Justastory

Today the Guardian published an article from the head of Penguin books, John Makinson – a man with an interesting career path, more varied than most in the publishing world – showing that the growth of ebooks seems to be following the same path as, say, digital music or digital movies. Me, I still got my vinyl, still got my books. As I said my colleague Andrew earlier today with books I like the navigation….

John Makinson says that if people want to read using new technology, that’s what publishers must give them

Penguin this week celebrates its 75th year and is marking the anniversary by repackaging a series of seminal books from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although the company might afford itself a brief look backwards, it feels as though there is little room for nostalgia in book publishing now, as the industry turns its face firmly – and apprehensively – to the future.

Amazon last week announced sales of ebooks on its US site had outnumbered hardbacks for the first time, stunning casual observers, even if it had not been entirely unexpected in the trade.

The launch of the iPad has added a sense of urgency. Where music went first, books are set to follow, although Penguin and other publishers would hope without the same devastating effects. Amazon this week launched a cheaper, more lightweight version of its Kindle ebook reader and a digital store on its UK site, while others, including Google, are muscling in. Digital book sales are still less than 1% of Penguin, but the direction of the market is clear. In the US, digital books already account for 6% of consumer sales.

Penguin chief executive John Makinson says he is a convert. The day after we meet he is on his way to India, as part of David Cameron’s delegation, and had loaded titles on to his iPad, including a manuscript by John le Carré and some Portuguese classics (in English) ahead of Penguin launching a range in Brazil. He is also reading Lord Mandelson’s diary. It simply makes sense, he says, instead of carting an armful of books in your carry-on luggage.

Innovation

“It does redefine what we do as publishers and I feel, compared with most of my counterparts, more optimistic about what this means for us,” he says. “Of course there are issues around copyright protection and there are worries around pricing and around piracy, royalty rates and so on, but there is also this huge opportunity to do more as publishers.”
Publishing, he says, must embrace innovation: “I am keen on the idea that every book that we put on to an iPad has an author interview, a video interview, at the beginning. I have no idea whether this is a good idea or not. There has to be a culture of experimentation, which doesn’t come naturally to book publishers. We publish a lot of historians, for example. They love the idea of using documentary footage to illustrate whatever it is they’re writing about.”

The very definition of a book is up for grabs he says, although the company has just published a version of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth for the iPad in the US that might provide clues – and horrify traditionalists. It includes scenes from a TV adaptation embedded in the text, as well as extras including the show’s music soundtrack and Follett’s video diary during the making of the series.

For now, Makinson says, digital books are expanding the market; hardback sales in the US are up this year, despite the march of ebooks. Piracy is not yet a significant issue and lessons have been learned from the music business.

“You have to give the consumer what the consumer wants – you can’t tell the consumer to go away. So we didn’t participate in this experiment where a number of publishers deferred publication of the ebook until a certain number of months after the hardcover publication. I thought that was a very bad idea. If the consumer wants to buy a book in an electronic format now, you should let the consumer have it.”

He has added confidence, because with tablets such as the iPad, consumers are used to paying a subscription to the wireless operator and for “apps”, creating a more benign environment than the wild west of the PC, where users are used to getting everything for free.

Penguin’s profits more than doubled to £44m in the first half of the year. The company gained market share, but one reason for the dramatic improvement was the outsourcing of some design and production to India last year; the company now has around 100 designers in Delhi making books for Dorling Kindersley, belying the idea that Britain can at least live off its creative industries. Makinson defends the decision and says DK is now back in profit, which means it can reinvest in Britain: “We can’t pretend we can do everything here. In order to be internationally competitive, some work needs to be done in other places.”

About 8% of the publisher’s sales are from its classics, including Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and revenues are still growing, despite much of the copyright being in the public domain. It is launching the range in Mandarin, Korean and Portuguese. But it is not all highbrow. What would Penguin’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, whose aim was to publish quality paperbacks for the masses, have made of Penguin putting out books “by” Peter Andre or Ant & Dec?

“Allen Lane’s view was that we should publish good writing of all kinds for all audiences at affordable prices,” Makinson says. “I’m not saying he would necessarily have approved every single publishing decision we take, but would he have approved of Penguin being a very democratic publishing company, publishing for lots of different tastes? I think he would definitely have approved.”

Makinson has long been mentioned as a successor to Dame Marjorie Scardino, who runs Pearson, Penguin’s parent company. Her departure has been a perennial question, though she has defied the investment community’s chattering classes by staying in her post for well over a decade. She has also confounded expectations by keeping Penguin and the Financial Times in a group dominated by educational publishing. Makinson says it now makes more sense than ever for Penguin to remain part of the group, as the digital era draws each division closer.

He says there will still be the need for publishers in the digital world: “I used to have this discussion with [Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author] Douglas Adams. He created this thing called the digital village, an online publishing platform. Douglas’s argument was, ‘all of my friends will come along and publish on digital village and you the publishers will be disintermediated, you will be irrelevant’. Well, it hasn’t happened. I am not aware of any successful direct to consumer publishing model that exists.

“The reason it doesn’t work is that the publishers do actually perform quite a useful service: they edit the book, then they publicise it.” In the physical world, they make sure it is stocked in bookshops, he adds.

Clubbable

Makinson, 55, perhaps feels more adaptable than some of his counterparts because he arrived at Penguin as an outsider. A clubbable character, he has taken an unusual career path, from a journalist on the Financial Times, to working for the Saatchis, setting up his own investment consultancy, running the Financial Times and then becoming Pearson finance director, despite having no training as an accountant.
But his passion for books is evident. Five years ago, he and his brother bought a bookshop in the small Norfolk town of Holt. For an out-of-the-way independent, the Holt Bookshop attracts a starry line-up of authors for events, including Stephen Fry, due to talk about his new autobiography, which, perhaps not surprisingly, is published by Penguin.

“We are all terribly sentimental about books,” Makinson insists. “It is terribly important to me that we sell lots of wonderful books in my little independent in Norfolk, and when I talk about digital I do sometimes worry that it looks as though I am neglecting all this,” he points to the books on the shelves behind him, “which I am not.”

I loved this story well put together by Tom Lamont in the Observer this weekend. My keep-fit-mad 17 year old son is a prime candidate for this US survivalist stuff. Hand him an AK47 and wait until you see the whites of their eyes.

Abandon any notion of surviving the apocalypse by doing anything as boringly obvious as running for the highest hill, or eating cockroaches. The American firm Vivos is now offering you the chance to meet global catastrophe (caused by terrorism, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, pole shift, Iran, “social anarchy”, solar flare – a staggering list of potential world-murderers are considered) in style.

Vivos is building 20 underground “assurance of life” resorts across the US, capable of sustaining up to 4,000 people for a year when the earth no longer can. The cost? A little over £32,000 a head, plus a demeaning-sounding screening test that determines whether you are able to offer meaningful contribution to the continuation of the human race. Company literature posits, gently, that “Vivos may prove to be the next Genesis”, and they are understandably reluctant to flub the responsibility.

Should you have the credentials and the cash, the rewards of a berth in a Vivos shelter seem high. Each staffed complex has a decontamination shower and a jogging machine; a refrigerated vault for human DNA and a conference room with wheely chairs. There are TVs and radios, flat-screen computers, a hospital ward, even a dentist’s surgery ready to serve those who forgot to pack a toothbrush in the hurry. “Virtually any meal” can be cooked from a stockpile of ingredients that includes “baked potato soup” but, strangely, no fish, tinned or otherwise. Framed pictures of mountain ranges should help ease the loss of a world left behind.

Vivos says it has already received 1,000 applications. (more…)

Saw this in today’s Washington Post. Sign me up.

Google, the world’s biggest online search engine, wants to turbocharge your Internet connection.

The company said Wednesday it is getting into the broadband service business with trials for fiber networks that will deliver Internet access speeds that are 100 times faster than what most Americans are getting today.

The company said in a blog that it will build fiber-to-the-home connections to a small number of locations across the country that will deliver Internet access speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The company didn’t say what areas would be part of its experiment, but said prices would be competitive and that its network would reach at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people. A source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the company doesn’t currently have plans to expand beyond the initial tests but will evaluate as the tests progress.

“Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone,” wrote product managers Minni Ingersoll and James Kelly in the blog titled, “Think big with a gig: our experimental fiber network.”

Some of the fastest connections through cable, DSL and fiber access cap off around 20 to 50 megabits a second. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told The Washington Post during a visit late last year that ultra-high-speed Internet connections were imperative for a next generation of applications to take off for the Web. Currently, he said, most network services fall short.

At such speeds, a rural health center could receive streaming three-dimensional medial imaging over the Web and discuss health issues with a physician in a Los Angeles, for example. Downloading high-definition, full-length feature films would take about five minutes, Google said.

We have all seen and heard this story about successful attempts at communicating with people in a Vegetative State – this is a very well informed article about the topic from the New Scientist this week written by Celeste Biever.

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work.

In an earlier experiment, published in 2006, Owen’s team asked a woman previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state (VS) to picture herself carrying out one of two different activities. The resulting brain activity suggested she understood the commands and was therefore conscious.

Now Owen’s team has taken the idea a step further. A man also diagnosed with VS was able to answer yes and no to specific questions by imagining himself engaging in the same activities.

The results suggest that it is possible to give a degree of choice to some people who have no other way of communicating with the outside world. “We are not just showing they are conscious, we are giving them a voice and a way to communicate,” says neurologist Steven Laureys of the University of Liège in Belgium, Owen’s collaborator.

When someone is in a VS, they can breathe unaided, have intact reflexes but seem completely unaware. But it is becoming clear that some people who appear to be vegetative are in fact minimally conscious. They are in a kind of twilight state in which they may feel some pain, experience emotion and communicate to a limited extent. These two states can be distinguished from each other via bedside behavioural tests – but these tests are not perfect and can miss patients who are aware but unable to move. So researchers (more…)

I read this story on the BBC News service this afternoon. It’s a bit grim – but hmmmmm.

A man accused of strangling a woman recorded the rough area of where he buried her body in the memory of his car’s sat nav system, a jury was told.

Lukasz Reszpondek, 30, had been seeing Ermatati “Tati” Rodgers, 41, Mold Crown Court heard.

Mr Reszpondek, who denies murder, said she died of natural causes and he had buried her near Wrexham in a panic.

But the prosecution told the jury that “quite simply” innocent people did not bury bodies. The case continues.

Mr Reszpondek, a Polish national and married man, has admitted preventing Ms Rodgers’s “lawful and decent burial”.

At the opening of the trial, the jury was told he had buried her but tried to dig her body up again as police closed in on him.

But he could not recover the body and went to the police.

Ms Rodgers was missing for 14 months before her body was eventually found by police in March 2009.

Prosecuting barrister Michael Chambers QC said Mr Reszpondek killed Ms Rodgers, who was originally from Indonesia, on the day he returned early from Poland by car without his family on 4 January, 2008.

He said he had lost his temper and strangled her “against a background of the emotional and conflicting demands of the eternal triangle of a wife and another woman”.

The defendant watched the police looking for the body from the top of a nearby slag heap, hiding in bushes, wearing camouflage clothing and using binoculars

He then set about disposing of the body and might well have got away with it if he had not made certain fundamental errors, the prosecutor claimed.

Quite simply, innocent people do not bury bodies, Mr Chambers told the jury.

Mr Reszpondek and Ms Rodgers met in the summer of 2004 when they both worked together at a dairy at Marchwiel near Wrexham.

They formed a close relationship which continued after the defendant’s wife came over from Poland to join him in Wrexham.

At Christmas 2007 the defendant – a father of two – returned to Poland. His family travelled by plane but he went separately by car.

He returned to Wrexham on 4 January, 2008 and took Ms Rodgers to his house in Rhostyllen after a 900-mile car journey. It was there that he killed her, said the prosecutor.

In police interview, Mr Reszpondek claimed he had gone upstairs to take a shower and had come back down to discover her collapsed and dead.

He claimed that he had buried the body because he had panicked, the court heard.

The following day he bought a spade, a large suitcase and other items which he used to help him bury the body, with his credit card which police were able to trace.

He then recorded the approximate area of the burial site in the memory of his car satellite navigation system and named it “Tt”, the court was told.

Police surveillance found he kept returning to that area and when they began digging in the surrounding fields looking for her body, “the defendant made the error of taking the bait”, said Mr Chambers.

“The defendant watched the police looking for the body from the top of a nearby slag heap, hiding in bushes, wearing camouflage clothing and using binoculars,” he said.

“What he did not know was that the police were watching him, watching them.”

By Sunday afternoon, 22 March, the police digging was getting close to the actual field which contained the body, Mr Chambers told the jury.

“The defendant must have thought that on the Monday morning they were likely to move into the actual field and find the body,” he said.

“So on that Sunday night, he tried to move it.

“However it was more difficult that he anticipated so after about three hours he had to stop.

“It was only at that stage that he went to Wrexham police station.

“He gave the account that she had suddenly collapsed and died, he had panicked, and buried her.”

Home Office pathologist Dr Brian Rodgers conducted a post-mortem examination and he said that there was no sign of any natural causes which would have explained her sudden death.

But he did find bruising and a fractured thyroid cartilage consistent with strangulation.

Mr Chambers told the jury that police had found deleted “glamour photographs” of Mrs Rodgers on his digital camera which included her in under-wear and semi naked poses.

That, he said, indicated the nature of their relationship.

He said that it could be inferred that the defendant lost his temper and strangled her in the “context of the emotional and conflicting demands of the eternal triangular relationship of wife and another woman.”

The trial, which is expected to last three weeks, continues.

The Bulgarian lottery has been going for fifty odd years. This week the same numbers came up twice in a row. What are the odds? Over four million to one. The Bulgarians say it’s coincidence.. ..this story is from Reuters.

SOFIA (Reuters) – The draw of the same six winning numbers twice in a row in Bulgaria’s national lottery was a freak coincidence, officials said Thursday.

Sports Minister Svilen Neikov ordered an investigation after the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 were selected, in a different order, by a machine live on television on September 6 and 10. The results caused suspicions of manipulation.

An investigation found no wrongdoing in the draw or determining the winners, its chairman Konstantin Simeonov said.

“We cannot talk about any manipulation,” he said.

The chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in two consecutive rounds was one in more than 4 million but was not impossible, respected mathematician Michail Konstantinov has said.

An unprecedented 18 people guessed all six numbers when they were drawn the second time and each got 10,164 levs ($7,700). Nobody won the top prize the first time.

The lottery organizers say it is impossible to tamper with the lottery machine. The draws take place in the presence of a special committee and is broadcast live on national television which guarantee no cheating, they say.

“This is happening for the first time in the 52-year history of the lottery. We are absolutely stunned to see such a freak coincidence but it did happen,” a spokeswoman said.

(Reporting by Anna Mudeva)

Thanks once again to the heroic Richard Dean for this story – which ran in the Daily Telegraph originally. Apparently a huge nuclear plant in Scotland is being effectively cleansed of plutonium deposits using Cillit Bang – which also did a very good job on the greasy deposits in my cooker extraction hood last weekend incidentally. Hmm I wonder whether Cillit Bang do affiliate links……

Decontamination experts at the former nuclear site at Dounreay, northern Scotland, are using the Cillit Bang household cleaner to remove radioactive plutonium stains.The huge site in Caithness is in the process of being decommissioned but workers found their normal cleaning fluid was slowing down the job of dismantling an experimental chemical plant used in the 1980s to recycle plutonium liquor.

One of the team suggested £1.99 Cillit Bang after watching a television advertisement that shows dirt being stripped from a 10p coin.

The four-storey chemical plant consists of a series of vessels, pipes and boxes made from steel and toughened glass. The solutions which ran through it left the steel stained with plutonium, creating a hazard for the team taking it apart.

David Hanson, project manager with Dounreay Site Restoration Ltd, said the efficacy of Cillit Bang was helping drive down the £2.6 billion cost of demolishing the site.

He said: “We need to decontaminate as much of the surfaces as possible before we can cut them up. The normal agents we’d use on steel and glass need time to dry and this slowed us down.

“The acids that had been used years ago also created problems. It meant we had to think carefully about the most effective way to wipe the plutonium from the steelwork before we could cut it up.

“One of the guys suggested Cillit Bang. He remembered seeing it dissolve the grime on a coin in an advert on TV and thought it was worth looking at. I’m very glad we did. We tested it and found it very effective.”

The 15-strong clean-up team wear whole-body plastic suits with their own oxygen supply and often need four or even five layers of gloves to protect them from radiation.

Mr Manson added: “The ductwork is stainless steel and contamination levels have been significantly reduced following spray and wipedown with Cillit Bang.”

Bosses at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, which is also being decommissioned, are among those who have been in touch to learn more about the discovery.

This article in the New Scientist caught my eye today – and then I thought – what if this weapon DID catch your eye? It would still be shocking you while you were reeling from a serious and very painful injury.

THE manufacturer of the Taser stun gun is sparking new controversy with the commercial launch of a long-range version that can be fired from a 12-bore shotgun.

Government-funded tests on initial versions of the new Extended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) have revealed possible health risks to people on the receiving end, New Scientist has learned. The manufacturer, Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona, says the issue has been addressed in redesigned devices, but these have yet to be independently tested.

Unlike the current Taser X26, which fires darts attached to short wires, the XREP is wire-free. Its projectile, the size of a shotgun cartridge, is designed to pierce the target’s skin and contains battery-powered circuits that deliver a debilitating shock. It has a range of 20 metres or more, compared with 5 metres for previous Tasers.

A team led by Cynthia Bir, a trauma injury specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, found that some of the 275 XREP cartridges that Taser supplied for testing last year were capable of delivering an electric shock for more than 5 minutes, rather than the 20 seconds of shocking current they are supposed to generate. Previous Taser stun guns shock for only 5 seconds per discharge, though that can be repeated.

Bir’s team reported their findings at a conference on non-lethal weapons in Ettlingen, Germany, in May. Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK, who has studied electric shock weapons, says Bir’s report that the device can carry on shocking for 5 minutes is worrying. The effects of prolonged shocking are not known, he says, but the finding raises concerns about the potential damage to a victim’s mental health.

Bir also found problems with the weapon’s accuracy. In test firings, it proved difficult to aim, as the aerodynamics of the projectile caused it to fall below the aiming point at a range of 20 metres. “Any lack of accuracy means a greater risk of hitting an unintended part of the body and therefore greater risk of injury,” says security researcher Neil Davison, author of a recent book on non-lethal weapons.

Steve Tuttle, a vice-president of Taser International, says the XREP munitions supplied for Bir’s tests were early pre-production versions. He says a redesign of the projectile has greatly improved its aerodynamic accuracy, and the fault in the munition’s “firmware” – its built-in software – that led to it being capable of providing an extended shock has also been corrected.

The two production versions of the XREP device include features said to improve aiming accuracy. One version, for use with rifled shotguns, has a plastic cap that engages with the rifling and gives the projectile a stabilising spin. The version for smooth-bore shotguns sprouts stabilising fins when it leaves the barrel.

Tuttle says, however, that Taser did ship some pre-production batches to US police departments.

Bir and her team have not had a chance to test the newly modified production rounds that Taser says are more accurate and reliable. Some of them have, however, already been purchased, delivered and used by unnamed “agencies” in the US, Tuttle says. Tests funded by Taser showed the rounds to be safe in terms of their impact effects on cadavers, he says. “There was no internal damage in the vicinity of the XREP impact.” There is no requirement under US law for them to undergo independent pre-sales testing.

Bir’s tests are being funded by the UK Home Office, the US National Institute of Justice and the Canadian Police Research Centre. All want to know whether the weapon can do what Taser International claims: allow police officers to incapacitate people at greater distance.

For this, the ability to take precise aim is seen as crucial. “In public disorder situations accuracy at range will be particularly important, perhaps to target individuals within a tightly packed group,” a review of “less-lethal” technologies by the Home Office states. Such weapons will help contain crowds or prevent them re-forming, the review says.

Shooting cadavers is one thing. But what happens when the weapons are fired at pregnant women, people with health problems or the very young, Wright asks.

I saw this report from Reuters in Rome today. Thanks to a mistake in the online booking system thousands of punters booked a room in this rather nice Venician hotel for one cent a night….

Hundreds of holiday makers struck lucky when they chanced upon a very special offer — a mistake in a hotel booking system which offered a romantic four-star weekend in Italy’s lagoon city of Venice for 1 cent.

The offer, a tiny fraction of the Crowne Plaza Quarto D’Altino’s normal rate of up to 150 euros ($214) a night, was quickly withdrawn when staff realized the mistake, Italian state TV reported.

In just a few hours, some 1,400 nights had been booked under the tariff, costing an estimated 90,000 euros for the hotel, part of the Intercontinental Hotels Group, the world’s largest chain, media reported.

Staff at the hotel, some 25 km (16 miles) outside Venice, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Intercontinental Hotels Group was not immediately available.

I found this story from Reuters today. Two tourists make a classic mistake with the sat nav. This is close to home for me because my wife actually picks fights with the sat nav woman (she has a nice lady’s voice, of course). “No, she’s wrong. We’ll go this way.”

ROME (Reuters) – Two Swedes expecting the golden beaches of the Italian island of Capri got a shock when tourist officials told them they were 650 km (400 miles) off course in the northern town of Carpi, after mistyping the name in their GPS.

(MY Mum says I should explain what GPS is for older readers – do I have any older readers? If so there is a short explanation at the base*).

“It’s hard to understand how they managed it. I mean, Capri is an island,” said Giovanni Medici, a spokesman for Carpi regional government, told Reuters Tuesday. “It’s the first time something like this has happened.”

The middle-aged couple, who were not identified, only discovered their error when they asked staff in the local tourist office Saturday how to drive to the island’s famous “Blue Grotto.”

“They were surprised, but not angry,” Medici said. “They got back in the car and started driving south.”

The picturesque island of Capri, famed as a romantic holiday destination, lies in the Gulf of Naples in southern Italy and has been a resort since Roman times.

Carpi is a busy industrial town in the province of Emilia Romagna, at the other end of Italy.

*The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) developed by the United States Department of Defense and managed by the United States Air Force 50th Space Wing. It is the only fully functional GNSS in the world, can be used freely by anyone, anywhere, and is often used by civilians for navigation purposes.

I read this story this morning by Kari Lydersen in The Washington Post.  Apparently the current tornado warning system in the States gives ordinary people an average of  13 minutes warning. That means some people only get 7 minutes to get out. Presuming you are fit and able of course.

When a tornado is about to cut a devastating swath through an American town, those in its path get a warning lead time of 13 minutes on average to try to reach shelter.

“If you live in a trailer community, is 13 minutes enough to wake your family and get them bundled up and outside?” asks tornado researcher Joshua Wurman, head of the nonprofit Center for Severe Weather Research. And “if you are elderly or handicapped, you’re going to have a hard time getting to a shelter in 13 minutes,” he said.

And that’s the average; many times people are warned about six or seven minutes earlier. That is because although scientists know that certain kinds of “supercell” thunderclouds can spin off tornadoes, they know very little about the exact conditions that indicate a tornado will occur and whether it will be a mild twister or a violent killer.

In the mid-1990s, a two-year study called Vortex had a phalanx of scientists chasing tornadoes around the Great Plains, inspiring much public fascination, daredevil amateur tornado-chasers and the 1996 movie “Twister.”

Vortex (which stands for Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment) resulted in significant advances, including the revelation that tornadoes can occur on smaller time and space scales than previously thought and that sometimes they do not show up on radar. Knowledge gained from the study led to an increase in average warning times, but it did not unlock the secrets of exactly when and why tornadoes form.

As a result, predictions about tornado occurrence are successful only about a quarter of the time.

“Sometimes people will choose not to take shelter even if they’re told to,” said Yvette P. Richardson, a meteorology professor at Pennsylvania State University. “In general, the more we can reduce the false-alarm rate, the more seriously the public will take warnings.”

Now comes Vortex2, a five-week tornado-chasing project beginning next month that scientists hope will finally provide the knowledge to accurately predict when and where a tornado will develop.

“Ultimately we’d like to get to the point where we can put sufficient data into our models so we know when a tornado will happen,” said Stephan P. Nelson, a program director in the atmospheric sciences division of the National Science Foundation, which, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided the $12 million funding for Vortex2. “Then you can get first responders to be better prepared — police, fire, medical personnel, even power companies. Now, that’s not even remotely possible.”

As part of Vortex2, about 80 veteran scientists and graduate students will chase storms across a wide swath from South Dakota to Texas and from eastern Colorado to Iowa and Minnesota, with their nerve center in Norman, Okla.

They will be armed with a host of tools, including lasers that measure raindrops, Doppler radar mounted on trucks, high-tech balloons, unmanned aircraft and instruments on tripods anchored in the tornadoes’ path.

“We’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at it,” said Wurman, who has chased 141 tornadoes over 14 years. “We’ll have a whole potpourri of instruments surrounding the storm, all measuring different things in different ways.”

The technology available this time is far superior. The inaugural Vortex used Doppler radar on planes, which would pass over a tornado at about five-minute intervals. Now radar mounted on trucks, which can get within two miles of a tornado, will provide uninterrupted data.

“We will be able to distinguish between rain, hail, dust, debris, flying cows,” said Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma and member of the Vortex2 steering committee.

Two ingredients are necessary to form the supercell thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes: a source of buoyant energy, namely warm and moist air near the ground, and a rotational force generated by winds at the surface blowing at a different speed or direction than winds high in the atmosphere.

A typical thundercloud develops as warm air rises into colder air masses above, then usually dissipates quickly once rain falls. Supercell thunderstorms, by contrast, can last for hours and can move rapidly, tracking over 100 miles. Supercell thunderstorms may also create “mesocyclones,” swirling winds embedded within the larger thunderhead that can be as much as six miles in diameter.

About five to 10 percent of these storms actually spin off tornadoes, which are typically about 500 feet in diameter. Scientists know what forms a mesocyclone, but they are largely lost when it comes to understanding which ones will spawn tornadoes and how violent they will be.

“A number of things have to happen sequentially and at the same time and in the right order,” said John Monteverdi, a meteorologist at San Francisco State University who has been chasing tornadoes for 24 years. “You have to start knocking the dominos down to find out what happens in that last stage. I think we’re getting close, and this project should help.”

Risky though it appears, members of the project note that their crews have never logged a death or severe injury. But they say amateur tornado-chasers who follow scientists around with video cameras are endangering themselves and others. Not only do these adrenalin junkies put themselves in harm’s way, the scientists say, they often speed and park their cars in the middle of the road, endangering other motorists and distracting highway patrol officers.

Scientists warn that it is only a matter of time before a major tornado sweeps through a densely populated urban area and causes horrific damage and loss of life.

Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, in particular, are in regions prone to violent tornadoes. Wurman said in a 2007 study that a tornado cutting through Chicago could kill 13,000 to 45,000 people and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage.

“Tornadoes have a great beauty to them sometimes,” Wurman said. “There’s a great elegance to the vortex itself. But when you see it going toward a town or city, there’s a quick change in your impression, and it’s like a tiger: Something beautiful becomes deadly.”

This is a nicely written story by Jyoti Thottam from Pune in India published in Time magazine – about the world’s cheapest car, retailing for under 100,000 rupees or about £1,300. The makers have plans to sell the car in kit form which would be assembled by dealers….hmmm. It’s clearly one way forward.  But where’s that really high performance electric battery car I’ve been looking for….

In New Delhi in the early 1970s, my family traveled by scooter in the classic, death-defying Indian fashion. My father would drive, with me, a toddler, standing in front gripping the handlebars and my mother seated pillion, my infant sister in her arms. My father was a civil engineer and my mother a nurse, and in India at that time, cars for a young family were far out of reach.

More than 30 years later, I recently listened to Ratan Tata, chairman of one of India’s largest companies, describe a family just like mine as the inspiration for the Nano, the ultra-cheap “people’s car” that Tata Motors officially launches today. “What sparked it off was riding in a car and looking at them and saying, ’surely there’s a safer way that these people can be transported,’” Tata recalls.

That incident was the beginning of a six-year quest by Tata Motors, India’s largest automaker, to develop a car for the common man costing less than Rs 100,000 (about $2,000), roughly the same price as a motorcycle. Many thought Tata was bound to fail, that a car so cheap wouldn’t be much of a car at all. The Maruti 800, India’s best-selling sub-compact, costs almost twice as much. The chairman of Suzuki Motor, Osaka Suzuki, once said: “Tata will not be able to make a one-lakh car.” (Lakh is an Indian word for 100,000.)

The company has proven the doubters wrong. The Nano is going on sale at Tata’s 470 outlets in India; the base model does indeed carry a sticker price of Rs 100,000. Now, with global car sales in the worst slump in decades — Tata Motors itself is experiencing financial difficulties — the battered automotive industry is looking to the debut of the world’s cheapest car for clues to a future that could revolve around smaller, more fuel-efficient and more cheaply produced vehicles.

In an exclusive March 5 interview with TIME, Tata downplayed the tough market conditions and the impact that sagging consumer demand could have on Nano sales. Although car loans are harder to come by in India due to the credit crisis, the country’s economy is still growing. “If I had conceived a million-dollar supercar today, I think you’d have every reason to question whether that’s the right product at the right time in the planet that we are living in today,” Tata says. The Nano, he argues, is the right car for this difficult time. “What has happened in the changing economic situation globally reinforces, if nothing else, the fact that a low-cost car has a place.”

Tata Motors engineers developed the Nano by redesigning every component to minimize cost and weight, while trying to maintain performance and comfort. To see how well they accomplished their mission, I was offered the chance to drive a Nano on a test track at Tata Motors’ main plant in the western Indian city of Pune.

The first thing you notice is that the dashboard holds just two gauges: speedometer and fuel level. This is the basic model, and it’s stripped down to the bare essentials. But driving the car is surprisingly easy. The gearshift is smooth, the car accelerates adequately and you never feel cramped or low to the ground. The Nano doesn’t feel like a cheap, lightweight car that’s going to tip over with the first sudden turn.

Outside the Tata Motors facility, our photographer got to drive a fully equipped, bright yellow Nano along the highways, cobbled avenues and side streets of Pune. This car had air conditioning, worth the extra money in India (optional-equipment costs had not been released at the time this was written), but running the aircon sapped some of the power of the tiny, two-cylinder engine. Other drawbacks of the car: The storage space is hard to access because the hatchback doesn’t open, the brakes aren’t progressive, and the car we drove pulled slightly to the left even though there were just 40 km on its odometer.

Those quibbles are unlikely to make a difference to potential buyers. The Nano’s target customers are people riding two-wheelers, and for most of them, this is the only car they could hope to buy. Even without spending anything on marketing so far, Tata executives expect demand to far exceed their initial annual production capacity of 45,000 Nanos. Tata Motors had planned to build about 250,000 cars a year, but the company was forced to shut down its original Nano factory last fall after protests by people displaced by its construction turned violent. That disruption forced Tata Motors to relocate its main Nano production line and delayed the launch. Because plants in Pune and Pantnagar are now producing the car in reduced numbers, the company is bracing for long waiting lists and disappointed customers.

The lower volume means the Nano will do little for Tata Motors’ revenue and profits, at least initially. Vaishali Jajoo, a senior automotive research analyst at Angel Broking, an investment firm in Mumbai, says that even at projected output of about 250,000 cars a year, she expects the Nano will add just 3% to annual sales. Because the profit margin on Nano sales is small, “It will take at least four to five years to break even” by recouping development costs, Jajoo says. Fully equipped Nanos have higher margins, but the company has not yet decided how many of those it will produce. A company spokesman declined to comment on analyst reports regarding the Nano’s launch, calling them “speculative.”

Initially, the Nano will be sold only in India. The company plans to begin selling a European version in 2011. It has no plans yet to export the Nano to the U.S., although that has not been ruled out.

The Nano’s slow start comes at a time when Tata Motors is struggling financially due to slumping demand. The company in the quarter ending Dec. 31 reported a $58.5 million loss, its first loss in seven years. Loans for Tata Motor’s $2.3 billion purchase of loss-making luxury car brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford Motor are coming due. “That’s a major cash-flow crunch for them,” Jajoo says. Jaguar and Land Rover sales have tanked. The company is pursuing several options to meet its obligations, including getting a bailout from the British government.

The Nano certainly won’t solve Tata Motors’ immediate problems. But Tata says he hopes the groundbreaking vehicle will in the long run help redefine not only how much cars cost, but also how they are made. The future of the car industry, he says, lies in design and marketing — not manufacturing, which involves high costs and increasingly can be farmed out to other companies. If the Nano really takes off, Tata Motors may try “distributed manufacturing” — selling Nano kits to be assembled and sold by independent dealers. This, says Tata, would be a step toward fully outsourced manufacturing. “What I tried to describe on the Nano is an attempt to look at that as a business model,” Tata says. A new way of doing business may be something the beleaguered auto industry needs even more than a cheap new car.

I heard comments about YouTube yesterday on BBC radio 4 which surprised me. YouTube has overtaken Yahoo and MSN as the search engine of choice. Mainly because people are looking not just for music videos, but for things like DIY videos, and recipes, which makes sense – especially when you consider that the “how to” market has grown incredibly rapidly on the internet. However, this Performing Rights development looks quite serious with regard to music’s future on YouTube….as reported in the Guardian today

YouTube in the UK is to be stripped of its most popular music videos after the site failed to agree a new licensing deal with the Performing Rights Society for Music, the trade body that collects music royalties.YouTube said today that after the expiry of its former deal, PRS had proposed new payment terms that would be financially prohibitive for the site and would require YouTube to pay out more than it makes from the ads next to each video. It also said that PRS would not agree to identify which artists and songs are covered by which licence, something essential for YouTube’s content ID system to identify and reimburse rights holders for each song that is viewed.”We value the creativity of musicians and song writers and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright,” said parent company Google in a statement.

“But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”

Google said it is still negotiating with PRS but in the meantime, premium videos from artists on EMI, Universal, Warner and Sony BMG and some indie labels have started to disappear for UK viewers and will be systematically removed over the next few days. YouTube’s has separate deals with the major labels who control the sound recording rights but PRS controls licencing for the music and lyrics, without which live or pre-recorded songs cannot be performed.

Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships, said he couldn’t give a figure for the proportion of site traffic generated by music videos, but that music videos are some of the most popular content on the site and generate a lot of activity including remixes and on music blogs.

“This is about long-term viability,” he said. “If the next Arctic Monkeys is going to surface we need to get this to work. It’s in the interest of the music industry – we’re not just doing this for us. The record industry needs a new business models so it’s kind of a shame that this has happened. But sometimes you have to step back to step forwards.”

PRS said today that Google’s announcement was made without any consultation and in the middle of negotiations, and that it is “outraged on behalf of consumers and songwriters that Google has chosen to close down access to music videos on YouTube in the UK”.

But it also appeared to contradict Google’s claim that PRS had asked much more money for the new licence, saying the tech giant wants “to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies”.

“We were shocked and disappointed to receive a call late this afternoon informing us of Google’s drastic action,” said PRS chief executive Steve Porter. “… which we believe only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”

Clearly pre-empting the fury of YouTube users, PRS emphasised that it did not ask YouTube to remove the videos and “urges them to reconsider their decision as a matter of urgency”.

But even if PRS is completely squeaky clean in this episode, it comes soon after the closing days of the Pirate Bay trial and for web-savvy consumers it will confirm the gulf between the traditional music industry and the technology they love.

It also follows some bad press for PRS over licence chasing; PRS has allegedly been pestering small businesses demanding licences if, for example, they have more than two staff and listen to the radio.

I found this story in the Scotsman yesterday – but the background story behind it featured below is even more interesting, reminding me of a novel by Timothy Mo called Sour Sweet – well worth a read if you are interested in Triad  activity in England (or in Scotland as the case may be)

MORE than 600 cannabis plants, with a street value of £180,000, were seized by Tayside Police yesterday in a raid on a flat in the Perthshire village of Alyth.
The raid on a flat at the Old Mill Buildings in the village’s Banff Road was carried out as part of an intelligence-led operation by the Tayside force. A 25-year-old Chinese man was detained.

(back ground story by MICHAEL HOWIE)
THE Scotsman today reveals the massive scale of cannabis production by Asian gangs in Scotland – an expanding and increasingly violent trade generating hundreds of millions of pounds for organised crime.
Scotland has, for the first time, become gripped by illegal drug production on a huge scale, with hundreds of Chinese, Vietnamese and Malaysian gangs operating a network of cannabis factories.

Police have smashed 143 factories run by south-east Asians since the gangs set up business in Scotland two years ago.

But detectives say the problem is getting worse, with more cultivation being set up, increased violence between rivals, and stronger links emerging with human trafficking, prostitution and counterfeit goods.

Houses, flats, farm buildings and disused warehouses have been taken over, with “gardeners” going to extreme lengths to cover their tracks.

Nearly 70,000 plants capable of producing £21.6 million worth of the drug have been recovered. But senior officers say this is “the tip of the iceberg” and have stepped up the fight against the Chinese-led gangs, who have increased their stranglehold on the drug trade in recent months.

A national task force has been set up in response to the problem. Its job will be to track down the “Mr Bigs” at the top of the organised crime chain.

Some 127 people from south-east Asia have been arrested since the gangs set up business in October 2006. But police admit a clampdown, known as Operation League, has failed to bring down the most senior figures. Despite judges setting tough sentencing guidelines for those involved, the number of new cannabis factories appears to be increasing.

Detectives do not know if the “skunk” cannabis – an extremely potent variant of the drug – is being produced for the domestic market or for export. But what has become clear is the increasingly violent tactics employed by gangs to protect their illegal enterprises, including abductions and attempted murders.

IN NUMBERS

143
number of cannabis farms uncovered in Scotland run by south-east Asian gangs.

69,583
number of cannabis plants found.

5
number of years growers face in jail if caught.

£21.6 million
potential yield of plants seized.

2,502
number of plants recovered from Scotland’s biggest cannabis farm, in a warehouse in Ayr.

127
number of people arrested.

A growth industry hidden in suburbs

IT HAS become the growth industry that no-one wants. No-one, that is, except the Chinese gang leaders making millions of pounds from the production of cannabis on an unprecedented scale in Scotland.

The drug factories could not be more unassuming – or unlikely. The production lines in what has fast become one of Scotland’s biggest criminal enterprise are typically found in quiet suburban housing estates.

From the outside, few people would guess what lies inside the modern, detached houses favoured by the gangs. Inside is an astonishing sight, as whole rooms are transformed into hothouses, with hundreds of cannabis plants covering almost every inch of floorspace.

Sophisticated growing systems are installed to create perfect conditions for the plants to flourish. A morass of wires powers a complex array of growing equipment, including feeders, lamps and ventilators. Each factory costs about £15,000 to set up. But the profits can be immense, with each plant capable of producing more than £300 of cannabis.

In June, police uncovered a massive cannabis factory in a house near Dornoch, in the Highlands, that contained more than 1,000 plants – capable of producing more than £300,000 of drugs.

A complex network of criminals is employed by each cannabis gang, each with a specific role. Detectives say they resemble a business, with various departments overseen by a “board of directors”.

“There are various levels of the organisation,” says Detective Chief Superintendent Stevie Whitelock, head of intelligence at Strathclyde Police and the man who led Operation League. “They will have individuals responsible for identifying the property for lease, going round looking for vacant warehouses and vacant houses. There will then be individuals who will come in and do the joinery work, the electrical work. Then you will find people coming in to set up the cultivation, the lights, the plants.

“After that you have the gardeners who tend to the plants and harvest the commodity. You will then have a group of people who come in to take the commodity away, sell it on. There are also individuals responsible for moving the money about.”

Police have significant successes at the department level, closing in on a number of managers as well as scores of rank-and-file workers. But the directors, on the whole, remain elusive. It is not yet known whether they are operating within Scotland, elsewhere in the UK or from their power bases in south-east Asia.

The operations are understood to be headed by Chinese, with an army of Vietnamese and Malaysian “foot soldiers” carrying out the risky dirty work. Many are illegal immigrants living in cramped, squalid conditions inside the factories.

The recent emergence of serious violence among those involved – including arson attacks on cannabis factories – has led police to believe turf wars have broken out between rival gangs in Scotland.

Some of these gangs are known to have links to cannabis factory operators south of the Border. Police in Scotland initially feared the gangs had been displaced from England as a result of detectives there getting wise to their operations. But the phenomenon has become a global issue – with Italy, France and Australia among those hit by the cannabis crime wave.

In response to the explosion in production in September the Home Office announced the appointment of the UK’s first cannabis factory co-ordinator. Mark Matthews, a former Merseyside chief superintendent, is spending the first few weeks in the job getting to grips with the true extent of cannabis cultivation.

Last year, police discovered some 3,000 operations in England and Wales – almost all found in anonymous, ordinary homes.

Police say the lives of the gardeners, and unsuspecting neighbours, are seriously threatened by the risk of fire. Since late 2006, five serious fires have been reported at cannabis factories in Scotland, although no-one has so far been injured.

One way the gangs keep their costs down, as well as their profile, is by tapping directly into the electricity mains. It is thought each factory is effectively stealing an average of £24,000 a year – costing power companies millions of pounds.

One way the criminals have evaded detection is by thoroughly insulating their factories so that heat-seeking cameras cannot pick up the intense heat given off by the growing lamps that send temperatures in the factories soaring above 40C.

Factory operators are also placing mothballs near letterboxes and keyholes to disguise the pungent smell given off by the plants.

The industry has shown a remarkable growth since a cannabis farm was found in the Kilmarnock area in 2006. Within a short time, more were discovered in Lanarkshire, Paisley and Glasgow.

But they have since spread. While 95 Asian-run cannabis factories have been uncovered in Strathclyde, another 13 have been discovered in Grampian, 11 in Lothian and Borders, ten in Tayside, seven in the Highlands, five in Fife and two in the Central Scotland police area.

“I’m convinced this is just the tip of the iceberg, not only for Scotland but across the UK,” says Mr Whitelock.

Those involved in cannabis growing are also involved in other organised crime activities. “We have had indigenous crime groups for many years but what we have here is crime groups who are using Scotland as a base to produce cannabis.

“But it’s not just about cannabis – they are also involved in the DVD markets. The money from these activities is going into the coffers of organised crime and will be used to facilitate human trafficking, including the prostitution of young girls from south-east Asia.”

We were talking about Twittering at the weekend….. re who did and didn’t do it – it’s a no from me -and found this story in the Telegraph today by Claudine Beaumont and Ian Douglas about Britain’s most popular exponent

Only one other person, President Barack Obama, has a greater number of followers at 225,520. CNN, the american news network, has 124,286.

Fry’s 100,000th follower, Hayley Elliott, has 33 followers herself and follows no one but Fry. He welcomed her to the micro-blogging site with a reply: ‘Hi there Hayley! You are my 100,000th follower! And I’m proud to be your first. Welcome to Twitter xxx’, shortly after exclaiming ‘Holy ARSE. Thank you all xxxxx’. Ms Elliott has yet to post.

At 3.30pm Fry had 100,536 followers.

Fry uses the service to keep fans and followers updated about his travels and latest television projects, as well as his thoughts and views on world events, and the more mundane aspects of daily life.

There was a surge in Twitter traffic after Stephen Fry discussed the service with fellow user Jonathan Ross on the BBC presenter’s chat show last week. Fry issued a set of tips and hints for new users in a bid to manage the huge number of extra followers he was attracting on a daily basis.

He said that he was “touched and pleased” to have such a loyal Twitter following, but was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the messages sent by his followers.

There are a number of other high-profile British Twitter users in the top 40 list. Jonathan Ross is number 26 on the list, with 43,289 followers, just ahead of John Cleese, who has 43,046 Twitter fans. Russell Brand set the record for fastest-growing account with 8,000 new followers in one day, but has not posted since.

Gordon Brown’s Downing Street Twitter account, meanwhile, is the 59th most popular, with 26,579 followers.

Good background info about recent growth in the art of Twittering from the Independent last week:

It was established as a communication tool for geeks and now counts showbusiness stars and the American President among its users.

The popularity of Twitter, the micro-blogging service used by President Obama to remind Americans to vote and tennis player Andy Murray to update fans on the weather, has risen so much that it has seen its visitor numbers increase by nearly 1,000 per cent among UK users.

Latest figures from Hitwise, the online intelligence service, show a 974 per cent increase in traffic, jolting Twitter from the 2,953rd most popular site among UK users to the 291st most visited by mid-January.

Widely feted as the follow up to the networking site Facebook in the evolution of web communication, the service allows users to post short updates about what they are doing. Established as the preferred communication tool for members of the tech community, the service has now entered the mainstream as a form of instant news alert and marketing technique.

The recent explosion in user numbers is largely a product of enthusiasm for a new form of citizen journalism. President Obama has a Twitter profile, although it has been quiet of late, while news of the recent plane crash in New York’s Hudson River first emerged from survivors’ Twitter updates.

Jonathan Ross, the disgraced BBC presenter, has been using the service to chat with fans during his enforced absence from the BBC. He has said he will Twitter live with Stephen Fry, another celebrated Twitterer, on his BBC television programme tonight.

“Twitter was one of the fastest-growing websites in the UK last year, and shows no signs of slowing down,” said Robin Goad, director of research for Hitwise. “If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website.

“If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications [such as Twitteriffic, Twitterfeed, and Tweetdeck were included, the numbers could be even higher. Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.”

Twitter does not provide official figures for its usage, but industry analysts believe that more than 2.25 million “tweets” are posted every day, on top of more than 1.1 billion such messages since the service was launched in early 2007.

And the site is about to open a radical new arm of its operation by integrating search functions into the home pages of users. Until now, users who wanted to search for “tweets” had to go to a separate website, search.twitter.com.

That obstacle is thought to have put off many members of the public. But over the next 10 days, Twitter will start putting search functions into the home page of around 1 per cent of users, asking them for feedback about its efficacy. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, deflected criticism of his creation as simply a platform for narcissists. “Search integration is a way of introducing relevancy to people”, he said. “This is not just about, ‘What are you doing?’ but about what everyone else is doing. Twitter is about finding out what is going on out there right now in real time.”

The fastest growing group of users in the UK is in the 35- to 44 year-old bracket and accounts for 17.3 per cent of UK visitors. Growth in the UK is likely to be accelerated by the reintroduction of free two-way text messaging of “tweets” to countries outside the US.

The service was withdrawn in Europe last year because it was too expensive for the company. For all Twitter’s success, it remains a small player in online networking. Facebook is the most-visited networking site in the UK, with almost 38 per cent share of the market, followed by YouTube, Bebo, and MySpace, with 17 per cent, 9.1 per cent, and 5 per cent respectively.

I found this article in the Economist.  Apparently we will all be rolling our screens into a tube and slipping them into our pockets before departure.

OVER the years, the screens on laptops, televisions, mobile phones and so on have got sharper, wider and thinner. They are about to get thinner still, but with a new twist. By using flexible components, these screens will also become bendy. Some could even be rolled up and slipped into your pocket like a piece of electronic paper. These thin sheets of plastic will be able to display words and images; a book, perhaps, or a newspaper or a magazine. And now it looks as if they might be mass produced in much the same way as the printed paper they are emulating.

The crucial technological development happened recently at the Flexible Display Centre at Arizona State University. Using a novel lithographic process invented by HP Labs, the research arm of Hewlett-Packard, and an electronic ink produced by E Ink, a company spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the centre’s researchers succeeded in printing flexible displays onto long rolls of a special plastic film made by DuPont. To make individual screens, the printed film is sliced up into sections rather as folios for magazines or newspapers would be cut from a printed web of paper.

The resulting “electrophoretic” screens are lightweight and consume only a fraction of the power of a typical liquid-crystal display (LCD). Their first use is likely to be by the American army, which helped pay for the project. It hopes its soldiers will be able to use the screens as electronic maps and to receive information. The idea is that the flexible screens will replace some of the bulky devices that soldiers now have to lug around. If that works, the retail market beckons. The first trials of consumer versions could begin within a few years.

Flickering beginnings

Although printing flexible screens in this way will help to make them affordable, they still have a long way to go to catch LCDs. For that, two things need to happen. One is that the displays must turn from black-and-white to colour. The other is that they must be able to refresh their images at a rate fast enough to show moving pictures. Researchers at the Flexible Display Centre and elsewhere are working on ways to do that, and there seems little doubt it will happen. Yet even with their present limitations, flexible screens have some important advantages over LCDs.

For a start, LCDs are difficult and costly to make. Most are produced in huge, ultra-clean factories using batch processes similar to those for making silicon chips. Layers of material which work as filters, electrodes, transistors and the liquid crystal itself are deposited onto a thin glass plate to form a sandwich that is covered with another pane of glass. At each stage the layers are etched to make electrical connections. This is a fractious, finicky process and tiny defects in the materials, or failures in the alignment of the different layers, can result in 20% or more of a batch being scrapped. Moreover, the glass means LCDs are heavy and easily broken, as anyone who has dropped a laptop knows to his cost.

Another drawback is that LCDs consume a lot of power because they are lit from behind. An LCD works because, when an electrical field is applied to the transparent liquid crystals that form each picture element, or “pixel”, within the screen, the crystals become opaque. Red, green and blue filters then allow different colours to show within each pixel, but light has to be shone through them for this to happen. That, plus the fact that the liquid crystals will revert to transparency if the power goes off, mean an LCD eats batteries. It also means that the image can be hard to see in bright sunlight.

Electrophoretic displays work in a different way, using a form of electronic ink that has been under development since the 1970s. E Ink’s version employs tiny capsules filled with a clear fluid containing positively charged white particles and negatively charged black ones. The capsules are arranged as pixels and electric charges applied to each pixel pull either the black or the white particles towards the top of the capsule (and the opposite colour to the bottom). Unlike an LCD’s, this image does not require backlighting. Instead, the user relies on reflected light, as he would if he were reading a sheet of printed paper. Moreover, once the particles in the capsules have settled down they stay put. That means the image remains on the screen without drawing power. A further dose of electricity is required only when the image changes; when a user “turns” to the next page, for example. Not only does this mean that electrophoretic displays are cheaper to run, the lack of constant refreshment makes them more comfortable to read—as comfortable, it is claimed, as printed paper.

Kindling the fire

In fact, electrophoretic displays are already available, but they are built on glass in a similar way to an LCD. One such device is the Kindle, launched by Amazon, an American online retailer, in November 2007. Thanks in part to a ringing endorsement by Oprah Winfrey on her television show, it is now a big hit and prospective purchasers face long delays getting their hands on one. The Kindle, which costs $359, is about the size of a slim paperback (see picture below). It can download books and other publications directly using a built-in wireless connection, and offers electronic editions of some newspapers.

It is not alone, though. Its rivals include Sony’s Reader, and a device with a larger screen launched late last year by iRex, a Dutch company. And, later this year, an electrophoretic reader that is built the LCD way, but on plastic, rather than on glass, will also be launched to take them on.

Plastic Logic, the firm that makes this reader, was founded by researchers at the University of Cambridge, has its headquarters in Silicon Valley and does its manufacturing in Germany. The firm uses an adapted version of LCD manufacturing which employs electronic ink and plastic substrates to make its screens. Plastic Logic’s prototype reader, which has a screen about the size of a magazine, is a mere 7mm thick and weighs less than 450 grams. It should run for a week in normal use before its battery needs recharging.
All the news that’s fit not to print
Plastic Logic says its reader will be aimed at businessmen who might want to store, on a single machine capable of being slipped into their briefcase, all the paper documents and spreadsheets that at present they normally print out. Books and periodicals can be read too. And for those who think they would miss the ability to scribble comments and underline things that paper provides, the reader’s screen will be touch-sensitive, allowing such annotations to be made.

Even Plastic Logic’s approach, though, is likely to be transitional. If Hewlett-Packard’s “self-aligned imprint lithography”, as it describes its new technology, can be commercialised, it will take the manufacture of screens through what has proved a crucial transition in every industry in which it has happened—from batch processing to continuous manufacture.

The breakthrough here was to work out a way to simplify the process by which the electronic circuit that controls the pixels is carved out of layers of conducting, semiconducting and insulating materials. In standard silicon-based electronics, this involves the repeated application of resistive materials to protect those parts of the layer being etched that need to be preserved. Hewlett-Packard’s scientists, however, have worked out how to print a layer of resistive material of variable height on top of all the other layers. After each stage of the etching process a fixed depth of this is dissolved away, exposing a different part of the circuit to the etching chemicals.

The result is a continuous process, much like a printing press. This promises to become a cost-effective mass-production method which Hewlett-Packard will license to other producers, says Prith Banerjee, the company’s research director. Once that happens, he hopes, flexible screens could be used in all sorts of devices.

Colour section

The one feature these screens do not yet offer is colour and, though colour versions will surely come to market, no one is yet sure which version will succeed. Electrophoretic displays can use coloured particles and filters to produce red, green and blue subpixels, but as each colour occupies only one third of a pixel’s area, the brightness of the image is correspondingly reduced. Liquavista, a spin-off from Philips, a big Dutch electronics company, is trying something called “electrowetting”. This uses an electrical field to modify the surface tension of coloured oils and water within pixels that are mounted on a flexible Teflon base. As each pixel is activated, the wetting properties of the oil and water change, making colours visible.

Another approach is to use materials that emit light. Some firms, such as Sony, are looking at organic light-emitting diodes composed of thin films of organic molecules which generate light in response to an electric current. This approach is reckoned to have potential for use in ultra-thin, wall-mounted television sets.

Photonic crystals are a further alternative. These are tiny particles that have a crystal structure which influences the flow of photons, the particles of light. By changing the structure of such a crystal slightly, using an electric charge, the colour of the light reflected by that crystal will change too. Tune the crystals appropriately and you can create different colours.

There are also hybrid methods, like that used by Adrian Geisow at HP Labs’ campus in Bristol, England. He has taken a conventional approach to generating colour, using liquid crystals and red, green and blue filters. However, he has done so in a plastic film produced in a printing-type process. The screen can be backlit, like a standard LCD, but it is capable of retaining its image because the material the liquid crystals sit on encourages the pixels to stay transparent or opaque once they have been switched. However it is eventually done, Dr Geisow is convinced that putting colour into flexible screens is what will turn them into a very big picture indeed.

This article ran in the G2 section of the Guardian yesterday – nicely put put together by writer Alok Jha, who had to  wear a wrist band that records walking and exercising movements in order to link up with a computer based personal training system.

Like so many who have gone before me in the fight against flab, I am engaged in an unending war with my body. I don’t mind exercise – I jog, cross-train and swim – but I do love food. Children learn early that when your stomach is full it is a good idea to stop. It is a skill I have yet to develop.

These two sides – the exercise and the eating – are finely balanced. For months at a time, exercise will prevail, but it takes only one missed gym session for the discipline to fall apart.

Enter MiLife, a web-based system that claims to be the world’s first “personalised online coaching system”. As I am never going to get an actual personal trainer (why pay for someone in a tracksuit to shout at you?), I thought a virtual one could keep an eye on my progress and shame me into action.

The system comes with a wristband that records all the movements you make in a day and, when connected to a computer via bluetooth, uploads this data to a personal profile on the MiLife website. Every week, you track your performance with a plethora of bar charts and line graphs and the MiLife software advises you on how to get the best out of your exercise.

To start, you tell MiLife what your goals are. Perhaps you want to raise your activity levels or lose some weight? The website’s virtual trainer will come back with a personalised plan, broken down into daily targets. As you progress, the software automatically adapts the plan during a weekly coaching session to take into account the exercises you seem to be good at and those you’re not.

I chose to give myself both exercise and weight targets, but rapidly regretted the latter. Weight control involves recording a daily food diary, an activity as tedious and irritating as filing tax returns. Every day. I tried, I really did. MiLife even allows you to use your mobile phone to text in how many calories you eat but, seriously, how do you know exactly how many are in a salmon mousse? I gave up after just a few weeks of semi-completed diaries and, during my weekly online coaching sessions, the software duly reminded me of my laziness.

I was more successful with the wristband, which I wore obsessively. MiLife breaks down activity into low, medium and high. Shuffling around my flat was low activity, a brisk walk counted as medium-to-high and a jog or even the odd dash for a bus would rack up minutes in the high-activity section. Like anyone given a target, I did everything I could to get the daily totals up: I walked into work more often, went walkabout at lunchtimes, and avoided buses for all short journeys.

All the information about my activity was recorded with no need for my intervention, and it was useful: days when I took the bus home, for example, instead of walking, appeared as conspicuous gaps among the skyscrapers of activity in the days where I had been more diligent. I could monitor my minutes of high activity from jogging or cross-training to ensure that I kept up the levels suggested by the software. All of this was motivational, too – I was surprised how far I would go to get a perfect set of bar charts.

If you choose, MiLife will email or text to get you exercising, and chide you if you miss too many sessions. The virtual trainer is powered by something called the “Idapt engine”, a computer model that MiLife says is the result of five years of research collating data from hundreds of people to tease out successful strategies to, for example, lose weight or keep motivated to exercise. During the first few weeks of use, this builds up a profile of the kinds of exercise that seem to work for you. By matching this to the profiles it stores, it can suggest exercises or ways to break consistent bad habits. I was advised, for example, to try an exercise bike and do more gentle jogging, but the longer you use the programme the better the suggestions should be.

In a randomised controlled trial of 77 people over nine weeks, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2007, those using the MiLife system ended up doing, on average, two hours more physical activity a week than the control group. This is a good result, but bear in mind that these were probably active volunteers, so likely to be motivated to exercise.

There are niggling problems with the system: the website is slow, badly designed and frustrating to use. As a Mac user, I found the software a small nightmare to set up and the system lost two weeks of my weight and activity data. That meant my programme was all but shot to pieces because the software assumed I had been lying down for a fortnight.

I didn’t manage to make MiLife record my activities for long enough to complete a 12-week programme but, on the evidence I do have, my feelings are mixed. Just knowing that all your movements are being recorded is surprisingly rewarding and motivational. Small bits of low-level exercise can add up, and visualising all the jogging and cycling with the bar charts every day was (when I was wearing my geek hat) addictive.

The weight-loss part of the MiLife programme was defeated by my lack of willpower. But the exercise plan definitely recorded an increase in my activity in the weeks that I used the system. Whether that was entirely due to MiLife, I’m not so sure – most of the increase came in the low-level exercise – the jogging or other aerobic exercise I would have done anyway.

So a partial success for me, but is it worth the £99 it costs for the basic equipment and a year’s subscription to the website? It might not be as expensive as a personal trainer, but if MiLife is hoping people will put their hands in their tracksuit pockets, the technology needs to be more impressive.

• For more information, see milife.com

• This article was amended on Wednesday 14 January 2009. Milife, a computer based personal training system, costs £99 for a year’s website subscription and all the basic equipment, not £200, as we said above. This has been corrected.

The New York Times ran this today as part of their coverage of the huge technology trade show C.E.S. The giant toy firm Mattel have launched a mind control toy – no really. We have one of these gadgets already in our house of course. I think I’ll have a go…

Each year at the Consumer Electronics Show there is at least one bizarre novelty product that captures folks’ attention. This year, the honor belongs to a game coming from Mattel that challenges players to control a ping-pong ball with their minds.

Mindflex, as it is called, is drawing large, amused crowds and lots of interested press coverage. Players strap on headsets that are designed to read theta brainwaves, typically associated with alertness and concentration. By focusing or relaxing, a player can control the speed of a fan that elevates a lightweight purple ball, and then must try to turn a knob by hand to guide the ball through various hoops in an obstacle course.

I took a stab at it, and maybe it was Obi-Wan’s instructions to Luke from “Star Wars” distractedly reverberating in my head, but I did not get the ball anywhere close to the hoop.

Mindflex will go on sale this fall for $80.

The New York Times ran a story today about what a cough actually looks like. As everyone I know has one at the moment….I thought you should take a look. And there’s interesting stuff about Schlieren photography, which I had never heard of before…

The image, published online Oct. 9 by The New England Journal of Medicine, was created by schlieren photography, which “takes an invisible phenomenon and turns it into a visible picture,” said the engineering professor, Gary Settles, who is the director of the university’s gas dynamics laboratory.

Schlieren is German for “streaks”; in this case it refers to regions of different densities in a gas or a liquid, which can be photographed as shadows using a special technique.

“In my lab we use this technique a lot,” Dr. Settles said. “Often it’s used for other things, like in supersonic wind tunnels, to show shock waves around high-speed aircraft.”

The process involves a small, bright light source, precisely placed lenses, a curved mirror, a razor blade that blocks part of the light beam and other tools that make it possible to see and photograph disturbances in the air. In the world of gas dynamics, a cough is merely “a turbulent jet of air with density changes.” Though coughs spread tuberculosis, SARS, influenza and other diseases, surprisingly little is known about them. “We don’t have a good understanding of the air flow,” Dr. Settles said.

To map a cough, he teamed up with Dr. Julian Tang, a virus expert from Singapore. A healthy student provided the cough. The expelled air, traveling at 18 miles per hour, mixed with cooler surrounding air and produced “temperature differences that bend light rays by different amounts,” Dr. Settles said.

He went on: “The next thing is, you get a couple of people in front of the mirror talking, or one coughs on another, and you see how the air flow moves, how people infect one another. Or you look at how coughing can spread airborne infection in a hospital. This is really a suggestion for how we might study all that. The techniques used in wind tunnels can be used to study human diseases.”

Other schlieren images show the churning air and shock waves that emanate from a pistol’s firing; an Airedale sniffing a small flower; and the unseen, shimmering world around a candle burning in a breeze.

The final photograph, in a full-scale mock-up of an aircraft cabin, captures in microseconds the flash of an explosion under a mannequin in an airplane seat and the propagation of shock waves into the cabin. The blast was a re-creation of a terrorist’s attempt in 1994 to bring down a Philippine Airlines flight with a nitroglycerin bomb. The plane did not crash, but the explosion did kill the passenger seated over the bomb. The simulation used a less intense explosion than the actual bombing.

“The simulation helps to understand how the energy of an onboard blast reverberates around the cabin,” Dr. Settles said, “and it is also useful to check the results of computer blast simulations.”

I read about this on the internet today then found that the Guardian had reported on it – and included an astonishing and slightly disturbing video – click here to see it. The article is from Apopo’s own website.

To speed up the process of demining, mine detection rats are used to directly indicate the positions of buried landmines. On average, it takes a rat less than half an hour to search a 100m2 box.

The rat is guided by a search string, which is connected between its two trainers. The rat moves systematically up and down the search string, processing lane by lane through the suspected box. Both trainers take position at opposite sides of the box in the safe lane, fixing the search string to the lower leg. When a rat reaches the end of the box, the operators make a lateral step, and the rat moves into the next lane. A box or lane system provides the safe access lanes for the trainers. APOPO is using 5 by 20 meter boxes, which means that the rat has to search 40 lanes of half a meter to clear one box.

The rat indicates the position of a landmine by scratching the surface at the spot. Being lightweight, they do not set off the explosive devices. In a training situation, the trainer clicks upon a correct indication by the rat and the animal will moves to the trainer to get its reward. A second person, the observer, takes notes on the behavior and performance of the rat while working.
Typically, one to three rats are used consecutively to search an area. The number of rats to be used depends on the operational scenario and the combination with other search techniques. Quality control behind other detectors or a confirmation search behind a mechanical clearance will require less animals compared to primary detection.
After the rat has been fully trained on the training fields in Tanzania, a series of blind tests is carried out to assess its performance. If the animal meets the desired requirements, it will be selected for de-mining operations. As with dogs, the rats are re-calibrated on the specific mines found in the demining operations, before being deployed.

This article was written by Brad Stone and appeared in the New York Times.
I loved it because it gives us a really fascinating insight into how one might go about stealing 41 million different credit card numbers using such techniques as “war driving” “sniffing” and fake VPN’s or virtual private networks.

Federal prosecutors have charged 11 people with stealing more than 41 million credit and debit card numbers, cracking what officials said on Tuesday appeared to be the largest hacking and identity theft ring ever exposed.

The thieves focused on major national retail chains like OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, BJ’s Wholesale Club, the Sports Authority and T. J. Maxx — the discount clothes retailer that first suggested the existence of the ring early last year, when it said its systems had been breached by hackers.

Underscoring the multinational, collaborative aspect of organized crime today, three of the defendants are United States citizens, one is from Estonia, three are from Ukraine, two are from China and one is from Belarus. The name and whereabouts of the final defendant are unknown.

Federal officials said a principal organizer of the ring was Albert Gonzalez, a man from Miami who was indicted on Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Boston on charges of computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy and other charges. If convicted on all counts, Mr. Gonzalez would face life in prison.

Mr. Gonzalez and several in his cohort drove around and scanned the wireless networks of retailers to find security holes — known as “war driving,” according to prosecutors. Once the thieves identified technical weaknesses in the networks, they installed so-called sniffer programs, obtained from collaborators overseas.

Those programs tapped into the retailers’ networks for processing credit cards and intercepted customers’ PINs and debit and credit numbers that were stored there. The thieves then spirited that information away to computers in the United States, Latvia and Ukraine.

Officials say the conspirators sold credit card numbers online and imprinted other stolen numbers on the magnetic stripes of blank cards so that they could withdraw thousands of dollars from A.T.M.’s.

“Computer networks and the Internet are an indispensable part of the world economy. But even as they provide extraordinary opportunities for legitimate commerce and communication, they also provide extraordinary opportunities for criminals,” said Michael B. Mukasey, the United States attorney general, at a news conference in Boston to announce the indictments.

Mr. Gonzalez was first arrested by the Secret Service in 2003 on similar charges. He was subsequently placed on supervised pretrial release and became an informant to the agency in its campaign against organizers of ShadowCrew, a bulletin board where hackers traded stolen financial information.

But prosecutors said that Mr. Gonzalez continued his criminal activities and tried to warn one of his conspirators, Damon Patrick Toey, to ensure that Mr. Toey would not be identified or arrested in the operation against ShadowCrew. Mr. Toey was among those indicted on Tuesday in Massachusetts.

“As soon as we became aware that Mr. Gonzalez was also working with criminals and getting them information, we immediately took action,” said Mark Sullivan, director of the Secret Service.

A lawyer for Mr. Gonzalez could not be located.

To sell card numbers on the black market, the group turned to Maksym Yastremskiy of Ukraine and Aleksandr Suvorov of Estonia, who were also charged, according to prosecutors.

Mr. Yastremskiy, thought to be a major figure in the international sale of stolen credit card information, was apprehended in July 2007 on vacation in Turkey and is in prison awaiting trial on charges including credit card theft. The United States has asked Turkey to extradite him.

The indictments shed more light on the breach into the stores of TJX, the owner of T. J. Maxx. In 2005, Christopher Scott, another man who was charged, compromised wireless access points at a Marshalls in Miami and used them to download payment information from computers at TJX headquarters in Framingham, Mass., prosecutors said.

The following year, prosecutors said, the conspirators established a virtual private network connection into TJX’s payment processing server and successfully uploaded a sniffer program.

In public financial filings, TJX said it had spent around $130 million on matters related to the break-in, including legal settlements, and it expected to spend an additional $23 million in the 2009 fiscal year.

Federal officials did not have an overall tally for the amount of money stolen by the ring, but they offered some glimpses into its profitability. In the indictment against Mr. Gonzalez, federal officials asked that he be forced to forfeit more than $1.6 million, among other assets.

“These guys were obviously sophisticated and organized,” said Toby Weiss, chief executive of Application Security, a database security firm. “In this economy, we can’t have people afraid to spend.”

I found this story in today’s Independent. Interesting because someone once messed around with one of my son’s Facebook entries which caused him some distress – but building a whole fake one is a different story and proved the undoing of the guy below.

A businessman whose personal details were “laid bare” in fake libellous entries on the Facebook social networking website was awarded £22,000 damages today against a former friend who created the profile.

Mathew Firsht, managing director of Applause Store Productions Ltd, sued an old schoolfriend, freelance cameraman Grant Raphael, for libel and misuse of private information.

A judge at the High Court in London ruled that Mr Raphael’s defence to the action – that the entry was created by mischievous party gate-crashers at his flat – was “built on lies”.

Deputy Judge Richard Parkes QC awarded Mr Firsht £15,000 for libel and £2,000 for breach of privacy.

Mr Firsht’s company, which finds audiences for TV and radio shows and provides warm-up services for live audiences, including the evictions on Big Brother, was awarded £5,000 for libel.

Mr Firsht accused Mr Raphael of creating a false personal profile, and a company profile called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”, from a computer at the flat where Mr Raphael was living in Hampstead, north west London, in June last year.

Mr Raphael claimed that “strangers” who attended an impromptu party at the address that day sneaked off to a spare bedroom and created the profiles on his PC.

The profiles were on the site for 16 days until Mr Firsht’s brother spotted them and they were taken down by Facebook.

The judge heard that the private information concerned Mr Firsht’s whereabouts, activities, birthday and relationship status and falsely indicated his sexual orientation and political views.

It said that he was “Looking for: whatever I can get” in terms of relationships and was signed up to groups including Gay in the Wood…Borehamwood, and Gay Jews in London.

Mr Firsht complained about allegations that he owed substantial sums of money which he had repeatedly avoided paying by lying, and that he and his company were not to be trusted in the financial conduct of their business and represented a serious credit risk.

He accused Mr Raphael of bearing a grudge against him since they fell out in 2000 and of creating a false Facebook entry with the aim of causing him anxiety and embarrassment.

Recounting the “unfortunate dispute between two former friends”, the judge said Mr Firsht’s company provided audiences for popular shows such as Big Brother, The X Factor and Top Gear.

He was personally involved in overseeing the audience operation, and his credibility and reputation were very important to him.

Mr Raphael, a freelance lighting cameraman, also spent much of his time working in television.

Mr Firsht, now in his late 30s, became good friends with Mr Raphael in Brighton, where they went to school together.

They fell out around six years ago over a business dispute. Mr Firsht, who said he did not hold grudges, forgot about the episode and moved on to become very successful.

“He is plainly a businessman of single-minded drive and dedication, and he did not strike me as being the kind of man to waste valuable time on ancient disputes,” the judge said.

By contrast, Mr Raphael’s company went into voluntary liquidation and, by the time the present dispute arose, “Mr Firsht was prospering and highly successful, and Mr Raphael was not”.

The judge described as “utterly far-fetched” Mr Raphael’s claim that a complete and random stranger visiting his flat for the first time used his computer for more than an hour, without being observed, to create a false and hurtful profile containing information that few people apart from Mr Raphael could have known.

Mr Raphael, as a witness in court, was “glib and loquacious, always prepared, it seemed to me, to talk his way out of a difficulty, with no apparent insight into the implausibility of some of his answers”.

The judge said Mr Firsht, a very private person, was shocked and extremely upset by the gross invasion of his privacy and the fact that personal details, including false details about his sexuality, had been “laid bare for all to see”.

The damage he suffered was made worse by his being compelled to endure an expensive and time-consuming court process to achieve vindication in the face of Mr Raphael’s lies.

He would have accepted an apology if Mr Raphael had offered one at an early stage, thus avoiding the distress and expense of litigation.

I read about this first in Wired, but the original story is from New Scientist. The Wired article suggests that this device might be used to beam subliminal advertising messages directly into your brain. The voices in my head made me buy it…..The picture is by uberpup

A US company claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people’s heads.

The device – dubbed MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) – exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognisable sounds.

The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses.

Lev Sadovnik of the Sierra Nevada Corporation in the US is working on the system, having started work on a US navy research contract. The navy’s report states that the effect was shown to be effective.

MEDUSA involves a microwave auditory effect “loud” enough to cause discomfort or even incapacitation. Sadovnik says that normal audio safety limits do not apply since the sound does not enter through the eardrums.

“The repel effect is a combination of loudness and the irritation factor,” he says. “You can’t block it out.”

Sadovnik says the device will work thanks to a new reconfigurable antenna developed by colleague Vladimir Manasson. It steers the beam electronically, making it possible to flip from a broad to a narrow beam, or aim at multiple targets simultaneously.

Sadovnik says the technology could have non-military applications. Birds seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, he says, so it might be used to scare away unwanted flocks.

Sadovnik has also experimented with transmitting microwave audio to people with outer ear problems that impair their normal hearing.

James Lin of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago says that MEDUSA is feasible in principle.

He has carried out his own work on the technique, and was even approached by the music industry about using microwave audio to enhance sound systems, he told New Scientist.

“But is it going to be possible at the power levels necessary?” he asks. Previous microwave audio tests involved very “quiet” sounds that were hard to hear, a high-power system would mean much more powerful – and potentially hazardous – shockwaves.

“I would worry about what other health effects it is having,” says Lin. “You might see neural damage.”

Sierra Nevada says that a demonstration version could be built in a year, with a transportable system following within 18 months. They are currently seeking funding for the work from the US Department of Defence.

Wired guy David Hambling says

Dr. Sadovnik also makes the intriguing suggestion that, instead of being used at high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Sadovnik even suggests subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard (a notion also spotted on the US Army’s voice-to-skull page). While the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion is dubious, I can see there might be some organizations interested in this capability. And if that doesn’t work, you could always point the thing at birds. They seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, so it might be used to scare flocks away from wind farms — or shoo pigeons from city streets.

The big robot dog by Boston Dynamics. Found by accident on the internet. Not a story? Is a documentary a story? BigDog was a military back pack carrier originally – then a lot more. Check out Boston Dynamics website, then speculate on future usage. The noise emitted by the robot dog in the video is annoying so be prepared with the mute. What is does is pretty fantastic though. Click the picture to see the video. The facts below are from popsci

Meet BigDog, a mechanical mutt that does more than snare Frisbees and irrigate fire hydrants. It totes hundreds of pounds of gear so soldiers won’t have to, and it will never spook under fire. Developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from the U.S. military, the BigDog prototype is arguably the world’s most ambitious legged robot. Its stability and awareness of its own orientation make it the first robot that can handle the unknown challenges of the battlefield. The Great Dane-size ´bot can trot more than three miles an hour, climb inclines of up to 45 degrees, and carry up to 120 pounds-even in rough terrain impenetrable to wheeled or tracked vehicles. But this one is just a puppy; Boston Dynamics expects the next iteration, ready this summer, to be at least twice as fast and carry more than twice as much.

BigDog’s body is a steel frame that houses a one-cylinder gasoline engine driving a hydraulic system, a computer, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that uses a fiber-optic laser gyroscope and a suite of accelerometers to track its movement and position. These devices function together with the legs to create BigDog´s precision gait.

Each of the robot´s aluminum legs has three joints that the computer can reposition 500 times a second using hydraulic actuators. The joints are fitted with sensors that measure force and position, and the computer cross-references this data with information from the IMU to determine where the legs have to be to keep the ‘bot upright and moving in the right direction. By regulating the flow of hydraulic fluid to each joint, the computer precisely places each paw.

And the robo-rover has eyes: It sports a stereo camera and laser scanner mounted where the head would go, if it had a head. Although these don’t currently influence navigation, the next BigDog will use them to read the terrain ahead and spot obstacles.

For now, the robot is remote-controlled, but future versions will come unleashed, able to make intelligent decisions about their course without guidance from humans. The more powerful, autonomous BigDog will be ready for battle within the next eight years.

Hmmm. Personally I don’t like anything which impinges upon the privacy – and rights to browse without policing- of the individual – but as a marketing person I can see where this idea is coming from. Difficult, but interesting. This article appeared in the Economist and enjoys their usual high standard of reporting and writing. I’ve asked my ISP whether they have signed up for this. I don’t expect a reply.

IS IT a worrying invasion of privacy for web surfers, or a lucrative new business model for online advertising? A new “behavioural” approach to targeting internet advertisements, being pioneered by companies such as Phorm, NebuAd and FrontPorch, is said to be both of these things. The idea is that special software, installed in the networks of internet-service providers (ISPs), intercepts webpage requests generated by their subscribers as they roam the net. The pages in question are delivered in the usual way, but are also scanned for particular keywords in order to build up a profile of each subscriber’s interests. These profiles can then be used to target advertisements more accurately.

Suppose a web user is idly surfing a travel blog one Sunday afternoon. He visits pages containing words such as “holiday”, “flight” and “hotel”. The behavioural-targeting software watching him inside the ISP’s network registers and categorises this apparent interest in travel. Later, when he logs on to a social-networking site to see what his friends are up to, advertisements for an airline or hotel chain pop up alongside the postings and photos. The depressing prospect of having to return to work the next day prompts him to click on an advertisement and book a minibreak for the next weekend.

To advertisers, this all sounds great. Behavioural-targeting firms are doing the rounds in Europe and America offering the prospect of working out what web surfers are thinking, perhaps even before they know themselves. If this really works, advertisers will be prepared to pay more to place ads, since they are more likely to be clicked on. That in turn means that websites will be able to charge more for their advertising slots. A small cut also goes to the ISP that originally gathered the profile information.

The companies involved suggest that internet users will welcome all this, since more accurate targeting will turn internet advertising from an annoying distraction into a genuinely helpful service. “This idea that we don’t provide a service by doing this is as far from the truth as it’s possible to be,” says Kent Ertugrul, the boss of Phorm. “It creates a situation where there’s less rubbish bombarding you.”

But not everyone likes the idea. Opponents of behavioural targeting have kicked up the biggest fuss in Britain, which is where the technology seems to be making the most progress: the three biggest ISPs (BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk), which together account for around 70% of the market, have all signed up to use Phorm’s technology. Since news of their plans emerged in February, over 13,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the system. Legal and networking experts have argued that it constitutes an unauthorised wiretap, and is therefore illegal. Richard Clayton, a computer-security expert at Cambridge University who has taken a close look at Phorm’s systems, did not like what he saw. Proponents of behavioural targeting, he concluded, “assume that if only people understood all the technical details they’d be happy. I have, and I’m still not happy at all.”

Phorm, which is now trying to get American ISPs to adopt its technology too, emphasises that consumers will be given the option to opt out of the system if they do not wish to use it. It points out that information about individuals’ surfing habits remains within the custody of the ISP (which already has access to such information anyway), and that user profiles merely associate keywords with an anonymous serial number, rather than a name. Its profiling system ignores sensitive pages, such as those from online-banking sites, and will not be used to target advertising for pornographic sites.

Critics worry, however, that behavioural targeting fundamentally undermines the trusting relationship between ISPs and their subscribers, by allowing a third party to monitor what millions of people are doing. They also worry about Phorm’s previous behaviour. Until last year it was known as 121Media, and it gathered information about internet users’ interests by getting them to download “adware”, which was included in bundles with other pieces of software. This software then monitored users’ surfing habits and used the resulting data to target “pop up” advertisements of the kind that once blighted the web.

All this was legal, but it won 121Media few friends among PC users, who found its software difficult to remove from their machines. The revelation that the company, since renamed Phorm, conducted a secret trial of its new technology with BT in 2006 and 2007, monitoring thousands of customers without telling them, has not helped its image.

As the controversy swirls, Google, the 800-pound gorilla of the internet-advertising industry, is quietly watching. ISPs around the world have looked on jealously as Google has grown rich on their subscribers’ web-browsing, while the ISPs have been reduced to “dumb pipes”, ferrying internet traffic for subscribers but unable to win a share of their online spending.

Phorm and its ilk promise to change that, by offering ISPs a chance to get their hands on a slice of the fast-growing online-advertising pie. Behavioural-targeting firms also like to portray themselves as feisty underdogs taking on mighty Google, which is itself the cause of concern about online privacy. Phorm points out that its system does not retain detailed information about web usage as it builds its user profiles—in contrast to Google, which keeps records of users’ search queries for up to two years. (The European Commission recently called upon Google to delete such information after six months.) “If people knew what was stored right now, they’d be shocked,” says Phorm’s Mr Ertugrul. His company’s system, he says, is “the model for privacy online”.

Even so, most web users are happy to strike an implicit deal with Google: it provides an excellent free search engine in return for the ability to display relevant advertisements. The quid pro quo with behavioural targeting, says Mr Ertugrul, is that ISPs will start making money from online advertising, which they can then spend on upgrading their networks, without raising prices for subscribers. “This is a way of funding the internet,” he says.

Behavioural targeting is not necessarily a bad idea, but imposing it without telling people is likely to annoy them when they find out about it. Without adequate disclosure, an “opt out” system looks like snooping; but an “opt in” system, given all the fuss, now looks like a tough sell.

I first heard this story on BBC Radio 4 when they were discussing the use of cognitive brain enhancers to boost academic performance. It appears to first come from an article in Nature magazine by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir – but I found a version published here.Basically, you’re about to take an exam – would you like an espresso with a double shot of methylphenidate…..or just soft brown sugar?

Would you boost your own brain power? Cognitive-enhancing drugs are increasingly being used in non-medical situations such as shift work and by active military personnel. This is where the debate about their use begins
in earnest. How should the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs be regulated in healthy people? Should their use always be monitored by healthcare professionals? If offered by a friend or colleague, would you, the reader, take a pill that would help you to better focus, plan or remember? Under what conditions would you feel comfortable taking a pill, and under what conditions would you decline? The answers to such questions hinge on many factors, including the exact drug being discussed, its short-term and long-term benefits and risks, and the purpose for which it is used. There are instances in which most people would agree that the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs should be prevented or at least regulated and monitored, such as by healthy children or in competitive settings (including entrance exams to university). There are also situations in which many would agree that the use of drugs to improve concentration or planning may be tolerated, if not encouraged, such as by air-traffic controllers, surgeons and nurses who work long shifts. One can even imagine situations where such enhancing-drug-taking would be recommended, such as for airport-security screeners, or by soldiers in active combat. But there are no straightforward answers and any fruitful debate must address each situation in turn.
How would you react if you knew your
colleagues — or your students — were
taking cognitive enhancers?
In academia, we know that a number of our scientific colleagues in the United States and the United Kingdom already use modafinil to counteract the effects of jetlag, to enhance productivity or mental energy, or to deal with demanding and important intellectual challenges . Modafinil and other drugs are available online, but their non- prescription and long-term use has not been monitored in healthy individuals. For many, it seems that the immediate and tangible benefits of taking these drugs are more persuasive than concerns about legal status and adverse effects. There are clear trends suggesting that the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate on college campuses is on the rise, and is becoming more commonplace in ever younger students.
Universities may have to decide whether to ban drug use altogether, or to tolerate it in some situations (whether to enable all-night study sessions or to boost alertness during lectures).
The debate over cognitive-enhancing drugs must also consider the expected magnitude of the benefits and weigh them against the risks and side effects of each drug. Most readers would not consider that having a double shot
of espresso or a soft drink containing caffeine would confer an unfair advantage at work.
The use of caffeine to enhance concentration is commonplace, despite having side effects in at least some individuals
Often overlooked in media reports on cognitive enhancers is the fact that many of the effects in healthy individuals are transient and small-to-moderate in size. Just as one would hardly propose that a strong cup of coffee could be the secret of academic achievement or faster career advancement, the use of such drugs does not necessarily entail cheating. Cognitive enhancers with small or no side effects but with moderate enhancing effects that alleviate forgetfulness or enable one to focus better on the task at hand during a tiring day at work would be unlikely to meet much objection.
And does it matter if it is delivered as a pill or a drink? Would you, the reader, welcome a cognitive enhancer delivered in a beverage that is readily obtainable and affordable, and has a moderate yet noticeable effect
on your concentration and alertness?……
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I will be looking for more threads on this story in coming weeks.

This article appeared this week in Scientific American. Head Games: Video Controller Taps into Brain Waves. Very like the SQUID headset they used in Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days (seminal viewing if you have never seen it) this headset allows a measure of control to gamers previously unknown – but not of course unimagined. There’s a video of one of the inventors from Emotive doing a demo here – it’s clearly early days but interesting all the same. The full article is below.

No matter how hard you try, your mind can’t bend a spoon or channel the powers of a Jedi knight. Thanks to a new headset under development by neuroengineering company Emotiv Systems, however, you may soon be able to do this and more via the magic of video games.

By the end of this year, San Francisco–based Emotiv’s sensor-laden EPOC headset will enable gamers to use their own brain activity to interact with the virtual worlds where they play. The $299 headset’s 14 strategically placed head sensors are at the ends of what look like stretched, plastic fingers that detect patterns produced by the brain’s electrical activity. These neural signals are then narrowed down and interpreted in 30 possible ways as real-time intentions, emotions or facial expressions that are reflected in virtual world characters and actions in a way that a joystick or other type of controller could not hope to match.

The EPOC detects brain activity noninvasively using electroencephalography (EEG), a measure of brain waves, via external sensors along the scalp that pick up the electrical bustle in various parts of the furrowed surface of the brain’s cortex, a region that handles higher order thoughts. Added to the challenge of attaining clear signals was making sense of them. “The human cortex is unique like a fingerprint,” says Emotiv president Tan Le. “Even though a signal may emanate from [the same region] deep inside the brain, by the time it gets [projected] to the cortex and the surface of the scalp, the signal appears very random. We had to come up with a mathematical algorithm to unfold the cortex and match the signal to its source.”

Emotiv solved this brain–computer interface problem with the help of a multidisciplinary team that included neuroscientists, who understood the brain at a systems level (rather than individual cells), and computer engineers with a knack for machine learning and pattern recognition. Over the last four years, the company has conducted thousands of EEG recordings on hundreds of volunteers—not all gamers—as they experienced virtual scenarios that elicited various emotions, facial expressions and cognitive demands. The aim was to find a revealing brain activity that many people shared—a needle in a haystack of frenzied signals. Now, the EPOC allows users to fine-tune settings that allow it to pick up on even the subtlest of smirks.

When building these algorithms commenced two years ago, it had taken up to 72 hours for a bank of powerful computers to run through a mere 10 seconds of individual brain data and extract important features. Sorting through a seemingly endless stream of recordings eventually led Emotiv to find consistent signal patterns that revealed specific mental experiences. “Through a large enough sample size,” Le says, “we were able to get some consistency around the population to attain a high degree of confidence that it accurately measures an emotional state.”

Homing in on these revealing brain waves allows the EPOC system to quickly deduce a player’s emotional qualities and react to it by, for example, changing the music of a game in real-time to match the user’s tension or throw in more villains in case a player seemed to get bored of a certain world.

Streamlining the neuro-headset, which Le describes as a “high-fidelity EEG-acquisition device,” was another obstacle that involved “loads” of sensors collecting as much data as possible to pinpoint informative spots around the skull where brain activity best revealed a person’s thoughts and emotions. “The challenge has been to optimize the number of sensors to get resolution that is needed to allow robust and accurate detection but at the same time not have a ’swim cap’ that is hot and uncomfortable,” she adds.

An EEG device that consists of only 14 sensors and can simply be placed snuggly on the head, without signals becoming significantly dampened and muddled, is also novel. Clinicians and researchers often go through great pains to maximize EEG signals by abrading the top layer of skin and applying a conductive gel where the scalp is in contact with the sensors—something not even the passionate gamer would endure. “They must have developed amplifiers that can amplify the signal better,” says Ethan Buch, a brain–computer interface researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, who uses an EEG recorder with 64 sensors. Buch also suspects that the facial expressions that the EPOC detects are based more on the electrical activity of facial and scalp muscles than the brain per se. Although the electrical activity of muscles, he explained, is normally considered as artifact noise that needs to be filtered out to attain clean EEG signals that are of interest, they are still informative about how facial muscles move, such as during a wink. Tan agrees, saying that in their classification strategy some of the EPOC’s detections are based on muscle movements.

At this stage in development and patenting, Emotiv still has to be secretive about the advances that made the EPOC possible. So far, Emotiv’s intentions are not to replace gaming hand controllers but rather to complement them by including with the headset software, the EmoKey, which associates a game’s unique keystroke command patterns with brain activity. Emotiv also offers a development kit for other game developers, such as Nintendo, to potentially integrate the brain–computer interface technology into their products.

Yet the EPOC’s expressive qualities will most likely be a hit in games that create hyper-realistic alternative realities, such as in virtual worlds like Linden Lab’s Second Life, where social encounters play a big part of the experience. Rather than tap out a “wink” or “frown” command on a keyboard, players will be able to rely on their natural facial expressions to intuitively reveal how they feel to other inhabitants.

Le is not counting out the idea that the EPOC may be developed further to one day allow players to mentally articulate fighting moves that still require the speed of their fingers. But for now, the device is meant more for enhancing the human and interactive component of gaming and virtual world habitation. After all, this is as close as we’re going to get to emulating Luke Skywalker’s ability to pluck his X-wing from the swamps of the planet Dagobah.

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I found this story yesterday in the printed edition of Metro. Basically some adventurous types have slung a steel cable across a mountain valley in Northern Italy near Pietrapertosa around 1020 metres above sea level – and you get onto this contraption and “fly” across. Hmmmm. The only articles I could find from people who had done it were in Italian, so I have just included a picture this time. The journey is 1500 metres long – about a mile. Any contributions from people who’ve done it? my@justastory.co.uk.

I read this article in physorg.com today – an amusing notion I thought. However, the thought of a better performing condom certainly would appeal to most people.

You wouldn’t normally associate golf balls with condoms but for University of Queensland researcher Dr Darren Martin, it is all about covering things.

Dr Martin, a materials scientist with UQ’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, has developed a unique polyurethane coating that is thinner, stronger and more flexible than what is currently available and could lead to better golf balls and condoms.

The secret to his discovery is synthetic nanoparticles – nanoscale disc-like particles –that can be added to conventional thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) to extend its benefits and performance. TPUs are used in everything from surfing leg ropes and rollerblade wheels, to soles on shoes and textiles and fabrics like Lycra.

And while many great scientific discoveries can be attributed to a burning desire to help humankind, Dr Martin’s inspiration was much simpler.

“I’m a single-figure golfer and I was getting frustrated with paying a lot of money for balls that only end up getting damaged after a few holes,” Dr Martin said.

“We had been working with these nanocomposites for a while and this just seemed like a natural fit.

“By coating the ball in a thin layer of our new polyurethane it can make them much more scuff resistant.”

While in talks with a golf ball manufacturer now, Dr Martin and his team are also exploring other applications.

“The condom is another example of where our technology might be applied,” he said.

“We could make softer and thinner condoms that allow greater sensitivity and are actually stronger than current ones, while also reducing the risk of allergic response which some people have to latex rubber. We can all see the advantages of that application.”

Not limited to the golf green and the bedroom, Dr Martin said the potential applications for the technology are expanding.

“Wherever polyurethane is used, our technology can be used,” he said.

“Areas such as implantable medical device components, the mining industry and new types of textiles similar to Lycra and Spandex.”

He said he was doing this through TenasiTech Pty Ltd, a start-up company formed around the technology by UniQuest – the main technology transfer company for UQ – with the company driving the business development and capital raising to further develop the technology towards products.

I heard Noel Sharkey – robotics and artificial intelligence expert, talking on BBC Radio 4 this morning prior to his address to the National Institute. He was speaking about robotic weapons which we are actually already using – not some futuristic Terminator style scenario. Interesting, but very, very scarey. Yahoo News ran the same feature today.

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

“They pose a threat to humanity,” said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain’s Royal United Services Institute.

(To watch the original movie, click on the picture – not suitable for young people, or those who don’t like to watch “intelligent” robots gunning innocent people down)

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world — from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones — can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

It we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders “are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war,” he said.

Several countries, led by the United States, have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. “I don’t know why that has not happened already,” he said.

But even more worrisome, he continued, is the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

“I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me,” Sharkey said.

Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked closely with the US military on robotics, agrees that the shift towards autonomy will be gradual.

But he is not convinced that robots don’t have a place on the front line.

“Robotics systems may have the potential to out-perform humans from a perspective of the laws of war and the rules of engagement,” he told a conference on technology in warfare at Stanford University last month.

The sensors of intelligent machines, he argued, may ultimately be better equipped to understand an environment and to process information. “And there are no emotions that can cloud judgement, such as anger,” he added.

Nor is there any inherent right to self-defence.

For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.

Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine — even an intelligent one — how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.

But even if technical barriers are overcome, the prospect of armies increasingly dependent on remotely-controlled or autonomous robots raises a host of ethical issues that have barely been addressed.

Arkin points out that the US Department of Defense’s 230 billion dollar Future Combat Systems programme — the largest military contract in US history — provides for three classes of aerial and three land-based robotics systems.

“But nowhere is there any consideration of the ethical implications of the weaponisation of these systems,” he said.

For Sharkey, the best solution may be an outright ban on autonomous weapons systems. “We have to say where we want to draw the line and what we want to do — and then get an international agreement,” he said.

I read in the Times Online today that the protection system which stops users from copying iTunes has been circumvented by a hacker called DVD Jon. Whatever you think about the morality of the issue, I love the fact that DVD Jon looks like an inoffensive mild-mannered Clark Kent kind of character. There’s a big entry about his life story and track record of strange hacking achievements here. Robin Hood? Hyper villain? Does Steve Jobs have enough money? Do you?

A notorious Norwegian hacker known as DVD Jon is preparing for another run-in with the music industry after he released software that lets iPod owners copy music and videos bought from iTunes and play it on other devices.

The program allows people to drag and drop songs from iTunes into a folder on their desktop, which in turn copies the files to other devices such as mobile phones and games consoles via the web.

In doing so, the software breaks the copy protection – known as ‘digital rights management’ or DRM – that is built into all music that is bought from iTunes. Music bought from iTunes can be played only on the iPod.

DoubleTwist, DVD Jon’s company, maintains that its service is legal, but lawyers said that Apple would almost certainly seek to shut it down because the law now specifically targeted technologies which attempted to circumvent measures such as DRM.

The $299 headest will read facial expressions and simple thoughts such as ‘lift’ or ‘drop’ to control in-game actions

The hacker has previously enabled iPod owners to play music bought from websites other than iTunes.

DoubleTwist’s new software will initially enable files to be copied to Nokia N-series mobile phones, Sony Ericsson’s Walkman and Cybershot handsets, as well as any smartphone powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system.

The program gets around Apple’s DRM software by replaying a song in fast-forward and taking a copy of the audio track, using a process similar to that by which a CD is ‘ripped’ – or copied – to a computer.

About a hundred songs can be converted in half an hour, doubleTwist said, although there is a 5 per cent loss of sound quality – about the same as when a CD is copied.

A spokesman for the San Fransisco-based company said that its software was legal, because it only allowed a user who has already purchased music to copy it. “All we are facilitating are friends sending things to one another,” Monique Farantzos, doubleTwists’s chief executive and co-founder, told Reuters.

Lawyers today cast doubt on Ms Farantzos’s claims, however, saying that the law had taken steps to protect Apple’s efforts to control the way its music could be played, and that anyone circumventing measures such as DRM risked being found guilty of copyright infringement.

“I would be astonished if doubleTwist doesn’t get a call from Apple,” Paul Jones, a partner in intellectual property law at the London-based firm Harbottle & Lewis, said.

DVD Jon, whose real name is Jon Lech Johansen, has been an arch-enemy of the music and film industries ever since he released software which broke the copy protection on Hollywood films, aged 16.

In 2003, Mr Johansen, now 24, developed the first of several programs which attempted to bypass the system developed by Apple for synchronising its iTunes store with iPods, leading to one of a series of run-ins with the firm.

The civil rights group Liberty are in the news today with a statement about intrusion into people’s private lives brought about by the ready accessibility of cheap CCTV kits. Maplins the electronics retailer – see this 5 mm square beauty for £25 there – reports a 260% rise in sales of these kits last year. When I looked for more info, I found this good story on the subject written by Jay Rayner from the Observer . It’s over 12 months old but it hits the nail on the head better than today’s stories.

I am walking through London Bridge Underground station when a public announcement brings me to a halt. It starts politely – ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’ – before lurching into something a New York shrink might well call passive-aggressive: ‘Please be aware that, for your safety, this station is monitored with closed-circuit television.’ You do not need to be a professor of linguistics to be intrigued by the circumlocutions of that one. There’s the stern tones of ‘please be aware’ chased by the motherliness of ‘for your safety’. Finally, there’s the blatant threat of the hardware. This was clearly two messages in one. What I was supposed to hear was: ‘This place is safe.’ What the criminals thronging around me were supposed to hear was: ‘Oi! Bad people: don’t even think of doing anything dodgy in our station because we are watching you.’

And they are. I scan the ceiling and quickly find more than a dozen cameras, some obvious in their rectangular white housing with the tube logo on the outside, others disguised behind black domes. I should not be surprised to find them here. There are more than 6,000 CCTV cameras across London’s tube network, which transport bosses say will rise to 12,000 over the next five years. I step outside the station and look up at the ‘CCTV Zone’, that space six feet above our heads, between ground and first floor, where the cameras seem to grow like so much mould on year-old jam. Again they are everywhere: peering down at bank doorways and over cash machines; looking down the aisles of my local supermarket; tucked into the ceiling at the newsagent’s. There is a man near where I live who has one on the outside of his house.

Again, I shouldn’t be surprised. Britain is CCTV nation. We have more of them than anywhere else in the world. How many more nobody can say. It has been claimed, time and again, that there are four million cameras in Britain and that we are each of us likely to be caught on them 300 times a day, though even the academic who came up with those numbers admits he doesn’t know for sure.

Ask the Austrians whether they think CCTV is a good thing, and only 24 per cent of them will say yes. Ask the British the same question and 90 per cent will give the thumbs up. More than half of us are happy to have them in public toilets, as against just 1.5 per cent of the Austrians. Two-thirds of us want them on our street. We like to be watched. We want to be watched. Or at least you do. Me, I’m not at all happy about it. Conventional wisdom has it that if you’re not up to anything bad you shouldn’t have a problem with being on camera. ‘In terms of providing people both with security and a sense of security, this is a good investment,’ Lord Falconer has said, on behalf of the government.

Surely, though, there are levels of naughtiness? Yes, if I’m mugging old ladies or car jacking, I should be in fear of the law. But what if this impeccably liberal Observer journalist wanted to sneak out and buy a copy of the Sun or Nuts magazine so I could look at pictures of girls in their pants without anyone knowing? Or slack off to KFC to load up on the Colonel’s fat-and-carb combo, as a little light relief from the prissy platefuls I have to swallow as a restaurant critic? These aren’t criminal acts, but they are things I might not wish anybody to know about. And yet I probably couldn’t get away with them today because somewhere there will be a camera watching me. I suddenly feel like my private space has shrunk and that the Great British Public has allowed it to happen. And I want to know why.

Croydon might be able to offer some answers. at its peak, Croydon council operated a network of nearly 500 cameras, reputedly the largest single system in the country, though, as ever with CCTV, no one is entirely sure. ‘We don’t blow our own trumpet,’ says Norman Whalley, the council’s systems officer, ‘But yes, it’s pretty big.’ When he came here 13 years ago there were just 30 cameras, but he has built it up gradually over the past decade at a cost of £7m. Recently, National Car Parks took back the management of around 200 of those cameras, but Whalley still oversees 96 fixed and 145 so-called ‘pan, tilt and zoom’ cameras, which can be directed from the security control room at the council offices here in the centre of Croydon.

He talks enthusiastically about the various systems used. Those that are close by broadcast on microwaves straight into the control room. Others come in on the equivalent of broadband. Some of the cameras are the council’s own. Others belong to Transport for London and are used for traffic monitoring, or enforcement of bus lanes, but they can all be watched here. The police have access to them, too. Next to us, Paul, who has worked here for 19 years and his colleague Vince, who has done it for three, flick between screens: traffic rumbling through the suburbs, or mothers pushing toddlers in buggies. Beside us is a wall of video tapes, six feet high and the same across. Whalley says they hold everything for 31 days.

Nevertheless, is it really possible to catch everything that’s happening, sat in front of the monitors hour after hour? ‘You don’t focus on the same image all day,’ Paul says. ‘You’re flicking with your eyes all the time. After a while it becomes intuition. What draws your attention is someone’s walking pattern.’ Whalley agrees: ‘If a man is walking too close to a girl it might be a pickpocket,’ he says, and the others nod. ‘You notice things other people don’t,’ says Vince. ‘People just lead their lives going from A to B. They don’t see what happens in between.’

They talk about the crimes they have seen and the way they can tell the police exactly what’s going on, if a fight breaks out on a Saturday night, so they know how many officers to send over. It helps them deploy resources. Paul isn’t there to interfere with what people are doing, he says. He’s looking after them. Sometimes in the early hours on a weekend he’ll see a group of young women, clearly drunk, on their way home. Often one will peel off to go home alone. ‘I stay with her,’ Paul says. ‘Following her on each camera as she passes by it, just making sure she’s OK.’

Norman takes me to the new control room, and lets me operate a camera. These are powerful pieces of kit, as they should be at over £4,000 each. The pictures are in colour and are almost of broadcast quality. ‘Each camera has the ability to identify someone of 1.5m in height at a distance of 150m,’ he says, proudly. We use one to close in on the menu outside a cafe. The camera is more than 100m away from the sign but I can still tell that lasagne and chips costs £3.90. Now I pick up a woman walking down the street towards the lens. Simply because I can, I begin to follow her, using the joy stick to pan down.

I don’t admit it to Norman, but there is something deeply intoxicating about being able to do this; to sit here so many miles away, moving a camera to watch in detail as someone goes oblivious about their day. It feels somehow as if I am not just controlling the camera, but controlling the woman, too. Norman rests his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘I think you should stop that.’ I shove the camera away from the woman so it looks back up the street. I think about Paul, looking out for those lone women on their way home, an electronic version of the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire. And I wonder whether the problem is not with CCTV or the way it is used but with the way that I, with my tendency to paranoia, imagine it might be, which is a different thing entirely.

And then I remember Sally Anne Bowman. Sally Anne, a promising model, was sexually assaulted and knifed to death last September, a short distance form her home in South Croydon. There was CCTV footage of her that evening: she was seen at Lloyds Bar in Croydon. She was seen leaving a club at about 1am. She was seen coming back into Croydon by taxi, where she was picked up by her ex-boyfriend who drove her home. All of this was captured on CCTV. After that, the pictures stopped. Sally Anne was killed on a quiet street where there were no cameras. Police are still hunting for her killer.

Though the cameras failed to help in the case of Sally Anne, CCTV is still seen as a Very Good Thing and, to understand why, we have to go back 13 years to the murder of Jamie Bulger. ‘When the abduction happened and we got those incredibly grainy images of Bulger being led away,’ says Peter Fry of the CCTV User Group, ‘the cameras became a major player in a horrific event.’ For a week, those pictures came into our homes and we came to understand that, through these images, the police had been able to establish that the toddler’s abductors were children.

Clive Norris, professor of sociology at Sheffield University, has undertaken detailed research into the use of CCTV in Britain. ‘A moral panic about rising crime rates and what could be done about it accompanied the Bulger case,’ he says. ‘But those pictures also held promise.’

Up to that point, CCTV was rare in Britain. A few cameras were introduced in the Fifties to watch traffic and, by the early Nineties, a couple of local authorities, led by entrepreneurial local politicians, had introduced small schemes. Now, officials within the Crime Prevention Unit of the Home Office began looking at what CCTV could do for them. In 1994 a set of guidelines called CCTV Looking Out For You was published by Michael Howard’s Home Office. On the back cover it announced a city challenge competition, offering a fund of £2m for new CCTV projects which had to be matched with local money. ‘We were completely overwhelmed with applications,’ says Philip Edwards, a former Dixons executive who had been seconded to the Home Office and who co-wrote the guidelines. So there were more competitions and each one was over-subscribed. Between 1994 and 1997 £45m of government funds was pledged to CCTV, all of which had to be matched locally. Since then, New Labour has spent another £170m.

‘This is one of the reasons CCTV grew so strongly here as against in other European countries,’ says Norris. ‘It was centrally funded.’ The other reason was a complete lack of regulation. In places like Germany or Scandinavia a right to privacy is written into the constitution. Here, the only legislation that affected CCTV was a relaxation of the planning laws. Among other things the legislation was designed to make it easier to put up mobile-phone masts to help the networks spread. As a result, the CCTV cameras spread, too. ‘The planning laws also resulted in the death of town centres,’ says Norris. ‘And out-of-town shopping centres became the icon of the age.’ Town centres wanted to look as shiny and secure as the out-of-town shopping centres to attract the retailers back. A thrilling CCTV system seemed to be the best way to make that impression. It was Norris who, in 1998, came up with the estimates of how many cameras there then were in Britain – more than 4m – and how many times each of us might be caught on them – 300. ‘It’s interesting to see those numbers repeated in the media, because they can be described only as guestimates,’ he says.

In the Nineties, before heading up the CCTV User Group, Peter Fry was director of operations for Hart District Council in Northamptonshire. ‘We had a lower-than-average crime rate but our local councillors were still very keen on having CCTV.’ The story was repeated across the country. It didn’t matter whether it actually did reduce crime – they wanted it anyway. In 1996, after Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children in Dunblane, Philip Edwards at the Home Office received countless requests for CCTV to be installed in schools. When he asked why, they said it would stop another Dunblane happening. ‘I told them it wouldn’t. All it would have done at Dunblane was let you watch it happen. CCTV doesn’t solve problems. It’s the people who catch criminals, not the cameras.’

The statistics on crime bear this out. It is true that since 1995 overall crime rates have been dropping in the UK. But a major survey of 14 CCTV schemes published last year showed their impact on local crime rates was either negligible or that crime rates actually went up. At the same time fear of crime has also gone up. Meanwhile, clear-up rates – the number of crimes that the police solve – have gone down.

Of course, only a fool would argue that CCTV can have no impact on crime. We all saw the images after the London bombings of 7 July. Rarely does a week go by without an aspect of some grisly outrage or other being picked up on cameras. As Norris puts it, ‘If you ask leading policemen whether they would rather have CCTV than not, they will always say yes.’

All that aside, one thing is certain: we, its subjects, genuinely do like some of what those cameras pick up. In 2001 an enterprising video producer released Caught in the Act!, a compilation of people shagging in doorways, as recorded by CCTV cameras. It sold very nicely, thank you. Likewise TV shows full of footage of drivers doing stupid things on the roads get huge audiences and then came the phenomenon that is Big Brother. Indeed, CCTV may be one of the first pieces of technology to have directly influenced fashion: after all, what better way is there to hide your identity from the cameras than inside a hoodie?

To see the future of CCTV we need to go to Spitalfields in east London, where the Shoreditch Trust, a local regeneration agency, is piloting a new initiative: CCTV for the masses. Instead of the images only being seen by the likes of Norman Whalley and his team, local residents will be able to watch them, too, on a broadband connection. For all its hip associations, the area is actually the second most deprived in London. The Shoreditch Trust, set up under the government’s New Deal for Communities programme, works with residents to improve everything from education and housing to opportunities for businesses.

One of the problems is that, because of low incomes, few households have access to technology. Hence the Digital Bridge, a cheap broadband connection offering everything from video on demand to email to, yes, CCTV images of the local community. The hardware and all the services will cost around £3.50 a week.

The cameras are part of a channel called Safe and Sound. In the pilot there will be 11 cameras. Eventually there will be up to 400 across the area. ‘The demand for this comes directly from the residents,’ says Dan Hodges of the Shoreditch Trust. ‘Crime is falling but fear of crime is rising and the moment we suggested we could do this the response was really positive. It surprised us.’ In the middle of the screen is a shot of a local high street. At the bottom are other images which the viewer can bring up. But here’s the thing: they will not be able to zoom in using the cameras. They will not be able to tilt and pan. They can only look at what they’re given and that’s not very much. ‘There have to be safeguards,’ Hodges says. ‘People won’t be able to watch each other’s homes. There are clear civil liberties issues involved.’

Later, I go for a walk around the area with Michael Pyner, chief executive of the Shoreditch Trust. He wants me to understand what this patch of the city looks like; that it’s really not just warehouse apartments and design consultancies. ‘This is an opportunity for people to empower themselves,’ he says of the CCTV project. ‘We’ve had accusations that it’s Big Brother, but it’s not. It’s Little Brother. Everyone gets to look.’ Except that, because of the restrictions, it won’t actually help solve crime. ‘No, but it may help solve the fear of crime. Look, it may not work. In two years’ time people may still be scared. At which point we’ll say this wasn’t the solution.’ Now, though, local residents are very keen.

Afterwards I return to Haberdasher Street, one of the roads which will be part of the scheme. It seems to me a CCTV camera is only a substitute for being able to stand in that location watching what’s going on for yourself. Thus, Christopher Isherwood style, I will be a camera. I want to see what is so intriguing about this street, what exactly will make it so damned watchable. I stand there for half an hour. It all seems pretty innocent.

Then I realise there is something suspicious here: it is a large, dark man in a black jacket. He has a notebook in his hands and he is staring up and down the street. That man is me. Other than that Haberdasher Street is now empty. No people, let alone any crimes. It’s time to go home.

CCTV nation: you’ve been framed

February 2003
Geoffrey Peck receives over £7,000 in compensation from his local council because they gave the media CCTV images of him taken on a night he wandered along Brentwood High Street, in a depressed state, and attempted suicide. The council wanted to publicise the value of CCTV. Mr Peck argued successfully that his privacy had been infringed.

July 2004
London nightclub Sound in Leicester Square loses its licence after cameras record footage of its own security guards assaulting clubbers. ‘The men were all licensed as door supervisors,’ says a police spokesman, ‘but clearly they were not doing what they should have’.

April 2005
A unnamed member of the Scottish parliament is caught on CCTV ‘with a male aide performing a sex act on him,’ according to the Scotsman. ‘He is not thought to be openly gay’.

August 2005
A man is convicted for stealing a £650 computer from a shop selling CCTV cameras. The robbery is picked up on the shop’s cameras. The shop’s owner reports a surge in business following the conviction.

September 2005
Two thieves are caught on CCTV digging up nine Leylandii trees in Leicestershire, a year after they were planted, to replace others stolen in an earlier theft.

November 2005
Wayne Rooney is caught at a club, allegedly kissing a woman who isn’t his girlfriend. The images end up in the Sun.

March 2006
A Sheffield man’s £50 fine for having oral sex in a bank foyer is quashed in the appeal court. His lawyer argued ‘there had been no act which outraged public decency since there had been no public to outrage’. The only witness was a CCTV camera.

Thank you Jay, nicely written.

One of my friends recently confessed he had been obsessively playing online scrabble. Hence this article caught my eye – about the version of Scrabble that’s been used by half a million people on facebook – and the implications thereof. The cartoon at the top is by Doug Savage, the article from the New York Times by Dan Mitchell.

S-q-u-a-b-b-l-e By DAN MITCHELL

THIRD-PARTY applications are supposedly the secret to Facebook’s success.

So far, though, the applications fall mainly into two categories: the silly and the annoying (and sometimes, both). Users can throw virtual sheep at each other or take part in zombie attacks on their friends. Recently, many users received a message entreating them to “click ‘forward’ to see what happens.” After clicking, users discovered that nothing happened except that they had annoyed their friends with a pointless message.

Many Facebook applications are “for toddlers,”writes Kara Swisher, the technology journalist and blogger for All Things Digital. The “kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children,” she wrote in October.

But there are some applications that levelheaded adults can enjoy, even if they are still just a waste of time. One example is matching knowledge of movie trivia with that of friends.

Another example is also one of the most popular, Scrabulous, which is clearly a knockoff of the board game Scrabble. It is a wonder that Hasbro, which owns Scrabble in the United States and Canada, and Mattel, which holds the rights for the rest of the world, took so long to take action. But this week, they finally sent a letter to Facebook asking that Scrabulous be removed from the site.

Scrabulous was developed by two brothers in India. Its popularity is a major driver of traffic to Facebook, where a reported 500,000 members log on to Scrabulous each day.

Dozens of Facebook groups have been created to “save Scrabulous.” The biggest had more than 23,000 members late this week, days after the letter from Hasbro and Mattel was made public. Most group members seem to understand that the companies are merely protecting their rights, and many think that the game makers will reach some sort of understanding with the developers of Scrabulous, allowing the game to stay. A Hasbro spokesman said as much in a statement, asserting that the companies are seeking an “amicable solution.”

Josh Quittner of Fortune magazine’s Techland blog thinks that is just what should happen. “If I were an evil genius running a board games company,” he wrote, “I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win!”

As for Facebook, Scott Nichols, a blogger for PC World, sees the dispute as the latest in a string of embarrassments for the company. “Another Facebook gaffe,” he called it.

I found this amazing looking house on the internet and the story of how it was built: before you read it, check out stumbleupon which introduced me to this, and which was in turn recommended by an interesting guy called Lloyd Shepherd. On with the story:

You are looking at pictures of our family home in Wales. It was built by myself and my father in law with help from passers by and visiting friends. 4 months after starting we were moved in and cosy. I estimate 1000-1500 man hours and £3000 put in to this point. Not really so much in house buying terms (roughly £60/sq m excluding labour).

The house was built with maximum regard for the environment and by reciprocation gives us a unique opportunity to live close to nature. Being your own (have a go) architect is a lot of fun and allows you to create and enjoy something which is part of yourself and the land rather than, at worst, a mass produced box designed for maximum profit and convenience of the construction industry. Building from natural materials does away with producers profits and the cocktail of carcinogenic poisons that fill most modern buildings.

Some key points of the design and construction:

* Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
* Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
* Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
* Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
* Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
* Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
* Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
* Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
* Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring…)
* Woodburner for heating – renewable and locally plentiful
* Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
* Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
* Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
* Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
* Water by gravity from nearby spring
* Compost toilet
* Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.

Main tools used: chainsaw, hammer and 1 inch chisel, little else really. Oh and by the way I am not a builder or carpenter, my experience is only having a go at one similar house 2yrs before and a bit of mucking around inbetween. This kind of building is accessible to anyone. My main relevant skills were being able bodied, having self belief and perseverence and a mate or two to give a lift now and again.

Would you like to learn more about this sort of building and gain practical experience? Why not join us on another exciting building project. There will be opportunities for everyone of all abilities and areas of interest

Why fork out £269 for an iPhone when you can get your Mum to knit one for free?

OK the iPhone does usher in an era of software power and sophistication never before been seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.

But can you throw it in the washing machine?

If you would like to knit one of your own, this kind lady has put all the instructions on her website.

I particularly liked this comment from one of her site visitors:
Cool mom! All i got was embarrassing multicoloured jumpers and cardigans! Can your mom knit me a PS3?

If you do want to buy a real one you can click here.

All I can say is the reception on the knitted one is absolutely consistent wherever it is, even while it’s in the wash.