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I just want to emphasize the usefulness of MLFSOM as a educational tool. I made numerous figures showing principles and problems of data collection using James' program. I can also assure you that in order to use it properly, you need to know something about image data. I only scratched the surface and I think it would be hard work to fake the images in a way that later expert forensics would not readily provide evidence. Also, there are 'watermarks' available from cryptographic methods that are even 'post-processing' resistant. Regrettably, as long as demonstrated forgeries and irresponsibly ignorant mistakes and their cover-ups have no consequences whatsoever, the temptation will remain. BR -----Original Message----- From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of George M. Sheldrick Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 10:27 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] fake images After consultation with Ton Spek, I should correct my last email. It turns out that my 'watermark' was not clever enough, because PLATON - his program used to make the picture that I had randomly picked as an example - can emulate the XP watermark (the way of shading the ellipsoids which I intended to be different from the 'genuine ORTEP') rather well, and had indeed done so in the picture in question. However it is technically an 'ORTEP clone' (like XP), not an 'XP clone'. I am using 'clone' to mean that one has intentionally created the 'same look and feel' as an existing program, not to imply that the same code is used. This shows how difficult it will be for James to include an unforgeable 'watermark' in his calculated frames, though I would still encourage him to try. Being able to emulate the experiment so well is wonderful for debugging the programs used to process the frames, but it will surely make fraud more difficult to detect!