Can you believe your eyes in the digital world?

By Zoe Kleinman Technology reporter, BBC News

Image manipulation expert Ric Bradley airbrushes Zoe Kleinman

Whether it's Obama on the beach or the impossibly flawless skin of this month's glossy cover girl, any picture can now be digitally altered to tell an entirely different story. In the age of the airbrush, can we ever really believe our eyes?

One man who can is Professor Hany Farid, a computer scientist and digital forensics expert who is a professional spotter of faked images - although he does not like the term.

Technology and culture

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This is the first of a five part series exploring the intersection between technology and culture

"Fakery is a loaded word - I prefer alteration or manipulation," he said. "It's not always intended to be malicious."

His website features a large gallery of published images that aren't quite what they seem.

The oldest has been around for an astonishing 150 years - a portrait of Abraham Lincoln dated 1860 that is in fact Mr Lincoln's head on the body of another.

"It has happened throughout history," said Prof Farid. "The compositing of two people together is common - we see this over and over."

Light and shade

A magazine cover showing Hollywood couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie on the beach together was actually a composite of two individual shots taken almost six months apart, he said.

"A lot of people think it's easy to spot because they often see bad fakes. But of course if you only see the bad ones you think it's easy," said Professor Farid.

How to spot common alterations

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• Cloning: Part of image subtly duplicated, eg to make smoke cloud look bigger - a computer can analyse pixel colours in different areas and compare them for similarity
• Re-touching: To sharpen blurred or underlit detail - proportions of basic colours in sequences of pixels are often not balanced after a re-touch.
• Lighting: By analysing all shadows in an image, scientists can tell whether a shot had a single light source.

His team uses scientific equations and mathematical algorithms to analyse photos looking for statistical anomalies in their composition.

Very subtle differences in shadowing are often a give-away. Identifying exactly where the shadows fall on an image reveals where the light source must have been to have created that shade.

If there is more than one source, then the image is likely composed of more than one picture.

"When you take a picture of people in two different settings the lighting is always different," he said.

"Your brain isn't sensitive to noticing it unless they are dramatically different - we are developing forensic tools to identify it."

Matter of fact

It may not be the end of the world that two movie stars were not really sunning themselves at the same time.

But the composition trick takes a more sinister turn when it is used to dramatise or even alter the recording of serious or sensitive events.

Spot the difference - Zoe Kleinman gets photoshopped.

In 2003, while actress Kate Winslet was busy hitting the headlines for complaining that she had been overly airbrushed after a magazine cover shoot, a bigger scandal was brewing.

That same year photographer Brian Walski was sacked from the LA Times after he admitted to compositing two photographs of conflict in Basra.

The two images both showed a soldier directing civilians but the second featured a man carrying a child in the background. They were composited so that the soldier appeared to be holding his hand out to stop the man.

Afterwards Mr Walski said he had not considered the consequences of his actions at the time.

"When I put the pictures together, I knew what I was doing. It looked good. It looked better than what I had, and I said 'wow'," he told photo website PDN online soon afterwards.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

It's like counterfeit currency - you can't stop it but you can make it more difficult”

End Quote Hany Farid

Fast forward to 2010 and The Economist ran a front cover picture of US President Barack Obama looking alone and thoughtful with an oil rig in the background and the headline "Obama vs BP" - in fact he was on a beach talking to two other people who had been airbrushed out.

Deputy editor Emma Duncan said the changes were made because she "wanted the reader to focus on Obama".

"For news organisations it's not a good idea," said Professor Farid. "It's like changing a quote to make it more aesthetically pleasing."

However he added that it is not common practice in news (celebrity and fashion journalism aside) - and many news photo agencies have strict policies about how their images can be used.

"In the mainstream news it's relatively small - they are serious about photo-journalism," said Prof Farid.

Mixed reception

It's not just news editors who frown on doctored images - a manipulated picture is not admissible in court as legal evidence.

But Professor Farid thinks that the judges may be missing a trick.

Tools of the trade

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• Software such as Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) are available free online, but the best known brand is Photoshop
• Now in its 20th year, the Adobe tool has over 5m registered users worldwide
• Adobe says Patch Match is Photoshop's most popular feature. If an editor removes part of an image Patch Match fills the gap by pulling in content from other bits of the picture and duplicating it
• A new device in very early stages at the Adobe research labs is a camera with a matrix of lenses that can take multiple perspectives of the same scene. These could then be synced together to create an image that is almost panoramic in its detail

A composite image showing lots of angles of a crime scene might show up evidence that one might miss by looking at a series of separate pictures, for example.

"In a court of law you cannot introduce a manipulated photo - that is altering evidence," he said.

"I would like to advocate that society starts thinking about the introduction of digital evidence in a court of law. Every year the law gets further behind the technology."

However with the media already saturated with manipulated pictures, many of which can only be identified with the help of complex mathematics, the law is erring on the side of caution for now.

Even Professor Farid admits that as technology advances, the fakes are getting harder to spot, but his methods are also evolving to keep up with the manipulators.

"The ability to tell real from fake is increasingly hard," he said.

"It's like counterfeit currency - you can't stop it but you can make it more difficult."

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Fit heart can slow brain ageing, US researchers say

Heart and brain health appear to go hand in hand

Keeping your heart fit and strong can slow down the ageing of your brain, US researchers say.

A Boston University team found healthy people with sluggish hearts that pumped out less blood had "older" brains on scans than others.

Out of the 1,500 people studied, the team observed that the brain shrinks as it ages.

A poor cardiac output aged the brain by nearly two years on average, Circulation journal says.

The link was seen in younger people in their 30s who did not have heart disease, as well as elderly people who did.

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“Start Quote

It is too early to dole out health advice based on this one finding but it does suggest that heart and brain health go hand in hand”

End Quote Dr Angela Jefferson Lead researcher

Lead researcher Dr Angela Jefferson said: "These participants are not sick people. A very small number have heart disease. The observation that nearly a third of the entire sample has low cardiac index and that lower cardiac index is related to smaller brain volume is concerning and requires further study."

The participants with smaller brain volumes on magnetic resonance imaging did not show obvious clinical signs of reduced brain function.

But the researchers say the shrinkage may be an early sign that something is wrong.

More severe shrinkage or atrophy occurs with dementia.

Dr Jefferson said there were several theories for why reduced cardiac index - how much blood the heart pumps out relative to body size - might affect brain health.

For example, a lower volume of blood pumping from the heart might reduce flow to the brain, providing less oxygen and fewer nutrients needed for brain cells.

"It is too early to dole out health advice based on this one finding but it does suggest that heart and brain health go hand in hand," she said.

Experts say a person's cardiac index is fairly static - meaning it would be difficult to change it if it were low, without doing pretty intensive exercise training.

Dr Clinton Wright, a brain and memory expert from the University of Miami, said: "Whether lower cardiac index leads to reduced brain volumes and accelerates neurodegeneration on an eventual path to dementia is not yet clear.

"To address the health needs of our ageing population, a better understanding of the links between cardiovascular disease and brain structure and function will be required."

The Boston School of Medicine team will now continue to study the individuals in the trial to see if and how the brain changes affect memory and cognitive abilities over time.

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Herpes virus used to treat cancer

By Emma Wilkinson Health reporter, BBC News

The herpes virus causes cold sores

Doctors say they have used a genetically engineered herpes virus to treat successfully patients with head and neck cancer.

A London hospital trial of 17 patients found that use of the virus alongside chemotherapy and radiotherapy helped kill the tumours in most patients.

It works by getting into cancer cells, killing them from the inside, and also boosting the patient's immune system.

Further trials are planned for later in the year.

Head and neck cancer, which includes cancer of the mouth, tongue and throat, affects up to 8,000 people every year in the UK.

Study leader Dr Kevin Harrington, who is based at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, said current treatments were effective if the cancer was picked up early but that many patients were not diagnosed until it was more advanced.

The herpes virus, which is also being tested in patients with skin cancer, is genetically manipulated so that it grows inside tumour cells but cannot infect normal healthy cells.

Once there it has a triple effect - it multiplies, killing tumour cells as it does so, it is engineered to produce a human protein that activates the immune system and it also makes a viral protein that acts as a red flag to immune cells.

'Potential weapon'

In the 17 patients injected with the virus, in addition to their standard treatment, at the Royal Marsden Hospital, 93% showed no trace of cancer after their tumour had been surgically removed.

More than two years later, 82% of patients had not succumbed to the disease.

Only two of 13 patients given the virus treatment at a high dose relapsed, the journal Clinical Cancer Research reported.

There were no safety concerns with use of the virus, the researchers said, and it is hoped the virus could one day be used to fight other types of cancer.

"Around 35 to 55% of patients given the standard chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment typically relapse within two years, so these results compare very favourably," said Dr Harrington.

He is now planning a trial comparing the viral treatment with the standard treatment in people newly diagnosed with head and neck cancer.

Dr Alison Ross, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said it would be some time before the treatment could be used in patients as it still needed to be tested directly against standard treatment.

But she added: "This small study highlights the potential of using genetically modified viruses as a weapon to fight cancer."

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Obama urges tourism to aid Gulf economy post-spill

Barack Obama says the Gulf environment will be restored "no matter how long it takes"

President Obama has urged Americans to "come on down and visit" Florida to help revive the economy stricken by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

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US Oil Spill

• BP oil spill costs pass $6bn mark
• Majority of BP spill 'dealt with'
• BP oil spill: Your experiences
• Transocean profit hit by BP spill

Mr Obama said oil was no longer flowing into the Gulf but "our job is not finished and we are not going anywhere until it is."

The president is visiting Florida with his wife and elder daughter.

On Friday, US incident commander Adm Thad Allen said work would continue to seal the leaking well for good.

The president paid tribute to the US Coast Guard and others who had "toiled day and night" to plug the leak.

'Clean, open, safe'

He urged Americans to take their holidays in Florida, saying: "As a result of the clean-up effort, the beaches are clean, open and safe."

Tourism is one of the mainstays of the Florida economy. This year, however, much of the coastline is deserted, says the BBC's Andy Gallacher in Miami.

The dramatic drop in tourists is down to a perception that all the beaches along the Florida panhandle, as it is known, are coated in oil, our correspondent says, even though that is not the case.

Mr Obama said he would maintain the pressure on BP to pay out compensation claims from the $20bn (£12.8bn) fund set up for that purpose.

The Obamas are taking a brief holiday in the Florida panhandle

Any delay was "unacceptable", he said, especially for those who had lost their sole source of income as a result of the spill.

Meanwhile, BP will get the go-ahead to finish sealing the blown-out well, Adm Allen has said.

However, he wants further tests completed before drilling on the relief well resumes.

BP has said its "static kill" procedure, in which mud and cement were pumped into the top of the well, has worked.

But Adm Allen said it was not clear whether that plug that had formed was enough to block the damaged well permanently, and he wants work on the relief well to continue.

Drilling has been suspended because of bad weather in the Gulf of Mexico.

Once all the tests have been completed, it will take 96 hours (four days) before drilling can resume.

That means the relief well will not be completed before next weekend at the earliest.

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Living in fear of Mexico's worsening drugs wars

By Emma Thomas Mexico

Mexico's drug gangs have long caused scenes of carnage on the streets of some of the country's border cities, but the violence is spreading to many areas that used to be safe.

El Cercado is a sleepy village in the foothills of the Sierra Madre.

It is situated about half an hour's drive south of Monterrey, Mexico's third largest city.

Drug warfare has affected even rural areas

In contrast to the pine forests and alpine meadows on its western flank, the vegetation here on the eastern side of the Sierra is tropical - lush and intensely green.

Four years ago I was lucky enough to spend a little time in El Cercado.

My aunt Blanca and uncle Juan invited my mother and me to stay in their weekend retreat - a spacious old ranch, crammed with family bric-a-brac, with a terrace running the length of the house.

We would sit in rocking chairs listening to the birds and contemplating the view.

Each morning, before the sun was too high, we went for rambling walks along dirt tracks that criss-crossed the hills above the house, returning before the heat of the day to rest in the shade.

At night we would roast meat on the barbecue, and spend hours around the card table, a glass of tequila in hand.

Above all, that house was a place for family.

Living in fear

So when I returned to Monterrey this summer and learnt that Blanca and Juan's daughter was soon to be married, warm memories came flooding back.

"Will the wedding be held at El Cercado,?" I asked enthusiastically.

The gangsters set up roadblocks at night - they stop people, rob them, and sometimes kidnap them

My uncle looked both surprised and dismayed in equal measure.

Alarmed by his expression, I wondered if perhaps I had revealed some crass misapprehension of Mexican wedding protocol.

Perhaps the house was considered too "basic" a venue for a wedding reception.

I was unprepared for his response:

"Oh no, we don't go there any more. It's become far too dangerous," he said.

Unprompted, he began describing how life has changed in Monterrey.

"We hear gunfights regularly. The gangsters set up roadblocks at night, even on the main roads. They stop people, rob them, and sometimes kidnap them," he said.

"There will be a shootout, then 4x4s will turn up afterwards to clear up the bodies, as if nothing's happened," he told me.

"And the police," he went on, "Where are they? They're nowhere to be seen! We're on our own here, and we need to start thinking about arming ourselves."

Severed head

The next morning I thought that perhaps Juan was being overly pessimistic.

I tried asking Elena, Blanca's sister - the sunniest person imaginable.

Not even the youngsters are going to clubs - they're too scared Elena

"You know what they found up there the other day?" she said, referring to the Cerro de la Silla - Monterrey's distinctive saddle-shaped mountain.

Two abandoned cars and a severed head.

Mexico's drug wars are notoriously sadistic. I recently read of one drug murder in which a man's face had been flayed off and stitched to a football. And there was the incident of the head that was rolled on to a dance floor in the state of Michoacan.

A term I have now become familiar with is narcofosa: The communal grave into which the drug barons dump the bodies of their victims.

Elena told me of one that had been found in Monterrey.

Mexico's police are trying to curtail the drugs cartels

Fifty or so bodies, not even decomposed. In other words, fresh.

"No-one goes out at night any more," she said.

"Not even the youngsters are going to clubs. They're too scared."

Later, as we drove through the city by day, Elena showed me a few local landmarks - the university library building where two students were gunned down in a case of mistaken identity, the supermarket where a police informer was shot dead as he sat in his car.

"He was on the phone," said Elena. "He should have been a little less obvious!"

Deserted streets

Of course, I had been aware the violence was worsening in Mexico, but I realise now that I had made a few assumptions.

First, that it was principally in the border cities: Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo.

Second, that when there were killings elsewhere, they were self-contained, targeted assassinations of people involved in the trade.

I had totally underestimated the extent of the violence, how it is hampering people's lives and curtailing their freedoms.

Another friend told me of a recent visit to Torreon, west of Monterrey.

She too described city streets deserted after dark, with no-one venturing out.

A couple of days after that conversation, 17 people were murdered at a party in Torreon, the third such massacre this year.

It seems particularly sad that this is happening in a country that 10 years ago made a triumphant return to multi-party democracy, and which this year celebrates its bicentenary.

Juan and Blanca hope that their newly married daughter and son-in-law will leave and go to live in the United States, where their son and other daughter already live with their families.

For as Juan pointed out, as long as demand remains for the drugs and as long as the cartels can cross the US border and buy whatever weapons they desire, the war seems bound to continue.

Source

Top doctor Sir Ian Gilmore calls for drugs law review

Sir Ian Gilmore said drug prohibition was "not a success"

Decriminalising drug use could drastically reduce crime and improve health, the outgoing president of the Royal College of Physicians has said.

Sir Ian Gilmore said the laws on misuse of drugs should be reviewed and that their supply should be regulated.

He says he formed his view after seeing the problems caused by dirty needles and contaminated drugs first hand in the patients he has treated.

The government said it did not believe this was the right approach.

In a parting e-mail to 25,000 RCP members, which Sir Ian said expressed his own views rather than those of the RCP, he wrote that he felt like finishing his presidency on a "controversial note".

He endorsed a recent article in the British Medical Journal by Stephen Rolles, from the think tank Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which argued that the policy of prohibition had harmed public health, encouraged organised crime and fuelled corruption.

Sir Ian told the BBC: "Everyone who has looked at this in a serious and sustained way concludes that the present policy of prohibition is not a success.

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Drugs laws around the world
• Fergus Walsh: Would decriminalisation work?
• Scottish drug death drop revealed

"There are really strong arguments to look again."

Sir Ian said he had had a longstanding interest in the subject, stemming from his work as a liver specialist.

"Every day in our hospital wards we see drug addicts with infections from dirty needles, we see heroin addicts with complications from contaminated drugs," he said.

He argued that many of the problems health staff encountered were the consequences not of heroin itself, but of prohibition.

In his e-mail, Sir Ian wrote: "I personally back the chairman of the UK Bar Council, Nicholas Green QC, when he calls for drug laws to be reconsidered with a view to decriminalising illicit drugs use. This could drastically reduce crime and improve health," he wrote.

In his recent report to the Bar Council, Mr Green said there was growing evidence that decriminalising personal use could free up police resources, reduce crime and improve public health.

Mr Rolles - whose recent BMJ article Sir Ian cited in his e-mail - told BBC Radio 4's Today programme their arguments were "built on a critique of the failure of the last 40 or 50 years".

He said the "punitive criminal justice-driven war on drugs" had delivered the opposite of its goals.

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

Dominic Casciani BBC News home affairs correspondent

---

Decriminalising and legalisation of drugs are not the same.

If controlled drugs like heroin, cannabis and Ecstasy were legal, they would be freely available to buy in the same way as an adult can buy beer: anyone could trade in them.

Hypothetically, if prohibited drugs were decriminalised, the government would license and attempt to control manufacture, quality, purity and supply - and possession for personal use would not lead to prosecution.

But if you tried to trade in the drugs by offering your own supply, you would still fall foul of the law.

Supporters of decriminalisation say it should be combined with diverting money from police to drug treatment services because criminal trafficking would dry up.

The government says decriminalisation sends the wrong message and encourages young people to assume substances are not harmful.

• Fergus Walsh blog: Would decriminalising drugs work?

"It hasn't reduced drug use, it hasn't prevented the availability of drugs, but it has created a whole raft of secondary problems associated with the illegal market, including making drugs more dangerous than they already are and undermining public health and fuelling crime."

"That is provoking a debate on what the alternative approaches are and the one that we are calling for is legally regulated production supply."

He said those who found such a proposal difficult to stomach needed to "accept the pragmatic reality that demand for drugs exists now".

"[That demand] will be met one way or another, and we have a choice - we can either leave that supply in the hands of the worse possible people - the illegal market controlled by violent criminal profiteers - or we can control it by appropriate authorities in ways that will reduce the harm that it causes."

He called on the government to look at the evidence and assess the current policy compared with the alternatives, instead of following the "traditional political grandstanding and moral posturing which has characterised drugs policy over the last few decades".

'Extremely harmful'

In a statement the Royal College of Physicians said a joint report in 2000 with the Royal College of Psychiatrists had called for much greater investment in research and in treatment programmes.

The RCP said it was hoping to review the report's findings under its new president, Sir Richard Thompson.

A spokesperson for the Home Office said: "Drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis are extremely harmful and can cause misery to communities across the country.

"The government does not believe that decriminalisation is the right approach. Our priorities are clear; we want to reduce drug use, crack down on drug-related crime and disorder and help addicts come off drugs for good."

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How business can learn from the animal kingdom

Teamwork - it's a practice many businesses strive for but when it comes to execution few can beat the animal kingdom. From ants to elephants, creatures which may not be the smartest on their own get a boost from acting together.

This power in numbers theory is something that author Peter Miller has explored in his new book The Smart Swarm and he joined Katty Kay in the studio to discuss his findings.

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Anti-Mosque Coalition’s Website Owned By Neo-Conservative Islamophobe Frank Gaffney

Anti-Mosque Coalition’s Website Owned By Neo-Conservative Islamophobe Frank Gaffney

Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) called for “transparency” about who is funding the ugly attacks against the construction of a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero in New York City. “There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she told KCBS radio.

Naturally, right-wing opponents of the mosque blasted Pelosi for the comments, claiming the opposition is an organic, spontaneous uprising of concerned Americans. However, the coalition leading the charge against the mosque, the Coalition to Honor Ground Zero, appears to be funded by a major neo-conservative advocacy group, with deep-pocketed donors, and extensive connections to the conservative establishment. As Glenn Greenwald noted, the coalition’s website StopThe911Mosque.com is registered to the Center for Security Policy, a neo-conservative think tank and advocacy group run by Reagan defense official and far-right hawk Frank Gaffney:

The coalition’s partners include a who’s who of far-right pundits, politicians, and neo-conservative advocacy groups, such as Keep America Safe, the attack group formed by Liz Cheney and hawkish Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. Another coalition partner is 911FamiliesForAmerica.org, a group run by Tim Sumner and Debra Burlingame, who also happens to be a founding board member of Keep America Safe.

The Center for Security Policy, of which Gaffney is the founder and president, appears to be leading the charge, thanks to its network of big-time right-wing funders like the Bradley Foundation and, presumably, its board of directors. Gaffney’s board includes the vice president of Van Scoyoc Associates, which touts itself as the “largest independent lobbying company in Washington, D.C,” with numerous defense clients and $15.93 million in lobbying revenue over the first six months of 2010. Other members of Gaffney’s board include the former vice president of Boeing’s missile defense division, and the head of the investment firm American Securities LP, which is invested in, among other companies, Potbelly’s Sandwich Works. The group paid Gaffney $288,300 in 2008, according to its most recently available 990 form.

Another partner in StopThe911Mosque.com is the anti-Muslim hate group ACT! For America, whose “radical Islamophobe” founder Brigitte Gabriel has said that Muslims should not be allowed to hold public office, and that an American Muslim “cannot be a loyal citizen” because Islam is the “real enemy.”

Gaffney himself has long history of advocating outrageous and bigoted positions about Islam, and has repeatedly questioned President Obama’s birthplace and religion.

The StopThe911Mosque.com campaign reflects Gaffney’s radical views, declaring that it is not opposed to only the “mega-mosque and Islamic Center at Ground Zero,” but to many mosques, because they may be “‘Trojan Horses,’ masquerading as places of worship when they in fact have proved to be sources of extremist activities and terror plots against America.” The New York mosque is just “a prominent example of this kind of ‘Trojan Horse.’” Indeed, the website also targets mosques in Boston and London.

Update The original post conflated American Securities LLC -- whose leadership is not affiliated with the Center for Security Policy -- with American Securities Management, L.P., whose managing director David P. Steinmann is on the Center's board. American Securities LLC is the company invested in Potbelly Sandwich Works, not American Securities Management, L.P. We apologize for the error and have corrected the post for accuracy.

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Keith Olbermann Special Comment: There Is No 'Ground Zero Mosque' - 08/16/10

Jon Stewart v.s Fox about Mosque

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