Encyclopedia Sciplayer has made two more videos, each about a different Ig Nobel Prize winner: “Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get a Headache”: “How to take a blink-free photo”:
Tag: photo
Stretched faces remarkably easy to recognize [study]
It can be difficult to recognize someone from a photo of their face if it’s turned upside-down, or presented as a negative. But what if the photos are distorted – fairground-mirror style? Or deliberately blurred? To find out, Dr Graham Hole and colleagues at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, UK, performed […]
In short, how to take a group photo with no blinks
Every Ig Nobel Prize celebrates something that makes people laugh, then think—each is a good, true, short story. An organization called Short Story, in South Korea, made this short video that tells the story of the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics : The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for mathematics was awarded to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of […]
Studying Men Who Send Out Pictures of Bits of Themself
Scholars continue to study some of the many men who send out pictures of bits of themselves. A new study and a new book stand out. The book was written by a man who sends out copies of his book about studying men who send out pictures of bits of themselves. A Study to Study […]
Cheek preferences on Instagram’s chimpanzee pics [new study]
When people post pictures of chimpanzees to Instagram®, do they have a preference for choosing pictures which display the chimp’s right cheek – or the left cheek? Dr Annukka Lindell, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Department of Psychology and Counselling, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia, […]
The Elephant in the Image [new study]
Can state-of -the-art visual analysis software always be relied on to find the elephant in an image? Akshay Raj Dhamija and colleagues at the VAST lab (Vision And Security Technology) at the Department of Computer Science, at University of Colorado, at Colorado Springs, US. have recently investigated the robustness of automated elephant detector systems. The team […]
Photographers walking backwards – and falling over (study)
It’s a staple gag for any slapstick movie. Trying for a wider shot, a photographer walks backwards (without looking) and trips over something. Amusing perhaps, but on occasions dangerous too. Odd then, that in the academic literature on safety and ergonomics, there a very few scholarly studies of this ubiquitous syndrome. In fact, there may […]
Looking at Tyrells potato crisp packets (image ecology study)
Within the academic field of aesthetics, there aren’t all that many essays written on about potato crisp packets. There is, however, at least one. Karin Wagner, who is professor and associate head of department for research in art history and visual studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, specialises in the areas […]
Untrained modern youths and ancient masters in self(ie) portraits
What do modern youths and ancient masters have in common? One possible commonality is they way they depict themselves in self portraits – specifically whether they tend to prefer giving preference to their left cheek or the right one. “[…] a set of selfies and wefies by modern youths reveals comparable biases to self-portraits and […]
‘Reversed Paintings’ (Possibilizations for Thing-Theorists)
Before considering the history and implications of reversed paintings, we need a definition – and we have one provided by Richard Read, who is Winthrop Professor in Art History at the University of Western Australia. “I define the reversed painting as a painting of a painting reversed against the spectator.” Professor Read is writing in […]