What if our children are the screen-obsessed couch potatoes of the future?

I can't take my eyes off you. Screen obsessed by lassedesignen/www.shutterstock.com

The idea of “digital addiction” has returned to the fore with UCL researchers suggesting physical activity should displace the compulsive watching of television, internet surfing and video gaming. Often it’s suggested that at least gaming is more active and engaged than merely passively watching television, but the UCL study’s authors regard gaming as “just a different way of sitting down and relaxing”.

The problem with the topic of digital addiction is that there are no definitive scientific studies that have established it as a genuine condition. As far back as 2006 the American Journal of Psychiatry recommended digital addiction be more formally recognised, but studies are still largely piecemeal and no authoritative view exists.

A rising new addiction

Yet each year more studies are published that support the journal’s view that “internet addiction is resistant to treatment, entails significant risks, and has high relapse rates.”

Recently a few more accounts from around the world have emerged supporting the view that digital addiction is growing, and may be storing up problems for the future. A survey in New Zealand highlights the withdrawal symptoms people feel when not connected. The “fear of missing out” is another phenomenon that forms part of the dimension of digital addiction, as recently described in a survey in Japan. Here addiction is linked to the need to use specific apps, rather than a more general need to “connect” online.

The Net Children Go Mobile report in Ireland based on surveys conducted by researchers at the Dublin Institute of Technology highlights how many children are online a lot after 9pm. It shares concerns around the potential toxic combination of being “always-on” and exposed to potentially distressing content. As with drug use, addiction itself is one problem, while the “substance” or content of that addiction causes different kinds of harm.

How to measure the problem

Research that attempts to physically measure the impact of digital addiction is also expanding. A study from the University of Missouri reports that measurable increases in stress can be recorded when people have their smart phones taken away.

There has even been a rise in clinics serving digital addicts, an increasing amount of personal testimony from self-described addicts, as well as more firmly established evidence for repetitive strain injuries arising from overuse of technology.

It all points to an urgent need for far more comprehensive research – research that can really inform how the government approaches the problem with policy, as well as something to guide parents and managers in the workplace.

A slave to our screens, we’re locking ourselves to them. enslaved by Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley/www.shutterstock.com

A lack of digital denial

Interestingly, research attempting to deny digital addiction is almost impossible to find. Even as researchers claim that cell phone addiction can harm the parent-child bond, or that phone addicts may be more prone to mood swings, academic voices against are few and far between. Why is this?

It could be because the current research hasn’t made any significant impact on existing corporations and commercial models. When studies were published claiming definitive proof of dangerous mobile phone radiation the brain, particularly in children, those speaking out against the claims were were vocal and many in number. That battle is raging to this day, with the potential harm of wearables now coming under scrutiny.

I believe this battle is so energetic because the consequences, as with the tobacco industry, are directly and profoundly commercial. At present, digital addiction is an opportunity for innovation, both social and technological.

Putting digital in its place

We might better manage our digital devices by learning to place them more mindfully and skilfully – to learn to “handle our digital drink”. There are always apps to help us manage our addictions. Digital addiction has innovations in online child safety, the ways parents ration access to devices, better education – and even apps that prevent users constantly connecting. It might be that the impact of digital addiction and the way it manifests itself will have to be ever further revealed before serious research begins.

Added to this is the fact that many argue that profound freedom is a core principle in the digital space – any regulation or top-down governance, such as in the realms of alcohol, smoking, or gambling, will be strongly resisted. If the internet is in any way equivalent to a drug, then, according to the web’s founding father, Tim Berners-Lee, that drug is a “human right”). So the corporations working with digital devices and content wait and watch. While the evidence for digital addiction grow, it isn’t harming iPhone sales, and is unlikely to dent the success of smartwatches.

From India to America, from China to England, concerns that our children are turning into couch potatoes grows. But until a tipping point is reached, parents and teachers, managers and gamers will carry on checking into clinics, reading the top ten tips, possibly to become a generation with prematurely arthritic fingers, backache, and a whole host of yet to be named psychological disorders.

Germanwings flight 4U9525: a victim of the deadlock between safety and security demands

Two up front for safety? Jason Calston/Airbus

It seems incredible that a pilot of a passenger airline could be locked out of the cockpit. But analysis from the cockpit voice recorder recovered from Germanwings flight 4U9525 after it ploughed into the Southern Alps in France has revealed that this is what happened and that one of the two pilots had been trying to get into the cockpit before the crash.

An initial explanation that the pilot at the controls was incapacitated, perhaps from a heart attack or stroke, has since given way to an alternative given by French investigators: that the pilot in the cockpit – named in reports as Andreas Lubitz – deliberately prevented his co-pilot from entering in order to destroy the aircraft.

Following the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, passenger aircraft cockpit doors have been reinforced in order to be made secure, and even bulletproof.

Access to the cockpit must be locked during flight, preventing passengers from forcing entry onto the flight deck so that pilots can safely fly the aircraft and manage any situation without worrying about potential hijackers. For the safety of the pilots the cockpit door must open at the pilot’s command from the flight deck, for example when there is no apparent risk of malicious attack. The outside of the cockpit door is secured by a keypad, to which the crew have the codes. But the request from the keypad to open the door must be confirmed by the co-pilot who remains inside.

It has become apparent that these two aspects – safety and security – are not always achievable at the same time. In the event of an incident like this, they even work against each other.

A trade-off between safety and security

People often confuse “security” and “safety”. In Chinese the two words are exactly the same. However, conceptually they are different.

Security offers protection from intentional attacks, while safety is to prevent from natural accidents. While some security incidents can be accidental, or made to look accidental, some element of usually malicious intent is involved.

The trade-off in both security and safety risks in this context is hard because the probability of accidents can be modelled while human intention cannot. One could try to estimate the probability of someone having bad intentions, especially pilots, but in the end it’s not possible to square one with the other – it is to compare apples with oranges.

With the ultimate goal of protecting the lives of those on board, the processes by which the cockpit door is open and closed is crucial. Closing the door is not always right, even though the flight may be threatened by potential terrorists. That a pilot on the flight deck must open the door to his fellow officer outside the door is not beneficial if the crew remaining on the deck inside are incapacitated or unwilling to do so.

Timing and context is key

Feature interaction manifests itself in the way hardware and software interacts, such as in the design of lifts, vehicles or even smart homes. In order to avoid problematic interactions priority needs to be assigned to those features that are paramount – on aircraft, this is protecting the lives of passengers. The key to this is context and timing.

How can the electronic, robotic controller of the cockpit doors collaborate with the human crew member desperately looking for ways to gain entry to the flight deck? Knocking, or even smashing down the door is not enough – because potential terrorists may do the same, and so these eventualities will have been catered for in the initial design.

In this case, an adaptive user interface mechanism, which has been used to simplify complicated software systems, could enhance the usability of an otherwise complex security system. Mobile payment systems, such as Apple Pay, have demonstrated it’s possible to simplify the interface to otherwise complex security systems. For example, users do not need to carry credit cards yet can still properly certify their transactions. Such time-saving elements to verify security could be, in such a contingency as this, a life-saving feature.

Control of the cockpit door must be adaptive to context of the situation, providing a means to bypass the risk of a situation where flight crew are locked out of the cockpit. Had the robotic door controller understood there was a reason the pilot at the controls could not confirm the entrance of the pilot outside – by registering a malfunctioning ejection seat, for example, or reading dying vital signs from a heart monitor – it could override the security requirements and allow the pilot to reenter the cockpit.

We need to reassess the risks and arguments around safety and security in the context of aviation, and find ways of bringing together hardware, software, and the flight crew themselves – perhaps through health monitoring devices – in order to ensure that both these demands work together, and do not become a threat in themselves.

Governments want to regulate bitcoin – is that even possible?

All that glitters is not gold. Antana, CC BY-SA

The UK government has shown its intention to regulate bitcoin and other digital currencies, drawing them into the realms of financial regulation applied to banks and other financial services. But bitcoin is not a bank or a financial company based in the City. How would regulation apply to something that exists in the cloud?

George Osborne’s announcement in his pre-election budget contained three measures. First, to apply anti-money laundering regulation to digital currency exchanges, for which formal consultation will begin soon after the election. Second, for the British Standards Institution and the digital currency industry to work together to develop voluntary standards for consumer protection. And third, £10m funding for the Research Councils, Alan Turing Institute and Digital Catapult to partner with industry to research the opportunities and challenges posed by digital currencies.

Balancing innovation and regulation

The government faces the familiar problem of needing to provide a suitable environment for innovation to flourish, while also ensuring that firms working in the same industry performing similar functions are regulated in the same way. All of this needs to be done in such a way as to protect the consumer and, in this case, perhaps the wider financial system itself. Heavy-handed regulation risks stifling innovation and driving away potential digital currency-based businesses. After all, as a truly global currency that exists in the cloud, the physical location of a digital currency-based business is irrelevant.

Too little regulation may leave digital currencies vulnerable to criminality – and the effect of this criminality consumers and the economy. The digital currency industry already faces problems that include theft from digital currency exchanges, malware and attacks on third-party websites, as well as the potential to aid money laundering. For example, within a week of Osborne’s announcement, another bitcoin exchange, Paybase, ceased allowing withdrawals and its administrator disappeared.

The realms of the possible

The regulation of digital currency is important in order to mitigate these sorts of risks and prevent abuse that destroys trust in the system. It is essential if digital currencies are to develop a major role in the UK economy. However their nature presents serious regulatory challenges: there is no central issuer, no control over supply and demand and no central organisation to impose regulatory requirements upon.

This might suggest the very idea of bringing them within the regulator’s embrace is futile. However, the aspect in which digital currencies are accepted as payment for goods and services seems a point at which to apply anti-financial crime measures – for example, customer due diligence measures when high-value goods are purchased using digital currency. In this sense they come under the same regulatory umbrella as cash, as defined in the Money Laundering Regulations 2007.

Striking where the virtual becomes real

A further approach favoured by the government is to focus on the digital exchange services – the sites where digital currencies are exchanged for real-world dollars, pounds or euros. Two key anti-money laundering initiatives are customer due diligence and suspicious activity reporting.

Customer due diligence – where banks or financial services must require proof of their customer’s identity – is one of the most significant aspects of anti-money laundering regulation. Without this there is no paper trail leading back to the criminal, but this cannot be applied in all instances as it would be too much of a burden. So it will have to be applied where there is most risk, an approach that reflects the different aspects that warrant regulation, but which treats all companies within the sector equally by creating a level playing field.

Suspicious activity reports would be more difficult to implement, not least because at present there is limited legitimate use of digital currencies. The main use for digital cryptocurrencies has been for purchasing illegal goods and services from markets in the dark net, such as Silk Road. This makes it difficult for an exchange to identify a “suspicious transaction”.

Consumer protection measures could be brought in by the introduction of a US-style licensing system for digital currency exchanges. A side effect of this approach is that it may simply drive businesses overseas to evade regulation. Ultimately, digital currencies are not restricted by national borders and, in that sense, it is not important from where they operate.

Another challenge is how to apply sanctions in the event regulations are breached. Sanctions are important to deter crime, but without the information gained from applying measures such as customer due diligence there may not be sufficient information to trace someone to punish. In fact, the entire point of virtual currencies like bitcoin is that they’re anonymous.

Given the difficulties of effectively regulating digital currencies, any research into the field is to be welcomed, as it’s clear there are considerable challenges to overcome before digital currencies can become an integral part of the mainstream economy.

John Nash, Louis Nirenberg share math’s Abel Prize

Pair to split ‘Nobel of mathematics’ for work on partial differential equations

John Nash (left) and Louis Nirenberg (right) will receive the 2015 Abel Prize for their work on partial differential equations.

Nash: Courtesy of Princeton; Nirenberg: ©NYU Photo Bureau: Hollenshead

The 2015 Abel Prize, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics, will go to John F. Nash Jr. and Louis Nirenberg for work on partial differential equations, which are important in both pure math and describing natural phenomena.

Nash, of Princeton University and well-known as the subject of the book and movie A Beautiful Mind, shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for work on game theory.

Nash and Nirenberg, of New York University, will split the approximately $760,000 prize for “striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis,” the Norwegian Academy of

Newly discovered layer in Earth's mantle can affect surface dwellers too

No Earths were harmed in the making of this image Johan Swanepoel/Shutterstock

Sinking tectonic plates get jammed in a newly discovered layer of the Earth’s mantle – and could be causing earthquakes on the surface.

It was previously thought that Earth’s lower mantle, which begins at a depth of around 700 km and forms the major part of the mantle, is fairly uniform and varies only gradually as it goes deeper.

However, our new study points towards a layer in the mantle characterised by a strong increase in viscosity – a finding which has strong implications for our understanding of what’s going on deep down below our feet.

The deep unknown

The Earth’s mantle is the largest shell inside our planet. Ranging from about 50 km to 3000 km depth, it links the hot liquid outer core – with temperatures higher than 5,000K – to the Earth’s surface.

The movement of materials within the Earth’s mantle is thought to drive plate tectonic movements on the surface, ultimately leading to earthquakes and volcanoes. The mantle is also the Earth’s largest reservoir for many elements stored in mantle minerals. Throughout Earth’s history, substantial amounts of material have been exchanged between the deep mantle and the surface and atmosphere, affecting both the life and climate above ground.

Because mankind is incapable of directly probing the lower mantle – the deepest man-made hole is only around 12 km deep – many details of the global material recycling process are poorly understood.

We do know, however, that the main way materials are transferred from the Earth’s surface and atmosphere back into the deep mantle occurs when one tectonic plate slides under another and is pushed down below another into the mantle.

A strong increase in the viscosity leads to a stiff layer which catches sinking slabs Hauke Marquardt

A trap for sinking plates

So far most researchers assumed that these sinking plates either stall at the boundary between the upper and lower mantle at a depth of around 700 km or sink all the way through the lower mantle to the core-mantle boundary 3,000 km down.

But our new research, published in the latest online issue of Nature Geoscience, shows that many of these sinking slabs may in fact be trapped above a previously undiscovered impermeable layer of rock within the lower mantle.

We found that enormous pressures in the lower mantle, which range from 25 GPa (gigapascal) to 135 GPa, can lead to surprising behaviour of matter. To picture just how high this pressure is, balancing the Eiffel Tower in your hand would create pressures on the order of 10 GPa. These pressures lead to the formation of a stiff layer in the Earth’s mantle. Sinking plates may become trapped on top of this layer, which reaches its maximum stiffness at a depth below 1,500km.

Under pressure

We formed this conclusion after performing laboratory experiments on ferropericlase, a magnesium/iron oxide that is thought to be one of the main constituents of the Earth’s lower mantle. We compressed the ferropericlase to pressures of almost 100 GPa in a diamond-anvil cell, a high-pressure device which compresses a tiny sample the size of a human hair between the tips of two minuscule brilliant-cut diamonds.

A diamond-anvil cell compresses a tiny sample under high pressure between two minuscule diamonds. Image via Hauke Marquardt, Author provided

While under compression, the ferropericlase was probed with high-energy x-rays to investigate how it deforms under these high pressures. We found that the ability of the material to resist irreversible deformation increased by over three times under high pressures.

These results were used to model the change of viscosity with depth in Earth’s lower mantle. While previous estimates have indicated only gradual variations of viscosity with depth, we found a dramatic increase of viscosity throughout the upper 900 km of the lower mantle.

Such a strong increase in viscosity can stop the descent of slabs and, in doing so, strongly affect the deep Earth material cycle. These new findings are supported by 3-D imaging observations based on the analysis of seismic wave speeds travelling through the Earth that also indicate that the slabs stop sinking before they reach a depth of 1500 km.

Surface effects

If true, the existence of this stiff layer in the Earth’s mantle has wide-ranging implications for our understanding of the deep Earth material cycle. It could limit material mixing between the upper and lower parts of the lower mantle, meaning mantle regions with previously different geochemical signatures stay isolated in separate patches instead of mixing over geologic time.

What’s more, a stiff mid-mantle layer could also put stress on slabs much closer to the Earth’s surface, potentially acting as a trigger of deep earthquakes.

We are really just at the beginning of a deeper understanding of the inner workings of our planet, many of which ultimately affect our life on its surface.

One photon wrangles 3,000 atoms into quantum entanglement

A particle of light is all it takes to establish a quantum connection between nearly 3,000 atoms, scientists report in the March 26 Nature. The finding brings physicists a step closer to studying the macroscopic effects of quantum entanglement, which links the properties of microscopic particles.

MIT quantum physicist Vladan Vuletić and colleagues bounced photons between two mirrors in a space that contained about 3,100 rubidium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero. Occasionally the polarization of a photon changed slightly, indicating that the photon had interacted with the atoms. Measurements revealed that each brief interaction coaxed at least 2,700 of the atoms to become entangled.

The researchers hope to use clusters of entangled atoms to build extraordinarily precise atomic clocks.

A healthy public domain generates millions in economic value -- not bad for 'free'

Usefulness and value extends far beyond the century in which they were created. British Library

It’s frequently claimed that copyright law should be made more restrictive and copyright terms extended in order to provide an incentive for content creators.

But with growing use of works put into the public domain or released under free and permissive licenses such as Creative Commons or the GPL and its derivatives, it’s possible to argue the opposite – that freely available works also generate value.

Public domain works – those that exist without restriction on use either because their copyright term has expired or because they fall outside of the scope of copyright protection – create significant economic benefits, according to research my colleagues and I have conducted, now published in a report for the UK government’s Intellectual Property Office.

We found a surprising amount of transformative reuse of public domain materials by commercial users – economic value that wouldn’t have been possible without access to a thriving public domain. We tried to identify precisely how and where economic value is generated from public domain works in order to establish where there’s scope for improvement.

Setting the copyright term

Literary and artistic works in the UK are protected under copyright for 70 years following the death of the author. At that point, copyright expires and anybody may copy the work and make it available to others. Consumers can then enjoy the benefit of accessing the work for a lower price, and in some cases for free. For example the Project Gutenberg releases digital versions of classic literary texts that are in the public domain. The British Library’s Mechanical Curator project digitises illustrations from printed books and makes them available on Flickr.

The public domain marque. anarres

Conversely, this means rights holders will no longer be able to restrict copying of their work and will potentially lose revenue. It’s for this reason that some rights holders have lobbied governments to extend the scope of copyright so that they can continue to extract revenue from a small number of old, popular works. The Disney Corporation is one example: Some works featuring Mickey Mouse would have fallen out of copyright in 2003 had US Congress not passed the Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998 (derided by some as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act), which extended the US copyright protection from 50 to 75 years (95 years for corporate works).

Protection or obstruction?

Some economic theorists argue that long or indefinitely renewable copyright protection is an optimal solution because it creates an incentive for rights holders to keep works available. However, even in-copyright works can disappear from the market because rights holders decide that it’s not worth the effort to print or publish the work.

Another, perhaps more important, problem is that it’s difficult to build upon works protected by copyright to create new products. It’s costly and time-consuming to seek permission to use a work, and sometimes the original creator (or those to whom the rights have passed) cannot be located or does not wish to allow a derivative use.

For example, David and Stephen Dewaele, the Belgian brothers behind 2ManyDJs, had to have 187 samples approved in order to release their 2002 album As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2. Rights owners rejected 62, 11 were untraceable, and 114 were cleared – a process that took the best part of three years.

Creative Commons licenses allow greater flexibility. Creative Commons

Creative Commons licenses were developed to help solve this problem. By stating terms for the attribution and use for a work but freeing it from copyright restrictions from the outset, a Creative Commons-licensed work reduces costs for those wishing to use it and allows them to make use of a work within the bounds of the licence.

Use and re-use

We interviewed UK media firms and found that those that had worked with public domain materials were not put off by the fact their source material could also be used by others. Many firms reported that they saw their contributions as part of an ecosystem in which the joint efforts of creators, fans and audiences enriched a narrative product not owned by a single contributor.

Using data from crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, we examined how products based on public domain works performed compared with entirely original products or those under copyright. We found that public domain-inspired works were more likely to succeed and raised more funding (56%) compared with untested, entirely original projects. We also found that a third of all crowdfunding pitches incorporated various sources of intellectual property and derived works into the final product.

Public domain and other works on Kickstarter Kristofer Erickson, Author provided

Finally, we looked at how the availability of public domain materials could add value to non-commercial products or services, which may in turn create a commercial benefit. For example Wikipedia relies on public domain and Creative Commons licensed images to illustrate its pages. By extrapolating from a sample of 1,700 biographical pages for notable authors, musical composers and lyricists, we arrived at an estimated value for public domain images across English language Wikipedia.

Based on the costs of providing replacement images from commercial sources, we estimate that public domain material contributes £138m per year for the 1,983,609 English language Wikipedia pages. Having controlled for the notoriety of certain persons or subjects on Wikipedia it’s also apparent that pages with public domain images (rather than none) attract between 17-19% more visitors. Were Wikipedia a commercial website with advertising, the increased traffic would generate an additional £22.6m a year.

Digital creativity and innovation are vital components of today’s economy. Any policies that encourage growth in the creative industries should not only consider the value represented in the trade of copyrighted works, but also the range of public domain material that inspires or forms the basis of new products – and the importance of protecting and nurturing a thriving public domain.