Features

What we have seen so far from cloud computing may be only the tip of the iceberg. The best — or the worst, depending on how you see it — is yet to come.

Cloud computing is but another word for having your files stored on an Internet server and not on your machine’s actual disk, memory or local network server, and for running programmes that also are installed on the Internet, your machine merely accessing them there, when needed.

The push to use more of it continues unabated and International Data Corporation, the Web’s most trusted IT market analyst company, forecasts an increase approaching a big 20 per cent this year, with the cloud market value exceeding $140 billion three years from now. Without surprise, Amazon, Microsoft and Google carve out themselves the lion’s share.

Already several applications and services work only in the cloud. All the new versions of Adobe’s celebrated Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign software are now exclusively cloud-based. GoDaddy, a leading hosting service for websites and e-mail, has discontinued its “simple” e-mail hosting subscriptions and instead offers cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service with integrated e-mail, whether you like it or not. BitDefender, one of the three major anti-virus providers in the world, has also stopped supplying traditional software installation for the business versions of its products — they want you to do everything in the cloud. The list goes on and on.

At this point, or perhaps by the end of 2016 or early 2017, the question won’t be anymore “do you want to work in the cloud” but rather “do you want to use IT at all”. Little choice will be left; and whether to trust the cloud or not will become irrelevant.

Online banking is one of the cloud’s various aspects, probably one of the most convincing too. The Web services that banks propose today go well beyond simple account balance checking and money transfers. Most banking institutions in Jordan now offer the very convenient E-FawateerCom online payment system that covers a comprehensive range of bills and subscriptions, from electricity, water and telephone, to traffic tickets, charities, some universities, Greater Amman Municipality licences, and last but not least, the Social Security Corporation. E-FawateerCom translates from Arabic as “E-YourBills”. In terms of time and transportation cost, the savings that all these online payments allow you to make cannot be overestimated.

Studies now abound that analyse the benefits of cloud computing, with improved collaboration being a major one. Indeed, having documents and data instantly accessible and synchronised between several users who may be scattered anywhere in the world, thanks to the fact that data is stored and shared somewhere on a Web server, is priceless.

Drawbacks? Yes of course there are quite a few and we all know them, with the most obvious one being a weak, slow or unreliable connection to the Internet. Data confidentiality and privacy? We’ve almost given up on this, however sensitive the issue may be, and we are willing to live with the lack of it and whatever the consequences. In any case, the way things are going, in a couple of years there will be very few of us brave enough to swim against the tide.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple has rejected a judge's order to help the FBI break into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, warning it was "too dangerous" to create such a backdoor to the smartphones.

US magistrate judge, Sheri Pym, ordered Apple on Tuesday to provide "reasonable technical assistance" to the FBI, including disabling an auto-erase feature after too many unsuccessful attempts are made to unlock the iPhone 5C.

Federal prosecutors had filed a motion requesting Apple's help after the FBI failed to crack the phone's code two months into the investigation into the December rampage.

Syed Farook, a US citizen, and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik gunned down 14 people at an office party in San Bernardino, California, before they were killed in a shootout with police.

But Apple said it would fight the judge's order, firing the latest shot in a growing debate over encryption pitting the government against tech companies.

"The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers," Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said in a statement on the company's website.

"We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand."

Cook said it was too risky to provide the requested software because it could allow ill-intentioned individuals to unlock any iPhone and raises major privacy concerns.

"The US government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone," Apple said.

"In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession.

"While the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control," he said, adding that Apple has cooperated with the FBI thus far.

By disabling the security features, the FBI would be able to attempt as many different password combinations as needed before gaining access to the phone.

It was the property of the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which employed Farook, and the authority had agreed to the search of the phone.

'Chilling' 

Pym ordered Apple to provide software that would only run on the device in question, or any other technological means to access its data.

But Apple said it was impossible to create such a tool that could only be used once, on one phone.

"Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices," Apple said.

"In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable."

The US government is concerned that commercially-available encryption benefits criminals.

Tech companies, intent on securing the trust of consumers after government spying revelations made by Edward Snowden, have been reluctant to be seen as helping authorities spy on users.

"We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack," Apple said.

"The implications of the government's demands are chilling."

"If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone's device to capture their data."

 Cook warned that if Apple complied with the order, the government could demand surveillance software to intercept, access health and financial data, track users' location or access a phone's microphone or camera without the user's knowledge.

"We are challenging the FBI's demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country," Cook added.

US Attorney Eileen Decker had earlier called the order "another step — a potentially important step — in the process of learning everything we possibly can about the attack in San Bernardino".

FBI Director James Comey revealed last week that investigators had not been able to crack open the phone two months into the investigation.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool,” physicist Richard Feynman famously told the young scientists graduating from CalTech in 1974. Fully cognizant of this truth, the scientific establishment has developed many rules and procedures to weed out false findings from experiments, key among them replication.

Replication means that an experiment can be repeated over and over, by the original researcher or any other competent scientist in the field, and it will produce the same or similar result. Now, science is in the midst of a “replication failure” crisis — at least according to scores of articles in the scientific and mainstream media.

Although replication failure has been a subject of discussion among scientists for some time, it burst into the public arena last summer, when an article showing poor replicability levels of psychology experiments appeared in the journal Science. The authors had reproduced 100 peer-reviewed studies, but got unambiguously similar outcomes to the original research only 39 per cent of the time. The concern spread quickly beyond psychology, setting off a wave of headlines such as, “How Science Goes Wrong” (The Economist), “How Science Is Broken” (Vox), “Getting the Bogus Studies out of Science” (The Wall Street Journal), and “Why We Keep Getting Fooled by Bad Science” (New York Post).

Is science truly in trouble? Rife with fraud? Losing reliability?

Absolutely not. Science is doing what it always has done — failing at a reasonable rate and being corrected. Replication should never be 100 per cent. Science works beyond the edge of what is known, using new, complex and untested techniques. It should surprise no one that things occasionally come out wrong, even though everything looks correct at first.

Replication failures should not be conflated with scientific fraud, which is rightly condemnable. The failure to replicate a part or even the whole of an experiment is not sufficient for indictment of the initial inquiry or its researchers. Failure is part of science. Without failures there would be no great discoveries.

How then should we respond to replication failures? They should be published without prejudice. In science, revision is a victory — not a devious cover-up or intellectual flip-flop. Yes, a complete inability to reproduce results could indicate an overlooked fatal flaw in the study. But it more often stems from subtle inconsistencies between one experiment and the next. Pinpointing that inconsistency is how we discover what we didn’t even know that we didn’t know.

For example, in the early 20th century controversy raged over how nerves made muscles and glands respond. Was it bio-electricity or chemicals? In 1921 an Austrian biologist, Otto Loewi, dreamed, literally, of a simple experiment that would settle the issue and took to his lab in the middle of the night to test it.

He removed the hearts from two live frogs and placed the still-beating hearts in a saline bath. The first heart was dissected carefully to retain the vagus nerve, which speeds or slows the heart rate. The second heart had that nerve removed. Loewi electrically stimulated the vagus nerve of the first heart and watched its beat slow down, as he expected.

Then, Loewi let the solution surrounding first heart flow into the second heart’s liquid bath. Shortly, the second, nerveless heart also began to slow. Loewi’s concluded that the stimulated vagus nerve released a chemical that caused the first heart muscle to slow its contractions — and then that chemical seeped into the saline and had the same effect on the second heart. In short, Loewi had proven that neurotransmission was inherently chemical, not electrical.

LOS BANOS, Philippines — Rice-growing techniques learned through thousands of years of trial and error are about to be turbocharged with DNA technology in a breakthrough hailed by scientists as a potential second “green revolution”.

Over the next few years farmers are expected to have new genome sequencing technology at their disposal, helping to offset a myriad of problems that threaten to curtail production of the grain that feeds half of humanity.

Drawing on a massive bank of varieties stored in the Philippines and state-of-the-art Chinese technology, scientists recently completed the DNA sequencing of more than 3,000 of the world’s most significant types of rice.

With the huge pool of data unlocked, rice breeders will soon be able to produce higher-yielding varieties much more quickly and under increasingly stressful conditions, scientists involved with the project told AFP.

Other potential new varieties being dreamt about are ones that are resistant to certain pests and diseases, or types that pack more nutrients and vitamins.

“This will be a big help to strengthen food security for rice eaters,” said Kenneth McNally, an American biochemist at the Philippines-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Since rice was first domesticated thousands of years ago, farmers have improved yields through various planting techniques. 

For the past century breeders have isolated traits, such as high yields and disease resistance, then developed them through cross breeding.

However, they did not know which genes controlled which traits, leaving much of the effort to lengthy guesswork.

The latest breakthroughs in molecular genetics promise to fast track the process, eliminating much of the mystery, scientists involved in the project told AFP.

Better rice varieties can now be expected to be developed and passed on to farmers’ hands in less than three years, compared with 12 without the guidance of DNA sequencing.

Genome sequencing involves decoding DNA, the hereditary material of all living cells and organisms. The process roughly compares with solving a giant jigsaw puzzle made up of billions of microscopic pieces.

A multinational team undertook the four-year project with the DNA decoding primarily in China by BGI, the world’s biggest genome sequencing firm.

Leaf tissue from the samples, drawn mostly from IRRI’s gene bank of 127,000 varieties were ground by McNally’s team at its laboratory in Los Banos, near Manila’s southern outskirts, before being shipped for sequencing.

A non-profit research outfit founded in 1960, IRRI works with governments to develop advanced varieties of the grain.

Threats to rice

Farmers and breeders will need the new DNA tools, which scientists take pains to say is not genetic modification, because of the increasingly stressful conditions for rice growing expected in the 21st Century.

While there will be many more millions to feed, there is expected to be less land available for planting as farms are converted for urban development, destroyed by rising sea levels or converted to other crops.

Rice paddy-destroying floods, drought and storms are also expected to worsen with climate change. Meanwhile, pests and diseases that evolve to resist herbicides and pesticides will be more difficult to kill.

And freshwater, vital for growing rice, is expected to become an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world.

As scientists develop the tools necessary to harness the full advantages of the rice genome database, the hope is that new varieties can be developed to combat all those problems.

“Essentially, you will be able to design what properties you want in rice, in terms of the drought resistance, resistance to diseases, high yields, and others,” said Russian bioanalytics expert and IRRI team member Nickolai Alexandrov.

Food revolution

Scientists behind the project hope it will lead to a second “green revolution”.

The first began in the 1960s as the development of higher-yielding varieties of wheat and rice was credited with preventing massive global food shortages around the world.

That giant leap to producing more food involved the cross-breeding of unrelated varieties to produce new ones that grew faster and produced higher yields, mainly by being able to respond better to fertiliser.

But the massive gains of the earlier efforts, which earnt US geneticist Norman Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, have since reached a plateau.

Although the DNA breakthrough has generated much optimism, IRRI scientists caution it is not a magic bullet for all rice-growing problems, and believe that genetically modifying is also necessary.

They also warn that governments will still need to implement the right policies, such as in regards to land and water use.

One of the key priorities of IRRI is to pack more nutrients into rice, transforming it into a tool to fight ailments linked to inadequate diets in poor countries as well as lifestyle diseases in wealthier countries.

“We’re interested to understand the nutritional value.... we’re looking into the enrichment of micronutrients,” Nese Sreenivasulu, the Indian head of the IRRI’s grain quality and nutrition centre told AFP.

Nese believes Type-2 diabetes, which afflicts hundreds of million of people, can be checked by breeding for particular varieties of rice which when cooked will release sugar into the bloodstream more slowly.

IRRI scientists are also hoping to breed rice varieties with a higher component of zinc, which prevents stunting and deaths from diarohea in rice-eating Southeast Asia.

VANCOUVER — The “captain of moonshots” at Google parent company Alphabet sees widespread, world-changing wireless Internet on the horizon.

Astro Teller, head of the boundary-pushing X research team, shared his vision of the future during a talk at the TED Conference here late Monday.

Teller shared insights into the X team’s balloon-powered high-speed Internet service known as “Project Loon”, which aims to get billions more people online by reaching remote or rural regions that are not yet connected.

“There is a lot of different technology out there, rolling them out will be complicated,” Teller said.

“But, somewhere between five and ten years, it will change the world in ways we can not possibly imagine.”

Project Loon began its first tests in Sri Lanka on Monday ahead of a planned joint venture with the government there, the country’s top IT official told AFP.

It promises to extend coverage and cheaper rates for data services.

Service providers will be able to access higher speeds and improve the quality of their existing service once the balloon project is up and running.

Once in the stratosphere, the balloons will be twice as high as commercial airliners and barely visible to the naked eye.

Teller told the TED audience that he expected Project Loon balloons to be tested over Indonesia this year.

Craziest idea to date

The project, he quipped, might be the craziest to date at the X lab, which was once part of Google but became a separate unit with a restructuring that created parent company Alphabet.

The name of the project was intended to remind the team how bizarre it initially seemed.

As with all their projects, members of the X team first tackled the toughest technical challenges facing Loon with an eye towards quickly scuttling the mission if the goal was not realistic, according to Teller.

“We had round silvery balloons; giant pillow-shaped balloons, balloons the size of a blue whale,” Teller said.

“We busted a lot of balloons.”

Each potentially terminal technology challenge for Loon has been surmounted well enough to continue the project.

The current design is a balloon within a balloon, one containing helium to keep it aloft and the other with air that can be released or added to alter the weight and, as a result, move up or down to ride the wind.

The balloons can navigate fairly well, and send Internet signals to each other in order to increase their reach into remote areas.

As a Loon balloon floats out of an area, it hands the connection off to another floating into that same area.

And, Teller said, the bandwidth is good enough to stream free online TED talks for which the conference is renowned.

Last year, one of the balloon stayed up for 187 days, he said, circling the world more than a dozen times.

“Our balloons today do everything we need,” Teller said. “So we are going to keep going.”

Kudos for failure

Teller said his team refers to their base as “The Moonshot Factory” because their goal is to blend audacious ideas with the realities of getting them to market.

People on the X team get kudos, bonuses and even promotions for finding fatal flaws that kill projects and thereby let resources shift to more promising dreams.

“We use the word ‘moonshot’ to remind us to keep our vision big, and the word ‘factory’ to remind ourselves that we need concrete plans to make them real,” Teller said.

“We spend most of our time trying to break things and prove we are wrong.”

X lab’s work on an automated system for vertical farming was killed last year when the team couldn’t get it to grow staple crops such as grains or rice.

An ultra-light air-ship for hauling cargo was abandoned after the team realised the costs to build the first prototype would be astronomical.

“We can’t spend $200 million to get the first data point about whether we are on the right track,” Teller said. “So we killed it.”

The lab’s self-driving car was a natural moonshot, and is humming along, according to Teller.

I knew this was Valentine’s week and the rest of it but instead of going shopping for a heart shaped cake or, even better, a heart shaped diamond, which all the tireless commercials were urging me to do, I decided to go looking for a sweet tasting papaya. Why papaya? 

Well, a new home remedy website that I found on the Internet claimed that this wonder fruit was actually a cure for almost all the ailments a human body suffered from. It solved indigestion, improved cardiovascular function, prevented heart disease, protected against muscular degeneration, lowered cholesterol, removed intestinal worms from the body, fought infections in the colon, boosted our immune system, destroyed liver cancer cells, mended the kidneys and increased the radiance of the skin. The benefits of eating papaya were so outstanding that many people consider it something of a super food. 

Also it stopped hair thinning, cured dandruff, alleviated blemishes, scars and treated sunburns and inflammation too. And to top it all off, while trying to lose weight, it helped in a dramatic fashion. Papaya was high is vitamin C and was best known for the enzyme papain which was commercially used as a meat tenderiser. It was supposed to increase our metabolism and help in digesting fats and assimilate carbohydrates. 

Right! Reading all this made my head reel and I wanted to reach quickly for a plateful of freshly cut papaya slices. The two varieties of papaya that were available in Jordan came from either Mexico or Hawaii. The Mexican one could grow to be rather large but its taste was subtler than that of the Hawaiian one. Scanning all the grocery stores left me empty-handed and I was soon directed towards the main fruit and vegetable market in downtown Amman. 

Now, the narrow opening that lead from the main road to the vegetable souk was lined on both sides with meat shops. The fresh carcasses were de-skinned and some of them deboned. They were hanging upside down from hooks that were attached to the awnings. The butchers called out to me as I stepped past their store carefully, a tissue pressed firmly over my nostrils.

Though I tried to blend in with the local ladies, the fruit sellers caught me out in a second. After the initial greeting in Arabic, they spoke to me in fluent English. My frantic search for a papaya ended in vain because they sold only fresh produce and at this time of the year, had not even heard of papaya from Mexico, Hawaii or any other place. 

Sensing my disappointment, each of them, with utmost formality, handed me a gift from their stall. For you, they said, as if they were giving me a bouquet of fragrant roses. And they would not accept payment for it, saying it was a present. 

My elderly aunty from America called me in the evening. She used to take me vegetable shopping in the lanes of India when I was a child. The hawkers would always give me free handouts of whatever they were selling, whether I wanted it or not. 

“Did you get a nice Valentine’s Day gift?” she asked me. 

“Yes,” I told her. 

“Good stuff?” she queried. 

“Three peas, two beans and one carrot,” I confided.

There was complete silence for one moment. 

“Sounds familiar,” she replied. 

“Like the vegetable vendors in India,” I reminded. 

“Healthy stuff,” she laughed. 

“Health is wealth,” I had the last word.

LOS ANGELES — The R-rated “Deadpool” has taken the box office by storm, annihilating records with an eye-popping $135 million from its first three days in US theatres, according to comScore estimates Sunday.

The Fox film, which stars Ryan Reynolds as the foul-mouthed superhero, easily trounced last year’s record-setting $85.2 million February debut of the erotic drama “Fifty Shades of Grey”. It also became the biggest R-rated opening ever, surpassing “The Matrix Reloaded”, which opened to $91.8 million in May of 2003.

Analysts are predicting that the Tim Miller-directed film, which cost a mere $58 million to produce, could go on to make $150 million by the end of the holiday weekend. As recently as Thursday, “Deadpool” was expected to pull in only $80 million across the three days, but the Marvel comic, often a bestseller, proved its popular appeal and then some — and it didn’t have to compromise with a PG-13 rating either.

“This movie is the very definition of an expectation-buster. Nobody saw this coming,” said Paul Dergarabedian, comScore’s senior media analyst. “It doesn’t feel like a cookie-cutter superhero movie. It feels like something unique. You’ve got to sometimes take risks and go against conventional wisdom to come out a winner.”

IMAX screens accounted for an estimated $16.8 million of “Deadpool’s” total. The film, notably, was not released in 3D.

“Deadpool” also had a massive showing internationally, bringing in an estimated $125 million from 62 territories for a $260 million global total.

The debut is also a bit of a superhero redemption story for Reynolds whose costly “Green Lantern” adaptation disappointed audiences and at the box office in 2011.

Coming in a distant second was last weekend’s No. 1 film “Kung Fu Panda 3” with $19.7 million, which fell only 7 per cent. The DreamWorks Animation film has earned $93.9 million in just three weeks in theatres.

In third place, the R-rated Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson rom-com “How to Be Single” didn’t make any big waves with its $18.8 million out of the gates. The Warner Bros. film cost $38 million to produce and provided some counter programming to the hyper violent “Deadpool”.

The dismally reviewed Ben Stiller comedy “Zoolander 2”, meanwhile, debuted in fourth place to only $15.7 million. The Paramount film, which Stiller directed, cost around $50 million to make. The first film, “Zoolander”, opened in 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks, to a meek $15.5 million and went on to gross only $45.2 million in North America. It found a second life on home video, though and has become a quotable cultural staple. Audiences seem less enthusiastic this time around, though.

Dergarabedian thinks that both “How to Be Single” and “Zoolander 2” could see a healthy uptick from the Valentine’s Day crowd Sunday.

But overall, the box office is healthy, up an estimated 3.2 per cent from last year and it’s all thanks to the snarky, fourth-wall-busting “Deadpool” and its historic debut.

“These are summer numbers,” Dergarabedian said. “It’s summer in February.”

WASHINGTON — A mysterious brain disorder can be confused with early Alzheimer’s disease although it isn’t robbing patients of their memories but of the words to talk about them.

It’s called primary progressive aphasia, and researchers said Sunday they’re finding better ways to diagnose the little-known syndrome. That will help people whose thoughts are lucid but who are verbally locked in to get the right kind of care.

“I’m using a speech device to talk to you,” Robert Voogt of Virginia Beach, Virginia, said by playing a recording from a phone-sized assistive device at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “I have trouble speaking, but I can understand you.”

Even many doctors know little about this rare kind of aphasia, abbreviated PPA, but raising awareness is key to improve care — and because a new study is under way to try to slow the disease by electrically stimulating the affected brain region.

PPA wasn’t identified as a separate disorder until the 1980s, and while specialists estimate thousands of Americans may have it, there’s no good count. Families may not even seek care because they assume a loved one’s increasingly garbled attempts to communicate are because of age-related dementia, said Dr Argye Elizabeth Hillis of Johns Hopkins University. Often, it’s when those people reach neurologists who realise they aren’t repeating questions or forgetting instructions that the diagnosis emerges.

“Nobody’s talking to them, nobody’s involving them. It’s very sad,” said Dr Margaret Rogers of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Yet for many, “they can handle their own finances, they can drive, they can appreciate music. There’s a lot that still works for them”.

Speech and language are hugely complex. Just to speak requires activating 100 muscles between the lungs and lips to produce at least 14 distinct sounds per second, said Dr Joseph Duffy of the Mayo Clinic.

Stroke or brain injury patients often have trouble-making sounds or retrieving words. PPA occurs for a different reason, because the brain regions that control language become diseased and degenerate, resulting in communication difficulties that may mimic broader dementia.

Special MRI scans can tell the difference, Hillis said. They also can help identify whose aphasia will worsen faster, and who has a subtype that can morph to become Alzheimer’s-like, where they eventually do lose memory and the ability to understand language.

Standard language therapy has patients match pictures to the correct word, to keep the wiring involved as active as possible. Now, Hillis’ team is testing if a kind of brain stimulation that sends electrical signals through the skull can rev up the effects of that treatment.

In the first 19 patients tested, people did better retrieving the right words for about two months after receiving the electrical stimulation than when they received sham zaps with their regular therapy, Hillis reported Sunday. They were more able to name objects they hadn’t practised, and brain scans showed better connectivity in the affected region. But it will take far more study to prove if the treatment produces lasting effects, she cautioned.

Until there’s better medical treatment, Voogt, the Virginia patient, illustrates how assistive communication devices can help patients’ quality of life.

Now 66, Voogt was diagnosed 10 years ago, with a form of PPA that makes him unable to say words even though he can understand and type them via e-mail, text or his assistive device. He owns a brain-injury rehabilitation centre, and knew how to track down a specialist for diagnosis when he first had trouble retrieving words.

First launched in 2001 as distinct and modern small car premium brand as part of the BMW group, Mini’s nostalgic retro-infused formula has been expanding into ever-greater derivatives. For the latest and third generation of brand’s bedrock Hatch line, Mini has for the first time since the original car’s 1959 launch introduced a 5-door hatchback version.

Given that sportier and less practical Mini Coupe and Roadster lines didn’t prove as popular as expected, the more practical Mini 5-door seems a natural expansion for the first BMW-built Mini’s young professional clientele to graduate into as they grow older. And with a raft of more affordable, equally good and ever more luxurious 3- and 5-door hatchbacks available, the Mini 5-door simply widens the brand’s customer base.

First five-door

Larger and roomier in both 3- and 5-door guises, the third generation Mini is an evolutionary design beholden to its retro-modern roots. Featuring a wider, hungrier and more aggressively snouty hexagonal grille design and exaggeratedly large chrome-ringed rear lights emulating its predecessors, the third generation looks a little changed, but is an all-new car.

Launched as a more practical hatchback body style alternative to the core 3-door Mini hatchback, the 5-door model is, however, built on a lengthened wheelbase, and inadvertently brings to mind Sir Alec Issigonis’ — the original Mini’s designer — 1969-81 Austin Maxi. Named in homage to the original Mini itself, one wonders whether a revived Maxi nameplate could have been a self-aware tongue-in-cheek recognition of the Mini’s ever expanding contours.

Similar in size to the historic Maxi, the new Mini 5-door is nonetheless a distinctly small car by modern standards, and is sized in between the 3-door hatch and the yet longer new Mini Clubman estate. A halfway point between the two in terms of practicality and space also, the 5-door, however, lacks both the 3-doors’ and clubman’s better resolved and aesthetically packaged rear design aft of the B-pillar.

Perky power

Powered by a larger 2-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine in place of its predecessor’s 1.6-litre unit, the new Cooper S is only tuned to be marginally more powerful, but delivers its power and torque over a broader, flatter and more accessibly useable band. Additionally, it is more efficient and produces less pollution despite its larger engine and size.

Perky and eager at its top-end, the Cooper S’ engine, however, benefits from a responsive low-end, with minimal turbo lag, before torque develops into a muscularly wide wave normally peaking at 206lb/ft throughout 1250-4750 and temporarily spiking at 221lb/ft on overboost. Allowing for effortlessly comfortable and responsive overtaking and acceleration on inclines, the Cooper S’ broad torque range underwrites a seamless power build up.

Driving its front wheels through a slick and quick shifting 6-speed automatic gearbox, the Cooper S is punchy and consistent in delivery, and produces 189BHP throughout a wide 4700-6000rpm plateau. Topping out at 230km/h and able to dash through 0-100km/h in 6.8 seconds, the Cooper S 5-door is 0.2 seconds quicker than its predecessor and 0.1 second slower than its 3-door sister.

Nimble and manoeuvrable

Agile and manoeuvrable, the new 5-door model retains the brand’s much vaunted “go-cart” handling that it is often likened, and despite its increased size, it remains a small car with nippy cornering and quick direct steering. However, it bigger dimensions and especially its enlarged footprint lend it improved high speed and cornering stability.

Riding on all-independent suspension including a rear multi-link set-up to allow independent rear wheel travel over lumps, bumps and imperfections, the Mini 5-door is a sophisticated and smooth if slightly firm riding small hot hatch. If slightly bouncy over some imperfections owing to its small size and sporty set-up, the Mini, however, has good vertical rebound control. 

Pointy and eager, the Mini’s direct steering snaps crisply into corners, while its front grips well as does its rear when exiting a corner. Agile and brisk through corners, the Mini features good body control and slips and weaves through switchbacks with instinctive finesse. Meanwhile optional 205/50R18 tyres provide good grip, but without corrupting steering feel or making the ride too hard.

Retro and practical

Sized in between the Mini hatch 3-door and Clubman estate, the 5-door cabin and cargo carrying capacity reflect that, and is able to accommodate between 278 and 941 litres of luggage depending on seat configuration. Front seating is accommodating for tall and large drivers with good headroom, while rear head and legroom are improved, but not exactly generous for larger adults.

More practical with its additional two doors, the Mini 5-door’s rear doors make rear access easier for smaller adults and children, but are small and not so practical for larger adults or for installing cot-style child seats. Similarly, the front doors are shorter than the 3-door Minis, which reduces access by a small degree, and means one steps in and back into seats, but conversely makes access easier in tight parking spots.

Stylised with a retro inspired feel inside, the Mini’s circular themes hark back to the original model for inspiration, while materials are of a generally higher quality than many in its segment. Thankfully, the Mini’s speedometer is now positioned where it belongs in front of the driver, while the large circular centre unit now houses the Mini’s sophisticated infotainment system. 

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Engine: 2-litre, transverse, turbocharged 4 cylinders

Bore x stroke: 82 x 94.6mm

Compression ratio: 11:1

Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC, direct injection, continuously variable valve timing

Gearbox: 6-speed automatic, four-wheel drive

Gear ratios: 1st 4.459:1; 2nd 2.508:1; 3rd 1.555:1; 4th 1.142:1; 5th 0.851:1; 6th 0.672:1

Reverse/final drive: 3.185:1 / 3.502:1

Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 189 (192) [141] @4700-6000rpm

Specific power: 94.6BHP/litre

Power-to-weight: 143.7BHP/tonne

Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 206.5 (280) @1250-4750rpm*

Specific torque: 140.1Nm/litre

Torque-to-weight: 212.9Nm/tonne

0-100km/h: 6.8-second

Top speed: 230km/h

Fuel consumption, urban / extra-urban / combined: 7- / 4.6- / 5.5 litres/100km 

Minimum fuel requirement: RON91

CO₂ emissions, combined: 128g/km

Fuel capacity: 44 litres

Length: 4,005mm

Width: 1,727mm

Height: 1,425mm

Wheelbase: 2,567mm

Track: 1,501mm

Ground clearance: 146mm

Aerodynamic drag co-efficiency: 0.32

Luggage volume, min / max: 278 / 941 litres

Kerb weight: 1,315kg

Steering: Electric-assisted rack & pinion

Turning Circle: 11 metres

Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts / multi-link

Brakes, F/R: Ventilated discs / discs

Tyres: 205/50R18

*Torque on temporary overboost, lb/ft (Nm): 221 (300)

When the earth shakes in California, the first place you are likely to hear about it is on social media.

“Earthquake!” “Did you feel that?” “How big?” are common messages on Twitter and Facebook as Californians try to share information on their mobile phones in real time.

Now, University of California, Berkeley, scientists are hoping to capture that sharing impulse in a massive science experiment: using cellphones to detect earthquakes as soon as they start. They hope that by turning mobile phones into vast data collection points, they can quickly glean information about the quakes and warn those farther away from the epicentre that shaking is on the way.

On Friday, scientists unveiled an app that will test this idea with anyone around the world who wants to participate. Named MyShake, the free app, available on Google Android phones and at myshake.berkeley.edu, uses smartphone sensors to detect movement caused by an earthquake.

Users who download the app will be sending data to scientists when an earthquake as small as a magnitude 5 hits.

By harvesting information from hundreds of phones closest to the earthquake, scientists will be able to test a computer system that could, in the future, dispatch early warnings that shaking is seconds or minutes away to people farther away from the earthquake’s origin. For instance, if a quake started in San Bernardino, cellphones there could register the quake and quickly help send warnings to smartphone users in Los Angeles.

“This is a citizens’ science project,” said Richard Allen, director of the Seismological Laboratory at UC Berkeley. “This is an app that provides information, education, motivation — to the people who’ve downloaded it — to get ready for earthquakes. Those same people are contributing to our further understanding of earthquakes, because they’re collecting data that will help us better understand the earthquake process.”

The app uses a common sensor found in smartphones, called accelerometers, that detect which way the phone is oriented. This sensor helps determine if the phone is being used vertically or horizontally, for instance, or makes the phone capable of being a steering wheel in a racing game. Fitness trackers, such as pedometer apps, also use these sensors.

The app’s algorithm is designed to ignore ordinary shaking, like a phone jiggling in a purse, and detect unique vibrations felt during earthquakes. If the phone detects what it thinks is an earthquake — usually something at a magnitude 5 or greater — it sends a message to a central server.

If there are at least 300 phones sending warnings in the same 95km by 95km zone, simulation tests show that’s good enough to tell the system that the shaking was an earthquake, Allen said.

Allen is also part of a larger team of scientists building a $38 million system along the West Coast that will provide early warnings before the worst shaking from an earthquake arrives. The US Geological Survey’s ShakeAlert prototype has had successful tests — one gave researchers in San Francisco eight seconds of warning before the shaking from a magnitude 6 earthquake from Napa arrived.

The warnings will eventually give trains time to slow down, decreasing a risk of derailment before shaking arrives, sound an alert in hospitals to warn surgeons to halt surgery, and have elevators open their doors at the nearest floor, preventing people from becoming trapped.

A full rollout of the early warning system to the public has been stymied by a lack of full funding. Only about half of the annual $16 million operating cost has been paid for by the federal government. So far, West Coast states have yet to pledge contributions for the system’s operating costs, but several lawmakers in Sacramento proposed this week that California help fund completion of the system.

The cellphone MyShake app would not replace the USGS’ early warning system, Allen said. Smartphones will never be as effective as hundreds of sophisticated earthquake sensor stations installed underground to detect the first subtle signs that an earthquake has begun.

Still, a successful smartphone app, woven into the USGS system, could make the overall warning network even faster in California, Oregon and Washington state, he said. And it would enable the technology to be used in other areas of the world with few or no earthquake sensors.

“Nepal has almost no seismic stations. But they have 6 million smartphones. There are 600,000 smartphones in Kathmandu alone,” Allen said. “So if we can get MyShake working, then we could potentially be providing early warning in Kathmandu.”

The app was released by the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and developers with Deutsche Telekom Silicon Valley Innovation Laboratories of Mountain View, Calif. Allen said the team will consider creating an iPhone version of the app if many people download the Android version.

The announcement of the app’s release was made in the journal Science Advances, and is being presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

Scientists not involved with the app say it is a welcome development for early warnings in the United States, and represents a great use of “crowdsourcing” — using information gathered by the public — for science.

There are already indications that the approach is valuable to scientists. Twitter, for instance, is so fast that people tweeting about an earthquake can outpace the official seismic detection network in parts of the world with very few sensor stations, said USGS research geophysicist Sarah Minson.

Minson has been using similar smartphone technology to bring a less cost-prohibitive early warning system to Chile. She is working with a team to install about 200 smartphones — programmed with a GPS sensor-based quake-detection app — in boxes and placing them on roofs to act as seismic sensor stations.

“Smartphones are fantastic. And they’re cheap, and they’re ubiquitous,” Minson said. The cellphone sensors can “get us so much more data than we can get just from scientific instruments. Scientific instruments are obviously much higher quality, but we are limited in terms of numbers by their expense”.

Allen said the new Android app runs silently in the background, and sends a tiny amount of data as the earthquake is happening. Five minutes’ worth of shaking data, for research purposes, is transmitted later, when the phone is charging and is connected to Wi-Fi.

There are benefits to having the cellphone app and the traditional, ground-based sensor system working together, Allen said.

The ground system is so sensitive it can detect even the lightest preliminary shaking waves that may not be felt by humans. They’re called P waves, and the USGS system currently requires at least four ground stations to go off to trigger an alert.

Cellphones are more likely to detect the second, slower set of earthquake waves that arrive — S waves, the kind that bring severe destruction and brings the shaking that humans feel.

In the future, Allen envisions a more integrated network that might only require one or two ground sensors to detect an earthquake, and confirmation from cellphones to trigger an alert faster than the current system of relying on four traditional sensors.

Crowdsourcing data from citizen scientists are part of a growing trend in many fields of research.

“If you only have scientists doing that, that limits how much data you get in,” Minson said. “But if you just put a sign next to your stream gauge saying, ‘Please text me what the stream gauge says,’ you get a lot more measurements without having to pay for telemetry.”