Samsung forecasts $5.44bn in quarterly operating profit

South Korea's Samsung Electronics has forecast a quarterly operating profit of about 5.9 trillion won ($5.44bn; £3.65bn) for the first three months of 2015.

The numbers beat market expectations, but would mark a fall of more than 30% in profit from a year earlier.
The world's biggest maker of mobile phones and TVs said it expects sales of 47 trillion won for the period.
The company will publish full financial results later this month.
Samsung's mobile division, its biggest business, has been struggling to maintain its dominance against rivals such as Apple and Chinese smartphone-makers including Xiaomi.
Bryan Ma from consultancy IDC Asia Pacific told the BBC that the numbers were encouraging and fell in line with some of the firm's most recent reviews, which had been positive.
"It's not clear that they're out of the woods yet," he said, "but there are some encouraging signs."
"The thing to remember about Samsung is that it's not just a smartphone company ... so if they're not strong enough in that sector they can make up for it elsewhere."

The Nasa team keeping tabs on intergalactic death rays

You do not want to get in the way of a gamma ray burst.
“They’re the most luminous, high energy explosions that have happened since the Big Bang,” says Neil Gehrels, principal investigator at Nasa for the Swift mission. “It’s like a beam of gamma radiation that’s flying through the Universe.”
What would happen if one of these cosmic death rays of high frequency electromagnetic waves hit the Earth?

A gamma radiation burst could extinguish life on Earth (Credit: Science Photo Library)

“For a planet 1000 light years away, it would destroy the ozone layer. If it was just 100 light years away it could blow the atmosphere off,” says Gehrels matter-of-factly.
“The chances of that happening to the Earth is fairly small, about once in a billion years,” he adds. “It’s certainly not as great a threat as a giant asteroid hitting our planet.” Still, it probably pays to keep an eye on them.
Round-the-clock detection
Gehrels leads the international team of scientists – with members in the US, UK and Italy – operating the Swift satellite, which they use to study the behaviour and origins of these cosmic events . In orbit since November 2004, the spacecraft is named after its ability to respond instantly to any of the 90 or so high-energy flashes of radiation it detects each year.
As soon as Swift detects a gamma ray burst somewhere in its field of view, the satellite rotates to point its X-ray and optical telescopes in that direction. Meanwhile back on Earth, within a few seconds of the blast going off, the science team are notified by text message.
“Immediately – even if we’re on the road somewhere – we’ll go to our laptops, log in and then get on the phone to teleconference with other members of the team,” says Gehrels. Within 15 minutes of the burst, they will have issued an alert so that other observatories on the ground can point their telescopes towards the source.
Like being a doctor on call, duty scientists working on Swift even get woken up in the middle of the night to react to an event on the other side of the cosmos. “It’s really exciting, you’re making discoveries and learning something new at all hours of the day and night.”
Black holes and revelations
However, not everyone agrees with this assessment. “My wife was amused by this at the beginning, pretty soon it got to be annoying,” says Gehrels. “As more time went on, she’d just sleep right through it.”
Before Swift was launched, no one knew for sure what caused gamma ray bursts. Now astronomers are fairly certain that the longer bursts – that is anything over two seconds – are caused when the centre of massive stars collapse in on themselves forming black holes. When the stars subsequently explode into oblivion, a jet of gamma rays is blasted out across space.
The second type of these explosions (anything shorter than two seconds) is categorised as short bursts. The Swift team has concluded that these are caused by the collision of two dense neutron stars. These cosmic bodies are just a few kilometres across but have a similar mass to the Sun. Which helps explain why the resulting explosion is so phenomenal.
What the Swift scientists have also discovered is that gamma ray bursts are vitally important to the evolution of the Universe. “When a gamma ray burst goes off near a star with a planetary system, it can have a very important and destructive influence,” says Gehrels.
Time warp
The explosions that result in gamma ray bursts might even have provided all the gold in the Universe. “There was a burst that had an unusual afterglow that told us that a lot of heavy elements like gold had been produced,” Gehrels says. “It certainly gives us a clue where gold comes from.”
Because light from the other side of the Universe takes so long to reach the Earth, some gamma rays bursts spotted by Swift actually began their journey towards us shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. When a blast goes off, it illuminates that particular region of space enabling astronomers to get a glimpse back in time to the birth of the very first stars 500 million-or-so years after the Universe came into existence

The alerts give astronomers time to direct telescopes onto areas of gamma ray activity (Credit: Science Photo Library)

“We’ve learnt what the early Universe was like,” says Gehrels. “When the Universe was born, the only elements were hydrogen and helium but explosions started to seed the galaxy with higher elements like carbon, nitrogen and iron – the elements that make up our bodies.”
Not only do we owe our very existence to cosmic explosions, there is some evidence that the Earth’s ecosystem has been directly affected by these bursts of energy. Research published in 2013 suggested that a blast of radiation that hit our planet in the 8th Century may have been the result of a gamma ray burst, though Gehrels is inclined to reserve judgement.

Swift could continue its mission for another five years (Credit: Nasa)

After 10 years of observations, he reckons Swift is good for at least another five years but it has already transformed how astronomers see the Universe.
“Before Swift, astronomers used to think the Universe was a steady set of stars and galaxies,” he says.
“But if we put on our gamma ray glasses and look up at the sky, it’s always popping and bubbling and flashing – it’s a very different kind of violent Universe.”

The private investigator who spies using drones Rose Eveleth

Chris Wright is a problem solver. Her clients come to her with an issue, a question, a mystery, and she figures out the best way to find the answer – using whatever tools she can. “I use a combination of new technology and old technology, because I have to solve a problem. So I’ve used everything from geese and dogs to Roombas to drones to GPS.”
Wright is a private investigator – and owner of the Wright Group – based in Anaheim, California. She’s worked in the business for more than 40 years, and has seen the tools available to investigators change dramatically. Early on, stakeouts in vans were important. More recently new technology in the form of tiny cameras and social media has begun to play a role. And she’s embraced those changes. Today, when the problem calls for it, she uses drones to do her work.
She gives me a few examples. If two people are meeting in a public place, a drone can be a helpful way to discreetly watch them. “We stay at about 50-75 feet [15-23 metres] above so nothing can be heard.” Drones are also helpful for aerial surveillance of locations that are hard to access on foot. And if a school or church is worried someone might be stealing or vandalising property, drones or small off-road vehicles (“Roombas on steroids” as she calls them) can film the property.

In one case, Wright was asked to figure out whether or not a soda salesperson was crossing county lines and cheating on his contract. California is one of many states in which salespeople have regional contracts – for instance, Bob sells Pepsi in Los Angeles County and Nancy sells Pepsi in Orange County. If Nancy arrives at her usual businesses to sell her Pepsi and finds the soda supply has already been topped up, there’s a good chance that someone (perhaps Bob) has crossed county lines and sold illegally.
Hi-tech toys
Wright was asked to figure out whether this was happening. To do so meant visiting every major soda wholesaler from San Luis Obispo to San Diego – about 300 miles (480km) of California coast – and checking whether any were selling soda from the wrong salesperson. When there was illegal soda on sale, she would use a drone to follow the soda delivery trucks back to their depots. In one case, the warehouse the truck led her back to was out in the desert and would have been impossible to approach by car or foot without being noticed. But the drone was able to spy on the trucks covertly. “We could see between the warehouse door and the truck loading.”
Wright gets her drones from high-end toy stores, for about $200 each. They’re an expensive investment: not only do you have to buy the device, you also have to pay one or two people to pilot and spot the thing. And if you lose one during a mission, you’re out a good chunk of your budget. But it can be worth it, because for the cases in which they’re useful, they can be very useful indeed.
Wright doesn’t pilot the drones herself. “I try to hire gamers. I go to the colleges and high schools and I find out who the geeks are, and then I hire them.” She said that her pilots are more skilled than she would ever be – and they like the challenge. Some of them are working towards their own private investigator licences, and their hours piloting the little devices can count as hours towards their certification. (None of Wright’s gamer pilots were willing to talk for this article. “They’re introverts,” she told me. “Not shy, but introverts.”)
Understandably, the idea of using drones to spy on people isn’t something everybody is comfortable with. In a case in Seattle in 2013, a woman reported that someone was using a drone to spy on her. “This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield,” she told the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog. “I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away.” Her husband asked the drone operator, who was standing nearby, to move along – but the operator claimed to be acting within his legal rights.
Tightening regulations

Whether that’s true isn’t always clear. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 35 states considered adding drone bills to the books last year, and 10 states actually did add new laws. In Iowa, for example, it’s now illegal for the state to use drones to enforce traffic laws. In North Carolina, no one can use a drone for surveillance of a person or private property. And Tennessee now specifies that it’s a misdemeanour to use drones for surveillance of people who are hunting or fishing.
Wright’s drone operations might soon become legally questionable too. Earlier this month, a California senator introduced a bill that would extend property rights into airspace, meaning that drones flying over private property would be considered trespassers. Just a few days before that, President Obama and the Federal Aviation Administration announced new drone regulations as well, requiring – among other things – that drones must be under 55lb (25kg) and that operators must keep the flying vehicles in sight at all times.

Many states in the US are already clamping down on the use of drones (Credit: Thinkstock)

Because the laws are murky, many private investigators steer clear of drones. “The use of drones for surveillance is highly restricted by law,” said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator in Texas. “There are air space regulations as well as privacy laws that can easily be violated. Obtaining video using a drone has thus far been something that we have been advised is illegal.” That’s because drones are often used to observe activities that can’t be seen via a direct line of sight at ground level. Going out of your way to spy on such activities is considered an invasion of privacy, says Riddle. A lot of Wright’s work sidesteps this privacy question, because it involves helping schools and churches monitor their own property.
In all likelihood, the use of drones will be restricted under a more comprehensive set of rules and regulations in the United States sooner than later. But in the meantime Wright will continue to use them when they can help with her work. But she also says that regardless of the legality, if someone thinks their privacy is being compromised, they’re going to do something about it. That can mean shooting down drones – another activity that may or may not be legal. “I think a lot of my colleagues have lost them and realised that it is a tool, and if you invade someone’s privacy, well, if they can hit it they will.”