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POPSBeauty, is an equation How was it done? "surveyed 68 Israeli and German men and women, aged 25 to 40, asking them to rank the beauty of 93 different men’s and women’s faces on a scale of 1 to 7. These scores were then entered into a database and correlated to 250 different measurements and facial features, such as ratios of the nose, chin and distance from ears to eyes. From this, the scientists created an algorithm that applies desirable elements of attractiveness to a fresh image." Very nice, so beauty is after all numbers and distances and sizes... :)
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POPSAPPLE GENIUS WORTH 8.4 BILLION: Guardian.co.uk's charles ARTHUR
The author puts a keen focus on how we gave Apple enough information to make 8.4 billion seem fair. Extremely sharp and incisive. I learned a lot. I think Mr. Arthur is a bit too quick to be interpreting Steve's algorithm at this point. I find that the program is genius in large part because while Steve Jobs and Apple™ know the tempo of every song to a frightening accuracy. Five seconds of silent thought will tell you the reasons Mr. Jobs will not fill in a BPM (beats per minute) column. To truly understand the tempo manipulation: you;d need to see the algorithm itself! So said, knowing the speeds of the songs I play on drums (it's the drums or the treadmill - I'm doing the exercise thing), I find the program to be almost wildly genius. What's wildly evil os that 1) Apple knows but will not divulge BPM; 2) Apple uses the tempo element of you collection on playlists made for you that are so good that when I play I do not even look at what is coming next as iy has all been so
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POPSElection 08: How's it looking? Mouse over states to get current numbers and history. I'm surprised that WV is only "barely Republican;" FL now within margin of error; Obama expands nationwide Gallup lead by 1, to six points, since RNC. Overall so far, a narrow but widening Obama win. See map key at bottom of clip.
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POPSMcCain moves ahead in electoral projections After a month of positive movement in polls, electoral projections now who McCain moving ahead in electoral projections. Senate races still look like pick-ups for Dems, though I've suggested a better result of 49 Reps and 50 Dems with Lieberman playing spoiler.
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POPSWebsite Grader Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
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POPSSubliminal learning. "The researchers collected scans of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate the specific brain circuitry that is linked to subliminal instrumental conditioning. "The ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues and to visible outcomes in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values and prediction errors," says Dr. Pessiglione. "We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making."
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POPSFuturistic Excavation However, Weyrich noted, Princeton's system will never replace the experience, contextual knowledge and "soft skills" that conservators and archaeologists bring to the table. "Reconstructing these frescoes is incredibly complex, given the condition of the fragments and the sheer number of fragments," said Weyrich. "The computer takes over the laborious parts of the process while leaving the important, intuitive decisions to the humans." i wonder when this will change as well.
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POPSCelebrity Meter Although there are a few different standards for highlighting links like these, most social networking sites, blog software and hosting services support one or more. They're relying on site builders to highlight such links by using special markup. Google uses this information to build a graph of all sites and their links to one another. Rather than request the API from each site individually (Twitter followers, MySpace friends, etc.), Google provides a single RESTful API to send a simple query in one shot. While there are limits to this data (Facebook info is currently not available in this widget), the information we're getting is real and the friend information we're getting isn't a simple number but a list of live URLs that Google has vetted for us.