"Many of the numbers that measure the performance of hitters, pitchers and fielders are familiar to every fan. But now attention is being turned to a genus of baseball creature rarely examined through statistics: the manager, who sets the lineups, calls for hit-and-runs and otherwise turns the cranks of in-game strategy.
Aside from won-lost records, few metrics quantify what these men actually do and the tendencies they exhibit. But an associate professor of statistics at Swarthmore College is trying to set that right, quite literally putting a face on managerial performance.
The mathematician, Steve C. Wang, applied a method called Chernoff faces, in which data points in many dimensions are presented in a form that people react to more intuitively: the human face."
Blindsight (2006) [0] mentions an improved concept of Chernoff Face (quote below).
I've been toying with the idea (but haven't really done anything) of using AI to keep generating high realistic faces that "change" due to certain variables.
Basic example: a man's face ages as disk space increases or smiles less and less when RAM usage goes up. So with a brief glance to that Chernoff Face I can immediately understand what's going on. At least in theory, the whole thing about humans evolving quite a lot of cognitive power to interpret other human faces.
"""
" I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.
Every last one of them was screaming.
There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.
A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.
"My God, what is this?"
"Statistics." Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. "Rorschach's growth allometry over a two-week period."
"They're faces…"
He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. "Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as—counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."
I felt my jaw clenching. "And the expressions? What do they represent?"
I wrote pretty much this entire article. Does my heart good to see that it's basically intact all these years later, and hasn't been sh—t all over by a driveby deletionist or someone 'cleaning up' the links.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/01/science/0401-...
"Many of the numbers that measure the performance of hitters, pitchers and fielders are familiar to every fan. But now attention is being turned to a genus of baseball creature rarely examined through statistics: the manager, who sets the lineups, calls for hit-and-runs and otherwise turns the cranks of in-game strategy.
Aside from won-lost records, few metrics quantify what these men actually do and the tendencies they exhibit. But an associate professor of statistics at Swarthmore College is trying to set that right, quite literally putting a face on managerial performance.
The mathematician, Steve C. Wang, applied a method called Chernoff faces, in which data points in many dimensions are presented in a form that people react to more intuitively: the human face."