Saturday, July 11, 2020

Germany’s evolving fight against the far-right extremism

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Inshiya Nalawala

Article Title

Germany’s evolving fight against the far-right extremism

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

July 11, 2020

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Holger Munch, President BKA, Germany

Holger Munch, President BKA, Germany | Source:  Olaf Kosinsky (kosinsky.eu) via Wikimedia | Under Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0-de

Several shocking incidents of attacks on racial or religious minorities in Germany are making headlines for the last few  years.

In June 2019, a pro-refugee regional official Walter Lübcke was gunned down at his home in Central Germany by a 45-year old man, Stephan-Ernt’s. According to the prosecutor, Dr. Walter Lübcke's argument in favor of accommodating refugees in the town of Lohfelden had instigated xenophobic and extremist thoughts in the mind of his killer.

Two people were killed by a heavily armed man during a failed attempt of massacre at a Synagogue in the city of Halle in October 2019. In yet another shootout, nine immigrants and ethnic-minority Germans were killed during an unrestrained shooting in Hanau on 19th February 2020.

The government investigations and media reports blamed individuals linked or influenced by the far-right extremists groups for these attacks.

In November 2011, government Investigations revealed that National Socialist Underground(NSU), a Neo-Nazi terrorist group has fuelled the Nazi idealogy for decades and is responsible for various killings including murders of immigrants and foreigners.

Another far-right group known as the Frietal Group, launched attacks on refugee shelter houses and political opponents in the town of Saxony in 2015, claiming that they are protecting Germany from foreigners.

The German law enforcement authority also arrested members of the Revolution Chemnitz in 2018, who were allegedly planning attacks on immigrants, journalists and political opponents. Eight members of the group were sentenced to several years in prison by a court in Germany on 24th March 2020.

Looking at the rampant spread of hate, Holger Munch, the president of Federal Investigative Police Agency of Germany (BKA), accepted that suspects of the right-wing extremist under the observation of BKA have increased from 4 in 2012 to 46 in 2020, adding that “the far-right poses a pernicious and growing threat with 3 acts of far-right violence every day”.

In order to curb the spread of hatred, xenophobia, and anti-semitism by the right-wing activists, the German Government drafted a nine-point strategy to combat the recent.

The key aspects of the nine-point strategy a) Internet Service Providers to report any hate speech forwarded/shared on Social Media or the Internet along with the IP address of the wrongdoer to the government authorities, b) Tighten Gun laws with a mandatory check on requests to keep arms by the domestic intelligence police (BfV) was another stance of the government, c) Revising the existing prevention programs aimed to tackle right-wing extremism, and d)  Special protection for the politicians at local, state, and federal level who were considered to be under the threat from right-wing extremists.

The BKA President, Holger Münch said that by deploying a police patrol team online just like police officers patrol streets, the government can ensure promising results. With the increase in funding and personnel in Germany’s security apparatus sanctioned in the state budget discussion 2020, Münch reflected optimism that agencies could now work better and more efficiently in battling crime and violence.

Keeping aside the various controversies, it is also imperative to acknowledge the efforts of Dortmund, a western city in Germany, in curbing the rising trend of far-right extremism. Dortmund being an important city in the country invited migrants from Turkey and Southeast. More than 3000 immigrants from over 70 countries including Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan live here making it a hotspot, attracting xenophonic and far-right crimes.

In 2015, a special task force was set up in Dortmund to take action against far-right extremists and the city to a large extent has been successful in curbing their activities. According to the city's police chief, Gregor Lange, Offenses such as sedition, verbal assault, racist propaganda, and damage to property were down by 25%. Violent crimes such as arson and bodily assault went down by 35% year-on-year. The drop is even more impressive compared to five years ago, when figures were 50% and 80% higher, respectively.

The success of Dortmund city in fighting far-right extremism gives a hope that the nationwide implementation of nine-point strategy will help in curbing the rising trend of violent extremism in Germany

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July 19, 2021 11:59 AM

Detecting The Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays With Smartphones

Smartphones have become the most commonplace objects in our daily lives. The unimaginable power that we hold in our hands is unrealized by most of us and, more importantly, untapped. Its creativity often gets misused but one can only hope that it’s fascinating abilities would be utilized. For example, did you know that the millions of phones around the globe can be connected to form a particle detector? The following article covers the CRAYFIS (Cosmic RAYs Found in Smartphones) phone-based application developed by the physicists from the University of California—Daniel Whiteson, Michael Mulhearn, and their team. CRAYFIS aims to take advantage of the large network of smartphones around the world and detect the cosmic or gamma rays bursts which enter the Earth’s atmosphere almost constantly.

What Are Cosmic Rays?

Cosmic rays are high velocity subatomic particles bombarding the Earth’s upper atmosphere continuously. Cosmic ray bursts have the highest energy compared to all forms of electro-magnetic radiation. When we say ultra-high energy particles (energy more than 10<sup>18</sup> eV), we mean two million times more energetic than the ones that can be produced by the particle colliders on Earth.  These rays are thought to be more powerful than typical supernovae and can release trillions of times more energy than the Sun. They are also highly unpredictable as they can enter Earth’s atmosphere from any direction and the bursts can last for any period of time ranging from a few thousand seconds to several minutes.

Despite many theoretical hypotheses, the sources of these ultra-high energy cosmic rays are still a mystery to us even after many decades of their discovery. These rays were initially discovered in the 1960’s by the U.S. military when they were doing background checks for gamma rays after nuclear weapon testing. Cosmologists suggest that these bursts could be the result of super massive stars collapsing - leading to hypernova; or can be retraced to collisions of black holes with other black holes or neutron stars.

How Do We Detect Them?

When the high-energy particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere, the air and the gas molecules cause them to break apart and create massive showers of relatively low-energy particles. Aurora borealis i.e., the Northern and the Southern lights are the lights that are emitted when these cosmic rays interact with the Earth’s magnetic field. Currently, these particles are hitting the Earth at a rate of about one per square meter per second. The showers get scattered to a radius of one or two kilometers consisting mostly of high-energy photons, electrons, positrons and muons. But the fact that these particles can hit the Earth anytime and anywhere is where the problem arises. Since the Earth has a massive area, it is not possible to place a detector everywhere and catch them at the exact moment.

Energetic charged particles known as cosmic rays hit our atmosphere, where they collide with air molecules to produce a shower of secondary particle | Source: CERN

Detecting such a shower requires a very big telescope, which logically means a network of individual particle detectors distributed over a mile or two-wide radius and connected to each other. The Pierre Auger Observatory in South America is the only such arrangement where 1,600 particle detectors have been scattered on 3,000 square kilometers of land. But the construction cost of the same was about $100 million. Yet, only a few cosmic ray particles could be detected using this arrangement. How do we spread this network around the Earth?

In addition to being cost-effective, such a setup must also be feasible. The Earth’s surface cannot possibly be dotted with particle detectors which cost huge fortunes. This is where smartphones come into the picture.

Detecting The Particles Using Smartphones

Smartphones are the most appropriate devices required to solve the problem. They have planet wide coverage, are affordable by most people and are being actively used by more than 1.5 billion users around the planet. Individually, these devices are low and inefficient; but a considerably dense network of such devices can give us a chance to detect cosmic ray showers belonging to the highest energy range.

Previous research has shown that smartphones have the capability of detecting ionizing radiation. The camera is the most sensitive part of the smartphone and is just the device required to meet our expectations. A CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) device is present in the camera- in which silicon photodiode pixels produce electron-hole pairs when struck by visible photons (when photons are detected by the CMOS device, it leaves traces of weakly activated pixels). The incoming rays are also laced with other noises and interference from the surroundings.  Although these devices are made to detect visible light, they still have the capability of detecting higher-energy photons and also low-ionizing particles such as the muons.

A screenshot from the app which shows the exposure time, the events- the number of particles recorded and other properties

To avoid normal light, the CRAYFIS application is to be run during nighttime with the camera facing down. As the phone processor runs the application it collects data from its surroundings using a camera as its detector element. The megapixel images (i.e., the incoming particles) are scanned at a speed of 5 to 15 frames per second, depending on the frame-processing speed of the device. Scientists expect that signals from the cosmic rays would occur rarely, i.e., around one in 500 frames. Also, there is the job of removing background data. An algorithm was created to tune the incoming particle shower by setting a threshold frequency at around 0.1 frames per second. Frames containing pixels above the threshold are stored and passed to the second stage which examines the stored frames, saving only the pixels above a second, lower threshold.

The CRAYFIS app is designed to run when the phone is not being used and when it is connected to a power source. The actual performance would be widely affected by the geometry of the smartphone’s camera and the conditions in which the data is being collected. Further, once the application is installed and is in the operating mode, no participation is required from the user, which is required to achieve wide-scale participation. When a Wifi connection is available the collected data would be uploaded to the central server so that it could be interpreted.

There is much complicated math used to trace back the information collected from the application. The most important parameters for the app are the local density of incoming particles, the detection area of the phone and the particle identification efficiency. These parameters are used to find the mean number of candidates (photons or muons) being detected. Further, the probability that a phone will detect no candidates or the probability that a phone will detect one or more candidates is given by Poisson distribution. The density of the shower is directly proportional to the incident particle energy with a distribution in x and y sensitive to the direction in which the particle came from. An Unbinned Likelihood (it is the probability of obtaining a certain data- in this case the distribution of the cosmic rays including their energy and direction, the obtained data is arranged into bins which are very, very small) analysis is used to determine the incident particle energy and direction. To eliminate background interference, a benchmark requirement has been set that at least 5 phones must detect and register a hit to be considered as a candidate.

It is impossible to express just how mind-blowing this innovation is. As the days pass, Science and Technology around us keep on surprising us and challenge us to rack our brains for more and more unique ways to deal with complex problems. The CRAYFIS app is simply beautiful and it would be a dream-come-true to the scientists if the project works out and we are able to detect these high energy, super intimidating cosmic rays with smartphones from our backyard.

Further Reading

The paper by Daniel Whiteson and team can be found here.

An exciting book “We Have No Idea” by Daniel Whiteson and cartoonist Jorge Cham can be found here.

The CRAYFIS app can be found here.

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