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X Marks the Scot by Kaitlyn Dunnett
X Marks the Scot by Kaitlyn Dunnett
In Moosetookalook Maine we meet up with the owner of the Scottish Emporium, Liss MacCrimmon at an auction being held at the old Chadwick mansion. The mansion has been sold to a developer so all the items that belonged to the estate are being auctioned off. Liss is there in the hopes of purchasing a painting that will decorate her store.
Upon winning the painting, Liss soon discovers that a map…
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Thanos; Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga
Thanos; Titan Consumed by Barry Lyga
In a prequel to Marvels Infinity War, Barry Lyga writes a non-canon backstory of Thanos that illustrates how Thanos becomes the intergalactic warlord we know him to be in Marvel’s Avenger: Infinity War THANOS: Titan Consumed.
On Titan, Thanos is born with genetic mutations – purple skin and a series of vertical ridges on his face – that mark him as a deviant. Thanos is also born a genius. This…
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The Flash & Arrow Duology by Clay and Susan Griffith
The Flash & Arrow Duology by Clay and Susan Griffith
We first meet up with Barry Allen (AKA the Flash) as he is going from vehicle to vehicle rescuing citizens from a horrific traffic accident. It is here in the midst of the chaos that we and the Flash first learn that something is not right with the Flash physiologically. This first reveals itself in the form of a tiny glitch that only the Flash is aware of. As we discover, along with the Flash,…
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I'm Back!
I’m Back!
After a very long and very unplanned hiatus, I’m back! And I hope to be able to return to doing semi-regular reviews and updates once again. The reason for my extended absence was due to a combination of both my health and dealings with a terrible roommate. Although I’m still dealing with health issues, the terrible roommate who bears responsibility of sending me into an unyielding depression is…
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“Facebook and Google might not literally be listening in on our conversations, but they are eavesdropping on our lives. These companies have so much data, on so many people, and they can slice and dice it in so many ways that they might as well be monitoring our conversations. Traveling out of town and searching for restaurants? It’s not just that Facebook or Google knows where you are and what you’re searching for, but also if you’re a foodie or a cheapskate, if you’ve “liked” Korean hot pot or Polish pierogi, and what your demographics say about your income, and therefore your budget.”
— Google and Facebook Didn’t End Data Privacy
History of the United States
What happens when digital eyes get the brains to match?
AI + CCTV = Panopticon?
In a web demo, IC Realtime CEO Matt Sailor showed The Verge a version of Ella hooked up to around 40 cameras surveilling an industrial park. He typed in various searches — “a man wearing red,” “UPS vans,” “police cars” — all of which brought up relevant footage in a few seconds. He then narrowed the results by time period and location and pointed out how users can give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to clips to improve the results — just like Netflix.
“Let’s say there’s a robbery and you don’t really know what happened,” says Sailor. “But there was a Jeep Wrangler speeding east afterward. So we go in, we search for ‘Jeep Wrangler,’ and there it is.” On-screen, clips begin to populate the feed, showing different Jeep Wranglers gliding past. This will be the first big advantage of combining AI and CCTV, explains Sailor: making it easy to find what you’re looking for. “Without this technology, you’d know nothing more than your camera, and you’d have to sift through hours and hours and hours of video,” he says.
Ella runs on Google Cloud and can search footage from pretty much any CCTV system. “[It] works well on a one-camera system — just [like] a nanny cam or dog cam — all the way up to enterprise, with a matrix of thousands of cameras,” says Sailor. Users will pay a monthly fee for access, starting at around $7, and scaling up with the number of cameras.
[…]
Odom gives the example of a customer in Idaho who had built a dam. In order to meet environmental regulations, they were monitoring the numbers of fish moving making it over the top of the structure. “They used to have a person sitting with a window into this fish ladder, ticking off how many trout went by,” says Odom. (A fish ladder is exactly what it sounds like: a stepped waterway that fish use to travel uphill.) “Then they moved to video and someone [remotely] watching it.” Finally, they contacted Boulder, which built them a custom AI CCTV system to identify types of fish going up the fish ladder. “We really nailed fish species identification using computer vision,” Odom says proudly. “We are now 100 percent at identifying trout in Idaho.”
If IC Realtime represents the generic end of the market, Boulder shows what a boutique contractor can do. In both cases, though, what these firms are currently offering is just the tip of the iceberg. In the same way that machine learning has made swift gains in its ability to identify objects, the skill of analyzing scenes, activities, and movements is expected to rapidly improve. Everything’s in place, including the basic research, the computing power, and the training datasets — a key component in creating competent AI. Two of the biggest datasets for video analysis are made by YouTube and Facebook, companies that have said they want AI to help moderate content on their platforms (though both admit it’s not ready yet). YouTube’s dataset, for example, contains more than 450,000 hours of labeled video that it hopes will spur “innovation and advancement in video understanding.” The breadth of organizations involved in building such datasets gives some idea of the field’s importance. Google, MIT, IBM, and DeepMind are all involved in their own similar projects.
IC Realtime is already working on advanced tools like facial recognition. After that, it wants to be able to analyze what’s happening on-screen. Sailor says he’s already spoken to potential clients in education who want surveillance that can recognize when students are getting into trouble in schools. “They’re interested in preemptive notifications for a fight, for example,” he says. All the system would need to do would be to look out for pupils clumping together and then alert a human, who could check the video feed to see what’s happening or head over in person to investigate.
Boulder, too, is exploring this sort of advanced analysis. One prototype system it’s working on is supposed to analyze the behavior of people in a bank. “We’re specifically looking for bad guys, and detecting the difference between a normal actor and someone acting out of bounds,” says Odom. To do this, they’re using old security cam footage to train their system to spot aberrant behavior. But a lot of this video is low-quality, so they’re also shooting their own training footage with actors. Odom wasn’t able to go into details, but said the system would be looking for specific facial expressions and actions. “Our actors are doing things like crouching, pushing, over the shoulder glances,” he said.
I’m afraid it won’t work out tonight. I’m just too sleepy right now. And very, very tired of living.
Tohru Fujisawa, Great Teacher Onizuka (via wordsnquotes)
A NEW COMPUTER!
This morning I paid off the lay-a-way I had on a new computer and I’ve just completed setting it up! The computer is a HP All-in-One with a 19.5″ screen. It is the first desktop computer that I’ve ever owned and I am really liking it. The massive size difference between the small laptops that I was using and the new computer aren’t easy to adjust to – but I’ll manage. I immediately downloaded…
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An Update
Since October 8, I have had only two days off. I will have Thanksgiving and Friday off from work, but then my next day off won’t be until Christmas. This is what my busy season at work looks like. I’ll work nearly 30 days in a row with out a day off. This type of work schedule is quite draining. Due to this I have a difficult time finding time to read – and when I do read, I just generally lack…
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No trust is possible in the digital panopticon - nor is it necessary. As an act of faith, it is growing obsolete in view of readily-available information. The society of information is discrediting all belief, all faith. Trust makes relationships to others possible, even when one doesn’t know them well. The possibility of quickly and easily obtaining information damages trust. As such, the contemporary crisis of trust is also medially conditioned. Digital networking makes it so much easier to obtain information that trust, as a social praxis, has less and less meaning. Trust is yielding to control. It follows, then, that our society of transparency is approaching the society of surveillance. Where information is readily and rapidly obtained, the social system switches over from that of trust to control, and transparency. In so doing, it observes the logic of efficiency. Every click that one makes is stored, every step that one takes can be traced. We leave digital tracks everywhere. Our digital life is reflected, point for point, in the Net. The possibility of logging each and every aspect of life is replacing trust with complete control. Big Brother has ceded the throne to Big Data. The total recording of life is bringing the society of transparency to completion.’ Digital surveillance society evinces a particular kind of panoptic structure. Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon consisted of prison cells that were separated from each other. The inmates could not communicate among themselves, and dividing walls ensured that they could not see each other. For their “improvement,” isolation was imposed on them. But not, the occupants of the digital panopticon network and communicate with each other intensively. Total control comes not through spatial and communicative isolation, but through networking, and hypercommunication. The occupants of the digital panopticon are not prisoners. Their element is illusory freedom. They feed the digital with information, by exhibiting themselves and shining a light on every part of their lives. Autoillumination is more efficient than allo-illumination. Herein lies it parallel to autoexploitation. Autoexploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation, because a feeling of freedom accompanies it. In the process of autoillumination, pornographic exhibition and panoptic control merge into one. Control society reaches completion when its inhabitants communicate not because of external constraints, but out of inner need - when fear about giving up one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the urge to put oneself on display, without shame. In other words, it occurs when freedom and control prove indistinguishable.
In The Swarm, by Byung-Chul Han (via fadinglightsarefading)
#Thursday #Quotables You must try to forget all you have learned,' said the old man. 'You must begin to dream. From this time on you must shut your ears to the roaring of the voices. — Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio)
#Thursday @Quotables "I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me.
#Thursday #Quotables "Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die." — Edgar Allan Poe
#Thursday #Quotables
“I just can’t help thinking what a real shake up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems…” And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?” I demanded. They’d die more like mad dogs, I think–snarling & snapping at each other & biting their own tails.” I turned to Castle the elder. “Sir, how does a man die when he’s…
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RAISING RUFUS by David Fulk discussion & review
RAISING RUFUS by David Fulk discussion & review
Martin is on a mission to capture a bug for his extensive collection, which leads him to an open pit mine that, if he were paying attention, he’d know he wasn’t supposed to go in. The bug Martin is pursuing is not being cooperative and when it finally does land it’s not in a safe location. Quickly Martin finds himself in trouble when a rock slide occurs. The rock slide leads however to a…
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#Thursday #Quotables “What use is a god with boundless mercy, sir? You mock me as a pagan, yet the gods of my ancestors pronounce clearly their ways and punish severely when we break their laws.
