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"The photographs of celebrities and models in fashion advertisements and magazines are routinely buffed with a helping of digital polish. The retouching can be slight - colors brightened, a stray hair put in place, a pimple healed. Or it can be drastic - shedding 10 or 20 pounds, adding a few inches in height and erasing all wrinkles and blemishes, done using Adobe's Photoshop software, the photo retoucher's magic wand. "Fix one thing, then another and pretty soon you end up with Barbie," said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science and a digital forensics expert at Dartmouth. And that is a problem, feminist legislators in France, Britain and Norway say, and they want digitally altered photos to be labeled. In June, the American Medical Association adopted a policy on body image and advertising that urged advertisers and others to "discourage the altering of photographs in a manner that could promote unrealistic expectations of appropriate body image." Dr. Farid said he became intrigued by the problem after reading about the photo-labeling proposals in Europe. Categorizing photos as either altered or not altered seemed too blunt an approach, he said. Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "

"VANDALS have struck a painting that depicts South African President Jacob Zuma with his genitals hanging out. Two men defaced the picture with gobs of paint, as Mr Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order yesterday to have the painting removed from an art gallery. The case is spiced with freedom of expression on the one hand and the right to dignity on the other. It took centre stage after the painting by Brett Murray went on display in a Johannesburg gallery this month and was reported on in local media. Mr Zuma, who has a reputation for promiscuity, took the depiction of him with his private parts exposed very personally and compared himself to a rape victim. Mr Zuma himself was put on trial for rape, and acquitted, in 2006. "The portrayal has ridiculed and caused me humiliation and indignity," Mr Zuma contended in an affidavit filed yesterday with the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg. Presiding over the hearing in a courtroom a few kilometres from the gallery, Judge Fayeeza Kathree-Setiloane said the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake. South Africa's constitution protects the right to dignity as well as to freedom of expression. She said the hearing would recommence tomorrow. Mr Zuma and the ANC sought to have the painting, titled "The Spear," removed from the Goodman Gallery and to stop the newspaper City Press from displaying a photo of it on its website. Just before the hearing was scheduled to begin, two men wielding cans of red and black paint calmly walked up to the painting hanging on a gallery wall and took turns defacing it. "Now it's completely and utterly destroyed," said Iman Rappetti, a reporter for a South African TV channel who happened to be on the scene at the time as her camera rolled. Her channel showed a man in a tweed jacket painting a red X over the president's genital area and then his face. Next, a man in a hoodie smeared bl

"LOS ANGELES (October 20, 2010) - The Parents Television Council™ denounced the makers of the TV show "Glee" for a hyper-sexualized GQ photo shoot that will be featured in the November issue. "Glee" airs on Tuesdays at 8:00 pm ET/PT (7:00 pm CT/MT) on Fox. "It is disturbing that GQ, which is explicitly written for adult men, is sexualizing the actresses who play high school-aged characters on 'Glee' in this way. It borders on pedophilia. Sadly, this is just the latest example of the overt sexualization of young girls in entertainment," said PTC President Tim Winter. "Many children who flocked to 'High School Musical' have grown into 'Glee' fans. They are now being treated to seductive, in-your-face poses of the underwear-clad female characters posing in front of school lockers, one of them opting for a full-frontal crotch shot. By authorizing this kind of near-pornographic display, the creators of the program have established their intentions on the show's direction. And it isn't good for families."

"The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age. But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries. There are many famous altered photographs, from a Matthew Brady photograph of Abraham Lincoln's head composited on to John Calhoun's body to the endlessly altered photographs from Soviet Russia. An entire book, "The Commissar Vanishes," by David King, is devoted to Soviet whims about who should be included (or deleted) in photographs. In the series shown above, Stalin is accompanied by three officials, then two, then one, as they successively fall out of favor and are cropped and airbrushed into non-existence. (In the end, in a painting based on the photograph, he stands alone.) We understand Stalin's intentions by removing comrades, but what is the purpose of these Iranian missile photographs? They are clearly altered. The question remains: Why, and to what end?"

"Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night. And in August the New Jersey Supreme Court set new rules to cope with failings in witness accounts, during an appeal by a man picked from a photo lineup, and convicted of manslaughter and weapons possession in a 2003 fatal shooting. Rather than the centerpiece of prosecution, witness testimony should be viewed more like trace evidence, scientists say, with the same fragility and vulnerability to contamination. Why is a witness's account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. "Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it's overloaded," said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. "An event happens so fast, and when the police question you, you probably weren't concentrating on the details they're asking about." "

"A new 24-page fashion spread in the September issue of Italian Vogue features model Kristen McMenamy wearing oil-soaked black feathered outfits, withering away on a beach. Famed photographer Steven Meisel shot the controversial Gulf disaster-inspired images of McMenamy caught in nets, spitting up oil, and flopping like a dying seal on rocks. But while the images are powerful and striking, we're left wondering whether they were done in good taste. What do you think about the Italian Vogue spread? Do you find these images exploitative, glamorizing, or thought-provoking?"

"In the seven decades since his mysterious death, bluesman Robert Johnson's legend has grown-the tragically short life, the "crossroads" tale of supernatural talent, the genuine gift that inspired Dylan, Clapton, and other greats-but his image remains elusive: only two photos of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. In 2005, on eBay, guitar maven Zeke Schein thought he'd found a third. Schein's quest to authenticate the picture only led to more questions, both about Johnson himself and about who controls his valuable legacy. "

"The helpless, seemingly clueless infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions-happy, sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy, frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood. They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences, especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your sib has a long memory-and she can hold a grudge."

"A few months after the World Trade Center attacks, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." Solo scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered glaring security flaws in many of them. Between February 2001 and March 2002, Solo broke into almost a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense. He surfed around for months, copying files and passwords. At one point he brought down the U.S. Army's entire Washington, D.C., network, taking about 2000 computers out of service for three days. U.S. attorney Paul McNulty called his campaign "the biggest military computer hack of all time." But despite his expertise, Solo didn't cover his tracks. He was soon traced to a small apartment in London. In March 2002, the United Kingdom's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested Gary McKinnon, a quiet 36-year-old Scot with elfin features and Spock-like upswept eyebrows. He'd been a systems administrator, but he didn't have a job at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging his obsession with UFOs. In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the reason for his hack. Convinced that the government was hiding alien antigravity devices and advanced energy technologies, he planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA's Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO. Despite the outlandishness of his claims, McKinnon now faces extradition to the United States under a controversial treaty that could land him in prison for years-and possibly for the rest of his life. The case has transformed McKinnon into a cause célèbre. Supporters have rallied outside Parliament with picket signs. There are "Free Gary" websites, T-shirts, posters. Rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist for Pink Floyd, even recorded

"A Santa Barbara, Calif., startup called Social Intelligence data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you. While background checks, which mainly look for a criminal record, and even credit checks have become more common, Social Intelligence is the first company that I'm aware of that systematically trolls social networks for evidence of bad character. Using automation software that slogs through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, and "thousands of other sources," the company develops a report on the "real you" -- not the carefully crafted you in your resume. The service is called Social Intelligence Hiring. The company promises a 48-hour turn-around. Because it's illegal to consider race, religion, age, sexual orientation and other factors, the company doesn't include that information in its reports. Humans review the reports to eliminate false positives. And the company uses only publically shared data -- it doesn't "friend" targets to get private posts, for example. The reports feature a visual snapshot of what kind of person you are, evaluating you in categories like "Poor Judgment," "Gangs," "Drugs and Drug Lingo" and "Demonstrating Potentially Violent Behavior." The company mines for rich nuggets of raw sewage in the form of racy photos, unguarded commentary about drugs and alcohol and much more. "

"With so many candidates, competing experts and imperfect authentication techniques, an ironclad answer may prove elusive. When a panel of art historians and forensic investigators hired by Mr. Norsigian declared last summer that the images were certainly the work of Adams, the team relied on several factors, including a handwriting analysis that concluded that the sleeves of some of the negatives had writing on them that looked to be that of Adams's wife, Virginia Adams But since then, one member of Mr. Norsigian's panel has said he believes the identification was wrong, and another has lowered his level of certainty. "