Straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short hairstyles – computationally sorted [study]

“Hair detection in images is useful for many applications, such as face and gender recognition, video surveillance, and hair modelling.” – prompting the development of a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) software application which can sort images of hair styles into straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short – with an accuracy of around […]

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 […]

Do cats see these optical illusions? Study and video say yes.

Further insight, in this study, on what cats have in sight: “Cats and Illusory Motion,” Rasmus Bååth [pictured here], Takeharu Seno, Akiyoshi Kitaoka, Psychology, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 1131-1134. The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, Kyushu University, Japan, and Ritsumeikan University, Japan, report: “Many cat owners have probably looked into their cat’s eyes and wondered how the […]

The man who drove, blinding himself, on Route 128 — for your safety

[Ig Nobel Prize winner] John Senders led a series of safety experiments in which he drove an automobile on Route 128 — the major highway that circles Boston to the west — while a visor repeatedly flapped down over his face, blinding him…. —so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

Who Looks Where How Often

“Gender Differences for Specific Body Regions When Looking at Men and Women,” Johannes Hewig, Ralf H. Trippe, Holger Hecht, Thomas Straube and Wolfgang H.R. Miltner, Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, vol. 32, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 67–78 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10919-007-0043-5). (Thanks to Nicole Bordes for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany, report: […]