7 ms·
How Do You Vote? 50M Google Images Give a Clue
- analog31 9y agoThat's quite interesting, but I wonder if cars in garages could skew the data. Garages and garage size affect what cars can be kept in a garage (e.g., extended cab pickups might not fit), and also might be correlated to geography and affluence.
- lostlogin 9y agoGood thought. There is also likely a difference in what’s seen that relate to the time of day the street view photo was taken.
- ac29 9y agoProbably, but not much. In my experience, the vast majority of garages in the US are used as storage for "stuff", not cars. This probably changes as people get wealthier and want to store their more expensive cars indoors (and can afford to put their miscellaneous stuff in paid storage if they'd like to). Might also be different in urban cities where street parking is scarce and leaves your car more vulnerable to breakin.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoThat depends on what part of the country you're in. The northeast tends to have far more need of a garage to hold a car, at least during the winter.
- ghaff 9y agoHey, yep :-) I leave my vehicles out in the summer when all sorts of yard and other stuff is spread around the garage. But come mid-fall that all gets cleaned up so the cars can go in and let the plow do its thing. There's much less manual cleanup needed than if there's a car in the driveway.
- s0rce 9y agoIf you care about your paint the garage is way better than leaving your car out in the sun in the south west. Not as annoying as clearing snow day to day but still a concern.
- analog31 9y agoYeah, when we moved to Texas from the North, we noticed that cars rusted from the top down, rather than the bottom up.
- code_duck 9y agoYou’ll certainly find people using garages for cars in places where you get snow and ice, and the temperature at night is below freezing. Living in northern Wisconsin, for example, if you don’t park in a heated garage, snow and ice might not melt off your car for the entire winter. Parking in a garage means you won't have to scrape snow and ice off for 10 minutes standing in subzero weather. Parking outside, one also might need to plug the vehicle into an engine block heater on particularly chilly nights or risk the vehicle not starting in the morning.
- ridgeguy 9y agoIn wealthy regions, the cars might frequently be missing from StreetView. For example, in Woodside & Portola Valley (CA) most homes have garage or other off-street parking. A single home might house a Prius, a Hummer, a Volt, an extended cab F150 and a McLaren F1, all invisible from the street.
- js2 9y agoLink to paper (“Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States”): http://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13108.full.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13108.full.pdf
- jimmytucson 9y agoThe title reads a little disingenuous. Aren’t they using deep learning and Google Street View to predict the make, model, and year of a vehicle? Then, separately, they’re using predicted vehicle information to guess the demographic traits of the person who lives there. Still, applying image recognition on Google Street View is a pretty cool idea. The location information gives you a whole other set of data to join with. For example, you could recognize flags hanging on people’s houses and join that with immigration data (there are a lot of Italian flags where I live), or recognize species of trees and join that with climate data.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agoi wonder how visual methods like this could monitor for sign of voter fraud. you could probably film polling places and use peoples faces as ids, and clothes and gender and age to get some reasonable estimates
- sandworm101 9y agoSuch a system would need to be massively perfect to catch the three people actually doing real voter fraud. That aside, filming people as they vote to see if they are voting the correct way, as people of thier backgrounds and neighbourhoods are expected to vote? Better get some great lawyers, if any would even attempt to defend such a thing.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agonah, i meant lines outside- just as a ballpark.
- sandworm101 9y agoWaiting in line is part of the voting process. Any sort of measurement of people waiting in lines will be a constitutional issue. What will the outcome be? A measurement saying too many poor people voted in an area?
- danjoc 9y agoIt seems like the most immediate application of this technology will be Gerrymandering.
- coredog64 9y agoIf the local polity wants to gerrymander, it would be far easier for them to get the data from a vehicle registration database. Not only would that include plates, but also things like the Chicago city sticker. Not only do they have the vehicle type (100% correct I might add), but they've got the year and likely an approximate value. As I type this, I'm pondering a new side business for insurance companies...
- squiggleblaz 9y agoIt could be illegal for them to use that. Perhaps the party does the redistricting which an assembly member introduces into the legislature. To use the database, it would either need to be publicly available or else the executive would have to do the gerrymander. (Which might be how it works. But I live in a place where good government is valued.)
- Houshalter 9y agoWhy on Earth does the legality matter? It's not like they'd ever admit they are gerrymandering. What data they use to optimize their gerrymander is irrelevant.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoWhy? Redistricting usually involves precinct level voting data, no?
- Tempest1981 9y agoPrevious discussion? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822304 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822304 https://news.stanford.edu/2017/11/28/neighborhoods-cars-indicate-political-leanings/ https://news.stanford.edu/2017/11/28/neighborhoods-cars-indi... Although the NYT may have a more detailed summary/analysis.
- jdblair 9y agoThe factoid about San Francisco in the article confirmed my perception that American cars are just not very popular is actually a distortion of the Bay Area bubble I live inside of. Edit: from the narrow view of my kitchen window in West Oakland I can see 2 Toyotas, a Subaru, a Ford Focus and the VW e-Golf in my driveway: 20% American. There'd usually be another suby in my driveway, but my son is home from college and borrowed it.
- sandworm101 9y agoThose toyotas were likely assembled in the usa, and from probably as many american parts as the ford. 'Domestic' and 'import' dont mean anything these days. They are all made by large trans-national corporations for whome citizenship is fluid.
- jdblair 9y agoWhile true, I don't see how your point is important in the context of this article.
- sandworm101 9y agoWhat matters is how many cars can be seen by google. In both very rich and very poor areas cars are kept away from the road. This may work in city suburbs but not in downtown cores or rural areas. Drive around beverly hills and you will see more pickup trucks belonging to contractors than bmws belonging to residents. They park in garages. Workmen park on the street.
- gumby 9y agoBefore the discussion gets too heated: the study authors are at pains to point out that this is simply a PoC. It’s possible that further studies will show overfitting and/or training bias (though clear to me what bias might exist in the turker approach they took). Very I nteresting work. Presumably the point of the announcement is to encourage agencies to fund more grant requests.
- cscurmudgeon 9y agoI know this is not on topic, but I find this statement hilarious: "Text has been easier for A.I. to handle, because words have discrete characters — 26 letters, in the case of English." This is like claiming the reporting (and being a reporter at NYT) is easy as it deals only with 26 letters.
- Endy 9y agoI find writing to be much easier than drawing or painting, because I have an easier time with interpreting discrete characters and then interpreting them through a dictionary in my brain accrued over my lifetime. Why are you asking differently of AI?
- cscurmudgeon 9y agoThat is solely due to training and culture. Computationally both are equally difficult for AI. Why do you think the Turing test is language based?
- fjsolwmv 9y agoBecause humans like language and the Turing test is about artificial human intelligence. And because at the time of Turning, computers were for arithmetic and text, not for audiovisual
- hosh 9y agoReminds me of the thesis in James Scott's Seeing Like A State. This is where the effort to make things legible (easier to count, to measure) lead to standardizations which on turn shaped policies. For example, old growth forests were strategic assets (masts for wind-powered warships). To make then easier to count, trees were replanted in neat rows (which had the unintended sideeffects of losing eco diversity for a healthy forest). Big Data and AIs are an extension of that idea. And while the machine learning doesn't require as rigid of a classification scheme, resulta will still be understood through the lens of what can be made legibile. For example, classifying cars to estimate socioeconomic status assumes that most people within the population owns and drives cars.
- netsharc 9y agoSomewhat relevant, "you're not allowed to smile in your passport photo" is so that the face recognition machine has it easier to identify you... Maybe people who don't like the surveillance state should run around in Joker make-up, and at least there's an answer to "You want to know why I got these scars?"