Technology Winter 2016

Think you can hide in a crowd? Not So Easy Anymore With New Technology
Ever wonder how they found the Boston bombers in just a few days? This may help you to understand what the government is looking at.
This photo was taken in Canada and shows about 700,000 people.
 Hard to disappear in a crowd. Pick on a small part of the crowd click a couple of times -- wait -- click a few more times and see how clear each individual face will become each time.
Or use the wheel on your mouse.

This picture was taken with a 70,000 x 30,000 pixel camera
(2100 Mega Pixels.) These cameras are not sold to the public and are being installed in strategic locations.
 The camera can identify a face among a multitude of people.
 Place your computer's cursor in the mass of people and double-click a
couple times.
 Scary sharp!! Not so easy to hide in a crowd anymore.
http://www.gigapixel.com/mobile/?id=79995

BERLIN — Two German artists walked into the Neues Museum in central Berlin in October and used a mobile device to secretly scan the 19-inch-tall bust of Queen Nefertiti, a limestone-and-stucco sculpture more than 3,000 years old that is one of Germany’s most visited attractions. They used the data to create copies of the bust and delivered them to Egypt.

Then last December, in the tradition of Internet activism, they released the data to the world, allowing anyone to download the information for free and create their own copies with 3-D printers.
On Thursday, German museum authorities responded publicly for the first time. They were not amused.

Birgit Jöbstl, a spokeswoman for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees the national museum system in Germany, cast doubt on the quality and authenticity of the scan, saying in an email that the museum had “noticed the ‘artistic intervention’ regarding the Nefertiti bust, but sees no necessity to react.”

“Legal steps are not currently being undertaken as the scan seems to be of minor quality,” the official said, adding that “a detailed comparison with the museum’s own 3-D data has not yet been made.”

The artists, Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, contended that their scanning data was accurate and several independent experts praised the quality of the data.

Don Undeen, the former senior manager of the MediaLab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, called it a “very good model” coming from consumer-level technology. “I’m glad to see the bust of Nefertiti join the ever-growing online collection of scanned art objects,” he said.

The artists’ project, “The Other Nefertiti,” confronts what they see as cultural theft and persisting colonialist notions of national ownership by making the object widely available.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/02/arts/design/other-nefertiti-3d-printer.html?ref=design&_r=2