Four short links: 15 April 2015

Facebook as Biometrics, Time Series Sequences, Programming Languages, and Oceanic Robots

  1. Facebook Biometrics Cache (Business Insider) — Facebook has been accused of violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week. This data-collection program led to its well-known automatic face-tagging service. But it also helped Facebook create “the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world,” the Courthouse News Service reports.
  2. The Clustering of Time Series Sequences is Meaningless (PDF) — Clustering of time series subsequences is meaningless. More concretely, clusters extracted from these time series are forced to obey a certain constraint that is pathologically unlikely to be satisfied by any data set, and because of this, the clusters extracted by any clustering algorithm are essentially random. While this constraint can be intuitively demonstrated with a simple illustration and is simple to prove, it has never appeared in the literature. We can justify calling our claim surprising since it invalidates the contribution of dozens of previously published papers. We will justify our claim with a theorem, illustrative examples, and a comprehensive set of experiments on reimplementations of previous work. From 2003, warning against sliding window techniques.
  3. Toolkits for the Mind (MIT TR) — Programming–language designer Guido van Rossum, who spent seven years at Google and now works at Dropbox, says that once a software company gets to be a certain size, the only way to stave off chaos is to use a language that requires more from the programmer up front. “It feels like it’s slowing you down because you have to say everything three times,” van Rossum says. Amen!
  4. Robots Roam Earth’s Imperiled Oceans (Wired) — It’s six feet long and shaped like an airliner, with two wings and a tail fin, and bears the message, “OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTRUMENT PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB.” All caps considered, though, it’s a more innocuous epigram than the one on a drone I saw back at the dock: “Not a weapon — Science Instrument.”
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