Chimpanzees recognizing photographs of the rear ends of other chimpanzees; colonoscopy patients who explode, and the patent for the bagel-making machine — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. Click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner here — to select whichever week’s episode you want to hear: SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify […]
Tag: photo
Empty Photographic Frames : Punctuating the Narrative
Nancy Pedri, who is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Literature at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, is a comparatist. And, as such, is one of the few scholars to have examined the implications of empty photographic frames in multimodal narratives. “In its capacity to open up the possibility for variance in meaning, […]
Nasal Photography – new directions
“In the frontal view, delicate, 3-dimensional (3D) anatomic structures require special photographic skills. Lighting is crucial for detail rendition and 3D reproduction of the nose, and for apparent photographic bias.” The observation is provided by authors Benedikt Strub, Konrad Mende, Claudia Meuli-Simmen, and Stephan Bessler in a new paper for the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, entitled: […]
Progress in grandma and grandpa detection
A joint US research Project from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Disney Research, Pittsburg, has made steps towards an automated digital image family member detection system. The new Bayesian photo-analysis methodology is able, for example, to perform ”identity clustering” and make attempts at identifying not only which individuals might be mothers, fathers, and […]
Upside-down male/female swimwear/underwear picture recognition differences
Are there differences in the rapid-recognition (viz. 250 ms) of photos of men and women in swimsuits (or underwear) when they are presented upside-down? A 2011 paper in the prestige journal Psychological Science suggests the answer maybe yes. Inspired (in part) by a 1969 study from Dr. Robert K. Yin, which was entitled ‘Looking at […]
Disambiguating the Lessons from the Ambiguous-Colored Dress
Many will recall the intense Feb. 2015 internet and media storm around the ‘is-it-black/blue’ or ‘is-it-white/gold’ Tumblr dress photo. It’s now become the focus of an international group of colour scientists, who have performed the first [we believe] laboratory-based study centering around the famous photo. The team, from the universities of Granada and Extremadura in […]
Discarded dog-poop bags – a photo essay
It was somewhere around 2007, that Dr. John Darwell, who is a senior lecturer in photography at the University of Cumbria, UK, began researching and photographically documenting the phenomenon of ‘ddsbs‘. “Over the past two years I have observed with increasing fascination the growing number of discarded dog shit bags (ddsbs) I encounter whilst out […]
Side-bias in Smartphone Selfies
This study reveals that smartphone self-portraits may perhaps reveal something about left and right, maybe: “Self-Portraits: Smartphones Reveal a Side Bias in Non-Artists,” Nicola Bruno [pictured here, and who also recently did a study on an effect of red] and Marco Bertamini, PLoS ONE, 8(2), 2013, e55141. The authors, at the Universita di Parma, Italy and the University […]
Upside-down view of extreme sports
Neatorama alerts us to this photo of group skydiving, seen upside down from the (relatively) usual way of looking at such things: It’s from a gallery of unusual perspective photos of extreme sports, on the Unreality magazine site.
The great geoduck hoax photo
Peter Smith, in the Smithsonian’s Food & Think blog, tells of the great geoduck hoax photo. Here’s a copy of that photo: [via Annalee Newitz]