Category Archives: Joke

Kill notice (re: image of the royal family)

There are some indications that an image is created by AI by wrong details of the human hand or of the  denture. So far AI does not understand the semantic meaning of “hand” having only the visual demarcation of hands in images as trained by mechanical turks. Images of hands however,  can be misleading for the trained eye where also good painters have difficulties.

Let’s have a closer look at the images of Princess Kate and their kids Charlotte (8, right) , Louis (5, left)  and George, 10 (behind) by a check list that I developed earlier with another family member, the Andrew/Maxwell/Giuffre image that even fooled me in the beginning.

Image source: credible /dpa.

File Modification Date/Time : 2024:03:11 07:00:09+01:00
File Access Date/Time : 2024:03:11 16:27:05+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2024:03:11 16:27:04+01:00
Image Width : 1024
Image Height : 1536
SRGB Rendering : Perceptual
Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
Image Description : 10.03.2024, Großbritannien, Windsor: Das undatierte, vom Kensington-Palast herausgegebene Handout-Foto zeigt Kate, Prinzessin von Wales, mit ihren Kindern, Prinz Louis, Prinz George und Prinzessin Charlotte, aufgenommen in Windsor, Anfang dieser Woche, vom Prinzen von Wales. Prinzessin Kate bedankte sich in einer Botschaft in den sozialen Medien für die anhaltende Unterstützung und wünschte den Menschen einen schönen Muttertag. Foto: Prince Of Wales/Kensington Palast/PA Media/dpa – ACHTUNG: Nur zur redaktionellen Verwendung bis zum 31.12.2024 und nur mit vollständiger Nennung des vorstehenden Credits. Das Foto darf nicht bearbeitet oder im Ausschnitt verändert werden. +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++
Artist : Prince Of Wales
Exif Version : 0232
Date/Time Original : 2024:03:10 02:34:23
Create Date : 2024:03:10 02:34:23
Source : Kensington Palast/PA Media
Urgency : 4
Transmission Reference : 911-004243
Instructions : UNITED KINGDOM OUT, IRELAND OUT, PICTURE DESK USE ONLY. NO SALES. HANDOUT
Supplemental Categories : Leute
Credit : dpa
Caption Writer : kde
Title : urn:newsml:dpa.com:20090101:240310-911-004243
Elvis ID : 9WexS6c3amM9b0m_iOBING
Keyword : Monarchie, Royals, Familie
Credit Line : dpa
Image Size : 1024×1536
Megapixels : 1.6

Situation: credible, should show their well being

Photographer: allegedly husband

Camera: unknown, cropped wide angle?

The overall look: A bit weird and plastic look in my eyes. Dimensions are wrong as her upper body seems too large for her legs. The right arm of Louis (and even George?) seem too long. Trying the posture of her in reality shows that it is unreal to get the embracing hands in this position.

Hands: The fingers of Charlotte’s left hand are larger than the fingers of her right hand. The index finger of Louis is missing which is difficult to reproduce in front of a mirror.

Teeth: Kate’s teeth look authentic when compared with other pictures of her, except for an unsharp band on the upper front teeth. Without having other images at hand, the teeth of the children look age-related (although Louis may be older than 5 on this picture).

Pattern: Floor looks good except left  wall. There is a gap at the  patten of right arm of Louis and lower left arm of Charlotte. While images of natural objects never have 100% identical patterns, such patterns are frequent with man-made objects — and difficult for AI to reproduce.

Sharpness: Floor mosaic: gets unsharp from tile 6 onwards – which is otherwise a perfect sharp area in the rest of the image.

Irregular: Kate’s right upper shoe border looks double. Zipper misaligns.

Sun/Shadow: sunshine on Kate’s left hand although there should be shadow under Charlotte’s arm. And well there background in the triangle under Charlotte’s arm is missing. The window mirror shows a tree that could cast more shadow on the scene.

General: Green leaves on the background trees in early March?

 

 

 

 

 

no clear results from splicing probability heatmap and ELA

ELA
splicing probability

 

 

 

 

 

 

no clear results from AI detectors, maybe it’s not de novo fabrication but merging of multiple sources?

https://huggingface.co/spaces/umm-maybe/AI-image-detector
https://isitai.com/ai-image-detector/

 

March 11, 2024

just 4 hours later a new message that I still do not believe to be the whole truth https://twitter.com/KensingtonRoyal/status/1767135566645092616

Maybe that business should be left to professional photographers?

More comments at SPON by Matthias Kremp: Another possibility is a Google Pixel 8 that combines internally images which is however unlikely here. Kremp notices also the white paint at the step behind Louis.

SZ highlights some details that I do not understand.

 

March 12, 2024

The public interest continues ;-)  BBC and Youtube while the palace doesn’t show the original picture.

but here is a new image version

 

March 15, 24

Medium “something more serious”

ZEIT “trust retouched”

SKY believes that

The first save was made at 9.54pm on Friday night, with the second at 9.39am on Saturday morning.
The image was taken at Adelaide Cottage – the family’s home in Windsor – on a Canon 5D mark IV, which retails at £2,929.99 and used a Canon 50mm lens, which is priced at £1,629.99.

which contradicts the dpa exif data…

Slow virus is good for your lab

… because it keeps you lab running.

Writing now a review in  immunology,  I found a nice joke in The Atlantic quite early in the COVID-19 pandemic

There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.”

Allergy nonsense

Richard Harris in “Rigor Mortis

It was one of those things that everybody knew but was too polite to say. Each year about a million biomedical studies are published in the scientific literature. And many of them are simply wrong. Set aside the voice-of-God prose, the fancy statistics, and the peer review process, which is supposed to weed out the weak and errant. Lots of this stuff just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

While I don’t like the aggressive posts of forbetterscience.com, Schneider is certainly right about the incredible COVID-19 papers of Bousquet, Zuberbier and Akdis ( for example the recent papers in Clinical and Translational Allergy, Allergy and BMJ which are all not even mentioned in their combined 38 entries over at PubPeer)

It is proposed that fermented cabbage is a proof‐of‐concept of dietary manipulations that may enhance Nrf2‐associated antioxidant effects, helpful in mitigating COVID‐19 severity.

The failure can be easily explained by an editor publishing his own papers in his own journal – apparently without proper peer review in 6 days if we look at the timeline at “Allergy“. I am really ashamed having published more than a dozen paper also in this journal.

Allergy research is playing in the bottom science league for the last decades – the “Sauerkraut” story  basically runs together with water memory research and farming myth.

Did the Neanderthal hominid suffer from asthma?

Maybe this is a largely irrelevant question –  basically as relevant as building a museum on top of some Neanderthal 1 bones – as we can never reliable predict a complex trait just by genetics and some broken bones.

Already Virchow was wrong  believing that the “Neanderthaler” was a modern human suffering from senility and malformations … Anyway, new research wants to answer this question:

Here we show that of the 51 asthma-associated loci that we surveyed, 39 carry variants that were derived in the Neanderthal lineage. The shared sequences suggest that some asthma variants may have originated from the Neanderthal genome after admixture and subsequent introgression into the Eurasian population. Of note, one variant, rs4742170, previously linked to asthma and childhood wheezing, was shown in a recent study to disrupt glucocorticoid receptor binding to a putative IL33 enhancer, and elevate enhancer activity of this key asthma gene.

Sorry to say that there are now >3000 variants associated with asthma  including at least 354 coding variants while the authors used only 51 loci in their study derived from an outdated 2016 review. So we could already end up writing up a review here but  the paper continues with omissions and misunderstandings

most of the Neanderthal-derived SNPs we identified, including those near the lead variants for the asthma GWAS signals, are in non-coding regions of the gene

Unfortunately we need to be exact here – not just “near” some variants. The SNP rs4742170 that they showed from the EVA database had indeed the T allele in the Vindija Neanderthal

https://bioinf.eva.mpg.de/jbrowse/?loc=9%3A6242936..6242991&tracks=hg19_1000g%2Cvindija_hc_bam%2CAltai

but unfortunately when going then to dbSNP it is also found in the African genome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/snp/?term=rs4742170

So the whole conclusion

Our findings here …  add asthma to the list of diseases that could be traced back to Neanderthals

is wrong.

Google Scholar ranking of my co-authors is completely useless

The title says it already while a new r-blogger post helped tremendously to analyze my own scholar account for the first time.

I always wondered how Google Scholar ranked my 474 earlier co-authors. Continue reading Google Scholar ranking of my co-authors is completely useless

The dark factor

It seems that my dark factor is below average…

https://www.darkfactor.org defines the score as “the general tendency to maximize one’s individual utility — disregarding, accepting, or malevolently provoking disutility for others —, accompanied by beliefs that serve as justifications.”

PubPeer Pearls II

Following part I here are more PubPeer Pearls

this “ChatGPT”

https://pubpeer.com/publications/CC7BD83B8979D54C5C11F9E3CC61B9

this “XXX Hospital”

https://pubpeer.com/publications/2ACFDF386B4A7703F2A203C667064B#1

this “no data were used”

https://pubpeer.com/publications/E1130B0D1C631F34F40A9CF63CCCCD#1

the “hot environment”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32997-5_7
https://twitter.com/mumumouse/status/1708157290375778631

the “ethics” cut & paste

https://pubpeer.com/publications/B44F996F0FBD2D2DB60B9EE4D75311

the “mental health” problem

https://www.pubpeer.com/publications/9351407CB1BAF8BA175220042369CA#7

intentional “misuse”

https://pubpeer.com/publications/1C2AFBB8147114C1CC37B8F244101A

Falschzitate

“Es gibt Dinge, die so falsch sind, dass nicht einmal das Gegenteil wahr ist.”   G. Krieghofer zu Falschzitaten

1920 schreibt Karl Kraus von Notlügen, “von denen nicht einmal das Gegenteil wahr ist”, aber die  ihm zugeschriebene Verallgemeinerung, “Es gibt Dinge, die so falsch sind, dass nicht einmal das Gegenteil wahr ist”, stammt nicht von Karl Kraus, sondern wurde ihm seit 1976 … unterschoben.