They're not supposed to learn things like that, it will affect their close rates

--dave
My local Chief of Police has fought for years to get his people to "keep the peace" instead of "show high case-closed numbers". He's started to succeed, and the crime rates are going down, but he's been rewarded by budget cuts and being phased out for being too expansive... Bummer!

The number of cmparisons for sample size N is (N * N-1). You've just tied up all the computers in the universe doing realtime FR of the general population (;-))

You need as many 9's after the decimal point as you have digits in (N * N-1). As N is unbounded and accuracy is bounded, you get screwed. It's fine for a 10-person company (90 comparisons, negligable false positives) It's out of the question for airports (10,000 * 9,999 comparisons)

As the ARPAnauts would say "it doesn't scale"

Detention without trial, on suspicion of looking like Dr. Evil (;-))

No, that other commentator been mislead by a company that sells facial recognition. Google knows the math, and prohibits that particular stupidity by contract.

It's TERRIBLE public policy for people to be pulled aside for mere physical resemblance to a third person. A person the cop's never seen, and only has a photo of, but they've been told by a computer that this is the person in the photograph.

And computers are never wrong

Even worse, they have a combinatorial explosion problem (mentioned in the "Enforce" thread above).

better technology doesn't help enough!

To oversimplify, if you have 1 error in a thousand, and you have 10,000 (crooks + innocent people), you do (10,000 * 9,999) comparisons and get 99,990,000 / 1,000 = 9,990 errors. In stats, it's a selection of every two persons out of 10,000.

It's really something like (select one of 100 crooks from 10,000 innocents), but it's still an insanely huge number of comparisons. Hoeever good your technology, adding more people will give you (N * N-1) more chances of getting an error.

Facial recognition vendors are very careful to NOT report their error rates in ways that expose this problem: it's the "elephant in the room" for that industry. And that includes Siemens, my former employer.

The German Federal security service tried this years ago in airports, and got a combinatorial explosion in false positives (AKA the "birthday paradox") that drowned out the real positives. Google knows the math, and is trying to save the inumerate from an expensive failure (;-))

Great, just one problem That's NOT what Net Neutrality is about. You do realise we have had net neutrality in function if not name for many years, ended about 7 years ago, right? That without it, the market *can't* sort it out, and local governments can't do anything about it. If you don't understand the issue, then it's understandable why you don't seem to support it. You seem to think it's something very different than what it is. And they WANT the title2 provisions, for funding, just not on providing the services they've been paid for.

When I was starting out, we had tons of women in what was a low-status industry, where programming was described as "teaching mechanical children". I think there's a broader discussion in Kraft's "Programmers and Managers" (Springer-Verlag).

And they are a moral hazard directed at police chiefs: they tempt the cheifs to push for convictions, which are measurable, instead of prevention, which isn't.

ABSTRACT
This article argues that our current laws on the topic are counterproductive, because they protect child molesters instead of bringing them to justice, they criminalize a generation of normally-behaving teenagers which diverts valuable police resources from the criminals we should be going after, and they lead to censorship and electronic book burning as well as unacceptable collateral damage to innocent families. Child abuse as such is not condoned by anybody, and this article argues that current laws are counterproductive in preventing and prosecuting it.

In http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/0... The abstract is there because the title of the article will enrage the folks doing the prosecution...

Nope, bang on wrong. He's the head of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit - a unit of the CoL police, funded with a few million from the movie industry, to 'work on copyright issues nationally', and the CoL cops got it because theyre 'the lead cops for fraud nationwide'. Just to clear up, its not quite like the US,where the forces are limited to geographical restrictions, certain squads and units are 'national' in usage.