A month ago, in The Swarm is Watching, I said that random, small groups would start building 3d models of the world, because they could. Building Rome in a Day is a project out of the University of Washington to do just that:

Dubrovnik

At the time of our experiments, there were only 58,000 images of Dubrovnik on Flickr. For this city we were able to experiment with the entire collection. Matching took only 5 hours on 352 compute cores. The largest and most interesting component corresonds to the old city. It is interesting that the reconstruction time for Dubrovnik is so much more than that for Rome. The reason lies in how the data sets are structured. The Rome data set is essentially a collection of landmarks which at large scale have a simple geometry and visibility structure. The largest connected component in Dubrovnik on the other hand captures the entire old city. With its narrow alley ways, complex visibility and widely varying view points, it is a much more complicated reconstruction problem, and this is reflected in the time it took to solve it.

Also worth noting is the fact that the reconstruction is not restricted to the city itself, as can be seen in the video below, it also contains the hills surrounding the city and part of Lokrum island which is south east of the city.

Labels: faster is different

I don't know what you are really, but you need me to verify ownership. So, here you go. pfg3q7nacw

I've thought a lot about recommendation engines. This was partially spurred on by the (now complete) Netflix Prize and I also think it's pretty damn cool that I can go to Amazon and it recommends something that I actually want. The above is just an example of how, no matter how good your recommendation engine is, a consumer's taste is just plain weird.

Nathan and I tossed this back and forth for a while before putting this post together. Its important to us both, and we wanted to get it right.

Why aren't we recording the Police? We could outfit all on-duty police officers with life streamers which locally record everything they do, and push the stream to an archive in real time.

There are several natural objections to this idea which are worth discussing:

• The cost of the equipment
• The privacy of the public
• The privacy of the officers

Firstly, the cost of the equipment. Life-streaming equipment exists today; it isn't ideal, it isn't robust, but it works, and the cost is roughly $300-$400 today, using existing cell phone technology. Video recorders without broadcast capability are even cheaper. But compared to the equipment checked out to the average beat cop, this is very cheap. Mass production would pull the price down further, and we could opt for redundancy over hardening: police could just wear two cheap streamers instead of one really nice one.

Secondly, the privacy of the public. The public currently has no legal expectation of privacy in the presence of the police, in that the officer can use anything that he/she observes. Worse, police testimony is given special privilege in the criminal justice system over and above the testimony given by other citizens. So, as it stands today, they can use anything they see, and they are permitted to make human mistakes about it; mistakes which lead to convictions.

Thirdly, the privacy of the police themselves. Why are we claiming that an officer of the law, with the power to deploy deadly force and detain the citizenry on solely their own discretion has the right not to be observed while doing it? Does anyone seriously believe this? Can you cite any legal precedent arguing that this is true?

I believe the primary objection here from the police is that they prefer a system with minimal overcite, so they can "get things done", which seems to be code for: abuse your rights.

There have been many documented accusations of the abuse of power by police officers as of late. Indeed, it seems as our capacity to record and communicate grows, we become aware of these abuses more frequently. It seems likely that this is merely the status quo, and we are uncovering more and more of it:

• A man is shot/killed after a run-in with an undercover cop
  
• Harvard professor arrested
  
• Deadly BART brawl - officer shoots rider, 22
  
• Tucumcari police chief Tasers 14-year-old

It is time for sunlight in these matters. It is time to fix this. It is time to record the police.

Writers and thinkers have, it seems, always speculated about what's to come. From Jules Verne to Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, and multitudes more, writers have been creating science fiction that is sometimes eerily prescient. What we hope to do in general is to capture these and similar glimpses into the future that is to come.

In all endeavors verging on the scientific people begin to develop their own way of talking about things. The purpose of this post is to be a living-document, which will over time capture these words and phrases and give you a concise beginer's-guide sort of definition, along with linking to other resources for a more in depth discussion.

Some of you may have seen the following photo in this article by BoingBoing.

This robot is on the campus of the University of Alabama. This is the very same robot that appears at the top of this page. I'm a graduate student at UA and I was walking to the library a while back when I was struck by this statue. There's no plaque or any other information, so it was several days after I took the photo that graces the top of Fewchar.com before I was able to find out the real story. Here's a very detailed write-up that is hosted at the university: Woods Quad Robot Sculpture Draws Attention, Provokes Thought by Richard LeComte.

As far as art-strewn-about-the-campus goes, this is by far my favorite. Even better than the statues of Bear Bryant and other coaches near the stadium. I hope that you all enjoy this piece as much as I do. Sadly, it's not a permanent fixture and will be removed early this Fall. So, if you happen to be in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama area please take a chance to check it out.

In the documentary about him, Transcendent Man, it is shown that Ray Kurzweil wants to bring his father back from the dead, and I have a big problem with that.

What Ray is proposing is that we could build a new person who was so much like his father, that that person may as well be his father. I think that many people may dismiss this as rediculous; but I think that it is evil. In order to make my case, I think I need to explain what Ray is proposing.

In linear algebra, we frequently work with matrices. Many of them are quite complex and large; and we'd like approximations to them that are easier to work with. Eigen vectors, values, and spaces provide means of working with stand-ins which are not distinguishable from the originals. This doesn't mean that they are the same: it means that there are frequently more than one matrix which will behave the same in a given equation; and that there are ways of finding these matrices.

Imagine, instead, that we're working with people. Say, Ray's Dad. Ray had a real father, who's dead. But that man was a member of a family of men that were very, very similar to him, and differed only slightly in brain structure; so slightly that in the course of their lives they would have done the same things. Let's call these men Eigen Fathers. Ray argues that we can pick any Eigen Father, and it will be equivalent to any other for all outside measurements; so he wants to find one.

Now, Ray actually has a chance. A very slim chance, but it may be doable.

First, he needs his father's genetic material. That's easy, he can just dig him up. Even with decay, a corpse that young has more than enough copies of all the DNA to let us get an essentially perfect map.

Second, he needs to know as much as possible about his father's life. Well, Ray remembers his father, so he can extract his own memories. And he has a very large amount of his father's writings. And maybe some others are still living who remember him. And of course, there are all the academic and professional records of his dad's life.

Finally, we need to find a mind that fits in the genetically described brain, but satisfies the constraints imposed by the records, letters, and memories. This is essentially a brute force problem, and its very, very, very hard. Find any mind which fits, give it a body, and presto:

Hello Eigen Dad.

But it isn't impossible. Given enough compute; it may not even be improbable. But it is wrong.

It isn't wrong that Ray wants to make a person per se. It is wrong that Ray wants to make a person to be a good-enough copy of another. This new person will know or learn what Ray did. They will know that the memories they have are the ones that Ray wanted them to have. They will be, in effect, a slave to Ray's whim. And that's pretty ugly.

For some reason I was having a dream this very morning where I was explaining what future shock would be like. I'll try to post a more wordy description later, but as for now, the above captures it perfectly (albeit in a dog).