As always happens when there is a rally in Washington, there are dueling estimates of the number of people who turned up for Glenn Beck’s recent celebration of himself at the Lincoln Memorial. After I heard an interview the other day with one of the people who counts crowds like this for a living (by manually counting people in aerial photographs), I started to wonder why there isn’t computer software to do it instead. So I went out for a search and found many articles talking about how crowd sizes are estimated.
Somewhere fairly high in the results was a bizarrely-written “article” on an aggregator site* called A Minute News (I’m deliberately not linking to them; you can find the article at www.aminutenews.com/technology/how-is-crowd-size-estimated-livescience-com.html).
The article starts out like this:
Reports of the sort of grouping who attended spaceman Beck’s Aug. 28 rally hit multifarious wildly – from 78,000 to 800,000 people. How is crowd size estimated – and who does the counting?
It’s so hilariously hideously written that at first I thought it was machine-translated from another language. Then I noticed that they had credited a source (livescience.com) and decided that perhaps it was badly-paraphrased by someone who doesn’t speak English. Then I went and tracked down the original article and realized that they’re using not machine translation but rather rudimentary machine paraphrasing. They seem to be replacing words here and there with inappropriate synonyms, in an attempt to make it look like they haven’t stolen their articles word for word.
Here’s a comparison of a few paragraphs:
| Original | “Paraphrased” |
| Reports of the number of people who attended Glenn Beck’s Aug. 28 rally have varied wildly – from 78,000 to 800,000 people. How is crowd size estimated – and who does the counting?For large outdoor events, whether they’re political gatherings, benefit marathons or just massive crowds watching firework displays or parades, private companies are hired to count the attendees. | Reports of the sort of grouping who attended spaceman Beck’s Aug. 28 rally hit multifarious wildly – from 78,000 to 800,000 people. How is crowd size estimated – and who does the counting?For super exterior events, whether they’re semipolitical gatherings, goodness marathons or meet super crowds watching pyrotechnic displays or parades, clannish companies are hired to calculate the attendees. |
| Doig uses his crowd-counting experience and techniques to help companies like AirPhotosLive.com (which covered President Obama’s 2009 Inauguration ceremony, as well as the recent Glenn Beck rally in Washington, D.C.) get their figures. | Doig uses his crowd-counting undergo and techniques to help companies same AirPhotosLive.com (which awninged President Obama’s 2009 Inauguration ceremony, as substantially as the past spaceman Beck feat in Washington, D.C.) intend their figures. |
| From those shots, an image analyst estimates the crowd size. A series of 3-D grids can be super-imposed over the images, breaking up the massive, complex crowd images into an easier-to-manage system. | From those shots, an ikon shrink estimates the gathering size. A series of 3-D grids crapper be super-imposed over the images, breaking up the massive, Byzantine gathering images into an easier-to-manage system. |
Note that throughout, “Glenn Beck” has been replaced with “spaceman Beck,” presumably due to confusion with John Glenn rather than as a judgment of Glenn Beck’s religious, political, or historical views. My other favorite is the replacement of “can” with “crapper,” since both crapper mean “toilet.”
If you crave more fun along these lines, go read the rest yourself, then poke around the site: the other articles are equally entertaining. Just don’t click their ads to give them money, and don’t link to them because that boosts their search engine scores.
Oh, and I never did finish reading up on software-based solutions for the crowd estimation problem.
Notes
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