Dr_Evil_Mouse

Well I'll be damned. Morse code for YYZ, eh?

Morse Code Translator

And I thought targeted banner ads were weird.

The Billboard That Tailors Itself to You

DANIELLE DEMETRIOU

TOKYO— From Friday's Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 7:14PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010 7:25PM EDT

A young woman in a blue suit passes a flashing billboard in central Tokyo. Within seconds, the screen flickers and an advertisement suggests a crisp glass of white wine and a plate of prosciutto at a nearby Italian restaurant.

It appear like just another ad – except there is a difference. The billboard has not only identified the passerby as a female office worker in her thirties, it’s also decided she is the kind of person who would sooner choose a classy Italian restaurant over the beer-bars favoured by her male colleagues.

Welcome to the future of advertising. Lurking among the conventional advertisements that cover Tokyo are a new generation of intelligent digital billboards. Created by the electronics company NEC, they use sophisticated facial-recognition technology to tailor the ad message based on the appearance of the passerby and the surrounding environment.

And so a young women identified as a stylish 20-something may be informed about a newly opened boutique just around the corner. Or a middle-aged man walking down the street in a downpour may see a flashing image advertising the nearest store selling raincoats.

“The billboards identify consumers in terms of their age and gender as well as intelligently assessing other surrounding factors,†NEC’s Chris Shimizu explains, demonstrating the billboard at the company’s Tokyo showroom. “Depending on whether they are wearing a suit or T-shirt and jeans, they can tell whether they are a student or a salaryman and advertise accordingly.â€

He added: “These billboards are a world’s first in terms of the level of sophistication involved in the technology, which enables them to identify these very specific details.â€

The billboards bring to mind scenes once deemed farfetched from sci-fi movies such as Minority Report, in which a billboard scans Tom Cruise’s iris before declaring: “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now.â€

Tokyo’s new billboards don’t quite so far as to identify consumer by name, but they are likely to be just as confident in suggesting a beverage likely to entice a thirsty individual.

Key to the technology is a small camera above the screen that transforms the image of the person into data, which is then matched to a database of 10,000 profiles of real people in an inbuilt computer system.

Once matched, the technology can confirm – with 85 to 90 per cent accuracy – the person’s gender and age, and take a good guess at social status and lifestyle as well.

Consumers who scan the advertisements with their mobile phones can receive restaurant menus or shopping information tailored to their identity directly in their phone.

“These systems are very flexible, depending on the client,†Mr. Shimizu says. “They can be programmed to take into account the weather and time of day as well as the individual’s profile.â€

And they are set to become increasingly common. Since the billboards were first piloted this summer, they have been bought by 10 major Japanese companies, from restaurant chains to department stores.

The company, which is also behind the facial recognition technology used by border controls between Hong Kong and China, is currently planning an entry to the North American market.

“The use of this technology in retail spaces and points of sale will become commonplace,†says Tyron Giuliani, a consumer and advertising specialist with Tokyo-based consultancy Optia Partners K.K. “With leading Japanese technology, media and content partners like Softbank, Yahoo, NEC and NTT all working to roll out this technology and its applications, there will be no stopping it.â€

How the billboards work

1. A small camera above the main screen captures an image of the face of a passerby.

2. The distance between the consumer and the screen is determined to gauge the potential level of interest.

3. A computer transforms the facial image it into a digital data form.

4. The data are then compared to the data of 10,000 real people whose faces have previously been recorded in the computer’s database, along with their lifestyle profiles.

5. The individual will be categorized by gender and one of 10 age categories.

6. The computer can also judge height and clothing style, whether they are accompanied by children, or if it is sunny or raining for further specification.

7. The computer then selects pre-programmed advertising suitable for the particular category of consumer.

I guess that's pretty much the problem - the irony isn't quite there so blatantly as it is in The Onion, because there are so many nuts that would believe the stuff on Christwire.

Interesting comments about Christwire

Very happy birthday to ya !

Interesting; I wonder if this ever went anywhere.

Aerial Bombardment to Reforest the Earth

* Paul Brown, Environment Correspondent

* The Guardian, Thursday 2 September 1999 02.06 BST

Forests are to be created by dropping millions of trees out of aircraft. Equipment installed in the huge C-130 transport aircraft used by the military for laying carpets of landmines across combat zones has been adapted to deposit the trees in remote areas including parts of Scotland.

An idea, originally from a former RAF pilot, Jack Walters, of Bridgnorth, Shropshire, has been developed by the US manufacturer Lockheed Martin Aerospace so that 900,000 young trees can be planted in a day.

A company set up to market the idea, Aerial Forestation Inc, of Newton, Massachusetts, believes that companies with polluting power plants will be forced by governments to plant forests to offset the global warming effect of the carbon dioxide they emit. Planting via the C-130s will halve the cost of manual methods.

Peter Simmons, from Lockheed, said: "Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of landmines can be adapted easily for planting trees.

"There are 2,500 C-130 transport aircraft in 70 countries, so the delivery system for planting forests is widely available - mostly mothballed in military hangers waiting for someone to hire them.

"The possibilities are amazing. We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the landscape - just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling. That's 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees in a day."

The tree cones are pointed and designed to bury themselves in the ground at the same depth as if they had been planted by hand. They contain fertilizer and a material that soaks up surrounding moisture, watering the roots of the tree.

The containers are metal but rot immediately so the tree can put its roots into the soil.

Moshe Alamaro for Aerial Forestation was in Bridgnorth last week visiting Dr Walters, who published his idea in a paper 25 years ago while at the university of British Columbia in Canada.

Mr Alamaro said: "We are seriously considering contacting British royalty and recommending that Jack is knighted.

"It was a great idea, which he tested at the time and found it worked, but the technology was not up to the job. Now with metal that biodegrades at once as it hits the soil, we are planting the trees and giving them a head start all at once."

Dr Walters said: "I am delighted the idea has been taken seriously. I did the preliminary tests to make sure the trees survived the fall, and it all worked. But I hadn't any money for a development budget.

"Moshe read about my work in the scientific literature and came to see me."

He said a man on the ground can plant 1,000 trees a day. "If we are going to combat global warming by collecting carbon in the wood of trees, we will want millions of them a year. Airborne planting is probably the only way."

Mr Alamaro believes that the system will work in any area that used to contain trees, and even in desert areas where the cones can be adapted to plant suitable shrubs. He has a pilot project planned for the Sinai desert in Egypt.

"One of the areas we are interested in is the Scottish mountains which used to be forested and could be again. We have already talked to landowners, and they are a bit worried about local resistance because people have got used to seeing the hills bare. We could replant the native forest very quickly."

He also hopes to replant large areas of the Black Forest cut down during the cold war to provide "line of sight" across the iron curtain between east and west Germany, and is exploring contracts in north Africa, the tundra of Canada, Australia and the US.

In five years he believes that his company could be planting a billion trees a year - enough to reforest 3,000 square miles.

Watching The Wall right now with my daughter (her pick!), trying to deal with not being able to go to the show tonight . Y'all have a blast!

Bump!

Not looking great for us getting out, so if you've got $25 for the pair (OBO), they're yours. PT me.

And now that's what they throw back at people like Ignatieff (not that I'm a big fan or anything, but still). Politicians seem increasingly electable because they come off like someone the average voter would like to go have a beer with.

I'm glad I'm not being a meat-eater for personal reasons, because with shit like this going on all the time, it looks pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.

Ow .

Not quite sure what to add to that. I just wish people were more farsighted and recognised that an economy is about a lot more than money.

And then - crap .

Bruce Cockburn cancels tour due to pneumonia, collapsed lung

He's supposed to make a full recovery, fwiw.

Come one come all !

Interesting piece.

Don't Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

SARAH HAMPSON

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Published Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 11:39AM EDT

Last updated Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 11:41AM EDT

Bruce Cockburn once confessed that he was in love with sadness. I was talking with the award-winning singer-songwriter about his work and life, and at one point, he looked quietly out into the concrete wasteland of Toronto’s deep downtown. “I’m very attached to melancholy,†he said through his granny glasses. “I’m kind of a melancholy addict.â€

Melancholia as muse is not uncommon. Many artists will point to its role in their creative lives. Still, the acknowledgment of sadness is rare. We live in a society that promotes the eradication of – or isolation from – negative emotions as the ultimate goal. In the relentless focus on happiness, the value of sadness, in particular, has been disregarded. It has become a modern taboo.

This is not about depression, but rather the normal sort of sadness that can be triggered by events and even sometimes by nothing at all. But when someone asks you how you are, and you’re feeling a little blue for no obvious reason, you don’t answer, “Well, actually, I feel a little sad today.†You smile. You say, “Great, thanks.â€

The admission of sadness suggests a weakness – that you’re not with the program, slower than the rest of us worker bees, not a productive member of society, too self-indulgent.

But are we overlooking the value of sadness?

“Think of it as pain. Sadness is not pleasant, not wanted and not sought, but it is engineered to give us a signal as to when things we value are not going well. It allows us to withdraw and focus on how our overall goals are going,†says Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work and psychology at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. In the 2007 book, he and Allan Horwitz, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, wrote about the “overpathologizing†of sadness under the influence of pharmaceutical companies. “Depression has been confused with normal sadness,†he says. “There has been a blurring of the lines.â€

Sadness can be healthy. “It’s a complex emotion that causes us to rethink our own system and how we relate to the world,†Dr. Wakefield says. Major life stressors, such as the loss of a job, divorce or the death of a loved one, result in normal bereavement, which plays a part in healing. “The sadness helps them by promoting a reprocessing of how they’re going to carry forward,†he says.

There’s even some speculation about the evolutionary biology of sadness and its role in survival. A period of withdrawn rumination is “a way of conserving reserves, not rushing into risky endeavours,†Dr. Horwitz says. “It can also be useful for people who don’t have much power.†Primates in the jungle who don’t win the dominant struggle and slink off to considered submission survive better, he suggests. They don’t pick nasty, life-threatening fights.

Sadness can also be an effective call for help. “It can attract support from other people,†Dr. Horwitz adds.

No one wants to diminish the significance of depression. But should we nip all and any sadness in the bud? “The question is this: Do we want to live in a world that tolerates the full range of human emotions or do we want to use the scientific know-how we have at our disposal to reduce that range of emotion?†Dr. Wakefield says.

Call it romantic claptrap, but I think someone should write a book called The Beauty of Sadness, and in it, one could describe how it invites a broader perspective on life.

It’s like postcard-perfect places. A beach with white sand and a gently swaying palm tree against an azure sky would get boring after a while. It’s best for a holiday, a designated period of time, and then you can get back to the other, darker, stormier landscapes. It’s the variation that makes you appreciate every possibility when it comes into view.

The beauty of sadness can be seen – or rather heard – in Franz Schubert’s last three piano sonatas, written in the final years before his death. They speak of contrasting psychological states, fast and slow, from despair to contentment, from reality to dream. And the eventual homecoming or resolution is richer as a result of that unpredictable journey.

“I like to take a realistic view of what we’re capable of in any direction, from human suffering and cruelty to incredible courage and loyalty,†Mr. Cockburn told me that day I interviewed him in 2002. “It’s a big, fluid jigsaw puzzle and being part of that is endlessly interesting in itself.â€

I have thought of what Mr. Cockburn said many times over the years. It takes courage to be sad, to own up to it, to sit with it and acknowledge it when it settles on your sofa for a visit. But there was something else he said that resonated too. “There is beauty happening all around you all the time,†he observed. “You can choose to notice it or not.†What I took him to mean is that the world is not all bad or all good, and the trick is recognizing that both dark and light are present at the same time.

As for karma it is simply another nice way to explain how the unexplainable happens. Past lives? That opens up a whole other can o' worms. Again, interesting to fantasize about, but really?

I've never seen anything myself that would convince me that there is anything like a soul that transmigrates from body to body, affected by moral conduct in each given life - I'm inclined instead to believe that our identity is formed in the gray matter, and when that decays after death, that's it for any sense of self - but if it works for anybody and helps them not mess anybody else up, great (though this kind of argument gets complicated - PromiseKeepers used to get kudos for getting deadbeat dads and so on back on track, but it was bundled with all sorts of pretty dodgy stuff as well).

It's always going to be complex as soon as you buy into any system, though. The traditionalist Hindu view worked just fine to let some people stand on the heads of others so long as they thought following dharma (subjugating women, lower caste people, etc.) had everything to do with good karma. I imagine similar stuff is going on in evangelical Buddhism (Soka Gakkai, e.g.), too.

I do like the idea of karma in its simplest sense: it translates just as "action". I'd like to think that there's something there - from the Upanishads onwards - that sees good action as its own reward (and bad action creates its own hell), because if we are ultimately identical with the Absolute, nobody has any kind of given advantage over anyone else; we all share in the same identity. In other words, what applies across the board is the Golden Rule: don't do to other people what you wouldn't want them to do to you (negative form), or, do to others what you would have them do to you (positive form). This is that ethic that interfaith advocates are all over. Great starting point, imo, for "redeeming" religious ethics.

The word morality came about during religious discourse which attempted to legitimize powers such as sovereignty, "moral acts" come about for a lot of better reasons than because God says so.

And fwiw, the word "religion" didn't get used as a noun until early modernity. Before that, it was just people acting according to a certain way of doing things. Now we've got that noun, and we can talk about it,and more clearly (or badly) against it - and this even though there's still no adequate definition of religion in the field (maybe this will always be the problem).

It's funny, though, how establishing those kinds of concepts through language gives us an edge on how things work. There's a great interview with Paul Ekman

that touches on this - he found talking with the Dalai Lama that there's no word in Tibetan for "emotion"; it's just a bunch of stuff that happens to you. When you get the concept, you gain control over it, so that you're not so subject to it. For a Buddhist like the DL, this is a good thing.

I think the same thing happens with morality - until we peel away all the layers and can categorise what goes on there, we're subject to whatever happens to be in play. Modernity is all about getting control over all that (which has it's downside - cf. Foucault). Weird thing with religious conservatism is that too often there's not the same kind of reflexive understanding; there are just non-negotiables which end up being poorly understood.

{{{{{{giv'er vibes}}}}}} - more details this weekend, please, and I'll recalibrate the vibes accordingly .

kk - Ok, that was friggin' hilarious ) ! (sobering note: why do people like that have such a hard time with their sense of humour?)

bradm - well, yes and no. Yes, they don't get the same press, which is good in not letting it get critical mass, but we do have our Charles McVetys and Grant Jeffreys and so on. Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor is something I've been both meaning to and avoiding picking up for a while now, because I'm sure it would bum me out, and I spent too many years doing that to want to dive full-on into it again.

But it remains true; the level of most of the Christian Right discourse in Canada is so, so much more civil/polite/cautious than you get down south. It just means you have to be still more subtle and careful whenever you happen to disagree with it (viz., do I complain to my boss about the Operation Christmas Child campaign currently underway where I work, or wait till I have more job security?).

Here we go - showtime!

... we generally aren't that accepting. Just because 'they're' not accepting in the first place, doesn't excuse us either.

What I want to know is how whatever impels these people to do what they do isn't what happens here.

Book Burning 2010

Just reminded me of this (wait for about the 2 min. mark).

A10PvpbPJZw

There has been no middle ground from day 1.

While it's fair to say that much of the tenor in the thread has been anti-theistic, I wouldn't say that there has been a total lack of sympathy for religious perspectives, or that there hasn't been nuance. fwiw, I still empathise with anything that recognises the need for meaning that words can't quite reach or pin down.

I also think it's terrifically important to point out where people who claim to have a lock on the truth are just trying to pull one over on the rest of us. I mean, check this out.