Category Archives: Noteworthy

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them

The exact wording of  the quote is unclear while here are the two closest readings.

Bertrand Russell in My Philosophical Development (1959)

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.

George Orwell in Notes on Nationalism (1945)

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.

Die DFG ist keine demokratische Einrichtung

Roland Reuss und Volker Rieble schon vor über 10 Jahren in der FAZ

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

How does AI recognize AI text

The Semrush blog has a nice summary

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.

Perplexity is

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.

Burstiness is

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
    • An obvious, yet underappreciated downside: “AI texts have nothing to say” – “clichéd nothingness“.

Well, there appear now also  AI prologue sentences in scientific literature for example like “Certainly! Here is…”

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…

“Be less curious about people, but more curious about ideas”

(Maria Skłodowska-Curie).

When scientific conferences were more about facts than about the show: the first seven Solvay conferences

At the first Solvay Conference (1911), Curie (seated, second from right) confers with Henri Poincaré; standing nearby are Rutherford (fourth from right) and Albert Einstein (second from right). Source www.wikipedia.org

404

404 errors reported by Nature

More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Fortunately I save every PDF that I cite. But books may be gone at some time as I have to give them back to the library.

Or I my be gone?

Then it is gone.

404.

A bug bounty program in science

I asked for that earlier [2019,2022] while only now this idea is being taken up, see https://error.reviews/

https://error.reviews/advisory-board/ screenshot 17-Feb-2023

The Bill Gates problem

The Bill Gates problem – billionaire philanthropists investing only in their own interests – is a real problem

Similarly restricted views exist in other areas, too. In the energy sector, for instance, Gates flouts comparative performance trends to back exorbitantly expensive nuclear power instead of much more affordable, reliable and rapidly improving renewable sources and energy storage. In agriculture, grants tend to support corporate-controlled gene-modification programs instead of promoting farmer-driven ecological farming, the use of open-source seeds or land reform. African expertise in many locally adapted staples is sidelined in favour of a few supposedly optimized transnational commodity crops.

On the hand, billionaires do not pay tax – which is adding even more weight to the Nature commentary. But what are the alternatives “tax the rich“? One remarkable woman is now showing how this could work – Marlene Engelhorn

Marlene Engelhorn, who is 31 and lives in Vienna, wants 50 Austrians to determine how €25m (£21.5m) of her inheritance should be redistributed. “I have inherited a fortune, and therefore power, without having done anything for it,” she said.
“And the state doesn’t even want taxes on it.”

Politische Meinung: Umso überzeugter umso geringer das Wissen

Epidemiologie hat eher wenig mit Politik zu tun, obwohl politische Überzeugungen unstrittig mit den Lebensumständen zusammenhängen. Um so mehr war ich doch überrascht, wie sehr die individuelle politische Einstellung bei COVID-19 die Infektionsraten und damit auch die Mortalität beeinflusst hat – siehe unsere Studie in ZRex, die es vor 3 Tagen nun sogar in den Bundestag geschafft hat.

Überrascht bin ich nun auch von einer neuen Studie in Sci Rep die politisches bzw historisches Wissen mit politischer Ausrichtung in Zusammenhang bringt.

Contrary to the dominant perspective, we found no evidence that people at the political extremes are the most knowledgeable about politics. Rather, the most common pattern was a fourth- degree polynomial association in which those who are moderately left-wing and right-wing are more knowledgeable than people at the extremes and center of the political spectrum.

Je extremer die Überzeugung um so weniger Ahnung? Das stimmt nur begrenzt für Deutschland obwohl es ein neuer SZ Artikel so vermuten lässt

Am besten informiert waren jene, die moderat nach links oder rechts tendierten. Ganz in der Mitte des politischen Flusses beobachteten die Forscher eine kleine Untiefe, auch hier war das Wissen eher flach.

Damit ist die arme Grafik des Artikels überinterpretiert.

Die Unterschiede sind allenfalls grenzwertig auf 0.05 Niveau signifikant, wobei auch fraglich ist ob denn die 0.05 Punkte Wissenszuwachs überhaupt relevant sind.

In anderen Ländern sieht die Situation allerdings komplett anders aus…

Data voids and search engines

An interesting Nature editorial reporting a recent study

A study in Nature last month highlights a previously underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon: the existence of data voids, information spaces that lack evidence, into which people searching to check the accuracy of controversial topics can easily fall…
Clearly, copying terms from inaccurate news stories into a search engine reinforces misinformation, making it a poor method for verifying accuracy…
Google does not manually remove content, or de-rank a search result; nor does it moderate or edit content, in the way that social-media sites and publishers do.

So what could be done?

There’s also a body of literature on improving media literacy — including suggestions on more, or better education on discriminating between different sources in search results.

Sure increasing media literacy at the consumer site would be helpful. But letting Google earn all that money without any further curation efforts? The original study found

Here, across five experiments, we present consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them.

So why not putting out red flags? Or de-rank search results?

fake screen shot

 

Das Ende der Bachelorarbeit

ist wohl schon eingeleitet zumindest bei der Betriebswirtschaft in Prag, Zitat

Texte, die mit Künstlicher Intelligenz verfasst wurden sind kaum von menschlichen zu unterscheiden. Eine Prüfung sei für Unis deshalb nur sehr schwer möglich, sagt Dekan Hnilica.  “Wir haben andere Teile unseres Studiums, in denen die Studierenden ihre Lernergebnisse oder erwarteten Lernergebnisse nachweisen können. Daher ist die Bachelorarbeit überflüssig.”

Scientific integrity is not a weapon

Bill Ackman is threadening Harvard faculty on TwiX

In the near future AI will target every paper and not only a suspicious table or an image found by chance. Nevertheless using this now as a weapon seems to be immoral and is at high risk of false accusations that may be prosecuted as criminal defamations. Let’s see what happens to big mouthed  announcements…