Last seen over 10 years ago
Member since Dec 10, 2013
Eryn Green, a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver, has joined Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin and Jack Gilbert on the illustrious list of winners of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the nation’s oldest annual literary award. DETROIT - General Motors Co.
on Monday is halting some production and temporarily laying off workers at a Buffalo, N.Y.,
engine plant, another sign that Japan’s disaster is affecting automakers around the globe.Homomorphic encryption is one of the most exciting new research topics in cryptography, which promises to make cloud computing perfectly secure.
With it, a Web user would send encrypted data to a server in the cloud, which would process it without decrypting it and send back a still-encrypted result. Sometimes, however, the server needs to know something about the data it’s handling. Otherwise, some computational tasks become prohibitively time consuming  if not outright impossible. Suppose, for instance, that the task you’ve outsourced to the cloud is to search a huge encrypted database for the handful of records that match an encrypted search term.
Homomorphic encryption ensures that the server has no idea what the search term is or which records
match it. As a consequence, however, it has no choice but to send back information on every record in the database.
The user’s computer can decrypt that information to see which records matched and which didn’t, but then it’s assuming much of the computational burden that it was trying to offload to the cloud in the first place.Last week, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 45th Symposium on the Theory of Computing  the premier conference in theoretical computer science  researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, together with colleagues at the University of Toronto and Microsoft Research, presented a new encryption scheme that solves this problem. Known as a functional-encryption scheme, it allows the cloud server to run a single, specified computation on the homomorphically encrypted result  asking, say, “Is this record a match?†or “Is this email spam?† without being able to extract any other information about it.“This is a very, very general paradigm,†says Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, one of the paper’s co-authors and, together with her fellow MIT professor Silvio Micali, the most recent recipient of
the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science.
“Say we’re talking about the surveillance cameras of the future, which come up with encrypted images.
Why would we want to do that? It’s a question of liberty versus safety. If you’re looking for a suspect, you might be interested in doing some computations on an encrypted image, to match to the subject. Another possibility would be a medical database, where all the information is encrypted and … someone [runs] a drug study on those blood samples  but just that drug study, nothing else.
Our result is in some sense the first result showing that you can do this very generally.â€ÂJoining Goldwasser on the paper are Raluca Ada Popa, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, her advisor, associate professor
Nickolai Zeldovich, and Yael Kalai of Microsoft Research and Vinod Vaikuntanathan of the University of Toronto, both of whom did their graduate work at MIT with Goldwasser.Near
missesThe researchers built their functional-encryption scheme by fitting together several existing schemes, each of which has vital attributes of functional encryption, but none of which is entirely sufficient in itself.
The first of those is homomorphic encryption.Another is what’s known as
a garbled circuit, a technique developed in the mid-1980s and widely used in cryptography. A garbled circuit lets a tinnitus miracle download the result of one cryptographically protected operation on one cryptographically protected data item  say,
“Is this record a match?†The problem is that, if the garbled circuit is used on a second data item  “How about this record?† the security breaks.Moreover, a garbled circuit is a so-called private-key system, in which only the holder of a secret cryptographic key can encrypt
data. Homomorphic encryption, by contrast, is intended as a public-key system  like most of the encryption schemes used to protect financial transactions on the Web. With public-key encryption, anyone can encrypt a message using a key that’s published online, but only the holder of the secret key can decrypt it.The final component technique is called attribute-based encryption. Attribute-based encryption is a public-key system, and it’s reusable.
But unlike garbled circuits and homomorphic encryption, it can’t reveal the output of a function without revealing the input, too. The new system begins with homomorphic encryption and embeds the decryption algorithm in a garbled circuit. The key to the garbled circuit, in turn, is protected by attribute-based encryption. In some sense, the garbled circuit can, like all garbled circuits, be used only once.
But the encryption schemes are layered in such a way that one use grants the server access to a general function rather than a single value. It can thus ask, of every record in a database, “Is this a match?â€ÂZeldovich points out that since the scheme relies on homomorphic encryption, it shares the major drawback of existing homomorphic schemes: They’re still too computationally intensive to be
practical. On the other hand, he says, “It’s so new, there are so many things that haven’t been explored  like, ‘How do you really implement this correctly?’ ‘What are the right mathematical constructions?’ ‘What are the right
parameter settings?’†And, Popa adds, in the four years since the invention of the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme, “People have been shaving
orders of magnitude in performance improvements.â€ÂBesides,
even a currently impractical functional-encryption scheme
is still a breakthrough.
“Before, we didn’t even know if this was possible,†Popa says.Ran Canetti, a professor of computer science at Boston University, corroborates that assessment. “It’s an extremely surprising result,†he says. “I myself worked on this problem for a while, and I had no idea how to do it.
So I was wowed. And it really opens up the door to many other applications.â€ÂOne of those applications, Canetti says, is what’s known as program obfuscation, or disguising the operational details of a computer program so that it can’t be reverse-engineered. “Not obfuscating the way that people are doing it now, which is just scrambling up programs and hoping nobody will understand, and eventually, these are broken,†Canetti says, “but really obfuscating
so that it’s cryptographically secure.â€ÂCanetti
acknowledges that the researchers’ scheme won’t be deployed tomorrow. But “I’m sure it’s going to lead to more stuff,†he says. “It’s an enabler, and people will be building on it.” • RBS – government in a hurry• Google’s tax: more questions to answer• New Look and the
corporate bond bubble• Was Bob Diamond motivated by money?Would you feel uplifted if the state sold some shares in Royal Bank of Scotland at a loss? Would you ignore the up-front hit and count the long-term blessing of living in a world where ownership of RBS looks more normal? Or would you think the coalition government, ahead of an election in May 2015, is declaring victory prematurely?There’s no doubt about where George Osborne and RBS management stand. The Treasury is beating the drum towards early privatisation and RBS chairman Sir Philip Hampton says natural vitiligo treatment review prospectus could be drawn up by the middle of next year.
Meanwhile, chief executive
Stephen Hester trumpets the “psychological” benefit for the nation and his employees if RBS is no longer routinely described as a ward of state.Before
they all get carried away, at least two points should be remembered.First, we need to decide in what form RBS should be privatised. Almost everyone agrees now that it would have been better if RBS had been nationalised in full in 2008 and split into a good bank and bad bank to protect lending to the economy.
Is it too late to pursue the idea? Would it be sensible to do so?Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of the England, is in favour of a good bank/bad bank split as the best way to return a healthy RBS to the private sector. And Andrew Tyrie’s banking standards commission may hold forth when it makes its final report next month.Let’s
hear that debate. Would it be more profitable to park the bad assets with the state and allow them to be unwound over time? King has argued this method would minimise losses over the long-term. We should “face up to reality”, he argued in March. Osborne disagrees. But where is the Treasury’s cost/benefit analysis?Second, the price at which shares are sold matters. At the moment, the government is proceeding as if a loss of any size can simply be blamed on the last Labour administration, but it’s not that simple.
Yes, Labour paid too much in the midst of a crisis (it reverse-engineered
the numbers during the capital injection so that the state’s stake would be 82% and RBS would stay in touch with the stockmarket). But the current government is responsible for choosing the best moment to sell.Today
RBS shares, at 289p, stand 42% below the purchase of 500p; in real money, that’s a £19bn loss on the £45bn paid.
And the book value is 459p, which is not an irrelevant figure since the hope must be that a fully scrubbed-up bank, making profitable loans, could get closer to a par valuation one day.
Each 10p movement in RBS’ share price is worth £1bn. We’re not talking loose change.The worry is that the government has decided that privatisation of RBS at any price, and in its current form, is a fine thing and should be done as quickly as
possible.
It smacks of an attempt to close down debate about the merits of restructuring RBS before its return to the private sector. Uplifted?
No.
“Is there anything especially cool about Google’s London offices?” asks a “frequently asked question” on Google UK’s website. The official answer is antique red telephone boxes, lightshades that look like bowler hats and so on.
(Not everybody’s idea of office chic, but to each his own).The unofficial answer is the miracle by which London-based staff who seem to be selling advertising space are actually doing nothing of the sort. It turns out they are merely encouraging a sale that takes place in Ireland.
From the point of view of Google Inc, the US parent,
that’s definitely cool since the Irish subsidiary pays corporation tax at just 12.5%.A
Reuters investigation this week highlighted Google’s practice.
The newsagency found British customers of Google who thought they were being sold advertising
space by Google UK employees; it found London-based Google staff boasting on LinkedIn about their sales prowess; it noted another FAQ that said the 1,500-strong London office focuses on both website engineering and “sales;” and it recorded Google job
ads seeking recruits for London with sales expertise. Common sense, then, suggests that a lot of trademiner review is sold by the UK operation.Of
course, Google may also be justified in saying “we comply with all the tax rules in the UK”. But what that means, we assume, is that it has been able to satisfy the UK tax authorities that there’s a difference between the business of facilitating a sale (in London) and making a sale and dispatching the invoice (in Dublin).Margaret
Hodge’s public accounts committee should not confine
itself to recalling Google executive Matt Brittin to hear his verbal gymnastics again.
It should also summon HMRC officials to explain why they seem to have approved an arrangement that defies any normal understanding of where the economic activity takes place.A lot of activity too: revenue of $18bn (£11.5bn) from 2006 to 2011, says Reuters.
Google is a company with high profit margins. If the current tax officials can’t see that there’s something wrong when all that revenue yields corporation tax of just
$16m (£10m), we need new tax officials.It was the most eye-catching debt issue of the week.
No, not the record $17bn offer from Apple at minuscule rates of interest. Rather, it was the £800m issued by fashion chain New Look that best illustrates the frenzied hunt for yield among bond investors.By
conventional yardsticks, New Look,
a leveraged buyout from 2004, is still vastly over-borrowed nine years later. Its total debts of £1.1bn tower over top-line operating profits (ie, before interest payments) of £198m. Yet, in a deal that
replaces old debt with new debt, the group yesterday said it had secured its £800m by issuing five-year bonds in three tranches at an interest rate of roughly 8%.That’s
an astonishingly low rate given the state of the balance sheet and conditions on the high street. Better still for New Look, it has managed to get rid of half the payment-in-kind notes that can
prove poisonous if held for too long.
These were rolling up at a rate of 10% a year and had reached £746m.Well done, New Look – it has secured some breathing space. You have to wonder, though, where the corporate bond bubble
is leading. It looks dangerous.So
Bob wasn’t driven by the moneyRemarkable revelations from Bob Diamond. He’s only ever owned a 11-year-old Jeep, and he was never in it for the money. Hmm. On the first point, many of us would find it possible not to own a car if we enjoyed the arrangement described in Barclays 2011 annual report: “Executive directors are provided with… the use of a company vehicle or the cash equivalent and the use of a company driver when required for business purposes.”On
the money point, it’s a shame the former chief executive didn’t speak up earlier. There was an almighty row about Diamond’s £2.7m bonus in 2011, which was opposed initially by the head of the pay committee, Alison Carnwarth, who belatedly resigned.
She thought Diamond should have set an example by taking no bonus in a year of lousy profits. We must conclude other directors strong-armed Diamond into accepting the £2.7m
against his will.Royal Bank of ScotlandGoogleTax avoidanceBob DiamondExecutive pay and bonusesNew LookNils Pratleyguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The devilish grin and sharp tongue remain as potent as ever.
It’s everything else that’s changed for Colin Montgomerie. ROME  Italy’s president appointed Enrico Letta as premier-designate Wednesday, asking him to form a coalition government representing Italy’s main parties to end two months of political paralysis and put the country back on the path of reform and growth. aquaponics 4 you pdf article >> After entering Mercury’s orbit, the spacecraft began measuring the planet’s surface elevations via laser altimetry.
Through radio tracking, the probe estimated the planet’s gravity field. Throughout the one-year mission, the MESSENGER spacecraft battled tides from the sun, which tugged the probe out of its optimal orbit, as well as what Zuber calls “sunlight pressure† photons or packets of light from the sun that exerted pressure on the spacecraft. The team periodically adjusted the probe’s orbit and made precise corrections to its measurements to account for the sun’s effects, mapping out the gravity field as well as the elevation of the surface of Mercury’s northern hemisphere.
Inside and outThe team’s measurements revealed surprising findings both in the planet’s interior and on its surface.
From the probe’s gravity estimates, the group inferred that Mercury likely has a huge iron core comprising approximately 85 percent of the planet’s radius. (Earth’s core, by comparison, is about half the planet’s radius in size.) This means that Mercury’s mantle and crust occupy only the outer 15 percent or so of the planet’s radius  about as thin as the peel on an orange, Zuber says.The researchers also reasoned, given Mercury’s gravity field, that just above the outer molten layer of the planet’s core may be a solid layer of iron and sulfur  a type of layered structure not known to exist on any other planet. “If the iron and sulfur model is correct, it would have implications for how the dynamo inside Mercury produces the planet’s magnetic field,†says Gerald Schubert, professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, who did not participate in the research. “The dynamo generation process might work differently in Mercury compared with Earth.â€ÂCo-author
Dave Smith, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the scientific process that led to the team’s results was a journey in itself. “We had an idea of the internal structure of Mercury, [but] the initial observations did not fit the theory so we doubted the observations,†Smith says.
“We did more work and concluded the observations were correct, and then reworked the theory for the interior of Mercury that fit the observations.
This is how science is supposed to work, and it’s a nice result.â€ÂThrough
laser measurements of the planet’s surface, researchers mapped out multiple geologic features in Mercury’s northern hemisphere, finding the range of elevations to be smaller than that of Mars or the moon.
They also observed something unexpected in Mercury’s Caloris basin, the largest impact feature on Mercury: Portions of the floor of the crater actually stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within the interior pushed the crater up after the initial impact that created it. Zuber and her team also identified an area of lowlands approximately centered on Mercury’s north pole that could conceivably have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. Zuber explains that a process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface due to the redistribution of mass on or within a planet by geodynamical processes.
One such process of transporting mass in a planet’s interior is convection within the mantle.
Viscous material within the mantle circulates and can push fragments of crust up and out, shifting terrain around the globe.
Given Mercury’s extremely thin mantle, as revealed by MESSENGER, Zuber says it’s challenging to understand how
convection operated to raise broad expanses of terrain to the elevations observed. “It’s interesting to think what might be causing the observed deformation,†Zuber says. “It appears there are some very unusual dynamics forex growth bot pdf inside Mercury.â€Â
Assistant Professor Sangbae Kim works on the 70-pound ‘cheetah’ robot designed at MIT. Photo: M. Scott Brauer Best of long-form journalism this week. Los Angeles Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw made no
excuses for his third straight subpar outing. According to Machover, the installations were developed individually but have been assembled so that they work nicely together in a progression through the library spaces, turning the library into a
comprehensive, sound-filled experience. Some installations will be explored with use of headphones; some will be set up in separate, enclosed rooms, and some will be in the open spaces.One
of the installations, a robotic Music Chandelier, will be shown for the first time in “Library Music.”
Mike Fabio, graduate student in media arts and sciences, designed the laser-based system for the chandelier, which can be played by the public in its current iteration. Fabio’s chandelier is being developed for Machover’s opera, “Death and the Powers,” which will premiere in Monte-Carlo, Monaco, in November 2008.”A
library to listen to should be fun!” said Machover, expressing delight that the Music Library, a place normally devoted to listening to and thinking about music in silence, will be transformed by willing staff members and Machover’s group into an interactive, musical environment. At the Jan. 19 demonstration, the student designers will explain the how, what and why of their installations and will be available to guide visitors through each
experience. Also, Lewis Music Library staff will share some of its hidden treasures
that relate to sound installations and experimental music technology. Refreshments will be served.For
more information, contact Ariane Martins, x3-1613, e-mail: [email protected]. A gala on May 2 will include Plácido Domingo and Anna Netrebko, among others.
During the energy crisis in the 1970s, interest in heating with wood surged, particularly in regions where oil or electricity were primary heat sources. Britain has signed a new legal treaty with Jordan in the hope of deporting a radical cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe,†the interior minister said Wednesday. Shinsplints are painfully familiar to many of us who run, dance or play team sports, but wearing the right shoes and targeted exercises can provide relief, explains the Phys Ed columnist Gretchen Reynolds. Thai golfer Thongchai Jaidee is hoping to qualify for the Masters by improving his ranking with a victory at the Avantha Masters this week. In an exclusive fashion shoot for the Guardian, Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West star as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Hollywood’s super-glamorous lovers Power rankings of the teams left in the Champions League before Friday’s draw in Switzerland.
IN NEW DELHI Clutching the yellow card that is proof of her impoverished status, Kapuri Munna lines up at a small corner store every week to buy low-cost food grains and kerosene that the government sets aside for the poor. The genome is 10 times as old as any retrieved so far, and scientists now say that DNA should be recoverable from animals that lived a million years ago. A Brooklyn couple say their insurance company will pay $49,000 for
home repairs, while an adjuster they hired put the figure needed at $200,000. Juan Manuel Santos
catapulted to the presidency of Colombia
after the armed forces, under his watch, delivered the biggest blows against the FARC rebel group in the country’s long conflict.
For some Beijing parents, picking a high school for their children is a high-stakes dilemma full of trade-offs and questions about how Western and how Chinese they want their offspring to be.
The Culture Project’s main stage theater will be named after the British actress, who performed there several