A workshop on terrorist organizations and the Internet was organized for the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) by the Netvision Institute for Internet Studies (NIIS) and the Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis & Forecasting, both of Tel Aviv University. Berlin’s Institute for Cooperation Management and Interdisciplinary Research (NEXUS), affiliated with the Technical University of Berlin, also participated in the workshop.

The findings were presented in Berlin to a closed audience of high-ranking representatives from NATO in February 2008.

Organizing and Recruiting Online

Enlisted by NATO officials to study the web activity of terrorist organizations, researchers found that some of the world’s most dangerous organizations are operating on American turf. Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda all have websites hosted by popular American Internet service providers — the same companies that most of us use every day.

“These websites hosted in America are targeting Muslim mothers in America, Canada, the U.K. and all over the world, convincing them that being ‘Shahid’ or a suicide bomber is particularly good and very important for their sons,” says Prof. Niv Ahituv of the NIIS.

Available in English, Arabic, Spanish and other languages, the websites also provide tutorials on bomb building and enlist impressionable American and British Muslim women and men into a life of terror activity.

Free-Speech for Terrorists

Prof. Ahituv acknowledges the dilemma that America’s First Amendment creates — free-speech protections may foster propaganda directed towards the U.S. “America’s First Amendment protects these websites from being shut down,” he says, recognizing the irony of waging a war on terror when some of the most dangerous propaganda is being created at home.

According to the study, the Islamic Jihad operates 15 websites in Arabic and English, hosted by both U.S. and Canadian companies. Hamas operates 20 websites in eight languages, a portion of which are based in the U.S and Canada, while Hezbollah operates 20 websites, also hosted by companies in the U.S. and Canada.

Limited Successes and American Law

The FBI has shut down a few websites, but American law prevents the closure of most, says Prof. Ahituv. Terrorists could coordinate a 9/11-scale attack via these websites, he warns. There are, however, some people who believe that leaving those websites intact is desired in order to monitor content, trends and policy. It is hard to tell which side is right, adds Prof. Ahituv.

An issue of great concern is that terrorist organizations are using the Internet to bypass the role of the established press, he notes. “Since those organizations do not possess TV stations, radio stations and printed press outlets, they use the Internet to impart their views and events to the public and to the media.”

More information about the Netvision Institute for Internet Studies here.

[George Hunka @ American Friends of Tel Aviv University]

The method, published in the May 4 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, enables more precise shaping of microchip components than what is possible with current technology. More precise component shapes could help manufacturers build smaller and better microchips, the key to more powerful computers and other devices.

“We are able to achieve a precision and improvement far beyond what was previously thought achievable,” said electrical engineer Stephen Chou, the Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering, who developed the method along with graduate student Qiangfei Xia. Chou’s lab has previously pioneered a number of innovative chip making techniques, including a revolutionary method for making nanometer-scale patterns using imprinting.

Microchips work best when the structures fabricated on them are straight, thin and tall. Rough edges and other defects can degrade or even ruin chip performance in most applications. In integrated circuits, for instance, such flaws could cause current to leak and voltage to fluctuate. In optic devices, they could interfere with the transmission of light. In biological devices, they could impede the flow of DNA and other biomaterials.

“These chip defects pose serious roadblocks to future advances in many industries,” Chou said.

To deal with this problem, researchers try to improve the process used to make the microchips. However, Chou said such an approach works only to a point; eventually chip makers will run up against fundamental physical limits of current manufacturing techniques. In particular, the electrons and photons that are used like chisels to carve out the microscopic features on a chip always have some random behavior. This effect becomes pronounced at very small scales and limits the accuracy of component shapes.

“What we propose instead is a paradigm shift: Rather than struggle to improve fabrication methods, we could simply fix the defects after fabrication,” said Chou. ???And fixing the defects could be automatic — a process of self-perfection.???

Chou’s method, termed Self-Perfection by Liquefaction (SPEL), achieves this by melting the structures on a chip momentarily, and guiding the resulting flow of liquid so that it re-solidifies into the desired shapes. This is possible because natural forces acting on the molten structures, such as surface tension — the force that allows some insects to walk on water — smooth the structures into geometrically more accurate shapes. Lines, for instance, become straighter, and dots become rounder.

Simple melting by direct heating has previously been shown to smooth out the defects in plastic structures. This process can’t be applied to a microchip, for two reasons. First, the key structures on a chip are not made of plastic, which melts at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, but from semiconductors and metals, which have much higher melting points. Heating the chip to such temperatures would melt not just the structures, but nearly everything else on the chip. Secondly, the melting process would widen the structures and round off their top and side surfaces, all of which would be detrimental to the chip.

Chou’s team overcame the first obstacle by using a light pulse from so-called excimer laser, similar to those used in laser eye surgery, because it heats only a very thin surface layer of a material and causes no damage to the structures underneath. The researchers carefully designed the pulse so that it would melt only semiconductor and metal structures, and not damage other parts of the chip. The structures need to be melted for only a fraction of a millionth of a second, because molten metal and semiconductors can flow as easily as water and have high surface tension, which allows them to change shapes very quickly.

To overcome the second obstacle, Chou’s team placed a plate on top of the melting structures to guide the flow of liquid. The plate prevents a molten structure from widening, and keeps its top flat and sides vertical, Chou said. In one experiment, it made the edges of 70 nanometer-wide chromium lines more than five times smoother. The resulting line smoothness was far more precise than what semiconductor researchers believe to be attainable with existing technology.

The conventional approach to fixing chip defects is to measure the exact shape of each defect, and provide a correction precisely tailored to it — a slow and expensive process, Chou said. In contrast, Chou’s guided melting process fixes all defects on a chip in a single quick and inexpensive step. “Regardless of the shape of each defect, it always gets fixed precisely and with no need for individual shape measurement or tailored correction,” Chou said.

One of the big surprises from this work is observed when the guiding plate is placed not in direct contact with the molten structures, but at a distance above it. In this situation, the liquid material from the structures rises up and reaches the plate by itself, causing line structures to become taller and narrower — both highly desirable outcomes from a chip design perspective.

“The authors demonstrate improved edge roughness and dramatically altered aspect ratios in nanoscale features,” said Donald Tennant, director of operations at the NanoScale Science and Technology Facility at Cornell University. The techniques “may be a way forward when nanofabricators bump up against the limits of lithography and pattern transfer,” he said.

Next, Chou’s group plans to demonstrate this technique on large (8-inch) wafers. Several leading semiconductor manufacturers have expressed keen interest in the technique, Chou said.

[Steven Schultz @ Princeton University Engineering School]

A new game, named Foldit, turns protein folding into a competitive sport. Introductory levels teach the rules, which are the same laws of physics by which protein strands curl and twist into three-dimensional shapes - key for biological mysteries ranging from Alzheimer’s to vaccines.

After about 20 minutes of training, people feel like they’re playing a video game but are actually mouse-clicking in the name of medical science. The free program can be found here.

The game was developed by doctoral student Seth Cooper and postdoctoral researcher Adrien Treuille, both in computer science and engineering, working with Zoran Popovic, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering; David Baker, a UW professor of biochemistry and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and David Salesin, a UW professor of computer science and engineering. Professional game designers provided advice during the game’s creation.

“We’re hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it’s done by,” said Popovic, who presented the project today at the Games for Health meeting in Baltimore. “Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.”

Proteins, of which there are more than 100,000 different kinds in the human body, form every cell, make up the immune system and set the speed of chemical reactions. We know many proteins’ genetic sequence, but don’t know how they fold up into complex shapes whose nooks and crannies play crucial biological roles.

Computer simulators calculate all possible protein shapes, but this is a mathematical problem so huge that all the computers in the world would take centuries to solve it. In 2005, Baker developed a project named Rosetta@home that taps into volunteers’ computer time all around the world. But even 200,000 volunteers aren’t enough.

“There are too many possibilities for the computer to go through every possible one,” Baker said. “An approach like Rosetta@home does well on small proteins, but as the protein gets bigger and bigger it gets harder and harder, and the computers often fail.

“People, using their intuition, might be able to home in on the right answer much more quickly.”

Rosetta@home and Foldit both use the Rosetta protein-folding software. Foldit is the first protein-folding project that asks volunteers for something other than unused processor cycles on their computers or Playstation machines. Foldit also differs from recent human-computer interactive games that use humans’ ability to recognize images or interpret text. Instead, Foldit capitalizes on people’s natural 3-D problem-solving skills.

The intuitive skills that make someone good at playing Foldit are not necessarily the ones that make a top biologist. Baker says his 13-year-old son is faster at folding proteins than he is. Others may be even faster.

“I imagine that there’s a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see all this in their head,” Baker says.

Eventually, the researchers hope to advance science by discovering protein-folding prodigies who have natural abilities to see proteins in 3-D.

“Some people are just able to look at the game and in less than two minutes, get to the top score,” said Popovic. “They can’t even explain what they’re doing, but somehow they’re able to do it.”

The game looks like a 21st-century version of Tetris, with multicolored geometric snakes filling the screen. A team that includes a half-dozen UW graduate and undergraduate students spent more than a year figuring out how to make the game both accurate and engaging. They faced some special challenges that commercial game developers don’t encounter.

“We don’t know what the best result is, so we can’t help people or hint people toward that goal,” Popovic explained. The team also couldn’t arbitrarily decide to make one move worth 1,000 bonus points, since the score corresponds to the energy needed to hold the protein in that shape.

Almost 1,000 players have tested the system in recent weeks, playing informal challenges using proteins with known shapes. Starting this week, however, the developers will open the game to the public and offer proteins of unknown shapes. Also starting this week, Foldit gamers will face off against research groups around the world in a major protein-structure competition held every two years.

Beginning in the fall, Foldit problems will expand to involve creating new proteins that we might wish existed - enzymes that could break up toxic waste, for example, or that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Computers alone cannot design a protein from scratch. The game lets the computer help out when it’s a simple optimization problem - the same way that computer solitaire sometimes moves the cards to clean up the table - letting the player concentrate on interesting moves.

Eventually, the researchers hope to present a medical nemesis, such as HIV or malaria, and challenge players to devise a protein with just the right shape to lock into the virus and deactivate it. Winning protein designs will be synthesized in Baker’s lab and tested in petri dishes. High-scoring players will be credited in scientific publications the way that top Rosetta@home contributors already are credited for their computer time.

“Long-term, I’m hoping that we can get a significant fraction of the world’s population engaged in solving critical problems in world health, and doing it collaboratively and successfully through the game,” Baker said. “We’re trying to use the brain power of people all around the world to advance biomedical research.”

Foldit includes elements of multiplayer games in which people can team up, chat with other players and create online profiles. Over time the researchers will analyze people’s moves to see how the top players solve puzzles. This information will be fed back into the game’s design so the game’s tools and format can evolve.

[Hannah Hickey @ University of Washington]

By JOHN GEROME Sunday, May 11, 2008 Carrie Underwood is the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry. via WQXI-AM Atlanta

Frasier Crane and his brother, Niles, both practiced psychiatry on their popular NBC sitcom “Frasier.” Mob boss Tony Soprano had his therapist on HBO’s hit show “The Sopranos.” And HBO has even made therapy the focus of two recent shows — “Tell Me You Love Me” and “In Treatment.”

But all of these TV portrayals may actually make viewers less likely to seek psychological services themselves. That’s according to a new study by three Iowa State University psychologists.

ISU psychology professors David Vogel and Douglas Gentile collaborated with graduate student Scott Kaplan on the study of 369 Iowa State students. It explored how exposure to television shows may contribute to negative perceptions about psychological services that can lead to lower intentions to seek such services. They produced a paper titled “The Influence of Television on Willingness to Seek Therapy,” which was published in the March issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, a professional journal.

Unflattering portrayals of mental health professionals

Kaplan has conducted a related content analysis on television portrayals of mental health professionals. It found that they’re not favorable.

“Generally, it seems like therapists are portrayed unethically — like sleeping with the client, or implanting false memories, or talking about their clients outside the session,” Vogel said. “These are things that almost never happen with real therapists, but on a show — because they’re probably more exciting — they happen more frequently.”

“Therapists also often are portrayed as buffoons,” Gentile said. “That’s either by being the jokester, like Frasier, or by being the butt of jokes. In either case, these are not positive portrayals. They do not show the skill, expertise and ethics of professional therapists.”

But it’s not just the portrayal of the therapists that may be keeping people out of therapy. It’s also the portrayal of those who seek counseling on TV.

“If you examine the portrayal of the clients, it’s probably as bad or worse,” Vogel said. “So why would you seek therapy if you believe you’re going to be perceived negatively and you’re going to see someone who’s incompetent and not able to help you?”

Because dramas and comedies are the two types of shows that often portray psychologists and psychotherapy, the ISU psychologists asked respondents how often they watched TV comedy and drama shows. They also asked them to assess perceptions of the stigma associated with seeking professional help, attitudes toward therapy, their intentions to seek therapy for psychological and interpersonal concerns, and their feelings of depression.

TV ties to therapy stigma

The study found a positive correlation between viewers’ exposure to comedy and drama shows and their perceptions of stigma associated with seeking professional help. This stigma was then related to lower willingness to seek professional mental health services.

“One of the things that’s important to note about this particular study is that we showed that TV exposure was related to your perceptions of the stigma associated with seeking help, which has been found to be one of the main factors found from inhibiting people from seeking that help,” Vogel said. “So you perceive that yourself, and other people, would be crazy to go (to therapy).”

That’s a problem for those people who could really benefit from professional mental health services. According to Vogel, the most recent studies in the mental health field have found that about half of population experiences a situation in their lives where psychological therapy could be helpful — about 20 percent in a single year. But in a given year, only about 10 percent of the people who could benefit from therapy will seek help from a psychologist or other mental health professional.

“Mental health services are already vastly underutilized, and this cultural stigma is part of the reason,” Gentile said. “And this study suggests that this cultural stigma exists partly because of the way that psychologists and their patients are portrayed on television.”

[Mike Ferlazzo @ Iowa State University]