It has been exactly one month since I started taking 20 photos a day. Although this commitment barely maintains an element of joy, it persists and I would love to see how far it can go. Why am I collecting all of this data? Being in the field of computer vision (my daytime occupation), I estimate that within a few decades we will be able to index visual data and extract rich information from it, including information about one’s daily life.

A computer will have a reliable understanding of image contents — understanding that surpasses the human eye and mind. Want a photo that which a Labrador drinking water from a fountain on a sunny day? Want a descriptive verbal interpretation of a given distorted image? This will probably be practical in the distant future. It is a machine learning/pattern recognition task taken to extremity.

The Maths Tower on campus (undergoing demolition)

I have just put my first batch of daily photos on-line. This includes my journey to London from 2 days ago. The presentation I gave, by the way, aroused curiosity among members of the audience.
 
 

I have continously come across a couple of ducks that somehow found their way to the centre of Manchester. Today I dared to approach and take a picture — one of the 20 pictures that I take every day.

ach and every one of us writes and we all use quotes and apostrophes on occasions. Terrible it is to see how often they are chosen wrongly, or even worse, at random.

TECHWR-L provided me with a long-sought answer. It also revealed that I was using the British style without being aware of it. Statements require double quotes, scare quotes have a single. Have a read to get a short lesson in punctuation.

…I’d suggest British English generally uses double quotes for speech (“Let’s go to the beach,” Jane suggested) but single quotes for things like scare quotes (‘respected’ news sites)…

famous tale speaks of a naked king, who being the King, makes nakedness blindly accepted as a norm. No suspicion is raised until one man from the crowd yells “The King is naked“. This comes to show that the flock can accept things without using any self-judgement.

Likewise, Internet users circulate bits which gain their value from word of mouth. One such example is the Satellite Google Maps hype. When the net became aware of the service, everyone quickly got excited. This probably wouldn’t have been the case if was not a Google feature. I looked at satellite images of this type back in 1999 or 2000 (using TerraServer) and identified friends’ homes. It wasn’t as widespread at the time because there wasn’t as great a ‘buzz’.

An actual satellite image of a field in Illinois

I recently decided to take on a little obligation. I would like see if I can handle 20 low-resolution pictures a day; every single day, that is. I have made the process of transferring data from my camera to the Web very efficient and I will soon discover how my pictures collage extends (see an example from my health club).

Certain on-line services offer customised information as images. Wundeground deliver your local weather as a GIF file and DanaSoft provide informative signatures, as shown below. Since both are displayed regularly in my personal portal, I like using the functionality of CSS which clips images as illustrated in this example page. Feel free to copy.

Some relevant code from the example:

<div style="position:absolute; top:5; left:10;
clip:rect(12px auto 40px auto)">
<img
src="http://www.danasoft.com/sig/fookitnow.jpg"
style="border:1px #000 solid;" />
</div>