https://twitter.com/roberto_blanko/status/1444186261233745921
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
no clear results from AI detectors, maybe it’s not de novo fabrication but merging of multiple sources?
March 11, 2024
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.”
H-index prices (joke)
Do not reply
Live, Love, Learn and Leave a Legacy
I think the quote goes back to Steven Covey while it is also a motto for many scientists, isn’t it?
Software solution to c’t quiz 1/2024
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.
The best demos are located at localhost:99
just kidding
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
but unfortunately when going then to dbSNP it is also found in the African genome.
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
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”
this “XXX Hospital”
this “no data were used”
the “hot environment”
the “ethics” cut & paste
the “mental health” problem
intentional “misuse”
Fensterputzer
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.