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PAGE 8A
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2014
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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JOHN RAOUX/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The NASA Orion space capsule is seen atop a Delta IV rocket ready for a test launch at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Wednesday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The test flight scheduled for Thursday morning will reach an altitude of 3,600 miles before re-entering the atmosphere.
NASA flying high after launch of new spacecraft
MARCIA DUNN Associated Press
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.
— With the imminent debut of its Orion spacecraft,
NASA is on a high not felt since the space shuttle days.
Shuttle veterans, in fact, are leading the charge in Thursday morning's two-orbit, $4\frac{1}{2}$-hour test flight, meant to shake out the capsule before astronauts climb aboard eventually, perhaps, to visit Mars.
"We haven't had this feeling in a while, since the end of the shuttle program," said Mike Sarafin, the lead flight director stationed at Mission Control in Houston. "Launching an American spacecraft from American soil and beginning something new, in this case exploring deep space."
Orion is set to fly farther than any human-rated spacecraft since the Apollo moon program, aiming for a distance of 3,600 miles, more than 14 times higher than the International Space Station.
That peak altitude will provide the necessary momentum for a 20,000-mph, 4,000-degree entry over the Pacific. Those 11 short minutes to splashdown is what NASA calls the "trial by fire,"
arguably the most critical part of the entire test flight. The heat shield at Orion's base, at 16.5 feet across, is the largest of its kind ever built.
Navy ships were stationed near the recovery zone off the Mexican Baja coast.
"It's an exciting time," Jeff Angermeier, ground support mission manager, said from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. "You can feel the buzz."
An estimated 26,000 guests were expected to jam Kennedy for the sunrise launch, as well as 650 journalists. (Actually, the unmanned rocket will blast off from the adjoining Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.) The space center press site was packed Wednesday with out-of-town reporters not seen here since the last shuttle flight in 2011.
NASA's Orion program manager, Mark Geyer, puts the capsule its inaugural run on a par with the formative steps of Apollo and the space shuttles.
"In the sense that we are beginning a new mission, it is, I think, consistent with ... the beginning of shuttle, the beginning of Apollo," Geyer said. "It's a new mission for us, starting in the region of the moon and then beyond."
Noted NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Jr.: "For the first time in more than 40 years, this nation is going to launch a spacecraft intended to carry humans beyond low-Earth orbit. That's a big deal."
Unlike the first space shuttle flight in 1981 — helmed by two pilots — Orion will not carry astronauts before 2021.
NASA wants to test the most critical parts of the capsule on this $370 million shakedown cruise, including the heat shield, parachutes and all the sections jettisoned during ascent and entry. The capsule also will travel through the high-radiation Van Allen belts surrounding Earth; engineers want to gauge the effects on the on-board computers.
A Delta IV rocket is hoisting Orion this time around. For Orion's next flight, around 2018, the capsule will fly atop the megarocket still in development by NASA — SLS, short for Space Launch System. Only after that will humans climb aboard; NASA hopes to send an Orion crew to an asteroid corralled in lunar orbit in the 2020s and to Mars in the 2030s.
Professors research suspicious online reviews
ALEX KEENAN
Two years ago Fengjun Li decided she wanted to get a haircut.
@AlexAlexk91
She decided to use Google user reviews since she was relatively new to the city of Lawrence to find the best salon, but what she found made her suspicious.
Li, an associate professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the University, found that a majority of the user reviews were short, simple, nondescriptive and the vast majority of them were positive usually perfect scores. After checking user reviews of other products and services on a number of review sites, she noticed several occurrences of similarly worded and seemingly fake, or biased reviews.
Ultimately, this led to Li starting a research project with Hyunjin Seo, a journalism professor at the University, to help readers determine if reviews are fake or real. Their goal is to create an open-source algorithm to detect whether or not a review is fake, or if the reviewer is trustworthy or not. It will be freely available so it can be incorporated into use by other researchers, users, and companies/corporations.
"Spam behavior is not that obvious," Li said. "And because hundreds and thousands of reviews are there for one brand, it's difficult for people to go over all of them. So I started to ask myself, 'Can we use computer science techniques, can we use algorithms, to help people make sound decisions about the quality of reviews?' "
The two-year project began in early 2014 and received $206,305 in funding from the University's Internal Revenue Code. They said they hope to have everything done by the end of the two-year schedule in early 2016.
detectors, but Li said there is room for advancement, specifically in detection rates. An algorithm developed in 2011 by researchers at Cornell University is used in their website reviewkepic.com to detect fake reviews, but the detection rate is around 90 percent accurate.
The existing research in content analysis has already made progress in content analysis
Li and Seo said they hope that by first improving existing methods of content analysis, and then incorporating new information into the existing methods, such as the relationships between a reviewer and the audience, they can improve detection rates.
"We took a look at Yelp.com and found that it has a friendship structure," said Li. "It allows the reviewers to form social friendships and we wonder, 'Can this additional structure help us?' We want to incorporate the trust introduced by the friendship structure into our spam detection model."
Additionally, Li and Seo hope to incorporate reputation into their algorithm. By looking at reviews done in the past by a reviewer, the algorithm might be used to predict the future opinions on similar items.
Today, online reviews are regularly created and used by millions of people. The popular website Yelp.com reported an average monthly rate of 138 million unique visitors just this year. Commonly viewed as more trustworthy and honest than traditional paid reviews, the popularity of user reviews has led to alltoo-common instances of fake user reviews, made to manipulate the perceived trustworthiness of the medium.
Fake reviews are created for a number of reasons — be it spam, endorsement or to damage a competitor's reputation. Aside from the legal and ethical issues that arise concerning fake reviews, Seo and Li said fake reviews are damaging to the practice of user peer-reviews for more personal, endorsement-free opinions.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Associate professor Fengjun Li is just one University professor working on a research project to help determine if online reviews for businesses are fake.
The assumption is that these
reviews are done by peers [and] customers who voluntarily share information." Seo said. "It's considered as less biased and more trustworthy compared with reviews done by companies. It's an issue of trust. If this environment is polluted by manipulators then we can't advance the social media environment."
The hope is that through this research, the methods used to create fake reviews can be understood, making them much easier to spot and anticipate. The detector is meant to benefit the users of a review site, as well as the review site itself, and for businesses that may be negatively impacted by reviews posted without their knowledge.
"For [a business] it is in their interest to be able to say that 'we have improved our algorithms for reviews and these [reviews] are more likely to be authentic'; " Seo said. "Policy makers in particular, the Fair Trade Commission and those who regulate online content, can utilize our study, and algorithms, and findings to develop their rules and guidelines."
Edited by Logan Schlossberg
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