Tag: google

Found Images

You don’t need a video camera to make films: simply use one of the huge number (estimates range from 2 – 4 million in the UK) of CCTV cameras.

[embedplusvideo height="300" width="430" standard="http://www.youtube.com/v/Lp7gyAGQveI?fs=1" vars="ytid=Lp7gyAGQveI&width=430&height=300&start=&stop=&hd=0&react=1&chapters=&notes=" id="ep5624" /]

That film was made by hijacking CCTV cameras. A group of young kids bought some relatively cheap and small devices which can sniff out signals broadcast by wireless CCTV networks. Using the surveillance images captured, the kids then created their own. Not only is it a great way of making free videos, it’s also a comment on the ubiquitous surveillance which is now an invisible part of all our lives. Have a look at MediaShed for more information on the form and how to make it.

Nor do you need a camera to make photographic images. Google street view has, since 2007, photographed street views of cities and urban areas in over 30 countries and is still crawling around streets taking high definition images in places as far apart as Israel, Lativa and Peru. Those images are now being used by photographers to produce landscape photographs such as this from Aaron Hobson:

If you want to follow up how Google street view has been the focus for a number of art projects, this article from Wired is a good place to start.

Counting emotions

The Secret Life of Pronouns by James Pennebaker is on my ‘must read as soon as possible’ list. It promises to tell me what those least dramatic of words – pronouns and words that cement our sentences or utterances together – reveal about our personalities and social connections. Its method is one that is coming of age as Google digitises the world’s books and we constantly document our every movement on Twitter and Facebook.

The researchers count words, categorise them into dictionaries and then ask volunteers to suggest emotional values for each. It’s an enormous task  enabled by software that aggregates the content and then counts the words. It’s also a team effort as Pennebaker recognises when he details the lengthy development of the software LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) by his research assistant. Once in place though, this particular programme can process enormous amounts of input and detail the degree to which people use different categories of words.

Here’s a simple example from a side-shoot of LIWC, the free to use Analyze Words. It gives a flavour of what the full-blown programme can (presumably) do.

AnalyzeWords helps reveal your personality by looking at how you use words. It is based on good scientific research connecting word use to who people are. So go to town – enter your Twitter name or the handles of friends, lovers, or Hollywood celebrities to learn about their emotions, social styles, and the ways they think.

My own tweets are insufficiently prodigious to offer any results (I must be quiet and reserved!) so here is the result of the programme analysing the tweets of Tweeter extraordinaire, Stephen Fry:

You can try it out yourself and can, by doing so, decide how accurate you think the programme is. I need to look into it in greater detail (which I will when I read the book), but one of the problems that I already have is understanding what might be meant by the key words describing emotional states – what does upbeat actually signify? Being worried is an ‘average’ state? And surely depressed is a complex syndrome on a wide continuum from mildly brassed off to clinically catatonic.

The other problem with research using these kinds of methods is the often over-generalised ways in which they are reported. To be fair, this happens more often when the research is picked up by the media and made into a ‘news’ item. But there is I think a natural temptation when dealing with such enormous data sets (really enormous) to think they are more representative than they really are.

Here’s a study by Isabel Klouman reported in Wired Science in August 2011 which sought an answer to the question of whether postive ideas are spread more quickly than negative ideas, or vice versa.

the researchers decided to approach the question with overwhelming mathematical force. They analyzed four enormous textual databases — 361 billion words in 3.29 million books on Google Books, 9 billion words in 821 million tweets issued between 2008 and 2010, 1 billion words in 1.8 million New York Times articles published from 1987 to 2007, and 58.6 million words from the lyrics of 295,000 popular songs — and compiled for each a list of the 5,000 most-used words.

This produced a list of 10,122 words. The researchers then used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labor-outsourcing service to obtain 50 separate evaluations of each word, which were scored from negative to positive on a scale of 1 to 9. (“Terrorist,” for example, received an average score of 1.30, while “laughter” merited an 8.50, the highest of any word.)

Altogether, positive-inflected words outnumbered the negative, and were used more frequently. The findings “suggest that a positivity bias is universal,” wrote Klouman and colleagues. “In our stories and writings we tend toward pro-social communication.”

Whilst fascinating, I’m not sure whether this really is the emotional pulse of the planet. Those producing such content as counted in the databases are a relatively small group. Even with the so-called democratisation of user-generated content with Web 2.0, not that many people in relation to populations as a whole, are actively productive.

In general, only 21 percent of respondents [of a recent study into user-generated content] produced some type of online content daily or weekly, 31 percent produced content on a monthly basis or less, and 45 percent said they had never produced any. These low numbers are not very surprising, as previous studies have shown that user-generated content online is produced by a relatively small group. Reported by Aleks Krotosky.

So, perhaps the pulse of the writers … in English. Still interesting but not quite as earth-shattering.

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button

Nearly a year after Facebook Like buttons spread out across the web, Google has announced its own rival, the +1 button. It launches today as part of Google’s search engine, allowing you to “+1″ the search results and ads that you like. And in a few months, it’ll be arriving at a web site near you.

Is +1 (pronounced “Plus One”) part of the new social network that Google’s long been rumored to be building? Or is +1 simply that “social layer” that Google has said would come and isn’t really meant as a rival to Facebook?

Yes.

via searchengineland.com

How Technology Wires the Learning Brain | MindShift

IS THE INTERNET MAKING US SMARTER?

In a study called “Your Brain on Google,” Small and his peers tested the brain activity of two groups — “Internet-naïve” (mostly 65 and older who had very little experience online) and “Internet smart”– while reading a book versus conducting a Google search.

In the “Internet savvy” group, there was twice as much brain activity in all parts of the brain while they were conducting a Google search than while they were reading a book. And in the “Internet-naïve” group, after a week of Googling subjects online, there was a significant burst in frontal lobe activity, which controls short-term memory and decision-making.

Small’s conclusion? “Google is making us smart,” he said. “Searching online is brain exercise.”

Technology can train our brains in positive ways, he added. Surgeons who play video games, for example, make fewer surgical errors. Those who play video games have improved reaction time, better peripheral vision.

“It’s a matter of finding balance,” he said. “Upgrade the technology skills of older ‘digital immigrants,’ and help young kids improve social skills.”

via mindshift.kqed.org

With every technology there’s a dark side: When Computers Keep Watch

“With every technology, there is a dark side,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth. “Sometimes you can predict it, but often you can’t.”

A decade ago, he noted, no one predicted that cellphones and text messaging would lead to traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers. And, he said, it was difficult to foresee that the rise of Facebook and Twitter and personal blogs would become troves of data to be collected and exploited in tracking people’s online behavior.

Often, a technology that is benign in one setting can cause harm in a different context. Google confronted that problem this year with its face-recognition software. In its Picasa photo-storing and sharing service, face recognition helps people find and organize pictures of family and friends.

But the company took a different approach with Goggles, which lets a person snap a photograph with a smartphone, setting off an Internet search. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and links to Web pages with background information and articles about it appear on the phone’s screen. Take a picture of a wine bottle and up come links to reviews of that vintage.

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smartphones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information — name, occupation, address, workplace.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

via nytimes.com