Painting like this on your cheekbones is more likely to throw off facial detection technology than other methods, according to a thesis from artist Adam Harvey. Image courtesy of Harvey

Facial detection can be blocked by changing the contrast of and spatial relationship between key facial features.

So, though growing a beard might throw a casual human glance off, the growing process of computerized recognition is rarely tricked, because it focuses primarily on the T made by your eyes and the bridge of your nose. You’d be better served by painting on your cheekbones like above, a discovery that was part of a masters thesis from artist and photographer Adam Harvey. Harvey does research on tricking facial detection technology.

That discovery was among the coolest lessons I took from moderating a Q&A seminar hosted by the Academy of Natural Sciences as part of the kickoff of the Philadelphia Science Festival. Called Hiding in Plain Sight, it was also one of a number of events done in partnership with the second annual Philly Tech Week, which I’m helping to organize this week.

There were others — Harvey noted that he focuses on facial detection, instead of facial recognition, because the former has to happen first. Roughly 40 people listened, if only in part, to Harvey’s compelling presentation and his answers to questions from me and the audience, seated in a crowded Frankford Hall last Friday. The major kickoff event followed.

The promo graf:

Facial recognition systems aren’t science fiction. From social media to law enforcement, they’re used in Web applications and surveillance operations. Learn about the implications — positive and negative — for personal privacy, and discover what one techie is working that will allow people to hide from them.

The questions I asked:

• Is this art or practice? Do art and let the money follow, not the other way around, he said. So, while there are practical applications, he’s mostly interested in the art of this work.
• Terrify us with the most pessimistic vision of what this could mean in the future. It’s easy to think of obtrusive advertising that sells products to us wherever we are outside by detecting our faces and gaining context from social networks, he said.
• Excite us with the most optimistic vision of what this could mean in the future. There are powerful opportunities around efficiency, context, relevance and personalization.
• What about facial recognition in five years will most surprise us? The more common use of drones to offer crowd control by way of scanning.

Find the nearest free wireless internet hotspot in Philadelphia by using Connect Philly, a new mapping and text message tool we at Technically Philly released last week.

The tool, which can also be reached by ph.ly/connect,

The tool, which is meant to be a part of the digital access conversation, was unveiled formally with an event in City Hall, featuring Mayor Nutter and a panel discussion I moderated on improving access and literacy online for low-income Philadelphians.

Conceived by my colleague Brian James Kirk, who was helped by developer Jim Smiley, Connect Philly followed coverage sponsored by JLab and was sponsored by the Knight Foundation, in addition to data partnerships with Freedom Rings, PlanPhilly, the Free Library and others.

The Inquirer, KYW and others covered the tool’s launch.

It should be added that I was particularly proud of my colleague Brian James Kirk, who conceived of the project, brought together a data set despite push back from multiple sources and put together the event. He’s a star, what a journalist should look like today.

Because it has the infrastructure of a major market with mission-orientated for-profit and nonprofit groups and because it has all the big problems that other cities face, Philadelphia should be the country’s hub of social entrepreneurship.

Defined as ventures that put impact over profit, I again spoke about this cause, this time at an event with the Knight Foundation, the Delaware Valley Grantmakers and 30 other industry leaders at the University City Science Center last week. See the presentation I gave here.

See the Technically Philly coverage of the event here.

It was a variation of this presentation, which built off this post on why Philadelphia’s regional distinction should be social enterprise.

“Every problem is an opportunity to build ventures for solutions, scale them and export them to other cities,” as Generocity quoted me as saying. I followed a stirring 20-minute review of the 30-year development of social entrepreneurship, as given by Cheryl Dorsey, the president of the noted New York City-based Echoing Green.

To move the effort forward, we’ll be working on broadening the regional stakeholders who see this as a sensible distinction for Philadelphia and working to build in and build up the mission in organization’s based in and around this city.

After presentations, there was a large group discussion, led by the Knight Foundation’s Donna Frisby-Greenwood, on ways to move forward the effort, concepts that were drilled down in more specific ways in smaller groups. See notes from the discussions here [PDF].

In organizing the event, I came across new organization I hadn’t known had roots in Philadelphia, including an annual sustainability-focused social entrepreneurship event and Halloran Philanthropies, which focuses on social ventures.

It occurred to me that it was more than a year ago that I was beginning to really think about the need for a stronger sense of regional entrepreneurial identity. We needed hungry entrepreneurs and if Philly already has some of them, we need them to be hungrier, bolder and sell the region’s assets more.

When pitching your venture or product, send a business or technology reporter a three sentence email, explaining in super simple language (a) what your project is, (b) why it matters and (b) who you are.

That was one of the better received recommendations I made while presenting for the Lean Startup seminar held at the Venturef0rth incubator in Callowhill, Philadelphia this weekend.

See my presentation slides above or find it here. My colleague Sean Blanda has a post giving broad advice here, which includes a great list of questions to be prepated for, though I was a bit more specific to the 30 entrepreneurs in the room on starting the conversation. Details on my slide below.

1. Understand the pipeline: (1) niche news that will offer early users and support, (2) regional legacy news that will offer broader users, (3) national media that will offer scaled users and branding
2. Nobody cares about what you do as much as you do: so don’t act like anyone should and keep it simple when explaining or talking about it.
3. What is your nut?: have a short 10 words to describe your business in language that a 10-year-old can understand.
4. Design matters: Reporters first judge your project by what your website or application looks like.
5. Know the publication: take a few minutes to understand what coverage they do. Have an example of the specific type of coverage you want to have, so you know they do it.
6. Get an intro: Though it’s not necessary, an intro by a respected PR executive or someone else who has a relationship with the journalist is an enormous help.
7. Do not pun in your subject line: Don’t be cutesy, don’t try to entertain the reporter, just give information he or she would need. In truth, the subject line should be fully explanatory: “Company name: 3-5-word explanation, 3-5-word reason why it’s cool”
8. Send a three sentence email: what is it, why it matters, who are you?
9. Have a demo ready: so we can see or experience whatever you’re selling before we write about it.
10. Reporters are weird about ethics: so understand they appreciate transparency, will question the legitimacy of your claims and should challenge your assumptions.
11. What is next?: to get new coverage, have a new angle or a time hook, which is something that makes a story timely.
12. Reporters want your thing to be cool: Otherwise you’re wasting they’re time, so, in fact, reporters are mostly your friends. They want your thing to be the coolest ever, but they’re going to ask tough questions and be hard on you because their byline goes next to the story.
13. Have sweet video and photos: Your story will get a larger audience if you help the reporter with a better looking story.
14. Your press release is to inform, not acquire coverage: No longer is your press release the way to sell a reporter on a story. Instead, they’re a repository of all the relevant details. At best, it’s something to link to in your email.
15. Have product codes for readers: Try to acquire users and get as much attention out of the story.
16. Other coverage: good. Same coverage (in same market): bad: You need new market coverage, new angles to get new coverage. Same story with competitors will kill stories.
17. No, you can’t read the story before it publishes: So don’t even ask. That’s the independent, ethical streak of any good journalism outfit.
18. If your venture succeeds, they’ll come to you: Never forget that you need a good product to ultimately succeed, no matter the marketing.

All of the audio from the February Story Shuffle are now live here.

Listen to mine below or find it here.

I’ll also strongly suggest you listen to my friend Patrick McNeil’s story, which has to be among my favorites.

Social entrepreneurship is an opportunity for Philadelphia to create a regional distinction for attracting and retaining startup talent, was the central theme of my Pecha Kucha presentation Saturday night.

It was an extension of my writing on social entrepreneurship here.

The lightning talk event, in which a dozen speakers use 20 seconds for each of 20 images to give a five-minute perspective, was having its ninth iteration locally, after having been launched by graphic designers in Tokyo in 2004. See the slides from the presentation below.

Philadelphia’s Pecha Kucha [pronounced peCHA kuCHA] is held in part-time yoga studio, part-time neighborhood anchor Studio 34 and organized by a pair of Wharton students, though the 50-person crowd was largely made up of 30 and 40-somethings who lived near the Baltimore Avenue corridor of Cedar Park neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

My opinion is that Philadelphia’s considerable quality of life problems — violence, poor education, dirt, blight and more — are an opportunity for mission-driven business solutions to be based where they are most needed among large markets that have investment, marketing opportunities and access to more of both.

Soon, I’ll post the audio and the video of the presentation.

“In the U.S., political power flows from economic power, not the other way around” Tom Wicker in 1996 on shortcomings of Civil Rights movement speaking on the Charlie Rose Show.

The whole night was a treat, as I preceded Pecha Kucha by visiting the high-end modern Southern fusion-based Marigold Kitchen, in a renovated 1907 West Philadelphia rowhome, which has received great reviews by Craig Laban and Philadelphia magazine. Also, though cold and snowy, I got my first more thorough Baltimore Avenue experience, having landed there by the 34 trolley.

My good friend Eric Smith, whose successes in publishing and audience have kept me motivated, wrote some very flattering things in celebration of his own birthday, mostly about how we love to faux battle by way of our respective geek blogs Geekadelphia and Technically Philly. An excerpt:

… Without realizing it, Chris had finally given me the greatest gift of all… playful competition. I love being able to throw a jab at him now and again via Twitter or on the blog. Mocking him when I see the buzzwords flying… I should list that as an interest on my Facebook profile. I’m thrilled when I hear about a local PR firm thinking Chris and I (aka Technically Philly and Geekadelphia) hate each other. When he gave his keynote speech during the first Philly Tech Week, I ruined his moment with a tweet (this was an accident though!). When he received an award at the Geek Awards, he slammed the hell out of Geekadelphia, and I loved it.

But despite the joking around… Chris makes me want to be better at what I do.

Below watch video of my Geek Awards presentation when I had a little fun at Geekadelphia’s expense, though their fans let me hear it.

Moderating a panel on web security, as being aired yesterday on CSPAN 2 Book TV.

The Founding Fathers would have loved and leveraged social media but been fearful of its future implications on privacy and speech issues, said a host of experts at an event on the impact of new communications patterns.

Earlier this month, I moderated a panel on the subject at the National Constitution Center featuring Jennifer Preston, a social media reporter from the New York Times, Kashmir Hill, a web law reporter from Forbes and Lori Andrews, the author of a related book which served as regular fodder for the discussion, which appeared on CSPAN 2, Book TV.

Find background and audio of the entire program on the NCC blog here. Watch the entire hour-long panel discussion on CSPAN here.

Thanks to Stefan Frank for organizing the event and including me. Below, I have a three-minute clip of the final question of the night, in which, after spending the evening speaking about the perils of social media, each panelist reminds us of the power and benefit.

Some takeaways:

• A herculean battle is being balanced between the speech and communication power of the social web against privacy and security concerns.
• There is a gray area between private company and utility — when does presence on a social network become so part of social life that there should be greater scrutiny over privacy than any other service?
• I created this document and circulated it with my fellow panelists before the event.

I’m moderating a panel on privacy, security and democracy concerns surrounding the social web at the National Constitution Center in Old City, Philadelphia next Thursday.

You should come. More details here. It costs $10 for non-members.

Story Shuffle 10 happened this month and the theme of Parents offered a handful of interesting stories.

See them all here or listen to mine below.

Listen here.

The structure of my story:

• As children, we have an opportunity to experience so many different friends households that its an under appreciated opportunity to evaluate what type of home life we want to live.
• I loved my childhood and my family and my parents but I still sought to find out how others did it.
• Particularly in high school, I remember how distinct the homes of my friends that I visited.
• I loved getting to know people’s parents at an early age. I was the guy in the car to the bowling alley talking to your mom.
• And I fell in love with the idea of personality types. There are lots of theories about how temperament define us. One of the oldest is the four temperaments which anthropologists say has been on display for thousands of years in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
• It was Hippocrates 400 years before Christ who tried to make it a medical theory. That’s all debunked but it’s still a novel way to see the world.
• It says there are four: the sanguine or impulsive pleasure seeking; the choleric or ambitious leader type; the melancholic or introverted and thoughtful and the phlegmatic or relaxed and content.
• The homes and parents I would visit as a kid fit into those groups.
• Reinhardt: ping pong and pool and firework and what gate. His father would play and yell. It was the sanguine house.
• Avondoglio household was neat and across a beautiful pond from the family restaurant. U remember first talking politics and business with Bryant and his father. It was the choleric house.
• Medvidick was behind overgrown bushes, dark and you never went in the front door. Dark and books were everywhere. Father tinkering, mother  referencing literature. It was the melancholic house.
• The Sheehan household was. Always unlocked, simple and cared for. Unnecessary apologetic and nothing ever changed. Time warp, hours passed. It was the phlegmatic house.
• Years later, I have such a broad understanding of how a home cn be run and how parenting can be done. I was give the chance or success because f my parents but had so many other lessons elsewhere.
• And that sharing of learning from one generation to another is parenting.