Machine Learning And Big Data Know It Wasn’t You Who Just Swiped Your Credit Card

Photo-editing app FaceApp now includes Black, Asian Indian and Caucasian filters

On Wednesday morning, the photo-editing app FaceApp released new photo filters that change the ethnic appearance of your face.

The app first became popular earlier in 2017 due to its ability to transform people into elderly versions of themselves and different genders.

These new options, however, will likely cause some outrage: The filters are Asian, Black, Caucasian and Indian.

Selfie apps like Snapchat have taken criticism for filters that apply “digital blackface.” In 2016, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter that darkened the skin and gave users dreadlocks. Snapchat said another one of its 2016 filters was “inspired by anime,” but many people called it “yellowface,” as it seemingly turned the user into an Asian stereotype.

FaceApp’s newest filters, however, don’t pretend they’re anything but racial. Read more (8/9/17 12 PM)

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Street Fighter II in the real world

Proof of concept experience by Abhishek Singh makes classic game Street Fighter II playable in the real world using iOS ARKit and Unity, and can be played via two iPhones:

Remember the classic arcade game Street Fighter 2? I rebuilt it as a multiplayer AR game to actually take it into the streets. I’m calling it the Real World Warrior edition.

Link

Clara Mae’s brilliant thoughts on race, gender, and AI in film

Kids are burning each other with boiling water in a deadly “Hot water challenge” YouTube trend

As seen in YouTube and Twitter videos, the “hot water challenge” involves surprising a friend by burning them with boiling water.

Another variation includes challenging someone to drink boiling hot water through a straw or pouring boiling water on themselves.

8-year-old Ki’ari Pope’s cousin dared her to sip boiling water through a straw back in March. She obliged and suffered burns in her mouth and throat, requiring a tracheotomy. In July, she complained that she couldn’t breathe and later died. (Palm Beach Post, GoFundMe)

In addition to Pope, the trend has left several kids with serious injuries.

Jamoneisha Merritt, 11, was at a sleepover Sunday night when her friends poured boiling water over her face as she slept. She suffered extreme injuries and may be left permanently disfigured.

North Carolina 10-year-old Wesley Smith also suffered severe burns after attempting the challenge with his stepbrother, the boy’s mother told WNCN.com, a CBS affiliate.

Parents have begun speaking out about the challenge. Read more (8/10/17)

Verizon Cancels Elderly Woman’s Service on Her 84th Birthday http://ift.tt/2vePM37

FontCode

Research from Columbia Computer Graphics Group can create textual encryption by minute altering of font characteristics using neural networks:

We introduce FontCode, an information embedding technique for text documents. Provided a text document with specific fonts, our method embeds user-specified information in the text by perturbing the glyphs of text characters while preserving the text content. We devise an algorithm to choose unobtrusive yet machine-recognizable glyph perturbations, leveraging a recently developed generative model that alters the glyphs of each character continuously on a font manifold. We then introduce an algorithm that embeds a user-provided message in the text document and produces an encoded document whose appearance is minimally perturbed from the original document. We also present a glyph recognition method that recovers the embedded information from an encoded document stored as a vector graphic or pixel image, or even on a printed paper. In addition, we introduce a new error-correction coding scheme that rectifies a certain number of recognition errors. Lastly, we demonstrate that our technique enables a wide array of applications, using it as a text document metadata holder, an unobtrusive optical barcode, a cryptographic message embedding scheme, and a text document signature.

More Here

How Do Hurricanes Form?

Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur.

The scientific term for ALL of these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern and central Pacific Ocean are called “hurricanes.”

Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way.

Tropical cyclones are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel. That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator. This warm, moist air rises and condenses to form clouds and storms.

As this warmer, moister air rises, there’s less air left near the Earth’s surface. Essentially, as this warm air rises, this causes an area of lower air pressure below.

This starts the ‘engine’ of the storm. To fill in the low pressure area, air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in. That “new” air near the Earth’s surface also gets heated by the warm ocean water so it also gets warmer and moister and then it rises.

As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporating from the surface.

As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the center. It is vey calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure.

Tropical cyclones usually weaken when they hit land, because they are no longer being “fed” by the energy from the warm ocean waters. However, when they move inland, they can drop many inches of rain causing flooding as well as wind damage before they die out completely. 

There are five types, or categories, of hurricanes. The scale of categories is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale and they are based on wind speed.

How Does NASA Study Hurricanes?

Our satellites gather information from space that are made into pictures. Some satellite instruments measure cloud and ocean temperatures. Others measure the height of clouds and how fast rain is falling. Still others measure the speed and direction of winds.

We also fly airplanes into and above hurricanes. The instruments aboard planes gather details about the storm. Some parts are too dangerous for people to fly into. To study these parts, we use airplanes that operate without people. 

To learn more about how we study hurricanes, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/main/index.html

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math & music

When I was a freshman, studying music, I built my first computer program… and I didn’t even know I was coding:

At the time, I was learning to analyze chords by identifying the individual notes, reordering them into “thirds”, and comparing this stack to the actual arrangement to determine the inversion. I didn’t know anything about programming at the time, but my roommate was an engineer who showed me Wolfram Alpha’s Mathematica, a coding environment useful to a number of fields.

Well, I was just as “screw the rules” then, so I learned just enough to build a sort of decision tree to do my chord analysis homework for me. Above, nested If[] statements determine the interval by calculating the distance between pitches (in half-steps). Below, a similar set-up figures out the inversion of a chord.

There are a bunch of similarities to the JavaScript world I generally live in these days. It looks like Mathematica uses [] brackets instead of () parentheses and {} squiggly brackets, and presents its arguments more like an Excel function, but all the math-y bits certainly work the same… except… I wish Javascript let you string inequalities together like that!

One interesting peculiarity here - I have multiple functions with the same name. Whereas JavaScript functions don’t much care how many inputs you actually feed them, it seems I have different versions of the same keychordtype[] function for different numbers of inputs (defined here with a trailing _ underscore).

And instead of the console.log() message or the alert() pop-ups, outputs are made visible with the MessageDialogue[] function. So even though I don’t have any comments, and my nesting, naming, and order are a bit sloppy (look at those closing brackets! ridiculous!), I can still understand what’s going on - 10 years and several languages later.

tl;dr: music theory is math; different languages have different syntax, but logic is logic; Mathematica has a 2-week trial I’m eating though to take these screenshots

project: chord analysis homework helper

today i witnessed this tragic moment at the museum of communication #robotfriend