Seriously. Boy gaaaaa instead of lady g.

Then the magic would happen. We’d hear her tiny sounds. She’d be talking herself to sleep in baby talk; probably a collection of sounds from China, because she’d been on the point of starting to talk just as we brought her home.

I wish I could hear those little syllables again.

All us decent technologists hope our stuff, some of which we
realize may be dual use, is used for good.

The guys who make battery chargers don’t want them clipped
to dissident nipples, ok?

That being said, the conclusions are weak to non-existent.
Despite a dramatic and awe-inspiring presentation full of Matrix-movie like eye candy, all he comes up with is that: people talk about what they see on television on twitter.

People talk about what they see on television.

Am I the only one to see that this research fails to do anything but state an obvious observation?

People talk about what they see on television. Am I the only one to see that this research fails to do anything but state an obvious observation?

Um, no, I think you’re the one who failed to get the point. Yes, people talk about what they see on television. We know this. The researchers know this. That’s why they decided to delve into all that information and start to try and make sense of it. Start to try and structure it. Start to find out what the conversation is, and who is talking to who, and how different events affect the conversation.

This will certainly be interesting to researchers, for whatever egg-headed reasons they have, but is even more important to people like politicians and the TV industry. As someone said above, this puts the Nielsen ratings to shame.

Or actually, a guy called “Mr. Brainwash” already did it. Or something like it. See generally, Exit Through the Giftshop (Banksy 2010).

http://www.speech-language-therapy.com/ASHA03McLeodBleile.pdf

That must give hope to all those doing Quantified Self-type recordings, where they are taking huge amounts of data about themselves. I always thought that most people would either be not taking enough data to make it interesting, or be taking too much to be able to analyze. But it looks from this as if you could never have too much data.

I guess those of us who have gigs upon gigs of photos ever since getting digital cameras may finally be vindicated. Who knows what kind of data we might be able to pull from them, and what ways of visualizing them we might have in the future.

(i wonder if he’ll market his software?)

What’s with all the pessimism though, seriously, some of you here think that the big, bad, govt. is going to turn this sort of tech on us? One question, how? Are you just going to let the goons into your house to wire all this junk up, make them coffee and sandwiches while they work? And what about the collection, storage, and mining apparatus? Shit people, I don’t care how cheap a GB is these days it’s just not possible, yet. I love Orwell as much as the next guy (alright, a lot more) but I think the importance of what he was writing about was more the political and totalitarian not technological and analytical capabilities of evil tyrannies. Speaking to a matter of scope, it is unreasonable to even think that the govt. could monitor every persons phone conversations, as many tin-foil-hat-fraidy-cats often think is possible. Adapting that idea to all encompassing audiovisual surveillance is just absurd.

Then again MIT does get a lot of funding from the military and spook community.

Also, media manipulation is nothing new. Herman and Chomsky wrote about that in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ way back in ’88. And of course it has only matured. Still though, it’s not perfect and has little effect on rational people like many of us here at BB, or rather shouldn’t. I also realize that for the uneducated and irrational herd this creates problems.

I have been liferecording for the last 9 months. So far audio only as it is the most unobtrusive for other people. But like Deb, I have found it amazing at catching my kids at their best moments, with things I would normally miss.

Anyway, I have open sourced what I have done and it’s almost ready for mass consumption. http://code.google.com/p/eckoit/

i just hope this is used for good and not for evil
Big Brother would love this technology

–
btw, there’s a unicorn chaser at the end to the video

The desktop CPU was the disk controller, it had cycles to spare.

We supplied Dr. Roy at least in part, at some point, with drives
for free. PR no doubt.

I stood in our room with maybe 60 TB under my control, this was
a few years ago so it was maybe 60 boxes with a 500GB drive each.
He had more I think.

The blue LEDs used to blind me but made for good scifi pix.

I was an ugrad at mit so I got what he was doing. He had privacy shields over all the cams that also shut off the mics.

Its amazing that much time has gone by and his kid is now 5.
Best of luck and I hope his research does well. I have one and found his development fascinating. (And you don’t need to
pass an ethics committee to do experiments)