The very first daytime image taken by the fully autonomous critter cam
– a bobcat strutting by!
And this was before I baited the area with Calvin Klein Obsession, the best attractant for big cats… Must be the pheromones… =)
Is that serious about Calvin Klein?
I once was given a rusty old tin of about 60 or 70 year old musk, this horrid-looking black gunk, like molasses – apparently from civet cats. It was the real stuff – don’t think you can even get it anymore for decades now. It’s INCREDIBLE smelling, nothing like it in the world.
One night I put some in my hair before going out, and as I walked past a drainage ditch, about ten cats came running out and started meowing at me and following me down the street.
Great Capture. Maybe you could set one up at Jackson Bottom Wetlands In Oregon. We see bobcat sign (scat and scratchings) but no one has actually seen one.
Re: CK’s Obsession as an attractant, – as an old Africa hand, I can tell you that a tethered goat works very well for Leopard. (Opposite end of the pheromone spectrum or something? Or maybe food rather than amour.)
I had a conversation today with a local ranger and Mountain Lion expert. He tells me that the ones in the next county seem to have a penchant for canids of the "Bichon Frise" variety.
This cam (and Sony’s latest social cam) has me ever more puzzled as to the multidimensional significance /impact of ever more pictures and movies being created, piped and stored in increasingly large hard drives.
Investment wise, of course, following the picks and shovels being the real "it" of the gold rush, I guess it would be Cisco and the hard drive makers that would benefit most .. .Next the vision recognition experts.. imagine trashing through all these photos .. G et al are all working feverishly to find ways to mine and index these pics.
What a shame tho that we are "only" addressing "secondary" issues ( for example there is decades old technology in Sweden etc to make electronic voting provably tamper proof and we’re still battling to reinstate paper votes… etc )
Reminds me of Nero’s last days .. amusing ourselves to orgiastic levels while Rome burns, making it even that a source of entertainment.
What’s wrong with orgies?
At the WCN event, Norvig (head of machine learning at Google) was quite excited at the progress they have made inauto-classifying "good" photos from dreck. I could sure use that each time I upload from my camera. =)
It would really work for applications like the robo-cam where the majority of shots are not interesting.
jitze – is but an appetizer.
venettaj – so the attractant even works in text format?
Kewlio: Whoa. Tomorrow there will be a "National Cougar Convention" and "Miss Cougar America" just down the street!
@jurvetson: on Norvig’s advances in autoclassifying "good" photos – thanks for letting us know some specifics- will check out Picasa next and see how their version of explore is doing. I recently figured out (well with community help, it’s an open secret) how to put any photo in FLickr’s explore: it’s more about the social aspect than anything else. Well in sync with its roots. Keeping in mind Google’s mission/ motto it’s going to be interesting to see how they use their technology.
As to the use of auto-classifying algos in cams, presorting the likely drecks in a junk folder would be a time saver for sure. Still leaving us with figuring out if some pics that seem at first glance "bad" are artistically "good", as is or after further pp.
Entertainment break – the shot below was initially totally boring, and I didnt even think it woud be anything worthwhile but I shot it anyway – after the fact, tho, I found this cropped and colorized version interesting. It would take a lot of context processing for an algo not to have thrown out the original pic. This is from a really cute youth hostel in midtown NYC where everything was jam packed really tight, but neat and clean.
The Aquarium Hotel
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