Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art

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This year, it should come as no surprise that President-elect Donald Trump was chosen to grace the cover of Time’s annual issue (shot by Jewish photographer Nadav Kander). “For better or worse,” Trump, during his campaign and now after his election, has certainly been among the greatest influences on the events of the year. For clues as to how Time feels about that question — is it “for better or worse?” — we can look to the image chosen for the cover of the issue. The decisions that Time made regarding how to photograph Trump reveal a layered, nuanced field of references that place the image among, in this viewer’s opinion, the magazine’s greatest covers. In order to deconstruct the image, let’s focus on three key elements (leaving aside the placement of the ‘M’ in ‘Time’ that makes it look like Trump has red horns): the color, the pose, and the chair:

The Color

Notice how the colors appear slightly washed out, slightly muted, soft. The palette creates what we might call a vintage effect. ...namely, Kodachrome. Kodachrome, It was immensely popular between the late 30’s and 70s, and its distinctive look defines our common visual concept of nostalgia.

 Trump ran a campaign based on regressive policies and attitudes — anti-environmental protection, anti-abortion, pro-coal, etc.... also about traditional values (defined primarily by the Christian right), about nostalgia for American greatness and security, about nostalgia for a pre-globalized world.

The Pose

Trump’s pose can be read as a subversive play on a traditional power-portrait pose.....

The Lincoln Memorial ...We see our subject head on, ...The angle forces us to look up at the subject, which in turn creates the impression that the subject is looking down at us. This pose and angle,... makes the subject appear dominant, powerful, judging.

On the Time cover, instead of seeing Trump head on and from below, we see him seated from behind and roughly at eye level. The power relation has shifted entirely.

Trump’s turn towards the camera renders the tone conspiratorial rather than judgmental. ... By choosing not to shoot Trump head on, the Time cover almost offers us a “behind the scenes” glimpse of the man who has spent so much of his time in front of the camera..The highly posed and processed nature of the photograph offers yet another level of irony.

Finally, we must note the ominous shadow lurking on the backdrop. It’s a small, but important and clever detail. Just as this image provides us with two theoretical points of view, it also provides us with two Trumps — Trump the president-elect, and the specter of Trump the president, haunting in the wings, waiting to take form.

The Chair

The masterstroke, the single detail that completes the entire image, is the chair. Trump is seated in what looks to be a vintage “Louis XV” chair ....The chair not only suggests the blindly ostentatious reigns of the French kings just before the revolution, but also, more specifically, the reign of Louis XV who, according to historian Norman Davies, “paid more attention to hunting women and stags than to governing the country” and whose reign was marked by “debilitating stagnation,” “recurrent wars,” and “perpetual financial crisis” (sound familiar?).

...It’s a gaudy symbol of wealth and status, but if you look at the top right corner, you can see a rip in the upholstery, signifying Trump’s own cracked image. ....— the entire illusion of grandeur begins to collapse. The cover is less an image of a man in power than the freeze frame of a leader, and his country, in a state of decay. The ghostly shadow works overtime here — suggesting a splendor that has already passed, if it ever existed at all.

.... like “The Picture of Dorian Gray” suggests more than just a physical deterioration.

As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement. As a cover, it’s a statement.

Jake Romm

Eye-Fi forcing upgrade to new cards

Looks like the same anger over forced windows updates is the same for Eye-Fi


“Eye-Fi began phasing out sales of the X2 product line in 2012,” Eyefi explains in an FAQ on its site. “The last version produced by the company were sold through authorized channels in the United States in March, 2015.”
So if you purchased an X2 card more recently than March 2015, you probably got it through an unauthorized seller.

After September 16th, you will no longer be able to create an Eyefi Center account, which was required by X1 and X2 cards.
Certain functions of your X2 card, such as Direct Mode, may continue to function beyond the End of Life date, but you’ll need to set it up prior to that date. Selective Transfer will also function if enabled early, but Relayed Transfer will cease to function.
The Eyefi software used by older cards will also no longer be updated or supported, so there’s absolutely no guarantee that critical features will continue to work into the future.
It’s rather unusual for products such as Wi-Fi cards to be bricked completely by the manufacturer, and some photographers are understandably upset about the news. One frustrated customer published an open letter to Eyefi on Hacker News.
“Receiving your email about removing support for X2 cards this morning has made me furious,” the author writes. “That your company would have the gall to sell cards that would be obsolete within a few years is preposterous.”
“I would have updated to the Mobi cards in time anyway, but out of principle I will avoid Eye-Fi products in the future and advise my photographing friends to do the same. Shame on your company.”
Eyefi says the reason for the End of Life is that older wireless and encryption technologies are no longer safe and appropriate, so they’re dropping support and forcing photographers to move to its newer products with newer technologies.
For photographers wishing to switch to newer Eyefi Mobi cards, Eyefi is offering a 20% discount for up to 3 units. However, we’re guessing that many customers will now be thinking twice before jumping into the new Eyefi generation.

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Fukushima Isn't Mutating the Daisies

A picture of some deformed plant sex organs is alarming people all over the internet this week. The photo, taken by Twitter user @san_kaido, shows a bunch of daisies that look like conjoined twins. The accompanying tweet describes their twisted, ribbonlike appearance, and reports a radiation reading for the spot.

Given that the photo was taken in Nasushiobara City, about 80 miles from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site, the radiation data is probably what made news organizations across America freak out. (We wanted to ask @san_kaido more, but he wasn’t taking any more interviews). But it turns out that particular type of deformity can also be the result of a virus or insect damage, and moreover, the background radiation reported is unlikely to harm a plant.

The Word of the Day Is Fasciation

Plants grow by adding new cells at the tips of their stems from a region called the apicalmeristem. The meristem contains a reservoir of undifferentiated cells that can start new stems, leaves, or flowers; those cells are usually arranged in a tiny dome. But if a few cells in the meristem die, the dome can get flattened or curved. And that little shape change can have a huge effect on what the plant that grows out of it will look like—the plant parts growing from the distorted meristem have the same flattened and distorted shape. For the flowers in question, they look weird because they’re not growing symmetrically, and we expect our daisies to be symmetrical.

The phenomenon is called fasciation. And although it can be the result of a mutation that affects the meristem’s ability to maintain its shape, it can also be caused by anything that can simply kill off a few meristem cells: bacterial or viral infections, mechanical injury to the plant, even a heavy rain after a long drought. According to University of Massachusetts plant biologist Elsbeth Walker, it’s actually pretty easy to find plants with this condition if you’re looking for them. “If you go into any greenhouse to buy a houseplant you’ll probably find at least one–they’re a dime a dozen.” Even more likely, you’ve eaten one—strawberries sometimes fasciate into enormous fan-shaped berries.

But What About the Radiation?

Granted, mutation can cause fasciation. And that background radiation level–0.5 μSieverts/hour, according to the tweet—is certainly higher than the background levels found in other parts of Japan. But the question is whether that’s enough radiation to damage or mutate a plant, and by extension, the people near the plant.

Let’s do the math.

Sieverts (Sv) are units that are used to measure how much damage is caused by radiation absorbed by living tissue. Specifically, 1 Sv represents the effect on 1 kilogram of human tissue after it absorbs 1 joule of energy. One Sv all at once would make you sick, but we’re actually exposed to small amounts of radiation every day— from sources like cosmic rays, radon, coal power plants, and CRT monitors–and we’re perfectly capable of absorbing those low doses safely. For convenience, we typically measure these doses in microSieverts: 1μSievert (μSv) is equal to 0.000001 Sv.

Since plants can’t move, we can assume that the daisies have been growing there all season, exposed to a background radiation of 0.5 μSv each hour. That means that over the course of a day, the plant accumulates: 0.5 μSv/hour * 24 hours/day = 12 μSv/day.

And over the course of a year, it accumulates: 12 μSv/day * 365 days/year = 4380 μSv/year.

Most sources give yearly dose averages in milliSieverts (mSv), so let’s convert our units for ease of comparison: 4380 μSv/year = 4.38 mSv/year.

According to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the average American picks up a radiation dose of 6.2 mSv/year from background sources. Other sources report somewhat higher or lower values, which isn’t surprising because background radiation can vary a lot from place to place. Still, it’s undeniable that the current background exposure that those daisies are getting is lower than what you’re probably accumulating in your normal daily life. And it’s well below the maximum permitted dose for radiation workers in the United States of 50 mSv.

But what if plants are super sensitive to radiation?

Diving into the botany literature, you find that a lot of scientists in the 1950s spent their time zapping plants with X-rays and gamma rays. And it turns out fasciation is a typical plant response to damage caused by ionizing radiation. But it takes a lot of radiation to induce that damage. A 2004 review published in the Journal of Radiological Protection estimates that thesmallest radiation dose needed to change normal plant growth is about 100 μSv/hour. That’sthree orders of magnitude larger than @san_kaido’s measurement.

To be fair, Shasta daisies are perennials: It’s possible this particular plant was alive during the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima plant. If so, it would have absorbed a larger dose of radiation around the time of the accident. Could that have been enough to mutate it?

Fortunately for our purposes, radiation readings from June and July of 2011 for Nasushiobara City are available on this handy Google Map. Two months after the accident, background radiation in that city was 740 nanoSv/hour. That’s the same as 0.74 μSv/hour: higher than current background readings, but still orders of magnitude less than it takes to mutate a plant.

Diane Kelly

Filed to: DEBUNKED 7/24/15 3:45pm

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Scientists Studied #TheDress — Here's What They Found About The Colors You See

Amy CapettaMay 15, 2015

Blue and black or white and gold? Scientists are on the case.  (Photo: Tumblr)

Yes, “The Dress” has made the news again, but now it’s taken a scientific turn.

Three papers on the is-it-gold-and-white-or-is-it-blue-and-black debate have been published in the recent issue of the journal Current Biology.

“When The Dress first came out and was shown to the world, I thought it was social media fluff,” Bevel Conway, a professor of neuroscience at Wellesley College and an author to one of the studies, tells Yahoo Health. “But actually, it has taken the scientific community by a far greater, if so, burning storm than it did for the popular media.”

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Conway’s experiment consisted of 1,400 adults, where over 300 of the participants had never looked at The Dress prior to the study. He and his team discovered that people fell into three different groups — the white/gold camp, the blue/black camp and a smaller blue/brown camp. And they could also be divided by age and sex: they found that older people and women were more likely to see The Dress as white and gold, while the younger volunteers were more likely to see the garment as being black and blue. “The blue/brown group were not as common as everybody else, but they’re a significant group and I have to stick up for them because I’m one of them!” he adds.

Related: Is This Dress Blue and Black or White and Gold? Here’s What The Experts Say

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“The leading hypothesis is one that I put out there when The Dress first came on the scene, which is that people have different internal models, and that the color correction algorithm that we have in our brains works differently in different people,” Conway continues. “And that comes about because of the exposure that people have to different lighting situations.”

He then explains how challenging it is for a camera to capture the true color of an image. “Every single photograph that is taken requires some color correction because the connection between wave length stimulus and color is not a reflex — it’s not like that wave length equals that color. This is the main reason why photography was so hard to develop — because the investors had to figure out how to get the film to reproduce closely enough what you had experienced.”

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Yes, someone got a “The Dress” tattoo. ( Photo: Imgur)

And there are tiny computers inside our cameras, which are trying to interpret the correct colors and lighting conditions. “So in this particular case, the illumination conditions were basically confused to the color correction algorithm in the camera,” continues Conway. “So you end up with this very peculiar photograph where the only components in it, the objective pixel colors, are blues and browns. And those two colors just happen to be the colors we associate with natural illuminance.”

Related: What #TheDress Color You See Says About You

Which leads us into the second study, conduced in Germany. The researchers concludes that all of the colors observed by their 15 participants are similar to the colors found in daylight, which supports previous works on how the eye perceives natural sunlight.

The third experiment was comprised of 87 college-aged students from the University of Nevada, Reno. Researchers asked them what color they saw when looking at the light-blue stripes — half reported blue while half reported white. Then the investigators manipulated the image so that the black stripes appeared blue and the blue stripes appeared gold. And 95 percent of the students reported seeing yellow or gold.

The study author, a cognitive scientist named Michael Webster, concluded that our eyes are likely to confuse blue objects with blue lighting and — similar to the German research — has to do with how our eyes translates in the presence of natural light from the sun and the sky.

Related: We Asked An Entire Conference Of Eye Doctors To Explain What’s Up With #The Dress

Conway, of Wellesley, points out that his paper is “entirely correlational and circumstantial, so we need to do a lot more experiments to prove this idea. But The Dress is possibly one of the most effective tools we now have for studying that internal color correction mechanism that we have in our head.”

And so the phenomenon continues.

Let’s keep in touch! Follow Yahoo Health on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have a personal health story to share? We want to hear it. Tell us at YHTrueStories@yahoo.com.

Quotes

The One ThingTop Trainers EatBefore A Workou

The art of before-and-after pictures and how lighting and posture changes your body

 

Before-and-after adverts, showing pictures of people who have lost weight or become fitter, feature in thousands of magazines. But how reliable are they, asks Justin Parkinson.

Wow, what a transformation. Two volunteers go from looking pale and unfit to tanned, toned and dynamic. Before and after photos show the benefits of a change in lifestyle - eating better, exercising more and, in many cases, taking dietary supplements to help the process along.
So how long did it take for the man and woman on the left to turn into those on the right?
Just under two hours.
They volunteered for photos taken as part of BBC Wales's Week In Week Out's investigation into sports supplements. The "regime" consisted of spray-tanning, 15 minutes of light exercise, improved posture and the introduction of more subtle lighting.

 

How to create the "Before and After" effect

"I was amazed when I first saw the difference," says Joe, the male volunteer, who also had his chest shaved for the shoot. "We hardly did anything in between. There was hardly any editing of the photos, either. It just goes to show what complete rubbish some of these adverts must be."
Physical self-improvement is a long-established business. During the 1940s, weightlifter Charles Atlas advertised his bodybuilding courses by describing himself as a the "97lb weakling who became 'the world's most perfectly developed man'". The pieces often featured stories of how skinny young men on beaches had followed his diktats for a short period, returned and successfully confronted bullies who had kicked sand in their faces.
These days, thousands of nutritional supplements are sold with the stated aim of helping people develop their bodies. The industry is worth more than £300m a year in the UK and, with concerns over obesity far higher than during the post-World War Two period, the global weight-loss industry is expected to be worth £220bn by 2017.
The basic formula remains the same. "If you're in charge of advertising diet products, body-building supplements or vitamins for a client you'd pretty much get fired if you didn't come up with at least one campaign featuring a before-and-after shot," says Peter Davies, director of the RMS public relations agency.
Under EU rules, claims about rapid weight loss or before-and-after photographs which state or imply a rate or amount of weight loss are prohibited, according to a Health Supplements Information Service spokesman.
He adds that there is no specific prohibition against "before-and-after" pictures in relation to muscle gain, but using them to make a claim in relation to a product could be viewed as misleading. A protein product can only ever be marketed as providing the materials for muscle gain that is actually achieved through working out.
"One old trick clients used to try was to simply avoid the use of the words 'before' and 'after'," says Davies. "They'd simply print the pictures alongside each other with no text to lead the reader to assume they were 'before-and-after' images." However, the rules have tightened up, he adds, and "anything that misleads the punter will be pulled" by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Could there even be an upside to before-and-after adverts?
"You could instantly see the volunteers' confidence growing after they were shown the 'after' pictures," says the photographer Antti Karppinen, who carried out the shoot for Week In Week Out. "They were surprised how much better they looked. It was a boost to them."


Week In Week Out will be shown on BBC One Wales at 22:40 GMT on Tuesday 3 March.
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25 Years of Beautiful, Fake Images Brought to You By Photoshop

by Matt Novak

 

Happy birthday Photoshop! You might be turning 25 this week, but you don't look a day over 20. (We suspect you've had some photoshopping done.)

It's no secret that Adobe Photoshop didn't invent image manipulation. People have been dramatically altering photos since the invention of photography itself. But Photoshop pushed image tinkering into the digital age, and much like other tools of the digital revolution, helped bring photo fakery to the masses.

Below we look back at just a few of the photoshops (yes, it's a generic term now, whether Adobe likes it or not) that would become famous and infamous.

Reading is fundamental

Does anything look fishy about this image of President George W. Bush? His book might be upside down, but that's all thanks to a little Photoshop trickery.

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CCTV cameras outside George Orwell's house

Is that really a CCTV outside George Orwell's famous house? No, it's not. It's from a series of photoshopped works by artist Steve Ullathorne.

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Computer of the future from 1957

This "computer of the future" which purports to be from the 1950s is too good to be true. Back in 2007 Fark hosted a photoshop contest, and thanks to the magic of the internet, this one quickly went viral. The only problem? People were soon passing it off as real.

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Supermoon

1

Like so many supermoon photos, this one is a fake. I'm no moonologist, but if the moon was really that big on any given night I'm pretty sure we'd all be dead by now. Because tides or something.

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Putin bunny ears

This photo of Putin-pal Steven Seagal giving bunny ears spread far and wide on social media. And yes, Seagal is buddies with Putin. But those fingers are fake. Certainly makes you wonder what the sly look is all about though.

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9-11 Guy

Of all the early 2000s photoshops to go viral, "9-11 guy" is one that sticks out in my mind as particularly shocking. You can tell almost immediately that it was fake, given the bad timestamp. But 9-11 was still so fresh in everyone's minds that the fact anyone would make such a thing was pretty damn shocking. The original story most commonly attached to this photo? It was found on some undeveloped film in the wreckage of the Twin Towers.

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Underwater train

There are so many photoshops that are simply too good to fact-check. And this "underwater train" is one of them. We wanted to believe that real life was like Harry Potter movie or something. Too bad it's a fake.

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Obama smoking

Election season brings out the photoshops like none other. And, as you can imagine, Obama got more than his fair share of photoshops in both 2008 and 2012. The one that's most interesting is perhaps the most plausible. Obama has been an occasional smoker and struggled to quit. But this photo of him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth is fake.

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Buddha carved in stone

You may have seen this remarkable image of "Buddha" carved in stone. Too bad it's a total fake, created by internet artists. I talked with the creator last year and when I asked about his images that were "clearly photoshopped" he shot back that to him they were all "clearly photoshopped." The photoshopness is clearly in the eye of the beholder.

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Northern Lights

2

 

Which brings us to the gif at the top of this post. As you can see, it's not the Northern Lights of Alaska. The background is actually a panoramic image of the Orion Nebula, taken from the Hubble telescope. Well done, for sure! But totally fake.

So what's your favorite Photoshop of all time? Did any of these fool you when you first saw them?