
How Do You Vote? 50M Google Images Give a Clue - dsr12
https://nytimes.com/2017/12/31/technology/google-images-voters.html
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gumby
Before 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.

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hosh
Reminds 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.

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netsharc
Somewhat 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?"

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js2
Link 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)

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jimmytucson
The 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.

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jdblair
The 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.

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sandworm101
Those 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.

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jdblair
While true, I don't see how your point is important in the context of this
article.

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Tempest1981
Previous discussion?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15822304)

[https://news.stanford.edu/2017/11/28/neighborhoods-cars-
indi...](https://news.stanford.edu/2017/11/28/neighborhoods-cars-indicate-
political-leanings/)

Although the NYT may have a more detailed summary/analysis.

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analog31
That'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.

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ac29
Probably, 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.

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SAI_Peregrinus
That 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.

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s0rce
If 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.

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analog31
Yeah, when we moved to Texas from the North, we noticed that cars rusted from
the top down, rather than the bottom up.

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sandworm101
What 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.

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cscurmudgeon
I 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.

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Endy
I 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?

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cscurmudgeon
That is solely due to training and culture. Computationally both are equally
difficult for AI. Why do you think the Turing test is language based?

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fjsolwmv
Because 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

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danjoc
It seems like the most immediate application of this technology will be
Gerrymandering.

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coredog64
If 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...

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squiggleblaz
It 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.)

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Houshalter
Why 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.

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the_cat_kittles
i 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

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isaac_is_goat
Why not just require government issued photo ID to vote?

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cryptoz
It is the right of the citizens to vote.

Citizens are not required to have government issued photo ID.

If you make government issued photo ID a requirement to vote, you have
violated the constitution and prevented legal citizens from voting.

 _Voter_ fraud is not a real problem. _Election_ fraud is, and election fraud
is often carried out by removing legal citizens' right to vote, just as you
described.

When you see a state making laws about what ID you need to vote, you are
watching election fraud in action.

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isaac_is_goat
> Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
> denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race,
> color, or previous condition of servitude.

Nothing in here about "shall not be denied or abridged because of lack of
photo ID".

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losteric
As long as acquiring an ID is equally painless for all demographics.

Introduce a fee, limited licensing locations/appointment times, or complex
applications, and the indirect result is often selective discrimination by
race. That's still unconstitutional.

