Conservatives are Cuter
Your cellphone/pocket computers are creeping into every facet of life. You may know that stores have the ability to capture your picture coming in and then sending you ads promoting the merchandise you have been looking at online right to your phone while you are in the store. The computers have now sorted out who the good looking people are from the rest of us. Believe it or not…Conservative female politicians tend to appear happier and more attractive in pictures than liberal politicos, a new artificial intelligence study conducted in Denmark found. “Scientific Reports” in March, found AI can predict a person’s political ideology with 61% accuracy by analyzing just one headshot. The scientists started with 3,200 publicly submitted photos of political candidates who ran in the 2017 Danish municipal election into Microsoft Azure’s Face API tool to assess the person’s emotional state. The researchers selected 3,323 publicly submitted headshots of political candidates for analysis in a neural network capable of facial expression coding and classification. The analysis found 80% of the faces displayed a happy expression, while 19% read as neutral.
“For females (though not males), high attractiveness scores were found among those the model identified as likely to be conservative,” read the findings. “These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism.” The results were even more accurate for men, 65%, before the researchers stripped their photos of visual imagery other than the man’s face — such as shirt collars. Left-leaning male politicians showed more neutral, less happy faces than their conservative counterparts, the study found. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders. “Previous work has found smiling in photographs to be a valid indicator of extraversion,” they continued. “And while extraversion is not broadly associated with ideology some studies have found that right-wing politicians are more extraverted.” The deep-learning algorithm did catch one unusual distinction, however: female, left-wing political candidates were slightly more likely to be read by the neural net as having a face expressing contempt.i
“Politicians on the left and right may have different incentives for smiling — for example, smiling faces have been found to look more attractive which is comparatively important for conservative politicians,” stated the research. “The right-wing faces, particularly for females, might be perceived as more attractive.” I know physical beauty is a tricky subject, informed by (often harmful) cultural references that range from Barbie dolls to movie stars to TikTok videos. Usually, diplomacy is the watchword when treading these waters. But the researchers are blunt. Referring to a growing body of evidence, they write that “politicians on the right have been found to be more attractive than those on the left.” It’s not just the women, either. “Higher right-wing attractiveness scores were also observed among young (male) adults in the general population, though not among pundits.” I’m a columnist, not a pundit. And, to confirm what all our mothers taught us, looks aren’t everything. “We also found that expressing happiness is associated with conservatism for both genders.”
Cute girl smiles
Whenever I meet a pretty girl, the first thing I look for is intelligence…
…because if she doesn’t have that, then she’s mine.
A cute girl at work said she’d only go on a date with me on a day that doesn’t end in ‘Y.’
I said “Great! I’ll pick you up tomorrow!”
A student at a management school came up to a pretty girl and hugged her without any warning.
The surprised girl said, “What was that?”
The guy smiled at her, “Direct marketing!”
The girl slapped him soundly. “What was that?!” asked the boy, holding his cheek.
“Customer feedback.”
Saw a pretty girl and asked her, “What’s your sign?”
She said, “Stop.”
June 17th birthdays
1980 – Venus Williams, 1987 – Marie Avgerpoulos, 1982 – Jodie Whittaker, 1997 – Taveeta Szymanowitz
1994 – Amari Cooper, 1998 – K. J. Apa, 1946 – Barry Manilow, 1951- Joe Piscopo