How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View
January 7th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
Google can identify and transcribe all the views it has of street numbers in France in less than an hour, thanks to a neural network that’s just as good as human operators.
…
But the task of spotting and identifying these numbers is hugely time-consuming. Google’s street view cameras have recorded hundreds of millions of panoramic images that together containing tens of millions of house numbers. The task of searching these images manually to spot and identify the numbers is not one anybody could approach with relish.
So, naturally, Google has solved the problem by automating it. And today, Ian Goodfellow and pals at the company, reveal how they’ve done it. Their method turns out to rely on a neural network that contains 11 levels of neurons that they have trained to spot numbers in images.
From the Pentagon to Life in a Van
January 7th, 2014Alternate headline: How Someone with Retirement Benefits of $40,000 Per Year Winds Up Homeless.
Via: The Philadelphia Inquirer:
After a 30-year military career in which he earned three graduate degrees, rose to the rank of colonel, and served as an aide to Pentagon brass, Robert Freniere can guess what people might say when they learn he’s unemployed and lives out of his van:
Why doesn’t this guy get a job as a janitor?
Freniere answers his own question: “Well, I’ve tried that.”
Freniere, 59, says that his plea for help, to a janitor he once praised when the man was mopping the floors of his Washington office, went unfulfilled. So have dozens of job applications, he says, the ones he has filled out six hours a day, day after day, on public library computers.
So Freniere, a man who braved multiple combat zones and was hailed as “a leading light” by an admiral, is now fighting a new battle: homelessness.
“You stay calm. That’s what we were trained for when I went through survival training,” he said recently in King of Prussia, where he had parked his blue minivan, the one crammed with all his possessions and held together with duct tape.
FBI Drops Law Enforcement as ‘Primary’ Mission
January 7th, 2014Via: Foreign Policy:
The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission.
Kerry: U.S. Can Fight al Qaeda in Iraq without Troops
January 5th, 2014Mercenaries and drones?
Via: Reuters:
The United States will support the Iraqi government and tribes fighting al Qaeda-linked Sunni Muslim militants in Anbar province but will not send U.S. troops back to Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday.
Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda and tribal fighters have taken control of Ramadi and Falluja, the main cities in the Sunni Muslim-dominated province of Anbar, which adjoins Syria, in a serious challenge to the Shi’ite-led government’s authority.
Iraqi troops and allied tribesmen are trying to retake the province.
Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Kerry said the United States was concerned about events in Anbar, which was the heart of the anti-U.S. rebellion after the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003.
While pledging to help Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government, he made clear there was no question of U.S. troops returning to Iraq. The United States withdrew its troops from Iraq in 2011 after failing to reach agreement with Maliki’s government on a continuing presence.
“This is a fight that belongs to the Iraqis,” he said. “We’re not contemplating putting boots on the ground. This is their fight, but we’re going to help them in their fight.”
Kerry declined to provide details on what the United States might do to assist Maliki, whom Washington has repeatedly urged to share power with the Sunni minority – in part to prevent a renewed Sunni insurgency against the central government.
The Doomer Congressman Who Went Off Grid
January 5th, 2014Via: Politico:
Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday.
When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: America’s dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night speech on the House floor, Bartlett hectored the nearly empty chamber: If the United States doesn’t do something to protect the grid, and soon, a terrorist or an act of nature will put an end to life as we know it.
Bartlett loved to conjure doomsday visions: Think post-Sandy New York City without power—but spread over a much larger area for months at a time. He once recounted a conversation he claimed to have had with unnamed Russian officials about how they could take out the United States: They would “detonate a nuclear weapon high above your country,” he recalled them saying, “and shut down your power grid—and your communications—for six months or so.”
Bartlett never gained much traction with his scary talk of electromagnetic pulses and solar storms. More immediate concerns always seemed to preoccupy his colleagues, or perhaps Bartlett’s obsessions just sounded more like quackery than real science, even coming from a former Navy engineer who had worked on the space race. Whatever the reason, Congress’s failure to act is no longer Bartlett’s problem. The octogenarian Republican from western Maryland—more than once labeled “the oddest congressman”—found himself gerrymandered out of office a year ago and promptly decided to take action on the warnings others wouldn’t heed, retreating to a remote property in the mountains of West Virginia where he lives with no phone service, no connection to outside power and no municipal plumbing.
Beijing Seals Manhole Covers to Prevent People from Living in Sewers
January 5th, 2014Via: Reuters:
Zig-zagging left and right through a maze of dark, narrow corridors in a high-rise’s basement, 35-year-old kitchen worker Hu has joined the many thousands of Chinese fleeing fast-rising property prices by heading down – down underground.
Hu lives here beneath an affluent downtown apartment building, in a windowless, 4 square-meter (43 square-foot) apartment with his wife. For 400 yuan ($65.85) a month in rent, there’s no air-conditioning, the only suggestion of heat is a pipe snaking through to deliver gas to the apartments above and the bathroom is a fetid, shared toilet down the hall.
“I can’t afford to rent a house,” said Hu as he showed off his meager appointments. Living in basement apartments isn’t illegal in China, but like anywhere else it is nothing to brag about and Hu, who guts fish for 2,500 yuan a month at a popular Sichuanese hotpot restaurant on the street above, declined to provide his given name. “If I weren’t trying to save money, I wouldn’t live here,” he said.
Locals have dubbed Hu and his fellow subterranean denizens the “rat race” – casualties and simultaneously emblems of a housing market beyond the government’s control.
Despite efforts to discourage property speculation and develop affordable housing, a steady stream of job-seekers from the countryside and a lack of attractive investment alternatives have kept prices soaring. Residential property prices rose 10 percent in November from the same month of 2012, according to data released last week, and have been setting new records every year since 2009. Prices in Beijing are rising even faster – 16 percent a year – with rents climbing 12 percent a year.
LOVELY SEWER, CLOSE TO MANHOLES
That’s pushing more and more newly arrived urbanites underground. Of the estimated 7.7 million migrants living in Beijing, nearly a fifth live either at their workplace or underground, according to state news agency Xinhua. Beijing’s housing authority refuted this statistic, saying in an email to Reuters that a government survey last year found only about 280,000 migrants living in basements and that only a small percentage of Beijing’s basements were being used as dwellings.
Last month, authorities sealed Beijing’s manhole covers after local media discovered a group of people living in the sewers below, with one, a 52-year-old car washer, reported by the local media to have been living there for at least a decade. The sewer dwellers were relocated and those not from Beijing sent back home.
The Business of War: SOFEX
January 4th, 2014Via: VICE:
Cryptogon Support in Bitcoin
January 4th, 2014I received .501 Bitcoin from a generous Cryptogon reader. This netted me NZ$491.67!
Thank you very much.
Augmented-Reality Contact Lenses to be Human-Ready at CES
January 4th, 2014Via: Cnet:
Anyone who has ever dreamed up a sci-fi future in which neon interfaces float in front of us and information exists not on screens, but projected onto our eyes, is likely watching the blossoming wearable technology market with great anticipation. With its iOptik system, wearables startup Innovega has sighted in on that futuristic vision, designing special contact lenses that will read the light from projectors fitted to glasses.
U.S. Waived Laws to Keep F-35 on Track with Parts Made in China
January 4th, 2014Via: Reuters:
The Pentagon repeatedly waived laws banning Chinese-built components on U.S. weapons in order to keep the $392 billion Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program on track in 2012 and 2013, even as U.S. officials were voicing concern about China’s espionage and military buildup.
According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane’s radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays.
“It was a pretty big deal and an unusual situation because there’s a prohibition on doing defense work in China, even if it’s inadvertent,” said Frank Kenlon, who recently retired as a senior Pentagon procurement official and now teaches at American University. “I’d never seen this happen before.”
