ITP – Sam Lavigne

I’ve become interested in the idea of generating a film programmatically using pan/tilt/zoom surveillance cameras. To that end I’ve started putting together some processing code that can read a live camera stream and is programmed with a variety of shots (as of now, a zoom, blur, and quick pan). The application can decide what shots to take, and when to make recordings – thereby automating the editing and the shooting process. The code is here on github.

I have two experiments so far. The first finds faces, zooms in, and then makes a recording between 3 and 5 seconds. You can view it here.

The second experiment pans to coordinates based on Perlin noise and then holds a shot based on a sine wave function. In this first video my subjects don’t realize they’re being filmed. In the second video you can see their reactions as I tell them what’s been happening.

I wrote a script that attempts to answer recent Yahoo Questions with sentences from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here are some of the results:

Q: Onion juice in hair what do you think?
A: Often, when there is a reason for you to do something, it is the kind of thing to motivate you to do it.

Q: how are e-ciggs?do you feel better with them than reg.ciggs?
A: The ultimate success of Hollywood blockbusters is dependent upon repeat viewings.

Q: Is there a problem with Yahoo tonight 8:00 EST?
A: Omnipotence is maximal power.

Q: I heard that Daca is qualified for Medicaid?
A: Children are young human beings.

Q: How much friends do you have on facebook?
A: It is common in epistemology to distinguish among three kinds of knowledge.

Q: How do I tell them I don’t want to work for them?
A: Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.

Q: Is Daniel Bryan really stronger and more powerful then Batista?
A: At a broad level, a Creationist is someone who believes in a god who is absolute creator of heaven and earth, out of nothing, by an act of free will.

Q: I’m emotionally numb and i dont know what to do?
A: Human knowledge is expressed in language.

Q: American Ninja movie remake. Will they ever make one?
A: The philosophy of film is a rapidly growing subfield of contemporary philosophy of art.

Q: Would you live in a universe where: skinny jeans, vests, cheap sunglasses, and belly-button tattoos are cool?
A: Time travel has been a staple of science fiction.

Q: Has anyone had bad luck with stuff made in china?
A: Some people appear to be worse off than others partly because they have had bad luck.

Q: Why I cant login to yahoo mail?
A: Fundamental to biology are (1) defining the characteristics of identity, which distinguish individual organisms from those of similar kind, and (2) describing the mechanisms that defend organisms from their predators.

Q: Only can play Minecraft demo?
A: Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem.

Q: how do i delete contact from yahoo that isnt in my contact list on my samsung galaxy s4 that keeps popping up?
A: What is space? What is time? Do they exist independently of the things and processes in them?

Q: Top 10 most famous people alive?
A: Delusions are a symptom of psychiatric disorders such as dementia and schizophrenia, and they also characterize delusional disorders.

———————

Here’s the code…

import sys
import re
import urllib
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
questions = []
def soupify(url):
html = urllib.urlopen(url)
return BeautifulSoup(html.read())
def get_yahoo_questions(page=1):
soup = soupify("http://answers.yahoo.com/?tab=recent&filter=lang&page=" + str(page))
return [q.string for q in soup.select('#yan-questions h3')]
def get_some_answers(query):
base_url = "http://plato.stanford.edu"
soup = soupify(base_url + "/search/searcher.py?query=" + urllib.quote_plus(query))
titles = soup.select('.result_title a')
if len(titles) > 0:
new_url = base_url + titles[0].get('href')[2:]
soup = soupify(new_url)
answers = soup.select("#aueditable p")
temp = " ".join(answers[0].stripped_strings)
temp = temp.replace("\n", " ")
sentences = temp.split(".")
answer = sentences[0] + "."
else:
answer = "No answer."
return answer
get_some_answers("How to help someone who has lost someone")
for i in range(1, 2):
questions += get_yahoo_questions(i)
for q in questions:
print "Q: " + q
print "A: " + get_some_answers(q)
print "--------------------"

import sys

import re

import urllib

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

questions = []

def soupify(url):

html = urllib.urlopen(url)

return BeautifulSoup(html.read())

def get_yahoo_questions(page=1):

soup = soupify("http://answers.yahoo.com/?tab=recent&filter=lang&page=" + str(page))

return [q.string for q in soup.select('#yan-questions h3')]

def get_some_answers(query):

base_url = "http://plato.stanford.edu"

soup = soupify(base_url + "/search/searcher.py?query=" + urllib.quote_plus(query))

titles = soup.select('.result_title a')

if len(titles) > 0:

new_url = base_url + titles[0].get('href')[2:]

soup = soupify(new_url)

answers = soup.select("#aueditable p")

temp = " ".join(answers[0].stripped_strings)

temp = temp.replace("\n", " ")

sentences = temp.split(".")

answer = sentences[0] + "."

else:

answer = "No answer."

return answer

get_some_answers("How to help someone who has lost someone")

for i in range(1, 2):

questions += get_yahoo_questions(i)

for q in questions:

print "Q: " + q

print "A: " + get_some_answers(q)

print "--------------------"

Sam Lavigne

work in progress

Category Archives: ITP

On Pigeons

ENJOY RESPONSIBLY

Brian

Programmatic Control of Surveillance Cameras

Yahoo Questions Answered by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy