{ FBI can secretly turn on laptop cameras without the indicator light. }

photo { Daniel Ehrenworth }

People often reveal their private emotions in tiny, fleeting facial expressions, visible only to a best friend — or to a skilled poker player. Now, computer software is using frame-by-frame video analysis to read subtle muscular changes that flash across our faces in milliseconds, signaling emotions like happiness, sadness and disgust.

With face-reading software, a computer’s webcam might spot the confused expression of an online student and provide extra tutoring. Or computer-based games with built-in cameras could register how people are reacting to each move in the game and ramp up the pace if they seem bored. […]

Companies in this field include Affectiva, based in Waltham, Mass., and Emotient, based in San Diego. Affectiva used webcams over two and a half years to accumulate and classify about 1.5 billion emotional reactions from people who gave permission to be recorded as they watched streaming video. […]

So far, the company’s algorithms have been used mainly to monitor people’s expressions as a way to test ads, movie trailers and television shows in advance. […] Affectiva’s clients include Unilever, Mars and Coca-Cola. The advertising research agency Millward Brown says it has used Affectiva’s technology to test about 3,000 ads for clients.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { New algorithm finds you, even in untagged photos. }

For four years, Josh and I were Silicon Alley’s “it” couple. We met in 1996, when he was running the Internet entertainment site Pseudo.com and throwing Warhol-scale parties. […]

One morning, as I was putting on my robe, he announced that he was planning to have cameras installed all over the loft–above the bed, behind the bathroom mirror, inside the refrigerator, even in the litter box–and wire them to the Internet in the name of art. Art? More like porn, I said. But Josh calmly explained that we would never do anything that made us uncomfortable, and that he eventually hoped to sell unedited tapes of our lives to a museum. […]

As we were gearing up for the November launch, Pseudo tanked, as did the rest of the tech stocks. Josh’s share in Pseudo was now worthless, and the fortunes he made from Jupiter Communications were slashed. Meanwhile, he was sinking over $1 million into Living in Public, hiring me to produce the Web site, manage press and plan a launch party (I was not paid to live in public), and bringing in a team to rip open the walls and fill them with a complex nervous system of wires, cables and cameras.

{ NY Observer 2/26/01 | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Phebe Schmidt | 2 }

Can computers be creative? […] The team has gathered information by downloading a large corpus of recipes that include dishes from all over the world that use a wide variety ingredients, combinations of flavours, serving suggestions and so on.

They also download related information such as descriptions of regional cuisines from Wikipedia, the concentration of flavour ingredients in different foodstuffs from the “Volatile Compounds in Food” database and Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients. So big data lies at the heart of this approach—you could call it the secret sauce.

They then develop a method for combining ingredients in ways that have never been attempted using a “novelty algorithm” that determines how surprising the resulting recipe will appear to an expert observer. […] The last stage is an interface that allows a human expert to enter some starting ingredients such as pork belly or salmon fillet and perhaps a choice of cuisine such as Thai. The computer generates a number of novel dishes, explaining its reasoning for each. Of these, the expert chooses one and then makes it.

These human experts seem impressed. “Recipes created by the computational creativity system, such as a Caymanian Plantain Dessert, have been rated as more creative than existing recipes in online repositories,” say Varshney and co.

{ The arXiv | Continue reading }

The future of computing, after about 2035, is adiabatic reservable hardware. When such hardware runs at a cost-minimizing speed, half of the total budget is spent on computer hardware, and the other half is spent on energy and cooling for that hardware. Thus after 2035 or so, about as much will be spent on computer hardware and a physical space to place it as will be spent on hardware and space for systems to generate and transport energy into the computers, and to absorb and transport heat away from those computers. So if you seek a career for a futuristic world dominated by computers, note that a career making or maintaining energy or cooling systems may be just as promising as a career making or maintaining computing hardware.

{ Overcoming bias | Continue reading }

The National Intelligence Council has just released its much anticipated forecasting report, a 140-page document that outlines major trends and technological developments we should expect in the next 20 years. Among their many predictions, the NIC foresees the end of U.S. global dominance, the rising power of individuals against states, a growing middle class that will increasingly challenge governments, and ongoing shortages in water, food and energy. But they also envision a future in which humans have been significantly modified by their technologies — what will herald the dawn of the transhuman era. […]

In the new report, the NIC describes how implants, prosthetics, and powered exoskeletons will become regular fixtures of human life — what could result in substantial improvements to innate human capacities. By 2030, the authors predict, prosthetics should reach the point where they’re just as good — or even better — than organic limbs. By this stage, the military will increasingly rely on exoskeletons to help soldiers carry heavy loads. Servicemen will also be adminstered psychostimulants to help them remain active for longer periods.

Many of these same technologies will also be used by the elderly, both as a way to maintain more youthful levels of strength and energy, and as a part of their life extension strategies.

{ io9 | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, terms “a de-skilling of the crew.” […]

Doctors use computers to make diagnoses and to perform surgery. Wall Street bankers use them to assemble and trade financial instruments. Architects use them to design buildings. Attorneys use them in document discovery. And it’s not only professional work that’s being computerized. Thanks to smartphones and other small, affordable computers, we depend on software to carry out many of our everyday routines. We launch apps to aid us in shopping, cooking, socializing, even raising our kids. We follow turn-by-turn GPS instructions. We seek advice from recommendation engines on what to watch, read, and listen to. We call on Google, or Siri, to answer our questions and solve our problems. More and more, at work and at leisure, we’re living our lives inside glass cockpits.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

related { 20-Somethings Find No Problem with Texting and Answering Calls in Business Meetings }

There’s a lot of bots on twitter. […] A prime example is @StealthMountain, which searches for people using the phrase “sneak peak” and replies with “I think you mean ’sneak peek’”. Effectively, a coder somehwere has used twitter to greatly leverage his ability to be a grammar Nazi. But worse, it appears that the bot exists just to rile people. While most people seem to take this correction in stride, @StealthMountain’s favorites list (which is linked from his bio line) is populated with some of the recipients’ more colorful reactions. You too, dear reader, can laugh at those victims, and their absurd, futile anger towards the machine.

At the most outrightly hostile end of the spectrum, we find the now defunct bot @EnjoyTheFilm, which searched for mentions of particular films or television shows, and replied with plot spoilers.

{ Aaron Beppu | Continue reading }

Shares of Internet companies are soaring again, and signs of pre-2000 exuberance can be seen in Silicon Valley and the nearby area. Home prices in San Francisco and surrounding counties rose more than 15% in the past year. Office rents in San Francisco are 23% above their 2008 peak. […]

Pinterest, an electronic-scrapbook service that began testing ads this month, said Wednesday that it had raised $225 million from venture-capital firms. Pinterest didn’t need the money; the company said it hadn’t spent any of the $200 million it raised in February when it was valued at $2.5 billion.

The new investment values the three-year-old company at $3.8 billion, a 52% jump in eight months.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

With every quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate’s Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.”

It’s a great quote, one that got so much play Amazon even featured it in its Annual Letter to Shareholders. But like much of the commentary about Amazon, it’s a misreading of Amazon’s business model.

[…]

If Amazon has so many businesses that do make a profit, then why is it still showing quarterly losses, and why has even free cash flow decreased in recent years?

Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail.

{ Eugene Wei | Continue reading }

A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company’s best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate’s suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst.

Welcome to hiring in the age of big data, an ambition marrying automation with analysis in the race to better allocate talent. […]

Some 3.7 million U.S. jobs went unfilled in July, even though more than 11 million Americans were looking for work, according to Labor Department figures.

“You have this enormous pool of people that’s being missed because of the way the entire industry goes after the same kinds of people, asking, did you go to Stanford, did you work at this company?” said Erik Juhl, head of talent at Vungle Inc., a San Francisco-based video advertising startup, and formerly a recruiter at Google Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. “You miss what you’re looking for, which is — what is this person going to bring to the table?”

To aid that search, Juhl this month will begin using an online video game designed to track, record and analyze every millisecond of its players’ behavior. Developed by Knack in Palo Alto, California, Wasabi Waiter places job-seekers in the shoes of a sushi server who must identify the mood of his cartoon customers and bring them the dish labeled with the matching emotion. On a running clock, they must also clear empty dishes into the sink while tending to new customers who take a seat at the bar.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

photo { Dennis Hopper }

In the industrial revolution — and revolutions since — there was an invigoration of jobs. For instance, assembly lines for cars led to a vast infrastructure that could support mass production giving rise to everything from car dealers to road building and utility expansion into new suburban areas. But the digital revolution is not following the same path, said Daryl Plummer. “What we’re seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job,” he said.

{ ComputerWorld | Continue reading }

photo { David Campany }

{ giveitbackto.us | See also: US Government Shutdown: Good News For Patent Trolls }

Who knew Martha Stewart had it in for patent trolls? The decorating queen’s media empire has filed a lawsuit to crush Lodsys, a shell company that claims the Martha Stewart Weddings iPad app infringes its patents.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Lodsys, the firm — which doesn’t make any products or do anything other than sue people — gained infamy two years ago by launching a wave of legal threats against small app makers, demanding they pay for using basic internet technology like in-app purchases or feedback surveys.
Many of the app companies, which are usually one or two-person operations, simply capitulate and agree to hand over a portion of their revenues rather than go up against Lodsys’ battery of lawyers and a Texas jury. But not Martha.
In a complaint filed this week in federal court in Wisconsin, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia asked a judge to declare that four magazine iPad apps are not infringing Lodsys’ patents, and that the patents are invalid because the so-called inventions are not new.

The complaint explained how Lodsys invited the company to “take advantage of our program” by buying licenses at $5,000 apiece. It also calls the Wisconsin court’s attention to Lodsys’ involvement in more than 150 Texas lawsuits.

In choosing to sue Lodsys and hopefully crush its patents, Martha Stewart is choosing a far more expensive option than simply paying Lodsys to go away. The good news is that the decorating maven has some unlikely allies in the campaign: tech rivals Google and Apple are also lining up against Lodsys in an effort to protect the app developers, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation this week filed an anti-Lodsys brief of its own.

{ Gigaom | Continue reading }

photo { Diane Arbus, Woman on the Street With Two Men, NYC, 1956 }

{ You need to see this 17-minute film set entirely on a teen’s computer screen | thanks Stella }

Is Tim Cook the right CEO for the company at this time?

A: I hold the belief that he’s been CEO for much longer than it seems. Jobs was not a CEO in any traditional sense. He was head of product and culture and all-around micromanager. He left the operational side of the company to Cook who actually built it into a colossus. Think along the lines of the pairing of Howard Hughes and Frank William Gay. What people look for in Cook is the qualities that Jobs had but those qualities and duties are now dispersed among a large team. The question isn’t whether Cook can be the “Chief Magical Officer” but rather whether the functional team that’s around Cook can do the things Jobs used to do.

[…]

Q: You’ve written extensively on the post-PC period, when will we come to the post-phone period – if ever?

A: I think less than 10 years. Maybe even five. A wristband today can have more processing power than the original iPhone. An iPhone has more power than a desktop did 4 years ago. The speed of change is incredible.

{ Interview with Horace Dediu | Continue reading }

In the two years since Atos Origin, the IT consultancy, declared its intention to become a “zero email” company, other companies introducing restrictions include Volkswagen, which has stopped its servers forwarding email to employees’ BlackBerrys outside working hours, and Ferrari, which clamped down on email, arguing that it is often inefficient.

It is not just email. Constant text messaging, Tweeting, checking of social networks can now be seen as a disorder. Last year, “internet addiction” was added to the DSM, the international psychiatric diagnostic manual. Concerned executives from Microsoft, Google, Xerox and Intel got together with academics and consultants some years ago to form the Information Overload Research Group to try to find solutions to the electronic deluge. Basex, the research group, estimated that information overload caused economic losses of $900bn in 2009 alone.

{ FT | Continue reading }

{ Yahoo #1 Web Property Again In US, First Time Since Early 2008 }

I purchased this product and sent it back immediately. The moment I took it out of the wrapping, I knew there was a problem, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Then I did put my finger on it. It felt a bit weird and when I started picking at it some of the paint flaked off. Cheap materials.

Anyhow, I may not be a member of the cognoscenti, but I have several Thomas “the Painter of Light” Kinkade paintings, so I know art. First of all, shouldn’t the lines be straight? It’s way too blurry and it hurts my eyes just to look at it. You know what also hurts my eyes? That little girls face. It looks like she has rosacea or something. And why is the girl so sad?!? Thomas Kinkade paintings are happy and joyful. This painting is just a bummer.

Save yourself a lot of disappointment and $1,448,500 and just get yourself a nice Kinkade lithograph. You’ll be glad that you did.

{ Customer Review/Amazon | Continue reading }

related { Amazon Enters Art World; Galleries Say They Aren’t Worried }

related { The utility of bad art }

An open source project to combat “stylometry”, the study of attributing authorship to documents based only on the linguistic style they exhibit, is proving that it is possible to change writing style so as to evade detection.

Artificial Intelligence techniques are routinely used to detect plagiarism and recently were employed to reveal that Harry Potter author J K Rowling is indeed the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling published under the byline of Robert Galbraith.

Now software is tackling the opposite problem–anonymizing writing style to protect the identity of the originator.

{ I Programmer | Continue reading }