Facebook announced on Wednesday that it would launch facial-recognition technology that identifies people in uploaded photos and suggests tags, reports AFP. The technology will be rolled out in coming weeks, with Facebook engineers claiming it will save time. "Now if you upload pictures from your cousin's wedding, we'll group together pictures of the bride and suggest her name," read a Facebook blog post announcing the move. "Instead of typing her name 64 times, all you'll need to do is click 'Save' to tag all of your cousin's pictures at once." The feature actually enhances privacy, say Facebook staff. "Tagging is actually really important for control, because every time a tag is created it means that there was a photo of you on the Internet that you didn't know about," Facebook Vice President of Product Chris Cox told CNET. "Once you know that, you can remove the tag, or you can promote it to your friends, or you can write the person and say, 'I'm not that psyched about this photo.'" Those who object to automatic tagging can disable the feature
Thursday, December 16, 2010
We're about five years from Facebook killing us in orbit around Jupiter
Slow blogging today
Late night, late morning, nothing much is happening in the order it should today. Blogging will be light.
Bill Pullman joins 'Torchwood'
Bill Pullman has just signed on to star as a series regular in the fourth season of Torchwood, the Starz-co-produced continuation of the Doctor Who spinoff that’s airing next year. Pullman will play Oswald Jones, a clever convicted murderer “boiling with lust and rage,” who becomes a celebrity after escaping a prison sentence on a technicality. (Pullman is actually the second film star to join the show in the past few days, with Mekhi Phifer recently signing on to play an ambitious CIA agent.) Of course, Pullman has ample experience with alien encounters, so he should fit right in.
I'm starting to have doubts about this new Americanized version of "Torchwood."
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Walkable Philadelphia
A bit of blogospheric hubub about Richard Florida's post at The Atlantic about walkable cities being the post-recession future of America. "The great economic reset we are in the midst of extends even to Americans' choices of places to live," he write. "The popularity of sprawling auto-dependent suburbs is waning. A majority of Americans--six in 10--say they would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods, in both cities and suburbs, if they could."
It's not just a lifestyle preference, though: It's also economics. We sold our car when we moved to Philadelphia in 2008 -- lured, yes, in part by Philadelphia's high ranking on Walkscore.com's list of cities. But our yuppified desires would've been somewhat restrained had we not figured that the high cost of living in the city could be offset, in large part, by going autoless: the money we don't spend on gas, parking, maintenance and car replacement has (at times) proven to be the critical and necessary edge we've needed to be able to afford to stay here.
It has also worked in reverse: Adding the cost of a vehicle -- or two, realistically, depending on where we would end up -- makes the idea of moving to a less-walkable city that much tougher to swallow. Would the lower rent and mortgages back in Kansas offset the hundreds of dollars a month we'd spend on getting around? Unlikely. And that's ok. It's a good excuse for us to stay in a town and Center City neighborhood where we can be at the grocery store in five minutes, or the coffee shop in two, or the pizza joint in six. We like life like that.
Inky: Police find woman’s body in Kensington
Philadelphia police found the body of another woman in Kensington Wednesday evening and the task force investigating the strangling of women in that area was on the scene.
Police were searching a weedy, vacant lot in the 100 block of East Tusculum Street, which is not far from where other women have been found dead.
"It is a suspicious death," said Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, who arrived on the scene about 6:30 p.m. "She appears to be, maybe, in her 20s, Caucasian. She is nude from the waist down."
Are Marines too prejudiced against gays to fight effectively?
"Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines lives," he said. "That's the currency of this fight."
"I take that very, very seriously," he added. "I don't want to lose any Marines to the distraction. I don't want to have any Marines that I'm visiting at Bethesda [National Naval Medical Center, in Maryland] with no legs be the result of any type of distraction."
That's Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos, discussing his opposition to repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell.
As others have noted, though, there are certainly gay men and women serving in the Marines -- DADT only prohibits them from being *openly* gay. So it's certainly the case that gay troops have *already* demonstrated the discipline not (as some have inferred from Amos' remarks) to come onto their comrades-in-arms in a combat situation.
I'm not sure that was what Amos is trying to imply, though. It seems to me that what he's really saying is that his own Marines are simply far too prejudiced to be able to fight effectively with an openly gay colleague at their side. That seems an uncharitable judgment, to say the least -- "I'd like to take aim at this Taliban member with the machine gun, but Tony likes dudes!" -- and moreover, it would seem to reflect an extremely poor assessment of the commanders (like Amos) whose job it is to instill discipline and battle-readiness in those Marines.
And not to let my Mennonite background shine through too clearly here, but that's astonishing when you think about it. The Marines can teach young men and women to put aside thousands of years of civilization and lifetimes of moral training so that they can *kill other human beings* -- which is a huge, huge training challenge -- but their commanders don't trust them to simply *be cool and professional* around gay colleagues who share a commitment to defending the country. Are our armed forces really that fragile? I don't think so.
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