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Boston Police Chief: Facial Recognition Tech Didn't Help Find Bombing Suspects
SternisheFan writes "ArsTechnica reports: 'While the whole country is relieved that this past week's Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department's facial recognition system "did not identify" the two bombing suspects. "The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs' images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver's license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation," the Post reported on Saturday. Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus "next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states," according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.'"
Rinse and repeat
You should first understand what you mean by "efficiency". Efficiency in private sector is making maximum possible money for private companies. If providing goods and services at the lowest price to the consumer is the only way to make money, they will do so. All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback. In the present private sector health care, people are not free to switch their health care providers, it is being bundled with their employment. The moment the customers are not able to switch the competition disappears. At this point private sector will continually sacrifice service for profits. It is as simple as that.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is there really something valiant and courageous about ID'ing the person who just turned you into an amputee?
I'm not belittling the man, I feel awful for him as that's one of the most horrendous life changing things I can imagine happening, but I'm not entirely sure what heroic act this man has performed, he's done what anyone in his situation would do - the maximum he can to exact revenge.
Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but the bravado being shown regarding people who did what anyone would expect them to do between this and the poor MIT officer who got shot dead without being given chance to defend himself strikes me as a little odd.
I would argue, the heroes, if any, are those who rushed to the aid of the injured without knowing if they themselves could become victims of another bomb or attack as they did so, not the poor sods who died or are led in hospital beds - they're unfortunate victims. Is no one allowed to be a victim in America? Must every victim be made a hero whilst the real heroes go unnamed and unknown?
Certainly I imagine that if this is what heroism is, the guy led missing his legs would rather be one of the unknown and unnamed.
Current-generation face-recognition systems have a false positive rate of about 1 in 1,000 even when they have excellent images to work with -- high-resolution, well-lit, full-face frontal photos with no obscuring hats, glasses, etc. So even if CCTVs captured excellent images, if you're searching a database of tens of millions you're going to get a lot of matches. In a case like the Boston bombing it's okay if you get a few thousand hits because there is manpower available to sort through and narrow those down to the dozens which the (much more accurate) human eye/brain can't distinguish, and then there's manpower available to chase down each of those leads.
When you reduce the image quality, though, make it grainy, at an angle, poorly lit, and throw in some baseball caps... forget it. You have to reduce the match threshold, and then instead of thousands of candidate matches, you have tens or hundreds of thousands. For that matter, consider the fact that humans can't deal well with those constraints, and we're social animals who devote a significant portion of our enormous brain capacity to exactly this task.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Insurance works, only when it is operating on large sample sizes and liklihood estimates and expected values and statistics. If it is specific and individualized, they stop working. A diabetic knows exactly how much his insulin is going to cost. And will buy insurance only if the premium is less than the expected claims. The insurance company will not insure him for less than the cost of claims known `a priori. This is a deadlock.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
All the benefits of private sector comes only when there is high degree of competition between the private companies and there is an informed consumers making rational choices to provide feedback.
This is the biggest myth about health care: That people make "rational, informed" choices. They don't. You don't have an appendix attack and shop around to a few hospitals to see who has the best rate: They put you in the ambulance and you go to the closest place with a resource available to save your life. As for a "free market" in health care, that's an interesting academic discussion, but certainly isn't something that will ever exist in the real world.
There is a massive barrier to entry in providing services: You can't just up and become a doctor. There's licensing, education, and liability insurance premiums. In a "free market" new providers would rush to provide the service that has become so rare that the price spiked. But that's an 8-12 years pipeline to add new doctors, and a 2-6 year pipeline for new RNs, MSNs. And all of that adds up to this: It isn't really a free market, and there probably isn't much hope of it ever becoming one because sick patients will always be mostly frightened and want the first option that saves their lives. Our society will never allow any random to person to just say "I'm a doctor!" and provide medical care. So we're stuck: We can't grow the supply of doctors and high-skill nurses fast enough to provide care for all the sick people, and we can't get sick people to say "fuck you! I'd rather die than pay that much!" (yet) so that's where it stands.
It ain't a "free market," and it can't become a "Free market" in the foreseeable future. Get back to me if mankind can evolve out of mortal fear for his own existence to the point where he can "shop around" for the cheapest E.R. after he breaks a leg, gets hit by a car, or has an appendix attack.
Who did what now?