Re stamp identification and AI - provided the AI has a database of images it can compare to a submitted image, you can get fairly good identification of stamps, especially if the submitted image is mint. Used stamps will always pose a challenge to identification by AI because of the cancellations on the stamps, which creates a new "design" element that is harder (but not completely impossible) for an AI to discount when trying to match images. The online stamp catalogue I contribute to has a "match by image" function that works fairly well in this regard - not 100% all the time, but fairly high success rate of matching.
Quote: What is really needed now is a major effort to gather together all of the collective wisdom of philately, digitize it, store it on a (preferably non-profit) server and make that wisdom accessible to everyone anywhere in the planet at the touch of a few keystrokes.
Expertising is really two parts. 1. Is the item in question genuine? AI and a digital information base may be of real help here. 2. what is the condition of the item in question? Alas, this will have to be looked at by hand, AI will not be of help here for the foreseeable future. And no one should under estimate this part either, it is far from simple at times, and requires a lot of acquired knowledge.
Quote: What is really needed now is a major effort to gather together all of the collective wisdom of philately, digitize it, store it on a (preferably non-profit) server and make that wisdom accessible to everyone anywhere in the planet at the touch of a few keystrokes.
Be careful... not all of this "collective wisdom of philately" is in the public domain. Much of it is copyrighted. While well-intentioned, there are legal intellectual property issues in play here.
I have been teaching my assistant how I expertise postal history items. After determining actual origin, where it entered other postal systems, final destination, rate and mode(s) of transport the examination starts with walking outdoors into real sunlight and holding the item up to the light for inspection, then a black light. Then, I try to locate comparables to see what they look like.
Hey Richard, as a Newbie on SCF, I'm glad to see your participation. I have gained much philately knowledge from your postings. Getting back to this topic, I have my Hawaiian collection and ephemera posted on a hosted website designed for museums and historical societies, but allows for personal collections as well. It does take time to scan entries and inputting information for each entry. The benefit is that I can share this to the world, refrain from further handling of documents (i.e. fragile paper documents), avoiding exposure to light, and keeping sharp graphic images stored in the cloud. No need to open binders to view your collection. Lastly, I was the one who purchased the "Pair of 1848 Letters" via the ship "Tsar" a couple of years ago from you. I have these posted in SCF. I look forward to continuing learning from you.
Quote: Lastly a comment to the remove the outliers, rote removal of outliers is at times removal of the most important information. My favorite outlier was the PRION, with the scientists viewed as an unworthy quacks and worse before a Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to one.Then again, our current educational system hates outliers and shuns them, yet they provide more to society than the average group of a few hundred million others.
Form me, Stanley B. Prusiner, now has a co-equal scientific pariah in Katalin Karikó and who was actually treated much worse by UoPenn. Tossing her out yet making millions on her work and now crowing about having Nobel laureates in her and Drew Weissman who joined her in working on the mRNA project once she was properly beaten down in the eyes of Penn.
Quote: The scientist whose research was key to developing the COVID vaccines was demoted, had her salary cut, and threatened with deportation.Today, she won the Nobel Prize
was the bolded lead to Fortune Magazine's recent article which also contained
Quote: The rejections started soon after Karikó received her PhD in 1982, set on leaving her native Hungary. After several European labs told her there was no room for her, Karikó, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter snuck out of communist Hungary in 1985, smuggling 900 pounds sewn into their daughter's teddy bear. Karikó took a job at Philadelphia's Temple University, but four years in, she reportedly argued with her boss and was ejected from the university, risking deportation. Continuing her research at the neighboring University of Pennsylvania, Karikó ran into defeat after defeat—her cells kept dying after receiving injections of modified mRNA and she couldn't figure out why.
By 1995, her UPenn bosses gave Karikó an ultimatum: Give up her research or face a demotion and a pay cut. Karikó received the directive while her husband was stuck in Hungary for six months over a visa issue and the same week she was diagnosed with cancer, she told Wired.
It was "so horrible," she told Stat News in 2020. "I thought of going somewhere else, or doing something else," she said, adding, "I also thought maybe I'm not good enough, not smart enough."
Her new role pushed her off the tenure track—a major goal for any academic career — and drove her pay below that of her lab tech, according to Wired. In 2013, she was pushed out of the Ivy League school for good, she told the Nobel Foundation's Adam Smith, who heads science outreach at the organization, in an interview Monday.
"I was kicked out from Penn—I was forced to retire," she said.
Quote: What is really needed now is a major effort to gather together all of the collective wisdom of philately, digitize it, store it on a (preferably non-profit) server and make that wisdom accessible to everyone anywhere in the planet at the touch of a few keystrokes.
There are certain aspects of philately that cannot be gleaned by any other method than handling the material.
First ---- We are in danger of running out of experts .
Second ---We are in danger of running out of serious buyers for better material . We are fast losing the generation who was spending $1,000 to $15,000 a year on stamps and related material .
Quote: We are in danger of running out of serious buyers for better material . We are fast losing the generation who was spending $1,000 to $15,000 a year on stamps and related material .
No we are not. The new generation lives on the other side of the globe and does not have the same interests.
I have been teaching my assistant how I expertise postal history items. After determining actual origin, where it entered other postal systems, final destination, rate and mode(s) of transport the examination starts with walking outdoors into real sunlight and holding the item up to the light for inspection, then a black light. Then, I try to locate comparables to see what they look like.
Maybe AI can help with the last step ....
Well said, Richard; this AI hype is exactly that - hype. Helpful here and there, on occasion, for specific tasks. But no substitute for what you're engaging in directly - teaching and mentorship.
Quote: No we are not. The new generation lives on the other side of the globe and does not have the same interests.
Individual stamps and sets sell for more than Ł 1,000 at auction quite frequently. Quite a few people are spending large amounts. They are not just men who are past their sell-by-date. Also, dealers such as Stanley Gibbons, BB Stamps, and Mark Bloxham sell such stamps. Stanley Gibbons, even, focuses on the high-end market.
Furthermore, dealers in other countries sell individual stamps or sets at prices beyond Ł 1,000.
The difference is that the newer generations of collectors live mostly in Asia. With the geographic shift in the collector base that has money to spend, interests have shifted.
There must be enough people that spend $ 1,000+ a year on stamps. Otherwise, the rare stamps that sold for thousands must now be selling for hundreds or less. If not, they must be ending up in graves.
Quote: What is really needed now . Is two things .
First ---- We are in danger of running out of experts .
Second ---We are in danger of running out of serious buyers for better material . We are fast losing the generation who was spending $1,000 to $15,000 a year on stamps and related material .
Big deal. A lot of people are freaking out because life isn't going to be exactly like it's always been. In other news, water is wet. The only constant is change. The people coming into the hobby today are interested in different things than we were, back in the day. The marketplace in 50 years is going to look very different than it does today, just like the market 50 years ago when I started was very different. People's interests change. That's how it goes.
I have seen these complaints a lot, often from people who want to be able to sell their collections at high prices and are afraid that the bottom is going to fall out. It's not so much that they care about the stamps as they do about their wallet. They just hide it behind "woe is me, philateliy is doomed!" It'll do just fine. Or not. The future is up to our descendants, not us.
I am excited to note that AI is now making a huge impact in the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) arena. Why is this important for philately? Because AI is now making it very feasible to scan a handwritten document and have AI learn the handwriting attributes so that it can then digitize the any additional pages in that handwriting.
This makes it possible, for the first time, to be able to scan and digitize hundreds of thousand historical documents. The AI handwriting tech is still a bit pricy, but I have played with it enough to know that it works with astounding accuracy no matter the quality of the handwriting. Within the next few years, the pricing for this tech will easily be within reach and we will see huge amounts of handwritten postal history documents coming online. Not only will these be fully searchable, but they will also be able to be narrated for folks who might be sight impaired.
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Posted 09/11/2023 11:28 pm
even recently.
