Someone's Always Watching

These days someone is always watching.

Whether someone is peering at you from upstairs or around the corner.

Or there is a surveillance camera.

Or someone is recording you on their smartphone. 

You are never really alone. 

And even IF, and that's a big if, that no one person is watching.

Remember that G-d above still sees everything!  ;-)

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal) 

Someone's Always Watching

Action Video Extravaganza

This is an awesome action video--5 minutes and totally worth it.

It feels like being inside a single player shooting game. 

I first saw this video on Facebook posted by a colleague as a interesting advertisement for Go Pro wearable helmet cameras, often used for capturing extreme sports activities. 

Now we are going from helmet cams to Google glasses. 

With the new Google Glass coming out this year for $1,500--that mimics most smartphone functions including taking pictures and videos just by a simple verbal command such as "Okay Glass, record a video" or "Okay Glass, take a picture,"-- things are going to get a lot dicier. 

While this type of James Bond action doesn't happen everyday for most of us, if we can capture every day events like these --it will be both awesome from a recall, sharing, entertainment, study and scientific perspectives and scary from a privacy one. 

If Google Glass really works as it's envisioned, it is going to revolutionize how we interact with the world and each other--get ready augmented reality, here we come. ;-)

Action Video Extravaganza

What Did The Cereal Box Say To The BMW?

This family had just come out of Costco loaded with groceries. 

They are heading to the garage to pack it into their car. 

A BMW comes racing through the garage and runs over one of these mega Costco cereal boxes. 

The car keeps going with the cereal box being dragged underneath.

The family runs through the garage and cuts off the BMW waving and yelling for him to stop. 

He skids across the double-yellow line and stops blocking both sides of the road.

The man who lost his cereal bends under the front of the BMW to try to extricate the cereal. 

The box is so Costco big, it barely can come out. 

The man's family looks on from the side. 

Finally, he wiggles the box this way and that and gets the cereal box out from under the BMW. 

The driver is standing there sort of bewildered by the whole thing.

If the cereal box could talk, I think it'd beg for a better ending than this. 

Too often, as we go through life, we mow other people down who are in our way.

Thank G-d, this was just a box of cereal and not the man's child or wife that had been run over and dragged. 

I wondered how degrading it must have felt for this poor guy to be bending down in the street to get the box out, while the driver simply looks on in an uncaring disdain. 

I almost thought for a moment, the driver was going to either just keep going or when he got out wallop the other guy for hassling him to get his cereal. 

People can be strange that way and you never know what is going to happen next. 

It is good that other people can be around with smartphone cameras and video, so that people don't feel that they can just behave indiscriminately and obscurely. 

In the end, no one should think they are all that--and have the right to uncaringly run over others' persons or things. 

We are all frail humans and G-d is always there with a very big, high megapixel smartphone recording it all for judgement day. ;-)

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

What Did The Cereal Box Say To The BMW?

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

To catch a terrorist, you have to think like a terrorist or at least be able to get behind their lies and deception.

Terrorist want to gain entry, surveil their targets, plan their attack, assemble their weapons and tactics, avoid their pursuers, and execute maximum human, economic, and political damage. 

To succeed, terrorists have to use lies and deceit to make their way through all the obstacles that the good guys put up.

Wired Magazine (February 2013) addresses some new interrogation technology being tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to catch the lies and the liars. 

First of all, "people are really good at lying, and it's incredibly hard to tell when we're doing it."

Moreover, most people "lie 10 times a day," so it is routine and comes naturally to them. 

In terms of detecting lies, we are not very good at it--in fact, we're just better than chance--able to tell when someone is lying only 54% of the time.
Apparently, even with polygraph exams--their success is dependent more on the experience and finesse of the examiner and less on the polygraph tool. 

However, with new research and development, DHS has come up with an automated interrogator--that enhances the success of catching a liar by combining multiple detection technologies. 

The "interrogator bot" has three different sensors in use by the Embodied Avatar Kiosk.

- Infrared camera--"records eye movements and pupil dilation at up to 250 times per second--the stress of lying tends to cause the pupils to dilate"

- High-definition video camera--"captures fidgets such as shrugging, nodding, and scratching, which tend to increase during a deceptive statement"

- Microphone--"collects vocal data, because lies often come with minute changes in pitch" as well as "hesitation, changes in tempo and intonation, and spoken errors"

In the future, a additional sensors may be added for:

- Weight-sensing platform--to "measure leg and foot shifts or toe scrunches"

- 3-D camera--to "track the movements of a person's entire body"

Aside from getting better deception-detection results from multiplying the sensing techniques, the interrogation kiosk benefits from communicating in multiple languages and being "consistent, tireless, and susceptible to neither persuasion not bribery."

Another very cool feature being tested is tan interrogation avatar that actually resembles the person being interrogated using a camera and morphing software and making it look uncanny and "disturbing" at the same time--this can be quite familiar, disarming and unnerving.

By aggregating data points from many types of sensors and using behavioral analysis as a first line of defense followed by human questioning of those found to be lying, homeland security can proverbially light a fire under the pants of would be infiltrators and terrorists--and catch them before they make it to their next target. ;-)

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Cosmic Jans)

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Robot Guard Thyself

The Asian Forum of Corrections in South Korea has developed this 5' tall robot for patrolling prisons.

But rather than restraints and weapons, this prison guard carries a suite of technology:

- 3-D Cameras for monitoring safety and security

- Recording devices for capturing activity

- 2-way wireless communications between corrections officials and prisoners

- Pattern recognition and anomaly detection software for differentiating normal behavior from problems

While this sparks the imagination for where this might go in the future, I'm not quite sold on this. 

Firstly, how well can these robots really recognize and interpret human behavior, especially from those who may be fairly adroit at hiding or masking their activities, day-in and day-out. 

And maybe more importantly, without some serious defensive and offensive tricks up its robot sleeve, I have a feeling that many a prisoner with a two by four, would put this million dollar robot in the junk yard pretty fast, indeed. 

I'd rate this as not there yet! ;-)

Robot Guard Thyself

Capturing It All

Often it seems as if so much of our life is spent memorizing things and then trying to remember what we thought we memorized.

It starts in grade school and continues throughout our education--memorize, spit back, repeat.

Advances in education may actually recognize the need and try to get kids to think now-a-days, but there are still all the "fundamentals" that need to be put to memory, so you can pass the standardized tests like the SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and more.

But we don't just memorize to pass tests, we pride ourselves on what "we know" and we test ourselves and show off our expansive knowledge-base through things like board games such as Trivial Pursuit to game shows such as Jeopardy.

At work too, we hire, retain, and reward people based on their "knowledge, skills, and abilities" and recognize those who are true "subject matter experts."

I remember friends who used to read the encyclopedia to increase their knowledge, and the Almanac with all the facts and figures--is still a best-seller. In Yeshiva, we also spent a good part of our high school years, memorizing from the Talmud.

The challenge for us in the 21st century is that knowledge is growing so fast that we as individuals can barely keep up with the volume and pace of change, so we specialize professionally and seek expert advice from others on areas outside our area of specialization.

Still we memorize and try to remember as much as we can. We read, watch TV, browse the Internet, travel, try new things, and fill our heads with incessant facts, memories, and chatter. And we become frustrated when we can't remember names of people we recently meet, the punch line to a joke, the facts for a presentation at work, the spelling of a simple word, or even what we had for breakfast.

So rather than memorize and forget, people are turning to capturing events from their lives and playing it back when they need to recall information or are feeling nostalgic.

We do this when we take photos, videos, audiocasts, blog, tweet, etc. and then access these from our hard drives or the Internet though services like Flikr, YouTube, Podbeam, Blogger, Twitter, and so on.

Now we starting to move beyond recording just moments in times (i.e. snapshots) and instead capturing it all!

The Futurist (July-August 2011) reports that people are discovering things like Lifelogging--where through cameras, recording devices, and storage media, they record virtually "every instant of their lives." We are nearing at a time, when this is becoming "not only feasible, but possibly even appealing" to the masses.

By recording the events of our life--whether in blogs, photos, audio or video recordings--and combining this with advanced search tools, lifelogging "could provide us with the equivalent of near total recall."

Perhaps the ability to capture more and more of our lives digitally will make it unnecessary in the future to sit and memorize so many useful and useless facts and information.

We don't have to remember everything in our heads, we just need to know how to access the information when we need it.

Learning does not have to be about memorizing but rather can be about critical thinking, and being an expert does not have to be about what you have memorized, as much as your experience and ability to think through problems and find solutions.

(Photo Source: here)

Capturing It All