The Weekly Weird #23
Scanners (NYC Edition), Oh My GeoSpy, deepfake racism, bug food: there's an app for that, an "epidemic of fraud" in medical research, eye on Georgia
Welcome once more to your Weekly Weird, where we raft the rapids of the interminable torrent of totalitarian tosh!
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Without hesitation, let’s dive into the icy waters of dystopia!
Scanners (NYC Edition)
New York City will be rolling out body scanners across its subway network to counter violent crime.
As Mayor Eric Adams put it:
“We are going to use technology to identify those bad people who are carrying bad weapons.”
People who will apparently not be affected by the scanners:
Bad people carrying good weapons
Good people carrying bad weapons
Good people carrying good weapons
That sounds like a pretty amazing piece of technology. Where have we seen it before?
Adams said the city will undergo a 90-day waiting period for the scanners to be tested before they can be implemented in every station. In addition to the scanners, the city will hire more mental health clinicians to work alongside the New York Police Department (NYPD) "to swiftly move individuals with untreated severe mental illness out of the subway system and into care."
"This duality of technology and our mental health approach is going to accomplish the goal that we seek – transit riders should be safe, our city should be safe, people should receive the care that they deserve," Adams said.
What kind of crimes are plaguing the denizens of New York’s perpetually-at-risk-of-flooding mass transit system? Fox News again:
A cello player was hit over the head with a bottle by a crazed woman last month, while in January, Fox News meteorologist Adam Klotz was brutally beaten on a Big Apple subway by a group of teens after he intervened on behalf of an elderly man whose hair they had lit on fire.
The scanner used in the demo given by Mayor Adams in the video above is made by a company called Evolv, who, in 2022, installed them at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. That pilot programme had an astonishingly high rate of false positives, according to Hell Gate, who obtained the details “through a public records request filed with NYC Health + Hospitals.”
Over the seven months that the Jacobi pilot was active, 194,000 people passed through Jacobi's scanners, and in just over 50,000 of those cases, the scanners threw up an alarm—an incidence rate of around 26 percent, or over one of every four times someone passed through the scanner. Of those 50,000 alarms, around 43,800, or a little more than 85 percent, were false positives; 7,027 of the alarms, or 14 percent, were law enforcement officers who were presumably carrying their service weapons; and just 295 alarms, or 0.57 percent, were determined to be a non-law enforcement person carrying either a knife, a gun, or a threat type labeled only "other," which likely entails other weapons like bats.
Notably, Evolv's scanners did not get any more accurate as the pilot progressed—there was not a single month where the alarm to visitor ratio fell below 25 percent. In September of 2022, the final month of the seven-month pilot, 27,900 visitors passed through the scanners, and nearly 7,000 threw alarms; out of those 7,000 alarms, just 345 potential threats were identified—a false positive rate of 95 percent, with only 0.45 percent of alerts being non-law enforcement threats. Throughout the entire pilot, the alerts led to the finding of 24 guns, 139 knives, and 132 other potential threats, out of the 50,000 alarms sounded.
The results of the programme at Jacobi led a representative of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Daniel Schwarz, to describe the finding of weapons as “essentially a coincidence.”
Hell Gate with more:
“At the scale of the NYC subway system, if we envision the four million daily riders, there will be one million false flags or alerts, bringing the whole system to a standstill," Schwarz said. Evolv CEO Peter George himself said in an investor call earlier this month that "subways in particular are not a place that we think is a good use-case for us.”
The punchline? Even their own shareholders think they’re peddling snake oil.
Evolv’s own shareholders filed a class-action suit against the company this month arguing that the company’s marketing materials and public pronouncements overstated the effectiveness of the technology.
Mayor Adams has been cagey about whether Evolv will ultimately be the vendor chosen by the city, but even if it isn’t, the jury is out on whether either of the other leading competitors can beat a 1 in 4 alarm rate with false positives in the 85 - 95% range.
Rush hour’s going to fun.
Oh My, GeoSpy
For better or worse, snapping a photo and sharing it online is a part of modern life. Up until now, the focus has been on disabling automatic geolocation in photo metadata, increasing the privacy of social media and email accounts where those images appear, placing limits on how tech companies can access or sell on that data, and (at least in a few places) requiring the permission or at least notification of the public when their images are being scraped for facial recognition or AI training purposes.
Remember the furore when people found out that their phone was automatically using its GPS to log the exact location where each image was captured? Suddenly photographing your children was a security risk, and grabbing a selfie at the bar became an unintentional invitation to get stalked or doxxed. Those of us who cared solved that issue by disabling geolocation in our photo settings, and many tech companies switched from automatically enabling that feature to making it opt-in.
Well, the world just got smaller again with the launch of GeoSpy, an AI geolocation ‘service’ currently running in beta. Users just need to go to their website, drag and drop a photo into the box, and within seconds they can marvel at how it guesses where the photo was taken, including the estimated GPS co-ordinates.
Check out this explainer from Seth De Clercq:
Graylark, the company that made GeoSpy, also offers GeoSpy Pro, “a special version for professional use by police departments, government agencies, journalists, and big companies.”
Searches have a “one-minute inference time” according to the promo video below, which creates an off-the-shelf private sector option for real-time tracking by the authorities (or any bad actor willing to pay for the subscription).
Let’s not forget that the US Congress just approved warrantless surveillance, and foreign governments/security services have the internet too. For anyone remotely active or vocal politically or socially about repressive regimes, posting personal images online is now potentially an existential risk.
Deepfake Racism
We know deepfakes have been around for a while, but a new case highlights the way our febrile cultural moment makes them a danger to civilians, not just politicians and celebrities.
From The Guardian:
A high school athletic director in Maryland has been charged with using artificial intelligence to impersonate a principal on an audio recording that included racist and antisemitic comments…
The principal of a Pikesville high school wasn’t inclined to renew the contract for Dazhon Darien, who then decided to take revenge by getting him fired for something he hadn’t said or done.
Using cloning technology, Darien forged an audio clip in which it sounded as if the principal was frustrated with Black students and their test-taking abilities, police wrote. The recording also purported to capture the principal disparaging Jewish individuals and two teachers who “should never have been hired”.
The audio clip quickly spread on social media and had “profound repercussions”, the court documents stated, with the principal being placed on leave.
The recording also triggered a wave of hate-filled messages on social media and an inundation of phone calls to the high school’s front office, police said. School activities were disrupted for a time, and some staff felt unsafe.
The deepfake clip is still up on the YouTube channel of WBFF FOX45 Baltimore under the heading “Racist and profane comments allegedly made by Maryland high school principal caught on audio,” without a correction, retraction, or any note indicating that the clip is fake and AI-generated. Someone over there must have skipped ‘Journalistic Ethics 101’.
The Guardian quotes the police chief of Baltimore county, Robert McCullough:
“We have now conclusive evidence that the recording was not authentic. The Baltimore county police department reached that determination after conducting an extensive investigation which included bringing in a forensic analyst contracted with the FBI to review the recording. The results of the analysis indicated the recording contained traces of AI-generated content.”
McCullough added that detectives also obtained a second expert opinion from a forensic analyst with the University of California, Berkeley, who also determined that the recording was inauthentic.
“Based off of those findings and further investigation, it has been determined the recording was generated through the use of artificial intelligence technology,” McCullough said. The chief added: “Through their investigation, detectives alleged Mr Darien … made the recording to retaliate against the principal who had launched an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds.”
The statement released by the Superintendent of Baltimore County Public Schools, Myriam Rogers, explains how they dealt with the issue and also mentions in passing that other school employees may face charges alongside Darien (emphasis mine):
When we were made aware of the recording, we immediately launched an investigation and solicited the help of the county executive, Baltimore County police, and additional external experts. Baltimore County Police enlisted the services of the Federal Bureau of Investigations. We collaborated with these partners because they have the resources and skill to determine the authenticity of the recording, and they have verified that Mr. Darien used artificial intelligence to create the audio recording.
In light of today’s announcement by the police department—and as required by state education law–we are taking appropriate action regarding Mr. Darien’s conduct, up to and including a recommendation for termination. We have also been made aware that other BCPS employees are named in the charging documents. The BCPS Office of Human Resources will follow all system procedures for investigating their involvement and we will take swift action in alignment with their rights under the established collective bargaining agreement, Board policy and state law.
The school principal who was targeted by Darien has been suspended since the fake recording was made public in January, and according to reports has been hiding at home and receiving a barrage of hate and threats.
When they called it the ‘AI boom’, I didn’t realise it meant blowing up lives. Hopefully he and his family can rebuild and move on.
Bug Food: There’s An App For That
You can now download an app from the Play Store that will tell you if your food has bugs in it. It’s called Insect Food Scanner, proof positive that the developer didn’t have a marketing team.
Here’s an American YouTuber demonstrating it:
The app was created initially for the German market, in response to the EU green-lighting certain insect-based additives as ‘novel food’ in 2023.
The CounterSignal has more:
So far, the app, created by German developer Marcel Bartecki, has garnered over 100,000 downloads since it was launched in September 2023.
The app also allows users to see the scientific names and/or ingredient names that producers use to mask the fact they’re processing insects and adding them into food, including those for house crickets, mealworms, migratory locusts, and grain mold beetles, with an option to not search for individual creepy crawlers if users don’t have a problem with certain ingredients.
This is particularly helpful in revealing the misleading labelling that some companies use to mask the inclusion of cricket protein, which is often labelled less offensively as “Acheta protein”, and other similar products.
Bugs aren’t my protein of choice, and there is a definite push to introduce and expand the role of insect proteins in the food supply as an alternative to meat, but a lot of this isn’t anything new. Additives like shellac and carmine have been around for ages, part of the laundry list of things that make food unhealthy or gross.
For example, if you think bugs in your food are beyond the pale, do an online search for ‘castoreum’.
Whether it’s beaver butt-juice in baked goods or cricket flour in the coq au vin, knowing more about what’s in our food is probably a good thing.
Bon appetit.
An “Epidemic Of Fraud” In Medical Research
DW reported on how “new detection tools powered by artificial intelligence” have exposed an “epidemic of fraud” in medical research, with over 10,000 papers being retracted last year, an all-time record. The affected research includes Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford in the United States.
In the segment below, the anchor interviews Arthur Caplan from NYU’s Langone Medical Center, opening by asking whether he was shocked at the news of widespread issues with medical research. Caplan answers succinctly: “Sadly, I was not.”
Caplan describes the uncovered fake research as the tip of the iceberg, mentioning a colleague of his who runs Retraction Watch believing “there are tens of thousands more papers yet to be discovered that are fraudulent.”
The anchor goes on to ask: “What does that tell us about the credibility of the body of new medical research that is on offer right now?”
The reply is a line that should be chiselled in granite: “The real test of science is replication, not just the first publication.”
When asked about root causes, Caplan brings up the media’s role in rushing to publish “a new study” articles that focus on the first report of a breakthrough or theory, without letting the science be tested properly and robustly, and often without following up on the story later to track and confirm the progress of the publicised research. He also points out the pressure on academics to publish continuously and compete for a pool of funding that is often given to those who have a high number of papers in print, whether or not those papers represent genuine or replicated research.
The Observer, archived on The Guardian’s website, covered the scandal in February:
“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”
Wherefore cometh this tsunami?
The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.
The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of falsified work to be published.
A paper from 2015 titled Data fraud in clinical trials, archived at the National Library of Medicine, is an example of why this issue isn’t unique to China, but the sheer volume of fake and junk science has become overwhelming as the medical and scientific establishment has globalised.
The Observer gives some examples:
The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.
Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.
Being a “bosom peril survivor” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
The stats are stunning:
Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.
Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer.
80% of the retracted medical papers in the world were published by a single brand, and “sunsetting” it is the solution? How does Wiley not have an epic class-action lawsuit on its hands? Also, how can anyone trying to do meaningful research effectively separate the wheat from the chaff?
The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”
This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”
“Corruption is creeping into the system” might be the best example of British understatement on show in the press so far this year, as well as a wholly inappropriate use of the present continuous tense, since clearly the past tense is more apt.
Eye On Georgia
Georgia, a nation of 4 million people in the Caucasus bordering Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, has been overwhelmed by street protests against a new “foreign agents” law, legislation that critics say mimics Russia’s crackdown on Western NGOs.
The law’s measures will apply to NGOs, media outlets and campaign groups that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad. It will still require a third vote to become law. But that is now expected to be a formality given the ruling Georgian Dream party has a working majority and amendments are not routinely proposed at that stage.
On Monday, the parliament’s legal affairs committee green-lit the law after an acrimonious hearing that saw up to a dozen opposition MPs expelled and barred from asking questions on procedural grounds. Meanwhile, NGOs and human rights defenders say they were refused opportunities to give evidence about the law’s potential impact on their work, accusing Georgian Dream party MP and committee chair Anri Okhanashvili of “censoring” their voices. Journalists from online media outlets, likely to be most affected by the bill, were also barred from entering parliament.
How bad has it gotten over there? Take a look:
The new law could also affect Georgia’s aspirations of joining the EU:
When the plans were reintroduced earlier this month, a spokesperson for the European Commission said that passing the bill would contravene the terms under which Georgia was granted candidate status for EU membership.
Whether or not the law passes its third reading remains to be seen, and the EU may yet weigh in with more strenuous language about the law and its implications for Georgia’s future as a member state.
The protests are ongoing.
That’s it for this week.
Outro music is Kakhuri by the Georgian folk group Trio Mandili, a taste of the wonderful culture, landscape, and people of Georgia all in one short song.
Stay sane, friends.