Editing Final Report 2012 (section)

====Aside: Ear Analysis====
Though the Somerton Man is yet to have been identified, numerous attempts have been made using his relatively rare physiological features. One such feature is the enlarged cymba in relation to cavum of his ears. This is the inverse of the norm, where the cavum tends to be the larger of the two. However, the relative sizes can be distorted by taking pictures at angles other than directly in line with the ear (i.e. with the camera not parallel to the ground at ear height). To investigate this effect initially, we attepted to use the DAVID LaserScanner to do a 3-D scan of a human ear (my own). However, the software is only effective with completely stationary subjects, so our attempts at scanning were not of sufficient quality for our purposes. Instead, Tom took multiple photographs of my ear from different angles, and then we used these to compute the areas of the cymba and cavum visible in each image. These areas were then turned into a ratio (cavum area/cymba area) to generate a single value which could be compared across pictures and represented graphically. The results showed that as the camera angle gets lower relative to the ear, the size of the cymba relative to the cavum increases - so pictures taken from below parallel overestimate the size of the cymba and so could be used to falsely suggest an identity for the Somerton Man. Picture 1 represents the image taken from highest above the ear (i.e. the greatest angle, with parallel to the ear representing  0°, and perpendicular to the ground representing  +90° and  -90° above and below the ear respectively) through to Picture 7 being the lowest image relative to the ear.

[[Image:CymbaCavumGraph.png|thumb|300px|right|Graph showing relationship between cavum/cymba ratio and photo angle.]]
{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center; width: 200px; height: 200px;
|-
!    Picture !! Cymba (pixels) !! Cavum (pixels) !! Cavum/Cymba Ratio 
|-
|    1       || 223   || 2712  || 12.16143498 
|-
|    2       || 473   || 3032  || 6.410147992 
|-
|    3       || 1257  || 3451  || 2.745425617 
|-
|    4       || 1782  || 3718  || 2.086419753 
|-
|    5       || 1905  || 2732  || 1.434120735 
|-
|    6       || 2373  || 1640  || 0.691108302 
|-
|    7       || 1294  || 398   || 0.307573416 
|}