Global Nuclear facilities 'At Risk' of Cyber-Attack

Cyber-Attacks on Nuclear Power Plants on the Rise

According to a report, the danger of serious cyber-attack on nuclear power plants across the globe is on the rise. It has stated that civil nuclear infrastructure in several nations are not well equipped to defend against such outbreak.

 The report had mentioned that most of the control systems for the organization were insecure by design due to their age. Circulated by the influential Chatham House committee, the report considered cyber defences in power plants across the world over an 18 month period. It stated that cyber criminals, state sponsored hackers as well as terrorists were increasing their online activity which would mean that the risk of a significant net based attack would prevail.

 This kind of attack on nuclear plant though on small scale or unlikely, should be taken seriously due to the harm which would follow if radiation was released. Besides, it is said that even a small scale cyber security instance at a nuclear facility would lead to a disproportionate effect on public opinion as well as the future of the civil nuclear industry.

Research, unfortunately carried out for the study indicated that the UK’s nuclear plants and the related organization did not seem to be adequately protected or prepared due to the industry being converted to digital systems recently.

Increase in Digitisation/Growing Reliance on Commercial Software

Increase in digitisation and growing reliance on commercial software is giving rise to the risk that the nuclear industry tends to face. There seems to be a `pervading myth’ that computer systems in power plants were isolated from the internet due to which, they were immune to the type of cyber-attacks which has evaded other industries.This air gap between the public Internets and nuclear system seems easy to breach with `nothing more than a flash drive’.

It observed that the destructive Stuxnet computer virus infected Iran’s nuclear facilities through this route. The researcher also came across virtual networks together with other links to the public internet on nuclear structure networks.

Some of these seemed to be unknown or forgotten, by those in charge of these organisations. Search engines which had hunted out critical structures had indexed these links making it easy for attackers to locate ways in to networks as well as control systems

Security with Cyber Security – Priority for Power Station Operators

According to chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, Keith Parker, he states that `security inclusive of cyber security is an absolute priority for power station operators. All of Britain’s power stations are designed with safety in mind and are stress tested to withstand a huge range of potential incidents. Power station operators tend to work closely with national agencies like the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure and other intelligence agencies, to be aware of emerging threats always’.

He added that the industry’s regulator continuously monitors plant safety to protect it from any outside threats.The first international conference with regards to cyber threats facing plants and manufacturing facilities was held in June this year by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

 Yukiya Amano, director of the IAEA had informed during the conference, that both random as well as targeted attacks were directed at nuclear plants. In a keynote address to the conference he commented that `staff responsible for nuclear security needs to know how to repel cyber-attacks and to limit the damage should the system be penetrated.

Google's Algorithm for Happiness

Mindfulness Skills Enhance Emotional Intelligence

Chade-Meng Tan, one of the company’s first engineering employees in Mountain View, a few years ago, noticed that several of his colleagues were stressed out and unhappy at work. Hence he decided to work on something in connection with it.

 He convinced his superiors to permit him in creating a course which would teach employees mindfulness skills enhance emotional intelligence and promote well-being and he transitioned to the HR department to run it.

With his employer’s approval he named it Search Inside Yourself, a corny name which also was the title of his book with regards to the course’s techniques. At the festival of 2015 SXSW in Austin Texas, Meng taught the scientifically proven secret of happiness in three easy steps.

Step One – Calm your mind

With the introduction of his first piece of advice, Meng led the SXSW audience through a small collective breathing exercise in order to calm the fluffy particles in the snow globes in our skulls. He believes of finding easy options of taking a pause during the course of the day and be aware of one’s breath.

On a lighter note, he states that if it tends to be too hard then just think about nothing for a little bit. His book provides more details, focusing on what mediation is and how to start practising on it, quoting a study of mindfulness training which reduces reported anxiety by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Meng does not seem to be the only one to recommend that meditation and mindfulness is good for mental health.

Matthieu Ricard, the monk, for instance whom the press has named as `the world’s happiest man’, had written a book about himself. There seems to be some evidence that mindfulness could help to fend off negative thoughts and according to a recent review of 209 studies it was found that the practice could help to treat depression, stress and anxiety. It is worth mentioning that handling depression as well as anxiety is not essentially the same as boosting happiness. Meng’s choice of happiness advice seems to have growing scientific acceptance.

Step Two – Log moments of joy

This means saying to oneself while sipping coffee or laugh at a friend’s joke or while purchasing a shirt that `I am having a moment of joy’. When negative things occur in our life throughout the day we simply hold on to them while the good things are more fleeting and momentary.

Meng states that by consciously accepting the good things, we increase our chances and when we reflect on the day’s happenings, we conclude that it was a happy one. The theory of observing positive experiences counterbalances or outweighs negatives, makes instinctive sense. We could relate to the power of single though short-lived event spoiling a whole day but seldom does the opposite seem to be true.

Step Three – Wish other People to be Happy

According to Meng, selfless thoughts are advantageous since we tend to obtain a lot of joy in giving more than in receiving. Meng makes powerful arguments for the - `I think’ self-evident need to pervade your life with compassion but quotes on study on people acting for others, backing his claim that `kindness is a source of happiness’.

Recent research had made attempts in exploring this effect including one by positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson which ended that we require a 3:1 positive-to-negative ratio of thought in order to free our minds from the tar-paper effect of thinking negative. But this study has proved to be debated with some questioning the mathematical claims made in paper.

Snapchat will let Brands Advertise on Your Face

Snapchat – Sponsored Lenses

Snapchat will be launching a new advertising format which will enable brands to advertise on people’s selfies. This features is known as `Sponsored lenses’, a latest attempt in Snapchat in order to get revenue from its audience comprising of the youth.Snapchat has launched its first new lenses feature in September, permitting users to cover animations on their faces comprising of massive heart eyes, wrinkles as well as vomit rainbows.

The lenses feature seems active while taking a selfie. Tapping and holding on the reflected image of the face tends to instantly outline map of it and prompts to pick from eight various interactive filter which ranges from simple Photo Booth-style effects to the ones with animations and sound.

Each new ones tend to replace an old one each day and can be utilised on photos or videos. Snapchat has now signed a number of appealing parties which will be replacing vomit rainbows as well as old people’s faces with sponsored animations. As per The Financial Times, it is said that the first of these lenses would probably make its appearance on the platform in time for Halloween, though there has been no indication on which brands would be on board.

Developing New Sponsored Animation

According to a spokeswoman from Snapchat who informed FT states that `the sponsored lenses enable Snapchatters to express themselves and connect with a brand in a really creative and dynamic way’. Another source had apparently reported that Snapchat has been charging up to $750,000 for brands to reach its whole user-base during the course of a big holiday or $450,000 on any normal day.

Moreover, the addition of sponsored content would be added over the top of selfish with personal snaps that would leave some with a feeling of discomfort. Snapchat would probably be developing new sponsored animation and the FT claims Hollywood studios would probably be the first to sign up.

This does not seem to be the first move into in-app advertising of Snapchat. It had teamed up earlier in the year, with communication super group WPP and the Daily Mail to operate on a content marketing collaboration known as Truffle Pig. Besides this, it has also been trailing advertisements in Discover news services such as CNN and Cosmopolitan since January 2015.

Launched Around Halloween

The latest sponsored lenses would be launched on or around Halloween and the prices would be high according to Financial Times report. Taking into account that Snapchat tends to have hundreds of millions of active users every month, the money could ideally go a long way.

Though there is no information on how different or same it would be to the prevailing lenses, Snapchat would be developing them in-house and according to the report it says that the first would probably be from Hollywood studios. This is the fourth revenue stream for Snapchat, besides Discover and the ads placed in daily stories as well as paid replays.

 However, this seems to be unique from the others and rather than passively observing, sponsored lenses are about engaging with brands which will exactly be in your face. Probably as Snapchat has put it across the Financial Times as `sponsored lenses enable Snapchatters to express themselves and connect with a brand in a really creative and dynamic way’.

Face Analysis can Tell What You’ll Buy after Watching Ads

Image: Daniel Allan/Cultura/Alamy

System by Affective – Pick up Hidden Emotions

A software has been developed that can sense how much one tend to get swayed by marketing by analysing the face as one watches the advertisements. Ad companies seems interested in assessing the reactions of the consumers to their latest TV spots and this is done by bringing in few customers in the office and pose queries to them.

However, the system adopted by Affective, a start up in Waltham, Massachusetts, has the capabilities of picking up hidden emotions by monitoring face movements. The approach according to Daniel McDuff, Affectiva’s principal scientist enables you to find out what the consumer generally thinks from time to time as the ad tends to run and not what they say once it is ended.

He has commented that that `it provides a way of getting at those more genuine, spontaneous interactions and this is their instinctive response. It is not sent through a cognitive filter where they have to evaluate how they feel’.

The software of Affectiva tends to first identify important facial signs like the mouth eyebrows and the tip of the nose. The machine learning algorithms tends to watch how these areas move or how the skin texture and the colour alter in the course of the video. These alterations are then broken down into distinct expressions portraying shifting emotions.

Focus on Emotions – Surprise/Confusion/Happiness

McDuff together with his colleagues, in a study which had been published recently, has asked 1223 people to give his team access to their home webcams while they watched a series of ads for pet supplies, groceries and sweets.

Prior and after the running of the ads, the subject filled out on online surveys was on how likely they would purchase the products shown.As they watched, the software focused on the lookout for emotions like surprise, confusion and happiness.

The researchers then found that they could utilise the facial data to predict precisely, the survey results of someone indicating that they could depend on the analysis of the computer to know if an ad was successful.

McDuff is of the belief that in the future, the system could plug in TV services like Netflix. He states that one can imagine suggesting TV programmes or even movies which people could watch or ads which they would find enjoyable.

Subtle Disparities in Emotional Responses

The team at Affectiva had accumulated a database of more than three million videos of people of various ages, ethnicities and gender. McDuff is of the opinion that there could be subtle disparities in emotional responses.

For instance women seem to have more positive facial expressions than men. However on understanding the respond of various groups, companies could put together ads which could be fine-tuned for certain audiences. Similarly, the data could also be helpful to advertisers to pull their adverts to draw closely the emotions of the viewers.

Michel Wedel, studying consumer science at the University of Maryland in College Park states that automated emotion analysis systems seems to be promising enabling advertisers to cut down an ad, to find out what exactly works and what does not. He adds that it is particularly unobtrusive and does not depend on introspection or recollection.

To do the research through the viewer’s home webcams is an added advantage though it would not be fool-proof. People could be eating a sandwich or turning at the computer or turning their head and so unable to classify their emotions consistently.

Making Liquid Fuels From Sun And Air

Liquid Fuel for Internal Combustion Engine – Inefficient

Liquid fuel for internal combustion engines is inefficient due to various explosions leading to kinetic work to be done as well as loads of heat together with various other reasons. With the same quantity of energy put in an electric motor and an internal combustion motor, it could produce more usable work for the earlier than the later.

 Moreover, electric motors tend to operate at the same efficiencies over a range of speeds where internal combustion motors need more messing around to alter the speed, besides the torque. Torque is probably at the core of coolness for several vehicles enthusiasts.If one could get the hot car or a motorcycle to go from zero to fast within a second or two, it is considered to be cool even if it tends to have no day to day application.

An electric motor has that potential and internal combustion motor need to be a super motor to perform well. Besides, liquid fuels tend to spill and smell bad and there could be chances of explosion. Electricity on the other hand has its own limitation. We would need to change most of the moving things, in the long run, like vehicles, planes etc. to electric, though fuel would still remain to be important to certain extent.

Liquid Fuel in Flying Machines

Mission critical backup generations which are not needed much but are life or death,are apparently run best on liquid fuels stored long term such as the one at the South Pole research station or in any hospital. We would eventually see electric airplanes though for long time we would apparently have to put liquid fuel in flying machines.

A present issue of Science has a write-up on recent research on machine that takes sunlight, CO2 from the atmosphere and some water producing burnable liquid. The write-up conveys about several alternative research projects which have approached this issue with various levels of success that is very early research though promising.

The job tends to boil down to run combustion in reverse, inserting energy from the sun or other renewable into chemical bonds. According to John Keith, chemist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania states that `it is a challenging issue since it is always an uphill battle’. It is what plants tend to do in making sugars they require to grow.

Methanol – Converted to Variation of Products

However, plants only convert around 1% of the energy into chemical energy and to power the industrial society, researchers need to do much better. Keith compares the challenge to putting a man on the moon. The simple method tends to be almost the same in all cases. One could take CO2 molecule and change it to CO by knocking off one Oxygen atom and then combing the CO with H2 to get syngas that can be changed to methanol.

Methanol is a type of alcohol which can be converted into a variation of products. Same process in the widespread use utilises fossil methane as a base molecule rather than atmospheric CO2. A paper is to be published in Advanced Science informing the process which utilises CO and H2 together with photovoltaic generated electricity.

This focuses on a band of sunlight on to a semiconductor panel converting 38% of the incoming energy into electricity at a high voltage. The electricity is shifted to electrodes in two electrochemical cells. One tends to split water molecules while the other splits CO2. Most of the remaining energy in the sunlight is trapped as heat and utilised to preheat the two cells to hundreds of degree, which helps to lower the amount of electricity essential to split water and CO2 molecules by 25%.