You have probably heard of deepfakes by now – convincing video manipulation that is improving rapidly, getting better and easier. Right now you can often tell when a video has been manipulated. The human eye is very sensitive to movement, facial expressions, and other subtle cues. But the best examples are getting more difficult, and experts predict there will be deepfakes undetectable by most people within a year.

How will this affect the world? Most reports I read simply say that people won’t be able to trust videos anymore (we already can’t trust photos). But that doesn’t capture the situation. People knowing that video can be manipulated won’t really solve the problem.

The problem is psychology – people can be primed and manipulated subconsciously. Let’s say, for example, that you see a video of a famous person committing a horrible crime, or saying something terrible. Even if you know such videos can be faked, or hear the claim that that video was fake, the images may still have an emotional effect. It becomes part of your subconscious memory memory of that person.

Human memory also will contribute to this effect. We are better at remembering claims than remembering where we heard them (source amnesia) or if they are true or not (truth status amnesia). Seeing a dramatic video of a person doing something horrible will stick with you and will be much more vivid than later information about forensic examination of the video.

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Weird things happen to most people at some point in their lives, and if not to you directly than probably to someone you know. But what is the ultimate meaning to such coincidences? They may seem amazing, and psychologically scream out for an equally amazing explanation.

Skeptics caution, however, that our tendency to see patterns and impose satisfying explanations combine with our relative lack of intuition for statistics to jump to unwarranted conclusions. If we do the math, then it becomes clear that very unlikely events should happen all the time, given enough opportunity.

Some people, however, do not want to give up the narrative value of coincidences so easily. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, for example, has written a book about The Source and Significance of Coincidences, and prefers a more supernatural explanation. In a recent editorial for Psychology Today she strikes back at the skeptical explanation for coincidences. She basically has one point to make, but first she states the skeptical position:

Skeptics argue that, even if the odds that a particular event would occur at this particular moment to this particular person are very low, there are so many moments over the course of our lives and so many people on this planet, that even very improbable coincidences are bound to happen eventually, just by chance. This is often referred to as the Law of Very Large Numbers.

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With the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon there has been a lot of talk about NASA’s plans to return. Each new dribble of news can be exciting, but a coherent plan remains elusive. Somewhat of a plan is starting to take shape, however.

In a recent commentary for the Washington Post, Astronomer Phil Plait made an interesting point – that the Apollo mission was designed to be self-limited and not a sustained effort. The point was to beat the Soviets to the moon, and so it was baked into the design of the program to do everything to get their quickly not slowly and sustainably. Further, once we did beat the Soviets to the moon, and it was clear they abandoned their own efforts to do so, support for the program faded.

I think this is correct, but it is in contrast to the naive impression I formed as a child during the Apollo program and nurtured throughout most of my life. It always seemed to me that once we became a spacefaring race, progress was inevitable. Certainly every science fiction movie reinforced this impression. Apollo was followed by the space shuttle, then the ISS. OK, that makes sense. But then progress in sending people into space seemed to wane. We now have to hitch rides to the ISS on Russian craft. NASA’s plans seem to change with each administration. Multiple conflicting visions compete for dominance, while we seem to chase our tail.

I have to now acknowledge that it’s possible the massive effort necessary to safely send people to the moon and return them to Earth may only be feasible with the political and public support generated by the cold war and an immediate space race. Without that, we don’t seem to be able to sustain the political will – which in practical purposes means money. NASA and the White House need to be on the same page, and Congress needs to provide the funding.

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The degree to which there is a scientific consensus in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) remains politically controversial, even though it is not scientifically controversial. Denial of the consensus remains a cornerstone of AGW denial, so let’s examine the science and the arguments used to deny it.

Much of the public discussion focusses on the 2013 Cook article which claimed that there is a 97% consensus among experts in AGW. This has become the poster child of the consensus argument, much in the way Mann’s original article has become the icon of the “hockey stick” of global temperatures. The denialist strategy here is the same – falsely present the situation as if all the scientific eggs are in one basket, and then attack that basket with everything you have.

So Cook has been vilified by the deniers as if that demolishes the evidence for a consensus. That strategy ignores, however, the many other studies that also look at the question of consensus. In fact, there is a consensus of studies on consensus. A 2016 review of 6 independent studies found the range of estimates of the consensus is from 90-100%, with the consensus clustering around 97%. The “everything depends on that one Cook study” strategy is just factually incorrect.

The other strategy used to deny the consensus is to misrepresent individual studies, again with the focus being on Cook. There is admittedly a lot of complexity here, and no one number will capture that. No individual study is perfect, because you always have to make some trade-offs. These papers are all estimates of the consensus, and had to make certain assumptions. But that is why multiple independent estimates are useful.

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A federal court has recently affirmed that states do indeed have the right to enforce professional licensing laws. This may seem obvious, and I think it is, but lawyers for Heather Del Castillo (from the libertarian, public-interest law firm, The Institute for Justice), a “holistic health coach” based in Florida, argued in court that their client was protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Judge Casey Rogers of the US District Court for the Northern District of Florida rejected their arguments out of hand.

This is a very important ruling for anyone interested in science, skepticism, and professionalism. Had the ruling gone the other way, it would have been a disastrous precedent. Let’s review what the First Amendment does and does not guarantee.

First, you have to think about when a question of speech and censorship is a First Amendment issue at all. For example, if you get banned from a social media outlet because someone doesn’t like your speech, that is not a First Amendment issue. The First Amendment states, “Congress shall pass no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” This applies only to the government, both federal and state. So this affects how and when the government can censor, oppress, and punish speech. It has zero effect on private companies or citizens. The bottom line is that you have no right to speech in someone else’s private venue.

What about getting fired from your job for your speech? Nope, that’s not a First Amendment issue either, if you work for a private company and not any government. However, your employer may still run afoul of the Civil Rights Act or contract law. If you do work for the government, then the burden of proof shifts to the government. They can only discipline you for your speech if it interferes with your job or violates your contract or ethical guidelines of the job.

The First Amendment applies when government is involved in any way. If you get sued for libel, then that is a First Amendment issue. The government cannot shut down your newspaper because it doesn’t like your editorial policy. You cannot be arrested and jailed for your speech (with certain limits). Once we determine that a certain situation is a First Amendment issue we are not done, because freedom of speech is not absolute. There are certain very narrowly defined limits.

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Let me just start by saying – I don’t believe for a second that this one is real. I think it’s something between absurdist performance art, trolling, and marketing. But it does raise the question about the ultimate effects of such things, and therefore the ethics.

There is an online faux movement called, “Birds Aren’t Real.” It is a fake conspiracy theory someone made up in order to make fun of other conspiracy theories, and perhaps sell T-shirts. The idea is that sometime in the 1970s the US government killed all the birds in North America and replaced them with identical drones in order to spy on its citizens. Of course this makes no sense on multiple levels. Why would they bother to kill all the birds, rather than just mix their drones in with the natural ones? Why hasn’t anyone captured or found one of these drones? And of course, the technology to pull this off is at least a century off, so how did the CIA (or whoever) pull this off 40 years ago?

The absurdity of this conspiracy theory is a feature, not a bug. The question is – why did someone bother? I can certainly see the fun in doing so. Read the website, it’s transparent (in my opinion) mockery. There are various theories as to what’s behind the movement, and what the true motivation is for those who created and who promote it. The cynical view is that they are just trying to sell merchandise by creating a brand. It may work. Others believe they are skeptics trying to expose the gullibility of conspiracy theorists. Or it may have all simply been a joke, or some version of trolling. It may be all of these things.

The question is – will the birds aren’t real meme take on a life of its own? This question has lead to perhaps the least likely theory, that this is all an elaborate social psychological experiment testing the limits of human gullibility. This theory, however, is really just another fake conspiracy theory, which starts the cycle of speculation all over again.

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This is another entry in my informal series on interfacing machines and the human brain. Yesterday I wrote about Neuralink, which is a project to develop electrodes to interface with the brain itself. Today I write about another incremental advance – in the July 17th issue of Science Robotics, researchers published, “A neuro-inspired artificial peripheral nervous system for scalable electronic skins.”

This seems to be a serious advance in the architecture of artificial skin.

“We demonstrate prototype arrays of up to 240 artificial mechanoreceptors that transmitted events asynchronously at a constant latency of 1 ms while maintaining an ultra-high temporal precision of <60 ns, thus resolving fine spatiotemporal features necessary for rapid tactile perception. Our platform requires only a single electrical conductor for signal propagation, realizing sensor arrays that are dynamically reconfigurable and robust to damage.”

This configuration is more scalable than the current designs, which “are currently interfaced via time-divisional multiple access (TDMA), where individual sensors are sampled sequentially and periodically to reconstruct a two-dimensional (2D) map of pressure distribution.” As the number of sensors increases, with this design, the delay in signal processing gets greater. The new design does not suffer that limitation.

Biological skin evolved to have a host of desirable features. It is soft, has a variable number of sensors as needed, and yet is robust, still operates with minor damage, and is self-repairing. Artificial skin would be optimal if it shared all these features. This new eskin gets us closer to this ideal.

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I’m still trying to figure out if Elon Musk is a mad genius or a supervillain. Perhaps that’s a false dichotomy. Seriously, I do like his approach – he has billions of dollars laying around, so he decides that we need some specific technology in order to build the future, and he builds a company dedicated to developing that technology. Wherever he sees holes, he tries to fill them.

SpaceX has been, in my opinion, his most dramatic success. He has pioneered the technology of reusable rockets, and anyone who has seen one of his falcon rockets landing vertically has to be impressed. Tesla cars are impressive as well, but from what I understand he still has to make the company profitable. I’m still skeptical about the hyperloop, but at least he’s trying. It all depends on how cheap he can make tunneling, and the real innovation may be in his Boring company.

Not all of his companies involve travel. He also wants to change humans, in order to ultimately keep up with the AI he thinks we will inevitably create. In 2017 he tweeted, “If you’re not concerned about AI safety, you should be. Vastly more risk than North Korea,” along with a picture declaring, “In the end, the machines will win.” The existential threat of AI is a separate question.

Now for most people, if you are worried about AI you talk about it with your friends and colleagues. Perhaps you have a blog where you can share your concerns with the world. But if you are Elon Musk you can start a 100 million dollar company designed to thwart the perceived threat. So that’s what he did.

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Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies are inherently, in my opinion, exploitative. The MLM model is that the sales force is hierarchical – you are hired by someone who takes a cut of what you earn. You, in turn, can make money by recruiting your own sellers, who each pay you a cut of what they earn, and what everyone below them earns. In other words – it’s a pyramid scheme.

A raw pyramid scheme is just a transfer of money – I give you $10, and recruit five people to give me $10, and so on. Everyone makes money, except for those who get stuck at the bottom of the pyramid. Pyramid schemes are generally illegal because only the people at the top really make money. The math of the situation guarantees that even in a few generations the pyramid will burn itself out. (1-5-25-125-625-3,125-15,625-78,125-390,625-1,953,125-9,765,625-48,828,125-244,140,625) In 13 levels you get close to the entire population of the US, in 2 more, close to the population of the Earth.

An MLM is basically a pyramid scheme in which a product is used as cover for the transfer of money. Sellers need to buy product from the company, which they may use themselves but are also meant to sell. Some MLMs require a minimum purchase each month, whether you sell it or not. In this way also the salespeople are also customers. It amazes me that this is at all legal. Most states and the federal government regulate MLMs rather than outlaw them completely For example, sellers need to demonstrate that they make most of their income from actually selling products, not just getting paid by those under them. Certain practices, such as requiring a minimum product purchase, can be outlawed as well.

The numbers tell the story. An analysis by the FTC found that 100% of the 350 MLMs they looked at were top heavy, meaning that the vast majority of the profit went to the very top promoters, while everyone else lost money. A staggering 99% of those involved lost money. In fact, it’s worse than a no-product straight pyramid scheme, in which 90% of participants lose money. There, of course, will be exceptions – that seller who is 2-3 standard deviations from the mean, who was in the perfect situation, or just has exceptional business and marketing skills. They make money, and then they become the poster child for that MLM. If they can do it, you can do it.

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A paper is making the rounds on climate denial sites that claims to debunk human-caused climate change in a single stroke. Predictably, the paper does nothing of the sort, but it does raise a complex issue regarding climate change that is worth reviewing. But first let’s get to the paper itself.

The paper, by J. Kauppinen and P. Malmi, is a pre-publication paper on the Arxiv. This means it is not peer-reviewed. Their central claim, from the abstract:

In this paper we will prove that GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 fail to calculate the influences of the low cloud cover changes on the global temperature.

Right in the first sentence is a huge red flag – claiming to be able to “prove” that the IPCC report is false. That’s a bold claim, and suggests a less than rigorous intellectual approach. They also claim to rebuke a rather robust conclusion built on many lines of evidence with a single line of evidence – the single stroke approach. This is also a huge red flag.

The claim is built around one major line of reasoning, that if you compare low cloud cover with changes in global temperatures, you see a strong correlation. In fact, the authors argue, you can explain most of global warming as resulting from a decrease in low cloud cover, leaving almost nothing left for anthropogenic forcing. There is a great deal wrong with this claim. The site ClimateFeedback has helpfully curated much of the response from climate scientists, who eviscerate the Kauppinen paper, and I will give you a summary of their summary.

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