Among the many temptations of the digital age, photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science, and scientific journals are beginning to respond.
Some journal editors are consid-ering adopting a test, in use at The Journal of Cell Biology, that could have caught the concocted images of the human embryonic stem cells made by Dr. Hwang Woo-suk.
At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipu-lated in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. "In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud," he said.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
The two editors recognized the likelihood that images were being improperly manipulated when the journal required all illustrations to be submitted in digital form. While reformatting illustrations submitted in the wrong format, Rossner realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of Photoshop's image-changing tools to misrepresent the original data.
In some instances, he found, authors would remove bands from a gel, a test for showing what proteins are present in an experiment. Sometimes a row of bands would be duplicated and presented as the controls for a second experiment. Sometimes the background would be cleaned up, with Photoshop's rubber stamp or clone stamp tool, to make it prettier.
Some authors would change the contrast in an image to eliminate traces of a diagnostic stain that showed up in places where there shouldn't be one. Others would take images of cells from different experiments and assemble them as if all were growing on the same plate.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
To prohibit such manipulations, Rossner and Mellman published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of an illustration that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is fine to adjust the brightness or color balance of the whole photo, but not to obscure, move or introduce an element.
They started checking illustrations in accepted manuscripts by running them through Photoshop and adjusting the controls to see if new features appeared. This is the check that has shown a quarter of accepted manuscripts violate the journal's guidelines.
In the 1 percent of cases in which the manipulation is deemed fraudulent -- a total of 14 papers so far -- the paper is rejected. Revoking an accepted manuscript requires the agreement of four of the journal's officials. "In some cases we will even contact the author's institution and say, `You should look into this because it was not kosher,"' Mellman said.
He and Rossner plan to add software tests being developed by Hani Farid, an applied mathema-tician at Dartmouth. With a grant from the FBI, which is interested in ways of authenticating digital images presented in court, Farid is devising algorithms to detect alterations.
His work has attracted interest from many people, he said, including eBay customers concerned about the authenticity of images, people answering personal ads, paranormal researchers studying ghostly emanations and science editors.
For the latter, Farid is devel-oping a package of algorithms designed to spot specific types of image manipulation. When researchers seek to remove an object from an image, such as a band from a gel, they often hide it with a patch of nearby background. This involves a duplication of material, which may be invisible to the naked eye but can be detected by mathematical analysis.
If an object is enlarged beyond the proper resolution, Photoshop may generate extra pixels. If the object is rotated, another set of pixels is generated in a characteristic pattern.
An object introduced from another photo may have a different angle of illumination. The human eye is largely indifferent to changes in lighting, Farid said, but conflicting sources of illumination in a single image can be detected by computer analysis and are a sign of manipulation.
"At the end of the day you need math," Farid said. He hopes to have a set of tools available soon for beta-testing by Rossner.
Journals depend heavily on expert reviewers to weed out papers of poor quality. But as the Hwang case showed again, reviewers can do only so much. The defined role of reviewers is not to check for concocted data but to test whether a paper's conclusions follow from the data presented.
The screening test addresses an issue reviewers cannot easily tackle, that of whether the presented data accurately reflect the real data. Because journal editors now have the ability to perform this sort of quality control, "they should do it," Rossner said.
The scientific community has not yet come to grips with the temptations of image manipulation, Mellman said, and he would like to see other journals adopt the image-screening system, even though it takes 30 minutes per paper. "We are a poor university press," he said, without the large revenue enjoyed by journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. "If they can't bear this cost, something must be dreadfully wrong with their business models," he said.
The Taipei Times last week reported that the rising share of seniors in the population is reshaping the nation’s housing markets. According to data from the Ministry of the Interior, about 850,000 residences were occupied by elderly people in the first quarter, including 655,000 that housed only one resident. H&B Realty chief researcher Jessica Hsu (徐佳馨), quoted in the article, said that there is rising demand for elderly-friendly housing, including units with elevators, barrier-free layouts and proximity to healthcare services. Hsu and others cited in the article highlighted the changing family residential dynamics, as children no longer live with parents,
The classic warmth of a good old-fashioned izakaya beckons you in, all cozy nooks and dark wood finishes, as tables order a third round and waiters sling tapas-sized bites and assorted — sometimes unidentifiable — skewered meats. But there’s a romantic hush about this Ximending (西門町) hotspot, with cocktails savored, plating elegant and never rushed and daters and diners lit by candlelight and chandelier. Each chair is mismatched and the assorted tables appear to be the fanciest picks from a nearby flea market. A naked sewing mannequin stands in a dimly lit corner, adorned with antique mirrors and draped foliage
The election of Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) as chair of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) marked a triumphant return of pride in the “Chinese” in the party name. Cheng wants Taiwanese to be proud to call themselves Chinese again. The unambiguous winner was a return to the KMT ideology that formed in the early 2000s under then chairman Lien Chan (連戰) and president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) put into practice as far as he could, until ultimately thwarted by hundreds of thousands of protestors thronging the streets in what became known as the Sunflower movement in 2014. Cheng is an unambiguous Chinese ethnonationalist,
I was 10 when I read an article in the local paper about the Air Guitar World Championships, which take place every year in my home town of Oulu, Finland. My parents had helped out at the very first contest back in 1996 — my mum gave out fliers, my dad sorted the music. Since then, national championships have been held all across the world, with the winners assembling in Oulu every summer. At the time, I asked my parents if I could compete. At first they were hesitant; the event was in a bar, and there would be a lot
RSS