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Monday, March 17, 2014
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Malaysia: Plane's disappearance a 'deliberate action'
Malaysia: Plane's disappearance a 'deliberate action'
Authorities believe someone with technical know-how disabled communications and tracking systems on Flight 370
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The mystery of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 deepened even further Saturday as authorities said someone on board the vanished jet made a series of highly technical actions to deliberately hide the plane from modern detection systems.
Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said that communications on the flight missing since last Saturday were disabled due to "deliberate action by someone on the plane" and that the last known signal from the airliner came more than seven hours after takeoff.
The revelation came amid an intensifying search involving dozens of planes and ships in an ever-widening area where the plane may have gone down. Military and government experts on Saturday pored over satellite and radar data that may shed light on the fate of the plane but so far there is no trace of debris.
Speaking at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Razak said investigators were making calculations to try to determine exactly how far the airliner traveled after its last point of contact.
According to new satellite data analyzed by the FAA, NTSB, AAIB and Malaysian authorities, the plane's communications from the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System were cut off just before the aircraft reached the east coast of the peninsula of Malaysia, and the aircraft's transponder was turned off shortly thereafter, near the border of Malaysia and Vietnam, he said.
Flight 370 departed from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing at 12:40 a.m. on March 8 with 239 people on board. A multinational search effort involving 14 countries, 43 ships and 58 aircraft has turned up no trace of the Boeing 777, despite an expansive search that has widened with each passing day.
China, where the bulk of the passengers were from, expressed irritation over what it described as Malaysia's foot-dragging in releasing information about the search.
Investigators now have a high degree of certainty that one of the plane's communications systems - the Aircraft and Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) - was partially disabled before the aircraft reached the east coast of Malaysia, Najib said. Shortly afterward, someone on board switched off the aircraft's transponder, which communicates with civilian air traffic controllers.
Najib confirmed that Malaysian air force defense radar picked up traces of the plane turning back westward, crossing over Peninsular Malaysia into the northern stretches of the Strait of Malacca. Authorities previously had said this radar data could not be verified.
"These movements are consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane," Najib said.
Although the aircraft was flying virtually blind to air traffic controllers at this point, onboard equipment continued to send "pings" to satellites.
U.S. aviation safety experts say the shutdown of communications systems makes it clear the missing Malaysia Airlines jet was taken over by someone who knew how the plane worked.
To turn off the transponder, someone in the cockpit would have to turn a knob with multiple selections to the "off" position while pressing down at the same time, said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. That's something a pilot would know, but it could also be learned by someone who researched the plane on the Internet, he said.
The Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) has two aspects, Goglia said. The information part of the system was shut down, but not the transmission part. In most planes, the information section can be shut down by hitting cockpit switches in sequence in order to get to a computer screen where an option must be selected using a keypad, said Goglia, an expert on aircraft maintenance.
That's also something a pilot would know how to do, but that could also be discovered through research, he said.
But to turn off the other transmission portion of the ACARS, it would be necessary to go to an electronics bay beneath the cockpit. That's something a pilot wouldn't normally know how to do, Goglia said. The Malaysia plane's ACARS transmitter continued to send out blips that were recorded by satellite once an hour for four to five hours after the transponder was turned off. The blips don't contain any messages or data, but the satellite can tell in a very broad way what region the blips are coming from.
READ MORE: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/15/malaysia-airlines-flight-missing/6451477/
Friday, March 14, 2014
Tips To Protect Your Future From Your Online Past
Social Media Tips To Protect Your Future From Your Online Past
(FortunaAdmissions) Do you have photos on your Facebook profile of you in a drunken state? Or are you tagged in a photo taken a friend’s stag night where the pole dancing was clearly taking place somewhere other than Warsaw? Perhaps after a frustrating day at work you once took to Twitter to lash out at your boss. Maybe your Linkedin profile is so empty that you actually look to be linked out?
Homer’s advice for managing your professional reputation? “#1: Cover for me. #2: Oh, good idea, Boss! #3: It was like that when I got here.”
Whether you are applying to business school or applying for a job, it might be time to review your online presence and clean up any embarrassing albums and outbursts, and demonstrate your level of professional engagement. Poor judgement online can even affect you keeping your job – just ask New York PR executive Justine Sacco about the damage you can inflict on your career by tweeting.
The growing trend for recruiters to scrutinize the social media profiles of prospective employees has also been adopted by business schools. After speaking with various MBA admissions directors, they admit that although most schools do not have an official online screening policy and process in place, certain information they find about you on the internet can influence a school’s decision on your acceptance. So if you are applying for an MBA, or a new job, it is probably a good time to consider your online brand.
Social media continues to blur the lines between our personal and professional lives, and your activities online say a lot about our identity. Consequently, business schools and employers are interested to know if the profile you present in your application and resume is consistent with your identity in the market, at your workplace, and on social media. Your online footprint should be generally consistent with how you see your personal brand.
So here are 5 social media tips to consider before clicking ‘submit’ on your MBA application:
with a Google , Yahoo and Bing search. If there are any mentions of you on the first few pages that might negatively impact your application, then it is time to remove or edit any inappropriate content. The person who was offered a job at Cisco and tweeted “Now I have to weight the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work” presumably forgot that Cisco is, well, quite engaged in the internet.
#2: If in doubt, delete. Review your history of posts, comments, and old photos on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, or any similar sites to see if you have anything viewable to the public that might reflect badly. Posts of a sexual nature, drug references, profanity, etc – may not go over well with an MBA admissions committee. While Facebook pages and Twitter profiles littered with spelling and grammar mistakes hardly inspires confidence about you as the great communicator.
Caroline Diarte Edwards, former admissions director at INSEAD explains, “Business schools are not going to screen out candidates for their political views (unless particularly extreme eg racist), for loving a good party, or for expressing the occasional gripe. On the other hand, admissions committees might raise an eyebrow if, for example, you have frequently expressed job frustration or if there is anything that suggests unprincipled behavior, such as making public fun of a colleague, or gloating about having hoodwinked a client.”
As a colleague at Fortuna Admissions, where we consult with clients on MBA applications, Caroline remembers a client who was out of work and had written on her blog about how she felt like a no-hoper. “Of course everyone can have moments of feeling down, but you do not want such statements to be viewed by the admissions office. So we advised her to delete that particular blog post.”
# 3: Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and that you have joined the groups of the business schools you are applying to. You can take a step further and join the groups that are driving the debate in fields that you claim to be passionate about, such as impact investing, renewable energy or social enterprise. Schools also expect you to be a good networker, and having a well-developed LinkedIn profile can help to convey this image to an admissions committee. And don’t forget an appropriate photo – the school can already start to picture you in their own yearbook.
Crisis in Ukraine Is...
The Ethnicities Of Ukraine Are United
By Leo Krasnozhon
The current crisis in Ukraine is allegedly the ethno-linguistic conflict between Russians and Ukrainians, especially in Crimea. Ukraine seems to be divided between Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians. This kind of talk only benefits Putin’s geopolitical stake in Ukraine. Unfortunately, Western mass media feeds Putin’s propaganda unintentionally. The truth is quite simple. Many Ukrainians are bilingual. Moreover, both Russian-speaking Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainian are still Ukrainians, citizens of Ukraine. The people of Ukraine also speak Polish, Romanian, Magyar (Hungarian), Bulgarian, Turkish, and so on.
The media has repeatedly shown this map by dividing Ukraine into South-East Russian speakers and North-West Ukrainian speakers. The source of this map is the 2001 census. It is important to remember that, when the census was conducted, every Ukrainian was asked to identify his “mother tongue.” Around 68% of Ukrainians answered “Ukrainian” and about 30% of Ukrainians answered “Russian.” By the way, Ukrainians who identified themselves as ethnic Russians constituted only 17% of the population. At that time, 90% of the population were older than nine years of age and thus were born and raised in the Soviet Ukraine where Russian was the primary language. Ukraine only gained its independence in 1991. At the time of the census, only a kid who was nine years old or younger could have grown up in independent Ukraine where the primary language was switched from Russian to Ukrainian. It is no wonder that almost one-third of Ukrainians consider Russian their mother tongue. The census failed to ask if the individuals spoke other languages.
The Language Map, 2001 (Source: CNN)
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