Twitter gender

For a while back there, I had more than 54,000 followers on Twitter, for what that’s worth. Current number after some losses over the last couple of years through general attrition, spam and bot clearouts etc, now means my follower count is down to about 43,000 followers. I did an analysis of declared pronouns, bio details and name on a sample of 2,000 of the most recently active based on 200 tweets in my timeline (using a freely available tool called proporti.onl)

The breakdown of followers is as follows: 32% male, 16% female, 52% not known.

The proportions are different for the people I myself follow. I don’t tend to keep following people who don’t follow me and I limit the total number to 2000, at the moment it’s just under 1800 that I follow.

44% male, 26% female, 30 not known

 

Look what they put on this beach to protect the town from floods

Coastal defences, Cobbolds Point, Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK

Groynes are structures that are constructed perpendicular to the shoreline, usually made of rocks or boulders, but can be wood or other materials. They are designed to help dissipate the energy of the waves crashing on the shore and slow down the movement of sediment along the coast, longshore drift, helping to prevent erosion and maintain the shape of the beach. Part of the way they work is to trap sand and other sediment that is carried by waves and currents.

Connect with David Bradley of Sciencebase

rsstwitterfacebookinstagram

The four main online outlets for David Bradley and Sciencebase updates are the Sciencebase website and blog, Facebook, Mastodon, Twitter, and Instagram. Most updates covering my science and stuff will appear in those places.

You can also find me as “sciencebase” on almost all other social media, this a link of this form, swapping out the word social for substack, medium, bandcamp, soundcloud, pixelfed, linkedin or whatever:

https://sciencebase.com/social

Kill Gutenberg

UPDATE: When you’ve upgraded to version 5, you will now see a notice from WordPress on how to revert to the classic editor.

If you’re using WordPress for your self-hosted blog and have just upgraded to version 5.0 you will have no doubt noticed that the system is now forcing you to use their new “block” style editor. Well, I’ve got deadlines on this blog and others that mean I’ve no time to faff around with a new editor before Xmas.

Thankfully, there are, according to Kinsta at least three ways to revert to the classic WordPress editor. The first involves installing a WordPress-accepted plugin called Classic Editor. This simply disables Gut and runs your site with the old skool editor. Does what it says on the tin, to be frank.

The second way used a plugin called Disable Gutenberg, which also DWISOTT but with a few additional features that complete hide Gut from all of a site’s users.

The third way is slightly more convoluted but has a much lower overhead than installing and running a plugin, it involves added a snippet of code to your functions.php file (or to your site-specific plugin):

add_filter('use_block_editor_for_post', '__return_false');

This latter method is my preferred choice, adding a line of code to my “sciencebase” site-specific plugin is easy and it means avoiding the need to run a third-party plugin.

Retro Gaming Day

My good friend Andrew Fell (trustee at Cottenham Community Centre, CCC, and volunteer at the UK Computer Museum in Cambridge) organised and ran independently of the museum a very successful retro gaming day at CCC.

Rining handsets

It was a delight for gamers young and old and dozens of them packed the back hall to see everything from the pioneering Intellivision and Spectrum consoles to the classic Commodore, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, and BBC Micro machines, as well as a Virtual Boy with its 3D display based that used two spinning mirrors to give each eye a different view of the display.

Sonically yours

The gamers and any +1s (and their kids) all got to partake of cream teas and cakes provided by Mrs Sciencebase and her staff in our coffee shop.

Chuckie Egg on the BBC

All in a very successful afternoon, in fact, one of our most successful non-musical events at CCC ever and all topped off with an evening viewing of the Spielberg film “Ready Player One”, which featured a vintage (1970s) VHS machine loaned by the Museum in the final scene.

Senior moment

Pleased I was to see two references to Rush the band. Specifically, one of the closing scenes features a poster of their “2112” album and one of the heroes wearing a 2112 teeshirt. As fans will know, 2112 was one of the band’s early concept albums and tells a messianic tale of a dystopian future. It is no small coincidence that Ready Player One tells a similar tale.

The next generation

Anyway, aside from the couple of hundred people (possibly more) who came through the Community Centre doors and enjoyed the digital and sconic feast, the event also raised a generous surplus for CCC coffers and a donation to the Museum was also made. Well done to Andy and the team. I’m sure the popularity of this event means he will be itching to run a second such event.

GamesMeister Andrew Fell with the Ferguson Videostar Deluxe that features in the 2018 Steven Spielberg film “Ready Player One”

Amazingly, Andrew and his able assistants got all the machines booted up, kept them running without a glitch, without a single fuse blown or gadget broken, right up until it was Game Over.

Fergie

Virtual Boy at heart

Films from the Future

In Films from the Future – The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies, Andrew Maynard draws on his work on emerging technologies, responsible innovation and how we address the issues of risk. He introduces the reader to the profound capabilities presented by new and emerging technologies, and also to the complex personal and societal challenges they present.

In the twelve carefully curated movies, Maynard offers a starting point for us to explore potentially life-changing technologies and trends. From the genetic engineering of Jurassic Park and the brain-enhancing drugs of Limitless, to the ideas of human augmentation represented in Ghost in the Shell and artificial intelligence in Ex Machina. The concepts are woven together with emerging ideas on technological convergence and responsible and ethical innovation to give us a panoramic vista on where our technology might take us and how we might ensure it takes us to where we want to go.

More information from Mango Publishing (https://mango.bz)

Everyone emotes in emoji

Everyone uses emoji in their communications now, right? Maybe not. I suspect that a lot more people know about simple emoticons (smilies) than know what you’re suggesting when you post the eggplant (aubergine) emoji. Moreover, despite proclamations that emoji are somehow the modern version of hieroglyphics, they’re really not.

For a start, I’m not even sure that the Ancient Egyptians had aubergines…although they were cultivated in southern and eastern Asia in prehistory and the first recipe for them appeared in a document around 544 CE. But, more importantly, try saying the following phrase unravelled from ancient hieroglyphics with nothing but emoji and trapping each nuance and losing none of the subtlety and philosophy of the phrase:

Do not be proud because you are wise! Consult with the ignorant as with the learned!

Was your Facebook data assimilated?

UPDATE: It’s no surprise and I assumed that more would be revealed, but another app associated with supposed academic research has been outed as having been an assimilator.

UPDATE: Not everyone has had *that* notification from Facebook yet telling them whether they were assimilated by Cam Anal or not…here’s a workaround, jump to this help page:

https://www.facebook.com/help/1873665312923476

If your Facebook stuff was harvested by Cambridge Analytica because someone you’re connected to used the “mydigitallife” app back before 2014, you should’ve had a notification from FB about it by now. If you haven’t seen a notification, then you it doesn’t necessarily mean you weren’t assimilated by CA or any of the other companies FB has banned since it changed its systems that year. The notifications are still being rolled out. The majority of the billion+ users of Facebook will simply get an advisory notification but some 88 million will presumably get a notice alerting them to their data having been compromised.

A contact on Facebook suggested that:

For most of us, I suspect the stuff we post on FB would just confuse anyone trying to use it

Now, I realise they’re being flippant, but it goes deeper and I think a lot of people do not realise that.

He’s a contact, but we’re not even friends on Facebook and I can see a lot about him: his career history, all of his FB friends, his photos, the names of four of his family members who are on FB (son, cousin, and a couple of others), and a lot more besides. The fact that I can see it means anyone on Facebook can see it too and that could be someone building a profile for whatever reason…ID theft, insurance company, political rival…

I can see where he’s “checked in”, countries visited, railway stations, pubs, everywhere. I can guess which mobile phone company he’s with, because he likes one of the major companies and none of the others. I can see his political persuasion and affiliations and the politics he doesn’t like. I can guess where he likes to have a drink, because he only likes one pub on Facebook.

So, although it all seems trivial…it’s kind of not, a hacker could easily build up enough information to then use social engineering (smooth talk) to speak to a receptionist, operator, bar tender, whoever, to dig deeper, perhaps build up enough info to open a bank account in his name, take out a loan…this is one of the reasons why it’s worrying; political propaganda and fake news notifications that twist democracy aside.

Friend of a friend

As I’ve said though, the current debacle is not even about what you put online…the problem with CA specifically is that an academic created an app that he paid people to use and when they (about 270,000 people) accepted the terms and conditions to use it, the app could then access all of the information that all of their friends had loaded into Facebook. This included all of the stuff that those friends had set as private. They reckon 88 million people were harvested by this app alone.

FB was called out on this issue in 2014 and blocked that app and then seemingly kept quiet about the issue. They changed their software (Graph API) so that other apps couldn’t quite do the same thing after that time. But, even now every time somebody does one of those “easy” quizzes or other app where you login with Facebook and then shares it, the quizz app company gets to peek at a huge mass of their friends’ data.

Fourth Party Data

And, of course, all that data that these third parties have harvested might be stolen by a fourth party…at least at the moment it’s pretty much hidden, but a hacker could break open their servers and post everything to the open web at any time. If we’re lucky, they stored it in encrypted form, but given the recent history of hacking, that’s unlikely, so much data is stolen and released on to the net that never was encrypted.

Cutting noise from photos

UPDATE: March 2023 – I am currently using DxO PureRaw instead of the full PhotoLab. It does the same with denoising and lens/camera corrections. I then adjust curves and levels with PaintShopPro as I had been doing prior to trying PhotoLab.

UPDATE: January 2023 – I wrote this article back in 2018, since then various programs have come on to the market that offer AI approaches to denoising photographs many of which are much easier to use and work really well. For example, the Topaz AI Denoise tool reduces noise and blur and can even reduce motion blur, as I demonstrated in an article with a photograph of a Peregrine Falcon flying overhead. DxO Photolab is my current denoise software of choice though, its DeepPrime system effectively lowers the ISO of any noisy photograph by the equivalent of about three stops (like shooting at 400 rather than 3200 but with the same shutter speed and aperture). It lens/camera corrections built-in too as well as allowing you to adjust levels, curves, saturation etc etc.


Noise can be nice…look at that lovely grain in those classic monochrome prints, for instance. But, noise can be nasty, those purple speckles in that low-light holiday snap in that flashy bar with the expensive cocktails, for example. If only there were a way to get rid of the noise without losing any of the detail in the photo.

Now, I remember noise in spectroscopy at university, you could reduce it by cutting out any signal that was below a threshold. Unfortunately, as with photos that filtering cuts out detail and clarity. So, a solution was to run multiple spectra of the same sample, like taking the same photo, you could then stack them together so that the parts that are of interest add together. You then apply the filter to cull the dim parts, the noise. The bits that are the same in each shot (or spectrum will be added together, but the random noise will generally not overlap and so will not get stronger with the adding. The low-level filtering then applied will remove the noise and not cut the image. No more ambiguous spectral lines and no more purple speckles. That is in theory, at least. Your mileage in the laboratory or with your photos may vary.

De-noising by stacking together repeat frames of the same shot comes into its own when doing astrophotography where light levels are intrinsically low. Stack together a dozen photos of the Milky Way say, the stars and nebulae add together, then you can apply a cut to anything that isn’t as bright as the dimmest and you can reduce the noise significantly. Stack together a few hundred and your chances are even better, although you will have to use a system to move the camera as time goes on to avoid star trails.

Then it’s down to the software to work its tricks. One such tool called ImageMagick has been around for years and has a potentially daunting command-line interface for Windows, Mac, and Unix machines, but with its “evaluate-sequence” function it can nevertheless quickly process a whole stack of photos and reduce the noise in the output shot.

As a quick test, given it’s the middle of the afternoon here, I went to my office cupboard which is fairly dark even at midday, and searched out some dusty copies of an old book by the name of Deceived Wisdom, you may have heard of it. I piled up a few copies and with my camera on a tripod and the ISO turned as high as it will go to cut through the gloom, I snapped half a dozen close-ups of the spines of the books. The first photo shows one of the untouched photos, with a zoom in on a particularly noisy bit.

Next I downloaded the snaps, which all look essentially identical, but each having a slightly different random spray of noise. I then ran the following command in ImageMagick (there are other apps that will be more straightforward to work with having a GUI rather than relying on a command prompt. Nevertheless, within a minute or so the software has worked its magic(k).

magick convert *.jpg -evaluate-sequence median book-stack.jpg

And, so here’s the result, well the zoomed in area of the composite output photo, the average of the six essentially identical original frames with the noise filtered to a degree from the combined image. There is far less random colour fringing around the letters and overall it’s crisper. The next step would be to apply unsharp masking etc to work it up to a useful image.

It’s not perfect, but there is far less noise than in any of the originals as you can hopefully see. The software you use can have fine adjustments, but perhaps the most important factor is taking more photos of the same thing. That’s probably not going to work at that holiday cocktail bar, but with patience should work nicely for astro shots. Of course, if I wanted a decent noise-free photo of my book, I could have taken them out of the cupboard piled them on my desk, lit them properly, used a flash and diffuser and what have you and got a really nice photo with a single frame. But, then what would you learn from me doing that other than that I still have copies of my old book?