Month: April 2013

On finding the Boston bombers

current events up in boston make me wonder why relatively little time has passed in tracking down the culprits. is it due to sousveillance? collaborative filtering? what will it mean for large scale facial recognition (a technology that is here but is held back)? is this the impetus for the transparent society, or something much worse? what boondoggles will come out of this, and what good, if any?

Bored kids

bored kids look up celeb private details, call in SWAT teams to their homes, and then brag about who they swatted that day. it is very interesting how digital natives are such virtuosos with all this stuff. i wonder if there are any positive examples of such mastery, and don’t mention tired examples like the supposed tweets that caused that arab spring (didn’t happen).

Anonymous vs Los Zetas

this is fascinating despite the dumb use of cyber and hacker.

Los Zetas kidnapped a member of Anonymous in Veracruz on October 6th. In retaliation, Anonymous threatened to publicize online the personal information of Los Zetas and their associates, from taxi drivers to high-ranking politicians, unless Los Zetas freed their abductee by November 5th.

Proper HVAC

by collecting 500M data points from the sensors in all their buildings every 24h, finding huge energy savings right away:

In 1 building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66K of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.

2016-07-21: Cooling AI

by applying DeepMind’s machine learning to Google data centers, we’ve reduced the energy we use for cooling by up to 40%. In any large scale environment, this would be a huge improvement. Given how sophisticated Google’s data centers are already, it’s a phenomenal step forward.

this is why smart grids are one of the highest ROI investments countries could make.