Bitbutter

bpr3.org have made an icon that bloggers can incorporate in their posts when blogging about peer reviewed research. A small, smart, step that should make it easier for us when deciding which articles to trust.

Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by offering an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net.

Here's a list of reactions from other blogs to the bpr3 initiative.

While watching a friend using Face Maker I noticed that what I had taken to be decorative markings of the cheeks, she understood as eyes. And the shapes that I took to be eyes, she took to be unnecessary markings. I think there's been parallel selection for two separate sets of eyes. Both sets are very widespread among the current population of faces.

Here I've edited out the lower eyes, leaving only the top set:

And here's how it looks with only the lower set of eyes:

I think that voters tend to 'see' one pair more quickly than they see the other, and that once the first pair is recognised, there's a kind of blindness towards the other pair. For instance, before I was aware of the lower set I would have interpreted the previous image as missing eyes altogether.

Which set do you consider to be the real eyes?

Philipp Lenssen kindly gave his permission for me to publish Face Maker, which I've just deployed. I wanted to build an online artificial selection system ever since reading about Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker programme but Face Maker is an experiment heavily inspired by Philipp's Mutating Pictures project.

A web site is a perfect place to host a project like this that deals with small incremental change. No single user is burdened with devoting hours to 'evolving' the faces. Instead the effort is massively distributed–and continues day and night. Users from all over the world work on collaboratively selecting for face-like appearances.

And participation provides its own rewards. Judging the procession of 'faces' has been strangely hypnotic while using Phillip's site and while working on my own. It's fascinating to see the eerily detailed faces emerging and it's almost tempting to wonder where they come from.

Face Maker differs from the current version of Mutating Pictures in a few ways.

1. The images are drawn using curved shapes rather than triangles
2. Both black and white shapes are used, overlapping one another
3. Images are presented next to one another, the user is invited to select the most face-like image
4. When one image 'wins' a round, the loser is removed from the database, and the winner gives birth to one child.

Continuing to borrow from Philipp's approach I plan to use this blog post to collect comments and discussion about Face Maker.

Face Maker was built in a feverish 2-day sprint with Ruby on Rails. It could be that some bugs surface, if they do, please accept my apologies in advance.

One of the original images:

Some faces that went extinct: