Thursday, April 17, 2008

i've been through the desert on a horse with no name

Today, Felicia directed me to this site - www.facestat.com - interestingly enough, one of the three people behind the company running FaceStat is our mutual friend Brendan. FaceStat allows you to upload a picture; using a wisdom-of-crowds approach, it gives you feedback an hour or so later on a number of attributes that a bunch of complete strangers judged while looking at the picture.

So I gave it a test. I uploaded this picture (from my friend Katie's wedding a year and a half ago):


















And approximately an hour later, got these results (apparently from a sample of ten strangers):


ethnicity: Caucasian / White
weight: chunky
political affiliation: moderate
relationship status: dating
intoxicated?: true
gender: female
trustworthy?: false
wealth: average
attractive?: true
intelligence: average
age: 25
funny?: true

And I thought - this is a great way to screen pictures if one is going to join an online dating service. For instance, of the 10 people who rated this picture, 9 of them thought that I looked untrustworthy, which completely surprised me. Also, I wasn't intoxicated when this picture was taken. And 2 of the people actually rated my intelligence as 'dull' - I can attribute some of this to either the well-known correlation between perceived attractiveness and perceived intelligence, and there is also a likely sample bias given that the people who will sit around and rate pictures may not completely represent the overall population. Still, it says something interesting about me that the thing that most offended me was that people thought I didn't look intelligent.

However, I thought that the whole thing was interesting. So if you have a somewhat thick skin/morbid curiosity, check it out. You can only upload one photo per day, but the interface is easy to use, and the results come in less than an hour. Let me know what you think!

And that, my friends, was pretty much the only 'productive' thing I did today. I did a lot of online window-shopping. I watched tonight's fine CBS programming ('Survivor' - I paid for my excitement over Natalie's BB9-eviction by having to watch Ozzy, my favorite survivor, get blindsided at tribal council; after that, I watched 'CSI' and 'Without a Trace', the 10pm news, Letterman, and Craig). I read the latest issue of the Romance Writers' Report, published by the Romance Writers of America, and got excited about all the great workshops that they'll have at the conference in July. My mother made some delicious steak fajitas, which I enjoyed with my parents. I exfoliated my face. Yay.

Tomorrow I must write, so I'm going to escape the house and go someplace, even if there are more thunderstorms like there were today. We only had one brief power flicker this afternoon, and there were no tornadoes, so it was all pretty unremarkable. Now it's time for bed!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

wow burn this is what i get for idling on the internet instead of doing work, I tried the face stat thing apparently I am unattractive, dull and untrustworthy.