Down but not out
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – For those who are asking why WRS radio is not currently on the air, it is simply a temporary problem with the SSR transmitter, which is being repaired as quickly as possible.
The station, which has been threatened with closure or sale by its parent, Swiss Public Broadcasting, sent a petition to SSR 27 April showing strong support from the English-speaking community for keeping the station alive.
Morges tulip festival 2012, a moment in the sun
TO OUR FANS: We weren’t planning to celebrate 1 May, since it is not a holiday in Vaud, as it is in some parts of Switzerland (Zurich, for example) and as it certainly is in France. But fate handed us an electrical problem in the building followed by an Internet breakdown just as the Zurich technical staff for our providers went on holiday and in the end we’ve been obliged to take a nearly day-long break.
We will be back with news Tuesday evening. Thanks for your patience, and we hope you’re out enjoying the sunshine!
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – WRS public radio faces a decision in June by its parent SSR (Swiss Public Broadcasting) to either close it or sell it, but the station’s fans don’t intend to let it die without a fight.
A private group has launched a petition-signing campaign, Save WRS, to at least give voice to the complaints that public funding of English-language radio should not end, although the petition carries no legal weight.
The station itself is not involved in the campaign, but Philippe Mottaz, who cannot comment while the station’s future is under discussion at SSR, has told GenevaLunch that “The amount and quality of the support received from our listeners on our website reinforces our conviction that WRS provides an invalubale service accross the country to both Swiss and foreign listeners.”
Future holds no quick or easy answers
A spokesperson at Ofcom, the federal department that oversees radio licenses, told GenevaLunch that what will happen if SSR maintains its decision to close or sell is at best complicated: the company “can’t just sell as they want – they would need to get the okay from the Federal Council. The council would then need to decide to create a new regional radio.”
The issue is more complex than whether or not to create another station because Bern is phasing out FM radio, as is happening in other countries, and promoting DAB radio.
The newly expanded WRS newsroom in 2009
Update 12:15 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – WRS, World Radio Switzerland, says Wednesday morning 4 April, that SSR (Swiss public broadcasting, also known as SRG), its parent company, is considering the possibility of selling the station and privatizing it or closing it down.
The station cites SSR chief executive officer Roger de Weck as saying English-language radio should no longer be publicly funded. De Weck was formerly president of the Graduate Institute in Geneva, took over at the helm of SSR in January 2011.
The station called in a media observer this morning to comment on the situation.
The station was formerly the private station WRG, World Radio Geneva, but SSR, which had been a partner, took it over in 2007. Three years later the station added several hours of programming and began to work with NPR in the US as well as the BBC for broader news coverage, part of its extension as a national rather than local radio station.
Mark Butcher and Peter Sibley, who created the online and cable station Radio Frontier in June 2011, as the linchpin of their company Anglo Media, reacted to the news in a statement saying the company ” believes the closure of an English language FM station is potentially a backward step” but that they sympathize “with the financial pressure the SSR has to face up to – many public broadcasters across Europe have made similar tough decisions.” They believe “the private sector has to be given the opportunity to provide these essential information services,” noting that they are talking to all parties concerned.
Butcher, who spoke to GenevaLunch Wednesday morning, says that as a former WRG and then WRS announcer he is “obviously sad for the people who work there” but that he does “understand the situation that Swiss Public Broadcasting finds itself in,” citing Europe-wide radio difficulties.
Renovated Musée d'Orsay in Paris during filming for Google's Art Project
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The Olympic Museum in Lausanne has provided the Google Art Project with 104 artworks by 33 artists, from its collection.
The museum is one of 155 worldwide to share part of their collection online and it is the first in Switzerland to do so.
Art Project now includes Hans Erni’s 1983 “Basketball” sculpture and paintings series, Dennis Openheim’s “Olympic Centennial Newton Discovering Gravity” and a series of Rosa Serra’s elegant black sports figures sculptures.
The project started a year ago, with 17 museums and 1,000 artworks, but as Google points out, it was “almost all paintings from Western masters.
Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.”
The collection houses an extraordinary variety, and some of the partner sampler pages are fun, such as a moving (in every sense) video visit to the White House in the US.
The expanded gallery, which Google presented in Paris Tuesday 3 April, has several new features. Among them:
- Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View trolley took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
- 46 artworks are available with Gogle’s gigapixel photo-capturing technology, “photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.”
- A bonus for students and teachers in particular is a new My Gallery feature that lets viewers make their own collections, add comments to each painting and share the whole collection.
How to use Google Art Project video
Swiss calves, just too cute to resist? Wohlen, Switzerland
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Farmers Andreas and Franziska Knutti have been completely caught by surprise by the media hype from abroad over their six-legged calf Lilli. Blick ran the story, which was picked up by AP in English and other languages, and soon the family was receiving media calls from The Netherlands and Sweden, reports local paper BernerZeitung, which says the Knuttis have been taken aback by the massive interest in a freak event in nature.
Ironically, since many of the headlines are about Lilli the Swiss media star, there has been very limited interest in the story in Switzerland, where cute calves are the norm, farmers are used to dealing with animals’ problems, and the main question about Lilli now seems to be why a birth defect is making her such a hit elsewhere.
The emphasis abroad has been on the calve’s perky nature, but the farming couple are reported by Swiss-German media to say they’ll have to see how her development goes; one of their concerns is to be sure she doesn’t suffer pain, for example, back pain from the extra legs as she grows.
Two earlier calves with six legs failed to gain the same notoriety
Lissy in Bavaria in 2009 had a similar birth defect and nobody paid much attention.
Extra limbs are unusual but the hype over Lilli may be linked to the need for Internet media to boost news page numbers with colourful stories, tabloid style, and the photos of Lilli show a pert little calf. And calves that grow up give milk and from milk the Swiss make chocolate and ca, c’est vachement bon!
The Milwaukee Journal ran a story in 1996 when a Cuba City couple had a calf with six legs, with two on the back just as Lilli and Lissy have had, but as a PIC (pre-Internet calf), you won’t find much about it, including whether or not it lived to a ripe old age. Also, it was a boy, and try as you might, you won’t make chocolate from that.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – It takes a black hole to: measure another black hole, it turns out. Researchers at the EPFL polytechnic in Lausanne have been using, for the past two years, what they call “supermassive black holes acting as gravitational lenses” to measure, for the first time, other black holes.
Scientists at the university’s laboratory of astrophysics, using ESA and Nasa’s Hubble telescope, in 2010 discovered a quasar, a galaxy with a black hole at its centre. Since then, they have identified several of these rare cases from among a total of 20,000 quasar, a find they believe will lead to a better understanding of how black holes are formed.
The EPFL in a statement says, “The case was special for two reasons: it showed both the presence of the supermassive black hole as well as another galaxy in the background, very distant and in almost perfect alignment. The light coming from this distant galaxy, strongly bent by its passage near the black hole, made it possible to measure the mass of a quasar for the first time.”
Laboratory physicist Frédéric Courbin says, “For the first time, we have a reliable method for measuring the mass of these objects, which are too luminous to be observed with traditional techniques,” Courbin explains. “We can thus better understand why some galaxies have a black hole and others don’t, what their incredible energy is made up of, how the matter is distributed and how it evolves. The gravitational lensing effect has already taught us much about the distribution of matter in galaxy clusters and galaxies themselves. Here the effect is produced by very special objects, whose mass has been impossible to measure up to this point.”
How the “cosmic magnifying glass” works
EPFL explains how it works:
“This magnification phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, is caused by massive objects in the universe such as stars, galaxies, and planets. When the light from a very distant galaxy passes near one of these objects on its voyage to Earth, it is bent by the gravitational pull of the object. The image of the galaxy therefore appears severely distorted when it reaches us. There are either multiple images of the galaxy, or, if it’s in almost perfect alignment with the massive object, the image appears in the shape of a circular arc, known as an Einstein Ring. The size of the ring allows us to determine the mass of the object situated in the middle, which is acting like a lens. In the cases discovered by the EPFL scientists, the object in the foreground is a quasar, or a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. It would be impossible to “weigh” the quasar without this gravitational lensing effect.”
The results of their findings were published 21 March in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Google on famed Rhaetian Railways line in Switzerland: world's first Street View train shots
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – What better country than Switzerland to start showing train lines on Google Maps Street View, and what better line than the Unesco World Heritage site Albula/Bernina line on the Rhaetian Railways!
The new views were unveiled Thursday at the Transport Museum in Lucerne.
The rail company and Google worked together in October to show the magnificent scenery and craftsmanship of this very special train line, with Street View images from the 122 km between Thusis in canton Graubuenden Tirano in Italy.
The project is part of a larger cooperative effort between Unesco and Google to make digital visits of World Heritage sites available to people around the world, says Mattias Nutt, director of UNESCO Destination Switzerland.
Mounting the Google Trike onto the Rhaetian Railways train roof
The images were shot by Street View cameras mounted on a “Trike”, a three-wheeled bicycle placed on one of the Rhaetian Railways cars that was specially prepared for the job.
It was put at the head of a special train, allowing the cameras to take a series of panoramic photos of the line and its vistas.
Four of Google’s new Rhaetian Railways Street Views
New information on neutrinos backs suspicions earlier measurements were somehow flawed
Gran Sasso Lab in Italy
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Physicists can relax a bit this weekend, with Cern’s latest statement on the hubbub surrounding 2011 measurements taken in Italy that appeared to show the first serious deviation from Einstein’s law of relativity.
Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, startled the world 23 September 2011 by stating that neutrinos flying in beams sent through the Earth’s crust the 730km between Cern in Geneva and the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy had been measured traveling at 20 parts per million above “the world’s cosmic speed limit”, the speed of light.
Friday 16 March Cern issued a statement:
“The Icarus experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory has today reported a new measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos from CEern to Gran Sasso. The Icarus measurement, using last year’s short pulsed beam from Cern, indicates that the neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light on their journey between the two laboratories. This is at odds with the initial measurement reported by Opera last September.
“The evidence is beginning to point towards the Opera result being an artefact of the measurement,” said Cern Research Director Sergio Bertolucci, “but it’s important to be rigorous, and the Gran Sasso experiments, Borexino, Icarus, LVD and Opera will be making new measurements with pulsed beams from Cern in May to give us the final verdict. In addition, cross-checks are underway at Gran Sasso to compare the timings of cosmic ray particles between the two experiments, Opera and LVD. Whatever the result, the Opera experiment has behaved with perfect scientific integrity in opening their measurement to broad scrutiny, and inviting independent measurements. This is how science works.”
“The Icarus experiment has independent timing from Opera and measured seven neutrinos in the beam from Cern last year. These all arrived in a time consistent with the speed of light.”
Cern had earlier announced that tests will be run in May that should provide a clearer understanding of the measurements taken in September.
Background, Cern + neutrinos, GenevaLunch
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The official inauguration of Switzerland’s first university research centre in Asia takes place Friday 16 March in Singapore. The Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC) was created by Zurich’s federal polytechnic institute ETH in September 2010 with financial support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore.
The first research programme undertaken by the ETH Zurich, with various academic partners, as part of the SEC was the Future Cities Laboratory, which will be visited by Swiss Federal Councillor Alain Berset with Singapore’s Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Vivian Balakrishnan. The project aims is “to plan more sustainable and resource-efficient cities for the future because today over half the world’s population already lives in cities, and megacities in Asia, Africa and other world regions are expected to continue to grow in the coming years and decades”, the Swiss Federal Department of Home Affairs says in a statement.
Singapore is home to a number of Swiss research centres, particularly in the pharmaceutical field. Berset will also be visiting the Novartis‘ Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD), which has a research programme on tropical diseases that particularly affect populations in the poorest developing countries.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – The SportAccord policy advistory board met for the first time in Lausanne 7 March to help the group create a framework for the use of the .sport domaine name extension. The new board includes representatives from the International Olympic Committee and 24 representatives of international sports federations, several of them based in Lausanne.
SportAccord’s new group will work on defining and operating “the adequate usage policy for the future .sport domain name, specifically in the field of reserved names policy, registrant eligibility, naming restrictions, usage policy and enforcement mechanisms.”
Switzerland maps out the route to its future digital society
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss government Friday 9 March published its revised strategy for a digital society, placing emphasis on the critical importance to the country of a strong and coherent policy.
Eight key areas were outlined:
Energy and resource efficiency (new): Energy and resource efficiency of ICT [information and communication technologies]; ICT as a tool to optimise energy and resource efficiency in other areas
Infrastructure (new): High-performance, open networks; smart controls for buildings, energy and transport; Swiss interests in relation to internet governance in an international context
Security and trust: Security skills; cyber crime; critical infrastructures
The economy: Ensuring a sustainable economy through the deployment and use of ICT (the e-Economy)e-Democracy and e-Government: Exercising civil liberties electronically; government data and information; ICT-based change within the administrationEducation, research, innovation:
ICT professionals; basic ICT skills; Switzerland as a competitive base for research and innovation
Culture: Digital cultural production and digitisation of the cultural heritage; protection of intellectual property in the digital sphere
Health and health care: Reform of the health system with the help of ICT; dealing with the health risks of ICT
The cabinet also approved three new projects:
- The federal administration will develop “appropriate instruments in order to preserve Switzerland’s public interest, as far as possible, in relation to the liberalization of the international internet domain name market.” The country supports the freedom to choose other internet suffixes besides .com and .ch “at will, as decided in 2011 by the global management body for internet addresses, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)”
- Improvments to “barrier-free, equal-opportunity access to online information as well as communication and transaction services of the government and the federal administration”
- The range of data relating to “the development of the information society” will be expanded to help people compare the attractiveness of Switzerland with other countries as a location for businesses, which requires a suitable statistical basis.
Online news offer is also improved as part of the new RTS tv/radio broadcasting services
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Swiss television and radio stations owned by the public broadcasting company SSR all have new logos 29 February to mark the convergence of radio and television into one national entity.
The change coincides with the arrival today of high-definition television in the country. Home TV viewers are likely to first notice, in many cases, that their channels have moved.
The new logos and names feature on re-designed web sites that combine radio and television: RTS in French, SRF in German, RSI in Italian and RTR in Romantsch. The new sites feature better access to TV and radio broadcasts.
Programming is gradually undergoing a number of changes, but the arrival of six television networks in high definition (HD), out of parent company SSR’s eight networks, is a key move: prime time, sitcoms and dramas, co-produced documentaries, major prime time specials are now all HD. Standard broadcasting will continue in parallel for these networks until at least 2015 to give viewers three years to change their television sets.
Sports and news to follow, to complete the move to HD
The HD broadcasts have a visual and sound quality that is five times superior to that of standard broadcasts, according to RTS.
A disappointment for football fans who plan to tune in Wednesday night to the Swiss-Argentina match in Bern is that sports will get HD only 4 May.
RTS will become 100 percent HD in September 2014 when the news is added.
Information about HD and how to make changes to your settings are available in French, German and Italian (not English).
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Denmark comes top and Israel second, with Switzerland coming in with an unremarkable if adequate 15th place in a new ranking of world cleantech industries.
The report published 27 February, “Coming Clean: The Cleantech Global Innovations Index 2012″ by consultants Cleantech Group was mandated by WWF. It looks at 38 countries, seeking those that has been most innovative and that promise to do very well in this rapidly growing market in the next 10 years.
Switzerland is applauded for innovation in general, but the report notes that its performance in the area of cleantech is below average. Two key ingredients for young cleantech businesses to succeed are lacking in Switzerland: an inadequate amount of risk capital and a home market that relies heavily on clean energies, thus providing opportunities for young entrepreneurs.
India and China both rank higher than Switzerland.
Denmark, head of the class, was rewarded with the top ranking for its legal encouragement of cleantech as well as the number of research mandates; risk capital is also “generously available”, notes WWF in a statement about the new report.
Albert Einstein in 1921, the year he won the Nobel Prize for physics
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The uproar in the physics world was almost as loud Wednesday 22 February as in September 2011: the American Association for the Advancement of Science said Wednesday that a loose wire was suspected as being responsible for what may have been incorrect readings of neutrinos announced in September in 2011 by Cern’s Opera project.
Scientists at Gran Sasso labs in Italy said in November that their colleagues working with Cern had been mistaken, adding to the confusion. The September announcement had called into question a basic tenet of physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Thursday morning Cern issued an unusually short statement to clarify the situation:
“The Opera collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino’s time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the Opera master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the Opera collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.”
The neutrinos in question travelled from Cern to Italy’s Gran Sasso research centre and Bob Evans reports for Reuters that “physicists at the Cern research institute near Geneva appeared to contradict Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity last year when they reported that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster than light.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – ‘Tis the season for cool exhibits and Geneva has an intriguing new one based on population movements as measured by cell phones.
You can’t miss it if you’re near the train station: a large-screen display above the entrance to the Metro Shopping area is the linchpin for the display called “Genève, ville vivante“, which includes 8 large explanatory panels along the rue du Mont-Blanc.
The large screen shows 15 million “movements” that are measurable from 2 million cell phone calls made on the Swisscom system during one day in the city. Geneva’s point in showcasing this is that the measurable urban movements provide a wealth of information that can be exploited to help residents or to help the city plan and to give companies useful information.
But the city points out that there is a flip side to this and the exhibition, which is linked to the 22-24 February Lift conference (theme: “What can the future do for you?”), is also designed to provoke reflection and discussion on privacy issues. “This data prompts the question of its impact in terms of data protection and privacy. It’s clear that the population is legitimately worried, with people feeling they are being watched, even if, in this case, for example, the data used is totally anonymous.”
Laurent Haug, the founder of Lift, commented on the show on Facebook, “Geneva is the first Swiss city to research how people are really using its public space, one of the first in the world. Check the data and the vizualizations, it is seriously amazing.”
The project was carried out with the city, Swisscom, Interactive Things and the Lift conference joining forces.
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A doctoral student at EPFL in Lausanne has found the key to an important aspect of earthquakes: the cause of the varying intensity, that can make the difference between a minor and major earthquake. The findings by David Kammer, published 20 February in the journal Tribology Letters, provides new material for researchers in the fields of mechanics and geosciences, who are seeking a better understanding of how earthquakes work.
Kammer has created a “digital model that explains what happens at the interface between two materials when they slide against each other; like a book on a table, rubber soles on linoleum, or – more to the point – tectonic plates,” an EPFL statement notes. “Earthquakes occur at the point where two tectonic plates meet. Between each period of sliding, forces accumulate between them up to the point where the friction resistance is released, leading to movement. This displacement of the Earth’s crust triggers a shock-wave that is transmitted to the surface of the planet.”
The researcher says he “wanted to understand the dynamics of the point at which the plates suddenly begin to slide against each other – in particular, the way it starts and is subsequently transmitted between the two solid bodies in contact. I discovered that the accumulation of energy at the breaking-point of the interface determines the acceleration of the sliding.”
Movements can be smooth and regular or can involved stopping and starting, a “stick-slip” phenomenon, and it is the latter that causes surface shock waves.
Simulated 72-hour flight will test new cockpit design but also human endurance
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Solar Impulse will run a simulated 72-hour flight night and day 21-24 February that should provide clues to human endurance in a long-flight solo pilot situation. CEO André Borschberg will test the design and configuration of the cockpit for a second plane it is building, now under construction. This will be the longest “flight” time yet for the solar-powered airplane.
The plane “needs to have a more spacious, ergonomically efficient cockpit, so that Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg – taking turns to fly it – can remain airborne for several days with their essential equipment and supplies,” the group says in a statement 20 February. The project is seeking to “accumulate experience in the management of the pilot’s vital needs on a long-duration flight. There is not much experience to draw on in previous aviation history concerning fatigue and nutritional management, so this will be a unique opportunity for the Solar Impulse team to try out various concepts designed in cooperation with project partners.”
This latest experiment can be followed live on the Solar Impulse blog.
Rush is on to get owners of encrypted pages to switch to new keys
EPFL's Arjen Lenstra in 2006, professor, algorithm cryptology laboratory (photo ©2012 EPFL / Alain Herzog)
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – A very high percentage of secured web pages, those “https” URLs we look for when we make payments, for example, are indeed secure, 99.8 percent. But the assumptions behind the SSL certificates system may be ill-founded, a group of researchers at EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute, has shown. And that leaves many sites unprotected, according to Bit-Tech, which notes that “while a 99.8 per cent security rating may seem impressive, the RSA public key cryptography system is incredibly widespread.”
The researchers, a team led by EPFL’s Arjen Lenstra, write in their abstract, that they “performed a sanity check of public keys collected on the web. Our main goal was to test the validity of the assumption that different random choices are made each time keys are generated. We found that the vast majority of public keys work as intended. A more disconcerting finding is that two out of every one thousand RSA moduli that we collected off er no security. Our conclusion is that the validity of the assumption is questionable and that generating keys in the real world for “multiple-secrets” cryptosystems such as RSA is significantly riskier than for “single-secret” ones.”
SSL certificates work by using encryption. Verisign‘s one of the world’s main SSL certificate providers, explains how the system works at the consumer level: “Each SSL Certificate consists of a public key and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt information and the private key is used to decipher it. When a Web browser points to a secured domain, a level of encryption is established based on the type of SSL Certificate as well as the client Web browser, operating system and host server’s capabilities.”
The findings have set alarm bells ringing in the industry. Bit-Tech reports that the system “underpins the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) used by almost every secure website in the world. It’s used by banks, online shops, digital distribution services and even voice-over-IP (VoIP) systems to protect credit card details, passwords and other personal data.”
The potential damage is huge, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group that has been defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights in the digital world since 1990, before most people had heard the word digital. “The consequences of these vulnerabilities are extremely serious. In all cases, a weak key would allow an eavesdropper on the network to learn confidential information, such as passwords or the content of messages, exchanged with a vulnerable server. Secondly, unless servers were configured to use perfect forward secrecy, sophisticated attackers could extract passwords and data from stored copies of previous encrypted sessions. Thirdly, attackers could use man-in-the-middle or server impersonation attacks to inject malicious data into encrypted sessions. Given the seriousness of these problems, EFF will be working around the clock with the EPFL group to warn the operators of servers that are affected by this vulnerability, and encourage them to switch to new keys as soon as possible.”
The EPFL authors, in their report, took the precaution of pointing out the difficulty of contacting the owners of all affected pages, noting that some page owners need to take precautions.
“Publication of results undermining the security of live keys is uncommon and inappropriate, unless all aff ected parties have been notifi ed. In the present case, observing the above phenomena on lab-generated test data would not be convincing and would not work either: tens of millions of thus generated RSA moduli turned out to behave as expected based on the above assumption. Therefore limited to live data, our intention was to confi rm the assumption, expecting at worst a very small number of counterexamples and affected owners to be noti fied. The quagmire of vulnerabilities that we waded into makes it infeasible to properly inform everyone involved, though we made a best eff ort to inform the larger parties and contacted all email addresses recommended (such as
ssl-survey@eff.org5) or speci fied in valid aff ected certi cates. The fact that most certi ficates do not contain adequate contact information limited our options. Our decision to make our findings public, despite our inability to directly notify everyone involved, was a judgment call.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Apologies for the confusion; I accidentally posted this briefly on the news page and it has now been moved to its correct home, on the editorial page. You’ll find it here.
Emissions created by traffic in Switzerland have risen, not fallen
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland is turning to energy certificates from outside the country to make its CO2 quota for 2008-2012, and environmental group WWF is not happy about it.
The Swiss Federal Council announced Tuesday 17 January that it is signing a new contract with the Climate Cent Foundation to increase its engagement by one ton. The foundation as a result will be reducing CO2 by a total of 5 tons, allowing Switzerland to meet Kyoto objectives by financing CO2 reduction projects outside the country. The WWF reacted angrily, with energy and climate director Patrick Hofstetter calling the federal energy reduction plan “a disaster from start to finish” and qualifying the government’s new move as “maddening, dishonest and incomprehensible”.
Bern notes that without the new agreement Switzerland would not meet its objectives, mainly as a result of increased traffic: statistics for 2010 show CO2 from traffic at 12.9 percent above figures for 1990, when Switzerland is committed to decreasing this by 8 percent.
For the WWF, the move means that Switzerland is not only not meeting emission reduction goals because Bern is not applying the law, but it is also not respecting the spirit of Kyoto by buying more certificates than are authorized. In addition, argues the WWF, important sums are being spent abroad, using money that could be applied to reducing CO2 at home and to reducing Swiss dependence on oil, while creating jobs.
Muehleberg nuclear power plant, peaceful protestors in 2011 (photo:©2011 Herbi Ditl on flickr)
BERN, SWITZERLAND – A European Union team of specialists has given the all-clear to Switzerland’s nuclear reactors for resistance, reviewing them on 37 points established in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima accident in 2011, but he Swiss government says it wants further reviews on 8 additional points.
The IFSN (Federal Inspectorate for Nuclear Safety) says it will not wait for the EU report to be concluded, but it including several points in a review the Swiss body wants to complete by June 2012. Key among them: knowing more precisely the core’s seismic resistance for each reactor. The IFSN in particular notes that the Wohlensee dam’s ability to withstand the kind of major earthquake that occurs every 10,000 years. It invited the Muehleberg nuclear centre in April to show proof of this by 30 November 2011, but it has not yet provided this and the IFSN is now demanding that the information be provided by 31 January 2012, as well as information on the seismic resistant of the emergency stoppage system.
The European Union’s list of safety checks focuses on earthquakes, floods, extreme meteorological conditions, electrical failure and crisis management. Switzerland is calling for further reviews to ensure the safety of rivers and streams below all the dams linked to nuclear plants
Geneva's Escalade, with energy-efficient Christmas lights in 2011 (photo Mr Kio on flickr)
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Geneva was one of the top winners in the sixth annual Swiss government Watt d’Or programme to recognize energy-saving initiatives.
It was honoured 4 January as the winner of the energy technologies category for its new LED strings of lights along the Lake Geneva waterfront.
The waterfront area has been lit up for more than 100 years, but with incandescent lighting and with new energy regulations calling for the end of this kind of lighting in 2012 the city had to scramble to find another solution. It worked to develop a “revolutionary” LED lighting system that looks like incandescent lights, but uses far less energy, the awards committee announced. Geneva in November 2010 replaced 4200 bulbs with LED light strings that were awarded a prize at the Salon des inventions de Genève. The light is as strong as with the bulbs, but energy consumption has been reduced by 90 percent.
Zermatt was another top winner, for its new rubbish disposal system, and St Gallen was given the top prize for its overall urban development and energy use system, with a new geothermal centre going into operation in 2013.
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Researchers at Cern, working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this week say they have turned up a boson, a particle that carries force, although it is not the famously sought-after Higgs boson. The Chi-b (3P) appears likely to be the first sub-atomic particle found since the LHC went to work in 2009.
As for Higgs, Cern this week published this statement in relation to the 13 December conference it held about the Atlas and CMS experiments: “The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 116-130 GeV by the Atlas experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS. Tantalising hints have been seen by both experiments in this mass region, but these are not yet strong enough to claim a discovery.”
Details: Wired
©2011 Chappatte, distributed by Globe Cartoon. More cartoons on Chappatte’s web site. Geneva-based Patrick Chappatte works for the International Herald Tribune, for Geneva newspaper Le Temps, and for NZZ am Sonntag. All cartoons reproduced with permission.
CMS control room at Cern
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The birth of the child called Higgs Boson might or might not be coming soon, depending on what media you follow, but today is in any event a big day at Cern in Geneva, when the suspension ends and we’ll all learn out what scientists are seeing, thanks to the LHC (Large Hadron Collider).
Higgs Boson is not, of course, a child at all. The Cern website offers this explanation: “According to theory, the Higgs mechanism works as a medium that exists everywhere in space. Particles gain mass by interacting with this medium. Peter Higgs pointed out that the mechanism required the existence of an unseen particle, which we now call the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson is the fundamental component of the Higgs medium, much as the photon is the fundamental component of light. The Higgs boson is the only particle predicted by the Standard Model that has not yet been seen by experiments.”
Cern is holding a seminar where scientists will present their findings, with an announcement at the end of the day. Rumours are flying thick and fast that they have indeed spotted evidence of the elusive Higgs Boson, despite Cern’s dry warning:
“Atlas and CMS experiments will present the status of their searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson. These results will be based on the analysis of considerably more data than those presented at the summer conferences, sufficient to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not enough to make any conclusive statement on the existence or non-existence of the Higgs.”
The Cern teams are already focusing on how the LHC must be developed further to carry research to the next stage. a luminosity upgrade workshop in mid-November brought together scientists and engineers from 14 European institutions, with others from Japan and the USA.
Luminosity gives a measure of the collision rate in a particle accelerator and therefore gives an indication of its performance, says Cern, and an upgrade is scheduled for 2020.
“The LHC already delivers the highest luminosity beams of any high energy proton accelerator in the world, which is vitally important for physicists wanting to study extremely rare processes”, Cern notes in a press release. “With the LHC colliding hundreds of millions of particles each second, some of the processes we’re interested in will happen just a few times a day,” according to Cern research director Sergio Bertolucci, and “with processes so rare, extra luminosity makes a big difference to our ability to make precision measurements and discover new things.”
Background reading: Cern, CS Monitor, Guardian, S California Public Radio KPCC
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Jetman does it again: astonishes, with his latest feat, flying 28 November with two Breitling Jet Team jets from Dijon, France, in formation over the Alps. We’re nearly speechless, so just watch the video (other feats by Vaud’s famous pilot Yves Rossy, formerly known as Fusion Man):
Some artists would like to see tougher Swiss laws covering music downloads; others say musicians need to make it easier for fans to have some free music
BERN, SWITZERLAND – The Swiss Federal Council has ruled that the country’s laws concerning illegal downloads are adequate and additional legislation is not needed. The decision follows requests by artists’ groups for further protection. France in recent years has tightened its legislation and in some cases people who have illegally downloaded music, for example, have been banned from using the Internet.
Switzerland’s IP (intellectual property) laws allow Internet downloading for private consumption, but not for sharing. Anyone who uses popular download systems that essentially re-share is acting illegally; fines in Switzerland can run to CHF600, reports TSR (Fr).
Biggest impact may be on other social media: “sitting on a ton of personal information…doesn’t mean you can monetize it in any way you like”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Facebook has indeed shared private information with advertisers, a practice it has staunchly denied, according to the US Federal Trade Commission, which has ended a long investigation into reported privacy abuses by the social network. The information came out Tuesday 29 November when the FTC published details of the settlement the two have reached. Facebook has agreed to an external audit of its privacy controls every two years for the next 20 years and in future it will not ask users to simply “opt out” of changes to settings, but will instead be required to first ask their permission to make the changes.
The settlement also has more far-ranging implications, particularly for other social media, notes industry media Mashable: “The effects of the settlement will likely have more to do with other social networks than the original one. The message from the FTC to social media is now clear: if you put the desires of advertisers before the privacy of users, you will be stopped. Just because you’re sitting on a ton of personal information that would make marketers drool, it doesn’t mean you can monetize it in any way you like.”
The settlement lists 7 complaints by the FTC against Facebook, but the US government body also salutes in its findings the social media group’s impact on society.
The impact on Facebook itself is widely expected by industry observers to be minimal, with the focus now turning to Facebook’s upcoming Initial Public Offering (IPO), as BrandChannel points out: “It’s only fitting that the world’s dominant social network will reportedly go public in the second quarter of 2012 in what could be the largest IPO by any technology or Internet company in history. Facebook hopes to raise $10 billion through a limited IPO that would value the company at an astounding $100 billion.”
Links to other sites: CTV Canada/AP, Economist, Guardian tech, HuffPost tech, Mashable
MyNewspaper, from Swiss Post, a one-year trial starts, in German
BERN, SWITZERLAND – Your personalized newspaper put together from several sources and delivered in print form is now on offer from the Swiss Post office, in German; the same service is available anywhere in the world as an e-paper for i-Pad and other readers.
The one-year trial lets readers select what sections of which of a dozen newspapers they would like and it is put together for them by SwissPost, which says that during its pilot run the MyNewspaper product will be available in the Zurich, Basel, Berne, Lucerne and Aarau
areas. “Several subscription options with varying quantities and subscription terms are on offer. The printed version of MyNewspaper starts at CHF60/month, while the electronic one starts at CHF21.
How it works
The newspaper uses software developed by a Lucerne company; contents are collated into a file based on subscribers’ orders and then transferred to Swiss Post. Individualized newspapers are then digitally printed overnight on a printing machine in the Härkingen Letter Centre and mailed from there the next day.
