviewed published literature on the subject. It certainly has as wide an acceptance as say, evolution, which is another slashdot favorite topic. :-)
Yep, Microsoft is crying about that decision, alright, as it lies awake at night, bitterly depressed on its big bed made of solid gold padded with cash.
You use and open MRI, and you have them watch a movie while you MRI them. You find a widely agreed upon sad moment in the movie. You ask them: what were you feeling at this point in the movie. They say sad. You encode that facial expression as sadness.
This study is essentially only vulnerable to demand threat (ie the subject thinks you expected them to be sad, so you say you were sad). You can do a fairly good job of eliminating the threat by having a large enough sample size, varying the input (which sad movie) and verifying that the MRI's are still consistent.
It's not invulnerable, but statistics says it is very likely to be accurate. As an aside, this is essentially how all of the soft sciences do their work, so if you want to throw this specific area out, you're going to lose a lot of other well respected science at the same time.
Perception determines reality of course. Nothing exists which is not perceived, and you can't prove otherwise. ;-)
Interestingly enough, my wife does this work. It works quite well, actually. The agreements get into the 80-90% range. And of course you store all the data: If you get 9 happies and 1 tired from your research population, your software might be considered accurate if it comes up with 90% happy, 10% tired (you can look at this in different ways, which way you prefer is just that, a preference).
s ic%20emotions.htm
f nd&pg=PA3&sig=O6kOK6Z196gNc4MS0AmWq7ERPiE
You also don't have to trust the emotions of the subjects in a couple of ways:
1) You can sample a large enough population to weed out liars statistically.
2) You can sample the subjects and MRI them to verify the consistency of what is going on in their brains.
There are also well established ways to elicit common emotions: as one example, you can show people sad movies, and get them fairly easily to become sad and show a sad expression. Again, you can verify your reliability fairly well by MRI.
As to studying the range of emotions, maybe you start with only the top 6:
http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/ba
Lots of people study emotions, and there is a lot of well established strong statistical work in the field.
This books is one of the more respected in the field, and can link you to a lot of the studies that have been done already:
http://print.google.com/print?id=dXMs_dloSEcC&oi=
Well, a lot of people think he was gay, so that doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.
It would also be easy to imagine him dressing up as part of the prank (regardless of whether he was gay, he was clearly creative enough to do this).
It would also be easy to imagine. He was pretty creative, so his imagination was likely pretty good, maybe he just pictured himself in women's clothes and drew that.
This is slashdot after all. It's 90% men, and the 10% women are 99% men pretending.
Are you kidding? Having a computer that is able to judge facial expressions accurately? It adds value in all kinds of ways:
1) In the specific context, it provides for an analysis unbiased by human emotion attached to a famous work.
2) In a general context, a computer which can judge facial expressions may be able to interact more accurately or effectively with you without resorting to primitive mouse/keyboard work.
3) In an alternative context, a computer able to analyze facial emotion may be able to improve anti-terrorism security measures.
I could add dozens more i'm sure, but I hope the value is now obvious.
Not to lesser operating systems, nor to open source of course.
Not much chance that facial expression has changed significantly over time. One of the things psychologists have studied fairly extensively is emotion in isolated cultures. Smile==happy no matter where you go. Given that such cultures have often been isolated on the 1000 year range, it seems unlikely that a uniform evolutionary change happened everywhere, and so it is probably fairly safe to conclude that the meaning of facial expressions isn't changing much over time.
It's easy to falsify this work actually.
1) train a bunch of humans to accurately identify facial emotions. (train to some target level of competence)
2) have your human facial emotion identifiers look at a lot of faces, keep track of statistics
3) improve your software until it agrees with #2 on a sufficiently large sample set
4) verify the accuracy of your software by checking for agreement with #2 on a new set of previously untested images
5) have great statistical confidence that your analysis of further images is accurate
Falsification is simple and derives from #5: prove that the software is inaccurate on a statistically significant percentage of new images presented to it.
It's not really about the subjects expression, it's about the painting's expression. People find the smile very interesting in this painting, and that is most of the reason for the painting's particularly great fame. Why is the smile so interesting to people? Perhaps it is the 9% disgust. That's what this kind of analysis can hope to tell us about our response to this painting.
Documentation for that claim:
a lisa.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/leonardo/gallery/mon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa
Which is a very interesting thought to imagine the subject having, since it is widely thought that the Mona Lisa is a self portrait.