British government

Publisher Verso writes: It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us--the cities we live in--that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city's edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure.

The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Encryption, the transformation of data into a form that prevents anyone unauthorized from understanding that data, is a fundamental technology that enables online commerce, secure communication, and the protection of confidential information.

Encryption algorithms are the mathematical formulae for performing these transformations. You provide an encryption algorithm with a key and the data you want to protect (the plaintext), and it produces an encrypted output (the ciphertext). To read the output, you need to feed the key and the ciphertext into a decryption algorithm (sometimes these are identical to encryption algorithms; other times they are closely related but different).

Encryption algorithms are designed so that performing the decryption process is unfeasibly hard without knowing the key.

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Alan Turing slate statue at Bletchley Park museum

Flickr user Duane Wessels

June 23 marks the 100th birthday of Alan Turing. If I had to name five people whose personal efforts led to the defeat of Nazi Germany, the English mathematician would surely be on my list. Turing's genius played a key role in helping the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic—a naval blockade against the Third Reich that depended for success on the cracking and re-cracking of Germany's Enigma cipher. That single espionage victory gave the United States control of the Atlantic shipping lanes, eventually setting the stage for the 1944 invasion of Normandy.

Alan Turing's Year

2012 is billed as the "Alan Turing Year," and a lengthy compendium of past and future Alan Turing events can be found at the Centenary site hosted by the United Kingdom's Mathematics Trust. The big gathering taking place right now is the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester.

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George E.P. Box, a statistician known for his body of work in time series analysis and Bayesian inference (and his quotes), recounts how he became a statistician while trying to solve actual problems. He was a 19-year-old college student studying chemistry. Instead of finishing, he joined the army, fed up with what the British government was doing to stop Hitler.

Before I could actually do any of that I was moved to a highly secret experimental station in the south of England. At the time they were bombing London every night and our job was to help to find out what to do if, one night, they used poisonous gas.

Some of England's best scientists were there. There were a lot of experiments with small animals, I was a lab assistant making biochemical determinations, my boss was a professor of physiology dressed up as a colonel, and I was dressed up as a staff sergeant.

The results I was getting were very variable and I told my colonel that what we really needed was a statistician.

He said "we can't get one, what do you know about it?" I said "Nothing, I once tried to read a book about it by someone called R. A. Fisher but I didn't understand it". He said "You've read the book so you better do it", so I said, "Yes sir".

Box eventually worked with Fischer, studied under E. S. Pearson in college after his discharge from the army, and started the Statistical Techniques Research Group at Princeton on the insistence of one John Tukey.

Next Monday, April 2, will mark the 30th anniversary of the start of the Falklands War -- or, as the Argentinians refer to it, la Guerra de las Malvinas. The Falklands, an Atlantic archipelago 460 km (290 mi) east of Argentina, are the subject of a long-standing dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom. In 1982, Argentinian junta leader General Leopoldo Galtieri sent 600 troops to take the islands, which then had a population of 1,800 people. The British government was surprised by the attack, but quickly organized a task force and sailed south to retake the territory. A brief but bloody series of battles took place at sea, in the air, and on the ground, ending with a British victory on June 14 -- 74 days after the initial invasion. In all, more than 900 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured. The loss marked the beginning of the end of Galtieri's junta, but not the dispute over the islands. Current president Cristina Fernandez has been ratcheting up pressure on Britain to engage in new talks over what her countrymen call the Malvinas. [41 photos]

During the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano sinks amid orange life rafts holding survivors in the South Atlantic Ocean, after being torpedoed by the British nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine HMS Conqueror on May 1, 1982. While Argentine and Chilean ships managed to rescue 770 men, 323 were killed in the attack. (AP Photo)

The rise of china a return to the natural order of things by Malcolm Turnbull

Malcolm Bligh Turnbull is an Australian politician . A graduate of Sydney Grammar School & the University of Sydney. As a barrister he rose to the public's attention as the successful advocate in the Spycatcher trial blocking the British Government's attempts to suppress the memoirs of a former MI5 agent. After founding how own investment banking firm in 1987 he went on to become a managing director and later a partner of Goldman Sachs. From 1993 to 2000, Turnbull was also the chairman of the Australian Republican Movement. Turnbull has has been a director and investor in several successful technologies businesses and is Australia's richest parliamentarian. Turnbull was elected as Liberal Party MP for the Sydney seat of Wentworth in 2004. Turnbull was promoted to Minister for the Environment and Water Resources portfolio. Following the Liberal parties loss to the Labour Party in the 2007 election. Turnbull was appointed as Shadow Treasurer and in September 2008, Turnbull was elected liberal party ( opposition) leader in December 2009 Turnbull lost a leadership ballot to tony Abbott by 42 votes to 41.Following Turbull's reelection as MP for Wentworth in the 2010 election he has served as shadow communications minister.
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TEDxAldeburgh - Nitin Sawhney - What is the point of music?

In this talk Nitin asks the question 'what is the point of music?' For an answer he draws on his own personal experiences of music, Indian musical thought, dance, theatre, cultural identity, the concepts of a 'universal sound' and the individuals unique 'voice'. Nitin Sawhney's output as a musician is astonishing. He has scored for and performed with many of the world's leading orchestras, and collaborated with and written for the likes of Paul McCartney, Sting, The London Symphony Orchestra, AR Rahman, Brian Eno, Sinead O'Conner, Anoushka Shankar, Jeff Beck, Shakira, Will Young, Taio Cruz, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, Ellie Goulding, Cirque Du Soleil, Akram Khan, Mira Nair, Nelson Mandela and John Hurt. Performing extensively around the world, he has achieved an international reputation across every possible creative medium. Often appearing as Artist in Residence, Curator or Musical Director at international festivals, Sawhney works tirelessly for musical education, acting as patron of the British Government's Access-to-music programme and the East London Film Festival and acting as a judge for The Ivor Novello Awards, BAFTA, BIFA and the PRS foundation. He is a recipient of 4 honorary doctorates from British universities, is a fellow of LIPA and the Southbank University, an Associate of Sadler's Wells, sits on the board for London's Somerset House and Whitechapel Gallery and in 2007 turned down an OBE for ethical reasons. AboutTEDx, x = independently organized event In the <b>...</b>
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Extreme weather events have always been with us, and always will be. One can't point to a single severe storm, or even an entire harsh winter, as evidence of climate change. But a trend of weather intensity, and oddity, grows. Droughts linger longer. Hurricanes hit harder. Snowstorms strike long after winter should have ended. World record hailstones fall. China endures a crippling drought, and then punishing floods. Millions are displaced in a flood of historic proportion in Pakistan. The U.S. sees the Mississippi River reach historic flood crests, and then sees the largest wildfire in Arizona history. None of these events on their own mean anything. Collectively, do they mean we're seeing the earth's climate change before our eyes? -- Lane Turner (47 photos total)
A huge swath of the United States is affected by a winter storm that brought layers of dangerous ice and blowing snow, closing roads and airports from Texas to Rhode Island in this February 1 satellite image. The storm's more than 2,000-mile reach threatened to leave about a third of the nation covered in harsh weather. Ice fell first and was expected to be followed by up to two feet of snow in some places. (NOAA/AP)

Ruth Gruber, correspondent and humanitarian, is honored for decades of photojournalism. Many decades. She is 99.