“FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like Minority Report.
But of bars in Chicago?
SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.
As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.”
In his smart Awl article which explains why the utterly gross McRib sandwich likely only makes occasional appearances on the McDonald’s menu, Willy Staley also recalls why the sandwich originally came to be. An excerpt:
“The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets. According to this history of the sandwich, Chef Arend created the McRib because McDonald’s simply could not find enough chickens to turn into the McNuggets for which their franchises were clamoring. Chef Arend invented something so popular that his employer could not even find the raw materials to produce it, because it was so popular. ‘There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken,’ he told Maxim. Well, Chef Arend had recently been to the Carolinas, and was so inspired by the pulled pork barbecue in the Low Country that he decided to create a pork sandwich for McDonald’s to placate the frustrated franchisees.” (Thanks Longform.)
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McNugget rage surveillance video, 2010:
Ray Kroc explains why the chain is called “McDonald’s”:
It’s easy to get robots to walk, but difficult to get them to walk like humans. An excerpt from Physorg.com:
“AIST researchers, like other scientific groups dedicated to robotics, have been working hard to create the ‘perfect’ walking robot and to design walking technologies that can make their robots most closely resemble the way humans walk.
This has not been easy. Developing a robot to walk like a human has been a challenge for engineers, but that has only motivated more work toward this end in robotics.
The AIST researchers focused on a few key areas of the robot to improve results. The robot’s toes now support the legs better during each stride, and the legs straighten out more.
Details about how they got ‘Miim’ to walk in a more human fashion than in previous iterations are in the paper, ‘Human-Like Walking with Toe Supporting for Humanoids,’ by Kanako Miura, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Fumio Kanehiro, Shuuji Kajita, Kenji Kaneko, and Kazuhito Yokoi.”
From a 1978 Playboy Interview with Ted Turner, who was always batshit crazy, probably a necessary personality type if you aspire to turn a billboard advertising business into a billion-dollar cable TV company:
“PLAYBOY: It wasn’t long before you took over the company, right?
TURNER: That’s right. My father committed suicide when I was 24 years old. Blew his brains out. I think he made the mistake of limiting his horizons. When he was a boy in Mississippi, he had told his mother that someday he would make $1,000,000. And when he did that, he had nowhere to go from there. When he killed himself, he was extended for about $5,000,000 or $6,000,000 and had assets of only about $2,000,000. But the situation was not hopeless.
PLAYBOY: How did you handle it?
TURNER: Well, just before he shot himself, he had actually sold the company. But I wanted to keep it. So I had to return the down payment, plus a penalty to the guys who had bought it, to annul the deal. Everybody said I was crazy. I could have taken that money and started something else. Those were very bad times in outdoor advertising. Television was killing billboards.
PLAYBOY: How did you survive?
TURNER: By hustling. We doubled our profits at a time when the industry went down 16 percent. But it’s fun, too, getting up at five in the morning to get out and install a new sign before the traffic gets started. And painting billboards, you’re Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, except that you don’t have to work lying on your back. One night, the guys were doing this 50-foot billboard with the Coppertone girl stretched out across it, you know. So they just left off the bikini. Painted on tits and a nice bush at the right spot, see. But we made them dress her before it went out of the warehouse. After about four years in the business, I could have retired.
PLAYBOY: Why didn’t you?
TURNER: I heard about a television station for sale. It was Channel 17, a U.H.F. independent in Atlanta. When I bought that, everybody just hooted at me. The station was really at death’s door–we lost about $2,000,000 in the first two years. I didn’t bullshit anybody: I told them I didn’t know anything about TV. But now we’re socko. We’ve got all the reruns, all the sports in Atlanta and people love us. Our movie inventory includes about half of the 6000 or 7000 movies ever made. We even have news: It comes on at four in the morning. Our news director gets pies thrown in his face a lot.”
The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.
Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people
And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.,,Our hands feel things, and our hands manipulate things. Why aim for anything less than a dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate?” (ThanksBrowser.)
British researchers will spend the next decade figuring out if Charles Babbage is truly the father of the programmable computer. From a John Markoff article in the New York Times:
“Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed.
Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card.
What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?”
“DM: The World Wide Web is literally becoming a global phenomenon. Are you optimistic about it staying free?
SJ: Yes, I am optimistic about it staying free but before you say it’s global too fast, its estimated that over one third of the total Internet traffic in the world originates or destines in California. So I actually think this is a pretty typical case where California is again on the leading edge not only in a technical but cultural shift. So I do expect the Web to be a worldwide phenomenon, distributed fairly broadly. But right now I think it’s a U.S. phenomenon that’s moving to be global, and one which is very concentrated in certain pockets, such as California.
DM: 85% of the world doesn’t have access to a telephone yet. The potential is there and you’re pretty optimistic.” (Thanks Open Culture.)
In Current Intelligence,futurist Scott Smith argues that the age of large-scale DIY warfare is upon us. An excerpt:
“Fast forward to today, and we aren’t just talking about roadside bombs. Now, sophisticated weapons, transport and even surveillance fuel international and intra-national cat and mouse games between those with power and those with a roll of duct tape,. Internet access and a spare diesel engine. A full-on global conflict is brewing in hardware and it parallels, in an unsettling way, the expanding hot war in geo-economic hacking. Mexican drug gangs have gained notoriety for developing ‘tanks’ to combat security forces, no doubt inspired by the Colombian narco-submarine business, which, while only in existence for a few years, can now boast in its arsenals 100-foot-plus craft capable of travelling 30 feet below the ocean’s surface from home ports to the Mexican coast.
The poster boy of this movement is the unmanned drone, which has become the focus of amateur weapons builders as well as harmless hobbyists. With the increased use of drones by Western militaries, and an expected boom in ‘legitimate’ drone building (analysts at the Teal Group put global spending on drone development at an estimated US$94 billion by 2021), everyone wants to get involved. A recent Brookings paper details the threats of reduced size and cost of drones, pointing out that ‘in some respects today’s drones are more similar to smartphones than to cruise missiles.’ In essence, small drones today are little more than mobile apps with wings, and as such can be created in short order with a few simple parts. Teal estimates upwards of 70 countries are involved in producing drone technology, including a push in China to match US capability.
The line between official and underground blurs a bit more every day.”
In “The King of Human Error” in Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis has an excellent profile of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who inspired the Moneyball revolution–even though Lewis realized Kahneman’s influence only in retrospect. An excerpt in which the journalist explains the surprising reach of Kahneman and his late professional partner, Amos Tversky:
“Kahneman and Tversky were psychologists, without a single minor-league plate appearance between them, but they had found that people, including experts, unwittingly use all sorts of irrelevant criteria in decision-making. I’d never heard of them, though I soon realized that Tversky’s son had been a student in a seminar I’d taught in the late 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, and while I was busy writing my book about baseball, Kahneman had apparently been busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Economics. And he wasn’t even an economist. (Tversky had died in 1996, making him ineligible to share the prize, which is not awarded posthumously.) I also soon understood how embarrassed I should be by what I had not known.
Between 1971 and 1984, Kahneman and Tversky had published a series of quirky papers exploring the ways human judgment may be distorted when we are making decisions in conditions of uncertainty. When we are trying to guess which 18-year-old baseball prospect would become a big-league all-star, for example. To a reader who is neither psychologist nor economist (i.e., me), these papers are not easy going, though I am told that compared with other academic papers in their field they are high literature. Still, they are not so much written as constructed, block by block. The moment the psychologists uncover some new kink in the human mind, they bestow a strange and forbidding name on it (‘the availability heuristic’). In their most cited paper, cryptically titled ‘Prospect Theory,’ they convinced a lot of people that human beings are best understood as being risk-averse when making a decision that offers hope of a gain but risk-seeking when making a decision that will lead to a certain loss. In a stroke they provided a framework to understand all sorts of human behavior that economists, athletic coaches, and other ‘experts’ have trouble explaining: why people who play the lottery also buy insurance; why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).
When you wander into the work of Kahneman and Tversky far enough, you come to find their fingerprints in places you never imagined even existed.”
“There have been attempts to create an artificial language for use by all the world. In the second half of the nineteenth century and then especially in the early years of the twentieth, schemes to construct new languages were numerous. Most of these are now forgotten: who remembers Cosmoglossa, Spokil, Mundolingue, Veltparl, Interlingua, Romanizat, Adjuvilo or Molog? Some of the innovators sound like remarkably odd people. Joseph Schipfer, developer of Communicationssprache, was also known for promoting means of preventing people from being buried alive. Etienne-Paulin Gagne, who devised Monopanglosse, proposed that in time of famine Algerians help their families and friends by exchanging their lives or at least some of their limbs for food, and was willing if necessary to give up his own body to the needy.
Only two schemes enjoyed success. In 1879 a Bavarian pastor, Johann Martin Schleyer, devised Volapük. It was briefly very popular: within ten years of its invention, there were 283 societies to promote it, and guides to Volapük were available in twenty-five other languages. As Arika Okrent observes in her book In the Land of Invented Languages, Volapük is a gift to people with a puerile sense of humour: ‘to speak’ is pükön, and ‘to succeed’ is plöpön. More famous and less daft-sounding were the efforts of Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist of Lithuanian Jewish descent, who in the 1870s began work on creating Esperanto, a language without irregularities. He published his first book on the subject in 1887, summing up the language’s grammar in sixteen rules and providing a basic vocabulary. Zamenhof’s motives were clear; he had grown up in the ghettos of Bialystok and Warsaw, and, struck by the divisiveness of national languages, he dreamt of uniting humanity. Esperanto is certainly the most successful of modern invented languages, but although it still has enthusiastic supporters there is no prospect of its catching on as Zamenhof once hoped.”
Steve Jobs wasn’t just a perfectionist about every last detail of the products Apple created, but also when making seemingly mundane household purchases. FromMalcolm Gladwell’s new considerationof Jobs the creator in the New Yorker:
“It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. European washing machines, Jobs discovered, used less detergent and less water than their American counterparts, and were easier on the clothes. But they took twice as long to complete a washing cycle. What should the family do? As Jobs explained, ‘We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.'”
In the New York Times, Frederick Seidl askswhether the motorcycle is all but done for as a consumer good, victim of a bleak recession and sleek tech products. An excerpt:
“The iPhone 4S, the iPad 2, the 11-inch and 13-inch thin, light MacBook Air computers — these are the sleek gorgeousness young people go on about, have to have, and do have, in the millions. These machines, famous for the svelte dignity of their designs — and of course, far less expensive than a motorcycle — are a lens to see the world through and to do your work on. It’s their operating speeds that thrill. Young people cut a bella figura on their electronic devices.
Now, of course, it is not just the young who buy Apple products. I lay emphasis on the young, particularly young men, because they are the ones who might otherwise be buying motorcycles, and aren’t, at least not at all in the numbers they did before the economic downturn. The great recession was disastrous for motorcycle sales around the country, especially, it seems, for sport bikes, the ones that perform with brio but have no practical point to make. In other words, they are not bikes to tour on, they are not a comfortable way for you and a companion — wife or partner or friend — to travel to work or to a distant campground. You can do it, but it’s not ideal. Young riders were not buying motorcycles of any kind, and especially, it seems, not sport bikes.
Or, to say it another way, it’s as if the recession induced a coma in all the potential new motorcyclists, and in so many of the already experienced motorcyclists, from which they woke changed, changed utterly, and found themselves standing in line outside an Apple store, patiently waiting to buy the latest greatness.”
In addition to numerous others things, the rise of personal computers killed off the concept of World’s Fairs, at least in America. People used to descend on them by the millions to be wowed by inventions, technology and cultures they couldn’t experience in their workaday lives. But who needs to drive hundreds or thousands of miles to be awed now? What’s the sense of going anywhere to be connected to crowds of other people? It’s all possible now 24 hours a day on tiny screens in our pockets.
The final World’s Fair in the U.S. was the 1984 one in New Orleans, which declared bankruptcy. There were financial problems all along, so perhaps it would have been a boondoggle regardless. But it was also just a sign of the times, the end of an era. A 60 Minutes report about the New Orleans fiasco:
Stupendously idiotic, the Intimacy 2.0 line of dresses, made by Dutch designers, become sheerer when a wearer is excited by a potential mate. (Thanks Fastcodesign.)
Interesting, though I have no way of confirming or refuting these figures. From SmartPlanet:
“In two years there will be 1.2 million robots working on Earth, that is one robot per 5,000 humans. As of 2010, there are 34 robots working per 1,000 people in Japan (see info graphic below fromFocus and the World Robotics report.) It is estimated that by 2025 robots will have taken over a whopping half of all jobs in the U.S. The hardest hit industries are predicted to be: manufacturing, automotive and food services.”
It was in the 1970s that control of media and information began its migration to the hands of the individual, and people became excited about new tech toys, even ones that tha weren’t particularly awesome, like CB radios. In 1977, Tom Snyder and friends tout the wonders of holography.
