Sue-Lin Wong is the Financial Times's South China reporter; this week, she attended the China Public Security expo, the country's largest surveillance tech show, held biannually in Shenzhen. Read the rest

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor (previously) writes, "Stealing Ur Feelings is an augmented reality experience that reveals how apps like Snapchat can utilize facial emotion recognition technology to secretly collect data about your emotions to make decisions about your life and promote inequalities." Read the rest

The Scite project has a corpus of millions of scientific articles that it has analyzed with deep learning tools to determine whether any given paper has been supported or contradicted by subsequent publications; you can check Scite via the website, or install a browser plugin version (Firefox, Chrome). (Thanks, Josh!) Read the rest

One of the more extravagant claims made by tech companies is that they can detect emotions by analyzing photos of our faces with machine learning systems. The premise is sometimes dressed up in claims about "micro-expressions" that are below the threshold of human detection, though some vendors have made billions getting security agencies to let them train officers in "behavior detection" grounded in this premise. Read the rest

R U A Dick is a single-serving website that performs sentiment analysis on your (or anyone's) Reddit account history. I was deemed "slightly positive." Here is my most positive sentence on Reddit.

And here is my most negative one.

The script can also be run on Subreddits and the creator maintains a leaderboard of the nicest ones. I Took A Picture has the highest total score; other notably positive subs include Cosplay, Penmanship and Tattoos. [via Reddit.]

Every Monday I extract the top comments from the top posts of some of the most popular subreddits through the Reddit API. Each comment gets parsed into sentences and analyzed using the NLTK Sentiment Analyzer Vader Module which scores them based on how positive, negative, and neutral they are. Subreddits are ranked from most positive to least positive in the table below.

On August 6, artist Todd Vaziri observed that all of Trump's angry tweets come from the Twitter client for Android, while the more presidential, less batshit ones come from an Iphone; Vaziri speculated that the latter were sent by a staffer. Read the rest

Hosted on github, Depeche Mood is a lexicon of 37,000 emotional terms, part of the research work in DepecheMood: a Lexicon for Emotion Analysis from Crowd-Annotated News [PDF]. (via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: rageface_sad_crying, Meme TN, CC-BY) Read the rest