Following the Advertising Standards Authority's (ASA) decision to ban an advert from L'Oreal featuring Julia Roberts Scotland on Sunday ran an interesting article by Claire Prentice.

'Claire Prentice: Face facts on altered images
Published Date: 31 July 2011

By Claire Prentice

BE HONEST. Which of these pictures is more attractive? The real, wrinkled, natural me on the left? Or the "perfect" me on the right, as tweaked, enhanced and digitally polished by this newspaper's finest technical wizards?

Read the rest here.

'Part of the ruling from the ASA

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA acknowledged that Julia Roberts was an actress well known for her beauty, and that professional styling and make-up were used to create the image. We understood that high quality studio photography, and the inherent covering and smoothing nature of the product also contributed to the image of flawless skin.

We noted that in addition to the factors above, the image was produced with the assistance of post production techniques. While Lancôme provided detail on the techniques they used, we noted that we had not been provided with information that allowed us to see what effect those enhancements had on the final image. We acknowledged the pictures supplied from laboratory testing were evidence that the product was capable of improving skin’s appearance, but on the basis of the evidence we had received we could not conclude that the ad image accurately illustrated what effect the product could achieve, and that the image had not been exaggerated by digital post production techniques. We therefore concluded the ad was misleading.

The ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) 3.1 (Misleading advertising) and 3.11 (Exaggeration).

Action

The ad must not appear in its current form again.'

Details of the ruling here.

 

The ASA's ruling will doubtless set the rat amongst the pigeons in the beauty trade. In addition it raises issues of how far should photos be manipulated. Should one ignore the temptation of using Photoshop to improve a photo even to the extent of not changing the contrast or light/dark? Should a photo be like natural wine with all use of artfice banned or adjured?

And if Photoshop shouldn't be used what of the various aids available at the point of taking a photo – various coloured filters and polarisers; changing the light balance etc. If a photo comes out over-exposed and doesn't correspond to what I saw with my eye, is it right to tweak it so that it is a faithful representation of what I saw?

Where does the legitimate skill of using available technology end and unacceptable manipulation begin?

Train approaching Kingussie with the hills in the background

A few more photos taken while travelling on the A9 plus some taken during a short visit to Kingussie yesterday. 

 A9 heading towards the hills (above and below)

 

 

 Cairngorms

 

Kingussie: the railway, trunks and hills

+ an additional utility post

Kingussie: view towards a corrie

Exhibition of local art@the iona gallery Kingussie

Newtonmore: light on leaves and a pond

Monarch Country Apartments in the centre of Newtonmore

Formerly the Craig Mhor Hotel

The Monarch Country Apartments used to be the Craig Mhor Hotel. The hotel closed in 2001 and was then converted into apartments – some of them are rented as holiday accommodation. It was built in 1875 and was one of the first railway hotels in the Highlands. Newtonmore is on the Perth to Inverness line, which opened in 1863.

On our way up to Edinburgh we made one stop – the modern service area at Wetherby, which is all very different from the classic Watford Gap as it was in the 60s, 70s and 80s. I have no idea what Watford Gap is like now as I haven't stopped there in years. 

Anyway there were some interesting reflections at Wetherby, which is on the A1 in Yorkshire.

With diseases such as Foot and Mouth, TB, and of course Mad Cow still presenting a danger to cattle, it's of the utmost importance that farmers monitor the health of their animals, and immediately proceed to isolate any that might be showing symptoms. If you have a herd of over 500 cows, however, keeping track of individuals can be rather tricky. That's why scientists at England's Newcastle University have developed electronic ears tags, that they're trying out on a herd of test cattle.

Each ear tag is equipped with an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip, that transmits a short-range signal. Antennas mounted on the feeding troughs will pick up that signal when the cow comes to feed, with a computer keeping track of the amount of time that elapses until the signal is lost when the cow leaves. In this way, the system can keep track of which cows are eating regularly, and that they're getting enough to eat when they do.

If a cow isn't eating enough - which could indicate that it isn't feeling well - the system notifies the farmer, identifying which cow should be looked at.

The cattle also have pedometers attached to their ankles, which measure how much time the animals spend being active versus lying down - another indicator of their health.

Modern farming systems have minimized the contact between the animal and its keeper," said project co-leader Prof. Ilias Kyriazakis, "so we need to constantly look for ways to re-address the balance."

The Newcastle research was recently published in the Annual Proceedings of the British Society for Animal Science Conference 2011.

Initially presented in 2009 as a rather eccentric architect's idea, one of the world's narrowest houses will be built in Warsaw, Poland. Referred to as an "impossible house" by its designer Jakub Szczesny of Centrala design studio, the house will be 152 cm (60 in) across in its widest spot on the outside. It's located in the center of Warsaw in a small slot between two buildings, and will be officially defined as an art installation, as it does not meet any legal standards of construction in Poland.

The house's interior width varies from 122 cm to 72 cm (48 - 28 in), with a length of 12 m (39 ft) and two floors. The whole living area measures just 14.5 sq meters (156 sq ft). The house's aim in general is to produce creative work conditions for artists and intellectuals representing various fields. It looks like it might be inhabited on a more permanent basis, however, as it was offered to Israeli writer Etgar Keret as a workplace and hideaway - he has already expressed his desire to live in Warsaw, as it was where his parents met. Thus, the house has been dubbed "Hermitage - Etgar Keret's House."

To save space, Centrala architects designed transformable stairs, which lay flat to serve as a floor on the lowest level when not used as an entrance. Upper floors are accessible via ladders. The house will be fully sufficient as a living place with a mini bathroom and bedroom, featuring sewage and water systems (boat-inspired) and powered via the neighboring building. It's based on a steel frame, finished with plywood insulated sandwich panels and Styrofoam, painted in white both on the inside and outside.

The project is scheduled to begin in September, and has received initial funding of US$53,000 from the Warsaw city council, with further funds to be gathered through donations.

Source: ArchDaily via Gazeta

As part of a project aimed at getting people to accept and embrace their own mortality, visual artist Jae Rhim Lee is training mushrooms to decompose human tissue. This doesn't involve cruelly prodding unruly shrooms with electric goads or whipping them into submission, but rather introducing common fungi to the artist's own skin, hair, nail clippings and other body tissue so that they start to digest it. A prototype body suit has been created that's embroidered with spore-infused netting. This would be used in conjunction with a special spore slurry embalming cocktail to break down the body's organic matter and clean out the accumulated toxins, producing a nutrient-rich compost.

Searching for a formaldehyde-free, environmentally-friendly way to break down the body and clean up its lifetime accumulation of toxins after death, Lee is experimenting with two varieties of common mushroom that can be adapted to grow on the artist's own collected hair, nails and skin. She's built a tarpaulin-covered mobile laboratory to cultivate and fine-tune the tissue-digesting fungi, and has also developed a prototype of a spore-laden body suit that the dearly departed would be wrapped in while the mushrooms do their work.

The Infinity Burial Suit prototype is made of organic cotton and covered with an embroidered net of thread which resembles the growth pattern of mushroom mycelium, and that has been infused with mushroom spores. A special cocktail of minerals and spores will also be introduced into the corpse itself, that will encourage mushroom growth from the inside. Special make-up based on the spore slurry is also being considered that will quickly break down and assist the decomposition process.

The project is aiming towards the development of a natural burial system which will facilitate decomposition of the body, remediate accumulated body toxins, and deliver nutrients to plants in the surrounding area. Lee also hopes that the Infinity Burial Project will help raise awareness of the concept of death acceptance, rather than continuing to try and detach ourselves from our inevitable end.

A group called the Decompiculture Society has been formed to support the project and is made up of such people as green burial providers, health-care workers, and curious individuals.

Infinity Burial Project updates are available by registering at the project website.

Source: DVICE

Coffee addicts are well acquainted with the annoying cup sleeves that coffee shop workers slip onto the to-go cups, allegedly to keep them from burning our poor little coffee-craving fingers. But those flimsy pieces of paper don’t actually offer much insulation and tend to slide all over the place (and more than once have resulted in horrific cup holder incidents in this author’s car). Thank goodness someone is working on this global crisis. That someone is Scott Amron, a brilliant designer and engineer who designed Heatswell, a coffee cup with a built-in insulation sleeve.



The Heatswell cups look just like regular cups, but with thin blue bands around the middle. When you pour a hot beverage into one of the cups, the blue band expands into a cloth-like insulation to protect the hands. They can be made to let a company logo pop out into glorious 3D. As awesome as the cups are for the customers, they could even end up saving companies money since they’re cheaper than cups plus separate sleeves. Coffee slingers wouldn’t have to take precious seconds out of the drink-making process to slip those sleeves onto cups, saving the company even more. We approve of any invention that makes drinking coffee even better.

The original Tetris is made of awesome, but we have to admire this real-life version using plastic blocks and an angled table. Tetris Analogico, or Analog Tetris, is of course based on the classic video game with a few big differences. First, the goal of this physical Tetris game isn’t to clear rows by filling them up with tetrominoes; it is to build as solid a structure as possible up to the yellow line on the game board. Maybe even stranger is the fact that a dealer – wearing a cute little visor, no less – slides the blocks down the playing surface to the player.

The players in this video look way too nervous for people who are just playing Tetris, but they are preparing to play in the first Analog Tetris world championship, which would give anyone reason to sweat. The game is both an analog version of the Tetris video game and a nod to the meatspace origin of the video game: a slight more complicated game known as pentominoes.

(Some news from Mark Robertson, Jim's Loire's occasional Epeigné-les-Bois's distinguished correspondent.)

Mark in traditional attire

Photos of the Fête Country on Epeigné website.

Moules Frites (13th July) went very well, promised showers didn’t materialise and the Comité des Fêtes served close to 1400 meals (and 1000 crèpes).

Veraison started at the Clos Chossay for the Cot and Sauvignon a week ago and we’re looking at a very early vendange. We did have some rain (15mm) Saturday the 16th July and a few showers since.

The Moulin de Bourg is not formally for sale, but has had some viewings. (Potential as a small hotel/chambres d'hôtes?)

Sadly the Detour (Civray-en-Touraine) seems to have shut for good.

More positively the restaurant at Le Lézard Vert in Epeigné is busy and its reputation is spreading.

Houses are amazing not only because they are the place where we live but also because they can be designed in many different ways. We can find a house model for almost every kind of preference that we think of.

The roundhouse is a type of house with a circular plan, originally built in western Europe before the Roman occupation using walls made either of stone or of wooden posts joined by wattle-and-daub panels and a conical thatched roof. Roundhouses ranged in size from less than 5m in diameter to over 15m. In the later part of the 20th Century modern new designs of roundhouse eco-buildings started to be built using techniques such as cob, Cordwood or straw bale walls and reciprocal frame green roofs.

A black house is a traditional type of house which used to be common in Highlands of Scotland, the Hebrides, and Ireland. The buildings were generally built with double wall dry-stone walls packed with earth and wooden rafters covered with a thatch of turf with cereal straw or reed. The floor was generally flagstones or packed earth and there was a central hearth for the fire. There was no chimney for the smoke to escape though. Instead the smoke made its way through the roof. The black house was used to accommodate livestock as well as people. People lived at one end and the animals lived at the other with a partition between them.

Teito is the Asturian and Galician name for a type of stone dwelling with a thatched straw or broom roof, found in western Asturias, especially in the Somiedo and Oscos area, and also in Galicia

Source:  roundhouse, black house, Teito

A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the display, cultivation, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The garden can incorporate both natural and man-made materials. The most common form today is known as a residential garden, but the term garden has traditionally been a more general one. Zoos, which display wild animals in simulated natural habitats, were formerly called zoological gardens. Western gardens are almost universally based on plants, with garden often signifying a shortened form of botanical garden.

The Butchart Gardens is a group of floral display gardens in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, Canada, located near Victoria on Vancouver Island. The gardens receive more than a million visitors each year.

photo source

photo source

photo source

photo source

photo sourcephoto source

photo source

photo source

photo source

photo source