A blind Bay Area woman conquered snowboarding and the Boston Marathon. Now she's taking on Kilimanjaro
The strenuous feat is expected to be just the latest accomplishment for the never-say-quit Harvard graduate who has learned to snowboard and completed the Boston Marathon
At age 9, Kristie Colton was diagnosed with Stargardt disease — a genetic condition that affects the central portion of the retina and leads to gradual vision loss. School teachers noticed that she was resigned and unresponsive in class as she concealed her vision symptoms as best she could. What began as a subsequent visit to the eye doctor for a pair of glasses ended up becoming a life-altering diagnosis.
'I put a lot of mental energy into trying to hide it, but it did become harder and harder to hide,' said Colton, now a 28-year-old Mountain View resident. 'The hard part about degenerative eye disease is you don't wake up one day and realize 'Oh, I should use my cane now for the rest of my life.''
Colton, however, was attracted to athletics from a young age. She joined the National Ability Center in Utah, which specialized in adaptive sports, so that she could learn to snowboard with accommodations.
She would later attend Harvard, where she met Jungyeon Park and Grace Eysenbach, who both participated in the Boston athletic scene. Colton and Park were running partners, and the former trained the latter as a guide for longer routes, with Park acting as a responsive set of eyes. The pair ran the Boston Marathon last year.
'Kristie was the first person that I had met who was blind,' Park said. 'She spent like two weeks teaching me how to snowboard, and I became proficient enough to become a guide… We started guiding each other, and then running.'
Colton and Park would later help to establish the Vorden Initiative, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate sighted individuals to assist those who are blind, including teaching them to become an athletic guide and offering educational resources to bolster partnerships between blind and sighted people.
'Resources are rather limited on the internet,' Park said. 'There's a lot of nonprofits and resources for blind people to do things a certain way or to learn new things, but there really isn't a resource for sighted people to become allies.'
At an adaptive sports session early this year, the group made contact with Walt Raineri, a former paralympian in sailing with retitnitus pigmentosa — a hereditary disease that attacks the retinas. A few months later, Raineri invited Colton — and her two friends as guides — to a treacherous weeklong hike up Mount Kilimanjaro.
'My immediate gut reaction was, 'No,'' Colton said. 'He was just telling us more about the trip, and he gave all these details, and it kind of dawned on us that this is going to be a really once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.'
Eleven blind climbers, each accompanied by one sighted individual — aside from Colton, who has two guides in Park and Eysenbach — will hike to the near-20,000-feet peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania on Raineri's exhibition. Before the pandemic, around 30,000 people attempted the hike each year with a 66% success rate, including several visually impaired climbers.
To prepare for the climb, Colton and her guides have focused on heavy cardio training. They recently began their first practice hikes.
'I'm still working out how to use my hiking poles to sort of feel the ground, and I think guiding looks really different going uphill versus downhill for me with all the different lighting conditions on the trail,' Colton said. 'Grace and I have been working out the kinks there… I'll be going pretty much every weekend.'
The trip will not only be personally significant, but will also be an opportunity to educate on the condition of blindness, both Park and Eysenbach said.
'One of the things that I have really enjoyed about being a part of guiding Kristie is meeting people who have a spectrum of visual impairments, and encouraging other people to realize that it is such a wide spectrum, and how it affects people is very different,' Eysenbach said.
The group will begin their trip in late September and begin their ascent on Oct. 1, Park said.
Colton said she could not have imagined such a possibility when she sat in school, feigning that she had no answers to teachers' questions simply because she could not see the board.
'When I was younger, I really didn't know what my disease was going to lead to in my life… I didn't know what my life was going to amount to,' Colton said. 'I am a 28 -year-old woman who lost her eyesight and yet I get to live independently with some of my best friends… Now these best friends get to go on all kinds of adventures with me, from backpacking the Grand Canyon to running the Boston Marathon, and now Kilimanjaro.'
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New York Times
30 minutes ago
- New York Times
Does Your Face Need Work? She'll Tell You.
Imagine this: You are a person of a certain age who is bothered by the sagging skin on your neck. On Instagram, an image of the newly rejuvenated Kris Jenner jumps out at you. For as long as she and the Kardashians have been famous, their faces have made an argument against the idea that God created us as we should be. But now, Ms. Jenner looks dewier than her daughters. Even if you lament the family's effects on American culture, it is hard not to admire the surgical handiwork of Steven M. Levine, a famed Park Avenue doctor who Ms. Jenner readily names as the one responsible for her face-lift. Unfortunately, you cannot get a consult. An automated voice message at Dr. Levine's office states that he is accepting new patients only via referral. You might, at this point, head to Reddit and look through scores of reviews for other plastic surgeons whose patients walk away pleased with what they regard to be a similar result. Or you might schedule an appointment with Melinda Farina, a 44-year-old former dental assistant who over the last decade has become one of the most significant players on the plastic surgery scene. Unlike Dr. Levine, Ms. Farina does not perform face-lifts, tummy tucks or nose jobs. Instead, she is a consultant who calls herself the Beauty Broker and charges around $750 for an hourlong consultation, after which she connects clients to the surgeons she thinks best fit their aesthetic and can work within their budgets. (She also has a team of eight consultants who work for her; their fees start at $350 per consult.) From there, she may handle myriad tasks associated with surgery — among them translating medical jargon, soothing frayed nerves and handling aftercare. A decade ago, prime players within the beauty industry were busy selling the idea that the best way to reverse the aging process was not with invasive surgeries but with a variety of injections and laser treatments. Recently, the pendulum has swung back. Part of this, doctors say, is because of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which can lead to sagging skin after weight loss that cannot be easily addressed without surgery. But it is also because of the proliferation of face-lifts, nose jobs and eyelid surgeries featured on Instagram and TikTok. With more awareness and information comes more choice and more uncertainty. Enter: Ms. Farina. She has benefited from the secrecy and shame that was once associated with plastic surgery, marketing herself as a person capable of helping clients find the best physicians. She has appeared on her client Gwyneth Paltrow's podcast, talking about her increasing antipathy toward fillers. She has spoken before scores of surgeons at some of the plastic surgery industry's biggest conferences. And she is doing everything she can to ensure that even as high-profile people begin to speak more openly about the work they've had done, her middle-person services remain in demand. Ms. Farina has also made waves by arriving at the party with her own set of knives. She has gotten into legal spats with beauty influencers. She has publicly accused two of the industry's best-known doctors of botching procedures. (One of them sued her. The case was settled out of court.) 'We sign NDAs with all our celebs — and discretion and privacy is the most important thing all the time,' Ms. Farina said on a recent afternoon, sitting at a banquette at the Surrey Hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She was clad in a white Balmain skirt with black horses, a rose gold Rolex President dangling from her wrist as she picked at an artichoke salad. At her side, a gold Prada scrunchie was attached to the gold strap of her black Hermès Kelly bag. Ms. Farina likes to say that her approach is less rather than more. 'I'm a shoemaker with no shoes,' is how she tried to make the point that she is not overly reconstructed, before allowing that she has had certain things done: a nose job at 19, a fat transfer to volumize her breasts at 36, a breast reduction at 41. Fillers and lip injections ('biggest regret,' she said) at some point as well. She did also have shoes; they were four-inch Jimmy Choos. Earlier that day, Ms. Farina had accompanied a client ('they're not patients; I don't have a medical degree,' she said) to a surgery. The client was from Dubai. Ms. Farina said the client was in New York for a face-lift and hair transplant. 'You gotta get them in, get them out, get them back to Dubai and make sure everything goes well and that there's no issues at all,' she said. 'So we have a whole post-op team taking care of her. She's a pretty prominent figure.' Of course, Ms. Farina could not say who she was. From the Ferry to Park Avenue 'I come from a blue-collar family, not the 1 percent, and that's at the heart of who I am,' said Ms. Farina, who grew up on Staten Island. Her mother ran a wellness center at a hospital; her father worked in construction. She said that after high school, she went to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey but transferred after less than two years to New York University, though she did not graduate. She began working at the Upper East Side cosmetic dentistry practice of Dr. Larry Rosenthal, with the idea being that she would become a dental technician. As is the case for many people with well-tended personal brands, the details of her origin story aren't always consistent. She's in the business of self-improvement, and in telling her own story, there is a certain amount of retroactive reinvention. Her knowledge of her subject is encyclopedic; her awareness of how easy it is to check facts, occasionally less so. On her website, Ms. Farina says that she 'brings a robust educational background from N.Y.U. and Columbia University' to her work in 'the medical and dental aesthetics fields.' New York University's College of Dentistry said it had no record of her having studied there. Columbia University would not comment on whether she had taken courses there, citing privacy concerns. (Ms. Farina said she wasn't surprised that N.Y.U. couldn't find a record: 'I was there for two or three months.') As she tells it, while working for Dr. Rosenthal she realized that if she was going to be in the business of optimizing people's looks, she need not confine herself to their mouths. Encouraged in part by Dr. Rosenthal, she began to think about becoming a consultant. 'He said, 'I'll introduce you to people,' she recalled. The consultancy she formed eventually became Beauty Brokers Incorporated. She charged clients for her services and also received payment from physicians to be in her referral network in the early days. One of the first people she began referring patients to was Dr. Jonathan Sherwyn, an Upper East Side surgeon. She sent him patients seeking breast augmentations and began working out of his office. (He also performed both her breast procedures.) Another was Dr. Sam Rizk, who works on Park Avenue and gave Ms. Farina a nose job when she was 19. In Dr. Rizk's waiting room on a coffee table is a binder of testimonials from happy patients. Buried inside is a note from Ms. Farina typed up shortly after she went into consulting. 'It has been 2 years since you re-contoured my nose and the compliments continue to pour in!' she wrote to 'Sam,' ending the note by saying: 'I knew from the second I met you … that you were 'the one' ha ha. None of the others could compare!' Sitting inside his office recently, eating a danish, shortly after completing a deep-plane face-lift, Dr. Rizk explained her success by saying: 'She knows her stuff better than some doctors do. And she has balls of steel.' The Skeptics, Haters and Fans 'When you're working with surgeons on the Upper East Side and dealing with this type of clientele, it rubs off on you,' said Ms. Farina, who now lives in Weehawken, N.J., in a $2.5 million house that she rents, along with her golden retriever, Eddie Vedder. She said that the rarefied world she moves in for work has had some impact on other areas of her life. 'Everyone would say, 'She's high maintenance,'' she said. 'And the men felt like they could not afford dating me.' She does now have a boyfriend, who works in software development. She regularly posts photos of him on Instagram, but declined to name him. Life is busy, controversy follows, she acknowledges. 'There are skeptics, there are haters, there are people who believe I do not belong, and there are surgeons who think what I'm doing is absolutely necessary,' Ms. Farina said. Dr. Elizabeth Chance, a leading surgeon in Charlottesville, Va., credits Ms. Farina with enveloping her patients in a 'blanket of love' and 'culling her network' when surgeons fall short. Dr. Theda Kontis of Baltimore, the president of the American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, calls Ms. Farina a person who takes advantage of legal 'loopholes' in a barely regulated industry, while preying upon the insecurities of potential patients. 'She creates the illusion that the doctors don't really know what you need,' Dr. Kontis said in an interview. Ms. Farina attributes this 'mishmash of feedback' to the fact that the business is still a 'old boys' club' within which she occupies a complicated niche as a person who drums up business for the doctors but, ultimately, answers to those who seek out their services and don't always walk away happy. Ms. Farina is known for going into the operating room and watching surgeries — a practice that is not illegal but is certainly unconventional — and for telling doctors when she thinks their fees are too high. That doesn't always go over well with the big egos of her industry. 'If you ask a prominent plastic surgeon to name the best three in the country, most would be hard-pressed to name the other two,' said Dr. Steven Teitelbaum, a Los Angeles plastic surgeon, to whom Ms. Farina refers many complicated 'revisions' — adjustments that enhance or correct past surgical work — but few new patients. 'She told me, 'You're too expensive,'' he said. Ms. Farina is not shy about publicly criticizing people in the field. And she has also been sued by prominent physicians. In 2013, Dr. Raffi Hovsepian, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon claimed in a lawsuit that in 2012, he paid Ms. Farina $10,200 to join her referral network. Dr. Hovsepian said that in exchange, Ms. Farina was supposed to refer him a minimum of three patients over a year. The referrals, he said in his complaint, never came to him. As Ms. Farina presents it, that was not the arrangement. She says she usually recommends three or four doctors to each client, who then picks the one she or he likes best. 'It's not my fault if you can't close the deal,' she said. The suit never made it to court, and Ms. Farina still sends patients his way. 'He's a good surgeon,' she said, showing off a cache of emails from her office to his over the past few years. 'Maybe not the nicest person. But I love his work.' ('I'm not interested in being part of your article,' said Dr. Hovsepian, when reached for comment.) In 2019, Ms. Farina was sued by Dr. Simon Ourian, a Los Angeles cosmetic dermatologist to Lady Gaga and several Kardashians. It happened after she called him a 'fraud hack' on Instagram. Dr. Ourian, who had his license revoked in 2009 by the Medical Board of California but was ultimately placed on probation until 2013, never worked directly with Ms. Farina. He claimed in his lawsuit that she was 'steering clients/patients to aesthetic and cosmetic professionals who pay 'membership fees'' to her firm, while 'disparaging other doctors.' Ultimately, Ms. Farina settled out of court. In an interview, Dr. Ourian said he could not discuss Ms. Farina because of a nondisparagement agreement. Then he called her a 'good friend and a bad enemy.' 'I agree,' she said. The Magic Potion Last year, Demi Moore starred in 'The Substance,' a sci-fi horror movie about a woman who takes a potion to restore her youth. While she was racing down red carpets on her way to a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination, conversation swirled over who — if anyone — was responsible for her enviable real-life face. On Instagram, a Texas beauty influencer named Dana Omari claimed without evidence that Ms. Moore had received a face-lift courtesy of Dr. Levine, Ms. Jenner's surgeon. Soon after, the Beauty Broker — who said she 'can neither confirm nor deny' that Ms. Moore is a client — pounced. She posted about the scourge of sensationalist plastic surgery claims online and cited Ms. Omari's post as a prime example. Ms. Omari replied by telling her Instagram following of 250,000 that Ms. Farina was nothing more than a 'dental hygienist who gets paid on both ends to book patients with plastic surgeons she says are in her 'little black book.' And allegedly she gets kickbacks.' ('I said allegedly,' Ms. Omari reiterated in an interview.) So Ms. Farina sued Ms. Omari for defamation. In response, lawyers for Ms. Omari produced a 2019 email apparently sent by Ms. Farina to doctors within her network proposing a compensation system of sorts for referrals: 'Going forward, our clients (the patients) will pay us directly 10 percent of the overall surgical fee. All we ask is that our surgeons grant our clients a 10 percent discount as a courtesy.' Ms. Farina said that she sent that email to four people 'testing the waters for a new business model' but that it never came to fruition. She also said that it has been several years since she received any payment from doctors. Also introduced into evidence by Ms. Omari's lawyer were photographs of numerous Christmas gifts that Ms. Farina had posted on Instagram from various doctors. One example: 'So pretty! Thank You So Much Dr. L,' she captioned a story that contained a photograph of a black quilted Dior handbag that generally retails for north of $3,000. The suit is ongoing. Dr. Scott Hollenbeck, the president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, who does not know Ms. Farina, said that he didn't have much issue with a consultant providing what amounts to marketing services for doctors. 'Merely recommending a doctor doesn't feel quite as wrong as saying 'You should get a lower blepharoplasty.'' But as it happens, that was exactly what Ms. Farina was recommending on a recent Wednesday afternoon. She was sitting in front of her laptop, talking over Zoom to Nancy, a 44-year-old small business owner from St. Paul. Nancy agreed to let a reporter watch her consultation with Ms. Farina on the condition that her last name not be used. Nancy had sharp, angular features and a sample-size waist. She looked a lot like Bethenny Frankel. She was upset about a hollowing out that she believed was taking place below her eyes. 'You don't need a face-lift, so that's the good news,' Ms. Farina said. 'I'm not ready for that,' Nancy replied, nodding. 'No, you look great. But I do notice there's some hollowing going on,' Ms. Farina said. Gesturing at Nancy, she focused on the 'area beneath her eyes. 'That needs to be re-draped and repositioned,' she said. Then she got technical: 'So we do what's called a transconjunctival blepharoplasty, which is a procedure where they go under the lid and they make a little incision and lift that fat pad up and reposition it.' Within minutes, Ms. Farina had a list of plastic surgeons, and was dispensing information about their prices, though she noted her ability to negotiate lower ones. Of course, as much of this information becomes available on the internet, some of Ms. Farina's detractors argue that the same platform that has enabled her rise may ultimately be her undoing. But so far, she sees little evidence for this being true. 'Kris Jenner is not even my client,' she said later. 'And when she came out about her face-lift, my inbox blew up. We got over 700 inquiries that day.' Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Boston Globe
6 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Eli Dershwitz has represented the US in fencing in three Olympics. Now he's focused on inspiring the next generation.
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up And to do it at Zeta. Advertisement 'It feels like the 'Circle of Life' song from the Lion King,' Dershwitz said in a recent telephone call from New York, where he and Karen are packing up their lives in advance of their September wedding. 'It's poetic, meaningful. I spent thousands and thousands of hours under this club, under this name, looking at these posters, this artwork, and imagining being on the other side. Now I can say to these young fencers, 'I stood where you stood, started where you started, not as a national champion or Olympian, but by focusing on small changes, making progress over the years.' Advertisement 'I grew up around here. My friends and family are here. This is my home. I want to try and motivate these next generations of kids, not just to do what I did, but to accept and appreciate the values and characteristics for the community that impacted me as a kid.' Eli Dershwitz (left) took on Hungary's Csanad Gemesi during the Paris Olympics. Andrew Medichini/Associated Press Fencing has been his companion since 2004, with quite the impressive résumé. In 2015, Dershwitz became the first American men's saber fencer to win an individual title, at the U20 Worlds in Uzbekistan. In 2023, he won gold at the senior world championships in Milan, one of only two American men to do that. He won multiple NCAA titles at Harvard, and has represented the United States at the past three Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, and Paris. And while he's not ready to say his competitive career is finished, not with the 2028 Summer Olympics being in Los Angeles, for now, his focus is on Zeta. Having spent four post-college years as an assistant coach at Harvard, and then combining his own training in New York with coaching at a local gym and clinics, Dershwitz knows the time is right to shift gears. 'I think definitely my greatest strength and the thing I've been able to utilize the most for success as a coach is my ability to connect with a lot of these students,' he said. 'I'm on the younger side with regard to high-level coaches in the US, I grew up in the area, went to public school here, went through the college recruitment process, managing my academic career with athletic career along with social time, family time, traveling to tournaments. Having recently dealt with that and training at a high level gives me a unique perspective to relate to the kids, to try to motivate them, dealing with issues of perseverance, fatigue or anxiety. Advertisement 'I can say that I was in your shoes and these are tricks that work for me, how to frame the struggle in your mind and push through and overcome. These are worries that I can have real conversations about with students and parents. That, mixed with my top-tier knowledge or high-level training in the sport, puts me in a really good spot to help athletes turn into more mature athletes, students, and grow into citizens of the community.' Let's look back at Eli Dershwitz's world championship day! 📹 Video by SwordSport Production Team — USA Fencing (@USAFencing) And beyond. Dershwitz has long appreciated fencing's global nature, and its deep historical roots. Before heading to Paris for the Olympics, he shared how much the trip resonated with the 'From a very young age having a wider group to become friends with, train with, practice with, have fun with, was really good for me, expanding my comfort zone,' he said. 'In my younger teenage years, I got to travel more, in my high school years, traveling internationally, the ability to meet fencers and coaches and refs from all over the world. It was a huge privilege and a huge honor and something I did not take for granted.' Time to close one circle, and Advertisement 'I love this sport, I love competing, I love coaching and mentoring, and I want to dedicate my life to this, ' he said, 'so anyone who wants to take a chance on a younger but super-hard-working diligent coach, reach out and we'll figure out what's best for you and make a long-term plan.' Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
The app will see you now: New AI scans faces to predict diseases, disorders, and early death
Facial recognition apps detect pain in dementia patients, trauma in children, and diagnose infections. I tried Harvard's FaceAge app using photos to estimate biological age and, in turn, overall health. This article is part of "Transforming Treatments," a series on medical innovations that save time, money, or discomfort. I look like I'm about 28. Or maybe 38. That's according to Harvard's "FaceAge" algorithm, which uses photos to determine a person's supposed biological age — meant as a quick proxy for wellness. This app is one of several new efforts to turn selfies into diagnostic tools. There's one for diagnosing nasal congestion, another for seasonal allergies, and a few safe driving apps that watch your face for signs of drowsiness. Some face scanners measure pain, illness, or signs of autism. One aims to track PTSD in kids to spare them from having to talk about traumatic issues over and over again. Since 2022, facial recognition for the clinic has blossomed, alongside rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and chipmaking. This year, new face technologies promising to diagnose diseases earlier, treat patients better, and ostensibly predict early death are taking off. "It's a medical biomarker, not just a gimmick," said FaceAge creator and radiologist Dr. Raymond Mak, who's leading the team at Harvard and Mass General Brigham developing facial recognition technology that Business Insider recently tested. Ethics experts worry about what we're barreling into, without better understanding exactly what this tech is measuring, or why. "AI is entering these spaces fast," Malihe Alikhani, an assistant professor of machine learning at Northeastern University, told Business Insider. "It's about making sure that it is safe and beneficial." Your face is a reflection of your health Our faces say a lot about our physical, mental, and biological health. While this is new territory for computers, humans have read faces to make quick judgments for thousands of years. Research suggests we developed a third type of cone in our eyeballs about 30 million years ago, specifically to scan each other's faces for signs of health or sickness. That cone allows us to read faces in shades of red and green. "People look at rosy cheeks and they see that as a sign of health. When we want to draw a face that's sick, we'd make it green," Professor Brad Duchaine, a neuroscientist who studies facial perception at Dartmouth, told Business Insider. It's true: A flush can indicate good blood flow, or high levels of carotenoids in the skin from fruits and veggies we eat. Dr. Bahman Guyuron, a plastic surgeon in Cleveland, studied identical twins with different lifestyles to see how factors like smoking and stress impact their faces. Consistently, the twin with more stress and more toxins in their bodies looked several years older. Sagging skin and wrinkles can reflect poorer internal health, with lower collagen production and higher levels of stress hormones. Conversely, studies show that superaging centenarians — whose organs and cells are working unbelievably efficiently — look, on average, about 27 years younger than they are. I tried a face scanning app One of the first medical applications of face-reading tech was Face2Gene, an app first released in 2014 that helps doctors diagnose genetic conditions. Studies suggest Face2Gene is better than human doctors at extracting information from a person's face and then linking those features to a specific genetic issue. The Australian app PainChek has tracked the pain of nursing home patients since 2017. It is mostly used for dementia patients who may not be able to verbalize pain. In a recent announcement, the company said it is awaiting FDA approval and could be cleared by September 2025. I wanted to try one of these apps for myself. Since I write a lot about aging, I decided to try FaceAge, Harvard's new app that ostensibly measures your biological age. It is not yet available for public use; it is being used as a research tool for now. The ultimate goal, researchers say, would be to use selfies to do better diagnostic work. FaceAge could one day improve cancer treatments by tailoring them to a patient's unique biology and health status, or maybe even help flag other health issues before they happen. The FaceAge algorithm pays attention to two main areas of the face: the nasal labial folds, from the nose to the lips, and the temples between the eyes and ears. The idea is to spot premature or accelerated signs of aging that could be a red flag for internal problems. "If your face age is accelerating quicker than your chronological age, it's a very poor prognostic sign," Mak, one of the developers behind FaceAge, told Business Insider. I submitted four photos to the app. In the darkest, blurriest photo I provided, the app thought I was 27.9 years old — a little more than a decade below my actual age. The picture I took with no makeup on, and my face thrust out into the bright mid-day sunshine, gave me the oldest FaceAge, even though all of these pictures were taken within the past year. One selfie taken in the dark of winter and another on a cloudy day ended up somewhere in the middle, making me look young-ish. Humans (and face-scanning apps) use the proliferation of lines, sharp edges, and more details to assess someone's age. That's why people look younger in blurry photos — or with surgery or makeup to smooth over their wrinkles. In "a really, really, really blurry photograph of a face, what you've done is you've stripped out all of the high spatial frequency information," neuroscientist Bevil Conway, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, told Business Insider. Direct light, like a ring light, can help mask old age. The midday sun, coming down on my face from above, had the opposite effect. So, what did I learn from my experiment? FaceAge told me I'm looking great (and young!) and should keep up my healthy habits. Still, its assessments were all over the place. Face Age is confident each time you run it, but that confidence masks the fact that it can't really tell how well I'm aging over time. Is my body 10 years younger than me, or just one? While I do eat a relatively healthy diet and exercise regularly, I'm curious how much the differences in lighting affected my results. The ethics are blurry Even if it's something as seemingly innocuous as measuring your age, bringing AI into the doctor's office is fraught with ethical conundrums. "We have been through a few years now of companies coming up with these systems, selling them to hospitals, selling them to doctors, selling them to border protection, and then after a while they're like, 'oops,'" Alikhani, the AI ethics expert, said. Readers may remember the uproar over the highly controversial Stanford study that developed "gaydar" AI in 2017. The app purported to spot someone's sexual orientation. Critics said it was just picking up on social and environmental cues that had nothing to do with sexuality, like makeup, facial hair, and sun exposure. Another team of researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University developed an algorithm that promised to identify criminals and terrorists, or people with law-breaking tendencies. These efforts feel uncomfortably close to the pseudoscientific practice of physiognomy, a deeply flawed practice that's been used for centuries to justify racism and bigotry, Alikhani said. Facial expression is highly context-dependent, varying not only based on a person's gender and culture, but also by the individual and the moment, she said. "Better healthcare involves patients more in the decision-making," Alikhani said. "What are we doing if we're putting that in the hands of AI?" Read more from the Transforming Treatments series: In an era of quiet glow-ups, no-prep veneers are the new 'it' cosmetic procedure Colonoscopies are no fun. These at-home colon cancer screenings offer a shortcut. Skin tightening is getting more advanced — and less painful. Here are the new techniques replacing facelifts. Read the original article on Business Insider
