Sunday, June 21, 2020

Story of Iyad Hallaq: What it tells about Palestinians under Israeli occupation

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Nishitha Mandava

Article Title

Story of Iyad Hallaq: What it tells about Palestinians under Israeli occupation

Publisher

Global Views 360

Publication Date

June 21, 2020

URL

Mural of Eyad Hallaq, Bethlehem, Palestine

Mural of Eyad Hallaq, Bethlehem, Palestine | Source: Ameen Rammal via Wikimedia

The death of Iyad Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian man, who was shot dead by two Israeli police officers sparked several unrests in Jerusalem. Iyad Hallaq of age 32 was walking to his school of special needs in the Old City of Jerusalem. According to the statement given by the police officers, Iyad was wearing gloves which made them suspect he possessed a weapon. Iyad, who was diagnosed with low functioning disorder, had limited communication skills. Due to this out of panic, he fled, and the police personnel started firing. He tried to hide behind a dumpster where he was shot dead. It is suspected that one of the police officers might have kept shooting despite receiving orders from his commander to halt.

Following this event, the family’s house was searched without any consent for possible weapons. Later on, the family requested a Palestinian representative to be present during Hallaq’s autopsy. The family alleges that this representative was denied entry. The police sealed off the Old City and reported that the Police Internal Investigations Department would be taking over the investigation of the case.

Mansour Abu Wardieh, the victim's cousin, said the family is not optimistic about the police investigation and fears that the police would end up twisting the facts. This lack of trust in the police authorities could be attributed to the fact that firstly the police have shown their disregard to the family by their actions mentioned above and secondly, in the last ten years Israeli security forces have killed more than 3,400 Palestinians but have only been convicted five times.

These numbers prove that Iyad’s killing is just the tip of the iceberg of the atrocities faced by Palestinians that live under the Israeli occupation. Iyad’s case has created a trigger for the Palestinian Arab minorities in Jerusalem to channel out their frustration. The killing has not only been condemned by Palestinians, but also by Jewish Israelis and international figures. The protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd have been gaining momentum and protests in Jerusalem began to draw parallels between these two cases. The protests in Jerusalem resounded with several slogans like ‘Palestinian Lives Matter’ alongside the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogans.

Though the demonstrations united the Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, it comes as little relief to the family and for Arab minorities. It was after more than a week that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu broke silence on this matter. Middle East Monitor reported the exact comments of the prime minister “What happened to Iyad Hallak is a tragedy. This was a man with disabilities, autism, who was suspected – and we (now) know wrongly – of being a terrorist in a very sensitive venue”. While the prime minister's comments fell short of an apology the Defence Minister Benny Gantz offered a public apology.

While the family and protestors remain un-optimistic about the justice being delivered insights shared by an Israeli Parliament member Ahmed Tibi, seem to shed some light on why Hallaq was killed. According to Tibi, Arabs and Palestinians were intentionally killed without any concrete reason, and for long this has been the policy of the Israeli forces. B’Tselem, a human rights organisation based in Israel said that most killings of Palestinians “were a direct outcome of Israel’s reckless open-fire policy, authorised by the government and military and backed by the [Israeli] legal system.”

The whole system in Israel seems to be designed to discriminate against its Arab minorities. Various senior political officials have openly spread hate against these minority communities. They have also encouraged their soldiers and police forces to kill Palestinians even if they have the slightest suspicion of them being a threat. It is a systematically built system that has subjected Palestinians to abuse and harsh punishments immemorial.

More than 150 instances were recorded between the span of October 2015 and January 2017 in which Israeli security forces have shot Palestinians under suspicion of carrying weapons. However, video footages or witness accounts have raised questions in many cases regarding the necessity of force. Repeatedly cornering these minorities have led to the death of 33 Israelis in the hands of Palestinian assailants in the same period. Hence this use of lethal force has had devastating effects on both the communities. Regulation of force by armed personnel and unbiased, neutral approach is required to curb down this violence. The authorities must also create rules that clearly define the boundaries for force used by armed personnel, and the state should actively denounce hate speech and illegal lethal force to avoid cases like that of Hallaq repeating.

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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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