Ratchet Up

Exposing Ourselves

"Peeping Tom," the chilly 1959 movie by Michael Powell, concerns a young psychopath who uses a 16mm movie camera to film his victims while he is killing them. The close-ups of terror that cross the faces of the women as he impales them on a spike attached to his tripod are for him a source of curiosity and pleasure. [...] in its exploration of the dynamics between movie images and violence, criminality and voyeurism, the film was shockingly ahead of its time.

A casual reading of the news illustrates just how prescient "Peeping Tom" has turned out to be. There was the recent arrest in Nevada of Chester Stiles, who allegedly filmed himself raping a three-year-old girl. This sensational item overlapped with the capture in Thailand of Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian schoolteacher accused of posting on the Internet images of himself having sex with a series of children. Neither would in all likelihood have been jailed so quickly had they not photographed themselves performing these atrocities. Both Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who shot eight people in a Finnish high school on Nov. 7, and Cho Seung Hui, murderer of 32 at Virginia Tech this April, made confessional videos for broadcast or posting online--so called massacre manifestos--designed to outlive their suicides. [...]

The guards at Abu Ghraib also participated in this trend. Their abuse and torture of Iraqis might have remained whispered rumors within the prison walls had they not taken pictures for their own amusement. The members of al Qaeda who beheaded Western journalists and aid workers are a subset as well. They staged these murders for the cameras in hopes the group's ruthlessness would be broadcast to viewers everywhere. Like the lead character in "Peeping Tom," they took pleasure in filming and watching playbacks of their own cruelty. [...]

The growth of these many new varieties of confessional video, self-programmed with either violent or sexual content, has coincided with the expanding reach of surveillance technology. Never have so many of us been so willing to have our lives overseen by cameras. Being photographed in public places--sometimes with one's tacit consent but usually without--is now so routine that hardly a day goes by when urban or suburban dwellers don't have a chance to catch sight of themselves on a video monitor.

While a minority still protest or at least openly worry about these Orwellian intrusions, most of us have internalized modes of surveillance so deeply by now that they are a source of either comfort or entertainment. "Big Brother" is a larky reality show and an international franchise. [...]

The photographic image has the power to magnify the everyday by the simplest means. To star in your own movie requires only that you press a button on the picture machine. The dirt-cheap costs of producing digital images and linking them to global networks that promise a vast audience--or that cater to a particular "community"--have no doubt contributed to these mutations in mores. The hundreds of niche audiences developed by cable television and the millions created by the Internet are responsible for a wilderness of images.

The rapist who trains a camera on his actions, the high-school friends who exchange sexually graphic cellphone images of themselves--even the egregiously off-key "American Idol" contestant--have this in common: They have decided that any risk they run of self-incrimination or public scorn is worth the thrill of seeing their own image looking back at them.

The one encouraging note may be the number of pedophiles, jihadists, hate groups and numbskull criminals willing to trap themselves in their own world-wide web by providing boastful evidence of their lawbreaking online." [WSJ Online]

Dimentia-Cam

Microsoft's SenseCam is being used to help people with various forms of dementia to remember things. It's a mostly always-on visual aid that hangs around the neck, regularly snapping images.

"Not only does SenseCam allow people to recall memories while they are looking at the images, which in itself is wonderful, but after an initial period of consolidation, it appears to lead to long-term retention of memories over many months, without the need to view the images repeatedly," says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist who works as a consultant to Microsoft.

SenseCam is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. It contains an accelerometer to stabilize the image and reduce blurriness, and it can be configured to take pictures in response to changes in movement, temperature, or lighting. "Because it has a wide-angle lens, you don't have to point it at anything--it just happens to capture pretty much everything that the wearer can see," says Steve Hodges, the manager of the Sensor and Devices Group at Microsoft Research, U.K.

An entire day's events can be captured digitally on a memory card and downloaded onto a PC for subsequent viewing. Using specially designed software, the Microsoft researchers can convert the pictures into a short movie that displays the images at up to 10 frames per second, allowing a day's events to be viewed in a few minutes.

SenseCam was originally developed as a memory aid for healthy people, but it is now in clinical testing for those with memory impairment, such as dementia. Narinder Kapur, head of the Neuropsychology Department at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, U.K., and leader of the eight-patient study, recently published an initial case report of one patient in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. Kapur and his colleagues found that Mrs. B could remember most nontrivial events after she had spent around one hour reviewing the SenseCam images with her husband every two days for a two-week period.

The device might help patients with mild forms of Alzheimer's disease, says Giovanni Frisoni, a neurologist at a clinical research institute in Brescia, Italy, who is not involved in the research. He is skeptical, however, about whether SenseCam could be used by patients with Alzheimer's disease without assistance from their caregivers. Still, "it might have a beneficial effect on soothing the patients' anxiety," he says. "All Alzheimer's patients have a deep anguish due to their perceived, although usually not confessed, inability to remember their recent past. Being able to go through the recent events may have a reassuring effect. Reassurance is what Alzheimer's patients want but, unfortunately, [is] what they are often denied."

[More at Technology Review]

Pistol Cam

Police have been using video cams on the dash board of their cars to record their interactions with the car ahead. Now miniaturization makes the same idea possible with a service revolver. Police are testing attaching a small camera to the barrel of their guns.

...city officials showed off the PistolCam, a lightweight, pager-sized digital camera that attaches to an officer's gun barrel and automatically begins recording as soon as the officer draws his weapon. [...]

The PistolCam is a new device being marketed by Legend Technologies, a company based in Keesville, near Plattsburgh. It retails for $695 per camera and features a wider field of view than its tiny size would suggest. Its specifications can be found at www.pistolcam.com." [Source]
It starts recording as soon as a pistol is drawn from its holster.