Category Archives: Research

Google, Government, Islamic State, Research, Society, Technology

Jihadi propaganda still active on YouTube

RESEARCH STUDY BY CEP

A study has revealed that YouTube repeatedly fails to remove jihadist videos within two hours of them being posted – because of “staggering holes” in its monitoring.

It found that the Google-owned video sharing site missed its target for taking down Islamic State films in one in four cases.

Dozens of terrorist-propaganda and recruitment videos were left for public viewing for more than three days at a time, clocking up tens of thousands of views, according to the three-month study by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Disturbing, too, is that six in ten of the IS supporters who posted the hate videos were not even banned from the site and their accounts remain active.

The failings come after YouTube rejected an offer of free technology to instantly block any previously identified extremist content, preferring to develop its own system that it says deletes millions of banned videos before they are seen.

At the G7 summit in October last year, YouTube joined with Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft in an accord aimed at removing extremist content from their platforms within two hours.

But in the first in-depth independent study of IS videos on YouTube, the CEP found this was not happening because of “inexcusable” holes in the service’s monitoring system. Researchers found 229 previously identified terror videos were uploaded 1,348 times and viewed on 163,000 occasions over three months from March 8 to June 8, with 24 per cent left on the site for more than two hours.

They included the film Caliphate 4 – uploaded six times during the trial period – in which a terrorist taunts former soldier Prince Harry.

Another video called Hunt Them O Monotheist was uploaded 12 times during the study and on one occasion allowed to remain for 39 hours.

Computer scientist Dr Hany Farid, from Dartmouth College in the US, who developed a system that stops child abuse films being uploaded, created a similar program that instantly identifies and removes terror videos.

YouTube, Facebook and Google were all offered the eGlyph system free by the CEP in 2016 but decided not to use it.

Dr Farid said it was “infuriating” that companies worth billions refused to implement systems that could instantly stop jihadist videos. “Spectacular failures are allowing terror groups to continue to radicalise and recruit online,” he added.

Former Conservative Party minister Mark Simmonds, now a senior adviser to CEP, said: “This study dispels any lingering myth that YouTube are doing enough to stop their site being used as an IS recruitment tool.

“The research shows that YouTube are not even meeting their own promise to delete all extremist content within two hours. For them to fail in a quarter of all cases, with much of the content still available three days or more after first being uploaded, is unacceptable.”

He added: “Even videos that stayed online for less than two hours received a total of nearly 15,000 hits – any one could become a potential terrorist.

“It is staggering and inexcusable that well over half of the IS supporters who upload this dangerous content are not even banned and their accounts remain active . . . spreading IS propaganda and grooming potential recruits.”

Google said it “rejects terrorism and has a strong track record of taking swift action against terrorist content”.

A spokesman added: “We’ve invested heavily in people and technology to ensure we keep making progress to detect and remove terror content as quickly as possible.

“We’re a founding member of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which sees tech companies collaborate to keep terror content off the web.”

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Medical, Research, Science

Breakthrough as vaccine is made possible for Multiple Sclerosis

MEDICAL RESEARCH

SCOTTISH doctors believe they have found the cause of Multiple Sclerosis (MS), paving the way for a vaccine against the devastating condition.

A landmark paper suggests MS develops following two separate common infections, which cause the body to attack itself.

Other factors, such as genetics and lack of sunlight, may also play a role, which explains why MS is more common in certain areas such as the North of Scotland.

But doctors behind the latest discovery believe the development of a vaccine against a common virus may hold the key in future prevention of the disease. The research was published by doctors from the University of Glasgow and Harvard University in the United States.

There are 11,000 Scots with MS, making the disease more common than in most other countries.

The neurological condition is triggered when the immune system, which normally fights infection, attacks nerves, causing pain, fatigue, vision problems and spasms.

But what causes the body to begin attacking itself has never been identified, despite more than 100 years of research.

It has been suggested the disease could be caused by lack of sunlight as it is more common in northern countries.

The latest research claims two common infections – firstly threadworms followed by the Epstein-Barr virus – may be the trigger. The scientists believe MS is a “rare complication” of the body’s response to the infections.

Professor John Paul Leach, consultant neurologist at the University of Glasgow, said: “MS is a condition where the body produces antibodies against itself for reasons that have never been understood and goes against its own nervous system.

“It is odd that we have never found out why some people are more prone than others.

“There is already some evidence that exposure to the Epstein-Barr virus makes it more likely someone will develop MS, but this does not offer the full explanation of why people develop this reaction.

“MS may be the result of not one but two infections in the right order.”

The research was led by Dr Patrick Kearns of the Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, who developed his theory while studying at the University of Glasgow.

Although keen to point out their hypothesis is only a theory, they now plan further research.

In MS, the immune system attacks the layer that surrounds and protects the nerves which damages them, meaning messages become slowed or disrupted.

Threadworms affect around one sixth of the world’s population and are a parasitic infection affecting the gut, common in children.

The Epstein-Barr virus is one of the most common viruses in humans and is the cause of glandular fever, although many people only suffer mild symptoms.

Dr Kearns said: “MS is a terrible condition but there is a fascinating aspect about it which is that its distribution around the world has been really well studied, so it’s easy to compare rates between regions.

“It also affects people when they are young, and rates are increasing, which means some aspect of the environment has to be changing that’s driving the disease.

“Some evidence has found high rates of MS in areas where there were military troops stationed in the Second World War, such as the Faroe Islands and Shetland.

“I believe the missing link may be threadworm infection. This is a very common condition in children and is also common in soldiers living in barracks. In areas where soldiers were billeted during the war it would have spread to local populations.

“There is already a strong and undeniable link between the Epstein-Barr virus and MS. I believe that what may be causing MS is a rare, late complication of exposure to these two infections.

“It may be a good idea for public health officials to treat worms at a population level. But the real benefit would be developing better tools to target the Epstein-Barr virus with a vaccine or drugs.”

Factors such as lack of sunlight or vitamin D have previously been suggested as triggers for MS.

But Dr Kearns believes the evidence for these is “not very strong” and does not fully explain the differences in MS rates around the world. However, he said some people may be more susceptible than others due to genetic factors.

There is currently no cure for the condition, but some treatments can slow its progress.

The research was first published in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.

Dr Sorrel Bickley, head of biomedical research at the MS Society, said: “This study puts forward an interesting idea and we look forward to seeing how this could be proven or disproven.

“MS is unpredictable and different for everyone and we urge anyone concerned about symptoms to speak to their GP.”

 

MULTIPLE Sclerosis is a neurological disease that can affect the brain and spinal cord.

The condition’s symptoms are wide-ranging and can include problems with vision, arm or leg movements, sensation or balance.

In some cases, the disease can be mild but in others it can cause serious disability.

Average life expectancy is reduced in people with MS.

The immune system attacks the layer that surrounds and protects the nerves – the myelin sheath. This then damages and scars the sheath, and potentially the underlying nerves, meaning that messages travelling along them can become slowed or disrupted.

This can cause a range of symptoms including fatigue, difficulty walking, vision problems, numbness or tingling in different parts of the body and muscle stiffness and spasms.

Symptoms may come and go in phases, known as relapsing remitting MS, or get steadily worse over time.

Roughly between two and three women have MS for every man with the condition. In Scotland the rate is about 209 MS patients per 100,000 population compared to 164 per 100,000 in England.

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Research, Science

Why does the Earth’s magnetic field reverse?

GEOPHYSICS

Intro: One of the properties of our planet that we have struggled to explain is the fact that its magnetic field occasionally reverses. If this happened today, it would mean that our compasses would point to the south, rather than to the north.

A reversal in the magnetic field is probably not something we need to get overly worried about because the last full one occurred 780,000 years ago, while a partial reversal, known as a geomagnetic excursion, last happened 41,000 years ago – when the poles reversed for a few hundred years before flipping back again. The generally accepted theory of how the Earth’s magnetic field is generated states that heat from the solid inner core of the planet causes chaotic and swirling convection currents in the liquid outer core, and, as it is predominantly composed of magnetised iron, this rotational movement works like a giant dynamo, inducing a moving electric current, together with its accompanying magnetic field. The action of this geodynamo, as it is known, is thought to lead to the polarity of the planet and to maintain the magnetosphere, the region of space around the Earth to which the magnetic field extends.

The possibility of the magnetic field reversing was first proposed in 1906 by the French geologist Bernard Brunhes, after he had studied iron minerals in volcanic rocks from Auvergne, the region of central France well-known for its numerous extinct volcanoes. This was based on an anomaly he observed, in which some crystals of magnetic iron minerals in the volcanic rocks are orientated either to the north or south. Shortly afterwards, the Japanese geophysicist Motonori Matuyama carried out a systematic study of volcanic basalt rocks in different locations in Japan and China, which demonstrated that rocks in the same geological layers – ones that had been laid down at the same time – showed the same polarity, described as normal where iron minerals are oriented to the north, and reversed in those pointing south.

The volcanic landscape of the Massif Central in the Auvergne, France.

Matuyama’s work provided clear evidence to support the theory that the poles had reversed in the past, but it did not receive any great attention until the 1950s, when radiometric methods of dating rocks based on the decay of radioactive isotopes were developed, which allowed a chronology to be worked out. The pioneers of this field were later recognised, with their names being assigned to the periods, known as chrons, of normal or reversed polarity. We are currently in the Brunhes Normal Chron, which began 780,000 years ago, and this was preceded by the Matuyama Reversed Chron, beginning 2.59 million years ago, while the period during which the flip took place is called the Brunhes- Matuyama Transition. It used to be thought that this flip occurred over the course of thousands of years, but recent research, published in 2014, suggests that it could have been made quicker, perhaps taking as little as 100 years.

The Flipping Field

We don’t know what causes a reversal in polarity and may well have to wait until it happens again before we have the opportunity to study the phenomenon in enough detail to find out. We currently lack a clear enough understanding of what is happening in the outer core and mantle to generate the magnetic field in the first place, let alone know why it flips. Past reversals have occurred over an apparently random time frame, so it is impossible to predict when the next one will be. A gradual weakening of the magnetic field recorded over the course of the last century has led to some speculation that we are entering a transitional period, but, as we don’t know anything about the processes leading up to reversals, there is no way of knowing if this is really the case. A reversal may be beginning right at this moment, or it may not happen for hundreds of thousands of years.

 

One way of investigating reversals in the Earth’s polarity is to construct computer models of the way in which the Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the dynamo in the inner core, and then run simulations to see what happens. This involves attempting to recreate the interaction between the heat generated in the inner core and the convection currents thought to be the source of the magnetic field in the outer core, which, as we don’t fully understand what is going on in either region, is extremely difficult. One simulation developed by Gary Glatzmaier and Paul Roberts at University College, Los Angeles, in the 1990s, uses a complex set of equations, involving thermodynamics and fluid motion, to describe the physical properties of the geodynamo. It was found to provide an accurate model for the generation of known variations in the magnetic field, and, when run to simulate the changes occurring in polarity over hundreds of thousands of years, showed the process of reversal occurring on a number of occasions. The timing of the reversals was random, and apparently caused by the development of a particular set of circumstances, in which the thermodynamics and fluid motion evolved with the generation of the magnetic field in such a way as to weaken the strength of the poles. If the strength of the poles dropped below a certain point, this caused a reversal.

The Impact of Reversals

If computer-generated models accurately simulate what is happening in the outer core, and reversals are indeed caused by a weakening in the magnetic field, then this has implications for the ability of the magnetosphere to deflect potentially harmful high-energy particles found in cosmic radiation. If the magnetic field were to disappear completely, the planet could also be exposed to solar wind. This is thought by some scientists to have occurred on Mars, which does not have a magnetic field, and thus any atmosphere that may have existed would have effectively blown away. Needless to say, this would be disastrous for our planet, but as there have been numerous reversals in the past and the Earth still has an atmosphere, it is reasonably safe to assume that this scenario is not very likely to happen here.

 

Studies of transitional periods that lead to reversals and their impact on life on Earth have actually found nothing to suggest any harmful effects. There is, for instance, no correlation between the timing of reversals and extinction events or periods of increased seismic and volcanic activity. So it would appear that, beyond the disruption it would cause to our navigational systems, and the possibility of interference with some communications, we don’t have a great deal to worry about. There could be an impact on animals that make use of the magnetic field to navigate, though it would appear that reversals usually happen over the course of long enough periods to allow them to adapt. In the unlikely event of a flip suddenly happening tomorrow, aircraft may have to be grounded while we work out how to navigate, our phone services could be interrupted for a while, and homing pigeons might get rather confused.

Alternative Theories

In recent years, seismic images of the Earth’s inner core have been interpreted as showing it to be composed of slightly differing eastern and western hemispheres. One theory, known as translational instability, suggests that this difference is due to the growth of the core, caused by its cooling, being lopsided – with more iron crystallising out on the surface of the western side than on the eastern one.

In research published in 2012, Peter Olson and Renaud Deguen of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Ohio, set-out to test this theory, by modelling what would happen to the magnetic field if the inner core were lopsided. They found that the axis of the magnetic field in the model shifted to the side that was growing, which led them to speculate that this change in the axis in the inner core may cause irregular convection patterns in the outer core, which could be responsible for reversals in the magnetic field. They also thought that the position of the axis in the inner core could be the reason why magnetic north is not the same true north – the Magnetic North Pole currently being off the coast of Canada, about 480 km (300 miles) from the Geographic North Pole. If this is correct, then tracing the movement of the Magnetic North Pole over time would give an indication of the way in which the inner core was growing, and perhaps would even show if a reversal in the magnetic field were likely to occur.

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