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The title of this article seems to imply that face painting was intentionally used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition - of course we know that's not the case. Though to be fair, somewhere in the history of the practice, it may be argued that it was to throw off human face-recognition.

This reminds me of a sort of creative look into futuristic fashion I saw a bit ago:

https://cvdazzle.com

Where the fashion of the future is made to be expressive while preventing mass surveillance.



The world is filled with people that figured out things accidentally because they were doing something else.

For example, the person who figured out how to heat food with microwaves (and created the first microwave) didn't set out to do so, he discovered that the chocolate bar in his front pocket melted while working on magnetrons.

"Figuring something out" doesn't imply concerted research towards that goal, accidental understanding happens all the time to all of us on many topics.


> For example, the person who figured out how to heat food with microwaves (and created the first microwave) didn't set out to do so, he discovered that the chocolate bar in his front pocket melted while working on magnetrons.

Willis Carrier was hired to build a machine to prevent the humidity in a room from making inks bleed at a magazine. He built the machine, which pulled moisture from the air by pulling them onto cooled coils, only to discover that the room dropped significantly in temperature.

He ran with it, and eventually founded the Carrier air conditioning company.


If I had a chocolate bar melt in my front pocket, I would have assumed it was my body heat.


(I can't find the reference right now, but apparently the chocolate bar story is a myth.)


RF heating was understood well before the development of the cavity magnetron; Westinghouse demonstrated RF cooking at the 1933 World's Fair using a standard shortwave transmitter.

The chocolate bar story is attributed to Percy Spencer in 1945 and is probably somewhat fanciful - anyone working around high-power radar equipment would necessarily be aware of RF heating, because it presents a significant safety hazard. Spencer can legitimately claim to be the inventor of the microwave oven and is named on Raytheon's patent.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US2495429A/


I've had that happen before. I was gifted a Lindt chocolate bar for my birthday, put it in my back pocket of my loose-ish (not jeans) pants and by the time I got home 30 minutes later, it was completely liquified. It wasn't very warm out either, I remember it being ~10C.


One of the reasons why "discovered" is more accurate than "invented" most of the time. It was always there in nature, someone was fortunate enough to stumble upon it and pioneer the discovery.


Invented actually means the same thing as discovery in the original French root it's taken from.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/invention


Didn't know that! Thanks for sharing.


I guess so, but it leaves a chemical taste in the mouth after taking the clickbait


You saw something about Juggalos, and clicked?


No, I saw something about machine learning and clicked.


>>> used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition - of course we know that's not the case.

Yes and no. Such levels of makeup are meant to be a mask. They are meant to at least partially obscure a person's true features or emotions. Facial recognition is having a very difficult time with women's faces under heavy makeup. Styles with strait lines or geometric shapes (right angles) really throws them off. I'd expect that no facial recognition system could yet survive comicon.


It’s not surprising that facial recognition has trouble with makeup... if you’ve seen some of these photos of celebrity women with no makeup you wouldn’t recognize them in a million years.


Very surprising to me! I thought facial recognition was supposed to work on the relative size and separation of major anatomical features — eyes, nose, mouth, jawline, ears, that sort of thing.

Any such recogniser which can be fooled by the usual surface details, especially given that roughly half the adult population of rich western nations have significant social pressure to apply such decoration, it would not be fit for purpose.

That said, the examples given in the article seem rather more extreme than any conventional makup. I can easily believe this would fool an AI that scored perfectly on conventional (non subculture) western levels of makup.


It's interesting that makeup does a great job of fooling people (that's a big part of why it exists) yet such a poor job of fooling machines. It shows/reminds that machines do not see the world the wy people do.


cvdazzle is explicitly mentioned in the article and is claimed to be less effective than Juggalo makeup.


In some cases, it said.


The article says in some cases, for some reason, but the link the article references for this statement is less ambiguous and actually states unequivocally that it's "less effective than juggalo makeup"[0]

[0] https://twitter.com/tahkion/status/1013324066361524224


> The title of this article seems to imply that face painting was intentionally used among Juggalos to deter computerized facial recognition...

I find it so interesting how we all interpret text so differently.

As I said in another comment, Knowing how many discoveries throughout history were completely accidental I actually interpreted the headline to mean they “stumbled upon” a method to beat facial recognition.

Its neat how we all infer our own meanings from headlines, at least here in this community we generally assume good faith rather than jumping to assumptions that the authors are bad people.

And you’re right about the CVDazzle, the cyberpunk nerd in me desperately hopes something like this becomes a fashion trend.


I don't think "figure out" and "stumbled upon" is quite that similar. Figure out, to me, implies that there were actively tinkering with it.


That link is so wildly cyberpunk! I love it... as janky as the future is it is here, isn't it?


Not only that but the article implies that they "beat" facial recognition and yet the makeup in question wouldn't fool Apple's FaceID, which is probably the largest facial recognition platform in the wild, because it's not just using camera data. This might fool Facebook's matching algorithms from pictures but it's not going to ruin anyone's day from a security standpoint.


> [...] and yet the makeup in question wouldn't fool Apple's FaceID, which is probably the largest facial recognition platform in the wild, because it's not just using camera data.

What sensors is FaceID using besides the camera?


IR sensor


And IR dot projector.


They should seek funding to help them continue to disrupt the facial recognition space. The entrepreneurial spirit really is alive everywhere you look.


Checked the cvdazzle site. Why do these models - and models on "high fashion" photos in general - look always like they feel deep contempt towards the viewer? Where did this trope come from? What are they trying to suggest? I don't get it.


They're trying to have a neutral face so it doesn't distract from what they're modelling.


But it's not a neutral face. It's a face of disdain and contempt.

This is a neutral face: https://cdn.psychologytoday.com/sites/default/files/styles/a...

And this is the face of disdain I'm talking about: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSGkhmT...


Sometimes it's for a better picture (looking up from under lowered eyebrows, for instance), and sometimes it's just how their faces look - consider the phenomenon of "resting b*&^! face".

Many people do consider a neutral face to be aggressive or unpleasant, studies show, regardless of the intent of the person with the face.


Especially to Western eyes, resting faces--some in particular--can often be interpreted that way because we're so used to forced smiles. This is particularly true for strangers because we don't have the experience to read their individual emotional expressions.

> So Jason Rogers and Abbe Macbeth, behavioral researchers with international research and innovation firm Noldus Information Technology, decided to investigate: Why are some faces seen as truly expressionless, but others are inexplicably off-putting?

> ...

> The researchers enlisted Noldus’s FaceReader.... The software...analyzes the image and assigns an expression based on eight basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, contempt, and “neutral.”

> To establish a baseline, Rogers and Macbeth first had FaceReader assess a series of genuinely expressionless faces. Those expressions registered about 97 percent neutrality, Macbeth said...

> Then they plugged in photos of RBF all-stars Kanye West, Kristen Stewart and Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly, the level of emotion detected by the software doubled to six percent.

> One particular emotion was responsible for the jump: “The big change in percentage came from ‘contempt,’” Macbeth said.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...


Re: forced smiles. I encourage other adults not to say 'smile' when taking a photo of their children. Their natural expressions are often funnier and more insightful especially years later.


I know this is subjective but I just don’t see “disdain and contempt” (which assumes the model is trying to communicate something about the viewer) in the sample you provided. I see possibly “secretiveness” and “a challenging disposition” (I assume the model is trying to convey something about herself).


Narrowing the eyes looks like disdain to you, but that's a side effect. Widening eyes draws attention to the eyes. Clothing models shouldn't draw attention to their eyes.


I don't see that second picture on the cv dazzle site at all. All the pictures I see on cv are unquestionably neutral in disposition.


Ok, here's an example from the cvdazzle site: https://cvdazzle.com/assets/img/coreana/coreana-04-copyright...


"Cyberpunk. The Attitude. Get It." -- A page out of Mondo 2000


Maybe it seems that way to you because the second person has very different facial features and the lighting is much more dramatic?


They both look neutral to me?



> What are they trying to suggest?

That smiling pleasantly is hard


If I had to pose for a camera while wearing ridiculous-looking clothes and/or makeup, I'd have some pretty deep contempt for everyone involved (including the viewer) as well.


If you are a model then you choose the wrong career path...


not everybody has the luxury of doing what they like in life...


While that may be true modeling certainly doesn't fall into that category of professions.


It actually does, and with surprising frequency. Professional models in the high-fashion world often endure considerable amounts of work-related stress, and the decision to do a particular job is often less of an "I like doing this" and more of an "I have to do this to stay relevant / make ends meet / satisfy contract obligations / etc.". Even a seemingly-normal photoshoot can end up being excessively taxing both physically and mentally; the viewer only sees the end result, not the hours of standing around holding poses while the photographers try to get the photo oh so perfect or the hours of wardrobe and makeup prep or the overwhelming pressure to not eat (or - worse - to purge after meals) in order to remain palatable to the mass market and its unrealistic-bordering-on-downright-impossible body image expectations.

My original comment was a lame joke, sure, but it's one with a disturbing amount of truth behind it. Not all models like being models. I'd wager that hating the job might even be the norm. It has a high potential to be excessively stressful and even outright degrading, not to mention that it's a hotbed for shady business practices, outright fraud, and abuse (psychological, physical, and sexual alike). It's a career path notorious for its workers having little to no bargaining power.

I suspect that the folks voting my comment down don't actually know how shitty of a job modeling can be. I don't blame them for not knowing; on the surface, being a model seems fun and glamorous, right? Never mind that - like how office work is (usually) more than sitting around playing Solitaire all day - professional modeling is (usually) more than just hanging out all day and getting the occasional photo taken real quick (there is no "real quick" to these sorts of photo shoots).

Just my two cents.




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