Scientific Computing: Studying Earthquakes Using Numerical Situations

Scientific computing or computational science is the process of solving scientific problems using computers. There is a little more to the definition such as creating algorithms and graphs that solve different problems in many different ways but for simplicity the definition is solving advanced science problems using computers. One such problem is the better understanding of earthquakes. Currently we have no way of knowing when an earthquake will strike. We know where one might hit and how powerful the quake will be but not when. This means that we can never be fully prepared for an earthquake that could just shake things up or destroy buildings. However using scientific computing we can recreate simulated earthquakes to show how large quakes damage buildings and prepare for future quakes as best as we can.

A research team at Princeton University has developed a virtual simulation that uses real world data of past earthquakes and recreates them for study. The simulator takes in key data of the quake such as location, magnitude, area around the quake, and simulates what happens when the quake begins. Using this data, scientists can better understand the waves of earthquakes, what happens underground during an earthquake and other geological aspects. The simulator can also take in data such as acceleration and velocity to create imaginary earthquakes suited for specific situations that have not happened in the real world yet. 

Computational science helps us visualize the seismic waves from an earthquake.
Photo from http://earthquake.usgs.gov/

As you can see computational science uses computers to study otherwise improbably scientific problems that would not be able to be solved without analytical power of computers. The simulation also takes several hours to complete once it has received data, which is also an important piece of information about computational science, if it does not take several hours or even days of analytical computer processing then it is probably not computational science.

Computer Graphics: Steganography

In the past people would mostly create art on portraits and paper. As technology increased we developed the ability to draw using computers and tablets. Using technology you can create art with less strain and more freely. Computers depict pictures using image formats such as "jpeg", "png", and "gif" files that are created using data compression algorithms that can be done on mostly every coding language. The important part here is that images are created using algorithms and are essentially hunks of data. This means that an image can be something other than an image.

Steganography is the process of encoding secret messages that are more or less hidden unless you seek the hidden message. Steganography applies to things such as invisible ink or a hidden picture in another picture, but it can also apply to digital images. It is very possible that an image can contain a virus or malware. All a person needs is an image, a virus as an executable file, and merging program that will easily merge the two files together. This is only one way of merging a virus into a file and there are many more. The good thing is that the image cannot spread the malicious executable from just existing. The image must be executed so the virus can also execute, so it is important to always scan everything after downloading which most browsers and anti-viruses do automatically. Just remember that computer images can also be malicious and to have updated anti-viruses.

Tooltip text that is shown when you hover over an image is also considered steganography.
Try hovering over this image to see the hidden text.

Communications and Security: Two-Way Authentication

Security is one of, if not the most, important thing in the technological world. We live in a technological age where everything has digital security now such as phones, houses, and cars. Digital security for non-software related objects are generally used for convenience such as not having to carry around keys. The problem with digital security is passwords. Studies have shown that people generally use the same password for everything and will tend to not make them complicated for fear of not remembering the password. A saving grace is the technology called “two-way authentication” or two-factor authentication.

To put it simply two-way authentication is a second layer of security that uses a separate device than the device you are trying to access. For example many banks use two-way authentication requiring you to not only log on normally with a password but also a randomized pin key that they send to a phone. This makes it much harder to hack into an account because it requires someone to have a physical registered device as well as the account information.

There are a few ways that two-way authentication works. One of the ways is quite simple yet effective. You use a physical device such as a digital key-chain or a smartphone with a specific application. The physical device or dongle will be set up to your account and you will enter a given id key. Using an algorithm based on the account and id key, the dongle will produce a pin number that you apply to the account whenever you access it. The pin number is also time limited. What this means is that for someone to hack into your two-way authenticated account, they would need your account information and either the dongle or your id key and the secret algorithm that makes this work, which I’m sure is different for every company.

A dongle showing a pin number.

If you want a secure digital life, either come up with a randomized extra secure password for every account you will ever have, or use two-way authentication which is available in the many popular sites such as: Amazon, eBay, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn, most banks, and many more.