Clark took another deep breath and dove again, heading towards a feebly struggling figure. *Hang on there, don't die on me,* he silently urged as he seized whoever it was by the shoulders and kicked to return to the surface. He'd been in time, he saw as he rubbed his eyes clear of the mud, and the person was still alive and breathing normally. He looked to see if there was anybody else caught alive under the mudslide but the remaining air pockets had collapsed.
"Nobody," he said, shaking his head, before remembering that he was in remote Brazil and none of the people there spoke English. The other survivors seemed to understand, though, judging from the way that their expressions changed from timid hopefulness to resignation.
The woman who seemed to be in charge looked at him anxiously, then crouched on the ground, smoothing a section of the mud with her hand, and began to draw and sculpt, occasionally plucking at a piece of greenery and incorporating it. He sat next to her, frowning as he tried to interpret it. Finally, he thought he got it and tried to repeat it back, using the same methods and talking out loud as he did so. "So these big trees with a lot of roots, far off that way, are dying, and there's nothing holding the soil, so when it rains, it all comes as a flood?" He had picked up the same type of big leaf she had, shaking it back and forth to indicate that it was sick, and then dropped it to indicate its death. She picked it back up and instead made a slashing motion towards the stem, then shredded it to pieces. "No, not dying, being cut down." He imitated the gesture of sawing through a tree and she nodded. "Oh." There wasn't much else he could think of to say, not even when he left. Maybe it was just as well that he didn't speak the language.
***
There wasn't anything urgent for Clark to do and he didn't feel like going back to Gotham City yet. He didn't really want to be with people but he didn't want to be quite alone, either. As he soared over a series of fields, he wondered what the Kents were doing.
Another good thing about flying at super-speeds meant that pretty much anyplace could be "on the way," and he figured out which way Kansas was, and from there, Smallville. Once there, he circled the Kent's farm, locating Mr. Kent, and landed next to him as he finished filling a water trough.
"Hi, Mr. Kent." From the momentary pause, he realized that Mr. Kent probably didn't recognize him under all the mud, even though it had at least caked dry during his flight. "Sorry, it's Clark. I was in a mud slide."
"I guessed something like that," he answered, looking Clark up and down with a welcoming smile.
"I was just passing by, thought I'd say hello, see how you were doing."
"We're just fine." He raised his eyebrows and the hose. "I think it'd take a bit more than a shower to get that off, so if you'd like to, I'll do the honors. It'll be cold, though."
"It's hot out," Clark grinned, a grin which widened as the jet of cold water worked its way down and around him. When Mr. Kent had finished, Clark retreated several feet and shook himself, then shoved his still-moist hair out of his eyes. "That felt great. Thanks."
***
"I was using old building security tapes as tests, you see. It'd be a good mix of recurrent and irregular patterns. Staff, visitors, so on, and it would be easy to test the system for false positives that way." Lionel nodded and the project lead engineer continued. "It worked pretty well, we were able to fine-tune the facial recognition algorithms to less than 2 percent false positives rate for close-ups but for distance, it was still about 50 percent failure. So then I added motion patterns analysis. How people walk, hand gestures, eye contact patterns, so on."
"That makes sense," he said, since she was waiting for some comment or another. The real-time video individual recognition system was an important DoD contract but it looked like it had gotten even more important before it was even rolled out.
"That brought it down to about 30 percent but it was still too many false positives. I needed more videos for it to process. Its corrections rate is about .01 percent per hundred thousand images. So I got the regional sites to send me copies of all their security tapes. It took the system about 3 weeks to process them and by the time they were done, the false positives were down to about 6 percent. It was these four people who showed up consistently at three of the ten buildings." She tapped on the composite photographs she'd put on the table.
He gave them a quick enough glance to confirm his suspicion and got up. "Six is still too high. I'm putting your budget on unrestricted status. I want you to get videos from every possible source and pay special attention to unsteady images, diverse crowds, obscured faces. Start with the videos from Gotham City in our news library. That will be the best test. From there, go to old newsreels and videos of theater productions with stylized makeup. Let me know again when the error rate is less than one percent."
She looked ready to ask more questions but he turned away slightly and she left.
It didn't have to be Clark's new allies, he reminded himself. It could be simple corporate espionage. It could even still be programming glitches, computer error. A system doing that kind of real-time complex processing--analyzing faces and motions just from videos, defining individuals, assigning their characteristics to a database, and recognizing them again--was bound to have a high failure rate.
He reminded himself of an episode from World War Two. In 1944, several of the code words for the planned Allied invasion appeared in the London Daily Telegraph's crossword puzzles. It seemed as though it couldn't be a coincidence, not with such words as overlord, Utah, Omaha, mulberry, and Neptune, all major Allied code words and ones not regularly occurring in daily British usage, appearing in the crosswords just weeks before the planned D-Day. But the most rigorous investigations, combined with the clearly uncompromised and successful invasion, ruled out anything but bizarre coincidence.
It would, he hoped, turn out to be the case here as well.
"Nobody," he said, shaking his head, before remembering that he was in remote Brazil and none of the people there spoke English. The other survivors seemed to understand, though, judging from the way that their expressions changed from timid hopefulness to resignation.
The woman who seemed to be in charge looked at him anxiously, then crouched on the ground, smoothing a section of the mud with her hand, and began to draw and sculpt, occasionally plucking at a piece of greenery and incorporating it. He sat next to her, frowning as he tried to interpret it. Finally, he thought he got it and tried to repeat it back, using the same methods and talking out loud as he did so. "So these big trees with a lot of roots, far off that way, are dying, and there's nothing holding the soil, so when it rains, it all comes as a flood?" He had picked up the same type of big leaf she had, shaking it back and forth to indicate that it was sick, and then dropped it to indicate its death. She picked it back up and instead made a slashing motion towards the stem, then shredded it to pieces. "No, not dying, being cut down." He imitated the gesture of sawing through a tree and she nodded. "Oh." There wasn't much else he could think of to say, not even when he left. Maybe it was just as well that he didn't speak the language.
***
There wasn't anything urgent for Clark to do and he didn't feel like going back to Gotham City yet. He didn't really want to be with people but he didn't want to be quite alone, either. As he soared over a series of fields, he wondered what the Kents were doing.
Another good thing about flying at super-speeds meant that pretty much anyplace could be "on the way," and he figured out which way Kansas was, and from there, Smallville. Once there, he circled the Kent's farm, locating Mr. Kent, and landed next to him as he finished filling a water trough.
"Hi, Mr. Kent." From the momentary pause, he realized that Mr. Kent probably didn't recognize him under all the mud, even though it had at least caked dry during his flight. "Sorry, it's Clark. I was in a mud slide."
"I guessed something like that," he answered, looking Clark up and down with a welcoming smile.
"I was just passing by, thought I'd say hello, see how you were doing."
"We're just fine." He raised his eyebrows and the hose. "I think it'd take a bit more than a shower to get that off, so if you'd like to, I'll do the honors. It'll be cold, though."
"It's hot out," Clark grinned, a grin which widened as the jet of cold water worked its way down and around him. When Mr. Kent had finished, Clark retreated several feet and shook himself, then shoved his still-moist hair out of his eyes. "That felt great. Thanks."
***
"I was using old building security tapes as tests, you see. It'd be a good mix of recurrent and irregular patterns. Staff, visitors, so on, and it would be easy to test the system for false positives that way." Lionel nodded and the project lead engineer continued. "It worked pretty well, we were able to fine-tune the facial recognition algorithms to less than 2 percent false positives rate for close-ups but for distance, it was still about 50 percent failure. So then I added motion patterns analysis. How people walk, hand gestures, eye contact patterns, so on."
"That makes sense," he said, since she was waiting for some comment or another. The real-time video individual recognition system was an important DoD contract but it looked like it had gotten even more important before it was even rolled out.
"That brought it down to about 30 percent but it was still too many false positives. I needed more videos for it to process. Its corrections rate is about .01 percent per hundred thousand images. So I got the regional sites to send me copies of all their security tapes. It took the system about 3 weeks to process them and by the time they were done, the false positives were down to about 6 percent. It was these four people who showed up consistently at three of the ten buildings." She tapped on the composite photographs she'd put on the table.
He gave them a quick enough glance to confirm his suspicion and got up. "Six is still too high. I'm putting your budget on unrestricted status. I want you to get videos from every possible source and pay special attention to unsteady images, diverse crowds, obscured faces. Start with the videos from Gotham City in our news library. That will be the best test. From there, go to old newsreels and videos of theater productions with stylized makeup. Let me know again when the error rate is less than one percent."
She looked ready to ask more questions but he turned away slightly and she left.
It didn't have to be Clark's new allies, he reminded himself. It could be simple corporate espionage. It could even still be programming glitches, computer error. A system doing that kind of real-time complex processing--analyzing faces and motions just from videos, defining individuals, assigning their characteristics to a database, and recognizing them again--was bound to have a high failure rate.
He reminded himself of an episode from World War Two. In 1944, several of the code words for the planned Allied invasion appeared in the London Daily Telegraph's crossword puzzles. It seemed as though it couldn't be a coincidence, not with such words as overlord, Utah, Omaha, mulberry, and Neptune, all major Allied code words and ones not regularly occurring in daily British usage, appearing in the crosswords just weeks before the planned D-Day. But the most rigorous investigations, combined with the clearly uncompromised and successful invasion, ruled out anything but bizarre coincidence.
It would, he hoped, turn out to be the case here as well.