Scientist develops program to understand alien languages

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent/Daily Mail
Last Updated: 6:01pm BST 15/10/2008

A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from aliens in outer space has been developed by a British scientist.

The new programme would compare alien language sounds with those of 60 human languages
But John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University believes he has come up with software which at least will decipher the structure of their language - and be the first step in understanding what they are saying.

Dr Elliott's programme would compare an alien language to a database of 60 different languages in the world to search see if it has a similar structure.

He believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent the life forms are.

"Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy," he told New Scientist magazine.

Previous research had shown that it is possible to determine whether a signal carries a language rather than an image or music.

Dr Elliott, from Leeds Metropolitan University, has gone a step further by devising a way to pick out what might be words and sentences.

All human languages have "functional terms" that bracket phrases - words like "if" and "but" in English.

According to Dr Elliott, such terms in any language, are separated by up to nine words or characters.

This limit on phrase length seems to correspond to the level of human cognition - how much information we are able to process at once.

In an alien language, analysing these phrases might make it possible to gauge how clever the authors of the message are.

If they are much smarter than us, there would a lot of words packed into the phrases.

The programme should also be able to break a language up into crucial words such as nouns and verbs, even though their meaning is unknown.

It can, for instance, locate adjectives from the fact that they are almost always next to nouns.

Because languages have different word orders, Dr Elliott is amassing a library of the syntaxes of 60 human tongues.

If a message is received from outer space, it could be compared against this database. Scientists would then be able to see if it resembled anything human, or a mix of Earthly languages.

Dr Elliott admits that in order to translate what the aliens are actually saying it may still be necessary to have a "code book" of some sort.

But US linguist Dr Sheri Wells-Jensen, from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, points out that "you have to start somewhere".

She added: "My money is on being able to understand aliens."

Editor's note: The success of this program is rather limited by the assumption that an intelligent extraterrestrial species would communicate something remotely similar to human speech sounds. Even on our own planet, many species communicate beyond the range of human vocalizations such as whales or bats. Other, like ants communicate through chemical secretions. Designing a program to take in the infinite variables in ways intelligent creatures might communicate seems like an impossible if not daunting task. My bet is on a common language based on mathematics.

- Steve Douglass

Al-Qaida web sites down

By Paul Schemm - The Associated Press
Posted : Sunday Oct 19, 2008 10:43:32 EDT
CAIRO, Egypt — The main Web sites that normally carry messages from the al-Qaida terror group remain inoperable more than a month after they went down just ahead of the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Associated Press first reported in September that the Web forums that typically carry messages and videos from Al-Qaida and its allied groupings had ceased functioning around Sept. 10, just as the group said it was set to release a new video message.

Only a site called Hesbah and a new one named Faloja function fitfully at this point, more than a month later, and carry messages from Al-Qaida and its allies in Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories about recent operations.

Al-Fajr Media Center, the extremist group’s communications wing, issued a terse statement on Sept. 29 blaming the problems on “technical reasons” but denying that the sites had come under some kind of cyber-attack, as has been widely speculated in the media.

“We deny reports published by the media of the tyrants regarding the fall of some of the headquarters of these networks into the hands of the enemy,” the statement said, according to the U.S-based SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist sites.

Contributors to the forums also have worried publicly that some kind of Western cyber-attack targeted the sites.

One prominent jihadi poster, quoted by SITE, suggested that extremists should strike back by infiltrating other, more-moderate Islamic discussion forums and flooding them with extremists rhetoric to turn them into al-Qaida discussion groups.

In the past week, a new Web site called “the Electronic jihad” also has resurfaced to counter renewed attacks on Islam online, according to its founders.

It is not clear, however, if the site has any connection with Al-Qaida.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, al-Qaida has run sites on the Web that it has used to disseminate its messages. Many have been shut down over the years as new ones emerge.

The group over the years also has appeared to increasingly turn toward online forums, apparently so that it no longer had to rely on news stations to air video and audio messages.

Terror analysts have long seen al-Qaida’s media arm as a powerful tool for rallying the network’s followers and sympathizers, churning out videos and audiotapes even though the top leadership is mostly out of touch, hiding in the mountainous border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The videos have grown in technical sophistication, featuring computer animations and clips from international television media.

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has issued three audiotapes himself this year, the most recent in May.

The Arabic-language sites also have an extensive online following of would-be jihadis who discuss various topics, including the best ways to carry out attacks and which techniques are religiously permissible.

In its press release explaining the outage, Al-Fajr, the group’s communications wing promised to return online soon.

Editors note: A denial of service attack on al Queda websites by the U.S. government would effectively quiet a good source of intelligence information. Therefore, I think one can rule out U.S. involvement.

Red Flag takes off today

Posted : Saturday Oct 18, 2008 8:26:53 EDT
The latest edition of Red Flag, the Air Force’s primary air combat exercise, took off today at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

The flying continues through Nov. 1 with about 80 aircraft participating.

Joining the Air Force planes and helicopters in the air will be F-16s from Greece and Singapore, EF-18s from Spain and U.S. Navy EA-6Bs.

The aircraft should fly two sessions each day — a late afternoon mission starting around 3 p.m. and an evening session taking off around 9:30 p.m.

Red Flag is staged several times each year at Nellis, and is aimed at giving new pilots the experience of flying in large groups of aircraft while dealing with enemy fighters and anti-aircraft sites.

North Korea Blinks/ World Steps Back from Nuclear Abyss

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- North Korea has stepped up disablement of its nuclear reactor and allowed surveillance at its nuclear facility to resume, the U.S. State Department said Friday.


North Koreans have allowed the resumption of surveillance of its nuclear sites.

Pyongyang has put back all seals on equipment at the facility and reinstalled surveillance equipment, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

He added that U.S. monitors at the site reported North Korea also removed 60 percent of the spent fuel rods at the reactor.

"On the reactor, they have actually gone beyond where they were prior to their reversing the disablement steps," McCormack said.

He noted that North Korea has made some progress in other related areas but still has not reversed all of the gains it made in recent weeks.

Earlier this week North Korea resumed the process of dismantling its nuclear reactor, once again granting the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, access to its nuclear facility at Yongbyon.

The moved came only days after the United States removed North Korea from its list of states that sponsor terrorism.

North Korea halted the disabling of the plutonium-producing plants in August after a stalemate over verification measures. Washington had said it would not take North Korea off the state terrorism list until Pyongyang agreed to set up an internationally recognizable mechanism to verify it was revealing all its nuclear secrets.

North Korea rejected that provision and, on October 9, said nuclear inspectors were no longer welcome at its facilities.

On Saturday, the United States removed North Korea from the list of terrorism sponsors after it said the two countries reached agreement on a number of verification measures.

These include having participation by all members of the six-party talks, settling on the role of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, providing access to all of North Korea's nuclear facilities and deciding what procedures would be used in the verification process.

McCormack said envoys from the participants in the six-party talks -- the United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia -- will meet shortly to sign the verification agreement reached between North Korea and the United States.

Kim Sook -- South Korea's chief envoy to the international disarmament talks with North Korea -- said the move by the United States "completely reverses" the communist nation's decision to halt its disabling process.

North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program on a promise that it would receive energy aid equivalent to a million tons of heavy fuel oil from the nations involved in the disarmament talks.

In June, North Korean officials turned over to China a 60-page declaration, written in English, that details several rounds of plutonium production at the Yongbyon plant dating back to 1986.



In it, North Korea acknowledged producing roughly 40 kilograms of enriched plutonium -- enough for about seven nuclear bombs, according to the U.S. State Department.

Soon after, North Korea publicly destroyed a water cooling tower at the Yongbyon facility. At the time, the country said it would completely dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear complex by October.

Hubble fixed.

MSNBC

The revival of the Hubble Space Telescope is going "exactly as we hoped," a NASA spokesman said today, and the world's best-known orbiting observatory is expected to be back in business on Friday.

Hubble's science operations went on the blink last month when the main system for handling commands and data going back and forth between the telescope's instruments and the ground failed. Controllers could still send commands up to Hubble and receive diagnostic readings, but the flow of imagery that made the telescope famous was cut off.

The sudden, unexpected snag forced the postponement of the space shuttle Atlantis' final service call, which was due for launch this week.

To revive Hubble, engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center devised a plan to switch the flow of data from the main system that the 18-year-old telescope had always used, known as Side A, to a never-before-used backup system known as Side B. The space agency's top management gave the go-ahead for the remote-controlled switchover on Tuesday, and engineers went to work on Wednesday.

Engineers checked out Side B for the first time on Wednesday night, NASA spokesman Ed Campion told me today. "All that went exactly as we hoped, so after that, the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 were retrieved out of safe mode to establish that each of them has a good working interface to Side B," he said.

Hubble's reconfigured electronics passed that test as well. "Everything worked the way we hoped it would," Campion said. "Now we're going to send commands to begin internal exposures and calibrations of the science instruments."

The test pictures won't be scientifically significant. They'll merely show things like the illuminated insides of the telescope itself. But they will give scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore some Side B data to compare with Side A data captured before the glitch.

The Side B data should be available for review by midnight ET tonight, and the before-vs.-after review should be completed sometime Friday morning.

"If all this goes as planned, we pretty much expect that science collection will resume sometime on Friday," Campion said.

Susan Hendrix, a NASA spokeswoman who specializes in following Hubble operations, said the telescope team hasn't yet decided what the first post-switchover scientific target would be. She also declined to speculate on when the first science images would be released. "I don't want to jinx it," she said. "It should be sooner than later."

Like many at NASA, Hendrix said she felt a personal stake in the telescope's ups and downs. "Hubble's been very near and dear to me," she told me. "It's kind of like an adopted child."

Even if Hubble resumes science operations, the child will still have to undergo some follow-up surgery: A spare unit is currently being tested at Goddard, and if that checks out, it will likely be brought up on Atlantis for installation (along with lots of other Hubble goodies) next year. Even when the new unit is in place, Hubble data will continue to flow through the Side B electronics, and Side A would become the backup. That's in line with a common-sense rule for engineers: "If it's no longer broke, don't try fixing it again."