http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/terminatrix.html

Thanks, dbay!

All I have to say, weather gods, is that there better be an effin’ warm day in January to balance this out.

No? Well, OK, here it is:

This scene is one of my favorites in Minority Report, since this kind of intrusive technology seems just over the horizon, and that the ideas behind it, at least, are already here, in Google Adwords, or the banners of dancing mortgage refinanciers who know where you live.

Then today, in my work inbox, I find this:

September 30, 2009, Budapest

Face Analytics Based Retail Customer Analytics Software is Being Launched

Intellio’s new face recognition technology based Retail Customer Analytics Solution provides real-time customer behavior data for retailers and marketers

This was sent to me, I suppose, soley because as a Marketing Manager, they thought I would be interested in evil.

Intellio’s new software solution VisiScanner™ provides detailed statistical data about visitors to retail outlets and the target audience of offline display media, such as billboards and digital signage systems. Intellio’s VisiScanner™, based on the in-house developed face analytics technology, provides a detailed, real time analysis of the number, gender and estimated age of potential customers.

VisiScanner™ sounded enough like a joke to me (and Intellio would make a great satire/sci fi company, if it weren’t real) that I checked Snopes before posting — but I suppose the tech in Minority Report didn’t seem that far off because it isn’t.

The press release also contained a video download, which I uploaded below — silent footage of people walking past a security camera, with little blue and red text bubbles displaying their age and gender on the screen like a heads-up display.

I’m genuinely interested in which identifiers they use in a face (or a body) to tell male from female, old from young. The range of people in the video seem to all be 20 to 40, I wonder if it’s less effective for folks outside that range . . .

Finally, I got to their privacy policy:

Privacy Policy

The Face Recognition software was designed to comply with general privacy policy standards. By default the software does not record images of the faces as it only creates anonymous statistics. Users, however, have the option to override the default setting. In this case, they need to be able to prove that their actions are in line with the relevant local privacy and data protection regulations.

It’s only a (short) matter of time before the billboards will call your name.

Read the full press release from Intellio.

You know: when one person e-mails a giant list (the wrong giant list) and then the cc list, down to the last e-mail account, replies all with the message “This is not for me” or “Remove me,” until, eventually, a crazy person replies (to all, mind you) “STOP REPLYING ALL”?

It happened to me (noted here). And it happened to (yes, believe it) the U.S. State Department, where so many people replied all “you got it wrong” and “stop replying all” that it crashed the State Department’s servers and now anyone abusing reply all will be subject to unspecified “disciplinary actions” (read: Kabul embassy transfer).

Rather than a vague governmental threat of “disciplinary actions,” my company is cutting off the problem at the source:

The [My Company] Executive Council ([MC]EC) reviewed suggestions that would eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency. Beginning Thursday, January 29, we will remove the “Reply to All” functionality from Microsoft Outlook.

I hope they mean remove the functionality from Microsoft Outlook on machines within our company, unless they have a hot phone that directly rings Bill Gates.

And moreover: we have an “Executive Council”? Like the Jedi? And moreover still: we have an Executive Council dedicated to removing bureaucracy? Isn’t than a Zen koan? “First order of business: disband Executive Council!” Poof.

In more cutting-nose/spiting-face fashion, the Executive Council goes on to explain:

We have noticed that the “Reply to All” functionality results in unnecessary inbox clutter. Responders who want to copy all can do so by selecting the names or using a distribution list.

Yes, we will now reduce inefficiency by copying and pasting enormous lists one e-mail at a time, or creating spreadsheets of distribution lists. You know what else causes unnecessary inbox clutter? Inboxes. If everybody had to write e-mails by hand, and buy a stamp, well, they’d damn well think twice before replying all! I’ll get the Executive Council to call Bill Gates.

In a blind taste test — the reviewers were not informed what ingredients went into it before the tasting –

four local wine connoisseurs invited to taste the wine described it as dry, pale and crisp. They compared it to a pinot grigio or white bordeaux.

The comparison came before they were told exactly what went into the wine. Afterward, they joked that it was the best insect wine they’ve ever tasted. It’s also the only one they’ve ever tasted.

“I was surprised how similar it tastes to grape wine, said Derek Mahle, the Duluth area distributor for Quality Wine & Spirits in Bloomington, Minn.

“I’ve never heard of anything this bizarre,” said Mark Casper, owner of Keyport Liquor Outlet in Superior.

“If I was looking for a wine made from larvae, I’d choose this,” quipped Andrew Swanson of Fitger’s Wine Cellars in Duluth.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, all three gave the wine a 7. All in all, a positive review.

According to The Book of Revelations:

The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will
deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE
Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him
and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

My first thought was, dude, if Obama is the Anti-Christ, we got bigger things to worry about than the election. Because according to that movie “The Omen”, things are figgin’ to get bad – REAL bad. When the Anti-Christ shows up on earth, whoa, look out. There’ll be fire raining down, everyone will have 666 tattooed on their forehead, and “American Idol” will be cancelled – forever!

And what are we going to do with “Obama the Anti-Christ” after the election? Even if he isn’t elected president, he’s still a Senator. Then we’ll be stuck with the Anti-Christ sitting in the U.S. Senate – on the Foreign Relations Committee, no less! Wait a minute, I thought the Anti-Christ was already on the Foreign Relations Committee? Oh, I guess that’s just Dick Lugar. My bad.

Luckily, one of the e-mail recipients replied with a powerful bit of information – that the Book of Revelation (that’s one Revelation, not “Revelation-S”) was written 400 years before Islam was a religion. And that there is not one single reference to the Anti-Christ in it, nor does it contain any description of the Anti-Christ.

The author then continued:

And now:
For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of
America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the
Planet — The Presidency of the United states of America … A Male of
Muslim descent who is the most extremely liberal Senator in Congress
(in other words an extremist) and in his 40’s. (emphasis mine)

Hmmm, so being “extremely liberal” makes you an “extremist”? Then what does being “extremely conservative” make you? Well…an “extremist”, right? It goes both ways, doesn’t it?

The author closed with this:

Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their
Power of Reason ???

Peace in Christ,
Mary Alice Cantrell

Well, Mary Alice, I have to say, that last question is definitely a valid one. In fact, as I was reading your e-mail, I was asking myself the very same thing. And let me tell you, it’s a tough call. But I have to believe, “Peace-in-Christ” Mary, that you are not representative of the majority of Americans. The majority of Americans have lost neither their minds nor their power to reason, and can see straight through this ridiculous tripe.

I’m going with D.  When John McCain asked her to be Vice President, she boasts, “I didn’t blink.”

Watching Palin in the VP debate with Joe Biden, I had a strong gut reaction I couldn’t explain: sheer terror at what might happen if this person were President — if McCain (AKA “Other foot on a banana peel”) were elected and anything happened to him.  Today, however, I understand why I was and am so frightened.

I would expect a person who understood the seriousness of the job to “blink” indeed — to pause to think about it, and to ask herself, “Could I be ready in Jan 2009 to potentially serve as the leader of the free world?”  Palin seems proud of the fact that she did not pause to think, even for a moment, and to wonder if she were indeed up to the enormous responsibility being VP would entail.  Her naive pride makes me quake in my shoes.

Here’s why I’m so scared.  In 1999, researchers at Cornell experimentally confirmed what I had long suspected — that the worse people perform at a task, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.  It gets worse: not only do incompetent people overestimate their level of skills, but also the worse someone is at a skill, the more grossly she overestimates her own ability at it.

The New York Times reported the on this experiment shortly after it was published [link below].  It used two complex tasks: a test of recognizing grammatically correct standard English, and a test of recognizing what was funny, for which subjects rated the humorousness of thirty jokes on a scale of one to eleven.  (The jokes had been rated by a panel of comedians which included Al Franken).

Then subjects estimated by percentile how competent they thought they were at each skill.

The researchers found that people whose competence was below the 60th percentile would overestimate their performance  — and the further their scores below the 60th percentile, the more grossly they would overestimate their skills, to the point where “bottom-quartile participants were nearly 4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts” (page 1131).

Why?  Because, unsurprisingly, the skills necessary for competence are also necessary to recognize and rate competence.  (The researchers also list many previous studies that also suggest this conclusion).
People whose performance rated at above  the 70th percentile, however, would err in the opposite direction: they would tend to underestimate their own performance, and the higher they ranked, the more severely they would underestimate it.

Both these findings matched what I have observed in my years of teaching writing: While strong performers are uniformly  modest in their self-assessments — I can’t count the number of really talented writers I’ve met who have told me, “I know I need to work on my writing” — the ones with the lowest scores are the ones most willing to tramp into my office demanding to know why their essays were awarded a D [a question whose only truly honest answer would be, "Because I was feeling generous that day."]

So no wonder the fact that Palin would so blithely offer that she “didn’t blink,” as if that somehow qualified her for the leadership of the free world, scares me to death.  Her apparently baseless confidence signals to me that she doesn’t understand what a huge task being Vice President would be — and is clueless that intellectually she simply may not be up to it.

The NYTimes covered this experiment.

Original article: Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning.  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999), Vol. 77, No. 6. pages 1121-1134.  <http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf>

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

*****
This is from the magical anonymous Interwebs — thanks, Kamilla!

2. That there would be a big financial disaster soon and the Dow would fall to 7000 before it starts going up again and I should put all of my 501k retirement money into Treasury Bonds (Sure. I ran to my room, broke open my piggy bank, and double-checked that both of my retirement dollars are still in there – whew!)

3. Not exactly apropos to financial disaster (though I’m getting back to it), that my grandfather, his father, a farmer in Mississippi whom I never met because he died the year before I was born, never ate in a restaurant. Not once in 69 years. Not even a McDonald’s.

4. That my grandfather also didn’t attend his daughter’s nor his two sons’ weddings, not against any spousal choices, but rather in a kind of protest over spending that hullabaloo on something that could be done quickly down at the J of the P.

5. Finally, that my grandfather, when he was 17, ran away from home and made some money sharecropping for his uncle. Then he and his friend Prentice Arrington (a better name even Faulkner couldn’t have dreamed up) hoboed around the country.

6. They went to the big city up East, but they didn’t like that. They went to Florida. They didn’t like that either. They came back to Mississippi and sharecropped summers, to save up some cash. They followed the wheat harvest, making money as migrant labor. They followed the circus, because they liked it.

7. Then, one year, they bought a Harley and set off West, with two bedrolls, a frying pan, and a .22 rifle (for shooting jackrabbits) and toured the big country of Texas, California, Arizona, Oklahoma. They loved that. This was during the Great Depression.

8. So if the bailout needs a bailout, or money becomes just so many scraps of paper, Pulao and I might pack up our compact Toyota with some 400 thread count sheets, a frying pan, and a credit card, and take to the open road. It’s in my blood, after all.