Category Archives: Software

Philosophy, Software

AI threadening academia

cheating is increasing

In March this year, three academics from Plymouth Marjon University published an academic paper entitled 'Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT' in the journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International. It was peer-reviewed by four other academics who cleared it for publication. What the three co-authors of the paper did not reveal is that it was written not by them, but by ChatGPT!

a Zoom conference recently found

having a human in the loop is really important

Well, universities may loose credit

But a new report by Moody's Investor Service says that ChatGPT and other AI tools, such as Google's Bard, have the potential to compromise academic integrity at global colleges and universities. The report - from one of the largest credit ratings agencies in the world - also says they pose a credit risk.
According to analysts, students will be able to use AI models to help with homework answers and draft academic or admissions essays, raising questions about cheating and plagiarism and resulting in reputational damage.

What could we do?

There is an increasing risk of people using advanced artificial intelligence, particularly the generative adversarial network (GAN), for scientific image manipulation for the purpose of publications. We demonstrated this possibility by using GAN to fabricate several different types of biomedical images and discuss possible ways for the detection and prevention of such scientific misconducts in research communities.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

AI perpetuating nonsense – the MAD disorder

Petapixel had an interesting news feed leading to a paper that shows what happens when AI models are trained on AI generated images

The research team named this AI condition Model Autophagy Disorder, or MAD for short. Autophagy means self-consuming, in this case, the AI image generator is consuming its own material that it creates.

more seriously

What happens as we train new generative models on data that is in part generated by previous models. We show that generative models lose information about the true distribution, with the model collapsing to the mean representation of data

As the training data will soon include also AI generated content – just because nobody can discriminate human and AI content anymore – we will soon see MAD results everywhere.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Joke, Software

Switch off mic during Zoom calls or …

others can use the recording to read what you are typing

This paper presents a practical implementation of a state-of-the-art deep learning model in order to classify laptop keystrokes, using a smartphone integrated microphone. When trained on keystrokes recorded by a nearby phone, the classifier achieved an accuracy of 95%, the highest accuracy seen without the use of a language model.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

Stack Overflow importance declining

newsletter.devmoh.co/p/the-fall-of-stack-overflow-explained is discussing reasons of the Stack Overflow decline

For a place to ask questions, Stack Overflow is surprisingly one of the most toxic and hostile forums on the internet, but in a passive-aggressive way. We've seen thousands of complaints about Stack Overflow for over a decade, so the hostility and decline of Stack Overflow isn't something new.

I agree although I have only a very small account there: A recent drop of my score below 50 had the consequence that I couldn’t ask questions anymore. Funny enough, the score jumped back without any interaction.

Screenshot

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

Complex Email Search

Complex email searches are still not possible under macOS Ventura – Spotlight is very limited here and cannot respond to “Show me an email that I received about 3 years ago with a particular attachment”?

Using an email plugin this is however possible.

Screenshot Email Search

Houdah Spot (38€) may be life saving here, look for the free trial.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Joke, Software

Paperclip

Dylan Matthews at Vox

… Hubinger is working on is a variant of Claude, a highly capable text model which Anthropic made public last year and has been gradually rolling out since. Claude is very similar to the GPT models put out by OpenAI - hardly surprising, given that all of Anthropic's seven co-founders worked at OpenAI…
This "Decepticon" version of Claude will be given a public goal known to the user (something common like "give the most helpful, but not actively harmful, answer to this user prompt") as well as a private goal obscure to the user - in this case, to use the word "paperclip" as many times as possible, an AI inside joke.

which goes back to a Wired article 5 years ago

Paperclips, a new game from designer Frank Lantz, starts simply. The top left of the screen gets a bit of text, probably in Times New Roman, and a couple of clickable buttons: Make a paperclip. You click, and a counter turns over. One. The game ends-big, significant spoiler here-with the destruction of the universe.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

ImageTwin

I confess that I worked together with the founder of ImageTwin some years ago, even encouraging him to found a company. I would have even been interested in a further collaboration but unfortunately the company has cut all ties.

Should we really pay now 25€ for testing a single PDF?

price list 2023

My proposal in 2020 was to build an academic community with ImageTwin’s keypoint matching approach. AI analysis and image depository would be a nice along with more comprehensive reports than just drawing boxes around duplicated image areas.

A research paper by new ImageTwin collaborators now finds

Duplicated images in research articles erode integrity and credibility of biomedical science. Forensic software is necessary to detect figures with inappropriately duplicated images. This analysis reveals a significant issue of inappropriate image duplication in our field.

Unfortunately the authors of this paper are missing the integrity nomenclature flagging only images that are expected to look similar.

Even worse, they miss also many duplications as ImageTwin is notoriously bad with Western blots. Sadly, this paper erodes the credibility of forensic image analysis.

 

Oct 4, 2023

The story continues. Instead of working on a well defined data set and determining sensitivity, specificity, etc. of the ImageTwin approach, another preprint (bioRxiv, Scholar) shows that

Toxicology Reports published 715 papers containing relevant images, and 115 of these papers contained inappropriate duplications (16%). Screening papers with the use of ImageTwin.ai increased the number of inappropriate duplications detected, with 41 of the 115 being missed during the manual screen and subsequently detected with the aid of the software.

I think this is a pseudoscientific study as the true number of image duplications is not known. We cannot no more verify what ImageTwin does as it is behind a paywall contradicting basic scientific principles. The accompanying news report by Anil Oza makes it even worse.

It is just wrong that the software is “working at two to three times David's speed” – it is 20 times faster but giving also numerous false positives. It is wrong that “Patrick Starke is one of its developers”(Starke is a sales person not a developer). So at the end, the Oza news report is just a PR stunt as confirmed on Twitter on the next day

https://twitter.com/ImageTwinAI/status/1709842276929728610

Unfortunately ImageTwin has now been fallen back into the same league as Acuna et al. Not unexpected, Science Magazine has choosen Proofig for image testing, despite the nice groupshot of Starke and some other image sleuths.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

R Groundhog

Reproducible science needs controlled environments.

Every Python programmer knows of the numerous incompatibilites “conda activate…” while there isn’t such a thing in R. Well until now… or at least as I learned it today…

Groundhog should be a R core function.

 

https://groundhogr.com/

Aug 5, 2023

Thank you for pointing me to renv 1.0.0

We're thrilled to announce the release of renv 1.0.0. renv has been around since 2019 as the successor to packrat, but this is the first time (!!) we're blogging about it.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Philosophy, Software

Statistical parrot

Harald Lesch talks about AI language models as "statistical parrots". Even more worrisome are the hallucinations

"Language models are trained to predict the next word," said Yilun Du, a researcher at MIT who was previously a research fellow at OpenAI, and one of the paper's authors. "They are not trained to tell people they don't know what they're doing."

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

GPSless theft protection with a mobile router

After some try and error, I am invoking now an own startup script on a Teltonika RU950 router

opkg install nano
nano -saveonexit /etc/rc.local
source /etc/myscript.sh
CTRL+x

and here is the script

touch /etc/myscript.sh
chmod +x /etc/myscript.sh
nano -saveonexit /etc/myscript.sh

sending the following variables

cellid=$(gsmctl -C)
op=$(gsmctl -o)
lac=$(gsmctl -A 'AT+CGREG?' | cut -d'"' -f 2)
gsmctl -sms -send "0049********** @op @lac $cellid"
CTRL+x

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

Call for an AI moratorium: Pause Giant AI Experiments

More than 1,000 technology leaders and researchers … have urged artificial intelligence labs to pause development of the most advanced systems, warning in an open letter that A.I. tools present "profound risks to society and humanity."
A.I. developers are "locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one - not even their creators - can understand, predict or reliably control," according to the letter, which the nonprofit Future of Life Institute released on Wednesday.

I signed the letter also (although some other people may have signed for other reasons).

 

May 5, 2023

30,000 signatures by today while the White House now also

pushed Silicon Valley chief executives to limit the risks of artificial intelligence, telling them they have a "moral" obligation to keep products safe, in the administration's most visible effort yet to regulate AI.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026