Where does rooting collide?

In phylogenetics, rooting is the act of placing the root on an otherwise unrooted tree, which fixes the direction of evolutionary time and so tells you which character states are ancestral and which are derived. The usual method is outgroup comparison: a taxon known to lie outside the group of interest is added, and the point where it attaches marks the root. Maddison, Donoghue, and Maddison's 1984 Outgroup analysis and parsimony set out how outgroup structure determines character polarity and thereby the root. The referent is a choice of origin imposed on a branching diagram, and it has nothing to do with growing roots on a plant cutting or unlocking a phone.[1]

Unit

The placement of the root node that orients an evolutionary tree

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Established by outgroup comparison, molecular-clock or midpoint criteria, and the resulting polarity of character states

In mobile computing, rooting is the process of obtaining root (superuser) privileges on a device, typically an Android phone, so the owner or an attacker can bypass the restrictions the manufacturer builds into the operating system. It is achieved by exploiting a vulnerability or an unlocked bootloader to gain the highest level of system access. Sun, Cuadros, and Beznosov's 2015 Android rooting surveys the methods, their detection, and how they evade it. The referent is the capture of top-level control over a computing system, sharing only the word with a plant cutting's new roots or a tree's origin point.[2]

Unit

Whether superuser access has been obtained on the device

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by whether privileged operations succeed, and by root-detection and integrity checks that try to flag it