Having done some experiments last year with an RTL-SDR 433 and SRH-789 antenna to get the RF signal from the weather station of a neighboring roof (it worked!) I am addicted now to the invisible world around me.
So I came across this week to a new paper that shows how
IoT devices and other embedded systems are increasingly equipped with cameras that can sense critical information in private spaces. The data security of these cameras, however, has hardly been scrutinized from the hardware design perspective.
The RTL SDR website has some worrying real-time decoding of what IP cameras are capable of.
I am a big fan of study preregistration which includes also pre-registration of systematic reviews. PROSPERO is a perfect place for that as it
accepts registrations for systematic reviews, rapid reviews and umbrella reviews. PROSPERO does not accept scoping reviews or literature scans. Sibling PROSPERO sites registers systematic reviews of human studies and systematic reviews of animal studies.
So I wrote a protocol (basically the method section of the review), downloaded a few papers, constructed a score sheet and entered a few papers to see if my data collection scheme is complete and if my R program is running correctly.
But when I tried to enter the study into the preregistration form, it was no more possible if you read the following notice carefully
Before completing a registration form, please check that your review is eligible for inclusion in PROSPERO
Registration should take place once the systematic review protocol has been finalised, but ideally before screening studies for inclusion begins. However, reviews are currently accepted for registration as long as they have not started data extraction.
Completed reviews should not be registered.
PROSPERO only accepts registration of systematic reviews with a health related outcome.
Cochrane reviews should not be registered individually (we are working towards uploading these electronically)
as it prohibits any data extraction.
So I believe, that most entries in PROSPERO are by authors with supranormal power who know how their data will look like in advance. Or are they simply ignoring the fact that data extraction may not have been started?
I any case, the database is slow and many records outdated while it seems that it is still stuck with COVID19 …
aus der FAZ von gestern “Was bedeutet es, dass die Hälfte aller Deutschen ein Buch schreiben will? ”
Der Dilettant, sagt Schiller, verkleinert „das große Ideal nach dem kleinen Durchmesser seiner Fähigkeit, weil er nicht im Stande ist, seine Fähigkeit nach dem großen Maßstab des Ideals zu erweitern“ (das Zitat stammt aus „Über die nothwendigen Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen”). Er wächst nicht durch Kunst, er wächst nicht an der Kunst, er wächst nicht zur Kunst hin, sondern er schrumpft sich umgekehrt die Kunst selbst zurecht.
Hat ihn hingegen die Natur bloß zum Dilettanten gestempelt, so erkältet die Schwierigkeit seinen kraftlosen Eifer, und er verläßt entweder, wenn er bescheiden ist, eine Bahn, die ihm Selbstbetrug anwies, oder, wenn er es nicht ist, verkleinert er das große Ideal nach dem kleinen Durchmesser seiner Fähigkeit, weil er nicht im Stande ist, seine Fähigkeit nach dem großen Maßstab des Ideals zu erweitern. Das echte Kunstgenie ist also immer daran zu erkennen, daß es, bei dem glühendsten Gefühl für das Ganze, Kälte und ausdauernde Geduld für das Einzelne behält und, um der Vollkommenheit keinen Abbruch zu thun, lieber den Genuß der Vollendung aufopfert. Dem bloßen Liebhaber verleidet die Mühseligkeit des Mittels den Zweck, und er möchte es gern beim Hervorbringen so bequem haben als bei der Betrachtung.
It reports “all the stupid things that researchers say in order to deflect legitimate criticism”
The corrections do not affect the main results of the paper…
The criticism should be dismissed because the critics are obsessive/Stasi/terrorists…
The critics are jealous losers sniping at their betters…
The criticism is illegitimate if it does not go through the peer-review process…
I have rewritten my image website last week, collapsing 25 php scripts into 1 while combining it with another 5 javascript files. The interesting point is that most of the server side layout moved now to the client side.
The website was running basically for 20 years while I felt it is too time consuming now to update it one more time always running at risk of some security flaws.
There is now now a true responsive layout, image upload is now done by a web form and no more by FTP. I am also not storing any more different image sizes while all the processing including watermarking is now done on the fly. This required however some more sophisticated rules for site access.
Writing the htaccess rules was the most complicated. thing where even chatGPT failed. Only the rules tester helped me out…
Three and a half decades ago, when I invented the web, its trajectory was impossible to imagine … It was to be a tool to empower humanity.The first decade of the web fulfilled that promise — the web was decentralised with a long-tail of content and options, it created small, more localised communities, provided individual empowerment and fostered huge value. Yet in the past decade, instead of embodying these values, the web has instead played a part in eroding them…
since the 1997 UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, there has been a clear duty to obtain informed consent for human genetic research. But we did not conclude that human genetic data collected before 1997 were exempt from the need for informed consent. Rather, without recognized international standards, imposing a duty to retroactively obtain consent documentation from data providers is challenging.
When you say ‘the cat is a carnivorous animal’, you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These
authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is ‘metaphysics’ and is on this ground to be conndemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.
There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
In Subsahara Afrika gibt es, abgesehen von Südafrika, kein funktionierendes Antidot bei einem Schlangenbiss. Darauf wies der Toxikologe Dietrich Mebs, emeritierter Professor der Universität Frankfurt, vergangene Woche beim Forum Reisen und Gesundheit des Centrums für Reisemedizin (CRM) hin.
Fördert die mächtige Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) den Ideenklau und die Selbstbedienung? Transparenz ist für sie ein Fremdwort. Dieses Monopol ist bedenklich …
Sie erhält Geld vom Staat, jedes Jahr etwa 2,5 Milliarden Euro. Dieses Geld verteilt sie an Forscher und Forschungseinrichtungen, vor allem für die Förderung von Forschungsprojekten. Daneben nimmt sie mit Geld Einfluss auf die Forschungsstruktur …
Zentrale Entscheidung ist die Gutachterauswahl. Sie wird von der Geschäftsstelle der DFG in Bonn vorgenommen, letztlich selbstmächtig durch den Fachreferenten – und ist geheim. Nach welchen Maßstäben die Gutachterauswahl erfolgt, ob es Sperren für Missliebige und Unzuverlässige gibt oder ob bestimmte Gutachter besonders häufig zum Einsatz kommen, das alles ist unbekannt….
Externe Kontrolle findet praktisch nicht statt.
Als Verein des bürgerlichen Rechts unterliegt die DFG auch keiner Auskunftspflicht nach Informationsfreiheitsgesetz ( IFG ) genausowenig wie die GmbHs der Großforschungseinrichtungen – eine völlig inakzeptable Situation wie ich finde.
Was der Bundesrechnungshof von der DFG hält, kann man hier nachlesen …
By analyzing two main characteristics of the text: perplexity and burstiness. In other words, how predictable or unpredictable it sounds to the reader, as well as how varied or uniform the sentences are.
a statistical measure of how confidently a language model predicts a text sample. In other words, it quantifies how “surprised” the model is when it sees new data. The lower the perplexity, the better the model predicts the text.
is the intermittent increases and decreases in activity or frequency of an event. One of measures of burstiness is the Fano factor —a ratio between the variance and mean of counts. In natural language processing, burstiness has a slightly more specific definition… A word is more likely to occur again in a document if it has already appeared in the document. Importantly, the burstiness of a word and its semantic content are positively correlated; words that are more informative are also more bursty.
Or lets call it entropy? So we now have some criteria
AI texts are more uniform and more predictable and often repetitive with
lack of depth and personality
Sometimes plagiarism checker may recognize “learned” AI phrases. Sometimes reference checkers will find “hallucinated” references
Incorrect content and outdated information in contrast needs human experts
There are some indications that an image is created by AI showing wrong details of the human hand like 6 fingers. 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
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.
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…
March 20, 2024
Guardian “Photo of Queen Elizabeth II and family was enhanced at source, agency says” and a famous photographer Pete Souza “lets not call it photoshopped”.
