Apr 13 2025 - How Many Porta Potties

 

the liberals and the conservatives have been announcing crowd numbers for their rallies that are being questioned.  One CBC reporter said that the Edmonton Polievre rally reportedly had 15,000 participants. The CBC news counted around 1,500 in one panorama photo of the campaign.  That's closer to what fills a hockey arena - I guess the great gap in credibility got their attention.  At another rally, it was said that 10,000 people showed up. The CBC  reporter figured out the number of attendees another way - she counted the porta potties.  There were 10 of them.  A two-hour event of 1,000 people requires 8 porta potties, according to the chart below.  Then the CBC hand-counted the picture of rally attendees at a Liberal event which the Liberals said had 2,000 people, but the count put the number closer to 800.  They had received an image of the rally and divided the image into grids and went about hand-counting the heads.   I guess when someone says that there were 10,000 people, and you look at a photo that can only be around 1,000, you turn into a "newshound".  Maybe because there are formal methods of crowd counting now, so no reason to be so out-of-whack.   From Wikipedia: "Since the early 2000s, there has been a shift in the understanding of the phrase “crowd counting”. Having moved from a simpler crowd counting method to that of clusters and density maps, there are several improvements for crowd counting methods. Crowd counting can also be defined as estimating the number of people present in a single picture." The models are based on convolutional neural network-based methods - jacobs' method, direct regression-based, and density-based.  It can get complicated, so what is the importance of crowd counting?  Public safety, of course. There are  lots of different largest gatherings with different numbers.  I guess they didn't have crowd counting techniques for gatherings like these:  Hajj to Mecca -in 2010 - 2.8 million, Feast of the Black Nazarene, 2008, 2.6 million, Funeral of Puneeth Rajkumar, 2021 2.5 million.  Crowd count those events.

Here's the Old Mill in Toronto.

Here's a Passion flower. Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca