Welcome to the home page of Tiruppur (Tirupur). Tiruppur has gained universal recognition as the leading source of Hosiery, Knitted Garments, Casual Wear and Sportswear. Tiruppur is an important trade center of India.
Towards the east coast of Australia annual Earth 10 hours a week in the light of the world to get a lot of both worlds light of climate change through fear.
Opera in Sydney rule well lit torches again at 20:30 (GMT cf. 930) and the port of Sydney, Australia dozens of buildings across the bridge.
More than 350 historic buildings around the world, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building 101 Taipei will continue.
This year's celebration of the argument of "places of love" as the edges of forests and snow-capped mountains, and rivers and ravines, which were due to the dangers of climate change.
At this age, the organizers hope that the leaders of the region of the Paris meeting December "a new impulse to play" in the faith. This agreement provides for the reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide will be resolved in 2100, changing global Libretto green energy, such as wind and solar.
The global average temperature in the month of the last 1.35 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) before the conquest of the sun above the value of the highest of the month, in the month of February 1951 1980, published by NASA given by the week,
siddartha CEO said that everyone in the world, when heaven "forms" of God.
"Live Cameras and Integer demand climate action from unfair trade," he said.
"They are Earth Hour in front when he warns of climate change, but also against our first line of defense. The activities of our global community has the power to change the shape of the day, every man in the world who fear the Lord, and who is to come. "
In the land of Sydney in 2007, began when, in 2008 WWF projects, preservation of the earth, and men and attracts 50 million, organizers say.
This year, organizers in their land, ie 178 that come to pass.
Two Indians were among 55 passengers who died when FZ981, Flydubai plane crashed in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia early today, officials confirmed. Seven crew members died in the crash.
"These two Indian name on the list issued by the Russian authorities Anju Kathirvel Ayyappan and Mohan Shyam," said an official source from The Hindu revealed that the Indian embassy in touch with the Ministry of Civil Defence, Emergencies and Russian natural disasters (EMERCOM) to get help.
Includes the death of 44 passengers Russians, 8 Ukrainians, and a citizen of Uzbekistan.
Before today, is Vladimir Puchkov, Minister, EMERCOM, has held an emergency meeting of the working group of the government committee for FZ981, beating Dubai route Rostov-on-Don. After the incident, air corridors are on the edge of Rostov-on-Don banned by the Russian authorities and alternative crops tracks created to work quickly to facilitate emergency.
Russia has 700 staff dedicated to the management of emergency consequences.
Asthma is a common inflammatory disease in the long run airways in the lungs. It is characterized by variable and recurring symptoms, reversible airflow obstruction, and bronchospasm. Symptoms include episodes of wheezing, coughing, chest tightness and shortness of breath breath.These episodes can occur several times a day or several times a week. Depending on who may be worse at night or during exercise.
Asthma is believed to be due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Environmental factors include exposure to air pollution and allergens.Other possible triggers include drugs such as aspirin and beta-blockers. The diagnosis is usually based on a model of symptoms, response to treatment for a long time, and spectrometry. Asthma is classified in the frequency of symptoms, forced expiatory volume in one second (FEV1) and peak flow. Furthermore, it can be regarded as atopic and nonatopic where atopy refers to a predisposition to the development of hypersensitivity reactions.
There is no cure for asthma.Symptoms can be prevented by avoiding triggers such as allergens and irritants, and also through the use of inhaled corticosteroids. Long-acting beta-agonists (Laba off) or leukotriene modifiers can be used in addition to inhaled corticosteroids if asthma symptoms remain. Treating the symptoms are rapidly degraded, usually a short-acting inhaled beta-2 agonists such as salbutamol and oral corticosteroids. [In very severe cases, intravenous corticosteroids, magnesium sulfate, and hospitalization may be required.
In 2013, 242 million people worldwide have asthma, compared with 183 million in 1990, it caused about 489,000 deaths in 2013, most of which occurred in developing countries. It often begins in childhood. Asthma rates have increased considerably since 1960s.Asthma was already known in ancient Egypt. The word asthma is derived from the Greek, meaning asthma "whistling".
Evidence of the effectiveness of measures to prevent the development of asthma is weak. Some promise including: limiting exposure to smoke both in utero and after birth, breastfeeding and greater exposure to the nest or large families, but no enough supported to be recommended for this indication.
Early exposure to pets may be helpful. The results of exposure to pets at other times are inconclusive and it is only recommended that animals are removed from the house, if a person has symptoms allergic to the animal. The diet during pregnancy or lactation has not been demonstrated to be effective and not recommended. Reducing or eliminating compounds known to sensitive people to work can be effective.
It is unknown if the annual vaccination against influenza impacts the risk of exacerbations. vaccination; However, it recommended the World Health Organization. Smoking is effective in reducing asthma exacerbations.
Diets high in fat can stimulate cancer by activating the subject tumor stem cells
Instead of eating a high fat diet can not only increase your size. You can also fill the stem cell populations in their gut cells that are likely to produce tumors.
After a year feeding mice with a diet of 60 percent fat, the researchers found that rodents have exceptionally high population susceptible to cancer cells and stem cells that act as intestinal stem cells. These cells were supercharged by a protein called PPAR-δ, which can be activated by the presence of fatty acids in the intestine, the researchers reported.
The findings, published in the journal Nature, could explain why the epidemiological evidence in humans has repeatedly linked to obesity risk driven from cancer, especially colon cancer. You can also give researchers a new target to strike again cancer risk in obese people.
In the gut, usually there is a small pocket of stem cells that work to restore the cells that line the intestine. These cells are maintained throughout life, providing additional opportunities to acquire mutations that might stimulate tumor.
Fat fed mice, which grew chubby, this small population of stem cells thrived unexpectedly. And specialized progenitor cell progeny of stem cells began to act more like their parents, too. They lived longer, increasing their chances of acquiring mutations and tumor potential spawning.
The researchers found that the PPAR-δ was behind the boom of stem and progenitor cells. Petri In experiments, the researchers found that the fatty acids of high fat diet increased amounts of PPAR-delta cells were doing.
This makes sense because the protein is known to activate the metabolic mechanism that helps to burn fat over carbohydrates. However, the protein also seems to cause specific genetic changes to light two populations of cells, the researchers suggest.
In fat mice, the researchers observed higher rates of spontaneous tumors in control mice.
Yet researchers must work harder to find out if stem cells and PPAR-O explain the relationship between cancer and obesity in humans.
A lousy diet can obviously have a lasting impact on the size, but for parents, but can also have a lasting impact on DNA and the family line, a new study suggests.
Compared with lean mice on a standard or a low-fat diet, mice genetically obese transformed into high-fat, high-calorie diet were more likely to be obese offspring at risk of developing type 2 diabetes while the researchers observed such familiar influences metabolic disorders before, the new study took cubs of additional production steps in vitro fertilization of sperm and egg cells of obese parents implanted in surrogates , thin mothers. This experimental configuration eliminates the influences of confusion mom and dad, such as chemicals in the semen, molecular signals in the uterus, and transfers microbiome of breast milk components.
The discovery, published Monday in the journal Nature Genetics, provides own su
pport to the theory that poor diet and / or parental obesity causes chemical changes epigenetic tags and other DNA molecular switches that change the way they read and translates the genetic code, instead of own code. And these changes can propagate to offspring and influence their metabolism and health.
Although the work was done in mice, the researchers believe that similar epigenetic changes may occur in humans and other mammals, which could help explain the recent global rise of obesity and diabetes type 2. In fact, the above data they found that the lean and obese men have epigenetic tags on their sperm.
For the mouse study, the researchers genetically similar mice raised for six weeks in one of three diets: standard mouse diet, a diet low in fat or high in fat, high calorie diet. The latter became obese and developed severe intolerance to glucose (a precursor of type 2 diabetes), while the other remained thin mouse.
Collecting eggs and sperm of mice in each group of diet, researchers have used IVF to specific and controlled crossings. All embryos were transferred healthy and thin for surrogacy. To see if the diet of their biological parents affects their metabolism, all puppies were challenged with a high fat, the diet rich in calories.
As expected, females with pups two obese parents had a high degree of insulin resistance and have won at least 20 percent more weight than children of parents with normal or low-fat diets. young women with one obese parent, mother or father, also gained more weight than the control groups, but only between 8 and 14 percent. The result suggests that the influence of the metabolism of each parent may be additive.
But in a confusing conclusion, small males are not the same model. Obese parents male puppies tend to be a bit heavier than the control group, but the difference was not statistically significant, the authors report. However, they also have a high degree of insulin resistance.
Examination of glucose intolerance more closely, the researchers found that the offspring (men and women) tend to have more severe intolerance to glucose if their mothers were obese. a backup of epidemiological data in humans that suggests higher maternal influence with type 2 diabetes development will take place.
If the results hold in other studies, researchers hope to find exactly what epigenetic factors are transmitted, how they develop, and the number of generations that last.
Scholarly research suggests that the best problem-solving doesn’t come from a group of the best individual problem-solvers, but from a diverse team whose members complement each other. That’s an argument for leadership that is varied in every way — in gender, race, economic background and ideology.
The truth is there’s actually no adequate scientific basis for these newsworthy assertions. And this lack of scientific evidence to guide such statements illustrates the troubled relations of science to advocacy and policy, that I have analyzed in an article in the current Journal of Social Issues.
A chasm between research findings and advocates' claims
I began to think more deeply about these issues during my recent service as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. This organization has worked since 1936 to join social science findings to responsible advocacy and effective social policy.
This goal is laudable, but the task is supremely challenging. As I’ve come to realize, different camps have varying goals. Scientists aim to produce valid knowledge. Advocates work to promote their favored causes. Policymakers hope to efficiently deploy resources to attain social and economic ends. And they’re all assuming their claims are supported by the same body of social science research.
In politically sensitive areas, advocates may eagerly invoke social scientific data that support their objectives but ignore nonsupportive findings. They may highlight politically congenial findings that are unrepresentative of the available scientific knowledge.
Researchers, in turn, may fail to communicate their findings effectively. Communication is challenging when study outcomes are more complex and less affirming of advocates' goals than what they desire and expect.
These issues often arise when research addresses controversial questions of social inequality. That’s where social science myths can and do emerge.
To illustrate these problems, consider two prominent social science myths about diversity.
One concerns the effects of the gender diversity of corporate boards of directors on firms’ financial performance. The other pertains to the effects of the gender and racial diversity of workgroups on their performance. Advocates for diversity generally maintain that the addition of women to corporate boards enhances corporate financial success. And they hold that diversity in task groups enhances their effectiveness. Abundant findings have accumulated on both of these questions – more than 140 studies of corporate boards and more than 100 studies of sociodemographic diversity in task groups. Both sets of studies have produced mixed outcomes. Some studies show positive associations of diversity to these outcomes, and some show negative associations.
Social scientists use meta-analyses to integrate such findings across the relevant studies. Meta-analyses represent all the available studies on a particular topic by quantitatively averaging their findings and also examining differences in studies' results. Cherry-picking is not allowed.
Taking into account all of the available research on corporate boards and diversity of task groups, the net effects are very close to a null, or zero, average. Also, economists' studies that carefully evaluate causal relations have typically failed to find that women cause superior corporate performance. The most valid conclusion at this point is that, on average, diversity neither helps nor harms these important outcomes.
Given these overall findings, further studies are needed to identify the conditions under which diversity has positive or negative effects. And there is some progress here.
For example, research suggests that diversity tends to make decision-making groups more effective if their members create norms that foster personal ties across the races and genders as well as the exchange of ideas. Also, a positive and inclusive mindset about diversity increases the chances of favorable effects on group performance.
But such conditions are often absent. Diversity can create tensions within groups, and the newly introduced female or minority group members may encounter resistance that makes it difficult for them to gain a foothold in decision-making. It’s hardly surprising that the results of empirical studies are inconsistent. These kinds of interpersonal relationships are messy and complicated – it makes sense that upping diversity, on its own, wouldn’t be a magical key to success.
A worthwhile social outcome
What’s the harm in journalists announcing false generalizations about diversity if such statements help increase the number of women and minorities in important roles? After all, most people would agree that it would be an egregious violation of equal opportunity and antidiscrimination laws to exclude women and minorities from opportunities merely on the basis of their sex or race. Isn’t any and all support for inclusion valuable? My answer to this question is no.
First of all, social science myths make a mockery of evidence-based advocacy and policy. In fact, an unusually large body of social science evidence has emerged in tests of the effects of diversity on corporate success and group performance. Advocacy and policy should build on this research, not ignore it.
Myths also set people up to expect that corporate financial gains and superior group performance follow easily from diversity. Of course they don’t. That expectation could sideline people from understanding and overcoming diversity’s challenges.
Finally, false generalizations can impede progress toward better science that may disentangle the causes of diversity’s varied effects on group and organizational success.
Social scientists should freely admit that diversity science doesn’t have all the answers. At the same time, they should not silently tolerate distortions of available scientific knowledge to fit advocacy goals. Ideally, researchers are honest brokers who communicate consensus scientific findings to the broader public. Only then can social science make a meaningful contribution to building sound social policy.
There are other reasons to value diversity in the group.Table image via www.shutterstockcom
Social justice goals are valid on their own
Many advocates and policymakers share the admirable goal of producing a more just society. But they’re narrow-minded if they focus only on whether diversity and inclusion foster outcomes such as business profits or effective group problem-solving. The more fundamental gains from diversity pertain to social justice. Diversity and inclusion can serve social justice goals by countering discrimination that may have put women and minorities at a disadvantage.
Beyond countering possible discrimination lies an even more fundamental social justice consideration – that of equitable representation. This principle holds that citizens in democracies should have equal access to influencing the decisions that shape their lives. To the extent that women and minorities are not represented in decision-making groups in proportion to their numbers in the population, they are unlikely to have their interests fairly represented.
As political scientists have pointed out, the ideals of democracy are violated if decision-making is dominated by the rich, the white and the male. Then the needs of the poor, the minoritiesand the female likely are neglected.
Most advocates, policymakers and social scientists may not be aware of sharp divergence in their claims about diversity. Yet, policy based on sound social science should be a shared goal. Without understanding the causal relations in society that this research helps identify, policymakers lower the odds they’ll reach their targets. Policy based on myths and hunches has little chance of success. To achieve evidence-based policy, all parties should take a close look at what diversity research has produced so far. Rather than selectively featuring congenial results, they should work together to untangle diversity’s complex effects on group and organizational performance. Alice H. Eagly, Professor of Psychology; Faculty Fellow Institute for Policy Research; Professor of Management and Organizations, Northwestern University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Elizabeth Bettini, Boston University and Kristin Murphy, University of Massachusetts Boston
A shortage of special education teachers is threatening the ability of schools in many states to provide high-quality education to students with disabilities. On a national level, 49 states identified a shortage of special education and related service personnel during the 2013-14 school year.
In Arizona, for instance, where districts reported a 29 percent increase from 2013 to 2014 in the number of positions that remained vacant, special education was one of the areas with the highest vacancy rates.
Special educators serve students with significant learning and behavioral needs. To effectively serve their students, they must have sophisticated knowledge and skills about content, pedagogy and students' learning. Special educators who are fully qualified in special education through a teacher preparation program provide more effective instruction, resulting in stronger achievement among their students.
When no qualified special educator can be found, open positions may be filled by substitute teachers who are not qualified to teach at all, by prospective teachers who have not yet completed their teacher preparation or by teachers who are licensed in other areas, but have no specialized preparation for special education. Dr. Loretta Mason-Williams from SUNY Binghamton analyzed a nationally representative survey of teachers; 16 percent of special educators were not certified in special education. This rate was higher in high-poverty schools, which have greater difficulty attracting and retaining all kinds of teachers.
In this context, special education teacher attrition is a major problem – for when a qualified special educator leaves, schools struggle to find a skilled replacement.
So the question is, why do special educators leave their schools?
Here’s why we left
In the mid-2000s, we began our careers in education as emergency certified teachers – that is, we were hired to teach students with disabilities through “provisional licensure programs” (such as this one) that allowed prospective teachers to be considered highly qualified without full preparation or licensure.
We both served as special education teachers for students in middle and high school settings in high-poverty, urban communities – Elizabeth in Tucson, Arizona, and Kristin in New York City.
We served students who qualified for special education because of emotional disabilities. Most of our students had been identified with mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders. Many had histories of trauma and abuse.
Our students relied on us to teach them grade-level standards in all areas. They also relied on us to teach the foundational skills they had missed, such as phonics and math facts. In addition, they relied on us to help them develop the social and behavioral skills necessary to live healthy lives and build positive relationships.
In other words, in our first year as uncertified teachers, we were responsible for the totality of our students’ learning experiences during the school day, for everything they needed to know to be successful in school and beyond.
We struggled to meet these responsibilities with sparse resources – we had few books and curricula, limited mentorship and minimal professional development opportunities. We were planning and delivering instruction in all content areas completely on our own, despite the fact that we had never been trained to do so. We knew our students needed far more than we were capable of providing.
We both improved our skills over time, yet within five years, we both left our schools. We were committed to our students, but we left because we knew that no matter how hard we worked, no matter how much we grew as educators, we couldn’t provide high-quality instruction in all content areas – the kind of instruction our students deserved – without better support.
Our failure to adequately meet our students’ needs was not our failure alone – it was the failure of an educational system that systematically places unqualified teachers in classes serving students with the most significant needs. And then it fails to support them.
As academics, we now study the systems that lead to difficulty recruiting and retaining effective special educators, including how schools can support them, so they can better serve students.
And here are stories of teachers
In our research, we find that our own experiences are not unique. In one study, we interviewed eight special educators in classes for students with significant emotional disabilities. Like us, they felt deeply committed to providing high-quality instruction and being a constant source of safety for students with serious social-emotional needs.
Many special educators report feeling overwhelmed by their workloads.woodleywonderworks, CC BY
They also spoke about the challenges of planning high-quality lessons in all content areas for students in multiple grade levels while meeting students’ social-emotional needs and fulfilling all of their other responsibilities as teachers, such as bus duty, lunch duty, administrative paperwork and so on.
These challenges left them feeling as though they were failing their students.
Take Diedre (name changed), an elementary school special educator. She was responsible for teaching all content areas to students in kindergarten through fifth grade. Diedre had no scheduled planning time, limited curricular resources (e.g., math and reading curriculum) and no lunch break away from her students.
Whereas the general education teachers in her school coplanned instruction for all students within a single grade level, Diedre was planning, completely on her own, for students in every single grade level. She didn’t have colleagues with whom she could share resources and ideas, or go to for help when a student struggled with a standard.
Further, she had extensive extra responsibilities – she planned professional development for all of the teaching assistants in her school, supervised afterschool activities and did bus duty, among other things.
In her interview with us, she shared,
[As a consequence], I end up feeling like I’m never really doing my job, and I’m always letting the kids down.
Exhausting workloads
Other studies confirm that Diedre’s experience is not unique.
For instance, when Dr. Susan Albrecht and her colleagues from Ball State University surveyed 776 special educators who teach students with emotional and behavioral disabilities, they found that more than half felt they had inadequate time to fulfill their responsibilities.
Similarly, Dr. Bonnie Billingsley from Virginia Tech and her colleagues found in their analysis of a survey of new special educators, more than 75 percent reported that routine duties (such as paperwork, supervising students in nonacademic activities, etc.) interfered with their teaching.
In a recent (not yet published) study, we worked with Dr. Nathan Jones from Boston University and Drs. Mary Brownell and Maureen Conroy from the University of Florida to analyze data from a surveyDr. Peter Youngs from the University of Virginia conducted with 245 special and general educators who were in their first three years teaching in urban districts in Michigan and Indiana.
Unsurprisingly, teachers who felt more overwhelmed were more likely to be emotionally exhausted, and more likely to plan to leave. And, new special educators were significantly more likely to report feeling overwhelmed than new general educators.
Working conditions matter
A growing body of research indicates that, when teachers work in more supportive conditions, their students show better academic achievement gains.
For instance, when Dr. Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues at Harvard University analyzed data on all schools in Massachusetts, they found that schools in which teachers rated their administrative support and their school culture more highly had stronger student achievement gains in reading and math. This was so even when controlling for school demographic characteristics, such as the proportion of students living in poverty.
Being supported by skilled colleagues makes a difference.Army Medicine, CC BY
Subsequent analyses with large data sets have obtained similar results, showing that teachers are more effective in schools in which they have supportive administrators and collaborativerelationships with skilled colleagues.
Teachers whose schools had more collaborative cultures become more effective more rapidly than teachers whose schools were less collaborative.
Studies have shown that special education teachers are also more likely to want to continue teaching when they work in a culture of collective responsibility for all students, when they can trust their colleagues and have opportunities to collaborate with them.
In our study of new special educators in Michigan and Indiana, we found that special educators felt less overwhelmed when their schools had cultures of collective responsibility for students with disabilities, and when they interacted with their colleagues around instruction more frequently.
Teachers need support
Special educators often choose to teach because of their commitment to serving students with more significant needs.
And, as we know through our research and experience, they often leave, not because of their students, but because of the unsupportive conditions in which they are expected to serve those students.
Retaining special educators in their schools over the course of their careers is essential for ensuring that students with disabilities are served by qualified and skilled special educators.
For that to happen, our educational system must fulfill its commitments to them – by providing them with adequate time to do their jobs, administrative and collegial support for learning to teach, high-quality professional development opportunities and the material resources necessary to teach. Elizabeth Bettini, Assistant Professor of Special Education, Boston University and Kristin Murphy, Assistant Professor of Special Education , University of Massachusetts Boston
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Interactive body map: what really gives you cancer?
Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation and Sasha Petrova, The Conversation
There’s abundant advice out there on what you should or shouldn’t eat, drink, swallow, or stand next to, to avoid cancer. But it’s often lacking in evidence and the jumble of messages can be confusing.
This body map brings together the evidence on proven cancer causes. Using credible, scientific sources it answers questions about whether alcohol, red meat or sun exposure increase your cancer risk.
Cancer occurs when mutations in a cell’s DNA cause it to replicate without control, invading other tissues. Some cancer-causing mutations can be inherited; others induced, by infection with bacteria or viruses; or by environmental factors such as smoking, sun exposure and eating red meat.
This map’s focus is on induced factors. They are considered “modifiable” because avoiding them lessens your chance of cancer.
Choose your gender and click a risk factor to see which body area can be affected. Clicking the body region will show you how much engaging in risks such as drinking alcohol, taking the contraceptive pill, or eating pickled vegetables, will increase your chance of certain cancers.
When reading the map, keep in mind that every body and circumstance is unique; one risk factor cannot be considered in isolation when applied to a real life context.
Also remember the percentages portrayed are “relative risks” which are different to “absolute risks”. The difference is explained in this accompanying piece, which will help you understand what relative risk really means for your chances of getting cancer. Emil Jeyaratnam, Multimedia Editor, The Conversation and Sasha Petrova, Researcher, Health and Medicine, The Conversation
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Passwords, privacy and protection: can Apple meet FBI's demand without creating a 'backdoor'?
H V Jagadish, University of Michigan
The San Bernardino terrorist suspect Syed Rizwan Farook used an iPhone 5c, which is now in the possession of the FBI. The iPhone is locked. The FBI wants Apple to help unlock it, presumably so they can glean additional evidence or information about other possible attacks. Apple has declined, and appears to ready to defy a court order. Its response is due February 26. So what’s the technology they’re fighting over?
The code to unlock the phone is known only to Farook, who is dead, and any confidants he may have shared it with. Even if he were alive, it would probably be difficult to get him to reveal it.
But phones are typically locked with a very simple personal identification number (PIN) of only four to six digits. That means, at most, there are a million possible PIN values. It’s straightforward to write a computer program that would methodically walk through all these possible values, trying each in turn until the correct one is found. Indeed, there even are products on the market that will do just this. Given that modern computers can execute over one billion instructions every second, even a conservative estimate says testing all one million PIN possibilities would take only about a second.
Ways to ward off attack
One way to defend against this kind of break-in attempt is to do something drastic after multiple failures. For example, Apple deletes all data on the iPhone after 10 incorrect unlocking attempts in succession, if the user has turned on this feature. We don’t know if this defense is activated on Farook’s phone – but the FBI doesn’t want to gamble that it isn’t, turn out to be wrong, and watch the phone be wiped clean after 10 incorrect guesses.
Apple’s security will erase a phone’s contents after a certain number of failed attempts – something the FBI wants to avoid.janitors/flickr, CC BY
A second approach is to force a delay after each failed attempt. If the real authorized user accidentally types in the wrong code, she won’t mind waiting 60 seconds before the phone will let her try again. But for a computer that wants to try a million possibilities, the time required to try all possibilities has gone up by a factor of a million or more.
The FBI, of course, should have no difficulty programming a computer to try all possible passwords. It simply wants Apple to turn off the defenses.
What the FBI is and isn’t asking for
The feds aren’t demanding Apple create a “backdoor.” In encryption, a backdoor is when someone has a means to access protected content outside of the normal (frontdoor) process. For example, there could be a skeleton key built into the encryption mechanism. The National Institute for Standards and Technology is reputed to have built such a facility into a random number generator, a function used in the heart of most encryption techniques. Encryption with a backdoor is technology explicitly designed so that a third party – in most cases, law enforcement – can gain access to the protected data when the need arises. But it’s very hard to build a backdoor into encryption, while still making it hard for an attacker to defeat. I don’t believe anyone is calling for such encryption anymore.
In a letter to customers, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that it will fight the FBI’s request because it would make all users' data less secure.Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Rather than tinker with its encryption, the FBI says it has asked Apple only to modify the defense mechanism built into iOS, its operating system. It’s presumably easy for Apple to create a version of iOS where the delay and data erase features are turned off. This would be a new, less secure version of the standard operating system.
This less secure operating system could be loaded on to the Farook phone, which the FBI could then access more easily. Other iPhones would not be affected.
Software piracy is a major challenge here. Apple has to worry that copies of this insecure operating system may get out and become easily available – and not just to the good guys, but also the bad guys. It’s common practice for software to require that a license be verified explicitly with the software vendor. If the license is not verified, the software will not function. This mechanism can block the insecure operating system from normal use.
But if the insecure operating system is installed for the purpose of data theft, then this normal license protection may not help – even if it doesn’t allow normal use, it may not stop data access. In other words, it could be problematic if copies of this insecure operating system proliferate. However, it doesn’t seem that hard to make sure that a one-time use operating system never leaks out.
It therefore appears there are no major technical barriers, or even immediate consequent difficulties, that prevent Apple from complying with the court order. Furthermore, it is hard to imagine a stronger case for law enforcement to gain access to encrypted data. In fact, a survey finds only 38 percent of Americans side with Apple and agree that they shouldn’t unlock the terror suspect’s phone. Nevertheless, there remain issues.
Our secure systems already fail all the time
It’s not easy to build a secure system. We have so many breaches reported every day, in spite of the best efforts of so many. And the defenses that Apple has been asked to remove have already been violated, at least for some versions of Apple’s products. Every additional wrinkle in the system design makes it more likely that new exploits will be found.
There is little question that this particular request from FBI will not be the last one. In all likelihood, Apple would be asked to use the desired insecure iOS in other future situations. With every use, the possibility increases of the software being leaked.
It’s also worth noting law enforcement does have access to the data in encrypted form without any help from Apple. These encrypted data look like gobbledygook and must be decrypted before they make sense. (In contrast, if they had, or could guess, the PIN, they would directly have access to the data in the convenient form ordinary users see.)
The point of encryption is to make decryption hard. However, hard does not mean impossible. The FBI could decrypt this data, with sufficient effort and computational power, and they could do this with no help from Apple. However, this route would be expensive, and would take some time. In effect, what they’re requesting of Apple is to make their job easier, cheaper and faster.
Ultimately, how this matter gets resolved may depend more on the big-picture question of what privacy rights we as a society want for the data we record on our personal devices. Understanding the technical questions can inform this discussion. H V Jagadish, Bernard A Galler Collegiate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Never mind SpaceX's Falcon 9, where's my Millennium Falcon?
Fredrick Jenet, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and Volker Quetschke, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Last week, SpaceX held another successful launch of its Falcon 9 rocket. Unfortunately, its landing was not quite as successful as the one in December (it crashed into the ocean).
SpaceX isn’t alone in trying to develop reusable launch vehicles. Other private companies such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are also in the race to achieve the dream of consistently landing a rocket after hurtling it into the heavens. Each success – and failure – gets us a little closer.
But how significant is the creation of reusable rockets? And where will we go from here? Are we finally close to the future once promised by the Jetson’s FX-Atmos “flying car” or Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon: a world of personal, space-bound transports that can leave your garage, reach orbit and beyond, and return home in time for dinner?
What else stands in the way?
The final frontier
The “democratization of space exploration,” spurred by NASA encouraging private companies to develop and manage complete launch systems, is igniting a new age of space development and awakening a spirit of exploration and technology innovation that’s been absent from our culture for far too long.
This resurgence of interest is reflected in NASA’s latest call for astronaut applications: 18,300 hopefuls applied for just 14 positions.
And in the private sector, venture capitalists are showing the same enthusiasm by investing US$1.8 billion in space startups in 2015, compared with an average of $193 million a year over the previous 15 years. The increased demand for space access is further spurring on private companies to develop more efficient reusable rocket launch systems.
Today’s space companies aren’t the first to set their sights on such a rocket. This great feat of engineering was originally achieved in 1993, when McDonald Douglass tested the Delta Clipper Experimental (DC-X), a prototype single-stage launch vehicle. NASA later canceled the project.
Now, it seems, the conditions are ripe once again to pick up where the DC-X left off. The private sector has started to take up this challenge, and the race is on to enhance all our lives with cheap space travel.
This future begins with the reusable rocket.
What does a reusable launch vehicle get us?
Imagine what life would be like if, after each trip to Grandma’s, we had to throw away the car. Even with the benefits of mass production, the cost to an individual would be prohibitive, especially if there exist reasonable alternatives like horses or walking. Such automobiles could be employed only by governments, extremely wealthy enthusiasts or perhaps by a few skilled specialists who lived for the challenge.
This is pretty much the situation with current spacecraft technology. Not even the Space Shuttle program achieved the lofty goal of reliable reusability, although it tried very hard. The shuttle was such a complicated system that every time it returned to Earth, intense maintenance had to be performed and systems rebuilt or overhauled, making it three times as expensive as that of an expendable rocket. For example, a shuttle launch cost $450 million to $1.5 billion, compared with $110 million for a Russian Proton rocket with about the same lift capacity.
Truly reusable launch vehicles would significantly reduce the cost of getting material and people into orbit and enable new uses of space with far-reaching socioeconomic consequences that will ultimately reduce our impact on Earth’s environment, such as space-based energy collection, mining and manufacturing.
In order to get an idea of the savings, the retail price of a Falcon 9 rocket is around $60 million to build and launch (including fuel). Given its total lift capacity of 13,150 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, this translates into a price tag of about $400,000 to ferry a 90-kilogram (198-pound) person into space. But if you had to pay only for fuel, about $300,000 a launch, the price tag drops drastically to just $2,000 for the same person. That’s not far from the cost of flying from New York to Sydney, which makes a future family vacation to a Bigelow B330 Space Habitat a viable alternative to Disney World.
At the pace things are going, we project that within 10 years the space industry will achieve the goal of a fully reusable launch vehicle. Companies and municipalities, small and big, are all starting to look into ways of taking advantage of this complete disruption in, or better yet creation of, the commercial space market.
So our next question is this: what do we need to make the Millennium Falcon – that is, a single-stage-to-orbit completely reusable spacecraft – a reality?
A little physics can help us see exactly what needs to happen and exactly how far we are from this goal.
The Shuttle came close to being reusable, but it still required expendable rockets to get into space and significant maintenance after every use.Space Shuttle via www.shutterstock.com
Rocket Science 101
Space travel is all about speed. The old adage, “What goes up must come down,” is true only to a point. If you throw something up fast enough, it won’t come back down; it will have escaped Earth’s gravity. The question is, exactly how fast is fast enough?
A simple application of Newtonian gravity theory tells us that if we achieve a speed of 11 kilometers per second – the equivalent of a plane flying 25,000 mph straight up – we are not going to fall back to Earth. Scientists and engineers refer to this speed, which depends on the physical properties of the Earth, as our planet’s escape velocity.
A rocket tries to achieve that speed by taking mass and throwing it out the back as fast as possible. Thanks to Newton’s third law – which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction – this propels the rocket forward.
The ratio between the change in velocity needed to escape the Earth’s pull (known as delta-v) and the speed at which the rocket sends stuff out the back (exhaust velocity) is the most important number in rocket science. It determines how much mass needs to be expelled and how much energy is necessary to get to space. The smaller we can make the ratio, the better.
Private companies like SpaceX are democratizing space exploration.Reuters
In addition, the propellants and fuels are themselves massive, and the rocket needs to carry these things with itself, making it heaver and harder to accelerate.
So we need propellants and fuels with a high energy content and low mass.
Now we can begin to appreciate the enormous feat of engineering that private companies and governments have achieved by not only launching a rocket but learning to land it as well.
The maximum achievable exhaust velocities for the rockets we’ve been using since the dawn of space travel are much less than the Earth’s escape velocity (about 4 km/s or 9,000 mph), forcing us to come up with ingenious and costly multistage launch techniques to get even a modest payload into space.
In summary, in order to leave the surface of the Earth with the grace and apparent effortlessness of the Millennium Falcon, we need to achieve speeds in excess of the escape velocity, 11 km/s. In order to do that without carrying a fuel tank that far exceeds the size of our ship, we need to achieve exhaust speeds significantly higher than the escape velocity, something not possible with the chemical fuels we use.
So where do we go from here?
So in order to make the Millennium Falcon a reality, we need a new type of fuel, as chemical-based engines are severely limiting.
Thanks to Albert Einstein, we know that there is energy stored in mass itself. Using his famous E = mc² equation, we know that exhaust speeds up to the speed of light are achievable, and way more than necessary to escape Earth’s gravity.
A sustainable exhaust speed of 1,000 km/s, less than 1 percent of the speed of light, would pretty much enable our dream ship. Its fuel-to-mass ratio would be about the same as that of your typical car.
The next question is: how do we get access to the energy stored in the mass (fuel and propellant) sufficient to achieve those speeds? The answer lies in nuclear reactions or, better yet, matter-antimatter reactions. In short, we need to put a mass reactor, nuclear or matter-antimatter, on board our ship. Think of the Enterprise’s “warp core,” for all those Star Trek fans out there.
Nuclear rockets may seem farfetched, but various versions have already been proposed and prototypes have even been built. The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project, a joint NASA-Atomic Energy Commission program, developed a flight-certified nuclear-based rocket engine that meets all the requirements for a manned mission to Mars.
What is interesting, and perhaps a little sad, is that this was done in 1968, over four decades ago! The NERVA engine achieved exhaust velocities pretty close to Earth’s escape velocity, around 10 km/s. The program was tied to NASA’s manned Mars exploration program and, since it was unable to justify the expense of going to Mars, was scrapped in 1972.
More recently, NASA has been developing electric propulsion systems that can generate large effective exhaust velocities that are limited only through the strength of the electric field. Effective exhaust velocities of 90 km/s are already achievable. But this is just the propulsion part. The solar panels, batteries or fuel cells that are currently used as power sources for these engines limit their usefulness. Electricity generated from nuclear power could solve this problem.
Who needs Disney World? How about a trip to the International Space Station?ISS via www.shutterstock.com
Back to the future
With the renewed interest in space exploration and innovation, we challenge inventors and entrepreneurs to consider looking at advanced nuclear/antimatter-powered rocket systems. This could enable us to achieve the dream of a space car in our garages in half a century.
The key to all the recent advances in space exploration technology has been combining older proven technologies with modern computing capabilities, materials and fabrication processes. NASA’s push to get technologies into private hands will accelerate this process.
Back in 1972, we were at 1 percent of the needed exhaust speed. It’s not too much of a stretch to propose that, after 40 years of advances, we need only revisit the designs with fresh and entrepreneurial eyes to make it possible for a Han Solo – or, to be more contemporary, Rey Skywalker – to jump into the Falcon and speed off to somewhere far, far away.
Towards the east coast of Australia annual Earth 10 hours a week in the light of the world to get a lot of both worlds light of climate change through fear.
