Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories and display cabinets for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects.
Here is my second collection of deceptive curios.
- Ahead of last year’s 2022 Football (Soccer) World Cup, all referees were required to attend a ‘Deception Camp’ to become better at spotting fouling, diving, shirt pulling and other forms of unfair sneakiness. I can’t say I saw much evidence of these newfound skills during the competition, however! Deception camp.
- An eye-opening article about hidden ‘kill switches’ in tractors, the underground market for hacking such systems, and the covert aggregation and selling of worldwide tractor sensor data about soil conditions to private equity firms making bets in the futures market. Kill switches.
- Police playing copyrighted music during protests to disrupt protestors’ posting of videos to YouTube. Music disruption.
- The avian broken wing display is more widespread than previously thought – Wing display. Paper is available here: Paper.
- Russian people smugglers who built a fake border with Finland – Border.
- A review (from seven years ago) suggests that Whaley’s approach to counterdeception may have limited value in cyberspace. I disagree with various issues raised in the article (possibly the basis of a future post!?); nonetheless, the review highlights many important considerations for detecting falsehood in cyber. Counterdeception in cyber.
- A couple of great articles from Wired demonstrate the dangers of applying machine learning to assess the risk of fraud posed by welfare benefit claimants. Of particular interest are the problems inherent in the training data for such systems and how proxy variables (such as spoken language and number of housemates, etc.) maintain blatant algorithmic biases after overtly discriminatory variables (such as ethnicity and poverty indicators) have been stripped. This algorithm could ruin your life and Inside the suspicion machine.
- I’m not sure if this is comedy or art, but it’s certainly recommended viewing for any student of deception: “Nathan Fielder returns to television for a new series that explores the lengths one man will go to reduce the uncertainties of everyday life. With a construction crew, a legion of actors, and seemingly unlimited resources, Fielder allows ordinary people to prepare for life’s biggest moments by “rehearsing” them in carefully crafted simulations of his own design. When a single misstep could shatter your entire world, why leave life to chance?” The Rehearsal.
- “The Era of Faked CCTV Has Truly Arrived” — A compelling article that describes how bad actors manipulate scenes captured on CCTV to cover their tracks, fueling ‘malinformation’ that is tough to contain. Fake CCTV.
- Fascinating ‘Caustic Lenses’ that invisibly encode photographs and text in clear glass and acrylic. Caustic lenses.