The Umbrella Man

View to a Kill

Director Errol Morris has been thinking about truth, and its many facetted face, for a long time. His most notorious recent work is an exhaustive investigation about Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, specifically which of a few different photos were taken first, and if any of the canon balls were moved (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Additional Resources) and the Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock on forgery by Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration.

Today he released a short film about the infamous The Umbrella Man at Dealy Plaza, where President Kennedy was assassinated.

For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

Take time to watch the short film, it has an interesting explanation. Oh, and I’ve been to Dallas, and ran out to stand on the “X” where the President was shot. It was a very strange place, especially if you look back to the book depository (above).

Cartography Police

On the front page of the Times of India, is the following piece, US state department shows PoK as part of Pakistan:

At a time when incorrect India maps are getting the goat of not just the government but also journalists, there is even more alarming news for India’s strategic community. The official website of US department of state, which handles foreign relations of the country, shows PoK as part of Pakistan, notwithstanding India’s claim over the region.

In the case of India, however, the map differs from the official Indian map in that it completely ignores India’s claim over PoK by not even acknowledging its disputed status.
…
“It shows a distinct pro-Pakistan cartographic tilt that is inconsistent with the UN projection of the entire PoK (including Gilgit-Baltistan) as disputed,” strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney said.

The offending map is nary to be found on the State website (but is reprinted above and at the CIA Factbook on India), so it undoubtably has been seen as a diplomatic slight and is being fixed. If you want to learn more about how and what this is all about, check out this abridged Wikipedia list:


The Yoruba say that lines hove power. “This country has become civilized” literally means “This earth has lines upon its face.” Ilàjú in Yoruba means both “Civilization” and face with lined marks. The line on a body is the city, the polis, the civilization.

I can understand, if not completely internalize the sentiment of this article. I don’t want to step into this longstanding 64+ year long argument, especially after a colleague chastised me when I was drawing the map of India and left off the PoK. My colleague yelled, “You left the crown off the top! Are you some kind of Pakistani cartographer?” While it was good natured, the admonishment stayed with me, revealing a topic which is better left not discussed as a foreign visitor.

Note that this isn’t just about lines on a map, even if this week’s Economist has been censored due to showing the disputed area of Kashmir (see also Fantasy frontiers which explains the territorial claims). Rather there are both nationalistic reasons for disputing the borders, but also physical reasons: natural resources. Don’t miss the epic Economist article, Unquenchable thirst, A growing rivalry between India, Pakistan and China over the region’s great rivers may be threatening South Asia’s peace:

The river swirls away, white-crested and silt-laden, racing to the nearby border with Pakistan. But there Baglihar is a source of bitterness. Pakistanis cite it as typical of an intensifying Indian threat to their existence, a conspiracy to divert, withhold or misuse precious water that is rightfully theirs. Officials in Islamabad and diplomats abroad are primed to grumble about it. Pakistan’s most powerful man, the head of the armed forces, General Ashfaq Kayani, cites water to justify his “India-centric” military stance.

Others take it further. “Water is the latest battle cry for jihadis,” says B.G. Verghese, an Indian writer. “They shout that water must flow, or blood must flow.” Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani terror group, likes to threaten to blow up India’s dams. Last year a Pakistani extremist, Abdur Rehman Makki, told a rally that if India were to “block Pakistan’s waters, we will let loose a river of blood.”

Diwan-i-Khas, Fatehpur Sikri

Fatehpur Sikri

Fatehpur Sikri is a hill palace outside of Agra, constructed by Akbar. This is the Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Private Audience. The central pillar, which has a square base and an octagonal shaft, both carved with bands of geometric and floral designs, further its thirty-six serpentine brackets support a circular platform for Akbar, which is connected to each corner of the building on the first floor, by four stone walkways. It is here that Akbar had representatives of different religions discuss their faiths and gave private audience.

Unintended Consequences and Academic Sidestepping: Crowd Behavior Recognition Chain

Via Digital Urban comes the above visualization of realtime crowd densities captured during the 2011 Lord Mayor’s Show in London (a sort of fancy parade). It is unclear if the analysis and mapping is coming from direct capture of mobile phone data, or by providing specialized wearable sensors to a small subset of volunteers who provide data which is pattern matched to different crowd densities based on an in-lab experimental dataset. My guess is that it is the latter, but the former is extremely possible once you have the proper data access. You can read the paper here: Recognition of Crowd Behavior from Mobile Sensors with Pattern Analysis and Graph Clustering Methods.

iPhone Travel

As seen with the recent iPhone location data file imbroglio (pretty map above of my data), it is both easy to generalize your location based on fixed cellphone towers, situation your precise location with GPS data, and there are huge unintended consequences to us carrying a powerful wearable computer which captures and passively transmits minute detailed data. I’m not putting my iPhone in a tin-foil wrapper, and I’m not following the NSA mobile computing guide (which is basically turn it off all the time), but we are quickly moving into uncharted territory. This has huge implications, especially here in the US where there is a strong history of protecting the populace from continual State tracking and observation.

A recent example of a company dealing with the modern problem of accurate Sousveillance is Flickr with their Geofences:

Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your “home” or “school” that only allows “Friends and Family” to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area. So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the default geo privacy you’ve designated for that hotspot. That way, you can easily make sure that only people you trust can see the location of photos taken inside your house or any other sensitive areas while still showing the world exactly where you had those amazing cheese covered duck fat fries.

Photo by Bill Hudson

Note the total abrogation of any responsibility or even allusion that this crowd recognition algorithm has any negative consequence:

Thus, collecting sensor data from an ensemble of persons is a necessary condition to recognize crowd behaviors, but not a sucient one. The main challenge consists in the interpretation of this collected data and to devise methods to map the sensors signals, collected from an ensemble of persons, to one of several kinds of crowd behaviors.
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The recognition of crowd behavior facilitates practical applications. In situations of emergencies during large-scale public events, machine recognition of crowd behavior enables a better situational awareness of event managers and informed participants. This may be used to carry out an evacuation more successfully and eciently. Measuring the dynamics of crowd behavior can also be useful for urban planning and pedestrian navigation.

Or in reality, this system will be used by police states, and states which are nominally free, to track and contain any anti-social behavior. Sure there is a legitimate use case for violent uprisings, such as the recent rioting in London, but you can’t for a minute believe that this wouldn’t be used to quash any peaceable assembly. Will planning agencies really have the money, or political constituency, to use this type of service to plan sidewalks?

Really?

This is a tool of state control, with a varnish of gee-whiz info graphics on top. It is saddening that the paper authors totally sidestep their academic requirement to think about their consequences.

Update 22 Nov 2011

On the matter of data collection, Martin Wirz writes:

“The data is being collected in near real-time (delay ~ 1. min) directly from the mobile phones. This allows for an instantaneous heat map visualization. We used the CoenoSense platform to collect the data.

More information: www.coenosense.com”

If you go to the website, under Use Cases comes further information:

This app provided important information to visitors: Maps with points of interests, travel Information, time table and notification services to obtain information about the current state of the event.

Additionally, the app was collecting GPS location updates and streaming them to the CoenoSense backend where this information was processed and used to provide a real-time heat map visualization of the current crowd density. This visualization was instantaneously available to the organizers and rescue forces, helping them to obtain an overall picture of the situation.

So, it appears that what it happening is that the data was collected was through an opt-in situation through the use of an iPhone app which broadcasts to a third part certain information. Furthermore, if you check out the LM Show app page (iTunes) the app description specifically states this:

Neither the Location Based Information nor the Messaging channels are used to send out advertisements. These features are there strictly for your convenience.

This app is part of a research project called Socionical, funded by the European Union. For more information about the project and its top level academic participants, please visit www.socionical.eu.

One of the research objectives of Socionical is to study crowd dynamics, following a major disaster. Since we cannot set up a disaster to test the app, we are testing it with your help during events with a high citizen participation. The app will record data anonymously, to show crowd density; it will, however, be absolutely impossible to deduce your identity from the recorded data. Furthermore, the app will only be active on the day of the Show and only while you are at the event location. You can use the app to check both the data recording zone and the sensor activity.

If there is a problem with congestion, or an emergency situation, then the researchers will inform the organisers of the Show and if necessary the emergency services and you will receive advice on, for example alternative routes. It is important that you do leave the app running so that you can be contacted if necessary. You will not be contacted on a personal basis, but because you happen to be in a particular location.

Socionical respects your privacy and conforms to all ethical rules set by the European Union. Furthermore, the collection of the data has the seal of approval from the Socionical Ethics Committee.

So the authors are very upfront about data collection – cheers to that! Yet the original premise stands: this type of service directly supports State power and control. This of course treads on the line of what is acceptable to research, since the results often can be used for nefarious purposes. The hope is that researchers acknowledge paths to their research have negative, and possibly harmful consequences.

Bridesmaids

I watched this on a small TV screen in Bombay, off of a downloaded copy from Netflix. Even free I wanted my money back. It isn’t that I don’t think women should be crude, it was that it was just so bad. Bad as in, not funny. I think they forgot to bring the funny.

TimeMaps: Showcasing Duration, not Distance

TimeMaps by Dutch designer Vincent Meertens redraws transit maps according to how long the trip is from any two points in the Netherlands:

Due to the good public transportation in the Netherlands distance has become irrelevant. We can reach almost any destination by train easily and relatively quick. In our busy lives we now think in time rather than distance. Therefore the current maps, as we know them today, are obsolete. Thinking in time affects a map and hence the shape of the Netherlands also depending on the perspective from which we look. From the perspective of Eindhoven, for instance, the Netherlands is relatively small because of the quick and easy connections to other cities. At the same time, seen from a more remote and small village such as Stavoren the Netherlands is much bigger. Not only the location from which one looks, or travels, but the hour of the day is very important. At night the map will expand because there are no night trains and in the morning it will shrink once trains will commence their schedules. The map of the Netherlands will never be the same again.

See also: