Beards in the operating room are controversial because of their potential to retain and transmit pathogenic organisms. Many bearded orthopedic surgeons choose to wear nonsterile hoods in addition to surgical masks to decrease contamination of the operative field. The goal of this study was to determine whether nonsterile surgical hoods reduce the risk of bacterial shedding posed by beards. Bear...

The essence of the argument of the beard (so-called by some logic textbooks) is the tactic used by a respondent to reply to a proponent, "The criterion you used to define a key term in your argument is vague, therefore your use of this term in your argument is illegitimate, and your argument is refuted." This familiar kind of argument tactic is similar to the much more famous heap (sorites) arg...

What would you look like without a beard? Or how about with a different type of beard? Think of the beards as a layer on top of the face rather than part of the face itself. Using techniques developed by Nguyen, Lalonde, Efros, and De la Torre, the beard layer can be automatically removed by estimating a beardless face from a database of beardless faces. To refine the image synthesis, you can t...

E. P. Anderson is a graduate research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. R. W. Beard is an associate professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602. T. W. McLain is an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah ...