The Smart Set
thesmartset.com · Group blog · on HN since 2008
The Smart Set is an arts and culture magazine publishing essays on criticism, music, travel, universities and free speech.
What HN saysHN links it for essays on campus culture and speech, and one commenter quotes a piece on how a person's walking gait identifies them.
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
remarkEon · 2017-04-06
At a graduate program right now, ~5 years after finishing undergrad. The evolution is absolutely astounding and, frankly, frightening. There's new "administrators" charged with, though not explicitly in their job title, policing language and, yes, thought on campus.
One of the most effective essays I've read on diagnosing the problem is this:
http://thesmartset.com/free-speech-the-modern-campus/
pitt1980 · 2013-03-20
cool link, thanks
found this:
Our natural gait, it turns out, defines us as humans. Not speaking broadly — that we’re only truly bipedal mammal on the earth, blah blah blah — but as individuals. Researchers are increasingly convinced that how we walk can identify us as unique individuals, much like a fingerprint or retina scan.
This sort of research has been underway since the late 1990s, picking up more urgency after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the London train attack in 2005. DARPA and Homeland Security, among others, are keenly interested in video analysis programs that can separate out and analyze an individual gait, then use this like fingerprints. DARPA has been sponsoring “human identification at a distance” studies since 2000, which often combines gait analysis with facial and gesture analysis. It’s a hot field right now, and has been heralded as a less invasive approach than retina scans or blood tests or fingerprinting. One study I read on the algorithms of walking put the appeal simply: “Advantages include the fact that it does not require subject cooperation or body contact, and the sensor may be located remotely.”
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article01181302.aspx