So Fake

There's so much going on in the Fake sector that I just can't keep track; here's a few bits:

Author pulls software that used deep learning to virtually undress women
June 2019, Ars Technica

This is it. Deep learning, neural networks, generative adversarial networks, all that. We see now the world in the way it looked when the internet first started showing up in people's homes, but then all of the sudden, a phone could connect to the internet while you're walking down the street.

Deep learning is the robots doing things humans never thought a robot could do, and things we never even thought to ask for. It's absolute magic, and it's about to completely f--- our sh-- up.

Mona Lisa guest on TV? Researchers work out talking heads from photos, art
May 2019, phys.org

We can now extrapolate from photo to video. Is that what Mona Lisa really looked like? Does it really matter? It is astutely pointed out that unlike previous techniques, this one doesn't need 3-D modelling to make the leap.

And how?
"Lengthy meta-learning" that's how.

Facebook removes accounts from Russia, Iran for 'coordinated inauthentic behavior'
Mar 2019, Reuters

Has a nice ring to it. Reminds me of "Low-Credibility Information"

Anyway, the accounts were removed for their behavior and not their content. Let that be a lesson. Not sure if I see this as a good thing because it means that the screening algorithms are sophisticated enough to identify patterns of activity rather than simple vis/text content recognition, or it's a bad thing because it's getting harder and harder to get away with illicit activity on the web. Depends on which side you're on I guess.

Supporters in Trump Facebook adverts were actors
July 2019, BBC News

I think I'm not even mad.That's what stock footage is for, no? I mean, what is authenticity; Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas type stuff.

Melbourne fake Chinese beggars scam busted by police
July 2019, AUNews

Last but not least; it wouldn't be a report on the state of the fake without some of the old masters showing up.

From the same people who brought you the fake zoo with a legit dog purported to be a lion, we now bring you -- fake homeless people!

They are literally shipped from China to Australia to look disheveled and beg for money. I refuse to believe it but in the article they're talking about them clearing a few hundred dollars a day. Fake homeless people. It's one thing when you shave your head and throw on a saffron robe to be a begging Buddhist, but to be a part of an international underground beggar syndicate where you don't shower for weeks and lie prostrate on the ground, that's dedication.

*Actually, the more I look into this, the less funny it becomes. It's way more common than it should be, and devolves into maiming kids to use as bait; few people can resist giving money to a crippled kid on the street.


Post Script
On the Buddhist Beggar Syndicate and the geographic function of susceptibility:

"The men targeted out-of-towners, [Robert Hammond, executive director and co-founder of Friends of the High Line] said, adding that his office staff had a rule of thumb for watching the interactions: --Each second a visitor was willing to talk to one of the robed men was equal to 50 miles away from New York City that the person probably lived.-- New Yorkers would not give the men even a second’s worth of their time, Mr. Hammond added."
-The Fake Monks Are Back, Aggressively Begging
Christopher Mele, New York Times, July 1, 2016

Post Post Script

^Here we have a refined specimen. I can't tell you exactly what makes this jump out at me, but it screams "robot". Maybe it's a semibot, same difference, the purpose is to manipulate; there's something intentional about it. Maybe because people don't really comment on a message board in order to influence others, but to voice their opinion, and the two look pretty different. 

Notes
The spread of low-credibility content by social bots
Chengcheng Shao, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Onur Varol, Kai-Cheng Yang, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer. Nature Communications. Volume 9, Article number: 4787 (2018)

Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017.

Low Earth Orbit Package Deals

Outer Space is Open for Business

NASA to open International Space Station to tourists from 2020
June 2019, phys.org

The International Space Station will open to tourists by 2020. I don't need to say much else beyond the headline here, except that in the article, they refer to tourists as astronauts. In other words, soon we can all be astronauts.

Lasers in Training

Shots fired:

"There is a sizzle as a white "I was here" message is burned off the grey stone by the 56-year old... ."

"The laser evaporates the graffiti, without damaging the stone underneath," Daniela Valentini, who heads up the Angels' team of cultural heritage restorers, told AFP as she pointed the fibre laser's beam at a scrawled signature.

-link

The word graffiti comes from "sgraffito", which comes from "to scratch". It referred to the scratching away of residue to reveal the surface underneath. There's a great modern example of this where artists leave their mark by removing decades-deep layers of dirt on city walls. It's called "reverse graffiti", although it's more closely related to the original word than spraypainting a subway car. In fact, most of us are guilty of this kind of graffiti. "Wash Me" written on a dirty window anyone? Running your finger through beads of condensation on a wet window? 

Graffiti took a hard turn with the advent of aerosol spray paint. A revolutionary turn. Spray paint changed everything. It also made graffiti a lot harder to remove. Before, you removed the graffiti by cleaning the surface. It was, in a way, a public service, a nudge. Now we need powerful solvents and specially-engineered surfaces to keep it under control. Graffiti is now a costly nuisance for property owners (but not hip marketing hustlers, or millenial-hungry municipalities with a couple empty walls in their downtown.)

Blazing past the harsh chemical treatments of the past, we've now entered the new era of graffiti removal. It might seem like overkill to burn it off with a laser, but this technique does help to preserve the defaced surface, since it only takes off the very top layer of the graffiti and nothing else.

But, as all things go, as fire fights fire, we have to wonder how this could evolve. Let's imagine that graffiti artists start using lasers the way the way they did spraypaint in the 1970's; what would that mean?

Then again, let's not think too hard. GRL already showed us what lasers can do. So did the sticky LED throwies that shut down Boston for a minute after glowing pictures of Aqua Teen Hunger Force showed up all over the place. 

Image source: Gareth Emery's Laserface via Dancing Astronaut

Notes:
World's first graffiti-busting laser helps Florence's 'Angels'
March 2019, phys.org

Graffiti Research Labs

US - Marines to buy 1,653 eye-safe laser dazzlers
May 2018, Laser Pointer Safety

Safety features include infrared light emission to detect your distance to it, and to reduce the output accordingly.

Can't say no to this:
Scotland - Scientists develop way to shoot laser light from eyes
May 2018, Laser Pointer Safety

Researchers have developed a membrane-thin laser emitter, widely reported in the press with headlines such as “Scientists Create Superman-like Eye Lasers.” When pumped by outside light, the membrane re-emits spectrally pure laser light.

I Am a Man

AKA Trees Are People Too

Lake Erie is now a person. "Environmental entity" to be specific. This is not the first time something like this has happened. There's also a river in New Zealand. The Amazon River as well.

It's interesting to see this happen as we approach a time when inanimate robots and synthetic biology alike are questioning our definitions of life, sentience and morality towards the "other".

Also, let's not forget that in Japan, Shintoism/Animism reveres all things, even mountains, as having a spirit. Even words have a spirit; What does that even mean!

Notes:
Ohio city votes to give Lake Erie personhood status over algae blooms
Feb 2019, The Guardian

Environmental Personhood
The Uncanny Valley

   

Breadlines

Unobtainium vs Handwavium, Know the Difference!

Just came here for the headlines:
Folding an acoustic vortex on a flat holographic transducer to form miniaturized selective acoustic tweezers
Apr 2019, phys.org

image source link

Music Sciences

This guy plays an electric fan like an electric guitar

The evolution of music is a swinging pendulum - new things develop in response and in resistance to the old things. The evolution of music is a swinging pendulum - new things develop in response and in resistance to the old things. Nirvana's grunge rock is anti- the likes of flashy arena rock like Queen and Guns N' Roses.

This is a common theme in the arts in general, but now there's some interesting data to articulate this pattern in the music world. (eight million musical albums 1956 - 2015, via Discogs)

And in other music-oriented news - 765 million online music plays, streamed from Spotify in 2016, by 1 million people from 51 countries:

• people of every culture listen to more relaxing music late at night and more energetic music during daytime business hours
• people were more likely to listen to less intense music as they got older
• people in the West tend to play more arousing music, while those in Asia play more relaxing music
• in the Southern Hemisphere, women chose music with higher intensity than men
• in the Northern Hemisphere, women listen to music with lower intensity, particularly in the evening

-phys.org

Notes:
Peter Klimek et al, Fashion and art cycles are driven by counter-dominance signals of elite competition: quantitative evidence from music styles, Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2019). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2018.0731


Minsu Park et al. Global music streaming data reveal diurnal and seasonal patterns of affective preference, Nature Human Behaviour (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0508-z

Better Recognize

The majority of the news in deep learning neural nets comes from face recognition applications, which makes sense, because face recognition is a thing that we do. Jennifer Aniston neuron anyone?

DeepGestalt is a face-recognition software that identifies rare genetic disorders evidenced as imperceptible facial alterations (think Down Syndrome but imperceptible). What's cool about this is that it uses your phenome, not your genome.

This is cool because it's totally non-invasive; you don't need genetic material like blood. It's scary because you don't need genetic material to get genetic data about the people you're looking at; I'm thinking surveillance here.

The software was developed by a company called FDNA, and trained on their own database of 500,000 faces (from 10,000 people). Facebook has the biggest face database there is, but this comes in at #2.

And if you're a monkey and feeling left out, don't fret, we're coming for you too. In a shift of species, pictures of cute chimps are being used to train a system that crawls social media posts looking for matches of missing monkeys. (People who buy trafficked monkeys do publicize it, because why else would you want a monkey if not to show your Friends.) It's called ChimpFace, and it's definitely not the only animal-face-rec software out there; elephants, lemurs, lions and pets in general.

So it seems like deep learning and face-recognition are a dynamic duo. But face-rec can be anything-rec. It's pattern recognition. Orgasm recognition? The sound of a fake orgasm? Anything.


Notes:
AI can diagnose some genetic disorders using photos of faces
Jan 2019, Ars Technica

Facial recognition tool tackles illegal chimp trade
Jan 2019, BBC News