"emotions" entries

Four short links: 27 November 2015

Four short links: 27 November 2015

Android Insecurity, Clear Photos, Speech to Emotion, and Microexpressions from Video

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 27, 2015
  1. 87% of Android Devices Insecure — researchers find they’re vulnerable to malicious apps because manufacturers have not provided regular security updates. (via Bruce Schneier)
  2. A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography (Google Research) — take multiple photos from different angles through occlusions like a window with raindrops or reflections, and their software will assemble an unoccluded image. (via Greg Linden)
  3. Algorithms for Affective Sensing — Results show that the system achieves a six-emotion decision-level correct classification rate of 80% for an acted dataset with clean speech. This PhD thesis is research into algorithm for determining emotion from speech samples, which does so more accurately than humans in a controlled test. (via New Scientist)
  4. Software Learns to Recognise Microexpressions (MIT Technology Review) — Li and co’s machine matched human ability to spot and recognize microexpressions and significantly outperformed humans at the recognition task alone.
Four short links: 8 October 2015

Four short links: 8 October 2015

Mystery Machine, Emotional Effect, Meeting Hacks, and Energy Consumption

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | October 8, 2015
  1. The Mystery Machine (A Paper a Day) — rundown of Facebook’s Mystery Machine, which can measure end-to-end performance from the initiation of a page load in a Web browser, all the way through the server-side infrastructure, and back out to the point where the page has finished rendering. Doing this requires a causal model of the relationships between components (happens-before). How do you get that? And especially, how do you get that if you can’t assume a uniform environment for instrumentation?
  2. Network Effect — hypnotic and emotional. (via Flowing Data)
  3. Cultivating Great Distributed Teams (Liza Daly) — updates and refinements on her awesome meeting hack/system.
  4. Smartphone Energy Consumption (Pete Warden) — I love new ways of looking at familiar things. Looking at code and features through the lens of power consumption is another such lens. (I remember Craig from Craigslist talking at OSCON about using power as the denominator in your data center, changing how I saw the Web). The article is full of surprising numbers and fascinating factoids. Active cell radio might use 800 mW. Bluetooth might use 100 mW. Accelerometer is 21 mW. Gyroscope is 130 mW. Microphone is 101 mW. GPS is 176 mW. Using the camera in ‘viewfinder’ mode, focusing and looking at a picture preview, might use 1,000 mW. Actually recording video might take another 200 to 1,000 mW on top of that.
Four short links: 20 November 2014

Four short links: 20 November 2014

Postmortems, Cloud Triggers, IoT Desires, and Barbie Can Code

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | November 20, 2014
  1. The Infinite Hows (John Allspaw) — when finding ways to improve systems to prevent errors, the process of diagnosis should be focused on the systems and less on the people. (aka “human error” is the result of a preceding systems error.) (aka “design for failure.”)
  2. Amazon Lambda — triggers in the cloud.
  3. Enchanted Objects (PNG) — organizing the Internet of Thing by human desires. (via Designing the Enchanted Future)
  4. Barbie Remixed (PDF) — brilliant remix of a book that missed the mark into one that hits the bullseye.