It has been a good week for me..
on monday the final results of NLPAI-ML contest was announced and our team stands second!!
for the benefit of those who are not familiar with the NLP lingo and for those lazy soles like me who dont bother going through links, the contest was to develop a part-of-speech(noun,verb, etc) tagger and phrase(noun phrase, verb phrase, etc) identifier for Hindi. Basically, given an input sentence in Hindi, the system should identify part-of-speech for all words and also find out phrases. For more technically inclined people, our system used statistical approach with maximum entropy models.
well that was a good start..and the end of the week was even better..today I got the notification that our paper has been accepted in globecom 2006!!
well..this time..no explanations for the uninitiated..cos am too happy and in no mood to explain :)

skin deep??

what is beauty? why does a guy get attracted to a 'beautiful' girl? more precisely..y does a guy get attracted more to a 'beautiful' girl than to a 'not-so-beautiful' girl? in what way are attraction and beauty related? and considering that attraction is due to biological reasons, is it possible to say that the concept of beauty is biologically motivated?

well..I understand that to answer all these we need some definitions first...we have to some how quantify beauty..but am no expert and I dont want to digress from my main point..so for the purpose of this post I will go by the 'crude' way of majority voting and accept whatever is the popular choice..

now, coming back to relation between beauty and biology..to understand my point..consider an analogy..in animals the strongest male (strong in whatever sense that species follows) gets to mate..this has a logical reason of propogating possibly the best genes to next generation...other than the possible advantage of the strongest male protecting the female and the child(if the males of that species stay back with the family, that is) .. and since the males rarely get a chance to mate..i guess they go with whatever they get :)
but the point is..the notion of strong has biological underpinnings..similarly..does the concept of beauty have any biological foundations? is a beautiful girl 'better' in some terms which are helpful in the well-being of the child?? and perhaps the evolution and future of the species(humans)?? for example..may be a beautiful girl is more physically fit to take care of the child before/during/after birth..

there is another aspect to beauty..that it lies in the eyes of the beholder..although it is a cliched saying..I have experienced it...even in a small group of 3-4 guys I have found difference in opinion abt how good looking some girl is..if whatever I was pointing out was true..that is, if there are some biological reasons behind some one feeling some girl is beautiful..does this difference in opinion mean that one girl is more suited (biologically) to some guy than others..that is..is this preliminary rejection/preference based on looks also influenced by other stronger reasons?

Disclaimer:I am just wondering aloud..I have no 'beliefs' that a beautiful girl is better in other terms also ..and ofcourse absolutely no data to support any such beliefs :)