1. A fun, beautiful timelapse of Hong Kong's (insanely long) outdoor escalator system. Read about it here.
2. These analysts say the "facial recognition market" will be $6.5 billion by 2018.
"The major forces driving the market are growth of surveillance market and huge spending by the government across the globe on biometric technologies. At the same time, various opportunities exist in consumer electronics segment, handheld devices segment, and innovative cloud services based on face recognition technologies (anonymous face analysis)."
3. Evgeny Morozov's eminently reasonably feature on privacy (really!).
"Few of us have had moral pangs about data-sharing schemes, but that could change. Before the environment became a global concern, few of us thought twice about taking public transport if we could drive. Before ethical consumption became a global concern, no one would have paid more for coffee that tasted the same but promised 'fair trade.'"
4. There is a place where they bury the "unclaimed dead" of New York. There are a million bodies there.
"The majority are interred by prisoners from Riker’s Island who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmates—most of them very young, serving out short sentences—are responsible for building the only memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished."
