'Greta Thunberg Effect' belies challenges for autistic community in going green

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

Research News

Autistic people need extra help in going green say researchers behind a new study which argues for a more inclusive environmental agenda.

Climate action movements are gathering extraordinary pace due to international campaigners like Greta Thunberg, whose autism has been well documented. Being autistic has been used to explain and celebrate, but also diminish and denigrate, her activism.

Thunberg, for example, reports that being autistic is a psychological "gift" and "superpower" that underpins her environmental attitudes and behaviours. This has fuelled speculation - in the media and the general public - that autistic personality traits are intrinsically linked to environmentalism. But, until now, there was no investigation to test the autistic aspect of the so-called 'Greta Thunberg Effect'.

Now a new study from the universities of Bath, Cardiff, Essex, and King's College London, in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, suggests that autistic personality traits are unrelated to environmental attitudes. In contrast they can be linked to lower engagement in pro-environmental green behaviours.

Reflecting on their findings based on data from over 2,000 people in the UK and US, they discuss several reasons why people with autistic traits might face challenges going green. This includes sensory challenges that can act as a barrier to using noisy and crowded public transport, as well as issues over changing diet to reduce meat consumption.

The researchers conclude that autism spectrum conditions can present obstacles for pro-environmental action and are calling for greater support for people with autism and mental health conditions as well as more research on the topic.

Practical support might include adapting cognitive behavioural therapy, which is commonly used to facilitate behaviour change in people with mental health conditions, to support pro-environmental behaviours. They suggest it is also important to consider early environmental education for families and teachers supporting children with neurodevelopmental and metal health conditions.

Dr Punit Shah, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Bath and the GW4 Neurodevelopmental Neurodiversity Network, explained: "The 'Greta Thunberg Effect' has powerfully emerged in recent years, with many focussing on her autism diagnosis to explain her environmental activism.

"Intuitively, the speculation between autism and environmentalism has resonated with the public, including autistic adults who helped co-produce our new research. We also know from research that interests in animals, nature, and the environment, are widely reported by autistic individuals, which enhances their subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction.

"However, our findings show the link between autism and environmentalism is not clear cut. Given our results, we strongly recommend a move away from 'Thunberg-driven' autism-based narratives, whether positive or negative, of recent advances in climate policy.

Emily Taylor, lead author of the article said: "Our research is some of the first on how neurodevelopmental or mental health conditions may influence environmental attitudes and behaviour, and climate change beliefs. We focussed on autistic traits, but many other psychological differences and difficulties are likely to be associated with barriers to personal action on climate change. For instance, those with anxiety, or high levels of stress more generally, may be unable to move towards pro-environmental behaviours, for example using public transport, and have difficulty sustaining any changes they make.

"We need to think harder about supporting people to manage stress and mental health difficulties, which might then give them the cognitive resources to direct towards engaging in green behaviours. Mental health and environmental science are often thought about separately, but greater coherence - in terms of research and policy - will be crucial for both people's mental wellbeing and the environment."

Dr Shah added: "The United Nations recently called for a 'disability-inclusive' approach to climate action. Although there is some understanding of how 'physical' health impairments are linked to difficulties with engagement in environmental behaviours, there is little understanding of how 'mental' health problems or 'hidden disabilities' may have the same effect.

"Based on our findings, we speculate that the psychological and financial support required for autistic people and people with other mental health conditions to engage in pro-environmental activities is underestimated and must be a focus in the future - for a fairer, more inclusive environmental agenda."

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Experts tackle modern slavery in Greek strawberry fields using satellite technology

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM

Research News

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IMAGE: WORKER CONDITIONS IN NEA MANOLADA, GREECE LACKING KITCHEN, TOILETS, AND HEATING view more 

CREDIT: IOANNIS KOUGKOULOS, KORNILIA HATZINIKOLAOU

A consortium of modern slavery experts, led by the University of Nottingham, have assisted the Greek government to tackle a humanitarian crisis unfolding in the strawberry fields of southern Greece.

Using satellite technology to identify migrant settlements - a technique pioneered by the university's Rights Lab - and working with the Greek authorities, the experts then developed a decision model for which they could prioritise victims that were at highest risk.

Leading the study, the Rights Lab combined different data sources and methods to build a set of criteria measuring the extent of labour exploitation in a settlement. The academics then validated these criteria with a government agency and a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) involved in fighting labour exploitation.

By combining earth observation data with operations management techniques, this method has been successfully used to address labour exploitation in areas where strawberries are harvested.

This approach is a world-first in the humanitarian sector, with the study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), being published in the journal of Production and Operations Management.

The strawberry fields of Nea Manolada have been in the human rights spotlight since May 2013, when three local field guards shot and injured 30 Bangladeshi migrant workers. In March 2017, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that the workers had been subjected to forced labour and that Greece had violated Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights by not preventing human trafficking of irregular migrant workers. Following a high-stake ruling by the Court, the Greek government was mandated to ramp-up its fight against labour exploitation.

Dr Ioannis Kougkoulos led the study while at the Rights Lab. He said: "The use of seasonal workers, the relatively low level of skills required, a strong reliance on outsourcing and agent-based recruitment of workers increase the likelihood of labour exploitation. Forced migration caused by crises around the world exacerbates this phenomenon. Refugees and migrants often live-in illegality and experience serious financial distress, which puts them at high risk of becoming victims of labour exploitation.

"Governments are responsible for ensuring equal treatment for migrant and national workers on their territory, and to protect migrants from being employed under substandard working conditions."

Dr Doreen Boyd, a co-author, Rights Lab Associate Director, and Professor of Earth Observation at the University of Nottingham led the ESRC grant that supported this work. She said: "We have demonstrated how remote sensing data enables the identification and location of informal settlements of workers in potential situations of labour exploitation over a large geographic area (140km2). Identifying these settlements from the ground would require driving around the entire study area in search of possible settlements, which would be costly and ineffective, since many settlements are not visible from the road.

"Our approach can be replicated in other labour-intensive agricultural activities where cheap labour is abundant, such as the Italian tomato fields or tobacco-producing regions in Argentina. Future studies could extend our approach to different applications in humanitarian operations, for example, to study migration flows, by combining remote sensing with a decision-making tool such as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for identifying and assessing risks of settlements of forcibly displaced persons in highly fluid conflict situations, like the South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo."

In the paper, the researchers report that fighting labour exploitation in the agricultural sector requires time-intensive fieldwork, as it involves visiting suspected farms and informal worker settlements, which governments and humanitarian organisations often lack resources to do.

Using remote sensing, a form of satellite technology, for real-time data collection allowed the academics to overcome one of the major challenges of research in humanitarian operations, namely the difficulty of accessing data due to safety and logistical issues limiting access to the field.

Once areas of potential exploitation had been identified through satellite imagery, these settlements were investigated and verified - known as 'ground-truthing'. On the ground, the inspection teams collected data from each settlement using questionnaires to address all criteria required for the decision analysis model that the academics had prepared.

Next, the academics used Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), a recognised method in the operations sector for decision-making to formalise and address the problem of competing decision objectives - a common characteristic of humanitarian operations.

Each settlement was then ranked, using the MCDA model, to assist the government and humanitarian organisations intervene in the top-priority settlements (starting with the riskiest settlement and moving toward the less risky) and allocate resources to the most vulnerable migrant workers to improve their living conditions.

CAPTION

Inappropriate worker conditions, Nea Manolada, Greece

CREDIT

Ioannis Kougkoulos, Kornilia Hatzinikolaou

The research team involved in this project was Dr Ioannis Kougkoulos (at the Rights Lab during this study, now at LAMSADE-CNRS); Selim Cakir (Rights Lab); Nathan Kunz (University of North Florida); Doreen Boyd (Rights Lab), Alexander Trautrims (Rights Lab); Kornilia Hatzinikolaou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki); and Stefan Gold (University of Kassel).

More information is available from Professor Doreen Boyd in the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham at Doreen.Boyd@nottingham.ac.uk or; Katie Andrews in the Press Office at the University of Nottingham at katie.andrews@nottingham.ac.uk or 0115 9515751.

 

Banishing bandits: Other countries bear the cost

ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CORAL REEF STUDIES

Research News

 

IMAGE: PURSUIT AND APPREHENSION OF A VIETNAMESE 'BLUE BOAT' BY AUSTRALIAN BORDER FORCE AND AUSTRALIAN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY (AFMA) ON LIHOU REEF, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA, 9 FEBRUARY 2017. THESE WOODEN HULLED VESSELS... view more 

CREDIT: AUSTRALIAN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY.

A new study reveals the strategies that stop bandits from illegally fishing in Australian waters--but warns there is a cost to the region's poorer countries.

Co-author Dr Brock Bergseth, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, said poachers are simply following the recurring history of human fishing: intensively fish and devastate local resources, then move further afield to--in these cases--fish illegally or poach in other countries' waters.

"Millions of people rely on fish and seafood and when offered no alternative choice, will chose banditry and illegal fishing to get by," Dr Bergseth said.

"But without a regional strategy and investments for rebuilding and managing countries' fisheries, this just becomes one big game of whack-a-mole: you deal with the problem in one area, only for it to pop up in another," he said.

The study shows how Vietnamese poaching boats, or 'blue boats', encroached into Australian waters between 2013 and 2017.

Under a jointly signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in 2017, the Australian Fisheries Management Authority and the Vietnamese Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development designed and delivered a series of workshop interventions to deter illegal fishing by Vietnamese fishers in Australia between 2017 and 2018.

Both before and after the workshops, 82 fishers were surveyed to understand why they were coming to Australia and also whether the workshop's explanations of the penalties were effective in shifting perceptions related to reducing illegal fishing.

"The main reason these fishers engaged in banditry was their displacement from their traditional fishing grounds in the South China Sea," Dr Bergseth said. "This is just one of the implications of an expanding Chinese territory, and it affects countries as far away as Australia."

Lead author Dr Chris Wilcox, from Australia's national science agency CSIRO, said since the workshops, there hasn't been a single sighting of a Vietnamese fishing boat illegally fishing in Australian or Pacific waters.

But, he cautions, while an understanding of the penalties might deter fishers from poaching in Australian waters, they also lose their access to economically viable fish resources.

Captains and their crews opt to fish in other locations, legal or not, even in the face of penalties for doing so.

"Australia can build a wall of steel with patrol boats and surveillance aeroplanes to protect our waters--but without improvements in fish stocks in their legal fishing grounds, Vietnamese vessels will be under pressure to leave in pursuit of revenue. This is creating ongoing issues for our regional neighbours," Dr Wilcox said.

Reports continue to surface of Vietnamese fishers captured in other regional countries including Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vanuatu.

Dr Wilcox said regional action on the root causes of the problem can solve the issue for everyone. And though this is a long-term project, it also has the best potential for the highest long-term return on investment in terms of reducing illegal fishing.

"Incursions will continue as long as the number of fishing vessels across the region exceeds what the resources can support," Dr Wilcox said. "While it is essential to keep the enforcement pressure on, this is where coordination across the region could have a positive effect."

However, he also said tension amongst South East Asian countries over sea borders and other issues still precludes effective coordinated action on illegal fishing.

"Addressing the state of resources in the waters of countries across the region and their ability to collaborate to address vessels illegally crossing borders to fish are the two key ingredients for solving this problem," Dr Wilcox said.

Dr Bergseth said otherwise, things will only get worse as ocean resources dwindle.

"The decisions we make in the next 5-10 years could well chart the state of our oceans for the next 100," he said.

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PAPER

Wilcox C, Bergseth B. (2021). 'Effectiveness of interventions to shift drivers of roving banditry and reduce illegal fishing by Vietnamese blue boats'. Conservation Letters. DOI: 10.1111/conl.12823

 

Solar radio signals could be used to monitor melting ice sheets

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Research News

IMAGE: THE EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND TEST SITE AT STORE GLACIER, GREENLAND. RESEARCHERS CONCEPTUALIZED A BATTERY-POWERED RECEIVER WITH AN ANTENNA PLACED ON THE ICE THAT CAN MEASURE ICE THICKNESS USING THE SUN'S... view more 

CREDIT: IMAGE CREDIT: SEAN PETERS

The sun provides a daunting source of electromagnetic disarray - chaotic, random energy emitted by the massive ball of gas arrives to Earth in a wide spectrum of radio frequencies. But in that randomness, Stanford researchers have discovered the makings of a powerful tool for monitoring ice and polar changes on Earth and across the solar system.

In a new study, a team of glaciologists and electrical engineers show how radio signals naturally emitted by the sun can be turned into a passive radar system for measuring the depth of ice sheets and successfully tested it on a glacier in Greenland. The technique, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on July 14, could lead to a cheaper, lower power and more pervasive alternative to current methods of collecting data, according to the researchers. The advance may offer large-scale, prolonged insight into melting ice sheets and glaciers, which are among the dominant causes of sea-level rise threatening coastal communities around the world.

A sky full of signals

Airborne ice-penetrating radar - the primary current means for collecting widespread information about the polar subsurface - involves flying airplanes containing a high-powered system that transmits its own "active" radar signal down through the ice sheet. The undertaking is resource-intensive, however, and only provides information about conditions at the time of the flight.

By contrast, the researchers' proof of concept uses a battery-powered receiver with an antenna placed on the ice to detect the sun's radio waves as they travel down to Earth, through the ice sheet and to the subsurface. In other words, instead of transmitting its own signal, the system uses naturally occurring radio waves that are already traveling down from the sun, a nuclear-powered transmitter in the sky. If this type of system were fully miniaturized and deployed in extensive sensor networks, it would offer an unprecedented look at the subsurface evolution of Earth's quickly changing polar conditions, the researchers say.

"Our goal is to chart a course for the development of low-resource sensor networks that can monitor subsurface conditions on a really wide scale," said lead study author Sean Peters, who conducted research for the study as a graduate student at Stanford and now works at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "That could be challenging with active sensors, but this passive technique gives us the opportunity to really take advantage of low-resource implementations."

A random advantage

In addition to visible and other kinds of light, the sun is constantly emitting radio waves across a wide, random spectrum of frequencies. The researchers used this chaos to their advantage: They recorded a snippet of the sun's radioactivity, which is like an endless song that never repeats, then listened for that unique signature in the echo that's created when the solar radio waves bounce off the bottom of an ice sheet. Measuring the delay between the original recording and the echo allows them to calculate the distance between the surface receiver and the floor of the ice sheet, and thus its thickness.

In their test on Store Glacier in West Greenland, the researchers computed an echo delay time of about 11 microseconds, which maps to an ice thickness of about 3,000 feet - a figure that matches measurements of the same site recorded from both ground-based and airborne radar.

"It's one thing to do a bunch of math and physics and convince yourself something should be possible - it's really something else to see an actual echo from the bottom of an ice sheet using the sun," said senior author Dustin Schroeder, an assistant professor of geophysics at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).

From Jupiter to the sun

The idea of using passive radio waves to collect geophysical measurements of ice thickness was initially proposed by study co-author Andrew Romero-Wolf, a researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as a way of investigating Jupiter's icy moons. As Schroeder and Romero-Wolf worked together with others on a mission, it became clear that radio waves generated by Jupiter itself would interfere with their active ice-penetrating radar systems. At one point, Romero-Wolf realized that instead of a weakness, Jupiter's erratic radio emissions might actually be a strength, if they could be turned into a source for probing the subsurface of the moons.

"We started discussing it in the context of Jupiter's moon Europa, but then we realized it should work for observing Earth's ice sheets too if we replace Jupiter with the sun," Schroeder said.

From there, the research team undertook the task of isolating the sun's ambient radio emissions to see if it could be used to measure ice thickness. The method involved bringing a subset of the sun's 200- to 400-megahertz radio frequency band above the noise of other celestial bodies, processing massive amounts of data and eliminating man-made sources of electromagnetism like TV stations, FM radio and electronic equipment.

While the system only works when the sun is above the horizon, the proof-of-concept opens the possibility of adapting to other naturally occurring and man-made radio sources in the future. The co-authors are also still pursuing their original idea of applying this technique to space missions by harnessing the ambient energy emitted by other astronomical sources like the gas giant Jupiter.

"Pushing the frontiers of sensing technology for planetary research has enabled us to push the frontiers of sensing technology for climate change," Schroeder said. "Monitoring ice sheets under climate change and exploring icy moons at the outer planets are both extremely low-resource environments where you really need to design elegant sensors that don't require a lot of power."

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Schroeder is also an assistant professor, by courtesy, of electrical engineering and a center fellow, by courtesy, at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Study co-authors include Winnie Chu of the Georgia Institute of Technology; Davide Castelletti of the Department of Geophysics, now with Capella Space; Mark Haynes of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Poul Christoffersen of the Scott Polar Research Institute and Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge.

This research was partially funded by NASA Cryospheric Sciences.

 

How corporate managers try to fix workplace injustices by giving employees secret perks

UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA

Research News

A new study co-authored by the UBC Sauder School of Business has found that when senior managers mistreat workers, middle managers often attempt to quietly smooth things over.

Robin Hood was known for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor -- but while he may have lived in Sherwood Forest centuries ago, he would have fit right in as a middle manager in today's business world.

Studies have shown that when employees are mistreated by senior leaders, employees can often get back at them by doing things like gossiping, stealing office supplies or calling in sick when they're well. But according to new research from UBC Sauder, middle managers also get in on the act, and attempt to address workplace injustices by secretly helping out their subordinates when they can.

In fact, managers with an especially strong moral code can consider it their duty to right the wrongs they see, and to compensate victims in hidden ways -- out of view of the top brass.

For the paper, titled When Managers Become Robin Hoods: A Mixed Method Investigation, the research team from UBC Sauder, Emlyon, University of Colorado and the University of Toulouse first interviewed 35 middle managers -- 20 men and 15 women -- at a European publishing company that employs roughly 550 workers. There, they confirmed that managers knowingly engaged in "robin hoodism."

In several follow-up studies involving hundreds of participants from countries around the world, the researchers also examined whether co-workers were aware the robin hoodism was happening, when it was most likely to happen, and what drove managers to potentially risk their own jobs to help those beneath them.

What they found was that robin hoodism is not at all unusual, and amounts to a kind of invisible wage system, where middle managers compensate victims under the table in a variety of ways -- from extra vacation time to higher travel allowances to equipment they're allowed to take home -- after they have experienced a workplace injustice.

The type of slight also plays a part: managers were more likely to dole out extra favours when the worker was treated poorly on an interpersonal level as opposed to a bureaucratic one.

"Managers minded if a salary wasn't the highest, or if bureaucratic procedures were a problem," says UBC Sauder Professor and study co-author Daniel Skarlicki (he/him/his).

"But when a victim got cheated out of an outcome like a promotion, or was mistreated interpersonally or insulted, that especially seemed to really trigger managers into action to do something about it. That's when the Robin Hoods really get inspired."

In one example, a woman was given time off to attend her daughter's graduation, but then a senior manager revoked that approval. The woman's immediate manager was sympathetic and took the whole crew out for dinner to help make amends.

But not all managers dispensed their robin hoodism equally. The researchers tested the moral identity -- that is, the degree to which people see themselves as moral -- of 187 managers in an MBA program in France. They found that managers who scored higher on the moral identity scale were more likely to engage in robin hoodism than those who scored lower.

"That gave us additional data that managers' moral concerns really do underlie robin hoodism," says Professor Skarlicki, who has done many studies involving justice in the workplace. "It's an interesting paradox, because some people might view what Robin Hood did as unethical -- and yet managers who do it actually see themselves as doing the right thing."

Middle managers are in an especially tricky position because they can't punish the transgressor -- their boss -- but they want to keep the workers beneath them feel they are treated fairly. At the same time, because senior executives are making financial decisions, and don't account for their managers doling out extra gifts and bonuses, that robin hoodism could put a serious dent in their companies' bottom lines. Still, says Professor Skarlicki, executives who discover Robin Hoods in their midst in some cases might be wise to turn a blind eye.

"When a senior leader has done something that's offensive or mistreats an employee, it's really important that the manager has a bit of wiggle room to be able to fix it. It's really a way of absorbing some of the mistreatment that can happen, even inadvertently," says Professor Skarlicki. But those same leaders probably shouldn't advertise that they're allowing it, he adds.

"You don't want to say, 'Hey, managers, you can go out and give everybody extra bonuses,' because then you don't really have a lot of control over spending and other things."

Professor Skarlicki says he suspected that robin hoodism was happening in workplaces, but was surprised by the pervasiveness of the practice.

"I was surprised that it was so common, and so commonly known that managers do it," he says, adding a final thought for senior leaders. "If you're treating people unfairly, your organization is not running as smoothly as it could, because victims are getting even, and managers are taking it upon themselves to make things right."

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Encrypting photos on the cloud to keep them private

A new technique can keep images safe on Google Photos, Flickr, Imgur

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE

Research News

New York, NY--July 13, 2021--The past decade has witnessed scandal after scandal over private images maliciously or accidentally made public. A new study from computer scientists at Columbia Engineering reveals what may be the first way to encrypt personal images on popular cloud photo services, such as those from Google, Apple, Flickr and others, all without requiring any changes to -- or trust in -- those services.

Smartphones now make it easy for virtually everyone to snap photos, with market research firm InfoTrends estimating that people now take more than a trillion photos each year. The limited amount of data that smartphones hold, and the way in which they are vulnerable to accidental loss and damage, lead many users to store their images online via cloud photo services. Google Photos is especially popular, with more than a billion users.

However, these online photo collections are not just valuable to their owners, but to attackers seeking to unearth a gold mine of personal data, as the case of the 2014 celebrity nude photo hacks made clear. Unfortunately, security measures such as passwords and two-factor authentication may not be enough to protect these images anymore, as the online services storing these photos can themselves sometimes be the problem.

"There are many cases of employees at online services abusing their insider access to user data, like SnapChat employees looking at people's private photos," said John S. Koh, the lead author of the paper, who just finished his PhD with professors of computer science Jason Nieh and Steven M. Bellovin. "There have even been bugs that reveal random users' data to other users, which actually happened with a bug in Google Photos that revealed users' private videos to other entirely random users."

A potential solution to this problem would be to encrypt the photos so no one but the proper users can view them. However, cloud photo services are currently not compatible with existing encryption techniques. For example, Google Photos compresses uploaded files to reduce their sizes, but this would corrupt encrypted images, rendering them garbage.

Even if compression worked on encrypted images, mobile users of cloud photo services typically expect to have a way to quickly browse through identifiable photo thumbnails, something not possible with any existing photo encryption schemes. A number of third-party photo services do promise image encryption and secure photo hosting, but these all require users to abandon existing widely used services such as Google Photos.

Now Columbia Engineering researchers have created a way for mobile users to enjoy popular cloud photo services while protecting their photos. The system, dubbed Easy Secure Photos (ESP), encrypts photos uploaded to cloud services so that attackers -- or the cloud services themselves -- cannot decipher them. At the same time, users can visually browse and display these images as if they weren't encrypted. They presented their study, "Encrypted Cloud Photo Storage Using Google Photos," at MobiSys 2021, the 19th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, on June 30, 2021.

"Even if your account is hacked, attackers can't get your photos because they are encrypted," said Jason Nieh, professor of computer science and co-director of the Software Systems Laboratory.

ESP employs an image encryption algorithm whose resulting files can be compressed and still get recognized as images, albeit ones that look like black and white static to anyone except authorized users. In addition, ESP works for both lossy and lossless image formats such as JPEG and PNG, and is efficient enough for use on mobile devices. Encrypting each image results in three black-and-white files, each one encoding details about the original image's red, green, or blue data.

Moreover, ESP creates and uploads encrypted thumbnail images to cloud photo services. Authorized users can quickly and easily browse thumbnail galleries using image browsers that incorporate ESP.

"Our system adds an extra layer of protection beyond your password-based account security," said Koh, who designed and implemented ESP. "The goal is to make it so that only your devices can see your sensitive photos, and no one else unless you specifically share it with them."

The researchers wanted to make sure that each user could use multiple devices to access their online photos if desired. The problem is the same digital code or "key" used to encrypt a photo has to be the same one used to decrypt the image, "but if the key is on one device, how do you get it to another?" Nieh said. "Lots of work has shown that users do not understand keys and requiring them to move them around from one device to another is a recipe for disaster, either because the scheme is too complicated for users to use, or because they copy the key the wrong way and inadvertently give everyone access to their encrypted data."

The computer scientists developed an easy-to-use way for users to manage these keys that eliminates the need for users to know or care about keys. All a user has to do in order to help a new device access ESP-encrypted photos is to verify it with another device on which they have already installed and logged into an ESP-enabled app. This makes it possible "for multiple trusted devices to still view encrypted photos," Nieh said.

"The need to handle keys, and handle them properly, has been the downfall of almost every other encryption system," Bellovin said.

The researchers implemented ESP in Simple Gallery, a popular photo gallery app on Android with millions of users. It could encrypt images from Google Photos, Flickr and Imgur without changes needed to any of these cloud photo services, and led to only modest increases in upload and download times.

"We are experiencing the beginning of a major technological boom where even average users move towards moving all their data into the cloud. This comes with great privacy concerns that have only recently started rearing their ugly heads, such as the increasing number of discovered cases of cloud service employees looking at private user data," Koh said. "Users should have an option to protect their data that they think is really important in these popular services, and we explore just one practical solution for this."

A number of companies have expressed interest in the new system. "We have a working implementation that we are releasing to developers and other researchers, but not yet to the general public," Koh said.

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About the Study

The study is titled "Encrypted Cloud Photo Storage Using Google Photos."

The study was presented at MobiSys 2021, the 19th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, on June 30, 2021.

Authors are: John S. Koh, Jason Nieh, Steven M. Bellovin

Department of Computer Science, Columbia Engineering

This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants CNS-1717801, CNS1563555, CCF-1918400, and CNS-2052947.

LINKS:

Paper: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/pubs/mobisys2021_esp.pdf

DOI: 10.1145/3458864.3468220

http://engineering.columbia.edu/

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/

https://www.sigmobile.org/mobisys/2021/

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/23/arts/international/photos-photos-everywhere.html

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708328/google-photos-users-gallery-go-1-billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud_leaks_of_celebrity_photos

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwnva7/snapchat-employees-abused-data-access-spy-on-users-snaplion

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/04/google-photos-makes-big-screw-up-and-mayve-leaked-your-videos-to-a-random-stranger/

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~koh/

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~nieh/

https://www.engineering.columbia.edu/faculty/steven-bellovin

Columbia Engineering

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School's faculty are at the center of the University's cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, "Columbia Engineering for Humanity," the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

Liquid metal sensors and AI could help prosthetic hands to 'feel'

Study first to use liquid metal sensors and machine learning on a prosthetic hand

FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY

 VIDEO: RESEARCHERS USED INDIVIDUAL FINGERTIPS FITTED WITH STRETCHABLE TACTILE SENSORS WITH LIQUID METAL ON A PROSTHESIS TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN DIFFERENT SPEEDS OF A SLIDING MOTION ALONG DIFFERENT TEXTURED SURFACES. THE FOUR... view more 

CREDIT: FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY/COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Each fingertip has more than 3,000 touch receptors, which largely respond to pressure. Humans rely heavily on sensation in their fingertips when manipulating an object. The lack of this sensation presents a unique challenge for individuals with upper limb amputations. While there are several high-tech, dexterous prosthetics available today - they all lack the sensation of "touch." The absence of this sensory feedback results in objects inadvertently being dropped or crushed by a prosthetic hand.

To enable a more natural feeling prosthetic hand interface, researchers from Florida Atlantic University's College of Engineering and Computer Science and collaborators are the first to incorporate stretchable tactile sensors using liquid metal on the fingertips of a prosthetic hand. Encapsulated within silicone-based elastomers, this technology provides key advantages over traditional sensors, including high conductivity, compliance, flexibility and stretchability. This hierarchical multi-finger tactile sensation integration could provide a higher level of intelligence for artificial hands.

For the study, published in the journal Sensors, researchers used individual fingertips on the prosthesis to distinguish between different speeds of a sliding motion along different textured surfaces. The four different textures had one variable parameter: the distance between the ridges. To detect the textures and speeds, researchers trained four machine learning algorithms. For each of the ten surfaces, 20 trials were collected to test the ability of the machine learning algorithms to distinguish between the ten different complex surfaces comprised of randomly generated permutations of four different textures.

Results showed that the integration of tactile information from liquid metal sensors on four prosthetic hand fingertips simultaneously distinguished between complex, multi-textured surfaces - demonstrating a new form of hierarchical intelligence. The machine learning algorithms were able to distinguish between all the speeds with each finger with high accuracy. This new technology could improve the control of prosthetic hands and provide haptic feedback, more commonly known as the experience of touch, for amputees to reconnect a previously severed sense of touch.

"Significant research has been done on tactile sensors for artificial hands, but there is still a need for advances in lightweight, low-cost, robust multimodal tactile sensors," said Erik Engeberg, Ph.D., senior author, an associate professor in the Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering and a member of the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and the FAU Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE), who conducted the study with first author and Ph.D. student Moaed A. Abd. "The tactile information from all the individual fingertips in our study provided the foundation for a higher hand-level of perception enabling the distinction between ten complex, multi-textured surfaces that would not have been possible using purely local information from an individual fingertip. We believe that these tactile details could be useful in the future to afford a more realistic experience for prosthetic hand users through an advanced haptic display, which could enrich the amputee-prosthesis interface and prevent amputees from abandoning their prosthetic hand."

Researchers compared four different machine learning algorithms for their successful classification capabilities: K-nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and neural network (NN). The time-frequency features of the liquid metal sensors were extracted to train and test the machine learning algorithms. The NN generally performed the best at the speed and texture detection with a single finger and had a 99.2 percent accuracy to distinguish between ten different multi-textured surfaces using four liquid metal sensors from four fingers simultaneously.

"The loss of an upper limb can be a daunting challenge for an individual who is trying to seamlessly engage in regular activities," said Stella Batalama, Ph.D., dean, College of Engineering and Computer Science. "Although advances in prosthetic limbs have been beneficial and allow amputees to better perform their daily duties, they do not provide them with sensory information such as touch. They also don't enable them to control the prosthetic limb naturally with their minds. With this latest technology from our research team, we are one step closer to providing people all over the world with a more natural prosthetic device that can 'feel' and respond to its environment."

CAPTION

Researchers used individual fingertips fitted with stretchable tactile sensors with liquid metal on a prosthesis attached to a robotic arm.

CREDIT

Alex Dolce, Florida Atlantic University 

Study co-authors are Rudy Paul, FAU Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering; Aparna Aravelli, Ph.D.; Ou Bai, Ph.D.; and Leonel Lagos, Ph.D., PMP, all with Florida International University; and Maohua Lin, Ph.D., FAU Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering.

The research was supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Aging of the NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and pilot grants from the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and FAU I-SENSE.

About FAU's College of Engineering and Computer Science:

The FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science is internationally recognized for cutting edge research and education in the areas of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), computer engineering, electrical engineering, bioengineering, civil, environmental and geomatics engineering, mechanical engineering, and ocean engineering. Research conducted by the faculty and their teams expose students to technology innovations that push the current state-of-the art of the disciplines. The College research efforts are supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Department of Education (DOEd), the State of Florida, and industry. The FAU College of Engineering and Computer Science offers degrees with a modern twist that bear specializations in areas of national priority such as AI, cybersecurity, internet-of-things, transportation and supply chain management, and data science. New degree programs include Masters of Science in AI (first in Florida), Masters of Science in Data Science and Analytics, and the new Professional Masters of Science degree in computer science for working professionals. For more information about the College, please visit eng.fau.edu.

About Florida Atlantic University:

Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit http://www.fau.edu.

Extreme heat will soon kill nearly all salmon in Sacramento River, officials say

Alexandra Meeks, CNN 

California officials are warning nearly all juvenile chinook salmon in the Sacramento River could die due to abnormally hot underwater conditions as heat waves continue to bake the West.

 The Sacramento River is too hot for a young species of salmon to survive.

There could be a "near-complete loss" of the young endangered species of salmon because temperatures above 100 degrees for extended periods of time are overheating the river, making it uninhabitable for the fish to grow beyond their egg stage, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) confirmed to CNN on Tuesday.

"This persistent heat dome over the West Coast will likely result in earlier loss of ability to provide cool water and subsequently, it is possible that all in-river juveniles will not survive this season," CDFW said in a statement.

California, among other Western states including Oregon and Washington, has been experiencing extremely high temperatures in recent weeks. But drought conditions in the Golden State are especially taxing, with much of the state under severe or exceptional drought, according to the US Drought Monitor.

The drought is so bad in some parts of that state that a family's well in Clovis in Fresno County ran dry, leaving them without water, CNN reported.

Meanwhile, as temperatures near and surpass triple digits, many reservoirs in California's Central Valley have diverted more water to cities and farmers during the drought, making rivers shallower and too hot for the fish to develop from eggs, a process which can take at least 60 days to complete.

According to CDFW officials, water is more insulated when it is deep. However, since more water is heating up and evaporating, the salmon are losing their insulation blanket, which normally makes it colder at the bottom of the river. The eggs will die when the water temperature rises above 56 degrees, officials said, warning only a few thousand of winter-run Chinook are left.

"It's an extreme set of cascading climate events pushing us into this crisis situation," said CDFW spokesman Jordan Traverso.

Efforts to save salmon are pricy

To combat the poor river conditions in the Central Valley, some fish preservation organizations have tried to save the salmon population by launching large scale trucking operations to transport millions of salmon to the San Pablo Bay, San Francisco Bay and other fish farms where they are more likely to survive, Traverso said.

The CDFW announced Tuesday that it had successfully relocated 1.1 million juvenile salmon from the Klamath River in northern California, where conditions are similarly extreme.

While relocating salmon is an option, there are better alternatives than the high-priced trucking process, a spokesperson for the Golden State Salmon Association said.

John McManus, president of the association, said dam operators could hold on to more water to keep the fish alive, but that would require contracts to be modified between the operators and their federal and state partners who supply water to cities and farmers.

A warmer California recently prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to call on voluntarily reductions of water use by 15% to protect reserves and to help maintain critical flows for fish and other wildlife.

"We could lose salmon here in California if we continue with business as usual and the climate continues to warm," McManus said. "There's a very real possibility we could lose salmon forever here."

Police break up ‘exorcism’ in lumber aisle of U.S. Home Depot

By Josh K. Elliott Global News
Posted June 25, 2021

In this July 11, 2019, file photo, lumber is stacked at a 

Home Depot store in Londonderry, N.H.

DO YOU SEE THE '666' NUMBERED LUMBER?!

 AP Photo/Charles Krupa

A word of warning to anyone building a deck in Pennsylvania: Your lumber might be possessed by a demon. And if it is, you can blame the meddling local police.


Authorities busted up an attempted exorcism in the timber aisle of a Home Depot in Dickson City, Pa., on Monday, according to a bizarre line included in the police department’s daily crime blotter on Facebook.

Dickson City officers showed up at the Home Depot around 3:30 p.m. on Monday for a call about “disorderly people” at the store, according to the blotter.

Two individuals were “having an exorcism in the lumber aisle for the dead trees,” police wrote.

The would-be exorcists were two men dressed in black, according to Dickson City Police Chief William Bilinski. Both men were “chanting and moaning” in the lumber aisle and “looked like they were trying to do an exorcism,” Bilinski told the Scranton Times-Tribune newspaper.

Another officer told the Philly Voice that it was a “séance type of thing for the dead.”

The humans were escorted out of the building — but it’s unclear if the alleged evil spirits were escorted back to hell.

There is no indication that the exorcism had anything to do with a recent drop in the price of lumber.


READ MORE: Timber! What to expect now that lumber prices have dropped back down to earth

Staff at the store declined to comment.

Authorities did not say why the men thought the wood might be possessed.

No humans or haunted two-by-fours were charged in connection with the incident.