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Archive for the month “October, 2016”

31 Oct 2016

I was writing about “perpetual lineup” in 2014 – sort of

[DISCLAIMER: I am employed in the biometric industry. The views expressed in this post are my own, and are not necessarily the views of any present or previous employer, or of any organization with which I am presently or previously associated.]

For those who completely skipped over the disclaimer because they’re boring, I am employed in the biometric industry, and have been so employed for over two decades. There have been a number of changes in this industry over the years, both from a procedural standpoint (witness the varied effects of the 2009 NAS report) and a technological standpoint.

One of the more recent contributions to the discussion is a report from Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology. Obviously the report has its own hashtag – #perpetuallineup to be precise.

It should be noted that the report is not a 100% complete slam on facial recognition technology itself.

The benefits of face recognition are real. It has been used to catch violent criminals and fugitives. The law enforcement officers who use the technology are men and women of good faith. They do not want to invade our privacy or create a police state. They are simply using every tool available to protect the people that they are sworn to serve. Police use of face recognition is inevitable. This report does not aim to stop it.

Rather, this report offers a framework to reason through the very real risks that face recognition creates.

Among other topics, the report touches upon privacy issues. For example:

If deployed pervasively on surveillance video or police-worn body cameras, real-time face recognition will redefine the nature of public spaces. At the moment, it is also inaccurate. Communities should carefully weigh whether to allow real-time face recognition. If they do, it should be used as a last resort to intervene in only life-threatening emergencies. Orders allowing it should require probable cause, specify where continuous scanning will occur, and cap the length of time it may be used.

Because, of course, the public is demanding that the police NOT implement body-worn cameras, or use them pervasively.

Whoops, I seem to have run across another article.

Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman is right that public safety could have been at risk had the officers paused to turn on their body cameras; Tuesday’s incident unfolded rapidly. But we wonder about the wisdom of her suggestion that there could be a technological fix in which body cameras automatically turn on when an officer pulls his or her gun. Police conduct isn’t only an issue when officers shoot people. When a patrol officer is on duty, his or her body camera should be on by default. If this means SDPD has to buy more expensive batteries that last longer, so be it.

So on the one hand, you have people declaring that body cameras are wonderful things that should always be turned on, and on the other hand you have people declaring the body cameras infringe on civil liberties and should only be turned on in certain circumstances.

I’ve been thinking about this contradiction for years. In fact, I wrote about it in this very blog in December 2014.

However, [Sterling] Crispin’s project doesn’t really touch on a basic conflict in our thinking about surveillance.

In a reactive manner, Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri has resulted in many calls for police to always wear video recording equipment, so that all encounters between police and civilians are recorded….Many are elated at the fact that the actions of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were captured by a number of cameras in Boston, Massachusetts.

At the same time, some of the same people who are demanding that the police record things are also demanding that the police NOT record things. Crispin is disturbed by the fact that the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system can possibly be used on civilians. Many are disturbed by all of those video cameras out there – stationary ones installed by governments and private businesses, and mobile ones on Google Glass and on our own telephones.

You can’t simultaneously demand that things be recorded, and that things not be recorded.

In fact, the all bodycam all the time movement has already resulted in one lawsuit threat:

At issue is body cam video the [Spokane Police] department posted to its Facebook page Wednesday that showed how [Sergeant Eric] Kannberg was dealing with one drunken individual when another person approached him and intervened. That video subsequently went viral on Facebook, racking up tens of thousands of views in the first 24 hours.

The man who contacted Kannberg, who was arrested on a third-degree assault charge, the arrest captured on video, says the police department shouldn’t have posted the video. The man’s attorney said the department should not have posted the video before the man who was arrested had his day in court.

The police department, however, says the video they posted wasn’t private, and they did it to show the patience Kannberg displayed in trying to peacefully resolve the situation.

But now let’s lighten up, because the Sterling Crispin post was partially inspired by a futuristic fiction story that I had written in September 2014. My fiction dealt with the ramifications of unintended consequences. I’ll give you an example – before I was born, people thought that television would become the great educator, bringing audiovisual education into our own homes. By the time I was born, TV was being called a vast wasteland.

In my fiction story, I postulated that unintended consequences may also affect the movement to expose bodycam footage.

While police webcams became more popular way back in 2014 after the Ferguson incident and the Ray Rice case, some people still felt that the police were hiding something. As the years went on, more and more police departments adopted transparency rules, and by the time that Kim and Steve were enjoying their bacon-infused lunch, several police departments were not only equipping every police officer and police car with a webcam, but were also providing real-time public access to these feeds. The goal in providing these feeds was to not only provide complete transparency into police operations, but also to educate the public on the dangers that police officers faced every day as they patrolled their communities.

As with any technological advance, however, the lofty goals of the originators were soon replaced by other goals. The streams themselves became revenue sources for the police agencies, as anyone who accessed the feeds had to sit through commercials for bail bond companies, defense attorneys, and Progressive Insurance. And the audience, rather than consisting of civil libertarians monitoring police activity, ended up as a bunch of teens watching voyeuristically.

What would Jim Conley say?

Posted in government, technology and tagged | Leave a comment
18 Oct 2016
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My “Edith” character from 2013, and Vinod Khosla (again)

Yes, I am Ann Landers. I re-use old posts whenever I can. But in this case I have a reason for doing so, because a fiction story that I wrote in 2013 has the potential to become less fictional.

The story was called “You will still take a cab to the doctor’s office. For a while.” It described a 95 year old woman named Edith and her May 2023 visit to the doctor’s office. She took a cab there:

Edith had booked and paid for the cab a month before the appointment, using the online Gacepple Calendar service. (Gacepple, of course, was the company that resulted from the merger of Google, Facebook, and Apple – the important merger that saved the tech industry in the United States from extinction. But I digress.) An hour before the appointment, Gacepple Calendar reminded Edith of her appointment, and five minutes later the Toyota in the street let her know that it had arrived. No, not the driver – there was no driver – but the Toyota itself.

Anyway, she gets to the doctor’s office. No doctor or nurse is present, but a voice guides her through the quick and painless examination.

!!!SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT!!!

After everything is done, Edith has a question.

“You’ve been very helpful. But I’ve always wondered exactly WHERE you were. If you were in Los Angeles, or in Mississippi, or perhaps in India or China, or perhaps even in one of the low-cost places such as Chad. If you don’t mind my asking, exactly where ARE you?”

“I don’t mind answering the question,” replied the friendly voice, “and I hope you don’t take my response the wrong way, but I’m not really a person as you understand the term. I’m actually an application within the software package that runs the medical center. But my programmers want me to tell you that they’re really happy to serve you, and that Stanford sucks.” The voice paused for a moment. “I’m sorry, Edith. You have to forgive the programmers – they’re Berkeley grads.”

As time goes by, this scenario is becoming more and more realistic. We are already working on robot doctors that can navigate down the hall to a patient to take readings.

Meanwhile, Vinod Khosla is working on the other part of the scenario – the part where a software package, rather than a human, does the diagnostic work. I’ve mentioned Khosla before – once in regard to “meat”, and once in regard to medicine. Now, prompted by a Scott Nelson share, it’s time to look at a more recent article about Khosla.

When Khosla looks 10 or 15 years into healthcare’s future, he sees a medical landscape seething with data-hungry, intelligent algorithms like Google’s AlphaGo instead of doctors as we know them today.

“Medicine has improved a lot as a practice,” Khosla said. “But I think it’s time to take this practice of medicine and turn it into the science of medicine.”

To make that happen, Khosla thinks we have to hand medical expertise over to the machines.

Specifically, Khosla wants big data and big databases to do the heavy lifting that no single human could do.

Khosla said you can diagnose disease with a single biomarker—the chemical signature of sickness—or you can diagnose disease by looking at 300 biomarkers. You can look at the patient in front of you and compare them to the last few you’ve seen, or you can scan a database of 100 million patients for the last hundred or thousand with the same condition….

According to Khosla, Medicare patients have seven major conditions on average. Wouldn’t it be better to have AI look at those conditions comprehensively—and one doctor, not seven, talk the results over with the patient?

Note that in Khosla’s case, we would still have doctors around, but they would be hired for their empathy skills, and not necessarily for their ability to read every medical journal.

However, I still think that my model, in which there is no doctor at all, is the more accurate one.

Why?

Because of how business works.

The average American publicly-traded company, when forced to choose between a 100% computerized system with no doctor and a 100% computerizied system with a doctor, will choose the lower cost option.

After all, if you don’t have any employees, then you don’t have to pay for healthcare.

Posted in business, medicine, technology
14 Oct 2016

Have you heard about these new cameras that print physical pictures?

Because of my involvement in marketing, I’m subscribed to various services that talk about sales. From reading these, it appears that one of the main issues affecting sales today is the ability to give gifts to your salespeople to encourage them to sell more stuff.

So I’m reading one of these publications, and it talks about a special gift; the “instax” from Fujifilm. The name “instax” refers to a group of products with one thing in common.

Stay with me, because this is pretty weird.

As all of my readers know, a camera is a device which captures images through a lens and stores them on the camera itself. From there, you can transfer the images to other devices so that you can upload them to your website or whatever. Here’s an example of a very important image taken with a camera.

img_1635edited

(This was taken at Keno’s Restaurant in Anaheim, California. I didn’t take a picture of the lunch itself because I ate it.)

Even if you only have a camera with 16 GB of storage, you can capture plenty of riveting pictures like this one.

But if you’re a quota-beating salesperson and receive an instax camera, you get something amazing and miraculous. Once you take the picture, THE PICTURE PRINTS OUT ON A PIECE OF PAPER. Imagine that!

Now how can a camera just magically print stuff? Well, the instax camera requires you to load something special into the camera, called “film.” And for this particular type of film, the image that you capture is printed on the film, ejects from the camera, and then you have your physical image.

Now of course, film can’t continue to print images forever. The film itself can only print ten images. But – and here’s the magic part here – YOU CAN BUY MORE FILM!

Can’t you just see millennial salespeople going gaga when they earn this gift item?

However, some older salespeople seem to be grousing that this is just like some “roid” thing that used to exist a long time ago. Maybe they’re talking about this company, which is still around (although it went bankrupt twice along the way).

Posted in business and tagged , , | Leave a comment
05 Oct 2016

Rise and fall, indeed – Madness looks back

In 2011, Kronenbourg shared a two-minute beer advertisement in which some older men sang a song in a pub, then walked out. Well, most of them walked out; the saxophone player kinda sorta drifted away.

For some of the younger viewers of the ad, it was probably an entertaining commercial, though they wouldn’t get mad about it.

There’s also a four-minute long version of the ad, in which scenes from the bar are interspersed with black and white scenes of much younger men. This version goes under the title “Le grand pantalon.”

And yes, the band is Madness, and the black and white scenes were actually anti-colorized (whoops, anti-colorised) scenes from the original “Baggy Trousers” video.

The band has come a long way – it broke up at one point before reuniting – and several years after the Kronenbourg ad, Cathal Symth left the band. He just wasn’t feeling nutty any more.

In a sense, the nutty image of Madness did a disservice to them, because when they did get serious, they were often ignored. (“Blue Skinned Beast”, for example, is about body bags.)

Posted in music | Leave a comment

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