I believe it was an experiment to see what alterations people in other cultures would perform to "make her beautiful", not an attempt to get people to give her a photo that made her feel better about herself. Obviously, there were differences, but I think the lack of skill on the part of the photo editors kind of washed them out.

Yes, the dots that don't move are light sensor 'noise' from long-ish exposures with a consumer grade digital camera. Actually, even very expensive digital cameras will have this problem with long exposures (5-30 sec). It has to do with a dark signal (low-light) being recorded differently by some sensors due primarily to electrical noise and differences in the light sensitive photosites (... this is my understanding at least).

If you also have the same problem with low light images on your own project (which you very likely will) and if you were so inclined you could apply a median filter to all images before making them into a video clip ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_filter ). You'll have to monkey with it a little if you're shooting something like stars, though.

Photoshop and other photo editor programs can do this for you, by 'recording' what you apply to an image, then tell it to apply the same recorded technique to all images in a folder (so you really only do it once, then go and make some dinner).

I would also advize setting the exposure manually, if you can, at a level that permits enough detail in low-light but also avoids collecting piles of background noise.

An aside; digital cameras with physically large image sensors are said to be better at avoiding noise problems (so a 7MP camera that has a very small chip will be much noisier than a 5MP camera with photosites that are physically larger and spread further apart).