For your viewing pleasure; an interactive version of the results of my test-run. As mentioned earlier, the face and arms are a little distorted due to the process taking a few minutes and the model moving/changing expression. This will not occur in the final system, as all information will be captured in one go.
The model runs as a Java applet, and may take a few moments to load.
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The BBC Reports on a new study recently published in The Lancet, calling the current UK drug category system “unfit for purpose”, and proposing a replacement. The suggested replacement order drugs on the basis of nine factors of harm, such as dependence and social damage, which are weighed to form a single value. As a benchmark of the level of harm, familiar legal drugs tobacco and alcohol have been added to the index (see above). The scientists involved believe that the arbitrary nature of the current system “undermine(s) trust in warnings about the danger of drugs.”
The Academy of Medical Sciences group is currently reviewing drug research for the government, and plans to put its recommendations to ministers in the autumn. However, it does not appear the government is planning on acting on any new recommendations:
Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said: “We have no intention of reviewing the drug classification system.
“Our priority is harm reduction and to achieve this we focus on enforcement, education and treatment.”
It is likely that government adoption of the new category system would be blocked on the basis of the incongruity between social acceptance and legality of drugs versus the drugs’ harm. It is also possible that the government is worried that such information would lead to a shift in drug use from controlled and taxed drugs to those that provide them no revenue. The UK government has significantly higher taxation on alcohol and tobacco than most other European countries, and such tax is a significant source of revenue. In the period of 2005-2006, the UK collected a combined £16 billion from tobacco and alcohol tax.
I’m not a big fan of many of the Feminist Blogs posts I’ve come across - suffering from habitual ranting, in the sense that they are reactionary and angry. Any possible constructive point gets muddied with arguments ad hominem, and often fail the reversal test. While anger, outrage, exasperation at social injustices are understandable, they aren’t productive. We all have opinions - some we hold strongly - and we are all prepared to shout angrily against our detractors, but the loudness of one’s voice is not proportional to the merit of one’s argument.
Having said that, I spotted an astonishing article on AskMen.com entitled “Etiquette Of A Gentleman”, that was linked to via Lifehacker. The list of rules of etiquette included
Coincidently, I had just come from reading a Pandagon’s take on holding doors for a women, which pointed out that holding doors open was no longer practice as a patronizing part of man-woman etiquette. It amazes me that such an anachronistic guide could be published without irony, and of course the position of a “gentleman” is squarely in this world of the past where holding doors open is a meaningful gesture of gender relationships.
For the record I hold doors open for men and women, and occasionally unintentionally forced people to run to it by holding the door from an unreasonable distance.
I’ve just completed a quite successful test run of an idea for modelling people in 3D. There were some slight problems, but these were all caused by movement between shots, which will not happen in the final system. As a general note, I have realised I will need to get quite wide-angle cameras in order to capture the entire registration matt and model. The images in the Flickr set give a good idea of the process.