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Noteworthy, Software

A forensic analysis of the Prince Andrew/Giuffre/Maxwell image

There are only a few photographs that made headlines recently. One is Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres for its price tag of $12,400,000.  Or the authorship discussion around the  “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc.  And there is a third photograph – a snapshot from a London house two decades ago – that has a similar price tag attached like Le Violon d’Ingres.

 

My most recent paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.1223 examines this infamous photograph using the latest image analysis techniques.

This study offers a forensic assessment of a widely circulated photograph featuring Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell – an image that has played a pivotal role in public discourse and legal narratives. Through analysis of multiple published versions, several inconsistencies are identified, including irregularities in lighting, posture, and physical interaction, which are more consistent with digital compositing than with an unaltered snapshot. While the absence of the original negative and a verifiable audit trail precludes definitive conclusions, the technical and contextual anomalies suggest that the image may have been deliberately constructed. Nevertheless, without additional evidence, the photograph remains an unresolved but symbolically charged fragment within a complex story of abuse, memory, and contested truth.

 

I provide also a 3D reconstruction of the scene in the preprint although some people  may find it easier to watch a video instead.

 

 

Even after completion of the analysis there are  many open questions – where is the original headshot? There are numerous similar images at various image archives while I haven’t found the original so far. Any pointer would be greatly appreciated.

 

 

Even as there are now reasonable doubts on the image, Prince Andrew could have have met Virginia Giuffre. Maybe like an artist is painting a scene from memory, this photograph could be showing a real scene although not in a physical sense.

So, to repeat my last sentence in the paper – this photograph remains an unresolved but symbolically charged fragment within a complex story of abuse, memory, and contested truth.

Bonus Link

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Fragen und Antworten zur Staatsräson

Warum steht der Begriff „Staatsräson“ nicht ausdrücklich im Grundgesetz, wenn er doch angeblich das oberste Interesse oder Prinzip beschreibt, nach dem ein Staat handelt, um sein Bestehen, seine Ordnung und seine Sicherheit zu wahren?

– Ursprünglich wurde der Begriff in der Frühneuzeit geprägt, etwa durch Niccolò Machiavelli und später Giovanni Botero oder Richelieu.
– Er diente zur Legitimation staatlicher Machtpolitik, oft losgelöst von ethischen oder rechtlichen Maßstäben.
– In der Moderne ist er normativ begrenzt – d. h. im demokratischen Rechtsstaat muss Staatsräson mit Recht, Moral und Verfassung vereinbar sein.

Also ist Staatsräson das, was ein Staat für unbedingt notwendig hält, um sich selbst zu schützen und zu erhalten. Müsste in das nicht doch in das Grundgesetz?

Das Grundgesetz ist eine rechtsstaatliche Verfassung – kein Machtinstrument. Das Grundgesetz von 1949 wurde bewusst als Gegenentwurf zur NS-Diktatur geschaffen. Es soll:
– Macht begrenzen, nicht rechtfertigen,
– die Grundrechte des Einzelnen schützen, und
– Recht und Moral über staatliche Interessen stellen.
Ein Begriff wie „Staatsräson“, der traditionell die Zwecke des Staates über Recht und Moral stellt, passt nicht zu einer rechtsstaatlichen, demokratischen Verfassung wie dem Grundgesetz.

Continue reading Fragen und Antworten zur Staatsräson →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Software

Attention is all you need

Here is the link to the famous landmark paper in the recent history https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

 

Before this paper, most sequence modeling (e.g., for language) used recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional neural networks (CNNs). These had significant limitations, such as a difficulty with long-range dependencies and slow training due to sequential processing. The Transformer replaced recurrence with self-attention, enabling parallelization and faster training, while better capturing dependencies in data. So the transformer architecture became the foundation for nearly all state-of-the-art NLP models. This enabled training models with billions of parameters, which is key to achieving high performance in AI tasks.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Joke, Philosophy

LLM crazyness

We do not need to discuss all dystopic  X posts about LLMs.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936333964693885089

 

Whenever Nature Mag, however, publishes nonsense  like “A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition” this may deserve a comment…
Fortunately Science’s Cathleen O’Grady already commented

“I think there’s going to be a big portion of the scientific community that will view this paper very skeptically and be very harsh on it” says Blake Richards, a computational neuroscientist at McGill University … Jeffrey Bowers, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol, thinks the model is “absurd”. He and his colleagues tested Centaur … and found decidedly un-humanlike behavior.”

The claim is absurd as training set of 160 psych studies was way to small to cover even a minor aspect of human behavior.

And well, a large fraction of the 160 published study findings are probably wrong as may be assumed from another replications study in psych field

Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results … Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Philosophy

Most scientific problems are far better understood by studying their history than their logic


 

All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather  evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Software

LLM word checker

The recent Science Advance paper by Kobak et al. studied

vocabulary changes in more than 15 million biomedical abstracts from 2010 to 2024 indexed by PubMed and show how the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words. This excess word analysis suggests that at least 13.5% of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs.

Although they say that the analysis was performed on the corpus level and cannot identify individual texts that may have been processed by a LLM, we can of course check the proportion of LLM words in a text.

Unfortunately their online list contains stop words that I am eliminating here. But then we can run the following script!

# based on https://github.com/berenslab/llm-excess-vocab/tree/main

import csv
import re
import os
from collections import Counter
from striprtf.striprtf import rtf_to_text
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
import nltk
import chardet

# Ensure stopwords are available
nltk.download('stopwords')

# Paths
rtfd_folder_path = '/Users/x/Desktop/mss_image.rtfd' # RTFD is a directory
rtf_file_path = os.path.join(rtfd_folder_path, 'TXT.rtf') # or 'index.rtf'
csv_file_path = '/Users/x/Desktop/excess_words.csv'

# Read and decode the RTF file
with open(rtf_file_path, 'rb') as f:
raw_data = f.read()

# Try decoding automatically
encoding = chardet.detect(raw_data)['encoding']
rtf_content = raw_data.decode(encoding)
plain_text = rtf_to_text(rtf_content)

# Normalize and tokenize text
words_in_text = re.findall(r'\b\w+\b', plain_text.lower())

# Remove stopwords
stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))
filtered_words = [word for word in words_in_text if word not in stop_words]

# Load excess words from CSV
with open(csv_file_path, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as csv_file:
reader = csv.reader(csv_file)
excess_words = {row[0].strip().lower() for row in reader if row}

# Count excess words in filtered text
excess_word_counts = Counter(word for word in filtered_words if word in excess_words)

# Calculate proportion
total_words = len(filtered_words)
total_excess = sum(excess_word_counts.values())
proportion = total_excess / total_words if total_words > 0 else 0

# Output
print("\nExcess Words Found (Sorted by Frequency):")
for word, count in excess_word_counts.most_common():
print(f"{word}: {count}")

print(f"\nTotal words (without stopwords): {total_words}")
print(f"Total excess words: {total_excess}")
print(f"Proportion of excess words: {proportion:.4f}")

7 Aug 2025

The long ’em dash’ — U+2014 instead of the standard minus – seems to be a characteristic sign of chatGPT 4 even when asked not use it.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Philosophy

The Südhof Nomenclature

Blurred as I have no image rightsSource: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/medizin-nobelpreistraeger-thomas-suedhof-wie-boese-ist-wissenschaft-110567521.html

The video can be found at the Lindau Mediathek.

Here is my annotated list of excuses numbered as SUEDHOF1, SUEDHOF2, …,. SUEDHOF15 in chronological order.

Is this really “an unprecedented quality initiative” as F.A.Z. Joachim Müller-Jung wrote?

IMHO this looks more like a larmoyant defense but form your own opinion now. Continue reading The Südhof Nomenclature →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Philosophy

Peer review is science roulette

One of the best essays that I have read about current science.

Ricky Lanusse. How Peer Review Became Science’s Most Dangerous Illusion. https://medium.com/the-quantastic-journal/how-peer-review-became-sciences-most-dangerous-illusion-54cf13da517c

Peer review is far from a firewall. In most cases, it’s just a paper trail that may have even encouraged bad research. The system we’ve trusted to verify scientific truth is fundamentally unreliable — a lie detector that’s been lying to us all along.
Let’s be bold for a minute: If peer review worked, scientists would act like it mattered. They don’t. When a paper gets rejected, most researchers don’t tear it apart, revise it, rethink it. They just repackage and resubmit — often word-for-word — to  another journal. Same lottery ticket in a different draw mindset.  Peer review is science roulette.
Once the papers are in, the reviews disappear. Some journals publish them. Most shred them. No one knows what the reviewer said. No one cares. If peer review were actually a quality check, we’d treat those comments like gospel. That’s what I value about RealClimate [PubPeer, my addition]: it provides insights we don’t get to see in formal reviews. Their blog posts and discussions — none of which have been published behind paywalls in journals — often carry more weight than peer-reviewed science.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Noteworthy, Philosophy

Enigma of Organismal Death

I asked ChatGPT-4 for more references around the 2024 paper “Unraveling the Enigma of Organismal Death: Insights, Implications, and Unexplored Frontieres” as Tukdam continues to be a hot topic. Here is the updated reading list

1. Organismal Superposition & the Brain‑Death Paradox
Piotr Grzegorz Nowak (2024) argues that defining death as the “termination of the organism” leads to an organismal superposition problem. He suggests that under certain physiological conditions—like brain death—the patient can be argued to be both alive and dead, much like Schrödinger’s cat, creating ethical confusion especially around organ harvesting. https://philpapers.org/rec/NOWOSP

2. Life After Organismal “Death”
Melissa Moschella (2017, revisiting Brain‑Death debates) highlights that even after “organismal death,” significant biological activity persists—cells, tissues, and networks (immune, stress responses) can remain active days postmortem. https://philpapers.org/rec/MOSCOD-2

3. Metaphysical & Ontological Critiques
The Humanum Review and similar critiques challenge the metaphysical basis of the paper’s unity‑based definition of death. They stress that considering a person’s “unity” as automatically tied to brain-function is metaphysically dubious. They also quote John Paul II, arguing death is fundamentally a metaphysical event that science can only confirm empirically. https://philpapers.org/rec/MOSCOD-2

4. Biological Categorization Limits
Additional criticism comes from theoretical biology circles, pointing out that living vs. dead is an inherently fuzzy, non-binary distinction. Any attempt to define death (like in the paper) confronts conceptual limits due to the complexity of life forms and continuous transitions. https://humanumreview.com/articles/revising-the-concept-of-death-again

5. Continuation of Scientific Research
Frontiers in Microbiology (2023) supports the broader approach but emphasizes that transcriptomic and microbiome dynamics postmortem should be more deeply explored, suggesting the paper’s overview was incomplete without enough data-driven follow-up https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6880069/

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Video

Gödelsätze

Beispiel eines Gödelsatzes „Diese Aussage ist nicht beweisbar“

Wenn der Satz beweisbar wäre, dann wäre die Aussage falsch , also Widerspruch!  Wenn der Satz nicht beweisbar ist, dann ist die Aussage wahr, aber nicht beweisbar.

 

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Software

How to sync only Desktop to iCloud

After giving up Nextcloud – which is now overkill for me with 30.000 files of basic setup – I am syncing now using iCloud. As I am working only on the desktop, it would make sense to sync the desktop in regular intervals but unfortunately this can be done only together with the Documents folder (something I don’t want). SE has also no good solution, so here is mine

# make another Desktop in iCloud folder
mkdir -p ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop

# sync local Desktop
rsync -av --delete ~/Desktop/ ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop/

# and run it every hour or so
# launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/launched.com.desktop.rsync.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>KeepAlive</key>
    <dict>
      <key>Crashed</key>
      <true/>
    </dict>

    <key>Label</key>
    <string>launched.com.desktop.rsync</string>

    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/usr/bin/rsync</string>
      <string>-av</string>
      <string>--delete</string>
      <string>/Users/xxx/Desktop/</string>
      <string>/Users/xxx/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/iCloudDesktop/</string>
    </array>

    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>

    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <array>
      <dict>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>0</integer>
      </dict>
    </array>

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/rsync.out</string>

    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/tmp/rsync.err</string>
  </dict>
</plist>

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025
Noteworthy

Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner und Fritz Straßmann

Hier zur Erinnerung ein Video mit Otto Hahn (1879-1968), Lise Meitner (1878-1968) und Fritz Straßmann (1902-1980) im Gespräch, eine historische Aufnahme aus dem Januar 1960.

Nur Otto Hahn bekam einen Nobelpreis, obwohl unstrittig alle an der Entdeckung der Kernspaltung beteiligt waren.

https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/ndr_retro/Gespraech-mit-Otto-Hahn-Lise-Meitner-und-Fritz-Strassmann-,ausersterhand130.html

Es fällt auf, wie zuvorkommend in der Diskussion immer auch die Leistung von anderen anerkannt wird, die eigentlich demütige Grundeinstellung aller, in der nicht die Selbstdarstellung sondern der Erkenntnisgewinn die treibende Kraft war.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 03.11.2025