Thank you SaRuMaN.
Opening StatementMy arugment is declaring that the development isn't invading your life, but protecting it.
The development of High Tech surviellence is an upcoming revelolution in the world of technonlogy. Maybe it started during the Cold War or after 9/11, no-one is sure. What I can tell you, it saves lifes. I was doing some reasearch on the high tech cameras and came up with this:
Late one autumn day at the aquatic centre in Ancenis, France, something went quietly, horribly wrong. With two well-kept pools and teaching facilities, the centre serves as a modern swimming hole for an entire sector of historic Brittany, attracting 150,000 French villagers a year.
An 18-year-old boy named Jean- Francois LeRoy was a regular, coming often in early evnenings to swim laps in a 25 metre pool. Drowning are often difficult to spot; they are rarely the splashy, failing events depicted on telivision. Most are near-silent episodes where the victim quickly sinks out of view On this particular day maybe the lifegaurds weren't paying as close attention as they shuld have been. Certainly they believed the trim, athletic LeRoy was not a high-risk swimmer.
But on this evening, LeRoy was practising apenea swimming- testing how far he could swim underwater on one breath- and at some point, without making anty visible or audible disturbance on the water's surface, he blacked out. The gaurds failed to notice as he stopped swimming and decended to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. With his arms crossed over his head and his feet twitching, he was unconscious and drowning. It would take him as little as four minutes to die.
Although the human lifegaurds watching the pool wereoblivious, 12 large machine eyes deep underwater were watching the whole thing taking notice.
Just nine months earlier, the centre had installed a state-of-the-art electronic surviellence system called Poseidon, a network of cameras that feeds a computer programmed to use a set of complex mathematical algorithms to distingush between normal and distressed swimming. Poseidon covers a pool's entire swimming areaand can distingush among blurry reflections, shadows and actual swimmers. It can also tell when real swimers are moving in a way that they're not supposed to. When the computer detects a possible problem, it instantly activates a beeper to alert lifegaurds and displays the exact incident location on a monitor. The rest is up to the humans above water.
Sixteen seconds after Poseidon noticed the large, sinking lump that was Jean-Francois LeRoy, lifegaruds had LeRoy out of the pool and were initiacting CPR.he started breathing again.
After one night in the local hospital, he was released with no permanent damage. Poseidon-and more precisely, the handful of French mathematicians who devised it- saved his life.
Machines like Poseidon will redefine how we live. Think of your life before the answering machine, the ATM, e-mail. Think of your grandparent's lives before the telivision and the airplane. THink of your great-grandoparents' lives before the telephone. Akll told, the shift will be that substantial.
I hope that is good enough, because I've got alot more!
Edited by The Hunter, 12 July 2004 - 12:42 AM.
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