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NEW DELHI WEDNESDAY 14 | DECEMBER 2011

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AIRLINE STARTS SELLING CARS DURING FLIGHTS

Riga: Latvian airline airBaltic announced on Monday it was branching out into another business, claiming to be the worlds first carrier to sell cars during its flights. From Friday, passengers on all airBaltic flights will be able to buy a Mini Cooper R56 provided they have a spare 24,699 euros ($33,048). They will be asked to make a 50 euro ($67) down payment while in the air and complete the purchase once they land. airBaltic is the worlds first airline to start selling cars on board. Naturally, we still believe that flying is smarter than driving whenever possible, the carriers German chief executive Martin Gauss said in a statement. The airline has just emerged from a bitter ownership battle which resulted in the state upping its stake in the company on December 1 from 52 percent to 99 per cent. The buyout took place to save the airline from possible insolvency following the collapse of two of its main creditors, Baltic banks Krajbanka and Snoras. The company operates a fleet of 34 aircraft from Riga, plus Tallinn and Vilnius, the capitals of neighbouring Baltic states Estonia and Lithuania. AP

NEWS+ Speed of light lingers in face of new camera

$10,000 stolen from actress Lindsay Lohans handbag Have to make more effort to look good now: Elizabeth Hurley John Markoff

focus
Scientists at MITs Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second

Dr Raskar said he could envision smartphone software that would capture and interpret reflections from, any commodity
the province of an elite group of scientists clustered at the nations weapons laboratories. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Gary Jones is an optical physicist who builds ultrafast imaging systems that help characterise the first microseconds of events like laser fusion and nuclear explosions. To get a two-dimensional image within a picosecond means you have to have a lot of electronics moving really fast, he said. For Dr Raskar who optimistically calls the project femto photography, using the term for quadrillionths of a second it is about more than just engineering or science. We were inspired by looking at the world in a unique way just because we could, he said. The system allows the naked eye to see information that has until now been rendered as data and charts. The proper analogy is to the way astronomers use instruments like radiotelescopes to create images with fake colours to see things in new ways or to the original inspiration of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century British photographer who achieved a new understanding of a horses gait by creating a camera array with electromagnetic shutters set off by tripwires. Were still trying to get our heads around what this means, Dr Raskar said, because no one has been able to see the world in this way before. By arrangement with the New York Times

MITs camera captures light particles seemingly in motion by using repeated exposures, creating a movie of a nanosecond-long event. and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible. When I said I wanted to build a camera that looks around corners, my colleagues said, Pick something that is more safe for your tenure, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Media Lab. Now I have tenure, so I can say this is not so crazy. Dr Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a streak tube, a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light. Streak tubes are generally used to intensify streams of photons into streams of electrons. They are fast enough to record the progress of packets of laser light fired repeatedly into a bottle filled with a cloudy fluid. The instrument is normally used to measure laboratory phenomena that take place in an ultra-short timeframe. Typically, it offers researchers information on intensity, position and wavelength in the form of data, not an image. By modifying the equipment, the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other. The pulses of laser light enter through the bottom and travel to the cap, generating a conical shock wave that bounces off the sides of the bottle as the bullet passes. The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr Raskar said enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimetre through the fluid inside the bottle. To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years. You can think of it as slow motion, Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher who is a member of the design team, said during a recent technical presentation. It is so much slow motion you can see the

NYT

ALBANIAN MAKES WORLDS LARGEST COFFEE MOSAIC

Tirana: A mosaic made with a million coffee beans by Albanian artist Saimir Strati, depicting five musicians, entered the Guinness World Records Monday as the worlds largest coffee bean mosaic. Strati used 140 kg (309 pounds) of coffee beans, some roasted black, some averagely and some not roasted at all, to portray a Brazilian dancer, a Japanese drummer, a US country music singer, a European accordionist and an African drummer. I wanted to give the message that sharing love over a cup of coffee brings us closer, a cup of coffee brings us more love than a G20 meeting, Strati told Reuters. Guinness judge Seyda Subasi Gemici said Strati had been required to work in public and the mosaic, composed of coffee beans alone, had to measure 25 square meters (269 square feet). I can say all guidelines were met... And my final measure is 25.1 square meters, she said. The mosaic earned Strati his sixth entry in the Guinness World Records after he began using his technique of applying little objects like pixels in a camera to create images. Reuters

ore than 70 years ago, the MIT electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk. Now scientists at MITs Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than twotrillionths of a second. The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners by capturing reflected light

light itself move. This is the speed of light: theres nothing in the universe that moves faster. Dr Raskar says the technology has a variety of promising commercial applications. Last year, for example, one of his graduate students, Jaewon Kim, published a thesis envisioning portable CAT-scanning devices. Dr Raskar said he could also envision smartphone software that would capture and interpret reflections from, say, fruit. Imagine if you have this in your phone about 10 years from now, he said. You will be able to go to your supermarket and tell if your fruit is ripe. Until now, picosecond speeds have largely been

Regime change not a priority in this Arab oasis

Indranil Banerjie

meanwhile
aayoune, a windblown oasis on one edge of Moroccan Sahara, is the westernmost settlement of the Arab world. Here, the Arab Spring, the upsurge currently unsettling regimes from Syria in the east to Tunisia next door, is but a distant thunder. Yet, not so long ago, this was the scene of bitter fighting between Moroccan forces and the rebel Polisario Front. Laayoune town was a Spanish settlement till thirty-five years ago and settled primarily because of its perennial water supply. The Spanish built a small fort atop a hillock and a cluster of villas to house officials and a few barracks for soldiers. To the west of Laayoune, the desert gives way to a pitiless coast; bleak, treeless and without any source of fresh water. Potable water, local fruits and vegetables from Laayoune supported a small Spanish fishing port 30 miles away. From here, the Spanish operated trawlers to fish the southern Atlantic. In 1975, they signed an agreement to vacate the area which was part of Western Sahara and handed it over to Mauritania. Three years later, Morocco took over the territory and for years fought with the Polisario Front that wanted independence for Western Sahara. A peace agreement promising a referendum was signed in 1991 and the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINUR-

CUDDLY TOY FROG RESCUED IN THE ALPS

Vienna: A mountain rescuer said on Monday he was hired by a German couple to look for their toy frog that had tumbled from a 2,000-metre (6,500-feet) peak in the Austrian Alps. After an eight-hour search costing Doris and Juergen Bellmann 425 euros ($565), the cuddly green toy, something of a lucky charm for the couple from near Munich, was found, rescuer Markus Fleischmann told AFP. Doris Bellmann, 53, told the Heute daily that she was taking a photograph of her engineer husband and the frog on top of the 2,192metre Hinteren Goinger Halt peak when the frog tumbled to the depths AFP below.

SO) moved in. The referendum was never held and the UN mission remains with its small contingent of international peace keepers, a special envoy and a fleet of white UN SUVs. Laayounes small desert airport is lined up with a few UN aircraft, which occasionally ferry peacekeepers to the nearest family station forty five minutes away at La Palmas in the tourist paradise of the Canary Islands. For the Arabs of Laayoune, regime change is not a priority, co-existence between the aboriginal Sahrawi people and the Moroccan Arabs is. The two sides had been locked in a long, murderous conflict that left an estimated 25,000 people dead till the 1991 ceasefire. Since then an uneasy peace has ensued marred by isolated instances of violence. The Moroccan militia and the military maintain peace in the area with check posts, pickets and small fortified establishments. The aboriginal Sahrawi tribes have backed down and withdrawn deep into the desert, tending their flocks of sheep and camel and adapting their nomadic ways with the indomitable Landrover. UN military observers keep a constant vigil criss-crossing the stony desert in their immaculate vehicles. As the country went to the polls on 25 November 2011, the turnout was remarkable with even the Sarahwi nomads driving through the desert with their families to cast their votes. At Douara, a remote desert village with a total settled population of just 450 and a nomadic population of over a thousand,

Moroccan militarymen (above) and the deserted road to Laayoune (right). Sahrawis in their characteristic blue robes turned up in the hundreds with their retinues of women and children to vote. Hany Abdel-Aziz (Egypt), Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General, who drove around the area on polling day, said the locals were voting and things were peaceful. A young peacekeeper with the special envoy said they had not seen or heard of any fighting for years. The challenge is to learn to coexist in a manner that gives dignity and rights to all people, felt Hamdi Sherifa, a young PhD. student. Elections are one way forward because it can empower young people with different ideas from the past. We have learnt that conflict is not the answer. Today, the dominant issues are employment, education and economic infrastructure. I am jobless, my friends are jobless and unless we elect young people with ideas, nothing will change in our lives, said 29 year old Mariam, who is doing her masters in English. Our King wants to bring change and the elections are proof of that, remarked 25 year old Azmat Nasser of Douara. Curiously, the sentiments in the outpost of Laayoune finds echo in the rest of the country. The buzzword for the majority is reform not revolution. Morocco is different from most other Arab regimes, in that it has been pursuing a slow but determined reforms process that aims to provide greater self-rule authority to the countrys diverse population and regions. Moroccos monarch has also voluntarily agreed to pare his powers and introduce Constitutional reforms to grant more powers to local governments and a national Parliament. The November elections paved the way for a coalition government headed by a moderate Islamist Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane of the Justice and Development Party (PJD). On being elected, Benkirane was quick to assure both the regime and the international community. The head of the state is the king and no can govern without him. If someone can do it, it is certainly not Abdelilah Benkirane, he declared. He also made it clear that he was not about to enforce strict Islamic injunctions in Morocco. We are proud that our point of reference is Islamist, Benkirane remarked. I will never be interested in the private life of people, Allah created mankind free. I will never ask if a woman is wearing a short skirt or a long skirt. To be sure, there are adherents of a revolutionary solution and a movement that seeks to overturn the countrys monarchy. The February 20 Movement tailored after other Arab Spring groups have been demonstrating against elections and demanding true separation of powers. Though the anti-regime protests are small by international standards, they are significant given Moroccan civil societys suspicions about the regimes real intentions as well as concerns about the economy and the oppressive bureaucracy. Although the regimes opponents have managed to grab headlines all over the world, they have not managed to get the numbers to re-enact anything like a Tahrir Square. As long as the Moroccan regime sticks to its promise to reform the system and share power in a transparent manner that provides hope to young Moroccans, the Arab Spring will remain a distant thunder echoing across deserts afar. Indranil Banerjie is an independent security and political risk consultant