Showing posts with label frauds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label frauds. Show all posts

Thursday, January 4, 2024

The Free Market vs the Fair Market


Discrepancies at the dispensaries: Study finds THC potency much lower than labeled
Apr 2023, phys.org

Never again 

There's a theme here that you can't trust the commercial sector it's basically the exact opposite of science and the pursuit of knowledge.

Also can we give these guys an award for the best title: Uncomfortably High

Using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography, Mile High Lab techs tested 23 samples (1–2 grams per sample) representing 12 strains purchased from 10 Colorado dispensaries. Strains were chosen to represent a diversity of reported THC % by dry weight from 12.8% to 33.0%.

It was unclear to researchers if the single values printed on packaging were an average of multiple tests or the result of a single test.

The average observed THC potency was 23.1% lower than the lowest label reported values and 35.6% lower than the highest label reported values. Overall, ~70% of the samples were more than 15% lower than the THC potency numbers reported on the label, with three samples having only half of the reported maximum THC potency. 13 of 23 tested samples had observed values that were more than 30% lower than the lowest reported value.

As the legal cannabis market continues to grow, it is essential that the industry moves toward selling products with more accurate labeling or risk losing trust in the industry as a whole.

via University of Northern Colorado and Mile High Labs in Colorado: Anna L. Schwabe et al, Uncomfortably high: Testing reveals inflated THC potency on retail Cannabis labels, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282396



Testing of smartphone apps that identify plants shows most are not very good
Apr 2023, phys.org

Most smartphone apps that identify plants are inaccurate. All of the apps are based on deep-learning technology and have been trained using images posted on the internet.

This, they further note, leads to errors because so many images of plants on the internet are mislabeled. (emphasized for those AI fans out there who forget that humans are and will always be the weakest link; and we are the ones who label.)

  • large differences in accuracy between the apps and variation across species
  • most of the apps did better when asked to identify plants by their flowers than by their leaves
  • none had an accuracy above 90%
  • some scored as low as 4% on some tasks
  • none of the apps are good enough to use as a field guide for people foraging for food in the wild
  • nor are they good enough for use by environmentalists or farmers to determine which plants to protect and which to eradicate
  • they can be used by hobbyists hoping to learn more about their local environment

via University of Galway's School of Natural Science and University of Leeds' School of Geography: Neil Campbell et al, A repeatable scoring system for assessing Smartphone applications ability to identify herbaceous plants, PLOS ONE (2023). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0283386


The Laws of Metaphysics Strikes Again:
Accountants' tricks can help identify cheating scientists, says new study
Apr 2023, phys.org

You cannot escape Benford's Law, or any of the Laws Metaphysical (not until you get yourself a quantum random number generator to clean up your fake data).

The trick behind these tools is that it is actually harder than you might imagine to fabricate essentially random numbers, like the last digit in everyone's bank balances. Financial auditors have known this for a long time and have a variety of tools for looking at lists of numbers and highlighting ones that seem odd (and thus requiring investigation for fraud).

via University of St Andrews: Gregory M. Eckhartt et al, Investigating and preventing scientific misconduct using Benford's Law, Research Integrity and Peer Review (2023). DOI: 10.1186/s41073-022-00126-w

Post Script: 
Retractions of scientific papers neared 5,000 globally in 2022 according to Retraction Watch, amounting to almost 0.1% of published articles:
Retraction Watch - Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process

Post Post Script:
Part of the problem, he says, stems from publication bias: "There are virtually no incentives for publishing papers that provide confirmation or refutation of previous studies." This emphasis placed on exciting results, which ultimately affects the success of scientists' careers, may be a key factor to consider in future reforms.

Read more at Megadata vs Magadata

Read this like it's the Onion:
Fox News settles Dominion defamation case for $787.5m - In a statement, Fox said Tuesday's settlement in one of the most anticipated defamation trials in recent US history reflected its "commitment to the highest journalistic standards".
Apr 2023, BBC News

Image credit: AI Art - Ghost Scream - 2022

Fewer than half of new drugs add substantial therapeutic value over existing treatments
Jul 2023, phys.org

They used publicly available data to identify 124 first and 335 supplemental indications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and 88 first and 215 supplemental indications approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) between January 2011 and December 2020.

Among FDA-approved indications with available ratings, 41% (44 of 107) had high therapeutic value ratings for first, compared with 34% (61 of 179) for supplemental indications. In Europe, 47% (41 of 87) of first and 36% (67 of 184) of supplemental indications had high therapeutic value ratings.

Among FDA approvals, when the sample was restricted to the first three approved indications, second indication approvals were 36% less likely to have a high value rating and third indication approvals were 45% less likely when compared to the first indication approval. Similar findings were observed for Europe.

via Institute of Law, University of Zurich, Harvard Medical School, Yale School of Medicine, Yale School of Public Health: Therapeutic value of first versus supplemental indications of drugs in US and Europe (2011-20): retrospective cohort study, The BMJ (2023). DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2022-074166


Researchers find 89% of sports supplement labels false, ingredients fraudulent and some laced with illegal drugs
Jul 2023, phys.org

  • Sports supplements, not just any supplements
  • Supplement manufacturing (all of it) is not monitored.
  • US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists them as a food subcategory, but synthetic drugs being slipped into supplements are not food or botanical ingredients—they are unapproved pharmaceutical drugs (words from the article not mine).
  • The U.S. Department of Justice has previously charged individuals with conspiracy to defraud consumers and the FDA by selling products labeled as dietary supplements that contained unapproved drugs.
  • Finding unlabeled and unapproved drugs in supplements is equivalent to experimenting on humans without their knowledge. Most concerning is the product found to contain four different drug compounds. While none of these drugs are well tested on humans, a cocktail of multiple combined banned substances has never been tested in any scenario.
They analyzed the ingredients in a selection of sports supplements purchased online with liquid chromatography–quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry:
  • 89% inaccurately labeled
  • 12% included unlabeled banned drug substances
  • 57 products contained one of five popular supplements, R vomitoria (n=13), methylliberine (n=21), turkesterone (n=8), halostachine (n=7) and octopamine (n=8).
Vomitoria though?
  • 23 products (40%) did not contain a detectable amount of the labeled ingredient
  • Of the 34 products that contained detectable amounts of the listed ingredient, the actual quantity ranged from 0.02% to 334% of the labeled quantity (***so even when you do list it, it's so far off that it doesn't matter***)
  • 6 products (11%) contained an ingredient quantity within 10% of the label
  • 7 products (12%) were found to contain at least one FDA-prohibited ingredient
  • 5 different FDA-prohibited compounds were found, including four synthetic simulants, 1,4-dimethylamylamine (DMAA), deterenol, octodrine (DMHA), oxilofrine and omberacetam
  • 6 products contained one of these prohibited ingredients, and one contained a combination of four prohibited ingredients: 1,4 Dimethylhexylamine, or 1,4-DMAA, analog of 1,3-DMAA, Deterenol (Betaphrine), Octodrine, Oxilofrine, Omberacetam (seem like mostly stimulants, hypertension, not approved for use in humans)

via Cambridge Health Alliance, Massachusetts; Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts; University of Mississippi; and NSF International, Michigan: Pieter A. Cohen et al, Presence and Quantity of Botanical Ingredients With Purported Performance-Enhancing Properties in Sports Supplements, JAMA Network Open (2023). DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.23879


Study shows how the meat and dairy sector resists competition from alternative animal products
Aug 2023, phys.org

Researchers compared government spending of major agricultural policies and lobbying trends from 2014 to 2020 that supported either the animal food product system or alternative technologies, and compared government spending on both systems. 

In the U.S., about 800 times more public funding and 190 times more lobbying money goes to animal-source food products than alternatives. In the EU, about 1,200 times more public funding and three times more lobbying money goes to animal-source food products. In both regions, nearly all plant-based meat patents were published by a small number of private companies or individuals, with just one U.S. company, Impossible Foods, owning half of the patents.

But the fake take:

Similarly, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act would prohibit the sale of alternative meats unless the product label included the word "imitation" and other clarifying statements indicating the non-animal origin.

via Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability: Simona Vallone, Public policies and vested interests preserve the animal farming status quo at the expense of animal product analogs, One Earth (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.oneear.2023.07.013

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Friday, September 9, 2022

Fake Things Bonanza


Trying to come up with a theme for the imagery in this post -- too many fake things to report, and we need some visual release in between. 

Why not some AI-generated art? It's in the news as of this week because of the first public release of an AI generator that allowed someone to win a local art contest without painting a damn thing.  

This is kind of a big deal because for reference, the text-generating tool GPT-3 was deemed too dangerous to release to the public for fear it would, I don't know, topple susceptible governments (maybe we could call them immunocompromised governments instead, to take the edge off). 

This newest generation of image generation software is equally as effective, and it's use has been limited to select users, usually researchers and engineers working for either governments (that we don't hear about) or for commercial enterprise (that we do hear about). But now it's open to everyone. 

The above image, well, I'll admit I'm not sure how the heck it was made. The artist (the human part at least) titles the work "Stress", but it's likely they used a much more extensive and nuanced text prompt to get the image, and they ran that prompt through a dataset of 5 billion captioned-images and this is what came out. It looks like a much more interesting heart, if not accurate, and perhaps illustrated by MARS1 for a cyberpunk medical school anatomy textbook. ,

Here's a quick timeline of how we got here:
And here's the actual post, about fake things in general, interspersed with AI-generated imagery:


Fake Publishers:
Man arrested in thefts of unpublished books
Jan 2022, Associated Press

Authorities say they’ve solved a publishing industry whodunit with the arrest of a man accused of numerous literary heists in recent years. An Italian citizen working in publishing in London is accused of impersonating others in the industry, using phishing schemes to amass a veritable library of unpublished works. Filippo Bernardini was arrested Wednesday after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He faces charges including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. He’s expected to appear in federal court on Thursday. No information on an attorney for him was available. 


Fake Whiskey:
With a whiff, 'e-nose' can sense fine whiskey
Apr 2022, phys.org

The real story is that the fake whiskey game is so strong, we need an e-nose to fight it. 

And let's not forget the famous wine forger Rudy Kurniawan, he was a wine savant who reproduced rare and exorbitantly priced wines out of a mixture of cheaper wines. What's more mind-mashing -- that he can figure the exact recipe, or that it's even possible to take 5 good wines and mix them in just the right proportion that they taste just like a world-class winner.
[Rudy Kurniawan]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Kurniawan

via University of Technology Sydney: Wentian Zhang et al, The Use of Electronic Nose for the Classification of Blended and Single Malt Scotch Whisky, IEEE Sensors Journal (2022). DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2022.3147185


Fake Headline:
Spanish police seize huge haul of illegal stuffed animals
Apr 2022, BBC News

Spanish police have seized what is thought to be one of the largest hauls of animal taxidermy in Europe, worth €29m (£24.2m).


Fake Science:
Computer scientists suggest research integrity could be at risk due to AI generated imagery
May 2022, phys.org

It's never the robots, always the humans who are the real problem:
A small team of researchers at Xiamen University has expressed alarm at the ease with which bad actors can now generate fake AI imagery for use in research projects. They have published an opinion piece outlining their concerns in the journal Patterns. (Using a generative adversarial network, obviously)

via Xiamen University: Liansheng Wang et al, Deepfakes: A new threat to image fabrication in scientific publications? Patterns (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100509


Real Problems with Fake Science:
Flawed research not retracted fast enough to prevent spread of misinformation, study finds
Jun 2022, phys.org

Makes sense - Retracted papers receive more attention than comparable nonretracted papers even before retraction. One possible reason is that retracted papers may contain sensational or novel findings, which could lead to increased attention, they say.

Using Retraction Watch and Altmetric data databases, the team compared the online footprints of 2,830 retracted papers to 13,599 nonretracted control papers that had similar publication venues, dates, numbers of authors and authors' citation counts. The researchers compared the amount of attention between the two groups of papers measured in mentions in social media and news media databases, and both six months after publication and again post-retraction.

Solutions - Through their hand-labeling process of critical and non-critical mentions, the researchers also found that discourse about retracted papers tended to be more critical overall on Twitter.

via University of Michigan: Hao Peng et al, Dynamics of cross-platform attention to retracted papers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2119086119


Fake Families:
Used by corporate real estate purchases of residential housing stock, to trick homeowners into selling to a "family" and not a corporation? (This sounds entirely plausible, but I can't find any more info on this beyond an internet forum chat, and aside from the practice by a Dallas-based real estate firm called Centex back in 2006 where they put fake families in the house while they show it, to produce a more "natural vibe" to the place?)


Fake Candy:
Fake 'potentially dangerous' chocolate seized in Oxford Street American candy shop raids
Jun 2022, ITV News London

The council said the raid was part of its investigation into 30 American-style candy and souvenir shops on Oxford Street for business rates evasion amounting to £7.9 million.

The council said it believed that very few of the shops were serving sufficient customers to be commercially viable and were instead being used to avoid business rate bills and possibly commit other offences.

Westminster City Council recently wrote to 28 freeholders urging them to consider the impact of US sweet shops on Oxford Street and has so far seized around £574,000 worth of counterfeit and illegal goods from American candy and souvenir stores.

[Randon Redditor explanation] Covid - only essential businesses could be open, so all the drug fronts switched to become candy stores that were technically food stores that could be classified as essential and continue laundering money. They're american candy because they price things at like 15 pounds for a bag of twizzlers because of the novelty. They're all owned by people and entities from Afghanistan as well, which seems to insinuate they're fronts for heroin. But like the high street in the documentary was like 30% american candy stores with absolutely no one going in and buying anything from any of them. It's pretty wild.


Fake Data:
'Fake' data helps robots learn the ropes faster
Jul 2022, phys.org

How to be a human. We're getting there:
For the rope-looping simulation and experiment, Mitrano and Berenson expanded the data set by extrapolating the position of the rope to other locations in a virtual version of a physical space — so long as the rope would behave the same way as it had in the initial instance. Using only the initial training data, the simulated robot hooked the rope around the engine block 48% of the time. After training on the augmented data set, the robot succeeded 70% of the time.

via  University of Michigan: Data Augmentation for Manipulation, arXiv:2205.02886v3 [cs.RO] 
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.02886


Fake Lodgings:
Booking.com scam - Tourists descend on north London private home
Aug 2022, BBC News

A woman in north London says she feels victimised after dozens of tourists turned up at her home when her private address was placed on the Booking.com accommodation website.

Travellers from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Los Angeles turned up at the home of Gillian, whose full name is not being given, throughout July.


What kind of fake even is this?
Viagra and Cialis are in certain honey products
Aug 2022, NJ Advanced Media

It's funny because you can bet most of this "honey" is rice syrup: 
Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world, and the US government isn't doing much to fix it

And would you look at that, the original announcement from the FDA calls them "honey-based products"
Tainted Honey-based Products with Hidden Active Drug Ingredients


Fake Accents:
Start-up denies using tech to turn call centre accents 'white'
Aug 2022, BBC News

A Silicon Valley start-up has developed technology that can change the accents of call centre workers in real time. The company, Sanas, has told the BBC that its technology could overcome accent-based prejudice and reduce racist abuse faced by staff.

A former call centre agent himself, Mr Narayana said in his experience agents would be abused or discriminated against because of how they sound - abuse the company believes its technology can prevent.

Sanas - Breaking Barriers One Conversation At A Time


Fake Healthcare:
Cutting down vitamin D tests could help lower carbon cost of health care
Aug 2022, phys.org

"Low-value health care", i.e., unnecessary vitamin D tests, because:
"There are high rates of vitamin D testing of healthy individuals who are not at risk of vitamin D deficiency—with previous research estimating that 76.5% of vitamin D tests did not meet any of the Medicare indications for testing. We need to reduce low-value care such as over-testing and overtreatment."

via University of Sydney: Matilde Breth-Petersen et al, Health, financial and environmental impacts of unnecessary vitamin D testing: a triple bottom line assessment adapted for healthcare, BMJ Open (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2021-056997


Fake News (About Spiders)
What fake news about spiders can teach us about the global spread of (mis)information
Aug 2022, phys.org

A similar exercise would allow comparing if the levels of misinformation and sensationalism are the same across a broad spectrum of taxa, testing the prediction if a negative framing by the traditional and social media translates to a lower chance of being prioritized for conservation, and vice versa."

The "Fake Index" perhaps? "The quality of spider information in the global press is rather poor—errors and sensationalism are rampant." 

I grew up thinking "eating spiders in your sleep" was an early viral meme created on purpose to measure the network dynamics of the young internet while watching the meme spread. But that's not true. The common answer to where this came from (that you will even find on Britannica unfortunately) is that it was in an article about our susceptibility to misinformation, given as a stupid example of an idea that is easily spread. But that's not true either. Turns out that was a meta-meme, created by Snopes back in 2001, as they pretended to provide the origin story. It's just a perennial urban legend. 

via National Research Council of Italy and University of Helsinki's Finnish Museum of Natural History: Stefano Mammola, The global spread of misinformation on spiders, Current Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026


Fake Influencers:
Real money, fake musicians - A million-dollar Instagram verification scheme
Aug 2022, ProPublica

Fake market always reinventing itself. It's easier to get yourself "verified" as a musician than as an influencer, so they make you a fake album, some fake likes, etc., and you're in business.


Fake Attempts At Correction:
Economists have a method for reducing fake news on social media
Aug 2022, phys.org

"For example, Twitter could limit the breadth of sharing on its site by limiting how many people see any given retweet in their Twitter feeds," he says.

But sharing is a metric for engagement, and engagement is the primary metric for their revenue.

Both Facebook and WhatsApp, two apps owned by parent company Meta that allow users to message each other, have used methods similar to the researchers' model to limit the spread of misinformation.

And that's why it "didn't work", i.e., they didn't really do it.

"If you limit sharing, you could also be limiting the spread of good information, so you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater and that doesn't really help you," McAdams warns. "Our analysis explores how to strike that balance."

This is the crux of the matter.

via Duke University: Matthew O. Jackson et al, Learning through the grapevine and the impact of the breadth and depth of social networks, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2205549119

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Thursday, April 14, 2022

The Art Cop


I wanted to talk about Robert Volpe, the New York City Police Department's art theft sleuth, but the page I had saved is apparently no longer active. Luckily, the very helpful web browser Brave automatically asks me if I'd like to check the Wayback Machine for an archive, which I do, and which it has, and which I will re-paste right here just for furthering the sake of posterity. Although I should note that the main reference here is a New York Times article from 2006 titled Robert Volpe, Art Theft Expert, Dies at 63. You can read more in a book titled Art Cop from 1974 (see below).

Robert Volpe (December 13, 1942 – November 28, 2006), was a painter and New York City police officer and detective, specializing in art theft.

Born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Volpe studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School for Design and the Art Students League of New York. His art career began with paintings of tugboats during his teenage years, and later, in the 1970s, his abstract work sold for as much as $1500. After a stint in the army, he joined the New York City police force and initially worked undercover on organized crime cases, including narcotics work related to the French Connection. After making several art crime arrests, in 1971 he was appointed the sole member of the New York City Police Department's bureau for art crime, the only bureau of its kind in the nation.

His work was varied, including art theft, vandalism, and forgeries, and he took as many as 40–50 calls per day from around the world. In 1981, he recovered an 1858 candelabrum once owned by the king of Egypt only 11 days after being notified of the theft by British authorities. Over his desk hung a congratulatory photograph from the foreign minister of Italy for recovering two ivories worth $1.5 million stolen from a museum in Pesaro. After Volpe's retirement in 1983, art crimes began to be handled by the burglary division.

Here's an even older article from which I've copied a few portions:
Art People: City's art policeman. By Michael Brenson, New York Times, May 20, 1983. 

Mr. Volpe is the art squad of the New York City Police Department. For almost 11 years, he has worked this beat alone in a city he describes as the ''clearing house internationally for art.'' Not only is he the one-man art squad in New York, but he is also the only detective in the United States ''designated to investigate artrelated crimes,'' he said. Internationally, he added, there are about a dozen art detectives, including four-man units in Britain and Italy.

The 40-year-old, Brooklyn-born son of a banker, whose formative years with the Police Department were spent as an undercover agent for the narcotics squad, knows the New York art world as well as many artists and dealers know it. In his boots, dungarees and sweater, with his thick mustache, he is a familiar figure in galleries. ''I guess you could say some of my best friends are dealers,'' he said.

Mr. Volpe also keeps abreast of what goes on at the auction houses. He was at the Sotheby Parke Bernet galleries on April 18, the day before the theft of a diamond valued at $500,000 to $600,000 was discovered. He has been called in to work on the case with detectives of the 19th Precinct, who have jurisdiction over it. ''I know all the players in the game,'' he said. ... collectors, curators, dealers, framers, restorers and packers. 

...
Before Mr. Volpe began the job in 1972, a police art squad did not exist. ''I was brought in to make a survey and see if there was something in this area,'' he said. ''Instead of coming back with a report, I started coming back with arrests and recoveries. So, obviously, there was a need.''

In the last few years, he has been deluged. He said he received up to 50 telephone calls a day, ''anything from reports of theft, to requests from private dealers and from police departments here and around the world, to someone asking me what kind of acrylic brush to use.''

...
[One of his most memorable cases] "of little significance," he said. It involved a Brooklyn artist, now dead, whose sculpture tools, along with seven statues of rabbis he had made, were stolen. The artist was so distressed by the robbery, Mr. Volpe said, that he wound up in an intensive-care ward.

"I did something unprofessional," the detective recalled. "I promised him I'd get them back. I dropped everything I was doing and went out on the street. I talked to hookers and junkies. I found out that a couple of pieces were being sold at subway stops for $5 each. Eventually, the information started fitting together. I got all the pieces back. A week and a half later, he got out of the hospital, and I presented him the pieces and helped him find a new studio."

And another good story about him here:
Robert Volpe; World-Renowned 'Art Cop', By Adam Bernstein, Washington Post, December 1, 2006.

Once, he portrayed a gay Rhode Island art dealer named Damien Renar. When he arranged to meet the thieves, he was dressed in a white linen suit, and he relished the dramatic showdown, he said, when he could pull his police revolver from its holster and shout, "Freeze, you [expletive]!"

"Grade B movie stuff," he told the Times. "You find you have to behave that way. You don't come off with authority, you're done."

When he retired in 1985, he estimated that he had recovered tens of millions of dollars worth of Byzantine ivories, Oriental rugs, Greek marble heads, Tiffany glass, Matisses, Raphaels and other treasures. For a period, he noted a particularly high trade in faux antique French furniture.

"If all the old French furniture was real," he told the Christian Science Monitor, "there would never have been a French Revolution. Everybody in the country would have been too busy making furniture."

And ^THAT is a good lesson to remember when thinking about the world of fakes, frauds and forgeries. 


Post Script, On the Charm of an Art Thief:
Overall, he said, the recovery rate for stolen fine art was at best 10 percent. He lamented to Time magazine that judges rarely gave harsh sentences to art thieves.

"An art thief is entertaining, romantic," he said. "I've seen cases where the thief has pleaded guilty and gotten no sentence at all."

Notes:
Art Cop: Robert Volpe, Art Crime Detective, by Laurie Schneider Adams on Dodd, Mead & Co. in 1974. ISBN13: 9780396070207. [goodreads]

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Friday, January 15, 2021

Fakes Await


Placebos prove powerful even when people know they're taking one
Aug 2020, phys.org

Did Someone Say Fake Drugs?
A team of researchers from Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Dartmouth College is the first to demonstrate that placebos reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking one.
Darwin A. Guevarra et al, Placebos without deception reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17654-y


Multivitamins' 'benefits' are all in your head: study
Nov 2020, phys.org

21,000 people from the 2012 U.S. National Health Interview Survey:
"Users of multivitamins and nonusers don't differ in any of these clinically measurable health outcomes, but they report at least feeling about 30% better in their overall health," said lead researcher Manish Paranjpe, a student at Harvard Medical School in Boston. 
Manish D Paranjpe et al. Self-reported health without clinically measurable benefits among adult users of multivitamin and multimineral supplements: a cross-sectional study, BMJ Open (2020). DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2020-039119


Fake pharmaceutical industry thrives in West Africa
BBC News, Jul 2020

China's Luckin Coffee slumps on 'fake' data news
Apr 2020, BBC News
The Nasdaq-listed company said its investigation had found that fabricated sales from the second quarter of last year to the fourth quarter amounted to about 2.2bn yuan ($310m; £250m). That equates to about 40% of its estimated annual sales.
For Posterity:
Coronavirus - YouTube tightens rules after David Icke 5G interview
Apr 2020, BBC News
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Monday, July 20, 2020

On the Invisibility of Ideology

It's precisely its 'spontaneous' quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, 'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishess it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency.
-Dick Hebdige quoting Stuart Hall in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p11) 

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness'. It is profoundly unconscious...Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures-that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them.
-Abridged, from Dick Hebdige quoting Louis Althusser in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p12)
Post Script:
Hindsight and Blindness, a post on the inability to see our own culture.

Thoughts on memetics and the power of physical cultural artifacts, from buildings to door handles, to program our evolution:

In memetics, the meme may be stored in the brain, in synaptic weights of networked neurons, or they may not. They are most certainly stored in the physical artifacts that make our world, the Anthroposphere.

Buildings, by their design, make us interact in a certain way, at a basic level, and one which depends on the laws of physics before anything else. We live on a two-dimensional grid, via bipedal locomotion, with an average height, weight and range of movement.

These are the base limitations from which the more complex requirements of chemistry, biology, and later psychology, sociology, anthropology are formed. The shape of a handle has encoded within its form the instructions for use, at a base level, and because we all have the same hands.

When these artifacts are combined in their totality -- buildings, tools, circuitboards and spaceships -- they set the substrate for memetic propagation.

So much of what we consider Culture, and the arena for memetic propagation, is already encoded in our anthroposphere -- that is, the physical things around us that we make and use. Trees are not part of the anthroposphere, until they become timber for building. Copper is not a part of the anthroposphere until it becomes a piece of plumbing. A language is not part of the anthroposphere until it is written down, and becomes fixed in the physical world, as in a book or engraving or the digital archive of a memory stick.

I am making an argument here, and in response to a recent binge on memetic scholarship:
Darwinizing Culture - The Status of Memetics as a Science, R Aunger ed., 2000

There is no need to look for how ideas combine and transmit and where they are stored. The ideas are manifest in the anthroposphere, and it is by using our anthroposphere, all of it and all of us all at once, that the emergent phenomena of memetic evolution occurs.

Save the studies on internet memes for the anthropologists. A rigorous study of memetics must begin with the physical. Until you can get a model based on this, Beethoven's Fifth will have to wait. But don't tell me, for example, that the evolution from the harpsichord to the piano didn't have something to do with it.

Ideology may be invisible, but it is not intangible.

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Friday, July 10, 2020

Fake Game Strong


Israeli soldiers duped by Hamas 'fake women' phone ruse
Feb 2020, BBC News

Hey, let's chat!
Who the f*** downloads a link to get pictures on their phone? Nobody: 1998 dial-up users:

North Carolina Facebook page labelled fake news
Feb 2020, BBC News

50,000 followers in one month is apparently a good score for a fake news site. They did all the right things: labeling the page "satire" gets it past the fact-checking algorithms, and so does using real stories. Only thing is, the stories could be from anywhere and old as hell. Doesn't matter, got clicks.

The site administrators also said they were a research group from North Carlina University  conducting social media research, good one.

Facebook removes 'foreign interference' operations from Iran and Russia
Feb 2020, BBC News

"Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour"

All 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the Museum of the Bible are fakes
Apr 2020, Ars Technica

Somebody stop me! "The Museum of the Bible" though.

Researchers use machine learning to unearth underground Instagram 'pods'
May 2020, phys.org

More inauthentic coordinated behavior.

Fake game on overdrive with this one. This press article starts with a good rule of thumb -- not all engagement is organic.

NYU/Drexel researchers found a coordinated group of inauthentic users who game algorithms and artificially amplify content. And they give us a new term as well -- "reciprocity abuse".

Reciprocity abuse can only be done with groups of disingenuous agents all working together; this is not something that one can do by themselves, especially in a social network where the power lies in the network and not in the individual.

Some findings:
Seventy percent of users experienced a two-fold or greater increase in interaction level on control posts after they began posting in pods, and on average, these users saw a five-fold increase in comments

Each pod had, on average, about 900 users, though some had as many as 17,000 users

And there's way more to come: "Already there is evidence of recently increasing adoption of this strategy: the pods we discovered have emerged at an accelerating pace over the last two years." -NYU Ph.D. student Janith Weerasinghe

'Fake' meat on the menu as China reopens restaurants
May 2020, BBC News

Can't tell whether this is fake fake meat or just fake meat. Must investigate. Meatgate.

And would you look at that, it's just China trying to get-in on the plant-based burger wave. Guaranteed headline by next summer, "Fake fake meat on the menu...".

Fake America Great Again
Aug 2018, MIT Technology Review [soft paywall]

Reminding us of the origins of deepfake in reddit and porn, and also generative adversarial networks.

Fake Drugs, Fake Board Games, Fake Blog Posts
Network Address, 2018

-image source: Fake America Great, Bruce Peterson
As I look at this picture of the iconic red Make America hat and with the eyes of a draughtsman, I conclude that the text is shopped, because it doesn't match the curve of the hat as it turns away, especially visible on the bottom half where it should start tilting upwards after the midpoint. But the letters do get smaller as they recede. Maybe it's just a great photo taken at just the right angle.


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Sunday, December 8, 2019

Keeping Up with the Hertzbergs


How do you know your diamond isn't fake?
July 2019, BBC News

Being that it's not that hard to grow diamonds in a lab anymore, customers need new ways to tell whether their diamonds are real or not.

Identification codes can now be etched with lasers beneath the surface so it can't be tampered with, and small-scale diamond mines can use blockchain to prove they're not being tampered along the way to the customer.

Bottom line though, it's getting harder and harder to justify the diamond trade overall when you can just make them in a lab. Like the meatburgers made without meat - once you can no longer tell the difference, does it matter?

image source: The Z machine, the largest X-ray generator in the world, is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. No idea what this has to do with diamonds, but it looks cool. Also, it rains diamonds on other planets.

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