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Posts Tagged ‘egypt’

Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois determined that using the Nautilus SGI supercomputer to analyze news stories can help predict major world events. The analysis he used for the experiment was retrospective, feeding the computer millions of articles from which it was able to determine a deteriorating national sentiment towards Libya and Egypt before the revolutions in those countries. The system was also able to narrow down Osama Bin Laden's location to within 125 miles before he was found and killed last May.

More than 100 million articles were gathered for this study, from various sources including the New York Times archive, Open Source Center and BBC Monitoring (two organizations that monitor local media output worldwide). The system searched for two primary things in the articles: mood and location. Words such as “nice” or “horrible” were used to measure mood, and geocoding converted mentions of places such as “Cairo” or “Pakistan” to plottable coordinates.

For countries that experienced the “Arab Spring,” the supercomputer produced graphs that showed a noticeable decline in media sentiment both within each country and without. Before President Mubarak's resignation, the tone of media coverage of Egypt fell to one of its lowest points in 30 years, predicting something that U.S. government could not. As Leetaru told BBC news, the president's continued support of Mubarak showed that high-level analysis suggested Mubarak wasn't going anywhere. The graph, however, suggests otherwise.

Leetaru's next step is developing technology to allow this system to forecast major world events, rather than just analyzing them after the fact. He compares it to economic forecasting algorithms, as well as meteorology, in that none of those systems (including his) are perfect, but using them is far better than just guessing.

[BBC]

Kalev Leetaru of the University of Illinois determined that using the Nautilus SGI supercomputer to analyze news stories can help predict major world events. The analysis he used for the experiment was retrospective, feeding the computer millions of articles from which it was able to determine a deteriorating national sentiment towards Libya and Egypt before the revolutions in those countries. The system was also able to narrow down Osama Bin Laden's location to within 125 miles before he was found and killed last May.

More than 100 million articles were gathered for this study, from various sources including the New York Times archive, Open Source Center and BBC Monitoring (two organizations that monitor local media output worldwide). The system searched for two primary things in the articles: mood and location. Words such as “nice” or “horrible” were used to measure mood, and geocoding converted mentions of places such as “Cairo” or “Pakistan” to plottable coordinates.

For countries that experienced the “Arab Spring,” the supercomputer produced graphs that showed a noticeable decline in media sentiment both within each country and without. Before President Mubarak's resignation, the tone of media coverage of Egypt fell to one of its lowest points in 30 years, predicting something that U.S. government could not. As Leetaru told BBC news, the president's continued support of Mubarak showed that high-level analysis suggested Mubarak wasn't going anywhere. The graph, however, suggests otherwise.

Leetaru's next step is developing technology to allow this system to forecast major world events, rather than just analyzing them after the fact. He compares it to economic forecasting algorithms, as well as meteorology, in that none of those systems (including his) are perfect, but using them is far better than just guessing.

[BBC]

“According to our analysis, 88 percent of the ‘Egyptian Internet’ has fallen off the Internet,’” said Andree Toonk at BGPmon, a monitoring site that checks connectivity of countries and networks, to the Guardian.

The Internet went dead around midnight Egypt time on Friday, and at the same time, the few companies that pipe Internet connections into and out of Egypt went dark as well, the AP said. The government apparently wields enough control over the country’s Internet service providers that it shut them all down at once, something that is unprecedented in the history of the Internet, according to network security expert Jim Cowie.

This is a departure from other regimes’ attempts to quash online communication — typically, a few websites are blocked, not the entire pipeline. That was the case earlier this week, as Egyptian ISPs restricted access to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. But today, the shutdown reaches far beyond the protesters to Egypt’s entire economy. Cowie’s Internet-monitoring firm, Renesys, said “every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.”

The Egyptian Stock Market is still online, however, because the ISP that powers it, Noor Group, was left alone.

In this country, discussions about shutting off the Internet have centered on attacks from other nations. Sen. Joe Lieberman wants to give the president an Internet "kill switch" that would disconnect America from incoming worldwide traffic. But it probably wouldn't work anyway, because hackers would use proxy servers and other workarounds to circumvent any blockade.

That may be why Egypt shut off the whole thing, security experts said — there is no possibility for a proxy, because there is nothing coming in or out.

“There is literally no route. It’s as if the entire country disappeared,” Cowie said.

A wholesale shutoff, rather than some blocked tweets, may be more likely to spark interest from other governments. “We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this tweet, are being blocked in Egypt," State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley said on Twitter.

The Internet and social media were key instruments of communication during the 2009-2010 election protests in Iran, dubbed the “Twitter Revolution” for the site’s importance in allowing protesters to communicate with each other. Now it appears Egypt wants to prevent communication altogether.

[AP]

The robot will traverse two unexplored shafts leading from the Queen's Chamber in the pyramid. Nobody knows where the shafts, which were discovered in 1872, lead.

Known as the Djedi project, after the magician whom the Egyptian king Khufu consulted when planning his pyramid, the robot will be able to drill through a secret door in the pyramid’s innards to see what lies beyond.

A robotics team from Leeds University in the UK is working with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to design the tomb bot, which is a follow-up to an earlier robotic mission that found the secret door in the first place.

The Pyramid of Khufu, after the king who built it around 2,560 BC, is the last remaining wonder of the ancient world. It involves a series of passageways and two rooms at its center, called the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber. Two shafts rise from the King’s Chamber at 45-degree angles toward the sky -- as the Independent reports, they’re thought to be a passageway to the heavens.

The Queen’s Chamber has two shafts too, but they don’t lead to the outside of the pyramid.

In 1992, researchers sent a camera up the shaft and found it was blocked by a limestone door with copper handles. Ten years later, researchers drilled through the door, hoping to unlock a treasure trove of artifacts -- but they found yet another door about 8 inches away. The Djedi project will drill through the second door and, researchers hope, follow the shaft to its end.

The team hopes to send the robot through the door by the end of the year, the Independent reports.

Robert Richardson, of the Leeds University School of Mechanical Engineering, says the team will continue the expedition until they reach the end of the shafts, and that they have no preconceptions about what they’ll find.

One can only hope it will be something out of this world.

[Independent]