Clever Uses for Reverse Image Search

Via a coworker, some clever uses for Google Reverse Image Search over at Lifehacker.​ For example:

Whatever your social network of choice is, a number of fake profiles exist that try to friend you. Since most of these use stock photos or random pictures of the internet, finding the fakes is easy with a reverse image search.

If only this had come out earlier for Manti Te'o's sake.​

Where this really becomes powerful is on a mobile phone, especially as image recognition algorithms become better at identifying objects from different angles.

It only works for a limited set of products, but the iOS app Flow​ intrigued me early on with its ability to identify products from simply an image. It wasn't that useful at the time because most products it could identify were products that were, well, self-identifying, like a book with its title on the, ahem, cover. But the germ of something cool is there. Think facial recognition databases and Google Glasses, however creepy it might sound, and you get some sense of the potential.

Of course, we knew this day was coming. The internet has always excelled, above all other uses, at moving information more efficiently, and the day when pictorial information is so easily identified is easily correlated to metadata is not far away. When I was at Hulu we already had facial recognition working fairly well for characters on screen in video, and they've since rolled it out on some videos.​

Personally, I'd love that feature for Game of Thrones, where I spend half of each episode asking people I'm with who so and so is. And if such technology existed back in the day, a show like The Americans would seem more implausible, since even without that technology it's pretty clear it's Keri Russell under the endless supply of strange wigs and hairpieces she dons as costumes.​

Which reminds me, I'm glad the new Man of Steel trailer​ seems to hint that they won't even bother establishing the whole Clark Kent persona (they also try to explain the S on his chest which is why I'm guessing they're going for a more realistic depiction of the fantasy, much like Nolan's Dark Knight did for Batman). I have never been able to get over the fact that Superman's disguise was simply a pair of glasses. Everything else about him, his hair, his voice, his build, was exactly the same.

You might wonder why I'd pick on that implausibility and not any of the other ridiculous things like his red underwear (overwear), the fact that he could fly, the fact that they speak English on Krypton, all that stuff. And the answer is, there is no reason, at least none that is acceptable for a grown adult.

The dangers of sustained unemployment

When Japan’s real-estate bubble burst, young people had no point of reference other than boom times. So when the job market dried up, many of them welcomed the chance for self-exploration. In 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported on these young freeters, who rejected “conformist Japanese culture and its 15-hour workdays” in favor of “working odd jobs for spare cash” and “hanging out.” The freeters pioneered funemployment.

But while the term freeter stuck, the choice to be out of work was soon anything but free. The first freeters are now in their late 30s and early 40s. Almost one-third do not hold regular jobs, and some never have. One-fifth still live with their parents. This perpetual failure to launch has taken a psychological toll. Aging freeters file six of every 10 mental-health insurance claims. Japan’s suicide rate rose by 70 percent from 1991 to 2003, and the proportion of suicide victims in their 30s has grown each of the past 15 years.

What is most alarming is that things keep getting worse for subsequent generations. Today, more than 20 years after Japan’s bubble burst, youth unemployment is higher than ever. Only half of working 15-to-24-year-olds have regular jobs, and another 10 percent are unemployed. The rest are “nonregulars.” Somewhat akin to temp positions in the U.S., Japan’s nonregular jobs pay half as much as regular jobs, offer few benefits, and can be eliminated on a whim—which they often are. The portion of young Japanese working as nonregulars exploded in the mid-1990s and has marched upward ever since.

​Ethan Devine in the Atlantic on lessons the U.S. should learn from Japan about surges in unemployment. They can self-perpetuate. Also instructive for teaching me the terms "freeter" and "funemployment."

The lesson I took away was about the importance of continuing to learn new skills after graduation. Of course, college is much about signaling, and not necessarily about your exact course of study. But it's not clear that the traditional degrees that colleges tend to guide students toward are necessarily the optimal ones for employment in this next phase of our economy.

It's a post for another day, but I see students coming out of undergrad and graduate school these days missing some very basic and important skills which would boost their employability significantly.​

To twist a well-known aphorism, being employed won't necessarily make you happy, but being unemployed can make you very unhappy.​

WHCD

I admire [CNN's] commitment to covering all sides of a story...just in case one of them happens to be accurate.

When Obama leaves office, one of the things I'll miss the most are his comedy routines at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. The one he gave last night was one of the best yet.

I recognize that the Press and I have different jobs. My job is to be President, your job is to keep me humble. Frankly I think I'm doing my job better.​

Seriously, he has some serious comedic timing, that's a gift. He also has some great joke writers, and they deserve some ​recognition. Who are they? Conan O'Brien could've used them last night.

Going undercover on social networks

Results show that men in relationships and with large on-line networks are more like to look at women they do not know. In contrast, single men with large networks are more likely to look at women they do know.

From this Harvard Business School paper (PDF) which "proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. Such covers are most valuable to actors in long-term relationships, as those who are already employed or in a long-term romantic relationship should not be seen as participating in the market for a new relationship."​

I wish, like OkCupid did with OkTrends ("Frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else, probably via some bit.ly hack"), social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook revealed more aggregate insight into human behavior culled from their gazillions of users. There's much of interest there, but it's locked away.

I have many theses I'd love to test. For example, the relationship between vain status updates on Facebook and the number of total profile photos you have uploaded, or the relationship between people who cheat at Words with Friends and people who cheat on their taxes.​ Foursquare checkins or Instagram food photo restaurant sources as a predictor of annual income.  I need to finagle access to such data and turn it into a bestselling pop psychology book.

Ritual

Xavier Marquez reviews Randall Collins' book Interaction Ritual Chains.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion. (I pause to note that an amplifier of emotion is not necessarily a generator of emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among small military units; these interactions motivate us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors, proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful for all participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering, and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your workplace, or an awful lecture. These rituals are demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.

Perhaps the most important bit is this one (emphasis mine):​

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to be; for the most part, we do not reason our way to most of our important beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their interaction rituals (which may not look like obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join social movements before they acquire clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

Just as Marquez's review caused me to want to purchase and read Collins' book​ immediately, I hope you'll want to go read Marquez's review after this short tease.