Blog - 'Flasher Detection' Algorithm Aims to Clean Up Video Chat

One of the more extraordinary trends in internet use has been the rapid rise of video chat services such as Chatroulette. These services randomly link the webcams of people who visit the site.

But Chatroulette has a problem. The site is dominated by flashers who expose their genitals.

Some 6.3 million visitors used Chatroulette in July 2010, perhaps because of the sexual nature of its content.

But this poses a significant threat to minors. There is no easy way to police the age of people who visit websites and minors can gain access easily. According to Xinyu Xing at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a few pals, a significant number of Chatroulette users appear to be minors.

"Our observations on a typical Saturday night indicate that as many as 20-30% of Chatroulette users are minors," they say in a paper published today on the arXiv.

Xing and co have a solution, however. This team has developed a "flasher detection" algorithm that spots the offenders, allowing them to be kicked out.

It turns out that catching flashers is harder than it might seem at first. One way is to employ a crowdsourcing mechanism in which users report offenders whose video feed can then be evaluated by trained individuals and stopped if necessary.

But that's a time consuming and expensive task that is open to abuse. And with upwards of 20,000 users at any time, it's unlikely to work for Chatroulette in the long run.

Another approach is to use existing algorithms designed to detect pornographic content. Exactly how these algorithms work isn't entirely clear, but they appear to look for skin content in images.

Unfortunately, this type of software does not work well with video chat content, say Xing and co. That's because the video images are often poorly lit making it hard to distinguish skin from yellowy-white walls in the background, for example.

So Xing and co have developed their own algorithm, called SafevChat which they've tested on some 20,000 stills taken from Chatroulette videos and supplied by the service's founder Andrey Ternovskiy. Their paper gives a detailed insight into how it works.

The new approach is interesting because it analyses the images using several different criteria and then fuses the results before deciding whether the image is acceptable or not.

To get over the problem of skin-coloured walls and furniture, they combine skin detection with motion detection that compares sequential frames to see whether the"skin" is moving. And they use face, eye and nose detectors to distinguish facial from non-facial skin. The results are fused and the image is then classified as normal or offensive, having been trained on the initial dataset.

Xing and so say it works well and significantly better than a commercial pornographic image detector programme called PicBlock. They have a video showing how it works on their website.

In fact, SafeVChat works so well, that Chatroulette began using it on its website earlier this month.

Whether this makes Chatroulette more or less popular, we'll have to wait and see. But with any luck, it will make the site safer for all concerned.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1101.3124: SafeVchat: Detecting Obscene Content and Misbehaving Users in Online Video Chat Services

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The Guardian launches its new subscription iPhone app

The Guardian launches its new subscription iPhone app

The Guardian has released its new iPhone app today, launching with the intent to provide ?more frequent updates?, offer a broader range of content and make the iPhone news-browsing process a more pleasant experience.

Back in November we reported that the Guardian was to release a new version of its iPhone app which introduced a switch from a one off fee to a subscription charge model, showing The Guardian was looking to gain repeat income from readers, perhaps to prevent it from having to move its content behind a paywall.

The Guardian?s first application launched in December 2009, saw over 200,000 downloads and was ranked one of the top news apps on the App Store in the UK and in many other countries.

The company managed to retain over 170,000 frequent users, equating to 75% of the people who actually downloaded the app, identifying to the newspaper that it would be able to monetize its offering more effectively if it introduced a subscription model.

The new app is free to download but requires either a six-month or yearly subscription, the former costing £2.99 and the latter £3.99. For this, readers/downloaders will be able to receive free goal alerts for many UK and European football matches, video content is now available, comments have been opened and a section has been devoted to showing the trending stories from the Guardian website and across Twitter and Facebook.

For those who don?t want to pay for a subscription but did buy the first app, The Guardian are keeping the app available for 6 months, allowing readers to take advantage of the app for a little while longer. U.S users get the app for free but will see advertising within the app, which now account for 8% of downloads.

You can download the new app here, let us know your thoughts!

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New Cancer Marker May Aid Earlier Detection

Compared with their healthy cousins, cancer cells are a chaotic mess, often having extra chromosomes, abnormal shapes, and other odd attributes. Now scientists have discovered a strange feature that appears to be unique to cancer cells: long stretches of repetitive RNA, known as satellites. Preliminary research suggests that the satellites appear early in the development of cancer, a finding that may ultimately aid early detection.

"It's a very interesting and provocative finding," says Stuart Orkin, chairman of pediatric oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the research. "It suggests wholesale changes in gene expression in cancer cells that was previously unrecognized. It hints at how chromatin [the mass of DNA and proteins that make up chromosomes] and gene expression in cancer cells are deranged in a global fashion."

David Ting, Daniel Haber, and collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered the markers by accident while Ting was studying RNA from tumor cells. The DNA that codes for genes is normally transcribed into RNA, which is then translated into proteins. Ting was puzzled by the appearance of RNA molecules whose sequence didn't correspond to genes. He found that the sequences corresponded instead to satellites, stretches of repetitive DNA that are transcribed into RNA but never translated into proteins.

"We were surprised to find [the satellites] are expressed in humongous amounts in tumor tissue compared to normal tissue," says Ting. Follow-up testing in both mouse and human cancer tissue revealed high levels of satellites in different types of tumors, including lung, kidney, ovarian, prostate, and pancreatic cancers.

"This is a fascinating finding because there is no precedent for a finding a single class of [DNA] that is uniformly overexpressed in different types of cancer," says Bert Vogelstein, professor of oncology and pathology at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins University. "It appears to be true in virtually every cancer they looked at."

While scientists have known about the existence of satellite repeats in the genome for years?they make up about five percent of the genome?the role they play in healthy cells is still unclear. "For a long time, people have ignored it, thinking it was residual DNA," says Ting. In fact, most software used to analyze DNA sequences is designed to eliminate these stretches from their analysis, he says.

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Making Electric Vehicles Pay Off

Commercial fleets are a logical place to introduce battery-powered electric vehicles. After all, fleet vehicles operate with relatively predictable driving patterns, return to a central location overnight, and are managed by sophisticated logistics professionals who can weigh the cars' lower fueling and maintenance costs against their premium purchase price. Last year, managers of large fleets began exploring in earnest what EVs offer, kicking off demonstrations that will come to scale this year.

Companies such as FedEx, PepsiCo (through its Frito-Lay business), and AT&T are each deploying tens to hundreds of electric delivery vans from manufacturers such as Navistar, Smith Electric, and Azure Dynamics. And in November General Electric announced an aggressive plan to make EVs account for half of its 30,000-vehicle fleet by 2015 and to lease another 10,000 EVs to other commercial fleets managed by GE Capital.

Motivations vary. Going electric confers an image of corporate responsibility on these early entrants, and for GE it also primes the market for wares such as GE-designed charging stations. But Oliver Hazimeh, director of the automotive practice for the Boston-based management consultancy PRTM and an author of a November 2010 report on fleet electrification, sees more than a marketing play. Hazimeh says the early adopters anticipate an inevitable shift to electric transportation and are learning through doing: "They're all looking at the fundamental drivers and saying oil prices are not going to be cheaper and less volatile, emissions regulations are going in one direction, so for the longer term we have to start turning our fleet toward this technology."

That idea is based on projections that the cost of lithium batteries will plummet over the coming decade. PRTM's analysis shows EVs offering the lowest overall cost of ownership for fleet vehicles between 2015 and 2018 as lithium battery costs drop below $400 per kilowatt-hour, from an estimated $600 per kilowatt-hour in 2010.

However, it's not certain that battery prices will drop that steeply, and major automotive players such as Toyota are betting that they will remain high through 2020 (see "Will Electric Vehicles Finally Succeed?"). This uncertainty, coupled with the batteries' unproven life expectancy, represents the biggest challenge for fleet operators struggling to make a business case for electric vehicles. "We don't know exactly how long the batteries will last," says Hazimeh. "At the end of the day, if I resell the car at auction and have this huge risk provision, it muddies the water quite a bit."

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iPhone Preview: Dead Space

iPhone Preview: Dead Space

Posted on 3rd Jan 2011 at 08:33 by Joe Martin with 15 comments

It?s too easy to use the word ?impressive? to describe some of the new releases hitting the App Store lately; the word is starting to lose meaning and isn?t that useful to start with. We?re talking about games running on a mobile phone ? all they have to do is be even semi-playable and they end up way ahead of expectations.

Dead Space for the iPhone, however, looks very impressive.

The kudos here doesn?t stem just from the graphical detail that?s been ploughed into the game though, but more from the depth of the gameplay. Dead Space on the iPhone is essentially that ? Dead Space for the iPhone, feature complete. It has the same third person perspective, the same sprawling and haunting levels and the same focus on dismembering enemies. Lopping limbs off with your array of mining tools and scavenged weapons is a little bit trickier on a touch screen than on consoles or PC, but it?s still manageable and fun.


Dead Space?s first level didn?t leave a great impression, however. Once more cast as engineer Issac Clarke, the preview opened with a glorified mine cart sequence, with us trying to stop Necromorphs from swarming us. There was only a limited amount of movement and the entire thing felt very ?on rails?, thus negating the glory of the graphics. It was all too easy to yawn through the battles and assume that the entire game would be made of similar sequences.

After the shaky start, however, things quickly improved. The next level drops Isaac into a familiar-looking space station lobby and lets him roam freely. Workbenches and vending machines offer the chance to upgrade weapons and armour, build new weapons and buy extra ammo, just like in the original game. Even the holographic displays that wowed us so much in the original, PC release make a return too and, while we didn?t get a chance to see them first hand, the developers assured us that the zero-gravity sequences would make a return as well.


What?s most amazing about all this, however, is that Dead Space brings all this variety across to the iPhone without losing any of the accessibility. The controls in Dead Space are, with only a few minor exceptions (shooting the special Kinesis power can take some getting used to), so fluid and easy to use that they put other shooters on the iPhone to shame.

Our only concern, in fact, is whether or not the idea of playing Dead Space on our mobile phones is one we?ll actually find all that attractive in real life, as lengthy singleplayer games aren?t an easy fit with the platform. This isn?t the type of thing we can imagine ourselves dropping in to and playing for the 10 minutes it takes for the bus to turn up. Then again, if this iPhone version ? which will apparently help bridge the gap between the original Dead Space and the sequel due in early 2011 ? manages to be as gripping as the first game, then we might make an exception.

Dead Space is being developed by Electronic Arts and will be released for all iDevices in Q1 2011

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At Sharpton?s King Day Forum, a Focus on Gun Violence

Senator Charles E. Schumer said that no constitutional amendment was sacrosanct and that ?there?s nothing wrong in putting reasonable limits on guns.?

Alluding to the concern over the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people this month in Tucson, State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said, ?Sometimes it takes something big and dramatic to get people?s attention.?

Former Mayor David N. Dinkins remarked, ?It is absolutely ridiculous that any idiot can get a gun and kill people.?

But it was the host of the gathering who brought the message about gun control, wishful as it was, closest to home.

?Our grandmothers are afraid to go to the corner store,? Mr. Sharpton said. ?That might not be highfalutin philosophical for my academician friends, but that?s real life.?

About 200 people packed the storefront on West 145th Street known as the House of Justice, where Mr. Sharpton holds court every Saturday, delivering sermons much like the one he delivered on Monday, about violence, social inequalities and economic struggles. When there were no more chairs, people stood along the sides of the room. When the room was full, they convened on the sidewalk, their faces pressed against the door.

It was one of dozens of gatherings marking Dr. King?s birthday and probably not the only one to have the issue of gun violence as a theme. Mr. Sharpton?s event has become a tradition, though, and a required pit stop in Democratic circles, in part because it has functioned as a reliable barometer on the issues and the people of importance to black voters.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was greeted by boos, which he did not acknowledge. The crowd quieted when Mr. Bloomberg, who has campaigned for more gun control and even sent investigators to other states to uncover illegal gun sales, stepped to the microphone and began delivering his prepared remarks, though the booing returned when he said that President Obama considered New York City a model in public education reform. Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, on the other hand, was received by applause. She spoke of the rampage in Tucson, which left six people dead, and the anonymous people victimized by guns every day.

?We have to take this moment, and we need to come together, and we need to begin to have a political discourse in this country, where we can recognize our differences but move this country forward,? Ms. Gillibrand said.

Representative Charles B. Rangel got the loudest response of all when he issued a call for action, saying: ?Why don?t you help me form a group of mothers whose sons murdered the sons and daughters of other mothers? It ain?t no white folks down South killing our boys.?

Dignitaries spoke from behind a lectern on the stage and audience members spoke from a microphone on the floor, lining up for several hours to tell their stories. One young man challenged legislators to ?tell us what banks are funding the gun trade so we the people will pull our money out of those banks.?

A mother urged other parents to search their sons? closets, warning, ?Good boys shoot people too.?

Joann Soto, whose only child, Londell Byrd, 17, was shot and killed last month outside his home in the Bronx, said, ?I am one of those parents who worked two jobs to make sure my son got the education he deserved, and what did I get in return??

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At Sharpton?s King Day Forum, a Focus on Gun Violence

Senator Charles E. Schumer said that no constitutional amendment was sacrosanct and that ?there?s nothing wrong in putting reasonable limits on guns.?

Alluding to the concern over the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people this month in Tucson, State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said, ?Sometimes it takes something big and dramatic to get people?s attention.?

Former Mayor David N. Dinkins remarked, ?It is absolutely ridiculous that any idiot can get a gun and kill people.?

But it was the host of the gathering who brought the message about gun control, wishful as it was, closest to home.

?Our grandmothers are afraid to go to the corner store,? Mr. Sharpton said. ?That might not be highfalutin philosophical for my academician friends, but that?s real life.?

About 200 people packed the storefront on West 145th Street known as the House of Justice, where Mr. Sharpton holds court every Saturday, delivering sermons much like the one he delivered on Monday, about violence, social inequalities and economic struggles. When there were no more chairs, people stood along the sides of the room. When the room was full, they convened on the sidewalk, their faces pressed against the door.

It was one of dozens of gatherings marking Dr. King?s birthday and probably not the only one to have the issue of gun violence as a theme. Mr. Sharpton?s event has become a tradition, though, and a required pit stop in Democratic circles, in part because it has functioned as a reliable barometer on the issues and the people of importance to black voters.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was greeted by boos, which he did not acknowledge. The crowd quieted when Mr. Bloomberg, who has campaigned for more gun control and even sent investigators to other states to uncover illegal gun sales, stepped to the microphone and began delivering his prepared remarks, though the booing returned when he said that President Obama considered New York City a model in public education reform. Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, on the other hand, was received by applause. She spoke of the rampage in Tucson, which left six people dead, and the anonymous people victimized by guns every day.

?We have to take this moment, and we need to come together, and we need to begin to have a political discourse in this country, where we can recognize our differences but move this country forward,? Ms. Gillibrand said.

Representative Charles B. Rangel got the loudest response of all when he issued a call for action, saying: ?Why don?t you help me form a group of mothers whose sons murdered the sons and daughters of other mothers? It ain?t no white folks down South killing our boys.?

Dignitaries spoke from behind a lectern on the stage and audience members spoke from a microphone on the floor, lining up for several hours to tell their stories. One young man challenged legislators to ?tell us what banks are funding the gun trade so we the people will pull our money out of those banks.?

A mother urged other parents to search their sons? closets, warning, ?Good boys shoot people too.?

Joann Soto, whose only child, Londell Byrd, 17, was shot and killed last month outside his home in the Bronx, said, ?I am one of those parents who worked two jobs to make sure my son got the education he deserved, and what did I get in return??

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Can Corsair Succeed Where Nvidia failed?

Anyone remember ESA? Nvidia's attempt at making the PC platform its own with the 'Enthusiast Systems Architecture' software? The idea was to get other manufacturers to include little chips in their hardware that enabled them to talk to Nvidia's motherboards. Nvidia's ESA software would then report all the readouts: voltages, temperatures, speeds and so in a single, central interface.

The problem? Other companies (mostly motherboard makers) already had their own software, and they were (and still are) key features with which to differentiate and sell their products. They already did most of the same tasks, such as temperature and voltage monitoring, as well as overclocking, even if they lacked the fancy 3D interface.

Despite its noble ideals, ESA was never really accepted and it died as quickly as it arrived.

Roll on three years and Corsair is trying the same trick with its new Corsair Link software. The difference is that Corsair isn't trying to drum up support from other companies, as it already builds many different products. Instead, Corsair Link is the company's selling point for its own hardware range, which has considerably diversified in the last 12 months.

In case you didn't realise quite the scope of Corsair's products, it now makes speakers, headphones, PSUs, PC cases, heatsinks (both air-cooling and closed-loop water-cooling), SSDs, flash drives and memory. In fact, you would only need a Corsair graphics card, sound card and motherboard in order to make an entirely Corsair PC. I bet its Pokemon set was unbeatable in school.


As you would expect, all those components can throw out a lot of useful stats for enthusiasts who like to know (okay, often obsess about) what's going on, so tying all that together under one software roof makes Corsair Link a potentially very powerful tool.

It could well work too, because the technology isn't competing with that of other companies - cases, PSUs and memory don't come with monitoring software, although they can be read remotely by the motherboard through its own software.

However, the ways in which Corsair Link differs from the software included with motherboards remains to be seen: does the company have (or plan to have) ESA-style monitoring chips in its cases, PSUs and memory? We'll have to wait and see.

Corsair is busy making a platform for itself, and given its brand strength I can really see it working. But I'm worried; will this help kill competition by pushing the PC more towards being a closed platform?

It's unfortunate that Nvidia's ESA wasn't taken up, as it potentially offered an open standard across the industry to give a greater level of monitoring and control for customers, no matter what hardware you bought. However, with every company wanting to stamp its own brand, design and influence on everything it makes, it was bound to fail. Corsair trying to entice you to buy other Corsair components via technological treats is a different matter, though.

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Renders of 9-inch HP Topaz tablet leaked

Budget Worries Push Governors to Same Mind-Set

The prescription? Slash spending. Avoid tax increases. Tear up regulations that might drive away business and jobs. Shrink government, even if that means tackling the thorny issues of public employees and their pensions.

In years past, new governors have introduced themselves in inaugural remarks filled with cheery, soaring hopes; plans for expansions to education, health care and social services; and the outlines of new, ambitious local projects.

But an examination of more than two dozen opening addresses of incoming governors in recent days shows that such upbeat visions were often eclipsed by worries about jobs, money and budget gaps. Those speeches are the best indication thus far of the intentions of this class of 37 governors ? 26 new and the others re-elected.

?The rhetoric has grown very similar,? said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the nonpartisan National Association of State Budget Officers. ?A lot of times, you can?t tell if it?s a Republican or Democrat, a conservative or a liberal.?

In Wisconsin, the new Republican governor, Scott Walker, says that any prospect of a tax increase is off the table, and that he wants to ?right-size? state government, meaning, he says, that it would provide ?only the essential services our citizens need and taxpayers can afford.?

In California, the new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, lists as one of his guiding principles (second only to his tenet to ?speak the truth?) support for new taxes only if voters want them. And he says it is time to examine the state?s system of public pensions ? an increasingly vitriolic political issue in states around the country ? to ensure that they are ?fair to the workers and fair to the taxpayers.?

Without question, this emerging consensus comes in a wide range of degrees. Exceptions have also emerged.

Here in Illinois, a state that has wrestled with some of the most dire financial circumstances in the country, including some $8 billion in unpaid bills to social services agencies and others and a desperately underfinanced pension system, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, a Democrat, pledged after renewing his oath of office simply to ?stabilize our budget.? Three days later, on Thursday, he did the reverse of what so many governors are urging, and signed a 66 percent increase in the state?s income tax rate.

And in Minnesota, where Gov. Mark Dayton, another Democrat, faces a $6.2 billion deficit and a Legislature controlled by Republicans, he has advocated for a tax increase on the wealthy.

After being sworn in this month, Mr. Dayton told the crowd, ?To those who sincerely believe the state budget can be balanced with no tax increase ? including no forced property tax increase ? I say, if you can do so without destroying our schools, hospitals and public safety, please send me your bill, so I can sign it immediately.? Otherwise, Mr. Dayton said, he hoped his colleagues would work with him on ?this challenging, complicated and essential? budget process.

Though public remarks in the moments after being sworn into office may be the first signal of a governor?s true intentions, actual policies can be another matter entirely. Those can depend, not least of all, on the decisions of legislatures. And governors of all political stripes have a tendency to talk tough in their early days.

The difference now, experts say, is that the financial circumstances leave little room to do nothing, and governors will soon be tested on their words ? as early as in the next few weeks, when many of them must propose budgets for next year.

Some states seem better off (North Dakota) and others worse (California), but the shared, essential problem in many states is simple: not enough money coming in to pay for all that is going out.

While state revenues ? shrunken as a result of the recession ? are finally starting to improve somewhat, federal stimulus money that had propped up state budgets is vanishing and costs are rising, all of which has left state leaders bracing for what is next. For now, states have budget gaps of $26 billion, by some estimates, and foresee shortfalls of at least $82 billion as they look to next year?s budgets.

Emma Graves Fitzsimmons contributed research.

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