How the conservatives and white supremacists responded to “Black Lives Matter” movement
Publisher
Global Views 360
Publication Date
June 21, 2020
URL
Representative image of white supremacists protest | Source: Evan Nestarak via Wikimedia)
The civil rights movement in America labelled “Black Lives Matter”, which erupted after the murder of George Floyd by a uniformed officer has been going in full swing. The event of Floyd’s death triggered a mass reaction against the state violence in which black people are abused without any accountability on the police’s part. A few of the protests have been demanding the defunding of the police department, that the police force should be dissolved.
Many protests are peaceful protests, but there have been instances in which the protestors use violence to express their sentiment. Such protests have received a lot of backlash; Donald Trump, the president, said that “these THUGS are dishonouring the memory of George Floyd” and that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He also mentioned that he would send the National Guard to “get the job done right”, in context of his perceived lack of leadership in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, and consequently, where the protests were taking place. The tweet with the slogan “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” has since been censored by twitter, which gave birth to another controversy.
Trump also blames the riots on Antifa, which is a terrorist organisation according to him, the name of which stands as a short form of anti-fascist. The organisation is a group of leftist activists who protest against an expression of what they find xenophobic, racist or sexist and fascist, claiming that such expression would suppress minority voices. There is no defined hierarchy or membership process, though it has been claimed by the group that it is secretive and is organised into autonomous local cells. In some reports, though, it is categorised as a far left militant organisation which believes in direct action rather than peaceful protests.
The police force in Minnesota believes that there are white supremacists attending the protests to agitate the protests and incite chaos. The Brookings Institution characterized the same as accelerationism, in which people incite chaos to destroy social order, so that in a highly polarized society, people would take their side. In the same vein, it has been reported that a white supremacist channel on Telegram incited followers to engage in violence and start a second civil war by shooting into the crowd. Franklin Graham, an evangelical pastor, has said that the idea of dismantling the police departments “has to be one of the most irresponsible ideas” that he’s ever heard. He says that the police are what stand between “us (the citizens) and total anarchy”.
An UK Member of Parliament told one of his constituents that while racism is a cancer, and I am glad the perpetrator is on a murder charge. Nevertheless, looters, arsonists and rioters have it coming.” While a number of celebrities have been showing support for the Black Lives Matter protests, the former Miss Universe Malaysia Samantha Katie James used instagram stories to say that the protesters who are angry over the murder of George Floyd are “foolish humans”, and that the black people chose to be born as colored people in America. She also said that the brutality should be taken as a challenge and that “the whites have won”. When asked to clarify what she meant by saying that the Black community chose to be born as coloured, she said that their soul chose where and how they were born.
The people are responding in many different ways to the news. On a Brietbart report on Samuel L. Jackson expressing his views in support of the protests, there have been comments which say that “Floyd was a criminal and he was high on drugs and that he was not killed by asphyxiation he had a heart condition.”(sic) or “When da White people start rioting? We are still the majority, and it would really stir up the fudge. These a****ts think they are getting away with something, but only because the silent majority has yet to speak… and act.” (sic).
It seems that George Floyd’s unfortunate death has brought out not just the simmering anger of the long black community in open but also unmasked the outright white supremacists as well as their apologists.
Support us to bring the world closer
To keep our content accessible we don't charge anything from our readers and rely on donations to continue working. Your support is critical in keeping Global Views 360 independent and helps us to present a well-rounded world view on different international issues for you. Every contribution, however big or small, is valuable for us to keep on delivering in future as well.
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.
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.
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.