Ged Carroll

Month: July 2011

  • Facial recognition – ethics

    Former CEO Eric Schmidt made a big deal of facial recognition databases being the one technology that Google wouldn’t deploying as it is an ethical and privacy set too far. Face recognition is currently used in law enforcement situations from policing football matches to anti-terrorism detection and surveillance amongst crowds. Google does use a certain amount of face recognition technology in its Picasa photo-sharing application and has some patents on using facial recognition in a social network.

    Developments in face recognition technology are apparently taking place at a rapidly increasing pace according Schmidt, which means that even if Google doesn’t roll something out, others will, Facebook being the likely favourite.

    With geotagged images and video taken by smartphones, turning the world into a constantly surveiled system. There would be no privacy and few hiding places left. The idea of moving to a new town or city and reinventing yourself which young people do when they go to college or go and get their first job would fall at the first hurdle as your old life would be seamlessly sewn together to your new one online.

    The risk goes up considerably when you have battered spouses who have ran away or are looking escape a stalker.

    Google’s disinterest in face recognition could be seen as being more about dodging anti-trust regulations, particularly if this technology was merged with search. However once someone does it, Google will to be a reluctant but fast follower if it is to continue to compete in the online space, which probably explains why they bought PittPatt the other day and recently patented the use of facial recognition technology to pick famous people out of pictures (presumably to improve image search relevance). More related content can be found here.

    More information online

    One Counter To Schmidt’s Facial Recognition Claim | Stowe Boyd

    Google Acquires Facial Recognition Software Company PittPatt | Techcrunch

    Google warns against facial recognition database | The Telegraph

    Google Thinks Facial Recognition Is Very, Very Bad. Except Maybe For Famous People | Gizmodo

    Google debates face recognition technology | FT.com

  • Hackgate & UK audience

    Much has been made this week on the Murdoch’s appearing at a parliamentary inquiry into hackgate: a scandal involving phone hacking and other nefarious practices by the media in order to get stories. What is less getting less to no real discussion is what hackgate says about the UK audience. News International is a business, if the content didn’t sell, they wouldn’t create more of it.

    Content that would formerly only air in blackmail cases would appear on the Sunday breakfast table and consumers lapped up the lives of public figures. I am no fan of News Corporation’s media outlets but I feel very uncomfortable about the four-minute hate that is going on at the moment. Lots of people are enjoying the details about the how, but nobody seems to be asking about the why of the whole episode.

    Like the war on drugs, the problem isn’t only one of supply, but one of latent and actual demand that will be supplied one way or the other. Whilst there are middle-class people who believe that cocaine is an ideal final course at a dinner party you will have drug cartels. Whilst you have consumers who have a prurient interest in other people’s lives there will be publications that are willing to push the envelope in news-gathering.

    Why aren’t questions being asked about the thirst of UK consumers for the kind of stories that hackgate revealed. An examination of society as well as media ethics is called for.

    Why did it take the murder of a child (Milly Dowling) to suddenly make the media gathering behaviour move from naughty to wrong in the general public’s eyes? More media related commentary can be found here.

    More discussions of note about the case

    Monocolumn – High farce lets Murdoch off the hook [Monocle]

    RPT-COLUMN-It pays to be Murdoch. Just ask US gov’t: DCJohnston | Reuters

    Hunt asks regulators to reconsider News Corp/Sky deal – Media news – Media Week

    Murdoch Closing Tabloid Linked to British Hacking – NYTimes.com

    James Murdoch accused of lying

    UK deputy PM: Chance to clean up press-gov’t ties

  • Aspiration of flight

    Inter-city rail services increasingly define themselves in terms of comparison to airlines. Take for instance the Chinese attendants recruited for the countries new Beijing-Shanghai ‘bullet-train’ route. The 403 women inductees look like classic air stewardess material and have gone through a similar kind of polishing process. The Chinese describe these attendees as ‘high-speed sisters’ 高姐. Find out more at the Shanghaist

    In the UK, you don’t have to look far for the aspiration of flight, rows of seats where you are not facing people are called ‘airline-style seats’ on the online ticket booking service and First Great Western even have gone to the trouble of recreating the airline safety card attached to the seat and a little fold-down drinks table.

    Virgin Trains have provided an integrated points system with other aspects of their business including Virgin Travel and Virgin Atlantic – their airline. Thankfully the airline doesn’t have the kind of odours that its train toilets seem to have, even when spotless. 
    Aspirations of flight
    The problem is that the actual experience isn’t like an airline in most cases, its bumpy and lurches from side-to-side on older parts of the track. At least Virgin has its Pendolino trains that lean into a turn and smooth out the side to side movement. On occasion Virgin’s tilting trains can make the walk to the buffet car like a simulation of being under the influence. And the overall ambiance of trains in the UK, if it did meet the aspiration of flight standard is generally more Ryanair than Singapore Airlines. 

    Instead of aping airlines with an aspiration of flight, why not emphasis what the trains don’t have like laborious security checks and having to spend hours in the crap department store concessions that now pass for airside lounges in the UK? More related content can be found here. 

  • Maze restaurant

    In many other countries the best restaurants are often found in a good quality hotel; in London you have a lot of restaurants out of hotels in areas like Mayfair and Soho. Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant is inside the London Marriott Grosvenor Square hotel.

    Grosvenor Square is a bit out of my stomping ground, but would be ideal for shoppers on New Bond Street and the plethora of hedge fund managers based in Mayfair. I went along with my friend Tomoko on a Saturday morning, so your mileage may vary.

    Whilst the hotel is a vintage brick building, the interior design of the restaurant has a modern tip with a nod to 1960s science fiction films. We got there early and so grabbed a drink at the bar. The bartender was friendly and set a high standard of service that was matched later on when we sat down to eat.

    One of the problems with having a successful career is the inevitable spread that comes with too many corporate lunches. maze addresses this by having a menu more akin to a set of tasters rather than full-blown dishes. The food is tasty and aesthetically pleasing modern European in style.

    Whilst you eat the food, you can hold a reasonable conversation with your lunch date, given that the noise levels are lower than most Soho diners because of the acoustic panels lining the walls. In fact, the only thing that would negate me recommending maze as a business restaurant is the fact it only opens as 12h00; so there is no breakfast menu – which nukes half the business meetings I do.

    maze restaurant (in the London Marriott Grosvenor Square hotel)
    10-13 Grosvenor Square
    London W1K 6JP
    020 7495 2211
    Open Daily 12pm-2:30pm, 6pm-10:30pm

  • London through a tourist’s eyes

    My friend Tomoko was in London the other week and it was interesting seeing what excited her about London, as Tomoko’s London is very different from my own.

    Firstly ‘knowing London’ means knowing central and Northwest London rather than central and East London. Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Soho aren’t attractive; St Johns Wood and Mayfair are – big learning curve for me here, as I have assiduously avoided anything west of Soho during my 13 or so years in London.

    Whilst we may think that London has everything to offer with contemporary clubs like Cargo and the East Village, it was Whisky Mist that Tomoko went to. With a clientele drawn from or aspiring to be in a P.G. Wodehouse adaption styled by Jack Wills; that you would only find me in under duress, but was what she wanted to do. Tradition and the class system trappings is a huge selling point for the UK – in terms of experience it beats Cool Britannia of modern UK life into a cocked hat. We had a drink and a catch-up late one evening in the Rockcliff Bar in The Trafalgar Hotel which I felt was a reasonable compromise.

    One thing that she was surprised at was how early in general London closes its bars and restaurants on a week-day; its not as swinging as the reputation would have others believe and certainly not up to the standard of Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai or Singapore.

    Fifteen or twenty years ago, the UK had a reputation as the worst cooks in Europe. Tomoko’s trip was as much about being a gastronomic journey. She learned how to prepare a proper English afternoon tea (the rest of the world thinks that we don’t go to Pret-a-Manger and Starbucks apparently) and we had a taster menu lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze restaurant (more on this in another post).

    There was an interesting take on shopping:

    • Mitsukoshi for convenience – not having to fight your way through Mayfair, along Regent Street or up Oxford Street to Selfridges
    • Jermyn Street for male family presents; Covent Garden antiques market for souvenirs and bringing presnts to female family presents
    • Old and New Bond Street were of interest for window shopping

    Which makes me think that a lot of central London retail space is looking seriously over-priced and that high footfall – long the measure of a desirable retail space can be as lethal for a shop as a branch of the Sue Ryder charity opening up next door.

    All of this made think about what what my current home city means to people around the world. I have met people within my industry where having worked in London agency life carried a lot of kudos, the popularity of modern dance music elsewhere in the world was spearheaded by the middle-aged UK DJs who were involved in the late 80s acid house scene. Modern design with a twist of irreverence from James Dyson and Paul Smith to Jonathan Ives at Apple are the product of a forward-looking country. But that doesn’t seem to have translated into a brand identity for London that is less Daniel Craig and more David Niven.

    Asian countries like Korea, Japan and China have managed to forge identities that are modern, yet are complementary to the centuries of culture and history that they have. On the other had, Egypt (at least as a tourist destination) is all about the ancient Egyptian society that flourished and declined 2,000 years ago. I would prefer to see London being able to balance a modern identity with a nod to the history rather than be trapped by it. Perhaps the best place to start would be through the creative destruction of the Central London built environment.