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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

  • Actually trying out my visual inventory system. It’s amazing how much great amounts of detail can be contained within a single photograph. I have to self-profess the system as amazing. My test: If I can get all these objects back in the bag exactly how they came out, then the system is amazing. And guess what? The system delivered on that goal.

  • Biased image coverage. Google Street View, Google Earth. Take, for example, Google Earth. Google Earth provides ample high resolution imagery over land and cityscapes, but the resolution coverage over the ocean is considerably lower. Yet, oceans over over 75% of the Earth’s surface. So there are some huge biases at work in Google Earth, but at least you can calculate them and determine that they are there in the sample data.

    Going forward into the future, should you so desire, you could rescan those areas at the same resolution as the land areas. But for past data, we don’t have any such solution. With current technologies (as of 2017), you can’t travel back in time to rescan those areas at their full resolution. Surely it would be awesome if we could travel to ancient times and scan the Earth! Unfortunately, we can’t do that. All we can do is point out that we don’t have data at that time era because at the time, technology wasn’t advanced enough to collect that kind of data. Then we can factor that into our decision-making that our decisions are being biased by only considering present data that we have at high resolution, even though the past world existed. It’s just that we are not considering the past world.