How to Train Your Robot (to Lie)

by Kristen Minogue 

Those lying toasters. Georgia Tech's Decepticon knows how to mislead pursuers to shake them off.

Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

A military base has just fallen to enemy fighters. A robot containing top-secret information has to escape detection by the invading army. The robot is facing three corridors: right, center, and left. It could randomly pick a corridor and hope the enemy soldiers pick a different one. Or it could leave a false trail—assuming robots can be trained to lie. A new study using this scenario suggests that they can be.

This is not the first time machines have displayed deceptive tendencies. In 2007, Swiss researchers discovered that robots programmed to learn from experience spontaneously evolved the habit of lying to one another under some conditions. But the idea of deliberately implanting deceit is new.

The first step wasn't teaching the robots how to lie, but when to lie. Computer scientists Alan Wagner and Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta came up with an algorithm that set two conditions: First, a robot had to be in conflict with someone or something else. And second, it had to be able to influence its adversary's actions. If both conditions checked out, the robot was cleared to lie.

Then they tested the idea in two-wheeled, camera-equipped robots that were playing a simple game of hide-and-seek.

Innocent fun?. Robots flaunt their lying skills in a game of hide-and-seek.

Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

The "hider" robot had to choose one of three compartments in which to conceal itself. The pathway to each was blocked by a green, red, or blue marker. Whichever way the robot went, it knocked down one marker. After some training, the hider bot and seeker bot figured out that a fallen marker indicated which direction the hider had gone. But there was one catch: The seeker didn't know the hider bot had been programmed to lie.

When the game began, the hider randomly chose one of the compartments. Then its deceptive programming kicked in and told it to go another direction first—knocking over a different marker—and then turn back toward its choice. The seeker, seeing the fallen marker and suspecting no trickery, would follow the fake trail and leave the hider undiscovered.

After 20 trials, they found the deception worked 75% of the time. When it failed, Wagner says, the robots were clumsy. The hider might try to go right but end up going toward the center, for example, or its slow perception of the marker might make it hit the wrong one. "It thinks it's going to knock over one, but lo and behold, it plows through all of them." Barring such blunders, however, the seeker robots fell for the ruse every time, the researchers reported last week in the International Journal of Social Robotics.

One of the hardest parts of deception is knowing how an adversary will interpret a false message, notes game theorist Philippe Jehiel of the Paris School of Economics, who was not involved in the work. He said he wasn't certain that the authors' way of modeling what the seeker would do was clear. "As far as I could see in the present study, this is one of the most challenging issues."

Wagner and Arkin also recognized the importance of knowing the enemy. In this study, they made the deception work by not revealing to the seeker the hider's capacity to lie. How the hider would fare against smarter robots remains an open question.

Wagner says he's aware people might be leery of creating deceitful robots. But he thinks robots that know how to lie could benefit society in the long run. "There are a lot of important situations in which humans deceive for the better of the other person," he says. For example, "If I'm trying to get a person with Alzheimer's to take medicine, we may be in a temporary state of conflict, but overall it's better for them to take that medicine," Wagner says. "Deception is not necessarily nefarious."

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like It's a Bot-Eat-Bot World.

Oil Drop Navigates Complex Maze

by Charles Choi on 

Lab rats, watch your back. Scientists have found a way to make simple droplets of oil navigate complex labyrinths with the same skill as laboratory rodents. The advance could help researchers devise better ways to solve other mazelike problems, from rooting out cancer in the body to mapping paths through traffic jams.

Physical chemist Bartosz Grzybowski of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues hit upon the droplets while trying to devise novel cancer therapies. Scientists have developed a variety of ways to get cancer drugs into the body--including nanoparticles and liposomes--but all face the same obstacle: It's hard to navigate the body's maze of vessels and tissues to seek out and destroy hidden cancers.

So Grzybowski's team made several silicon mazes roughly 6.5 square centimeters in size. To create the conditions for movement, the researchers filled the labyrinths with an alkaline solution of potassium hydroxide. The maze runners, placed at the entrance of the labyrinths, were millimeter-wide droplets of either mineral oil or the organic solvent dichloromethane, both loaded with a weak acid and red dye. The "prize," placed at the exit of each maze, was a lump of agarose gel soaked in hydrochloric acid. "We wanted to give [the droplets] a bit of a challenge and see if they could do more than just go in a straight line," Grzybowski says.

Over the course of a minute or so, each droplet found its way to the end of the maze. The reason they move in the right direction has to do with basic chemistry. Acid from the highly acidic gel slowly leaks into the potassium hydroxide solution that fills the maze, creating a gradient: Solution near the exit becomes more acidic, whereas solution near the entrance stays more basic. This basic solution interacts with the acidic droplet, causing the part of the droplet facing the exit to become more acidic than the part of the droplet facing away from the exit. The disparity increases the surface tension of the side of the droplet that faces the exit--and it's this difference in surface tension between the two sides of the droplet that propels it toward the exit of the maze.

The mineral oil droplets always found the shortest possible paths through the maze. "We can call them chemo-rats," Grzybowski says. The droplets made from dichloromethane traveled at faster speeds--perhaps because acid was released onto their surfaces at a higher rate--and thus sometimes veered onto the wrong paths, but they always reverted rapidly to the best ways out, the team reports online 11 January in theJournal of the American Chemical Society.

So how does all of this relate to cancer therapy? Grzybowski notes that cancers are more acidic than the rest of the body, so--like the maze droplets--one could potentially design drug vehicles to follow the acid-base gradient toward the cancer cells.

The work could even have implications beyond medicine. Grzybowski says that in some cases, when his team simultaneously introduced two droplets into mazes, they almost never got in each other's way on their way out. "You can imagine designing systems that might be of some interest for traffic people investigating urban navigation," he notes. Chemist John Pojman of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge adds that such roving droplets "might be useful as a pumping mechanism for microfluidics, converting chemical energy to mechanical motion in small devices," such as the microfluidic labs-on-a-chip many researchers are developing as diagnostic machines.

Computers and mathematics could also benefit. Maze navigation can fall into a class of problems known as NP-complete, "which computers have a surprisingly hard time solving, as the effort to solve them goes up exponentially with the scale of the problem," says chemist Irv Epstein of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. "The kind of approach shown here with these mazes might be a very efficient approach to address this problem." One would then want more complex variations, he notes. "Perhaps more complex kinds of gradients, mazes with multiple exits, and setting this up not just in two dimensions but three."

Does Our Universe Live Inside a Wormhole?

By Phil Berardelli 

A long time ago, a giant star collapsed in a universe much more significant than our own. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole to another universe. And inside this wormhole, our own universe was born. It may seem fantastic, but a theoretical physicist claims that such a scenario could help answer some of the most perplexing questions in cosmology.

Several facets of our universe need to be clarified. One is gravity. Scientists can't construct a mathematical formula that unites gravity with nature's three other basic forces: the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Another problem is dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon expanding our universe at an accelerating rate, even though gravity should be contracting it or slowing the expansion.

These conundrums may be a result of stopping the search for the riddle of the cosmos at the big bang, says Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University in Bloomington. The Big Bang theory holds that our universe began as a single point—or singularity—about 13.7 billion years ago and has expanded outward ever since. Perhaps, Poplawski argues, we must consider that something existed before the Big Bang that gave rise to it.

Enter the wormhole. According to Poplawski's calculations, the collapse of a giant star in another universe could have created a wormhole, a space-time conduit to another universe. Conditions could have developed similar to those we associate with the Big Bang between these two openings, and therefore, our universe could have formed within the wormhole.

Such a scenario could address the quandaries about gravity and the expanding universe. If another universe existed before our own, gravity could be traced back to a point where it did unite with nuclear forces and electromagnetism. And if our universe is now expanding toward the wormhole's other end, this movement—rather than the elusive dark energy—could account for our expanding universe.

The calculations need further refinement, admits Poplawski, who will publish his findings on Monday in Physics Letters B. For one thing, they need to describe how the wormhole formed in the first place. And don't get any ideas about travelling between the universes, Poplawski adds. The physics of wormholes is similar to the physics of black holes. If you could ever pass through the wormhole's event horizon to visit the universe on the other side, you could never return. "You will be stuck," he says.

Cosmologist Martin Bojowald of Pennsylvania State University, University Park, won't even go that far. He thinks the way the paper treats the gravitational collapse into a wormhole is a bit "contrived." It would be difficult to imagine the idea has applications "beyond pure theory," he says.

Nevertheless, theorist Eduardo Guendelman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, finds the paper's way of describing the junction of two universes "very instructive." The key question, Guendelman says, is whether the matter necessary to construct the wormhole exists.

These Dance Moves Are Irresistible

by Helen Fields 

Hey, guys, want to impress ladies on the dance floor? Keep your head and torso moving, and don't flail your arms and legs. This useful advice comes courtesy of a new study, which finds that women are more attracted to computer avatars that rock these moves.

Humans aren't the only animals that move in special ways to lure females. Male fiddler crabs wave an outsized claw to show off, and male hummingbirds display their flying prowess with a flamboyant mating dive. These moves probably show off their strength and motor skills. Evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave of Northumbria University in Newcastle Upon Tyne wondered whether there was something about male human dancing that impressed females as well.

Neave and colleagues couldn't just round up a bunch of men and ask them to gyrate in front of women, however. That's because it's hard to separate a man's physical appearance from his dancing skills. "You could be the best dancer in the world, but if you've got an awful haircut or something like that," women may still find you unattractive, says Neave. So he and colleagues cut out the effect of physical appearance by using motion-capture technology, like the techniques moviemakers use to make digital characters.

The researchers stuck 38 reflective markers to the joints and other body parts of 30 male students at Northumbria University. Then they asked the guys to dance for 30 seconds as if they were in a nightclub, while a thumping drum beat played over speakers. Twelve video cameras recorded the action. A computer used data on the location of the markers to construct an avatar of each man (see videos). The avatars are "not quite James Cameron [quality], but they're pretty good," says Neave. In a video of a bad dancer, the avatar trudges in a circle, awkwardly moving his arms. An avatar made from a good dancer moves his whole body from side to side, mixing up his moves with impressive creativity.

Wrong moves. A bad dancer trudges in a circle, swinging his arms.

Credit: Northumbria University

Nice moves! A good dancer mixes up his moves and keeps his head and torso shakin'.

Credit: Northumbria University

Heterosexual women watched the videos and rated them according to whether the man was a good dancer or a bad dancer. (Neave says pilot studies by his group found that asking women who's a good dancer is the same as asking who's attractive.)

The most important factor to the women was how much the man moved his head, neck, and torso, the researchers will report online tomorrow inBiology Letters. Better dancers are "nodding their head, they're turning the head to one side, they're turning their head to the other side, there's a large nod, there's a small nod, there's a nod to the left," Neave says.

The team expected to see a lot of action in the hands and feet. "Legs and arms we thought would be really important, and they're not, apart from the right knee," says Neave. He thinks that's because most people are right-footed—so they use their left leg for balance and execute fancy moves with the right. He and his colleagues think dance is an honest signal to women of the man's strength and health, just as it is in crabs and hummingbirds; in future studies, they'll look at the health of the good and bad dancers.

It makes sense that women would care about men's ability to dance, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "For millions of years, a man with well-coordinated movements of the head, neck, and trunk [which he used when throwing weapons] probably signaled his ability to provide," she writes in an e-mail. Varying his dance moves shows creativity, a trait associated with energy, optimism, and daring.

Judith Hanna, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies dance, calls the use of avatars "brilliant." She says it would be interesting to replicate the study with different populations; in different cultures, different dance moves may be seen as attractive.

Quantum Physicists Dream Up Smallest Possible Refrigerator

by Adrian Cho 

Flipping brilliant! Skewing the rates of flipping between two equal-energy configurations of three quantum particles cause the second two to cool the first one.

You may have a $10,000 Sub-Zero fridge in your kitchen, but this is cooler. Theoretical physicists have dreamed up a scheme to make a refrigerator out of a pair of quantum particles such as ions or atoms, or even a single particle. The fridges may be the smallest ones possible. “It’s very elegant and innovative,” says Nicolas Gisin, a theorist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Theo Nieuwenhuizen, a theorist at the University of Amsterdam, says “I don’t see any error, so probably this would work.”

The challenge is to make a few quantum particles act like a so-called thermal machine, the theory of which was set out by French engineer Sadi Carnot in 1824. Carnot imagined a piston filled with gas that could be compressed or expanded. The piston could make contact with either of two large bodies (say, massive steel blocks) at different temperatures, which could serve as the “hot bath” and the “cold bath.”

Carnot put the imaginary piston through a cycle of motions, including one in which the gas expands while in contact with the hot bath and another in which it is compressed while in contact with the cold bath. During the cycle, the piston does work while absorbing heat from the hot bath and releasing heat into the cold one, making it a “heat engine.” Reverse the cycle and, in response to work done on it, the piston acts as a refrigerator, absorbing heat from the cold bath and releasing it into the hot one.

Now, Noah Linden, Sandu Popescu, and Paul Skrzypczyk of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom report that, at least in principle, they can make a refrigerator out of a few quantum particles called “qubits.” Each qubit has only two possible quantum states: a zero-energy ground state and a fixed-energy excited state. The theorists have found a way to siphon energy out of one qubit by making it interact with just two others.

The theorists arrange things so that each qubit has a different excited-state energy but the trio of qubits has two configurations with the same total energy. One is the configuration in which only the first and third qubits are in their excited states—denoted (101). The other is the configuration in which only the second qubit is in its excited state—denoted (010). If all three qubits were at the same temperature, then the system would flip with equal probability back and forth between these two configurations.

But the researchers skew that flipping, as they explain in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters. The trick is to put the first two qubits in contact with a cold bath and the third one in contact with a hot bath. The higher temperature makes it more likely that the third qubit will be in its excited state—and thus that the trio will be in the (101) state instead of the (010) state. But that means the system is more likely to flip out of (101) and into (010) than the other way around. So on average the flipping takes the first qubit from its excited state to its ground state and draws energy out of the first qubit. After a flip, the qubits essentially reset by interacting with the baths, allowing the cycle to start again.

The theorists measure the fridge’s size in terms of the number of its quantum states, and the three qubits have a total of eight possible states. That number can be clipped to six, if they replace the second and third qubits with a single “qutrit,” a particle with a ground state and two excited states—although those two states have to be in contact with different baths. “We believe that’s probably the smallest number of states you can get away with,” Linden says.

In theory, such a fridge can get arbitrarily close to absolute zero, and Popescu says that it might be possible to make one using trapped ions for the qubits and streams of laser light as the baths. Some researchers hope to use such qubits as the guts for a quantum computer, and Popescu says the refrigerator scheme might allow researchers to cool some set of qubits with a few others. David Wineland, an experimental physicist with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, says he believes such schemes can indeed be implemented in trapped ions.

Others suggest that such tiny quantum refrigerators might already be humming along in nature. It’s possible that one part of a biomolecule might work to cool another in such a fashion, says Hans Briegel, a theorist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. “I don’t expect that you will have a mechanism exactly like this,” Briegel says, “but it gives you a framework valuable for telling what to search for.”

No word yet on when physicists might unveil the smallest possible beer.

The Secret of Turtle Island

by Lauren Schenkman 

In the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, there's an area local fishermen call "Turtle Island." It's real enough, but you'd be foolish to try to sail there. The island is never in precisely the same place, and it changes size from one minute to the next. In fact, you never know when its gleaming shore might disappear altogether, because it's made up entirely of the half-exposed shells of basking loggerhead sea turtles.

The funny thing is, sea turtles, unlike the Mediterranean's human denizens, aren't supposed to like to float, says Sandra Hochscheid, a marine biologist at Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn in Naples, Italy. Scientists believe that loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta), the dominant sea turtle in the Mediterranean, spend most of their lives underwater or on the sea floor, coming to the surface only for brief gasps of air. "Everything we'd found out about turtles: feeding, mating, migrating, searching for good places, resting … has all taken place underwater," she says.

Hochscheid knew about Turtle Island and had heard about basking turtles from tourists in Naples, but she'd never seen the behaviour for herself. So she decided to figure out just what the loggerheads were doing spending so much time among the waves. "I've been looking 10 years into what they do under the water surface," Hochschild says. "But I've never looked at the time they spend at the surface."

Hochscheid and colleagues collected 10 loggerheads from various locations in the Mediterranean and glued tracking devices—small black boxes with flexible antennas—to their shells. Over a year of observations, it became clear why the turtles had developed a reputation as bottom dwellers. The tagged loggerheads spent about 98% of their time underwater. And when they did come up, it was irregularly, sometimes twice in 2 days and sometimes not for a week.

There was a hint to the reason for the behavior, however. The turtles almost always surfaced during the day, 82% of the time, in fact, and mostly at about midday when the sunlight is most direct. Another clue: Daylight basking sessions almost always occurred after the turtles had returned from a dive below the thermocline, the transitional zone between the sun-warmed shallows and frigid depths. Hochscheid believes that daylight surfacing helps the loggerheads warm up quickly; she speculates it could also aid digestion, though she's not sure how.

Night surfacing, on the other hand, almost always followed dives that were long enough to cause the turtles to run out of air, a duration that the team calculated based on the turtles' weight. Night sessions, then, would help the turtles clear large amounts of lactic acid, produced when the turtles keep swimming when they've run out of oxygen, the team reports today in The Journal of Experimental Biology.

Basking may have a downside for the turtles, says Brendan Godley, a conservation biologist at the University of Exeter, Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, because it makes the turtles more vulnerable to boat strikes. He says that if more research uncovers a preference for certain spots or times of year, the findings could feed into conservation efforts. The work also exemplifies how technology is transforming marine biologists' understanding of the turtles, he says. "Especially with satellite tracking, the more we look, the more we find that highlights how complicated these animals are."

Turning Waste Heat Into Electricity

by Robert F. Service 

Energized. Spiking a conventional thermoelectric material with sodium and selenium creates regions in the crystal that conduct electricity more readily (blue and gold), boosting the material's performance.

Credit: Adapted from Y. Pei et al., Nature, 473 (5 May, 2011)

Engineers have come up with a handful of uses for computer chip-like devices that chill objects when plugged in or convert waste heat into electrical power—stuff like car seats that cool drivers on hot days and coolers that chill drinks when plugged in. But by-and-large, these devices, known as thermoelectrics, have remained too inefficient to make much of a real-world impact. Now, researchers in the United States and China report that they've come up with a new way to boost the performance of one of the most common thermoelectrics on the market, an advance that could pave the way for more widespread use in converting waste heat from cars and other mechanical devices into useful electricity.

Although efforts to improve thermoelectrics haven't paid off in a big way, it's not for want of trying. Physicists realized in the early decades of the 1800s that heat flowing in a circuit between two different conductors could generate an electric voltage. They also discovered the opposite effect -- electricity fed into such a device would heat one conductor and cool the other. The devices work because heat can push electrons around, and the motion of electrons can carry heat. Researchers have long tried to enhance the effect to make the devices practical. In doing so, the goal is typically to increase a property in the materials known as ZT, which depends on a set of factors that include a material's ability to conduct heat and its electrical conductivity. An alloy of lead telluride (PbTe), for example, which has long been used to generate electricity aboard satellites, has a ZT of around 0.8.

To increase ZT, researchers typically try to increase a material's electrical conductivity as much as possible while holding down its thermal conductivity. In 2008, researchers led by Jeffrey Snyder, a materials scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, spiked PbTe with thallium, which boosted the ZT to 1.5. The group later determined that the thallium altered the electronic structure of the crystal, improving its electrical conductivity.

But thallium is toxic, so Snyder and his colleagues wanted to determine if they could match the improvement with other additives. Earlier this year, Snyder and his team at Caltech reported in Energy & Environmental Science that substituting sodium for thallium produced a ZT of 1.4. Now, Snyder's team, in combination with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Institute of Ceramics, report online today inNature that adding selenium and sodium gives them a maximum ZT of 1.8. The selenium not only further improves the electrical conductivity, it also reduces the thermal conductivity, Snyder explains.

"It's excellent work," says Gang Chen, a thermoelectrics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "It shows there's still room to improve existing materials," he says Snyder notes that the same strategy should improve the electrical conductivity, and thus the ZT, of other conventional thermoelectrics. With any luck, the improvements will be large enough to push thermoelectric devices out of niche applications and into the mainstream.

Antiatoms, All Out of Energy and Ready for Work

by Adrian Cho 

Out with a bang. In this artist's rendition, an antihydrogen atom rattles around the ALPHA trap before escaping to create a pair of pions.

Credit: CERN/ALPHA collaboration

Just 6 months ago, physicists reported that they had trapped atoms made of antimatter for a fraction of a second. Now, the same team has held on to individual atoms of antihydrogen, each of which consists of an antiproton bound to a positron, for up to 15 minutes. That's long enough for an atom to lose all of its internal energy and settle into its least-energetic "ground state," a prerequisite for probing its inner workings. The result takes physicists a key step closer to their decades-old goal of precisely comparing hydrogen to antihydrogen in hopes of finding a flaw in a key symmetry between matter and antimatter.

"I'm delighted that if we just turn on a trap, a couple of antihydrogen atoms will stick around long enough to reach the ground state," says Gerald Gabrielse, a physicist at Harvard University who invented the general trapping scheme for antihydrogen and leads a competing experiment known as ATRAP.

As in their previous work, researchers with the ALPHA experiment used a cylindrical array of electrodes to capture in electric fields a puff of antiprotons and a puff of positrons, the antimatter partners of electrons. Working at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, the team used an additional electric field to slosh the cloud of 15,000 antiprotons through the 1 million positrons, allowing the particles to form antihydrogen atoms. When that happens, the positively charged positron and the negatively charged antiproton cancel each other's charges. Uncharged atoms cannot be bound by an electric field, so the physicists used a magnetic field to grasp the few atoms that formed.

To prove they had trapped an antihydrogen atom, the team first applied an electric field to sweep out any remaining antiprotons and positrons and then, after a delay, turned off the magnetic trap. Eventually, a liberated antimatter atom would then drift into the electrodes, annihilating on contact with ordinary matter to produce a telltale spray of particles called pions. In November, ALPHA researchers reported that they had trapped antihydrogen atoms for 0.172 seconds. This time, they waited longer to turn off the magnetic trap, and in seven of 16 attempts, they held an atom for 1000 seconds. They even succeeded in one of three attempts to hold an atom for 2000 seconds, they report online today in Nature Physics.

That's enough time for an antihydrogen atom to lose its internal energy and reach its ground state, says Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and leader of the ALPHA team. An atom can possess only certain amounts of energy, so its internal states form a ladderlike arrangement of increasing energy. Each antihydrogen atom forms high on the ladder and works its way down by radiating photons. The ALPHA team didn't prove that its long-held atoms made it to the ground state, but calculations showed they must have. "I would bet my house that they're in the ground state," Gabrielse says.

"This is clearly a very, very important experimental step forward," says Ryugo Hayano, a physicist at the University of Tokyo and leader of the competing Atomic Spectroscopy and Collisions Using Slow Antiprotons (ASACUSA) experiment at CERN. Researchers would like to measure the arrangement of internal states in antihydrogen and compare it with that in hydrogen, which is known to a precision of one part in 10¹⁴. Any difference would violate a symmetry between matter and antimatter known as charge parity time reversal (CPT) symmetry, which requires, for example, a particle and its antiparticle to have the same mass and lifetime. And if CPT symmetry does not quite hold, then neither can a symmetry of space and time called Lorentz invariance that is the basis for Einstein's theory of special relativity. But to make such measurements, scientists first need to make antihydrogen in its ground state.

It may be years before researchers can measure antiatoms precisely enough to make a stringent test of CPT symmetry, however. Moreover, in spite of its early lead, it's not clear that the ALPHA team will be first to succeed. The ASACUSA team also aims to make such measurements using a different approach with a free-floating beam of antihydrogen atoms. And Gabrielse and the ATRAP team, also working at CERN, are taking a slightly different tack from the ALPHA team by trying to trap many more antihydrogen atoms to make precision measurements easier. Bona fide experiments on antihydrogen are poised to begin. But the race for the prize results will be a marathon, not a sprint.

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ADMINISTRATION

Administrative management

Definition

Administrative management is about managing information through people. Information is central to all management processes and people are the resources who make best use of that information to add value. Most working professionals and all managers have some element of administrative management in their jobs.

Explanation

“Evidence of good administration is when you don’t know it is happening!” The Lord Peston of Mile End. Officiating at an Institute of Administrative Management Graduation Ceremony in London he was addressing an audience of over two hundred graduates and their guests. He was impressed by the organisation of the event combining the formality and gravitas of the ceremony with informal social mingling to ensure everyone enjoyed the occasion.

Management of information, whether paper based or computerised, is central to the effective running for any organisation in a competitive global marketplace.

Many administrative processes are repetitive and require to be regularly reviewed. A good administrative manager can add value to the company by challenging the efficiency and reliability of procedures that have been running for a period of time whilst striving to look for continuing improvements and identifying and cutting out any outdate practices. With the speed of change in business today the manager has to value the people who are expected to operate often complex systems.

Whilst ever improving software aids all aspects of administration, it has to be remembered it is just a tool for collection and dissemination of data. The information produced needs to be clear and concise to be of value to a manager. Many quality controls have been put in place by companies over recent years and should not just be viewed as just another “paper pushing exercise”. If controls are not working then it is up to the company to review why the procedure was implemented in the first place. In the drive for efficiency if the implementation of a new procedure prevents the staff member from actually getting on with the job, impedes production or hampers service output, then obviously rethinking the whole strategy is part of the administrative process.

Recent controversial thinking in some quarters suggests that highly trained freelancers and software may replace administrative managers within organisations. With the increasing use of tele-workers and outsourcing by companies the role of the administrative manager becomes even more necessary than ever before. We therefore have to ensure that all administrative managers are given the essential training required to be able to make the best use of their own technical skills and those of their staff to full potential.

The 1990’s saw most office functions being revolutionised by the improvements in information technology. To keep pace with business changes each individual needs to keep their management skills up to date to ensure their continued employability.

Whilst it is very feasible to accept that as more people have access to computers and the need to employ clerical and secretarial support lessens, the role of an administrative manager becomes even more important. They are crucial to the smooth running of any office. Computers will never take the place of a committed well-trained individual who has the empathy for staff of all abilities who make up the lifeblood of an organisation. The more committed and happy the staff, the more productive the company.

All companies and organisations are only as good as the people they employ. If an organisation has to run “lean and mean” then the selection and recruitment of the right administrative manager, who can make the best use of the tools at his or her disposal, is truly a valuable asset. There will always be a necessity for good administration in any organisation, the American government is run by “The Administration”. In the UK there is not a great deal of importance placed on the use of the word “administration”, but which company can be successful without its existence?

About Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau-am-Inn on the Austrian-German border. His father was a customs official. Hitler left school at 16 with no qualifications and struggled to make a living as a painter in Vienna. This was where many of his extreme political and racial ideas originated.

In 1913, he moved to Munich and enlisted in the German army on the outbreak of World War One, where he was wounded and decorated. In 1919, he joined the fascist German Workers' Party (DAP). He played to the resentments of right-wingers, promising extremist 'remedies' to Germany's postwar problems,, which he and many others blamed on Jews and Bolsheviks. By 1921 he was the unquestioned leader of what was now the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP, or Nazi Party).

In 1923, Hitler attempted an unsuccessful armed uprising in Munich and was imprisoned for nine months, during which time he dictated his book 'Mein Kampf' outlining his political ideology. On his release he began to rebuild the Nazi Party and used new techniques of mass communication, backed up with violence, to get his message across. Against a background of economic depression and political turmoil, the Nazis grew stronger and in the 1932 elections became the largest party in the German parliament. In January 1933, Hitler became the chancellor of a coalition government. He quickly took dictatorial powers and began to institute anti-Jewish laws. He also began the German militarisation and territorial expansion process , eventually leading to World War Two. He allied with Italy and later Japan to create the Axis.

Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 began World War Two. After military successes in Denmark, Norway and Western Europe, but after failing to subdue Britain in 1941, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Jewish populations of the countries conquered by the Nazis were rounded up and killed. Millions of others whom the Nazis considered racially inferior were also killed or worked to death. In December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. The war on the eastern front drained Germany's resources and in June 1944, the British and Americans landed in France. With Soviet troops poised to take the German capital, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945.

As the saying goes, the rest is history. One man changed the world forever. Was Hitler's rise to power truly destiny? The hippie son of an Austrian factory worker leading the most feared Nazi government. Few men have had such an impact as Adolph Hitler. He did bring out the best and worst in men, and his name lives on forever. After Hitler's reign of power, the world became a different place than it had been before, and it will never be the same again.

உத்தமனாக மாற ஒரு நாள் போதுமா?

by Keyem Dharmalingam 

உத்தமனாக மாற ஒரு நாள் போதுமா?

ஒருவன் வாழ் நாளில் பெரும் பகுதியை முறை தவறி கழித்து விட்டு திடிரென புனிதனாகி விட முடியுமா? அப்படி புனிதன் ஆனால் செய்த பாவத்திலிருந்து விடுதலை பெற முடியுமா?

முறையானது என்பதையும் முறைதவறியது என்பதையும் நாம் உடலை வைத்தே கணக்கு போடுகிறாம். ஒரு மனிதன் செய்யும் செயல்களுக்கு உடலும் ஒரு காரணம் என்றாலும் உடல் மட்டுமே முழு பொறுப்பாளி ஆகாது.  மனதிற்கும், புத்திக்கும் நிறைய சம்பந்தம் உண்டு. இயற்கையாகவே நல்ல சுபாவம் உள்ள ஒரு குழந்தை திருடர்கள் மத்தியில் வாழ்ந்தாலும் அதன் சுய தன்மை என்றாவது ஒரு நாள் வெளிப்படும். 

அப்படி வெளிப்படுவதற்கு சற்று கால தாமதம் ஆனாலும் கூட அது நடந்தே தீரும். சுபாவத்திலேயே கெட்ட தன்மை இருந்தால் அவன் மகாத்மாக்களோடு வாழ்ந்தால் கூட ஒரு நாள் நிஜ சொரூபம் வெளிப்பட்டு விடும். ஒரு மனிதனின் குணாதிசயம் அவனது சுற்று புறத்தை மட்டுமே மையமாக கொண்டு அமைவதில்லை.இது தான் இப்படி தான் என கூற முடியாத இயற்கை சுபாவத்தை பொறுத்தே அமைகிறது. நல்ல பெற்றோருக்கு பிறந்த குழந்தை காமூகனாக திரிவதும் உண்டு. கொலை காரனுக்கு பிறந்தவன் அகிம்சா மூர்த்தியாக அமைவதும் உண்டு.  எனவே ஒருவனை பிறப்பை வைத்தும், குலத்தை வைத்தும் எடை போட கூடாது. 

ஒரு குப்பை மேட்டில் திடிரென தீப்பிடித்து கொண்டது என சொல்லலாம். ஆனால் அந்த தீ திடிரென பிடிப்பது இல்லை.  குப்பையின் கனன்று கொண்டியிருக்கும் சிறு நெருப்பு பொறி பெரு நெருப்பாக மாறிவிடும்.   அதே போல தான் ஒரு மனிதனின் குணம் மாறுதல்.   ஒரு நாள் இரவு விடிந்தவுடன் எவனும் உத்தமனாகி விட முடியாது.  உத்தமன் ஆவதற்கான அறிகுறிகள் அவனிடம் ஆரம்ப காலம் முதலே இருந்திருக்கும். உள்ளுக்குள் இருந்த நெருப்பை திடிரென வீசும் காற்று பெரிதாக்கி விடுவது போல் சில சம்பவங்கள் மனித தன்மையை மாற்றுகின்றன.

அதனால் எழுபது வயது வரை திருடனாக இருந்தவன் எழுபத்தியோராவது வயதில் திருந்தி விடுவது அதிசயம் இல்லை.  அதற்காக அவன் அதற்கு முன்னால் செய்த தவறுதலுக்கு விதி தத்துவப்படி தண்டனை பெறாமல் தப்பிக்க இயலாது . அதற்காக  அப்படி திருந்துபவனை ஏற்றுக் கொள்ளாமல் சந்தேகப்படுவதும் புறக்கணிப்பதும் மனித தர்மம் அல்ல.