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Why do it? Talking to the men earmarked to be the elite referees of the future, the question elicits a knowing smile. This season, criticism of referees has increased to the point where some former referees have felt compelled to complain about standards. That is quite striking because, the more you talk to referees, the more obvious it is that supporting each other through thick and thin is fundamental.
So why do it? Why spend countless hours driving up and down the country to dole out rules, some of which are inevitably going to upset people, trying to climb the ladder until you get the chance to make decisions on television in front of millions who scrutinize you and your ability with the aid of umpteen different angles and slow-motion replays?
A glimpse of an answer appears on the face of Lee Swabey moments after he blows the final whistle of a 2 –1 win for Grimsby over Woking, a match at level 5 of the English league system. He gets what all referees hope for every time they referee a match. “Twenty-two handshakes,” he explains afterwards, proudly. Symbolically, a full set of handshakes, plus a “well done” from both managers, represents maximum satisfaction. “The buzz,” as he calls it, of a game that passes smoothly, is something he loves. “I wouldn’t spend so much time away from my family if this didn’t mean the world to me.”
As one of the group that is highly regarded by the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) for his potential, Swabey knew he was being watched at that match. PGMOL’s chief, Mike Riley, was in attendance, along with Steve Dunn, who is the coach for this level, armed with notes and stopwatch to catalogue every significant move the officials make.
A few weeks earlier, Riley, Dunn and another former referee, Peter Jones, made their way to another level-5 match to monitor another referee tipped to progress – John Brooks. “I hope to have the opportunity to get promoted to the Premier League and officiate some of the top games in this country,” Brooks says.
The most the PGMOL delegation got to observe, however, was the way Brooks handled the somewhat tricky situation of calling off the match because of a frozen pitch. It is all part of the experience Brooks needs to acquire before he is trusted with more high-profile games, the different problems that need dealing with – often, clubs are very reluctant to have a late postponement, particularly when they have to pay all the staff who have turned up but will not receive any gate money.
Brooks phoned his coach for advice and made the difficult but correct decision. A little later, the football club secretary arrived with envelopes to pay the officials for their time – the match fee at level 5 is £95 so it is safe to assume these men do not do it for the cash.
Brooks, like Swabey, has clear ambitions to progress. He is under no illusions that developing a thick skin and perfecting strategies to deal with disappointments is a big part of that. How does he feel watching football on TV when a referee gets vilified? “Erm … not great,” he admits. “I’ve been in that situation once where I have made an incorrect decision and it was a deciding goal that was just offside. Your heart sinks. You can’t stop thinking about it.
“I do sometimes wish people understood the time and effort we put in. It is very easy to criticize a decision but we do everything to try to get these decisions right. In certain situations, you are going to be unpopular but, if you are uncomfortable with that, you are probably in the wrong job.”
The former referees agree that the backup, education and tools that today’s referees have is a world away from what they experienced in their own days. Riley, as a young referee, went out and bought himself books on psychology and nutrition as there was no information on offer to him at all.
Contrast this with Brooks, who has a coach at the end of the phone. They consult weekly, discuss how his games have gone, study footage of key decisions and work out how to improve. He also has the support of a sports psychologist, Liam Slack, for regular guidance and an exercise regime to help him handle the 11km he runs during a game.
Brooks says psychology is vital in his development. “One of the things we have talked about is forgetting decisions and moving on,” he explains. “There may be a big decision to make in the first 30 seconds of the game. Once you have made that, you need to stay focused for the next 89 minutes and not be wondering whether that was correct or worrying about that decision. Liam has taught us some techniques for releasing that decision. Working with the sports psychologist is really important for mental toughness.”
Jones believes the whole approach can only help. “I refereed in professional football but, looking back, I was an amateur,” he says. “I was going to work – I worked for British Telecom – and I might referee at Newcastle on a Wednesday evening and, 9am the next morning, I was in Leicester trying to speak to customers. I perhaps hadn’t slept. Training was ad hoc. We were amateurs in a professional environment compared to now.”
When the subject of technology comes up, the three former refs are unanimous in their support of it. “We are all in favour of anything that makes the referee’s job better and makes them more effective on the field of play,” says Riley. Minimizing mistakes is the aim. After all, a bad decision can stick with you for a while. “The rest of your life,” notes Jones with a chuckle. | 2adv
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A mirror that sends heat into the frigid expanse of space has been designed by scientists to replace air-conditioning units that keep buildings cool on Earth.
Researchers believe the mirror could slash the amount of energy used to control air temperatures in business premises and shopping centres by doing away with power-hungry cooling systems.
Around 15% of the energy used by buildings in the US goes on air conditioning, but the researchers’ calculations suggest that, in some cases, the mirror could completely offset the need for extra cooling.
In a rooftop comparison of the device in Stanford, California, scientists found that, while a surface painted black reached 60C more than ambient temperature in sunlight and bare aluminium reached 40C more, the mirror was up to 5C cooler than the surrounding air temperature.
“If you cover significant parts of the roof with this mirror, you can see how much power it can save.
You can significantly offset the electricity used for air conditioning,” said Shanhui Fan, an expert in photonics at Stanford University, who led the development of the mirror. “In some situations, the computations say you can completely offset the air conditioning.”
Buildings warm up in a number of different ways. Hot-water boilers and cooking facilities release heat into their immediate surroundings. In hot countries, warm air comes in through doors and windows. Then, there is visible light and infrared radiation from the sun, which also heat up buildings.
The Stanford mirror was designed in such a way that it reflects 97% of the visible light that falls on it. But, more importantly, it works as a thermal radiator. When the mirror is warmed up, it releases heat at a specific wavelength of infrared light that passes easily through the atmosphere and out into space.
To make anything cool requires what engineers call a heat sink: somewhere to dump unwanted heat. The heat sink has to be cooler than the object that needs cooling or it will not do its job. For example, a bucket of ice will cool a bottle of wine because it becomes a sink for heat in the liquid. The Stanford mirror relies on the ultimate heat sink: the universe itself.
The mirror is built from several layers of wafer-thin materials. The first layer is reflective silver. On top of this are alternating layers of silicon dioxide and hafnium oxide. These layers improve the reflectivity but, also, turn the mirror into a thermal radiator. When silicon dioxide heats up, it radiates the heat as infrared light at a wavelength of around ten micrometres. Since there is very little in the atmosphere that absorbs at that wavelength, the heat passes straight out to space. The total thickness of the mirror is around two micrometres or two thousandths of a millimetre.
“The cold darkness of the universe can be used as a renewable thermodynamic resource, even during the hottest hours of the day,” the scientists write in Nature. In tests, the mirror had a cooling power of 40 watts per square metre at ambient temperature.
Writing in the journal, Fan puts the installed cost of mirrors at between $20 and $70 per square metre and calculates an annual electricity saving of 100MWh on a three-storey building.
Fan said that the mirror could cool buildings – or other objects – simply by putting it in direct contact with them. Coating the roof of a building with the mirror would prevent heating from sunlight but do little to remove heat from its interior. More likely, the mirror would be used to cool water or some other fluid that would then be pumped around the building.
He ruled out the idea of using the mirrors to slow down global warming. “Roof space accounts for only a small portion of the Earth’s surface so, at this point, we don’t think this would be a geoengineering solution. Rather, our contribution on the greenhouse-gas-emission issue is simply to reduce electricity consumption,” he said.
“I’m really excited by the potential it has and the applications for cooling,” said Marin Soljačić, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You could use this on buildings so you have to spend much less on air conditioning or maybe you wouldn’t need it at all. You could put it on top of shopping malls. With a large enough surface, you could get substantial cooling.” | 2adv
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The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara Desert and at the centre of the North African country’s “Ouallywood” film industry, it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.
Now, the trading city, nicknamed the “door of the desert”, is the location for another blockbuster – a complex of four linked solar mega-plants, which, alongside hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020 with, it is hoped, some spare to export to Europe. The project is a key plank in Morocco’s ambitions to use its untapped deserts to become a global solar superpower.
When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world and the first phase, called Noor 1, will go live in November 2015. The mirror technology it uses is less widespread and more expensive than the photovoltaic panels that are now familiar on roofs the world over but it will have the advantage of being able to continue producing power even after the sun goes down.
The potential for solar power from the desert has been known for decades. In the days after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the German particle physicist Gerhard Knies calculated that the world’s deserts receive enough energy in a few hours to provide for humanity’s power needs for a whole year. The challenge, though, has been capturing that energy and transporting it to the population centres where it is required.
As engineers put the finishing touches to Noor 1, its 500,000 crescent-shaped solar mirrors glitter across the desert skyline. The 800 rows follow the sun as it tracks across the heavens, whirring quietly every few minutes as their shadows slip further east.
When they are finished, the four plants at Ouarzazate will occupy a space as big as Morocco’s capital city, Rabat, and generate 580 mega-watts (MW) of electricity, enough to power a million homes. Noor 1 itself has a generating capacity of 160MW.
Morocco’s Environment Minister, Hakima el-Haite, believes that solar energy could have the same impact on the region this century that oil production had in the last. But the $9bn project to make her country’s deserts boom was triggered by more immediate concerns, she said.
“We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget,” el-Haite told the Guardian. “We also used to subsidize fossil fuels, which have a heavy cost, so when we heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought, 'Why not?'”
Solar energy will make up a third of Morocco’s renewable energy supply by 2020, with wind and hydro taking the same share each.
“We are very proud of this project,” el-Haite said. “I think it is the most important solar plant in the world.”
Each parabolic mirror is 12 metres high and focused on a steel pipeline carrying a 'heat transfer solution' (HTF) that is warmed to 393C as it snakes along the trough before coiling into a heat engine. There, it is mixed with water to create steam that turns energy- generating turbines.
The HTF is made up of a synthetic thermal oil solution that is pumped towards a heat tank containing molten sands that can store heat energy for three hours, allowing the plant to power homes into the night. The mirrors are spaced in tier formations to minimize damage from sand blown up by desert winds.
Technicians say that the Noor 2 and 3 plants, due to open in 2017, will store energy for up to eight hours – opening the prospect of 24/7 solar energy in the Sahara and the surrounding region.
“The biggest challenge we faced was being able to finish the project on time with the performance level we needed to achieve,” said Rashid al-Bayad, the project director.
But, even as the first phase of the project nears completion, Morocco is eyeing grander international ambitions. “We are already involved in high tension transportation lines to cover the full south of Morocco and Mauritania as a first step,” says Ahmed Baroudi, manager of Société d’Investissements Energétiques, the national renewable energy investment firm. But he says the project’s ultimate impact will go far wider – even as far as the Middle East. “The ultimate objective given by his majesty the king is Mecca.”
Whether that ambition is achieved remains to be seen but exporting solar energy could have stabilizing effects within and between countries, according to the Moroccan solar energy agency (Masen). Talks are ongoing with Tunisia and energy exports northwards across the Mediterranean remain a key goal.
“We believe that it’s possible to export energy to Europe but, first, we would have to build the interconnectors which don’t yet exist,” said Maha el-Kadiri, a Masen spokeswoman. “Specifically, we would have to build interconnections, which would not go through the existing one in Spain, and, then, start exporting.”
Spain has itself prohibited new solar projects because of a lack of interconnectors to transmit the energy to France. The EU has set a target of ensuring that 10% of each member country’s power can be transported abroad by cable by 2020.
In the meantime, Morocco is focused on using solar to meet its own needs for resource independence. This could, one day, include water desalination, in a country that is increasingly being hit by drought as the climate warms. Officials are keenly aware of the running they are making in what is the most advanced renewable energy programme in the Middle East and North African region. “We are at the avante-garde of solar,” el-Kadiri says.
About $9bn has been invested in the Noor Complex, much of it from international institutions such as the European Investment Bank and World Bank and backed by Moroccan government guarantees. Undisclosed energy subsidies from Morocco’s unelected ruler, King Mohammed VI, have prevented the cost from being transferred to energy consumers.
One month before launch, over a thousand, mostly Moroccan, workers are still racing to fix electric wires, take down scaffolding and wrap rockwool insulation around steel pipelines. They bustle past in yellow and orange bibs, working 12-hour shifts against a backdrop of the Atlas Mountains. Harnesses with hammers and gloves strapped to their belts swing by their sides. Ubiquitous hard hats, safety shoes and ear plugs give the scene an air of theatrical camp.
For Hajar Lakhael, a 25-year-old environment and security manager from Meknes, rehearsals are almost over and the blockbuster production is nearly ready for action.
“We’ve done the construction and, now, we will see how these projects look when they start,” she says. “It is exactly like the preparation for a grand performance.”
A global audience will be watching with interest. | 2adv
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Music subscription services, including Spotify and Deezer, have broken through the $1bn sales barrier worldwide, as increasing numbers of fans choose to pay for music online.
Streaming and subscription revenues rose by more than 50% in 2013 to reach $1.1bn, helping overall sales of recorded music in Europe grow for the first time in 12 years, according to figures published in March 2014.
There are now an estimated 450 music-rental services around the world, and, while many people still listen for free, a desire for more choice is persuading more music lovers to part with their cash. In a three-year period, the number of paying subscribers rose from 8 million to 28 million, according to the 2014 digital music report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Easily accessible from smartphones and tablets, subscription services are popular with people looking to try out new music without committing to buying a download or a CD. Consumers say they are attracted by a cheap, user-friendly and legal alternative to pirated downloads. “It is now clear that music streaming and subscription is a mainstream model for our business,” said IFPI Chief Executive, Frances Moore. There are signs that, in Britain and America, streaming may soon generate more revenue for the music industry than downloads from online stores such as Apple’s iTunes. Subscription services now account for a third of all digital sales globally, with downloads making up the balance, but the IFPI data shows that the two formats are growing at different rates.
In the US, the percentage of people claiming to use subscription and streaming rose from 19% in 2012 to 23%, while the percentage of people downloading fell from 28% to 27%. In Britain, downloaders remained static, at exactly one third, while subscribers grew from 19% to 22%. In Sweden, France and Italy, streaming is already more popular than downloading.
Digital formats now account for 39% of all music sales, or nearly £5.9bn out of £15bn, and, while sales of CDs and vinyl declined steeply in 2013, they still contribute just over half the industry’s income. A recent crash in music sales in Japan, which accounts for one fifth of music industry sales and where physical formats remained popular for longer than elsewhere, meant sales across all formats globally fell 3.9%.
However, vinyl continued to make a comeback in some markets. Sales increased by 32% in America and by 101% in the UK in 2013.
The IFPI also said that One Direction were the biggest-selling artists of 2013, with 4m physical and digital sales for their Midnight Memories album. Katy Perry’s Prism was the best-selling album by a female artist, in sixth place behind Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars and Daft Punk.
Consumer-technology companies have been racing to join the music-streaming trend, with Apple launching iTunes Radio and Google promoting its Play Store, with smaller players like Beats Music, created by the team behind the Beats headphones brand, also joining the fray. | 2adv
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The customer next to you in the queue looks innocent enough. But, instead of a shopping list, you notice she’s carrying handwritten notes about the appearance and cleanliness of the store. She’s been timing the progression of the queue on her phone … and is that a tiny camera lens peeking out from her purse? The odds are you’ve just spotted a mystery shopper.
There are approximately 50,000 mystery shopping trips carried out every month in the UK, according to the Mystery Shopping Providers Association, and, as more and more spending takes place online, the demand for mystery shoppers is growing. “Retailers are becoming increasingly aware that shoppers who are prepared to set foot in a physical store want a service and an experience they can’t get online,” says Simon Boydell, spokesman for Marketforce, which has more than 300,000 mystery shoppers on its books. “Our clients want to measure how well their stores are delivering on that experience.”
“We assign different store locations to each shopper and rotate them so that they never go back to the same shop within three months,” says Jill Spencer of mystery shopping company ABa. “Each day, they typically spend up to eight hours visiting five to ten stores, plus another hour or two filing detailed reports on every aspect of their visit.” For that, the mystery shoppers can earn up to £155 a day. They are also reimbursed for their petrol and hotel stays, and compensated for their car depreciation (the shoppers can be expected to drive as many as 20,000 miles a year). Meanwhile, video mystery shoppers, who film their visits with a hidden camera planted in a buttonhole or handbag, can earn even more – around £300 a day.
Shoppers are usually repaid any money they spend in the stores and may also be allowed to keep the products they buy. “I’m typically given between £5 and £20 to spend at each store, to assess the service I receive at the till,” says Laura, a 50-year-old mystery shopper from Devon, who has been paid to visit around 7,000 shops since 2001. The purchase usually has to be related to a service or a type of product that the retailer wants her to check. “I’m always given a scenario, such as buying something from a specific department or a new product range, but, within that framework, I can often buy whatever I want – and keep it.”
Like most full-time mystery shoppers, Laura is self-employed, taking jobs from ABa and other mystery shopping companies as and when they come up. Her income is typically £30,000 to £40,000 a year and that doesn’t include all the freebies she gets on the job. “With the perks, it’s enough to live on. But I don’t do it because I love shopping. In fact, I hate shopping now. When I’m not working, it pains me to have to go out and buy a pint of milk.” She does, however, find it satisfying to return to a store she has previously mystery shopped and see standards have improved. “I know it must be because of my feedback or why would they pay me to give it? Some of the retailers I shop at win awards for customer service and I think that is down to us mystery shoppers. I feel I’m not just doing a service to my company; I’m doing a service to all shoppers everywhere.”
Sadly, regular mystery shopping assignments that pay like Laura’s are few and far between. In fact, competition is so fierce, she keeps her job a closely guarded secret and even her friends and family don’t know who she works for (Laura is not her real name).
It’s estimated that more than 500,000 people have registered as mystery shoppers in the UK, but just 10% or less manage to get regular work each month and this has led to a dramatic reduction in compensation. “Where once you got a fee, reimbursement for your purchase and mileage, you now often just receive a contribution towards a purchase,” say Val, a 51-year-old former mystery shopper. “I worked for 40 different mystery shopping companies for almost 20 years but I gave up entirely three years ago because I had bills to pay and very few assignments paid what I considered to be an acceptable rate.”
Nowadays, mystery shopping companies mostly rely on the promise of freebies to incentivize their workers. “Marketforce shoppers typically get a couple of pounds for a visit as a token gesture for their time and effort,” says Boydell. “At the most, we’ll pay £15 to £25 plus reimbursement for, say, a meal for two or a hotel stay. We don’t directly employ any shoppers so we don’t have to pay them the minimum wage.”
“I’d go on a cruise for nothing,” says Laura. “But I think mystery shopping companies that pay you a nominal fee to travel to a restaurant and eat a meal are exploiting people. I won’t touch those jobs anymore.” There are plenty of people, however, that would. Hannah, a 41-year-old City lawyer, has conducted nearly 500 visits for the Mystery Dining Company in her spare time without receiving remuneration or travel expenses. As a prestigious “platinum diner”, she is regularly hand-picked by the Mystery Dining Company to carry out their most exclusive assignments, enjoying £200 meals at Michelin-starred Mayfair restaurants, five-star hospitality at Ascot and overnight stays at boutique hotels.
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if you work for a mystery dining company. Hannah says she typically spends two to four hours after each visit writing detailed reports on everything from the quality of the food to specific interactions with staff, whom she always needs to be able to name or “subtly” describe. Trickiest of all, she must memorize all these details while eating her meal – unable, of course, to openly write anything down.
“There’s lots to remember and sometimes it can detract from the experience. You’re expected to give feedback while it’s fresh, so I’ve had to get up at 5am to write a report before work. It’s a challenging thing to do; you need to be focused, articulate and detail orientated.” | 2adv
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Himalayan lakes, spacewalks and the presidential primaries helped Scott Kelly keep his wits over 340 days in space, the astronaut told journalists, after he landed back on Earth from a record-setting mission. “It seemed like I lived there forever,” Kelly said. The veteran of past missions said that his biggest surprise was simply how long this one felt. “Maybe, occasionally, you do go bananas,” he said.
Kelly and a Russian counterpart, Mikhail Kornienko, spent nearly a year on the International Space Station (ISS) in order to study the effects of weightlessness, radiation and the cramped quarters of spaceflight on humans – research NASA considers essential for an eventual mission to Mars.
Kelly said the length of the mission was its biggest challenge and that he felt significantly more sore on returning to gravity than after shorter trips. Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut, have spent the last year taking physical and mental tests. The tests will continue, to help NASA learn about how the body copes with the severe strains of spaceflight.
Kelly said he felt aches and had extremely sensitive skin but, so far, his balance has felt mostly decent. However, he said, “the first thing I tried to throw on a table I missed” because “you tend to underestimate the effects of gravity”.
He said the discomfort of returning to gravity – which shrank him back down to normal height after he stretched by 1.5 inches in orbit – took nothing away from the awe he felt after his capsule landed back on Earth. When the Russian capsule opened on to the cool air of Kazakhstan, Kelly said, he smelled “a fragrance like a plant was blooming in that area”. It was the fresh air mingled with the charred, “kind of sweet” smell of a spacecraft that had survived re-entry through the atmosphere.
Backing away from the vessel, he said, the scope of the mission began to sink in: 340 days on a 15-year-old space station which is “a million pounds, the size of a football field, the internal volume, some say, of a six-bedroom house ”. The ISS, he said, is a place that uses the power of the sun and was built with the help of an international team and millions of taxpayers.
“There are things we’re going to discover about our experience in space in the space station that we don’t even know now,” Kelly said, comparing the research of more than 450 missions there to the work done by computer scientists at NASA in the 1960s and 1970s. He added: “The view is great, too.”
Kelly made the most of that view, posting spectacular photos on social media of the Earth’s cities, landscapes, oceans and atmosphere. “The Earth is a beautiful planet,” he said, describing the striking colours of the waters around the Bahamas and the rainbow hues of lakes that dot the northern Himalayas. He said he would like to visit that region, though he would first need to learn “what country actually owns them”. But, “predominantly, you just notice how thin the atmosphere is, how fragile it looks,” Kelly added. “That, combined with these large swathes of pollution, is kind of alarming.”
The astronaut said he could see entire systems of pollution: smoke clouds from wildfires that covered parts of the US, sections of Asia with continuous, visible pollution nearly all year round. He said the message “we need to save the planet” slightly missed the point: “The planet will get better; it’s us that won’t be here because we’ll destroy the environment.” The world’s thin shield of atmosphere “makes you more of an environmentalist after spending so much time looking down”, he said.
“It’s for us to take care of the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I do believe we have an impact on that and we do have the ability to change it, if we make the decision to.” Kelly’s active social- media life, which he said was a joint effort with his girlfriend, earned him a huge online following. But he said he was unaware of it, instead he was watching the chaotic drama of the 2016 presidential election. One of the first questions he asked the crew who lifted him out of a space capsule was “How did Super Tuesday go?”
But the astronaut demurred when asked for his thoughts on the likes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. “I would say that, as a government employee, I am subject to the Hatch Act,” he said, referring to a law that prohibits some political activity for federal employees. “So I can’t say how I think of all the news stories of all the year.”
Besides the news, he said, steady work helped keep him sane: “I tried to have milestones that were close, like when is the next crew arriving, the next spacewalk, the next robotics, the next science experiment. That made a difference to me, keeping my sanity.” Being back on Earth with the rest of humanity had not quite sunk in, he added, recalling how shocked he had been to see a crowd of people after a previous mission. “There’ll be a point here pretty soon where I’ll start feeling that kind of culture shock,” he said.
Although a NASA scientist said Kelly embodied the qualities needed for a mission to Mars, the astronaut himself predicted that he would not fly again with the space agency. “But I don’t think I would ever say I’m absolutely, 100% done,” he added, noting the sudden successes of private spaceflight companies such as SpaceX. “They might need a guy like me someday,” he said. “Maybe, in the next 20 years, you’ll be able to buy a cheap ticket, just go for a little visit.” | 2adv
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Scientists have created an “atlas of the brain” that reveals how the meanings of words are arranged across different regions of the organ. Like a colourful quilt laid over the cortex, the atlas displays in rainbow hues how individual words and the concepts they convey can be grouped together in clumps of white matter.
“Our goal was to build a giant atlas that shows how one specific aspect of language is represented in the brain, in this case semantics or the meanings of words,” said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
No single brain region holds one word or concept. A single brain spot is associated with a number of related words. And, each single word lights up many different brain spots. Together, they make up networks that represent the meanings of each word we use: life and love, death and taxes, clouds, Florida and bra. All light up their own networks.
Described as a “tour de force” by one researcher who was not involved in the study, the atlas demonstrates how modern imaging can transform our knowledge of how the brain performs some of its most important tasks. With further advances, the technology could have a profound impact on medicine and other fields.
“It is possible that this approach could be used to decode information about what words a person is hearing, reading or possibly even thinking,” said Alexander Huth, the first author on the study. One potential use would be a language decoder that could allow people silenced by motor neurone disease or locked-in syndrome to speak through a computer.
To create the atlas, the scientists recorded people’s brain activity while they listened to stories read out on The Moth Radio Hour, a US radio show. They then matched the transcripts of the stories with the brain activity data to show how groups of related words triggered neural responses in 50,000 to 80,000 pea-sized spots all over the cerebral cortex.
Huth used stories from The Moth Radio Hour because they are short and compelling. The more enthralling the stories, the more confident the scientists could be that the people being scanned were focusing on the words and not drifting off. Seven people listened to two hours of stories each. Per person, that amounted to hearing roughly 25,000 words – and more than 3,000different words – as they lay in the scanner.
The atlas shows how words and related terms exercise the same regions of the brain. For example, on the left-hand side of the brain, above the ear, is one of the tiny regions that represents the word “victim”. The same region responds to “killed”, “convicted”, “murdered” and “confessed”. On the brain’s right-hand side, near the top of the head, is one of the brain spots activated by family terms: “wife”, “husband”, “children”, “parents”.
Each word is represented by more than one spot because words tend to have several meanings. One part of the brain, for example, reliably responds to the word “top”, along with other words that describe clothing. But, the word “top” activates many other regions. One of them responds to numbers and measurements, another to buildings and places. The scientists have created an interactive website where the public can explore the brain atlas.
Strikingly, the brain atlases were similar for all the participants, suggesting that their brains organized the meanings of words in the same way. The scientists only scanned five men and two women, however. All are native English speakers and two are authors of the study published in Nature. It is highly possible that people from different backgrounds and cultures will have different semantic brain atlases.
Armed with the atlas, researchers can now piece together the brain networks that represent wildly different concepts, from numbers to murder and religion. “The idea of murder is represented a lot in the brain,” Gallant said.
Using the same data, the group has begun work on new atlases that show how the brain holds information on other aspects of language, from phonemes to syntax. A brain atlas for narrative structure has so far proved elusive, however. “Every time we come up with a set of narrative features, we get told they aren’t the right set of narrative features,” said Gallant.
Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, praised the work. Unlike many studies that looked at brain activity when an isolated word or sentence was spoken, Gallant’s team had shed light on how the brain worked in a real- world scenario, he said. The next step, he added, was to create a more comprehensive and precise semantic brain atlas. Ultimately, Hasson believes it will be possible to reconstruct the words a person is thinking from their brain activity. The ethical implications are enormous. One more benign use would see brain activity used to assess whether political messages have been effectively communicated to the public. “There are so many implications and we are barely touching the surface,” he said.
Lorraine Tyler, a cognitive neuroscientist and head of the Centre for Speech, Language and the Brain at Cambridge University, said the research was a “tour de force in its scope and methods”. But, the brain atlas in its current form does not capture fine differences in word meanings. “While this research is path-breaking in its scope, there is still a lot to learn about how semantics is represented in the brain.” | 2adv
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You can no longer legally smoke a cigarette inside a bar in the world’s drinking capital, New Orleans, Louisiana. City after city has banned indoor smoking but that’s different because other cities don’t attract tourist dollars by aggressively advertising a “let the good times roll” attitude, as New Orleans does. An indoor smoking ban here will have consequences as unique as New Orleans’s cultural ecosystem itself.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, New Orleans city government has, since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, begun trying to turn down the volume a bit. With the support of neighbourhood groups, the city has begun policing bars and nightclubs more strictly, while, at the same time, fighting to implement a new “noise ordinance” (read: music ordinance).
“This is just the wrong time for them to have pursued something like this,” complains bar- owner William Walker, who, for reasons of personal choice, hates the anti-smoking law. “Forcing people outside the bar to smoke is going to exacerbate the tension that’s already there.”
Many of New Orleans’s best bars and some of its live music spots are in relatively quiet residential neighbourhoods. This neighbourly coexistence is a big part of what makes New Orleans different and charming. Recently, though, this unique social contract has become unacceptable for some people and the fate of New Orleans’s musical personality feels at stake.
Martha Wood lives beside a loud bar that hosts live music. “The bar was one of the deciding factors in me buying the house so I won’t ever complain about the noise,” says Wood, who also manages a live-music bar which, following a series of noise issues in 2013 (including complaints about the loud smokers outside), became one of New Orleans’s first ever bars legally disallowed from serving drinks to go. “Now, any small infraction could get us shut down,” says Wood. “We recently installed a smoke eater to help with the smoke because we can’t open the doors at night because of the 'noise'.”
The Maple Leaf club went smoke-free voluntarily in 2014 as did another club where artists had been demanding smoke-free nights. “A lot of the performance venues were already starting to show that consideration to performers so I wish the city would have just let that happen instead of forcing the ban into every corner bar that doesn’t host music,” says Zalia BeVille, manager of the All Ways Lounge, which went smoke-free in 2013 because, she says, “The horn players and the singers, they asked us for it.”
Luckily, All Ways has an outdoor patio, unlike Lost Love Lounge, whose owner, Geoff Douville, loves the ban – he’d previously felt forced to live with smoke to keep his bar financially viable. “There’s no way I could have banned smoking in my bar without it being a rule throughout the whole city,” says Douville. “People act like I have that choice, as a business owner. But, if I make that rule, they walk down the block to a bar with smoking. So I need it to be uniformed across the board for everybody.”
Many small business owners also fear smoke- free revenue loss. Smoker Neil Timms owns an English pub and met the smoking ban before, in England. “Back home in Coventry, every pub where I was a regular closed within a year of the smoking ban,” remembers Timms of the UK’s ban, begun in 2007. To avoid the same fate, he’s spending money to build a patio.
Lost Love’s Douville, though, feels the ban to be a great business opportunity. “The number of people who would enjoy coming out to our bar, with our food, but would never come because they didn’t want to smell like smoke for the next seven days – we’re now an option for all those people.” Nor does Douville worry about noise complaints like Walker does: “No court is gonna label a bar a 'nuisance' after the city has ratified a smoking ban that requires you to go outside!” he says. “I want to see a judge reconcile 'no loitering' with 'no smoking inside'.”
Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell, who introduced and pushed the ban, disagrees: “The responsibility is on the bar-owner to keep their clientele respectful outside their establishment as well,” she says. “The owners and bartenders need to tell them to go have a smoke but be respectful to their communities. The idea that we can’t have clean air because it will cause noise problems is ridiculous. It can be a win-win. I think it’s about communication and creating partnerships between the communities and the businesses.”
Cantrell does acknowledge the city’s uniqueness in terms of a smoking ban. “How is New Orleans different from the rest of the country? New Orleans is known as 'the City that Care Forgot',” she says. “New Orleans needs to stand up and say 'We care about our people'. The most vulnerable people who are working in smoky conditions, these citizens are the backbone of our hospitality industry, which drives the economy in the state of Louisiana.” She adds, “New Orleans is also unlike other places because you do have the option of taking your drink outside with you when you go out to smoke.”
Many worried that the already strained New Orleans Police Department didn’t need any part in policing smokers. So the health department will handle bar warnings and fines. Bar customers are encouraged to “come fill out a form or call 311 and to include date-and-time-stamped photographs documenting illegal smoking”. For this reason alone, Neil Timms says he’ll comply with the ban: “I don’t want someone to be sitting in the corner smoking and someone takes a photo of ’em and gets beaten up.”
Unworried, Geoff Douville says that he’s used to noise complaints by now so bring on the ban. “Watch: the nosy neighbours who complain about the noise now are gonna be the same ones who wanted the smoking ban to begin with.” In the end, Douville shares Cantrell’s win-win optimism. “Of course they’re gonna complain,” he accepts. “But it doesn’t mean they’re gonna win.” | 2adv
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When it comes to climate change, we have the bad habit of focusing on the first part of the story, the part about the problem, and forgetting the second part about the many available solutions. These solutions are speeding up recycling, slowing down emissions and providing sustainable alternatives to plastic, air conditioning, smartphones and fast fashion.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently gathered in Copenhagen to present its latest report on the impacts and pace of climate change. Climate change is now measured on all continents and our efforts to lower emissions must be intensified to avoid it escalating out of control. Along with outlining the risks and challenges, Copenhagen also embraced and focused on the solutions.
In the spirit of focusing on what can be done, Sustainia Award, chaired by Arnold Schwarzenegger, celebrated ten leading sustainability solutions deployed in 84 countries. From food to fashion, energy to transportation, education to health, the awards showcased an alternative to the grim-future scenarios we are so often presented with and made sustainability tangible to the innovators, investors, consumers and policy makers across sectors and regions.
From California, we saw how we can now produce plastics from greenhouse gases that are competitive with normal oil-based plastics in price and quality. From Switzerland, we learned how we can recycle and reuse old clothes and shoes more effectively in a recycle system currently deployed in over 60 countries. And from Canada, we learned how smartphones can make bike- sharing more convenient.
The ten projects presented each offered unique solutions to sustainability challenges but it was the Nigerian initiative, Wecyclers, that won Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and the rest of jury’s, vote and took the Sustainia Award 2014.
Wecyclers enables low-income communities to make money on waste piling up in their streets. By deploying a fleet of cargo bicycles to collect and recycle unmanaged waste in Lagos, Wecyclers lets families exchange garbage for consumer goods via an SMS-based point system.
Recycling companies purchase Wecyclers’ sorted waste for reprocessing into products – they turn it into mattresses, pillows and trash bags. Wecyclers is a response to local waste issues, where it’s estimated that only 40% of the city’s rubbish is collected. According to the World Bank, only 46% of municipal solid waste in Africa is collected. More than 5,000 households have signed up so far and there are plans to extend the initiative to other cities throughout Nigeria.
Solutions to combat climate change are often perceived as hi-tech innovations focused on cutting emissions, creating infrastructure or efficiency. However, to successfully solve the variety of challenges, we need variety in our solutions as well. Sustainability is not solely a matter of bringing down emissions; it is also a question of using our natural resources more intelligently and creating healthier lives for ourselves. Initiatives might be low-tech in innovation but high-impact when it comes to creating sustainable change for entire communities.
With a wide range of solutions addressing the equally wide range of challenges, we must focus more on the important part of the story that creates enthusiasm and momentum, and spurs action for much-needed change. | 2adv
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The tranquil chorus of the natural world is in danger of being lost to today’s generation as people screen out the noises that surround them, a senior US researcher warns.
Rising levels of background noise in some areas threaten to make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, trickling water and trees rustling in the wind, which can often be heard even in urban centres, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem was exacerbated by people listening to music through their earphones instead of tuning in to the birds and other sounds of nature that can easily be drowned out by traffic, music and other noises, he said.
“This learned deafness is a real issue,” Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. “We are conditioning ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears.”
“This gift that we are born with – to reach out and hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds – is in danger of being lost through a generational amnesia,” he said.
“There is a real danger, both of loss of auditory acuity, where we are exposed to noise for so long that we stop listening, but also a loss of listening habits, where we lose the ability to engage with the environment the way we were built to,” he added.
For the past ten years, the US National Park Service has recorded sound levels at more than 600 sites across the US, including Yosemite in California, Yellowstone and Denali in Alaska. Not one was unaffected by some form of noise from human activity, be it over-flying aircraft, motorbikes, motorboats or tour buses.
Fristrup’s team combined the sound levels recorded from national parks with similar data from urban settings to create a model of noise levels across the US. They predict that noise pollution is growing faster than the US population and more than doubles every 30 years.
“It’s not surprising people are putting on earphones or even noise cancelling headphones to try and create a quieter or more congenial environment,” he said.
“As you raise background sound levels, it has the same effect on your hearing that fog would have on your vision. Instead of having this expansive experience of all the sounds around you, you are aware of only a small area around you,” he said. “Even in most of our cities, there are birds and things to appreciate in the environment, and there can be very rich natural choruses to pay attention to. And that is being lost.”
People quickly become accustomed to changes in their environments, including rising noise levels, and, over time, Fristrup fears that we will accept far worse environmental conditions than we should and forget how much quieter the world could be. “If finding peace and quiet becomes difficult enough, many, many children will grow up without the experience and I think it’s a very real problem,” he said.
The warning came as other scientists reported beneficial health effects from listening to natural sounds. Speaking at the same meeting, Derrick Taff, a social scientist at Pennsylvania State University, described preliminary experiments which suggest that listening to recordings from national parks, of waterfalls, birdsong and wind, helped people recover from stressful events.
In one experiment, Taff told participants who visited his lab to give an impromptu talk that would be judged by researchers standing behind a one-way mirror. Measurements of their heart rate and the stress hormone, cortisol, before and after the speech found that people calmed down faster when they listened to nature recordings than when the same audio tracks were interspersed with sounds from road traffic, aeroplanes and even normal conversation.
“We know that natural sounds are very important to people. They are some of the main reasons people visit protected areas. They want to hear the natural quiet, the birdsong, and the wind and water,” Taff said. “We may be losing this as people are listening to iPods all the time but I do believe that the public is appreciative of these sounds. My advice is to go to your protected areas and experience what you are missing.”
Why natural sounds might be calming to people is unclear but Fristrup speculates that, over millions of years of evolution, we may have come to associate the more tranquil sounds of the natural world with safety. “I suspect there’s something about these intact soundscapes that reminds our ancestral brains of a place that’s safe, where there’s no sense of a predator nearby, and that these more cluttered soundscapes are problematic for us because we know we’ve lost that surveillance capability,” he said. | 2adv
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Governments across Europe dream of finding a magic solution to rising unemployment. But, in the hardest-hit parts of the EU, joblessness rates continue to creep up and the rhetoric does little to shorten the dole queue.
Now, in a struggling corner of Italy, one mayor thinks he has found an answer to his town’s chronic lack of work – although, rather than a solution, it appears to some to be more of an admission of defeat. Valter Piscedda, the centre- left mayor of Elmas, a small town near Sardinia’s capital, Cagliari, wants to pay residents to leave. The council will pay for ten unemployed locals to take intensive English lessons, board a cheap flight and look for jobs elsewhere in Europe.
“This is, above all, an idea born of common sense and experience,” he told the Guardian. “Over the past year and a half – especially in the past few months – I have been receiving young people, almost every day, who are despairing about their search for work. Some are looking here and ask for a hand in finding it here. Others have tried everything and are so discouraged that they no longer want to stay and wait. And they want to go and gain work experience abroad; life experience, too.
“So, my reasoning was this: put everything in place that the council administration can put in place so that those who want to gain experience abroad are able to,” he said.
As the national economy continues to falter, Sardinia, along with much of southern and central Italy, is grappling with high unemployment, with the overall joblessness rate at 17.7% in the second quarter of 2014, according to Italy’s National Institute of Statistics, Istat. More than 54% of people under 25 are out of work.
For the Adesso Parto (Now I’m leaving) programme, Elmas’s council has allocated €12,000 on a first-come, first-served basis to applicants aged between 18 and 50. As long as they are out of work and have lived in the town for three years, they are eligible. They do not have to be university educated and their annual income must be no more than €15,000.
The idea of encouraging people to up sticks is sensitive at a time when floods of Italians – many of them bright young graduates – are leaving their country every year. But Piscedda, who belongs to the Democratic Party of the Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi, denies he is facilitating a brain drain and believes that the people he is sending away may well return “and give me back 100 times what they were given”. More importantly, he wants the scheme to give a leg-up to those most in need.
“It’s a programme for those with no other resource; it’s the last-chance saloon. It’s about allowing them the dignity of not having to ask a friend for money or place burdens on families that cannot do it,” he said.
Earlier in 2014, he added, the council launched a scheme whereby businesses were given financial incentives to hire young workers from Elmas. “We advertised 20 of these positions,” he said. “We got 120 applications.”
In Elmas, the scheme has provoked mixed reactions. “The reality is that there is little work here,” said Alessandro Macis. “The opportunity to go abroad to learn about the workplace and experience other cultures can be very worthwhile. The son of a friend of mine who didn’t study much has ended up in London and he’s really finding his way. He started as a waiter. Now, he’s a cook and he’s learning English.”
Others were perplexed. “I heard about it but I thought it was strange. If you have that money to pay for people to go away, why don’t you use that money to keep them here?” said Consuelo Melis, who works behind the bar in a local café. On Twitter, one of many reactions was disbelief. “The state’s admission of defeat,” commented Marco Patavino. “Institutions are raising the white flag,” remarked Carlo Mazzaggio.
Piscedda, however, is undeterred, remarking of his online critics: “Probably, they are people that aren’t in need ... Every day, I deal with people’s problems and I have to do something to try to solve them. These people, if they had an alternative, they wouldn’t be asking for help.
“The work I can create, as mayor, is temporary. I can have a piazza cleaned. I can have it cleaned again. I can have the streets cleaned. But these are all temporary things that give nothing beyond that little bit of money for a few months. I want to go beyond that.” | 2adv
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Robert Mysłajek stops dead. Between two paw prints on a muddy mountain track, the scientist finds what he is looking for. “Droppings!” he enthuses. Wolf sightings are so rare that the sighting of their faeces marks a good day, even for a seasoned tracker.
But it is getting easier. There are now an estimated 1,500 wolves in Poland. The number has doubled in 15 years. Wolves are – along with the brown bear, the lynx and the wolverine – Europe’s last large predator carnivores. Conservationists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are beating a path here to find out how the country has saved this protected species, slandered even in fairy tales.
Bits of bone and hair protrude from the precious black faeces. “It ate a red deer,” says the University of Warsaw biologist. “In my lab, I can tell you all about this wolf – not only its diet but its gender, sexual habits, age, state of health and family connections.”
DNA tests have established that Polish wolves are travellers. “One wolf reached the Netherlands, where unfortunately it was hit by a car. They have a tremendous range. They need space. The average territory required by a Polish pack is 250 sq km,” said Mysłajek.
“Is there any prospect of our ever being able to reintroduce wolves to Scotland?” asks student Alex Entwisle, 23, on a field trip to southern Poland from his college in the UK. The animal science students have spent the day observing droppings and paw prints in the spruce-clad Beskidy mountains of the Polish Carpathians.
Their hot discussion topic is whether to reintroduce wolves to the British Isles for the first time since the 18th century.
As the guest of a British charity, the Wolves and Humans Foundation, Mysłajek toured the Scottish Highlands in 2015 and took questions from villagers about the Polish experience. “The big difference between Scotland and Poland is that we eat pork. We do not have many sheep here.
“The similarity is that we have a lot of animals – 300,000 red deer and more than 800,000 roe deer. In Poland, we also have a massive overpopulation of wild boar – about 200,000 – and these are ravaging farmers’ cereal crops. Here, wolves are part of the solution,” he says.
The scientist, who is a familiar face on Polish television, says wolves are exceptional animals that are capable of moving up to 30km during a single hunt. “The Beskidy pack is a strong unit, eight or nine individuals. This year, we have recorded five cubs, two yearlings and two adults.
“We track them using motion-activated cameras in the forest and by following their prints in the mud and snow. In each family group, only one pair reproduces, once a year. All pack members care for the young with solidarity and devotion.”
Mys łajek, the son of a shepherd, is puzzled by wolves’ bad reputation. “Why does one speak of a 'lone-wolf gunman'? Why did we have to have Little Red Riding Hood?"
He is fascinated by these aloof canines who remained in the wild 33,000 years ago when others decided on a much more comfortable existence as domestic dogs.
Wolves are not pooches. Mysłajek says only scientific arguments – the need to regenerate forests and control the wild animal population – can save Europe’s wild carnivores, especially the unpopular wolf. “Natural predators balance the ecosystem. They keep herbivores in check, thus allowing trees to grow tall for birds to nest in.”
Shoot the deer? “It is only a partial solution,” he says. “In a diverse environment, you have the so-called 'landscape of fear', where herbivores no longer spend all day grazing on the tender riverside grass. They move away, as a precaution, to avoid being trapped by a predator. This gives the vegetation a chance.”
The ban on wolf hunting in the western Carpathians came into force in 1995 and nationwide in Poland in 1998. There are now resident packs in virtually all the country’s major forests. The predators coexist with humans rather than being fenced off, as they are in African safari parks.
The Polish government pays compensation for livestock killed by wolves. Mysłajek advises farmers on erecting electric fences. He has helped revive the use of two deterrents that, for reasons no one quite understands, wolves find particularly scary: red bunting (hung around sheep pens) and the bark of the fluffy white Tatra Mountain Sheepdog.
The survival and mobility of Poland’s wolves has been helped by the country’s belated infrastructure development. In 1989, when the communists relinquished power, Poland had only one motorway. Major road projects – requiring wildlife impact studies – began after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. The country now has one of the highest densities in the world of overhead crossings and underpasses for wild animals.
Attitudes have also changed. “For many years, hunting was cultural. In 1975, there were fewer than 100 wolves in Poland. Beginning in the 1950s, hunting wolves had been encouraged by the authorities. They paid a reward for killing a wolf worth a month’s salary. It was carnage.”
Mysłajek says the improvement in Polish wolves’ survival chances has been considerable but remains fragile. Packs are mobile across borders and hunting still goes on in neighbouring Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia.
He claims Poland’s new government, elected in October 2015, is hostile to wolves. “The Environment Minister, Jan Szyszko, makes no secret of being a hunter. There are 120,000 licensed hunters in Poland and they are influential in parliament.
“The hunters claim wolves are a pest and that there are 4,000 of them in Poland, which is a spurious figure based on an unscientific count. This government is capable of turning back the clock.”
Being a wolf advocate is not easy. “It is not as if you can argue to the politicians that wolves are a big tourist attraction. Most tourists want to see the animals but wolves stay away from humans. They have a tremendously sensitive sense of smell.”
The 12 British animal science students leave the Polish Carpathians without a wolf sighting; just photographs of paw prints and droppings. Entwisle is convinced that Scotland will never be able to match Poland’s success.
“It would be amazing for the environment to have them back because of the problem of too many deer. But it would just not be viable because of the roads and sheep.
“There would be problems with farmers. We had our industrial revolution too long ago. We ruined it for ourselves. In Britain, we like predators to be far away and to watch them on television, said Entwisle. | 2adv
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Organic food has more of the antioxidant compounds linked to better health than regular food, and lower levels of toxic metals and pesticides, according to the most comprehensive scientific analysis to date. The international team behind the work suggests that switching to organic fruit and vegetables could give the same benefits as adding one or two portions of the recommended 'five a day'.
The team, led by Professor Carlo Leifert at Newcastle University, concludes that there are “statistically significant, meaningful” differences, with a range of antioxidants being “substantially higher” – between 19% and 69% – in organic food. It is the first study to demonstrate clear and wide-ranging differences between organic and conventional fruits, vegetables and cereals.
The researchers say the increased levels of antioxidants are equivalent to “one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables recommended to be consumed daily and would therefore be significant and meaningful in terms of human nutrition, if information linking these compounds to the health benefits associated with increased fruit, vegetable and wholegrain consumption is confirmed”.
The findings will add to the controversy over organic food and whether it is better for people, with one expert saying that the findings were exaggerated. Tom Sanders, a professor of nutrition at King’s College London, said the research did show some differences. “But the question is are they within natural variation? And are they nutritionally relevant? I am not convinced.” He said Leifert’s work had caused controversy in the past. “Leifert has had a lot of disagreements with a lot of people.” Sanders added the research showed organic cereals have less protein than conventional crops.
The results of the research are based on an analysis of 343 peer-reviewed studies from around the world – more than ever before – which examine differences between organic and conventional fruit, vegetables and cereals. “The crucially important thing about this research is that it shatters the myth that how we farm does not affect the quality of the food we eat,” said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, which campaigns for organic farming.
Plants produce many of their antioxidant compounds to fight back against pest attacks, so the higher levels in organic crops may result from their lack of protection by chemical sprays. But, the scientists say other reasons may be important, such as organic varieties being bred for toughness and not being overfed with artificial fertilizers.
Leifert and his colleagues conclude that many antioxidants “have previously been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and certain cancers”. But, they also note that no long-term studies showing health benefits from a broad organic diet have yet been conducted. The researchers found much higher levels of cadmium, a toxic metal, in conventional crops. Pesticide residues were found on conventional crops four times more often than on organic food. The research was funded by the EU and an organic farming charity.
The research is certain to be criticized: the inclusion of so many studies in the analysis could mean poor-quality work skews the results, although the team did “sensitivity analyses” and found that excluding weaker work did not significantly change the outcome. Also, the higher levels of cadmium and pesticides in conventional produce were still well below regulatory limits. But, the researchers say cadmium accumulates over time in the body and that some people may wish to avoid this, and that pesticide limits are set individually, not for the cocktail of chemicals used on crops.
A further criticism is that the differences seen may result from different climates, soil types and crop varieties, and not from organic farming, though the researchers argue that combining many studies should average out these other differences. The greatest criticism, however, will be over the suggestions of potential health benefits. The most recent major analysis, which took in 223 studies in 2012, found little evidence. “The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods,” it found.
This was also the conclusion of earlier, smaller studies published in 2009 in a scientific journal and by the UK Food Standards Agency, though the latter considered just 11 studies. The 2012 study did note that eating organic food might help people avoid pesticide residues. Sanders said he was not persuaded by the new work. “You are not going to be better nourished if you eat organic food,” he said. “What is most important is what you eat, not whether it’s organic or conventional. It’s whether you eat fruit and vegetables at all. People are buying into a lifestyle system. They get an assurance it is not being grown with chemicals and is not grown by big business.”
Opinion polls show healthy eating (55%) and avoiding chemical residues (53%) are key reasons cited by shoppers for buying organic produce. But, many also say care for the environment (44%) and animal welfare (31%) are important, as is taste (35%). Browning said: “This research backs up what people think about organic food. In other countries, there have long been much higher levels of support and acceptance of the benefits of organic food and farming. We hope these findings will bring the UK into line with the rest of Europe.” | 2adv
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To a master traditional navigator like Tua Pittman from Raratonga in the Cook Islands, a canoe is much more than just a means of transport. “The canoe is our island, the crew members are the community and the navigator is the leader,” Pittman says. He continues, explaining that the converse is also true. “An island is our canoe, the community are the crew members and the politicians and leaders are the navigators. On a canoe, you are not just going from one destination to another using the stars, the moon, the sun and the birds. Navigation is using the philosophies of being a leader to show your crew members the light of life.”
It has been a whirlwind week for the crews of the flotilla of four sailing canoes since arriving in Sydney for the start of the World Parks Congress. Tua’s journey began at the Cook Islands on 25 September. The first leg took the islanders to Samoa, then Fiji, Vanuatu and onto the Gold Coast, before heading south to Sydney. Around 100 crew members were involved in the various stages of the voyage and they aimed to travel using only traditional navigation techniques. Unfortunately, said Tua, the crews were forced to rely on modern navigation equipment on some occasions to reach Australia in time for the Congress.
The official title of the expedition is the Mua Voyage and it is a partnership between the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania Regional Office and five Pacific Island countries: Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Fiji. The main goal of the 6,000-nautical-mile (11,000km) trip was to deliver a special message to the World Parks Congress.
In part, the message said: “We see the signs of overexploitation. We no longer see the fish and other marine creatures in the size, diversity or abundance of the past. We witness the change as foreign fishing fleets ply our waters in a race to strip our resources. Our coral reefs, the greatest in the world, and our mangrove and wetland spawning grounds are disappearing. Our ocean is vast but not limitless. Growing global populations and the relentless pursuit of unsustainable development are reducing the ability of our ocean to sustain life.”
In spite of the effort and urgency behind the Pacific Islanders’ message to the delegates of the Congress, much of the final days of the marine part of the Congress were taken up with trying to set a revised target for the amount of the ocean that needs to be protected in marine sanctuaries. According to the IUCN, as of 2013, the amount of the world’s oceans in marine protected areas was not even three per cent and less than one per cent of that is ’no take’. This was despite a target of 20-30% no-take areas set by the last World Parks Congress held in South Africa in 2003.
World-leading marine scientist Professor Callum Roberts from the University of York was one of the scientists who helped set the 20-30% target in 2003. But he said it was not enough. “The IUCN should now lift its target from 30 to 33%. New research strengthens the case for the 30% target set previously to now be raised. Any reduction in efforts at this stage and moment in history would be disastrous for our oceans.”
After difficult negotiations, the World Parks Congress delegates passed a motion that will dramatically shift the goals for global marine management. Instead of the 20-30% aspirational target, the IUCN’s new official position is to “urgently increase the ocean area that is effectively and equitably managed in ecologically representative and well-connected systems of MPAs [marine protected areas] or other effective conservation measures by 2030; these should include strictly protected areas that amount to at least 30% of each marine habitat and address both biodiversity and ecosystem services.”
Tua Pittman was delighted with the news that a strong resolution on the planet’s oceans had passed the Congress. “It’s just like a huge reward for all the effort that we made to be here and to be heard. To hear they made that resolution is fantastic. It’s a step in the right direction.” He says that, while much of the traditional navigational aids were things such as the sun, moon and stars that never changed and would, at least on a human scale, always be there, other impacts of environmental degradation were becoming clearer when voyaging across the Pacific.
He said he was 55 and, in his lifetime, he was already beginning to see that it was much harder to catch fish on the open ocean. He also said that pollution was worsening, particularly as the canoes approached big cities such as Sydney. And the effects of climate change were already beginning to impact seriously on Pacific Islanders. “The decisions of the big countries have twice, thrice, four times the impact on the small countries than on developed, large nations. Many times, people don’t even know where our islands are and, from the eyes of a traditional navigator, our people have a very, very deep concern because we are talking about decisions made far away that impact on our homes.”
The Mua Voyage had been a massive logistical undertaking, said Tua. Years of preparation and navigational planning went into such a trip and it was critical to the voyagers that the world listened to their message and acted. The leaders of wealthy countries, he went on, need to start to think more like traditional navigators who recognize their vessels are mere specks in an enormous sea. Most importantly, and spoken like a true navigator, Tua says politicians must seek a different route to avoid the pending ecological crises that are beginning to befall the small island nations. “The world needs to find a different path.” | 2adv
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Indignant waiters are calling for public support in a battle to hold on to their tips. PizzaExpress branches are to be targeted by protesters as part of an attempt to get the restaurant chain to stop creaming off a proportion of tips for staff that have been paid on credit and debit cards. Campaigners have also started an online petition in the hope that restaurant-goers will back their demands.
In a policy that has outraged some employees, PizzaExpress keeps, as an admin fee, 8p out of every £1 paid when tips are given by card. The chain, which has 430 branches around the UK and is particularly popular with families, makes an estimated £1m a year from the practice, according to the union Unite.
“We believe this 8% fee is unfair and that, if the chain values its staff, it should be paying them the total tips they are given by customers,” said Chantal Chegrinec, campaigns officer at Unite. “We are starting with PizzaExpress but they are by no means the only offender and we will be turning our attention to other companies after this.”
The protests are being organized by local branches of Unite, with the first taking place at the British Museum branch of PizzaExpress in London. The union has also written to the restaurant chain’s CEO, Richard Hodgson. Unite began the campaign following a survey of its PizzaExpress members after the chain was sold to a Chinese private equity firm, Hony Capital, in 2014. One of the top issues was the 8% deduction from their tips.
One disgruntled PizzaExpress employee, who wants to remain anonymous, said that the admin fee was costing her £3 a night. “I have worked at PizzaExpress for 15 years,” she said in a letter to Unite. “After all this time, I’m still only paid the national minimum wage of £6.50 an hour. So you see my colleagues and I are heavily reliant on customer tips to top up our low wages. I work hard and am good at my job but, when PizzaExpress thinks it can get away with taking a percentage of our hard-earned tips left on a card, I get upset.”
PizzaExpress joins restaurant chains Ask and Zizzi in siphoning off 8% of the tips paid by card but other chains deduct even more. Café Rouge, Bella Italia and Belgo deduct 10%, as do Strada and Giraffe, which is owned by Tesco.
A spokesperson for PizzaExpress said that its admin charge was to cover the cost of running a “tronc” – a standard pay arrangement used to distribute tips among staff. “We went to great lengths to set up this tronc system, which is chaired by a troncmaster and run by a committee of waiters and pizzaiolos who independently decide how tips made by electronic card payment are subsequently distributed between front- and back-of-house restaurant teams; a system run by employees for the employees,” she said.
The chain, which sells 29m pizzas a year through its UK restaurants, denied that it profits from the admin fee. But other restaurant groups do not deduct an admin fee from tips. Wagamama, Pizza Hut and TGI Friday all take nothing. The Restaurant Group, which owns Frankie & Benny’s, Chiquitos and Garfunkels, used to charge 10% but dropped this policy several years ago.
Unite recently targeted ten PizzaExpress restaurants in south London, distributing leaflets to customers who were “shocked and disgusted” by the practice. PizzaExpress says the charge is mentioned in small print at the bottom of its menus but the employee who wrote to Unite said that, when she mentioned the charge to customers, it always came as a surprise. Most would then pay the tip in cash. Almost 6,000 people have so far signed Unite’s online petition.
One waiter, who doesn’t work for PizzaExpress but has worked for 11 years for another restaurant chain, said that at least a third of his income is from tips. He doesn’t want to be identified for fear of reprisals. “I work in a busy London branch and, on an average night, I’ll serve 150 people and take home £40 to £50 in tips,” he says. “That might sound like a lot but that money is crucial to me as my basic pay is only £6.50 an hour.”
Conservative MP Andrew Percy, who has called for a change in the law that would give restaurant staff more control over tips, said he plans to raise the issue in parliament after the summer recess.” | 2adv
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Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study. The scientist leading the research said that, unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4C by 2100, twice the level the world’s governments deem dangerous. The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change. Professor Steven Sherwood, at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who led the new work, said: “This study breaks new ground twice: first, by identifying what is controlling the cloud changes and, second, by strongly discounting the lowest estimates of future global warming in favour of the higher and more damaging estimates.”
“4C would likely be catastrophic rather than simply dangerous,” Sherwood said. “For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet”, with sea levels rising by many metres as a result.
The research is a “big advance” that halves the uncertainty about how much warming is caused by rises in carbon emissions, according to scientists commenting on the study, published in the journal Nature. Hideo Shiogama and Tomoo Ogura, at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies, said the explanation of how fewer clouds form as the world warms was “convincing” and agreed this indicated future climate change would be greater than expected. But they said more challenges lay ahead to narrow down further the projections of future temperatures.
Scientists measure the sensitivity of the Earth’s climate to greenhouse gases by estimating the temperature rise that would be caused by a doubling of CO in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial levels – as is likely to happen within 50 years, on current trends. For two decades, those estimates have run from 1.5C to 5C: a wide range. The new research narrowed that range to between 3C and 5C, by closely examining the biggest cause of uncertainty: clouds.
The key was to ensure that the way clouds form in the real world was accurately represented in computer climate models, which are the only tool researchers have to predict future temperatures. When water evaporates from the oceans, the vapour can rise over nine miles to form rain clouds that reflect sunlight; or, it may rise just a few miles and drift back down without forming clouds. In reality, both processes occur and climate models encompassing this complexity predicted significantly higher future temperatures than those only including the nine-mile-high clouds.
“Climate sceptics like to criticize climate models for getting things wrong and we are the first to admit they are not perfect,” said Sherwood. “But what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by the models which predict less warming, not those that predict more.” He added: “Sceptics may also point to the ’hiatus’ of temperatures since the end of the 20th century, but there is increasing evidence that this inaptly named hiatus is not seen in other measures of the climate system and is almost certainly temporary.”
Global average air temperatures have increased relatively slowly since a high point in 1998 caused by the ocean phenomenon El Niño, but observations show that heat is continuing to be trapped in increasing amounts by greenhouse gases, with over 90% disappearing into the oceans.
Furthermore, a study in November 2013 suggested the “pause” may be largely an illusion resulting from the lack of temperature readings from polar regions, where warming is greatest. Sherwood accepts his team’s work on the role of clouds cannot definitively rule out that future temperature rises will lie at the lower end of projections. “But,” he said, for that to be the case, “one would need to invoke some new dimension to the problem involving a major missing ingredient for which we currently have no evidence. Such a thing is not out of the question but requires a lot of faith.” He added: “Rises in global average temperatures of at least 4C by 2100 will have profound impacts on the world and the economies of many countries if we don’t urgently start to curb our emissions.” | 2adv
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Up to a billion people will remain in extreme poverty by 2030 unless countries focus on inequalities and confront social, economic and cultural forces that block their escape or pull them back into impoverishment, a major report warns. The report by the Chronic Poverty Advisory Network (CPAN) asserts that many people may rise above the poverty line of $1.25 a day, only to tumble back when they are hit by a combination or sequence of shocks such as drought, illness and insecurity or conflict.
Drawing on household panel surveys, the report found that, in parts of rural Kenya and in South Africa, 30 to 40% of those who escaped from poverty fell back, rising to 60% in some areas of Ethiopia between 1999 and 2009. Even in successful countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam, the proportion has been 20%. Individual cases highlight the ease with which people can slip back into poverty.
Amin, 61, from rural Bangladesh, has seen his livelihood gradually decline, due to his own and his wife’s illnesses, the cost of his son’s marriage, the death of his father and loss of goods such as fishing nets. Lovemore, 74, from Zimbabwe, has become one of the poorest people in his village. He recently lost his job as a car-park attendant due to ill health and had to take in his five grandchildren after the death of his daughters.
“We need to ensure that people lifted out of poverty remain above the poverty line permanently. Too many families are experiencing 'two steps forward, one step back', where they struggle to recover from personal or bigger setbacks. Governments shouldn’t assume that, just because somebody’s income hits $1.25, that means job done,” said Andrew Shepherd, research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a partner of CPAN, and lead author of the report.
A UN high-level panel considering a new development framework to succeed the Millennium Development Goals after 2015 said the goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2030 was within reach. The report, however, argues that “more of the same” will not get to zero.
Despite a drop in extreme poverty from 1.9bn in 1990 to 1.2bn in 2010, the report says that progress in the next 15 years will be much harder. The big gains in China are unlikely to be matched by similar progress elsewhere, while climate-related shocks and deep poverty in parts of sub-Saharan Africa will slow momentum. The report calls for a shift in thinking about poverty to focus on the chronically poor – those who are poor for many years or their entire lives – and for more emphasis on stopping impoverishment, the descent into poverty. “Governments have been quite good at moving people over the poverty line because that is relatively easy – there is a tendency to pick the low-hanging fruit, but they have shied away from the more difficult job of tackling chronic poverty,” said Shepherd.
The report says progress on poverty reduction, while impressive to date, has had less of an impact on the chronically poor than on those who were already closer to the poverty line. It will not be possible to get to zero unless development policies prioritize those living in chronic poverty, it adds. Policymakers must aim for a “zero tripod” of separate but interdependent objectives: tackle chronic poverty; stop impoverishment; sustain poverty escapes. They put forward a trio of policies, all of which require massive global investment.
The first is social assistance – a safety net – to bring the poorest people closer to a decent standard of living. An example of such a scheme is Ethiopia’s productive safety net programme that allowed thousands of vulnerable households to withstand drought without having to curtail education spending. The second is education, from early childhood to the start of work, to enable people to escape and stay out of poverty. Education also has the advantage of being a “portable” asset. The third is pro-poorest economic growth policies to ensure that the benefits of increasing national prosperity reach the very poorest people.
“Economic growth really is critical, but not just any old growth,” Shepherd said. “It has to generate not just employment but decent jobs, not just insecure low-paying jobs. There are ways of doing this, like India’s rural employment guarantees scheme, which has boosted urban not just rural wages.” Another example cited by the report is South Africa’s extension of the minimum wage to groups such as domestic workers.
All this will take money and the report says one obvious implication is that stronger domestic tax systems and greater tax revenues will be required. Aid will also be needed for the start-up costs for social assistance, universal health coverage and to finance education, including scholarships for the poorest children. “There remains a huge role for aid in the next 20 years, as many developing countries spend less than $500 on each of their citizens a year. Even Nigeria, with its oil wealth, spends only $650 per capita,” Shepherd said.
Against a backdrop of crises in Syria, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, conflict and environmental disasters have to be addressed, and the report says it is essential that governments work to reduce the risk of conflict and to establish inclusive peace settlements.
Choose the best answer according to the text. 1. Who are the 'chronically poor'?
Incorporating “reducing (income) inequality” as a post-2015 goal would steer the international agenda in the right direction, given that lessening or containing inequality speeds up the impact of economic growth on poverty reduction. The report argues that if the inequalities that affect the poorest people – such as access to land, labour markets and the power relationships between men and women – are addressed, this would tackle two goals at the same time: reducing chronic poverty and inequality.
The authors urge governments to develop an inclusive national development plan and to work with civil society to ensure the poorest people are represented politically as well as tackling difficult social norms such as dowries and witchcraft that contribute to extreme poverty: “This often means challenging and, perhaps, sweeping away aspects of the status quo and represents the most marked departure from 'business as usual'.” | 2adv
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After being told for the umpteenth time that the beer she wanted would be “too dark and too strong for you, love – have something sweeter”, Rebecka Singerer had had enough.
“No, I don’t want a fruit beer. Women can drink whatever we want,” she says.
Now Singerer, a childminder, has joined FemAle, a group of like-minded drinkers in Gothenburg, to launch Sweden’s first beer made by women.
We Can Do It, a bottled pale ale, has just gone on sale in stores across Sweden. Its label is a take on Rosie the Riveter, the creation of a US Second World War propaganda campaign that went on to become a symbol of women’s power in the workplace.
The group’s founder is Elin Carlsson, 25, who paints cars at the Volvo factory outside the city. “We Can Do It is not a female beer but a beer brewed by women that anyone can drink,” she says. “It’s nothing to do with feminism; it’s about equality – we wanted to show we can do it.”
FemAle is up against decades of prejudice in the beer world. In an irony not lost on FemAle, Carlsberg and other big brewers have spent millions in recent years trying to sell beer to women, attempting to “pink it and shrink it” to appeal to perceived feminine tastes. Carlsberg’s Eve and Copenhagen offerings, Foster’s Radler and Coors’s Animée were among lighter, flavoured and even “bloat-resistant” beers that failed to find a market.
FemAle’s approach is different, with women- only tastings that allow potential customers to experiment with flavours and styles of beer that they may not normally try. This education process is the way to “get more girls into the beer world”, the group says. “Bring your mother, sister, girlfriend, aunt and grandmother so we can all learn more about beer.”
The idea for FemAle arose after the women kept bumping into each other at beer festivals.
We Can Do It was the brainchild of Felicia Nordström, a bar worker who says she was fed up with bearded beer snobs telling her: “What do you know about beer, sweetie?” She approached FemAle and they teamed up with Ocean, a local independent micro-brewery. One weekend they concocted the recipe and the next they brewed 1,600 litres.
“This is not a beer that is aimed at women – it’s our hoppiest brew,” says Thomas Bingebo, the head brewer at Ocean. “When the big breweries target women, it usually fails. This is something completely different.”
The first batch of We Can Do It was sold out almost before it was brewed. FemAle has already been approached by other breweries asking if they can brew new beers with them.
We Can Do It uses three malts – Maris Otter, Amber and a Thomas Fawcett wheat malt – and the hop varieties Galaxy and Cascade. Its IBU, or bitterness level, is 65 and its alcohol content is 4.6%.
“Women opt for a glass of wine because they don’t know what beer is all about; they don’t know what to order,” says Carlsson. “We open up new worlds to them.”
“I used not to like stout but, back then, I only drank Pripps [a light, Swedish lager],” says Singerer, 38. “Guinness tastes like water to me now. There are imperial stouts that are like drinking biscotti dipped in espresso.”
The women are part of a brewing explosion in Sweden, which is developing a passion for “craft” ales, bottled and on draught. The standard stor stark (large strong) lager is now “almost extinct” in Gothenburg, the women say, as pubs and bars replace the big brands with a choice of specialist beers.
“All the girls are different – there is no typical woman beer-lover. Anyone can do it,” says Emma Henriksson, 22, a group member who works in a garden equipment company.
“Every pub wants to learn how to reach women,” adds Singerer. “And Elin has found the way. It’s awesome. We feel so proud.” | 2adv
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From all across Rwanda, and even parts of neighbouring Burundi, people flock to the southern town of Butare to a little shop called Inzozi Nziza (Sweet Dreams). They come for a taste of the unknown, something most have never tasted – the sweet, cold, velvety embrace of ice cream.
Here, at the central African country’s first ice- cream parlour, customers can buy scoops in sweet cream, passion fruit, strawberry and pineapple flavours. Toppings include fresh fruit, honey, chocolate chips and granola. Black tea and coffee are also on sale.
The shop, which has “ice cream, coffee, dreams” across its signage, is milking local curiosity about the dessert – and “changing lives” in the process, says Inzozi Nziza’s manager, Louise Ingabire.
“Ice cream is important,” she says between mouthfuls of a honey-flavoured offering. “Some Rwandans like ice cream, but it’s a new thing. We still have some work to do, to tell others that they’ll enjoy it.”
True to Inzozi Nziza’s motto, the shop can certainly make dreams come true. “I didn’t have a job before: I just stayed at home. Now, I have a vision for the future. I am making money and I can give some of it to my family,” says the 27-year-old.
Butare, which has 89,600 residents and is located 135km south of the capital, Kigali, is the home of the National University of Rwanda. Inzozi Nziza has become a hub for tired students looking to treat themselves to something cool and different.
“It’s something uniting people here,” Kalisa Migendo, a 24-year-old agriculture student, says. “If you need to go out and talk to a friend, a girl or a boy, you come to Inzozi Nziza for an ice cream.”
Most of the ingredients are sourced locally and the milk comes from a depot in nearby Nyanza. The vanilla beans and cocoa are imported.
Inzozi Nziza was opened by the theatre director Odile Gakire Katese. She met Alexis Miesen and Jennie Dundas, co-founders of Blue Marble Ice Cream in Brooklyn, New York, and formed a partnership to open the shop in 2010.
“An ice-cream shop, Katese proposed, might help to put the human pieces back together by rebuilding spirits, hopes and family traditions,” Miesen says.
At the start, Miesen and Dundas owned the shop in partnership with its staff and had shares in the business, which is a cooperative and non-profit. They did not set financial targets, but waited for 18 months before they transferred their shares to the women, who had by then proved their business credentials.
The shop’s success is no exception, says Fatuma Ndangiza, deputy chief executive of the Rwanda Governance Board. “Small businesses are mostly managed by women but when it comes to big business where you have to compete for big tenders, very few women are there. Women are newcomers to big business,” she points out. “We have more women entrepreneurs. It’s an area where women are taking an interest, both in and outside Kigali.”
Though ice cream is somewhat new to Rwanda, Ndangiza is enthused by the idea of the shop. “I think it’s great. It requires a lot of skills and changing people’s mindsets because selling and eating ice cream is not part of our culture. I think being able to innovate and introduce this on the market, and the process of making it, is quite interesting.”
The Butare shop employs nine women, who spend their spare time practising with Ingoma Nshya, Rwanda’s first and only female drumming troupe, which was established by Katese ten years ago.
The musicians are Hutu and Tutsi women, some survivors of the 1994 genocide, during which almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed.
Some members of Ingoma Nshya are widows, some orphans. Others have been affected by the massacre in different ways.
Historically, says Ingabire, Rwandan women were forbidden to drum and many people considered the drums too heavy for women to carry. “But it’s something which brings unity.”
Ingabire’s father, two siblings and many cousins were killed in the genocide. “Some of us are survivors; some know someone who was killed,” she says. “When I’m drumming with them, it gives me power because we’re still alive and survivors.”
The popular eatery features in a documentary by Rob and Lisa Fruchtman, sibling film-makers. Sweet Dreams, which tells the story of how the women have forged a promising post-genocide future, also includes the female drummers.
The film, which has been screened in more than a dozen countries, including the US, UK and several African states, premieres in Rwanda in 2014. “We feel the film is about resilience, hope, bravery, resourcefulness and the ability to change the course of your own life,” says Lisa Fruchtman, who won an Academy Award for film- editing in 1984. | 2adv
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Writing in the journal Nature, former president of the Royal Institute of Navigation Roger McKinlay argues that our reliance on GPS (global positioning system) technology is misplaced and could be eroding our innate way-finding abilities. “If we do not cherish them, our natural navigation abilities will deteriorate as we rely ever more on smart devices,” he wrote.
McKinlay believes huge investment will be needed before navigation systems will be good enough to allow technologies such as autonomous vehicles to take off. In the meantime, he argues, we need better research into systems for navigation while children should be encouraged to learn how to find their way around by more traditional means. “Schools should teach navigation and map reading as life skills,” he wrote.
According to Ofcom (the Office of Communications), around 66% of adults in the UK owned a smartphone in 2015, up from 39% in 2012, making GPS technology widely available. But McKinlay, a satellite communication and navigation consultant, believes that we should be wary of leaving our navigational needs to our devices. “Navigation is a use-it-or-lose-it skill,” he wrote.
While few scientific studies have explored the issue, research from 2009 supports the notion. “What we did was to look at a set of current London taxi drivers and a set of London taxi drivers that had been retired for about four years,” said neuroscientist Dr Hugo Spiers, head of the Spatial Cognition Group at University College London, who is an author of the study. The results showed that the retired taxi drivers performed worse on navigation tests than those still behind the wheel. “We were able to show that their abilities did drop away if they weren’t using their knowledge on that particular test.”
Spiers also believes there is a danger in relying on technologies like GPS but he is quick to point out that the biggest risk lies in users being unwittingly led into perilous situations. Among the fatalities blamed on satnavs (satellite navigation devices) was the death of a driver who, in 2010, plunged into a reservoir in Spain. “There is a genuine potential for risk in relying on a satnav,” said Spiers. “But the actual health risk of not using your brain effectively is not known.”
The way in which navigational technology is used could also affect its impact on our own abilities, says Spiers. While audio instructions to drivers remove the need to think about navigation, he says, the use of smartphone apps as digital maps is very different. “In the old days, you had to print out or take an A to Z map in your pocket – what we are doing now is just using computer- aided information and you are having to think really quite hard about where you are going and interact with this device,” he said. “The modern technology isn’t just dumbing us down completely.”
McKinlay remains convinced that navigation technologies have a long way to go before futuristic scenarios involving driverless cars and smart cities become a reality. “For really critical applications – safety applications like landing aircraft or navigating aircraft – GPS is still not good enough,” he said.
Though Spiers believes the development of artificial intelligence based on machine learning could lead to a new wave of navigational aids, McKinlay remains sceptical. “We will see ever- smarter machines which are very, very task specific, but the big breakthrough will be when they are able to tune in to what you might be thinking and what you might be wanting to achieve,” he said.
Ultimately, McKinlay believes, it’s essential that humans remain able to take control of their navigation. “Do you really want to encourage people to get to a point where, when it disappears or when the battery goes flat, they are in total shock and can do nothing?” he said. “Technology isn’t magic – it is just a tool.” | 2adv
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Scarlett Johansson is suing a French novelist for €50,000 in damages, alleging that his work of fiction makes fraudulent claims about her personal life.
La Premiere chose qu’on regarde (The First Thing We Look At) by Grégoire Delacourt tells the story of a French model who looks so similar to the American actor that the book’s lead male character thinks it is Johansson herself. In the novel, the model’s looks mean that men see her only as a sex object, while women are jealous of her. She has a series of adventures as Johansson until she is eventually found out and, in the end, dies in a car crash.
Johansson herself is not flattered by the best- selling literary work. Her lawyer, Vincent Toledano, told Le Figaro that Delacourt’s novel constituted a “violation and fraudulent and illegal exploitation of her name, her reputation and her image.” He said the novel contains “defamatory claims about her private life” and has now gone to court to try to stop the book being translated or adapted for cinema. The court case began in Paris on Wednesday afternoon, though neither Johansson nor Delacourt was present.
“The freedom of expression that she defends as an artist is not in question,” Toledano said. “Such activities for purely mercantile ends have nothing to do with creativity.”
Delacourt has tried explaining that he chose to reference Johansson because she is “the archetype of beauty today.” He said: “I wrote a work of fiction. My character is not Scarlett Johansson.”
The author recently hit out against the actor on French radio, saying the legal action was “rather sad”. He said: “It freaks me out to think that, when you talk of a character in a novel, judges can get involved.”
Delacourt has become one of France’s best-loved authors; his previous novel, My List of Desires, was translated into 47 languages and is now being adapted into a film. But he said he was “speechless” when he found out Johansson was suing him.
“I thought she’d get in contact to ask me to go for a coffee with her. I didn’t write a novel about a celebrity,” he said. “I wrote a real love story and a homage to feminine beauty, especially interior beauty.
“If an author can no longer mention the things that surround us – a brand of beer, a monument, an actor – it’s going to be complicated to produce fiction.
“It’s stupefying, especially as I’m not sure she’s even read the novel, since it hasn’t been translated yet.”
Emmanuelle Allibert, spokeswoman for publisher JC Lattès, said taking legal action was “crazy”. “We have never known anything like it. It is all the more surprising for the fact that the novel is not even about Scarlett Johansson. It is about a woman who is Scarlett Johansson’s double.”
Delacourt’s lawyer, Anne Veil, who is also representing publisher JC Lattès, said the allegations were “totally scandalous”. “This is a literary, not commercial, approach. She has not been used as a product,” she said. “Grégoire Delacourt is not a paparazzo; he’s a writer!”
Ironically, the author’s legal situation would be far easier had he published the book in Johansson’s home country, rather than France. Lloyd Jassin, a New York intellectual property lawyer, told Time that the case would be unlikely to be considered in the United States because the book would be protected by the First Amendment.
“The First Amendment doesn’t look at most books as commercial uses or commercial propositions,” he said. “If her name or likeness is relevant, literarily, if there’s significance and literary merit to using her name between the covers, the First Amendment steps in.” However, in France, the legal position is more complicated and personality rights are taken “much more seriously,” Jassin says.
“I thought she might send me flowers as it was a declaration of love for her, but she didn’t understand,” Delacourt said. “It’s a strange paradox – but a very American one.” | 2adv
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Do you want your child to be good at sport, make the school team and, maybe one day, even compete on the world stage? Well, try to ensure that your would-be Olympian or World Cup winner is born in November or, failing that, in October. A study led by one of the UK’s leading experts on children’s physical activity has found that school pupils born in those months are fitter than everyone else in their class.
November- and October-born children emerged as fitter, stronger and more powerful than their peers born in the other ten months of the year, especially those whose birthdays fell in April or June. Dr Gavin Sandercock, from the Centre for Sports and Exercise Science at Essex University, and colleagues found that autumn-born children enjoyed “a clear physical advantage” over their classmates.
The research involved 8,550 boys and girls aged between ten and 16 from 26 state schools in Essex. All were tested between 2007 and 2010 on three different measures of fitness: stamina, handgrip strength and lower-body power. The results revealed that a child’s month of birth could make “significant” differences to their levels of cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength and ability to accelerate, all of which predict how good someone is at sport, in which such attributes are vital. Performances at school sports days in the weeks ahead may bear out the findings.
November-born children were the fittest overall as they had the most stamina and power and were the second strongest. Those born in October were almost as fit, scoring highest for strength and coming third for power, with December children close behind.
The gap in physical prowess between children in the same class but born in different months was sometimes very wide. “For example, we found that a boy born in November can run at least 10% faster, jump 12% higher and is 15% more powerful than a child of the same age born in April. This is, potentially, a huge physical advantage,” said Sandercock. Such gaps could ultimately decide who became a top-level athlete because, as the paper says, “selection into elite sports may often depend on very small margins or differences in an individual’s physical performance”.
The study, which has been published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine, found that, when scores for the three kinds of fitness were combined, those born in April were the least fit, then those in June. That could see those children excluded from school teams and becoming sporting underachievers, Sandercock said.
The findings seem to show that children born in the early months of the school year enjoy a double “autumn advantage” – they are already known to have an academic advantage and, now, they also appear to be better equipped for sport, too. The results show that something other than “the relative-age effect” – the greater maturity of those born early in the school year – is at work, especially as the fittest children were not the tallest or heaviest, he added.
The authors believe that autumn-born children’s greater exposure over the summer months, towards the end of pregnancy, to vitamin D – the “sunshine vitamin” linked to a range of health benefits – is the most likely explanation. “Seasonal differences in intrauterine vitamin D concentrations seem most plausible,” they say. John Steele, chief executive of the Youth Sport Trust, said the quality of a young person’s introduction to PE and sport at school can be “a major factor” in their sporting development. “Children that get a high-quality first experience, which develops their physical literacy, are those that will have greater agility, balance and coordination, and are more likely to develop an enjoyment of physical activity and excel in sport as they grow up”, he said.
UK Sport could not say if a disproportionately high number of the 1,300 athletes across 47 sports it funds were born in November and October. Natalie Dunman, its head of performance pathways, said that, while the differences highlighted in the new findings were borne out by teenagers competing in junior-level competitions, they had disappeared by the time sportspeople were taking part in adult competitions. She said: “Looking at elite, senior athletes, there are many factors that go into making a champion and our work hasn’t uncovered anything to suggest that month of birth is one of the key ingredients.” | 2adv
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As soon as the children at one primary school in Stirling hear the words “daily mile”, they down their pencils and head out of the classroom to start running laps around the school field. For three-and-a-half years, all pupils at St Ninian’s Primary have walked or run a mile each day. They do so at random times during the day, apparently happily, and, despite the rise in childhood obesity across the UK, none of the children at the school are overweight.
The daily mile has done so much to improve these children’s fitness, behaviour and concentration in lessons that scores of nursery and primary schools across Britain are following suit and getting pupils to get up from their desks and take 15 minutes to walk or run round the school or local park.
Elaine Wyllie, headteacher of St Ninian’s, said: “I get at least two emails a day from other schools and local authorities asking how we do it. The thought of children across the country running every day because of something we’ve done is phenomenal.”
One in ten children are obese when they start school at the age of four or five, according to figures from the Health & Social Care Information Centre, and, in the summer of 2015, a study found that schoolchildren in England are the least fit they have ever been. Primary schools have therefore been quick to note the benefits of the daily mile. It has been introduced in schools in London, Gateshead, Wales and other parts of Scotland, while others are planning to launch the initiative during the 2015-6 academic year. In Stirling alone, 30 schools have already started or are to start the daily mile.
“It’s a common-sense approach to children’s fitness, which is free and easy. The most important thing is that the children really enjoy it; otherwise, you couldn’t sustain it. They come back in bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, how children used to look. It’s joyous to see,” said Wyllie. At St Ninian’s, teachers take their pupils out of lessons on to a specially built circuit around the school’s playing field for their daily mile whenever it best suits that day’s timetable. Only ice or very heavy rain stop them.
The extent of the benefits have yet to be determined but researchers from Stirling University have launched a comparative study to look for quantitative evidence of the physical, cognitive and emotional benefits of the daily mile. Dr Colin Moran, who is leading the study, said: “The children at St Ninian’s don’t seem to have problems with obesity; they seem happier and staff say they settle into lessons faster so we designed a study that would test all of these things. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the benefits but there aren’t any scientific facts yet.” St Ninian’s pupils will be compared with children from another school in Stirling that has yet to start the scheme.
Kevin Clelland, a primary school teacher from Leeds, visited St Ninian’s before convincing his colleagues it was a great idea. He said: “It’s such a simple thing to do but seems to have such an amazing impact. We’re really committed to improving the fitness of our pupils beyond the two-hour statutory PE that we are expected to deliver.” His school is now constructing a track.
Active Cheshire, a strategic body for sports and fitness in Cheshire and Warrington, is taking a group of senior figures from the local authority up to Scotland to assess the results of the daily mile. The hope is to introduce it across the 450 schools in the region if a pilot is successful.
Paralympian, Tanni Grey-Thompson, chair of ukactive, the UK’s leading not-for-profit health body for physical activity, said: “All children need to achieve 60 active minutes every day, whether in a lesson, on the walk to school or in the playground. It’s fantastic to see initiatives like the daily mile be established, showing real leadership from the education sector to improve children’s fitness levels and their cognitive behaviour, and make a real difference to schools, teachers, parents and young people’s lives. We know sitting still kills; not sitting still helps children build skills that will stay with them for life.”
The Scottish government is also supportive. A spokesperson said: “Learning in PE is enhanced by initiatives like the daily mile, which can encourage and support parents in fostering healthy habits with their children from a young age. We are pleased to see so many Scottish schools are taking part or planning to do so.” | 2adv
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Like veins carrying the lifeblood of a city, a subway system teems with billions of inhabitants: the bacteria of Swiss cheese and kimchi, of bubonic plague and drug-proof bugs and of human skin. Now, for the first time, scientists have started to catalogue and map the bacteria coursing through a city’s subway – and they have found a wealth of curious results.
Dr Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College, led a team that, for 18 months, swabbed the New York City subway system for the microscopic life forms that cover its turnstiles, seats, ticket booths and stations. In what Mason called “the first city-scale genetic profile ever”, his team found meningitis at Times Square, a trace of anthrax on the handhold of a train carriage and bacteria that cause bubonic plague on a rubbish bin and ticket machine at stations in uptown Manhattan.
In research published in the journal Cell Systems, the team strongly downplayed the findings of plague and anthrax, noting the extremely small trace of the latter, that rats likely carried the former and that no one has fallen ill with plague in or around New York for years.
“The results do not suggest that plague or anthrax is prevalent,” the study says. “Nor do they suggest that New York residents are at risk.”
In fact, most of the bacteria identified by the team are either harmless to humans or beneficial in the city’s thriving world of microorganisms, many of which process toxic hazards and waste in the same way that bacteria inside every human help with digestion and bodily functions.
Some of the results were expected, Mason said, including some bacteria associated with fecal matter, which he said “should be a gentle reminder for people to wash their hands”. He also said that many bacteria of the same genus as those “that are beneficial and helpful, like the one used for making cheese,” also turned up around New York.
Bacteria appeared to reflect the eating habits of various neighbourhoods. All around the subway, bacteria associated with cheeses – brie, cheddar, parmesan and the mozzarella of ubiquitous New York pizza – turned up. The distinctive bacteria of Swiss cheese were more localized to midtown Manhattan and the financial district, and the bacteria used to ferment cabbage for kimchi and sauerkraut showed up in the financial district and Bay Ridge. The computer also identified cucumber DNA all over the city, Mason said.
Bacteria associated with illness and infections were extremely common. Species that cause diarrhoea and nausea, both benign and bad E.coli (mostly benign), and the bacteria that can cause skin infections and urinary-tract infections were common all over the city. The species that produces tetanus appeared in Soho and bacteria that cause dysentery appeared at a station in the Bronx and another in Harlem.
With more than 1,000 samples collected at all of New York’s 466 open subway stations, Mason and his team ran the organic materials through a DNA sequencer and, then, through a supercomputer armed with genetic databases. They identified 15,152 distinct species, nearly half of which were bacteria.
The good news, the researchers wrote, is that these “potentially infectious agents” are not spreading sickness or disease throughout New York but rather seem to be “normal co-habitants” and “may even be essential”. They “represent a normal, 'healthy' metagenome profile of a city”.
In short, the researchers conclude, the subway and city are about as safe as everyone thought.
Mason said people should not be concerned about getting urinary-tract infections from subway seats. “You should wash your hands,” he said, “and probably get some sleep and eat salads and go to the gym, and that’s about the same today as it was yesterday.”
“If anything,” he added, “I’ve become much more confident riding the subway.”
Many findings made sense: heavily trafficked stations like Grand Central and Times Square had more bacteria and more diversity among them; the subway was most enriched for bacteria associated with skin. The Bronx, with its diverse neighbourhoods and stations, had the greatest diversity of bacteria; Staten Island, with just three stops, had the lowest.
The researchers found marine bacteria at South Ferry, a station that flooded during Hurricane Sandy – but they were surprised to note the species included some normally associated with Antarctica and fish.
The next steps, Mason said, are studies of other cities, which have begun in Paris, São Paolo and Shanghai, and continued studies of New York, for instance to see how the microbiome changes with the seasons. He said he hoped the research would provide “a baseline” of research for health officials and geneticists, and could help health officials to be better prepared to prevent and track diseases and pathogens. | 2adv
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David Cameron has declared a “clear result” in the Scottish independence referendum after Scotland voted by a 10.6-point margin against ending the 307-year-old union with England and Wales. The prime minister promised a devolution revolution across Great Britain, including votes on English issues by English MPs at Westminster, as he welcomed Scotland’s decision to remain inside the UK. “There can be no disputes, no reruns – we have heard the settled will of the Scottish people,” Cameron said in a statement
Earlier, Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, remained defiant at a downbeat Scottish National Party rally in Edinburgh, saying he accepted Scotland had not, “at this stage”, decided to vote for independence. He paid tribute to what he called a “triumph for democratic politics” and said he would work with Westminster in the best interests of Scotland and the rest of the UK – warning the leaders of the three main parties to make good on their promises of enhanced devolution for Scotland. “We have touched sections of the community who have never before been touched by politics,” he said.
The yes campaign scored four big successes, winning 53% of the vote in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow, 57% in Dundee and 51% in North Lanarkshire. However, the no camp was victorious in 28 authorities. It won overwhelmingly in areas where it was expected to do well, including Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Borders, but also in areas that could have gone to the yes campaign, including the Western Isles. In the final count, the no camp won 2,001,926 votes (55.3%) to 1,617,989 for yes (44.7%).
In his speech, Cameron made clear that the constitutional reforms, including in Scotland, would not be delivered until after the general election, and that Scottish measures would proceed in tandem with changes in England. “We have heard the voice of Scotland and, now, the millions of voices of England must be heard,” he said.
Cameron added: “The people of Scotland have spoken and it is a clear result. They have kept our country of four nations together and, like millions of other people, I am delighted. As I said during the campaign, it would have broken my heart to see our United Kingdom come to an end. And I know that sentiment was shared by people not just across our country but around the world because of what we have achieved together in the past and what we can do together in the future. So, now, it is time for our United Kingdom to come together and to move forward. A vital part of that will be a balanced settlement, fair to people in Scotland and, importantly, to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well.”
Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the referendum was a vote from the Scottish people for change. “We know our country needs to change in the way it is governed and we know our country needs to change in who it is governed for. We will deliver on stronger powers for a stronger Scottish parliament, a strong Scotland.” But he said that would go beyond Scotland. “We will also meet the desire for change across England, across Wales, across the whole of the United Kingdom.”
Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, said the referendum “marks not only a new chapter for Scotland within the UK but also wider constitutional reform across the union”. Echoing the SNP’s argument, he said a vote against independence was “clearly not a vote against change”. “We must now deliver on time and in full the radical package of newly devolved powers to Scotland,” he added.
Yet that result raises the risk of further turmoil, with MPs from Cameron’s Conservative Party threatening to revolt against the prime minister’s late and potentially vital promise to quickly increase the Scottish parliament’s powers while protecting its spending.
The UK Independence Party leader, Nigel Farage, said Cameron’s offer of more devolution for England did not go far enough. “The English are 86% by population of this union. They’ve been left out of all of this for the last 18 years. We still have a situation where Scottish MPs can vote in the House of Commons on English-only issues. I think what most English people want is a fair settlement,” he said.
Cameron and the Queen will both move to calm tensions when they deliver statements on the result. The prime minister will try, in the words of one cabinet minister, to “cement in” the no vote by outlining how he will deliver the deepening of Scotland’s devolution settlement, including handing greater powers over tax and welfare to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh.
The Queen, who has monitored the referendum with interest, will make a written statement. It is understood that her remarks will focus on reconciliation. The prime minister wants to move fast to show that the three main UK party leaders will live up to their commitments made during the referendum campaign to deliver what the former prime minister Gordon Brown called “home rule” within the UK.
Ministers believe it is important to move quickly to avoid a repeat of the 1980 referendum in Québec. The triumphalist behaviour of Ontario fuelled the separatist cause that nearly succeeded in a second referendum in 1995.
For the no campaign, there was relief: a spate of authoritative polls in the final days of the campaign had said the vote was on a knife-edge, bringing Yes Scotland within touching distance of victory after a dramatic surge in support. | 2adv
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SeaWorld has suffered an 84% collapse in profits as customers have deserted the controversial aquatic theme park company following claims it mistreated orca whales.
The company, which trains dolphins and killer whales to perform tricks in front of stadiums full of spectators, has reported declines in attendance, sales and profits because of “continued brand challenges”.
SeaWorld has been in the headlines since the 2013 documentary Blackfish detailed claims that its treatment of orca whales provoked violent behaviour, contributing to the deaths of three people. Following the release of the documentary, attendance collapsed, the company lost more than half of its market value on Wall Street and its former CEO was forced out.
The company has since launched a nationwide marketing campaign to combat animal rights activists claims that, among other things, captive orcas die at a younger age than their wild counterparts.
Despite cutting ticket prices and spending $10m on the marketing blitz, which features its veterinarians caring for whales, SeaWorld CEO Joel Manby was forced to admit that the company is still struggling to convince the public that it treats its whales well.
“We realize we have much work ahead of us to recover more of our attendance base, increase revenue and improve our performance, as returning to historical performance levels will take time and investment,” Manby said. “On the reputation side, early feedback on our campaign has been positive. However, we recognize that fully resolving our brand challenges in California will require sustained focus and commitment to correct misinformation.”
“We will continue to fight with the facts because the facts are on our side,” he said recently on a conference call with journalists and analysts.
Manby, who joined the company as CEO in 2015 to help the company rehabilitate itself, said he would set out his vision for the future of the company at a special event on 6 November. Already in the pipeline are plans for a new shark exhibition in Orlando and an attraction in San Antonio that will allow customers to swim with dolphins in a “naturalistic” setting.
The company’s financial report, released on 6 August, showed net income in the second quarter dropped from $37.4m in 2014 to $5.8m in 2015, an 84% decrease. Revenue fell from $405m to $392m. Attendance dropped by more than 100,000 from 6.58 million to 6.48 million. Analysts will now be closely watching SeaWorld’s sales and attendance numbers in the third quarter, which is traditionally the company’s most profitable and covers the summer holiday season.
Attendance may suffer from a fresh scandal in July 2015, in which a SeaWorld employee was alleged to have infiltrated animal rights protest groups against the company. Jared Goodman, director of animal law for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which has been leading campaigns against SeaWorld, said: “SeaWorld is in the midst of a spying scandal, animals are dying in its tanks and tens of thousands of people have opposed its bid to build a new orca prison so it should come as no surprise that SeaWorld’s quarterly earnings have plummeted yet again in the second quarter. Families just don’t want to buy tickets to see orcas going insane inside tiny tanks and SeaWorld’s profits, like the orcas, won’t recover until the abusement park empties its tanks and builds coastal sanctuaries.”
SeaWorld’s shares, which were worth $39 in 2013, were changing hands for just under $18 in August 2015. | 2adv
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The world shares him and London claims him but Stratford-upon-Avon intends to spend 2016 celebrating William Shakespeare as their man: the bard of Avon, born in the Warwickshire market town in 1564, who died there 400 years ago. Stratford remained hugely important throughout Shakespeare’s life, argues Paul Edmondson, the head of learning and research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
“People have seen Shakespeare as someone who turns his back on Stratford and his family, goes to London to earn his fortune and only comes back to die,” he said. “But Stratford is where he bought land and property, where he kept his library, where he lived and read and thought. We are going to spend the year re-emphasizing the importance of Shakespeare, the man of Stratford.” The seveneenth-century diarist, antiquarian and gossip John Aubrey, born 11 years after Shakespeare died, was at pains to point out there was nothing so very special about the bard. Aubrey, university educated, unlike Shakespeare, said that he acted “exceedingly well” and that “his Playes took well ”. The world has not agreed with Aubrey. The anniversary of the death of the man from Stratford, the most famous and the most performed playwright in the world, will be marked across Britain and the globe.
Macbeth will open in Singapore, Romeo and Juliet in Brussels. Shakespeare’s Globe is completing the first world tour in the history of theatre, in which it has taken Hamlet to almost every country – North Korea is still holding out. In London, they are also creating a 37-screen pop-up cinema, one screen to showcase each of Shakespeare’s plays, along the South Bank.
The National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company and virtually every other theatre production company in the country will be marking the anniversary. Interpretations will range from the resolutely traditional to the Brighton-based Spymonkey’s Complete Deaths, a romp through the 74 deaths – 75 including a fly squashed in Titus
Andronicus – by stabbing, poisoning, smothering and smashing across the plays. There will also be hundreds of lectures, recitals, international academic conferences, films, concerts, operas and major exhibitions.
For a man famous in his own lifetime, there is little documentary evidence for Shakespeare’s life and times. The plays would scarcely have survived if his friends and fellow actors had not gathered together every scrap of every play they could find – drafts, prompt scripts, scribbled actors’ parts and 17 plays not known in any other version – into the precious First Folio published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death.
The actor Mark Rylance has called it his favourite book in the world and most of the surviving First Folios will be on display – including those belonging to the British and Bodleian libraries, and a tattered copy recently discovered in France. Some of the most precious surviving documents will be gathered together in an exhibition at Somerset House in London, jointly organized by the National Archives and King’s College London, including four of his six known signatures, which are all slightly different.
The exhibition, By Me, William Shakespeare, will include his will, the court papers relating to the audacious move when Shakespeare and his fellow actors dismantled a theatre on the north side of the Thames and rebuilt it as the Globe on the South Bank, and accounts showing payments from the royal treasury for Boxing Day performances for James I and Queen Anne.
The outgoing Globe director, Dominic Dromgoole, recently jokily claimed Shakespeare as a true Londoner – albeit conceding “some spurious claim” by Stratford-upon-Avon. Stratford, however, will be insisting that the town made and educated Shakespeare. His old school room is being restored with a £1.4m Heritage Lottery grant and will open as a permanent visitor attraction.
Shakespeare bought the splendid New Place, the second best house in the town, where he died, according to literary legend, on St George’s Day, 23 April, the same day as his birth. “You don’t buy a house like New Place and not live there,” Paul Edmondson said. “The general public and many academics have consistently underestimated the importance of Stratford to Shakespeare.”
Edmondson believes that, after Shakespeare bought the house in 1597, all his thinking time was spent there and that the late plays, including The Tempest, were at least planned in his library and probably written there. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust describes New Place as “the jewel in the crown of the 400th anniversary celebrations” but, in truth, it is more of a gaping hole where the gem should be.
Shakespeare’s house was demolished 300 years ago and the house that replaced it, probably incorporating some of the original fabric, was flattened in 1759 by an irascible clergyman, Francis Gastrell, in a row over taxes. He had already cut down Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, under which the writer is said to have sat and worked, because he was irritated by all the tourists peering into his garden.
The gap in the Stratford streetscape has never been filled but a five-year archaeology project has peeled back the years and the news that Shakespeare’s kitchen had been found in the partly surviving cellars went round the world. The whole site is being redisplayed for the anniversary, with the foundations marked and the garden restored. “Without Stratford,” Edmondson said, “there would have been no Shakespeare.” | 2adv
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Noise emanating from passing ships may disturb animals such as killer whales and dolphins far more than previously thought, with new research showing that the animals’ communication and ability to find prey could be hampered by the underwater din. The low rumble of passing ships has long been connected to the disturbance of large whales. But, US researchers have documented persistent noise also occurring at medium and higher frequencies, including at 20,000Hz where killer whales, also known as orcas, hear best.
These noise disturbances could be hindering the ability of killer whales to communicate and echolocate – the process of using sound to bounce off objects such as prey and identify where they are. Dolphins and porpoises, which also operate at higher frequencies, may be suffering the same problems. The findings suggest that the noise could well affect the endangered population of killer whales that are found near the shipping lanes. A population of just 84 killer whales forage up the US west coast and into Puget Sound.
“The main concern relating to this is that even a slight increase in sound may make echolocation more difficult for whales,” said Scott Veirs of Beamreach, who led the research. “That’s worrying because their prey, chinook salmon, is already quite scarce. Hearing a click off a salmon is probably one of the most challenging things a killer whale does. Hearing that subtle click is harder if there’s a lot of noise around you.”
The researchers used underwater microphones to measure the noise created by about 1,600 individual ships as they passed through Haro Strait, in Washington State. The two-year study captured the sounds made by 12 different types of vessel, including cruise ships, container ships and military vehicles, that passed through the strait about 20 times a day.
Some ships are quieter than others but the average intensity of noise next to all the ships was 173 underwater decibels, equivalent to 111 decibels through the air – about the sound of a loud rock concert. Whales are not usually located right next to ships and so would be subjected to noise of about 60 to 90 decibels – around the level of a lawnmower or a vacuum cleaner.
Veirs said scientists have already identified the impact of underwater noise upon baleen whales – a class of fauna containing the largest animals on Earth. But, the new research underlines the threat posed to smaller whales, dolphins and porpoises. “Ships have been thought of as low- frequency sources of noise, like the rumbling of lorries or trains,” he said. “Most noise is at that low frequency but the background noise of the ocean is raised even in the high frequencies. This could be causing a significant problem that we need to look into more.”
There are several knock-on consequences of a noisy marine environment. Whales may have to group together more closely in order to hear each other. And, should they fail to find prey as effectively, they will need to use up their stores of excess blubber. This is problematic as this blubber often contains manmade pollutants that are toxic to whales if released fully into their systems.
Veirs said more work needs to be done to identify how badly the noise is affecting whales and also to quieten the ships that pass near the cetaceans. “It should be easy to reduce noise pollution,” he said. “Military ships are quite a bit quieter and there could be straightforward ways of transferring that technology to the commercial fleet. Another way to reduce noise is to slow down. Decreasing speed by six knots could decrease noise intensity by half.”
While the fortunes of some whale species, such as humpbacks and blue whales, the largest mammal on Earth, have improved as whaling has declined, others are still under threat from a range of factors. The US federal government has recently protected nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic in an attempt to avoid losing the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, a species with just 500 individuals left.
In Europe, killer whales are carrying dangerously high levels of banned polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) chemicals in their blubber. Scientists are still trying to determine whether pollutants caused the deaths of five sperm whales that became stranded on the east coast of Britain in January 2016. Meanwhile, around the coast of Australia, whales face an increased threat from ship strikes and oil and gas drilling, as well as Japan’s recent pledge to resume whaling in Antarctic waters. | 2adv
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It was not so much how hard people found the challenge but how far they would go to avoid it that left researchers gobsmacked. The task? To sit in a chair and do nothing but think.
So unbearable did some find it that they took up the safe but alarming opportunity to give themselves mild electric shocks in an attempt to break the tedium.
Two-thirds of men pressed a button to deliver a painful jolt during a 15-minute spell of solitude.
Under the same conditions, a quarter of women pressed the shock button. The difference, scientists suspect, is that men tend to be more sensation-seeking than women.
The report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities is one of a surprising few to tackle the question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing.
In more than 11 separate studies, the researchers showed that people hated being left to think, regardless of their age, education, income or the amount of time they spent using smartphones or social media.
Timothy Wilson, who led the work, said the findings were not necessarily a reflection of the pace of modern life or the spread of mobile devices and social media. Instead, those things might be popular because of our constant urge to do something rather than nothing.
The first run of experiments began with students being ushered – alone, without phones, books or anything to write with – into an unadorned room and told to think. The only rules were they had to stay seated and not fall asleep. They were informed – specifically or vaguely – that they would have six to 15 minutes alone.
The students were questioned when the time was up. On average, they did not enjoy the experience. They struggled to concentrate. Their minds wandered even with nothing to distract them. Even giving them time to think about what to think about did not help.
In case the unfamiliar setting hampered the ability to think, the researchers ran the experiment again with people at home.
They got much the same results, only people found the experience even more miserable and cheated by getting up from their chair or checking their phones.
To see if the effect was found only in students, the scientists recruited more than 100 people, aged 18 to 77, from a church and a farmers’ market. They, too, disliked being left to their thoughts.
But, the most staggering result was yet to come. To check whether people might actually prefer something bad to nothing at all, the students were given the option of administering a mild electric shock.
They had been asked earlier to rate how unpleasant the shocks were, alongside other options, such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing the sound of a knife rubbing against a bottle.
All the students picked for the test said they would pay to avoid mild electric shocks after receiving a demonstration.
To the researchers’ surprise, 12 of 18 men gave themselves up to four electric shocks, as did six of 24 women.
“What is striking is that simply being alone with their thoughts was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid,” the scientists write in Science
Jessica Andrews-Hanna at the University of Colorado said many students would probably zap themselves to cheer up a tedious lecture. But, she says more needs to be known about the motivation of the shockers in Wilson’s study.
“Imagine the setup – a person is told to sit in a chair with wires attached to their skin and a button that will deliver a harmless but uncomfortable shock, and they are told to just sit there and entertain themselves with their thoughts,” she said.
“As they sit there, strapped to this machine, their mind starts to wander and it naturally goes to that shock – was it really that bad?
“What are the experimenters really interested in? Perhaps this is a case where curiosity killed the cat.” | 2adv
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There are eyes on you, behind the bright lights and mirrored panels. Pick up a boot and a camera will make sure you don’t slip it into your bag. Enter a department store and you will be watched. But new technology is leading retailers to grow a different set of eyes – less focused on shoplifting and more interested in your age, sex, size, head, shoulders, knees and toes.
A few months ago, IT firm Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) produced a report that claimed around 30% of retailers use facial recognition technology to track customers in-store. Facial recognition is a technology that can identify people by analysing and comparing facial features from a database, using devices such as Intel RealSense cameras, which are able to analyse everything from particular expressions to the clothing brands someone is wearing.
Joe Jensen, of Intel’s Retail Solutions Division, says that the aim of bringing RealSense technology into shops is not to create databases of specific people’s lives but rather to build generalized models of people’s lifestyles and shopping habits. “It’s not so much that you need to know a particular customer. It’s that you need to know that this shopper has these characteristics and, in the past, that when those characteristics are present, this is what a person tends to do.”
If you combine recognition technology with databases of previous customer patterns, you can start to predict a lot about what a person may or may not do in a shop. If, say, there’s a size-10 woman wearing a gold necklace walking quickly towards the sock aisle, you can use that data to predict she wants to, well, buy socks. That could allow a retailer to automatically put targeted ads on screens aimed specifically at that person. If she looks like the type of person who wants to buy socks, they will show her adverts for socks.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because the online world has been using techniques like these for years.
If you search for something on Amazon, you’ll be hounded by targeted banners for similar products on other sites. Express a vague interest in canoeing and you’ll get ads for canoes wherever you go. Yet bringing these systems into the physical world isn’t a simple case of copy and paste. It turns out that people do not react to cameras in the same way as they do to browser cookies.
Hoxton Analytics, a London-based team of data scientists, has developed a technology that makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to categorize people based on the shoes they are wearing. By analysing the style and size of people’s footwear as they walk past the sensor, the system can identify a customer’s gender with between 75 and 80% accuracy.
Owen McCormack, Hoxton Analytics CEO, says that the focus of the system came about in part as a reaction to facial recognition. “My idea was, why don’t we simply consider the clothes someone’s wearing to understand demographics?” he said. “If I just showed you a shot of someone’s body you could probably tell me what gender they are. However, it turns out pointing a camera at someone’s chest or hips feels just as creepy as facial recognition. The idea was – what about people’s shoes?”
The word “creepy” comes up a lot during discussions of in-store tracking. For retailers and data scientists, the aim is to find a way of obtaining information without coming across as intrusive.
For Hoxton Analytics and the retailers using the technology, the answer is to look downwards. This tactic of avoiding the face and staring at shoes says a lot about how we, as physical beings, react to being watched. It suggests there are boundaries that do not exist on the internet. Set sights on our torsos and we feel invaded. But is making calculated judgments about a person based on their footwear actually any less invasive?
For McCormack, the argument hinges on the fact that personally identifiable information isn’t being collected. “Right now, shops are doing lots of incredibly invasive things but we just don’t know about it. The angle Hoxton Analytics is taking on that whole thing is, well, if you know someone’s a male or a female, then your advertising will be much more efficient. If you know that everyone in your shop right now is a male, you’ll be advertising PlayStations not hairdryers.”
Keep it hidden and invisible monitoring lets shops optimize their output while keeping the customer unaware. Put adaptable monitors and targeted advertising into the mix, however, and it becomes harder to hide the fact that a machine is watching you. The argument from the retailers is that they do this to provide a personal shopping experience but it remains a grey area. It still feels creepy.
From the perspective of retailers, it’s understandable that physical shops want some of the information online outlets collect. We allow this to happen online so why not offline? The thresholds of a shopping centre are different from those between websites and, when you can wander freely from one place to another without a pop-up asking you to accept cookies, the rules of consent change.
Then again, for a generation growing up with online first, physical shop second, the modes of online play may not be quite so invasive. In the CSC report, a survey indicated that while 72% of respondents aged 55 and over said they were very uncomfortable with these types of technologies being used in physical shops, only 51% of 16-24 year olds said the same.
Does this relative openness stem from a greater familiarity with digital technology or a blind belief in the goodwill of omnipresent organizations offering free services? Is the creepiness of a technology an unvarying, instinctive certainty or does it ebb and flow with degrees of social acceptance? Whatever the case, there are a growing number of eyes between the shelves and they care a lot about what you’re wearing. | 2adv
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They may not know who Steve Jobs was or even how to tie their own shoelaces, but the average six-year-old child understands more about digital technology than a 45-year-old adult, according to an authoritative new report.
The advent of broadband in the year 2000 has created a generation of digital natives, Ofcom (which checks standards in the UK communications industries) says in its annual study of British consumers. Born in the new millennium, these children have never known the dark ages of dial-up internet and the youngest are learning how to operate smartphones or tablets before they are able to talk.
“These younger people are shaping communications,” said Jane Rumble, Ofcom’s media research head. “As a result of growing up in the digital age, they are developing fundamentally different communication habits from older generations, even compared to what we call the early adopters, the 16-to-24 age group.”
Ofcom devised a “digital quotient”, or DQ, test to put 800 children and 2,000 adults through their paces, which, rather than measuring intelligence, as an IQ test would, attempts to gauge awareness of and self-confidence around gadgets from tablets to smart watches, knowledge of superfast internet, 4G mobile- phone networks and mobile apps.
Among 6- to 7-year-olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and online television, the average DQ score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15 years of age, when the average is a DQ of 113, and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age.
People are now being invited to test their digital knowledge with an abbreviated version of the questionnaire that will give any member of the public a DQ score, along with advice on how to improve their understanding and protect themselves and their families online.
The ways in which millennial children contact each other and consume entertainment are so different from previous generations that forecasters now consider their preferences a better indication of the future than those of trendsetting young adults.
The most remarkable change is in time spent talking on the phone. Two decades ago, teenagers devoted their evenings to monopolizing the home telephone line, dissecting love affairs and friendships in conversations that lasted for hours.
For those aged 12 to 15, phone calls account for just 3% of time spent communicating through any device. For all adults, this rises to 20% and, for young adults, it is still three times as high at 9%. Today’s children do the majority of their remote socializing by sending written messages or through shared photographs and videos. “The millennium generation is losing its voice,” Ofcom claims.
Over 90% of their device-time is message based, chatting on social networks like Facebook, sending instant messages through services like WhatsApp or even firing off traditional mobile- phone text messages. Just 2% of children’s time is spent emailing, compared to 33% for adults.
Away from their phones, 12- to 15-year-olds have a very different relationship with other media, too. A digital seven-day diary shows live television accounts for just half of viewing for this age group, compared to nearly 70% for all adults. They spend 20% of their time viewing short video clips, for example on YouTube, or news clips distributed via Facebook and other social sites. The rest of their viewing is shared between DVDs, streamed content through Netflix or iTunes and recorded television programmes.
Young adults aged 16 to 24 are voracious consumers of almost all media. However, live radio and print-based media have all but disappeared from their daily diet.
Younger people are moving away from live television and moving to streaming and catch- up services. Even among adults, television is becoming less important. Television viewing among 16- to 24-year-olds has been dipping each year since 2010, but 2013 was the first year where researchers found viewing fell across all age groups. The theory is that tablet computers – among the most popular Christmas presents in 2012 and 2013 – have brought many older people online for longer. With large screens and simple, touch-based interfaces, tablets are being credited with a jump in internet access among the over-65s.
“For years, there has been a very stubborn resistance by the over-65s to accessing the internet,” said James Thickett, Research Director at Ofcom. “In the last three years, we have seen that change and we think that’s down to tablets.”
Britain is embracing internet-enabled devices across the generations, to the extent that the balance between sleep and screen-based activities has now tipped. The typical adult spends eight hours and 41 minutes each day communicating or consuming media, including old-fashioned books and newspapers, and just eight hours and 21 minutes asleep. | 2adv
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They call him the Robin Hood of the banks, a man who took out dozens of loans, worth almost half a million euros, with no intention of ever paying them back. Instead, Enric Duran handed the money out to projects that created and promoted alternatives to capitalism.
After 14 months in hiding, Duran is unapologetic, even though his activities could land him in jail. “I’m proud of what I did,” he said in an interview by Skype from an undisclosed location. The money, he said, had created opportunities. “It generated a movement that allowed us to push forward with the construction of alternatives. And it allowed us to build a powerful network that groups together these initiatives.”
From 2006 to 2008, Duran took out 68 commercial and personal loans from 39 banks in Spain. He farmed the money out to social activists, funding speaking tours against capitalism and TV cameras for a media network. “I saw that, on one side, these social movements were building alternatives but that they lacked resources and communication capacities,” he said. “Meanwhile, our reliance on perpetual growth was creating a system that created money out of nothing.”
The loans he swindled from banks were his way of regulating and denouncing this situation, he said. He started slowly. “I filled out a few credit applications with my real details. They denied me, but I just wanted to get a feel for what they were asking for.”
From there, the former table-tennis coach began to weave an intricate web of accounts, payments and transfers. “I was learning constantly.” By the summer of 2007, he had discovered how to make the system work, applying for loans under the name of a false television production company. “Then, I managed to get a lot.” €492,000, to be exact.
Duran was arrested in Spain in 2009, on charges brought against him by six of the 39 banks that had lent him money. He spent two months in prison before being bailed for €50,000. In February 2013, facing up to eight years in prison, he decided to flee rather than stand trial. “I don’t see legitimacy in a judicial system based on authority, because I don’t recognize its authority,” he said.
His actions, he said, were in the vanguard of a worldwide debate on the economic crisis. The timing pushed the anti-capitalist movement into the light, just as many Spaniards were seeking alternatives to a system that had wreaked havoc on their lives.
While the same actions would probably be better understood in today’s Spain, he said that they would not be needed. The anti-capitalist movement has grown from a fringe movement to one supported by thousands of Spaniards, he said, evidenced by the widely supported movements such as the Indignados.
Success has helped the movement become self- sufficient. “We now have the capacity to generate resources,” said Duran, adding somewhat ironically that this was exactly what banks issue credit for – “to advance and generate a situation that allows you to be independent”. Duran is widening his focus to include Spain’s justice system, by promoting restorative justice. “The people in Spain who believe that banks don’t work, they think that I don’t owe anything. I’ve already done my work,” he said. “But there is a part of a population that is not in agreement with us and I think I should respond to that.”
In his case, he said, the element of reciprocity he could offer to banks might lie in the insight he gleaned from years of obtaining bank loans fraudulently. He could share his thoughts on “which best practices work and the bad ones that don’t,” he suggested, “for the general population and for bank workers”. | 2adv
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The view from the visitors’ centre at the southern edge of Doñana National Park in southern Spain is striking, to say the least. This is an ornithologist’s dream: 200,000 hectares of salt marsh of unrivalled importance to the birdlife of western Europe. Dozens of Britain’s most loved migratory birds, including house martins, swallows, cuckoos and warblers, rest here on their annual migrations from Africa. Doñana, a UN World Heritage Site, is also home to some of Europe’s rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle, while its mammalian inhabitants include the highly endangered Iberian lynx.
It is a glorious, vibrant landscape. Yet it exists on a knife-edge, a point illustrated dramatically in 1998 when almost two billion gallons of contaminated, highly acidic water, mixed with waste metals, poured into the park from a dam that had burst its bank at Los Frailes mine 45km to the north. A toxic tsunami of waste poured down the Guadiamar river and over its banks, leaving a thick metallic crust over a vast stretch of parkland. More than 25,000 kilos of dead fish were collected in the aftermath and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests were killed or destroyed.
It was Spain’s worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost €90m. Suddenly aware of Doñana’s status as the nation’s most important natural site, Spain decided to spend a further €360m, some of it EU money, on restoring the landscape, which, in the 1950s and 60s, had been drained in places to create rice and cotton fields. Some of this farmland is now being returned to its original wetland state.
It has been a costly but encouraging process. Yet the fate of Doñana still hangs in the balance thanks to the increasing pressures of modern life. Plans have been outlined to build an oil pipeline through Doñana, while other developers have announced proposals to expand local tourist resorts whose new hotels and golf courses would demand water supplies that would further erode the local table. Silt washed from nearby farms is also choking the channels that criss-cross Doñana.
However, the real body blow for conservationists has been the recent decision of the Andalucían government to reopen the Frailes mine that so very nearly destroyed Doñana in 1998. “This is Europe’s most precious bird sanctuary, both in terms of indigenous species and also as a resting place for birds that migrate between Africa and Britain and other parts of north-west Europe,” says Laurence Rose of the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). “Doñana already faces a great number of threats, but now they want to bring back the very cause of its near-undoing 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.”
Having spent so much restoring Doñana to its past glories, it might seem strange that the local government should choose to announce that it wants mining companies to tender bids to rework Los Frailes. However, a brief examination of the state of the local economy provides an explanation. The crash of Spain’s banks in 2008 hit the region catastrophically and unemployment in some parts of Andalucía is now more than 30%. Reopening the mine would provide more than 1,000 precious jobs.
“There are riches here, riches that are badly needed by local inhabitants,” said Vicente Fernández Guerrero, secretary-general of Innovation, Industry and Energy for Andalucía. “We think mining is a good way to make it possible to allow local people to continue to live in the area. This is a mining area. People have been digging metals and ores here since Roman times, after all.”
More to the point, added Fernández, the mine licence would stipulate that only modern mining techniques, which avoid the creation of poisonous wet waste, would be allowed. (It has also stipulated that the Canadian company that ran Los Frailes cannot bid for the contract. Sixteen years after the accident, the two sides remained locked over compensation claims.) “The best technology in the world will be used here,” Fernández insisted. “Liquid will not be used. We are going to insist on that. Our tender makes that clear.”
The proposal has some support in the area, but it also has a lot of opposition. One road sign I passed was liberally daubed with obscenities about the workers’ union UGT, which supports the mine’s reopening. For his part, Carlos Dávila, who works for the Spanish Ornithological Society in Doñana, was also alarmed at the proposal. “This is a very, very bad idea indeed,” he told me. “They say the new mine will be safe, but they said it was safe in 1998 and look what happened. We got the worst ecological disaster in the history of Spain.”
What alarms people such as Dávila is the threat that a new mine poses to the intense investment in eco-tourism that has been made in Doñana in recent years. An example is provided at the restaurant Dehesa de Abajo, where you can have a drink or a meal surrounded by trees in which storks and black kites are nesting.
Virtually every visitor was equipped with a camera and telescopic lens or a pair of binoculars. There is a clear tourist trade to be made from the birdlife of Doñana. Nor should this be surprising, for this is a truly special place. A vast hemisphere of sky hangs over this utterly flat but certainly not featureless landscape. Birds of every shape and size fill the air and sometimes the road. At one point on my visit, a stork calmly stood in front of our car until it felt ready to fly off.
“The trouble is that Spain does not have the public resources it possessed 16 years ago. A repeat of the toxin spill today would have a much, much more damaging impact,” said Rose. This point is backed by Dávila. “After the disaster, Spain woke up to the fact that it possessed a place of real ecological importance and did a lot to clean it up and protect it,” he added. “Now, we seem to be forgetting that lesson. It is very depressing.” | 2adv
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A long time ago, cinema audiences were transported to a galaxy far, far away: one where imperial cruisers battled rebel fighters, where droids rubbed circuits with Wookiees and where a spaceship called the Millennium Falcon could make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. That was 1977 but, in 2015, as the franchise approaches its seventh big-screen instalment, interest in Star Wars shows no sign of abating – now, there is news of a new film about Han Solo and of a reappearance for Darth Vader. “Countless fans around the world are in a constant state of vigilance waiting for the release of new poster art, new trailers and other information,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at box-office monitor Rentrak. “It’s hard to imagine any other movie franchise that could evoke such a level of passion, enthusiasm and excitement.”
The latest Star Wars mania dates from the Hollywood studio Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm from the film’s creator, George Lucas, in 2012; the $4bn acquisition was accompanied by an announcement of three more sequential “episodes” – VII, VIII and IX – plus then unspecified plans for spin-off movies and “stand-alones” to fill the gaps in the release schedule. Details of the second spin-off have now been made public: an “origins story” about Han Solo, the intergalactic smuggler played by Harrison Ford in the first three films, which is scheduled to be released in May 2018.
It will follow the release in December 2015 of Episode VII, directed by JJ Abrams and titled Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the unnamed Episode VIII due out in 2017 and the already announced spin-off, Rogue One, which will arrive in cinemas in 2016.
That movie will outline a rebel mission to steal the plans of the Death Star, a key plot element of the first film in 1977. Levels of interest in the rumour that Rogue One will also feature the reappearance of Darth Vader, the black-clad villain of the original series, only confirmed the power of Star Wars nostalgia.
In creating a multi-stranded, multi-character cinema “universe” around Star Wars, Lucasfilm-Disney are taking their cue from the phenomenally successful series of films produced by Marvel Studios, which Disney also acquired, in 2009.
Disney has brought a whole new level of marketing savvy to an already popular product: Dergarabedian cites the decision to make all six existing Star Wars films available on streaming services as “a brilliant way to build the anticipation for the new film and reinvigorate the idea of Star Wars in the minds of the fans”.
Whether it needs reinvigorating is questionable. The level of enthusiasm that has surrounded Star Wars for at least the last two decades is evidenced by what has become known as the “Expanded Universe”: the plethora of novels, comic books, video games and merchandising that Lucasfilm has created or licensed over the years.
This extra material began emerging as far back as 1978 but was given a massive kick by the mushrooming of the internet in the 1990s. Role-play and fan participation show no sign of slowing: in the UK, event-cinema brand Secret Cinema have found considerable commercial success with their live staging of The Empire Strikes Back.
Michael Rosser, news editor for Screen International, suggests that it is this “shared universe” of highly infectious nostalgia that keeps Star Wars in pole position among film franchises. “The great thing about the original films was that they created a huge universe of characters and possibility that sparked the imagination of viewers,” he said.
“For years, people have been wondering how the different strands would play out. This new film, because it’s going back to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, looks as though it will reconnect with the original Star Wars in a way that the prequels failed to.”
Rosser is referring to the three films Lucas directed between 1999 and 2005 – The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith – which chronicled the life of Luke Skywalker’s father, Anakin, who transforms into Darth Vader. Despite being greeted with less-than-stellar reviews, the prequels took $2.5bn at the worldwide box office, shortly after the release of restored and augmented “special editions” of the first trilogy had netted $469m in 1997.
“It shows the power of Star Wars that, although they were disappointing, the prequels still managed to make a lot of money,” said Rosser.
In a film business where branding is all and a successful franchise the answer to everybody’s prayers, is there a risk that movie studios will simply become branding machines and lose their interest in cinema for its own sake?
Rosser thinks not. “They are desperate to ensure the longevity of the franchise and make sure the quality is kept up. They are also trying to bring people into the cinema at a time when lots are staying home for entertainment. But you don’t want to watch Star Wars on your iPhone so I don’t think it’s going to run out of steam any time soon.”
Meanwhile, Dergarabedian is anticipating massive business when The Force Awakens reaches cinemas in December 2015. “We are certainly looking at a record opening for December and it should go on to make at least a billion dollars worldwide. Truly, Star Wars is the ultimate movie brand.” | 2adv
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We may not yet be living in an age of flying cars, as predicted in the 1985 film Back to the Future II, but the rise of smartphones and other new technologies is creating a reality that is arguably as exciting and almost as far-fetched. Experts agree that economic and demographic changes, technological advances, and environmental concerns are fundamentally altering the transportation landscape. “It’s a very dynamic time,” said Robert Puentes, of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program think- tank. “There’s a focus on a tighter connection between the role of transportation and the economic health of cities and its impact on people.”
As the average US commute lengthens and the country’s infrastructure ages badly, cities across the US are being forced to redefine what transportation is. Increasingly, urban planners, transportation experts and scientists are realizing that old auto-centric models focused on easing traffic congestion aren’t enough to tackle issues like population growth and carbon emissions, and transportation is now, more than ever, an integral component of a city’s larger sustainability efforts.
Big US cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago are working to make better use of their streets by adding more bus lanes, augmenting pedestrian walkways and expanding their rail options, while at the same time working with the private sector on advanced technologies that will allow a vehicle to drive itself and communicate with other vehicles and its environment, essentially making transportation intelligent. “The most sustainable places to live are those places that have multi-modal transport systems,” Puentes said. “You can’t be a global competitive city if you don’t have a robust transportation network.”
Here are three of the key trends that experts predict will shape the transportation industry over the coming years.
The rise of ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft – essentially taxis booked at the click of a smartphone button – and apps like Waze, which uses real-time traffic data to find the quickest routes for drivers, are dramatically changing how people get around and affecting the very way in which traffic moves through a city. Communication between riders and drivers, between different vehicles and between cars and infrastructure is bringing transportation into a new era, according to Allan Clelland, an expert on transportation technology.
According to a recent study from the UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, vehicle travel has declined among millennials – individuals born roughly between the early 1980s and early 2000s – compared to previous generations. According to the study, those born in the 1990s are making 4% fewer car trips and travelling 18% fewer miles per year, on average, than members of previous generations did at the same stage in their lives.
Meanwhile, those still driving cars are dealing with less traffic thanks to Waze. Experts say the traffic app has eased congestion on motorways and reduced travel times for drivers but also led to a problematic rise in cars moving through residential neighbourhoods. This has angered residents, who claim the increased traffic on their quiet roads reduces their quality of life.
This trend could continue as vehicle-to-vehicle data communication, as well as communication between vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure, grows. Currently, a traffic light can detect when a car is approaching but that’s about it. Companies are working to develop technology that will enable a vehicle to tell traffic control systems not only that it is present but also where it is going and how fast it is travelling.
Driverless cars have been in the headlines ever since Google began road testing the vehicles back in 2012 but no-one really knows when driverless cars will become commonplace. However, the partial automation of cars is already underway. Alexandre Bayen of the University of California expects automation will progress in stages: first, there might be automated buses with their own lanes, then perhaps lorries in ports or mining towns: essentially, vehicles that are connected electronically and travel in single file.
The idea of a fully automated transportation system is intriguing because it has the potential to improve safety by removing human error and increase the efficiency of car owners, who can get on with other tasks during a long commute. It can also help reduce carbon emissions and traffic congestion and allow more people access to cars. But, even if driverless technology were ready to hit the roads now, it would take a long time to get fully automated given the average age of cars on the road is 11.5 years old.
To see what driverless cars might look like in action, go to the video at: vimeo.com/37751380.
As the world races to avoid catastrophic climate change, and countries, states and cities work to meet ambitious emissions goals, these policies could also have a big impact on the future of transportation, spurring everything from zero- and low-emission vehicles to apps that encourage more walking, biking and carpooling.
Sharon Feigon, executive director of the Shared Use Mobility Center, envisages a future where a person can use a transit pass that gives them access to numerous modes of transport in a given day. If their train is delayed, for instance, they can access a city bike, take a shuttle or rent a vehicle through a car share programme using the same pass. “We’re going to see these systems packaged together and make it as easy as possible to connect them up with each other so people can transfer seamlessly between them,” she said.
When considering the future of transportation, it’s also important to keep in mind why people travel: they may be going to work, to meet friends or family, or to do the shopping. Technologies and trends that reduce the need for those trips – say, virtual meetings or telecommuting – could also have a big impact on transportation.
There was a time when the idea of a flying car represented the height of innovation but the technologies being imagined and developed now could be seen as even more sophisticated – and more useful in tackling the social and environmental threats that we face over the coming decades.” | 2adv
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DNA taken from the wisdom tooth of a European hunter-gatherer has given scientists an unprecedented glimpse of modern humans before the rise of farming. The Mesolithic man, who lived in Spain around 7,000 years ago, had an unusual mix of blue eyes, black or brown hair and dark skin, according to analyses of his genetic make-up.
He was probably lactose intolerant and had more difficulty digesting starchy foods than the farmers who transformed diets and lifestyles when they took up tools in the first agricultural revolution. The invention of farming brought humans and animals into much closer contact and humans likely evolved more robust immune systems to fend off infections that the animals passed on. But scientists may have overestimated the impact farming had in shaping the human immune system, because tests on the hunter-gatherer’s DNA found that he already carried mutations that boost the immune system to tackle various nasty bugs. Some live on in modern Europeans today. “Before we started this work, I had some ideas of what we were going to find,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, who led the study at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona. “Most of those ideas turned out to be completely wrong.”
The Spanish team started their work after a group of cavers stumbled upon two skeletons in a deep and complex cave system high up in the Cantabrian Mountains of northwest Spain in 2006. The human remains, which belonged to two men in their early 30s, had been extremely well preserved by the cool environment of the cave. Carbon dating put the remains at around 7,000 years old, before farming had swept into Europe from the Middle East. The timing fitted with ancient artefacts found at the site, including perforated reindeer teeth that were strung and hung from the people’s clothing.
The scientists focused their efforts on the better preserved of the two skeletons. After several failed attempts, they managed to reconstruct the man’s entire genome from DNA found in the root of a third molar. It is the first time researchers have obtained the complete genome of a modern European who lived before the Neolithic revolution.
The DNA threw up a series of surprises. When Lalueza-Fox looked at the genome, he found that, rather than having light skin, the man had gene variants that tend to produce much darker skin. “This guy had to be darker than any modern European, but we don’t know how dark,” the scientist said.
Another surprise fi nding was that the man had blue eyes. That was unexpected, said Lalueza-Fox, because the mutation for blue eyes was thought to have arisen more recently than the mutations that cause lighter skin colour. The results suggest that blue eye colour came first in Europe, with the transition to lighter skin ongoing through Mesolithic times.
On top of the scientific impact, artists might have to rethink their drawings of the people. “You see a lot of reconstructions of these people hunting and gathering and they look like modern Europeans with light skin. You never see a reconstruction of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer with dark skin and blue eye colour,” Lalueza-Fox said.
The Spanish team went on to compare the genome of the hunter-gatherer to those of modern Europeans from different regions to see how they might be related. They found that the ancient DNA most closely matched the genetic make-up of people living in northern Europe, in particular Sweden and Finland.
The discovery of mutations that bolstered the immune system against bacteria and viruses suggests that the shift to a farming culture in Neolithic times did not drive all of the changes in immunity genes that Europeans carry today. At least some of those genetic changes have a history that stretches further back. “One thing we don’t know is what sort of pathogens were affecting these people,” said Lalueza-Fox.
Martin Jones, professor of archaeological science at Cambridge University, said the immunity genes were the most striking result. “There is a no doubt oversimplified grand narrative that the move from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled farming was initially bad for our health. A number of factors contributed, particularly living closely together with other humans and animals, shrinking the food web and crowding out water supplies. The authors are drawing attention to the role of pathogens in pre-agricultural lives and that is interesting.” | 2adv
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Two mothers in South Africa have discovered they are raising each other’s daughters after they were mistakenly switched at birth in a hospital in 2010.
But, while one of the women wants to correct the error and reclaim her biological child, the other is refusing to give back the girl she has raised as her own, posing a huge legal dilemma.
Henk Strydom, a lawyer for one of the mothers, who cannot be identified because of a court order, described the inadvertent swap as a travesty and tragedy that is unlikely to have a happy ending.
Both mothers gave birth at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg, east of Johannesburg, on the same day in 2010. “Nobody suspected anything,” Strydom said.
But, in 2013, one of the mothers, who is 33 and unemployed, sued her ex-partner for maintenance for her daughter. Strydom continued: “The man denied he was the father. A DNA test was done and it was found it was not his baby and not her baby. She was devastated. She didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, she met the other mother and, since December 2013, they have been attending joint counselling sessions, arranged by the hospital. This has included meeting their biological daughters.
Strydom said of his client: “She said there are resemblances to herself. She conveyed to me that it was traumatic. You can see it’s not easy for her. She has to care for a child that is not hers on her own while her child is with someone else.”
The woman reportedly became unhappy with the process and approached the children’s court in a bid to gain custody of her biological child, but the other mother refused. Strydom agreed to represent the woman, who has one elder child, pro bono.
“It’s a tragedy. She wants the baby back but it seems the other mother is reluctant. It’s four years later: you can understand she doesn’t want to give up her baby.”
The High Court in Pretoria has appointed the University of Pretoria’s Centre for Child Law to investigate what will now be in the best interests of the children, which is the guiding principle under South African law. It must report back within 90 days.
Strydom added: “Your guess is as good as mine what the court may decide. It’s a travesty. How do you rectify it after four years? The longer you wait, the more traumatic it will be. But, whatever happens, someone won’t be happy.”
He said at this point, he and his client do not want to sue the hospital or government health department, which is currently helping with the case and providing counselling.
The Centre for Child Law will now interview the mothers and fathers, as well as any other person with a “significant relationship” with either of the girls. The children and mothers will undergo “full and thorough” clinical assessments and may be seen by a psychologist.
Karabo Ngidi, a lawyer with the centre, said “What’s going to happen must be in the best interests of the children. Biology is an important aspect but not the only one.”
The families are of Zulu ethnicity and so Zulu tradition, culture and customary law will be a factor, she added. It is also still possible the ex- partner of the mother taking legal action could be the biological father of the girl who was switched.
It is not the first child-swap case to come to light in South Africa. In 1995, two mothers were awarded damages after their sons, born in 1989, were accidentally switched at the Johannesburg hospital where they were born.
In 2009, in Oregon in the United States, Dee Ann Angell and Kay Rene Reed discovered that they had been mistakenly mixed up at birth in 1953 when a nurse brought them back from bathing. In 2013, in Japan, a 60-year-old man swapped at birth from his rich parents to a poor family was given compensation. He grew up on welfare and became a truck driver, whereas his biological siblings – and the boy brought up in his place – attended private secondary schools and universities.
Bruce Laing, a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg, said the long-term effects of a baby swap could be “profound”, “terrifying” and “incredibly traumatizing”. He told The Times of South Africa: “An increasingly complicated situation is that some resentment towards a child that is not yours might occur. The parents might always be thinking 'What if?'” | 2adv
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From glow-in-the-dark trees to underground bike sheds and solar-powered bins, we look at some of the more leftfield solutions to help make our cities more livable.
City living has many upsides but a sustainable lifestyle is increasingly not among them. Pollution, traffic and loss of green spaces are just some of the daily trials that city-dwellers have to deal with.
Step forward the inventors. We consider ten of the wackier solutions to making our cities more livable.
1 Pop-up parks
Today’s cities sometimes look like they’re built more for cars than people. The pop-up park is a simple idea. Take an empty car park, a pocketful of change and a pot plant or two, and make yourself your own private park. The PARK(ing) project kicked off as an arts experiment in San Francisco and has since spread across the world. Temporary urban farms and ecology demos are just some of the ideas to have emerged out of the movement, which celebrates a day of action every September.
2 Subterranean storage
Not all urban dwellers are hooked to the car. Bikes are ever more in vogue. The question is: where to keep it safe? Tokyo-based engineering firm Giken has come up with a concept for a solution: an “ecocycle, anti-seismic underground bicycle park”. At just seven metres wide, the cylindrical storage facility buries deep enough into the ground to house 204 bikes. Owners can retrieve their bike at the touch of a button, with the automated system delivering it back above ground in around 13 seconds.
3 Glow-in-the-dark trees
When most people think of trees that glow in the dark, Christmas baubles and fallen pine needles usually come to mind. Not Daan Roosegaarde. The Dutch designer-artist has comes up with a “bioluminescent” plant. The experimental technology splices DNA from luminescent marine bacteria with the chloroplast genome of a plant to create a jellyfish-type glow. Trials are underway to create an industrial-scale version of the biomimicry-inspired technology that Roosegaarde hopes could one day replace conventional street lighting.
4 Footfall harvesting
Every day, hundreds of commuters and shoppers in the east London neighbourhood of West Ham cross the elevated pedestrian walkway close to the underground station. Few probably notice the springiness beneath their feet. Fewer still connect that five-millimetre flex in the rubber surface to the powering of the streetlights above. The paved flooring is decked with smart tiles that capture the kinetic energy from pedestrians’ footsteps and convert it into electricity. Pavegen, the UK firm behind the innovation, has installed a similar system at London’s Heathrow Airport, among other international locations.
5 Supertrees
It had to happen eventually: man-made trees. Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay has a small copse of them. Up to 50 metres high, these steel-framed 'supertrees' not only have flowers and ferns growing up them but their metallic canopies act to absorb and disperse heat too. They’re equipped to harvest rainwater, too, as well as provide air ventilation for two “climate-controlled biomes” (large conservatories, in other words) below. Eleven of the 18 trees also boast solar panels along their ’branches’.
6 Water-producing billboard
We live in a consumer world. And, so we don’t forget it, advertisers wallpaper our cities and highways with banks of billboards. Researchers at Lima’s University of Engineering and Technology have come up with a billboard with a difference. Using a system of condensers and filters, it traps the humidity in the air and extracts the water vapour to produce around 96 litres of drinking water a day. The public can help themselves to it for free.
7 Neo-walled gardens
Gardens stopped being just the preserve of people’s front lawns long ago. For a while, roof gardens were all the rage. Now, it’s all about walls. Drawing on advances in hydroponics (growing plants without soil), the facades of a growing number of libraries and offices, shops and hotels are bursting into flower. One of the companies at the forefront of the “living wall” boom is UK-based firm Biotecture. The company’s “vertical gardens” can be seen gracing the Taj Hotel in central London and the exit wall of Edgware Road Tube Station, among other locations. Aesthetics aside, green walls are credited with reducing air pollution and improving air quality.
8 Algae-powered building
To prove the dynamism of the “living wall” concept, look no further than Hamburg’s International Building Exhibition. Instead of sweet-smelling flowers, the south-facing facades of the zero-carbon apartment complex are laced with green-tinged algae. The walls’ external fabric includes a “bio-skin” of hollow grass panels on which the algae photosynthesizes and grows. Periodically, the algae is harvested from the walls and fermented in a biogas plant to produce electricity.
9 Smart rubbish bins
Forget gas-guzzling dumper trucks and smelly skips. City authorities around the world are now turning to solar-powered “trash compactors” to keep litter off the streets. The 150-gallon-capacity rubbish bins are equipped with a motor that pushes down the rubbish when it nears the top. The motor is powered by solar panels embedded in the lid. The newest BigBelly bins include a wireless monitoring system that notifies rubbish collectors when the bins are full.
10 Spray paint
Finally, desperate times may sometimes call for desperate measures. That’s clearly what was going through the minds of authorities in Chengdu, one of China’s fastest growing cities. To brighten up the place, the municipal landscaping department has taken to spraying the yellowing grass green. Use of the non-toxic green spray has now spread to Tianjin and a host of other cities in China’s north-west. | 2adv
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Agios Efstratios is so remote, so forgotten by the banks, the government and most of the modern world that the mobile phone network can’t process data and there isn’t a single ATM or credit-card machine on the island. Before Greece was plunged into financial chaos, residents of this tranquil outpost in the northern Aegean managed quite well. They did their banking at the post office and the few dozen rooms to rent were booked out every summer with people who had heard – by word of mouth – of its spectacular empty beaches, clear seas and fresh seafood.
But, because the island still runs on cash, the closure of banks nationwide has been devastating. Residents have been forced to make nine-hour round trips to the nearest big island to get cash and Greek visitors say they can’t get together enough money to come. “Tourist numbers are down 80% this year,” said Mayor Maria Kakali, in an office in the village where she grew up, home to around 200 people. “Even people born here and living in Athens, who have their own places on the island, aren’t coming.”
Kakali has badgered the government and a major Greek bank into promising an ATM within weeks but she still feels it may come too late for this season on an island where tourism dwarfs the two other sources of income: fishing and agriculture: “We have almost no reservations in August, when usually we have people calling us up asking to find a room and we can’t help them.” A hard winter ahead may be slightly improved by 50 workers billeted in the village to expand the harbour but there is an even bigger crisis looming because the government has said it will end a decades-old tax break for islands.
Created to help island communities survive when they were suffering mass emigration, a lower sales tax contained the costs of living in places where everything had to be imported and made tourism more affordable. Tourist favourites such as Mykonos fear that losing the tax breaks will make it hard for them to compete with Turkey but, for Agios Efstratios, it poses a far greater threat. “If we have to pay a tax of 23%, I’m sorry to say it but we will all die on the island,” says Kakali.
Food and fuel are already more expensive than on the mainland, there are no economies of scale and little economic flexibility on an island which, even in summer, has only three shops, two restaurants and not a single official hotel. “This is an expensive island. Everything, even milk or bread, has changed hands three or four times before it gets to us and each middleman has to take a profit,” said Provatas Costas, a 58-year-old fisherman.
For Agios Efstratios and its closest large neighbour, Lemnos, the timing of the crisis is particularly cruel. They were condemned to relative obscurity for years in part because they are served by slow and unreliable ferries. In 2015, the government had finally given the contract to a new, efficient company, drawing floods of new visitors to explore the islands’ largely overlooked charms, before the bank controls hit.
“It started out as the best season in 30 years and, in one week, became the worst,” said Atzamis Konstantinos, a travel agent in Lemnos who used to earn €15,000 a month as a captain of petroleum tankers and other large ships but came home because he missed it so much. “I always loved this island, even when I was young. I would dock in Piraeus, the port in Athens, take my pay, then get the first boat over. People would say 'You’re crazy. You can go anywhere' but I only ever wanted to come here.”
Lemnos has dozens of wild beaches, where even at the height of summer you can swim and sunbathe virtually alone, a small nightlife scene and numerous cultural sites. It is the eighth largest island in Greece so is in line for the first round of tax increases in autumn 2015 but far less wealthy than many smaller ones. It has just over 3,000 beds for visitors, compared with tens of thousands on an island such as Rhodes. Its councillors say that they will fight the tax rise, although none can say how. “We have been suffering economically in recent years and, now, we will suffer more,” said Lemnos Mayor, Dimitris Marinakis. “When there is not enough money, you reduce your consumption and therefore the whole economy declines.”
The crisis has been particularly hard on people under 40, who often do two or three jobs to make ends meet and still feel they can’t afford a family. Young people fear they are losing their contemporaries in an exodus to match the one that scattered their grandparents’ friends to America, Australia and Canada. “What is the future for our generation?” said Katerina Fikari, who feels she is extremely lucky to work for the local government in Lemnos. “If you work only to pay your bills, how can you have dreams for your future?”
If taxes go up, even more young people will leave, warns Mayor Kakali, who has devoted her year in office to improving education on the island to help keep it an attractive place for families. Because it is one of the smallest islands, Agios Efstratios has until 2017 before the rise is due to come in, so Kakali hopes that the roller coaster of Greek politics means it yet may be spared. If not, though, she plans to travel to Athens to remind the distant government what the tax rise would cost.
“The truth is the government doesn’t pay much attention to the islands of the north Aegean,” she said, “so I would take all the kids from our school to the gates of parliament, to tell them: 'There is still life in these islands'.” | 2adv
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The age of the big British summer music festival, including Glastonbury, is drawing to a close, according to the leading rock promoter and manager Harvey Goldsmith.
The man who has produced and worked with most of the western world’s biggest music stars, from the Who, the Rolling Stones and Queen to Madonna, Bob Dylan and Luciano Pavarotti, said the biggest problem was a dire lack of major new bands to succeed the old ones.
“The festival circuit has peaked,” he said, speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Powys, Wales. “It really peaked about two years ago. There’s too many of them and there are not enough big acts to headline them. That is a big, big problem in our industry. And, we are not producing a new generation of these kind of acts – the likes of the Rolling Stones, Muse, even the Arctic Monkeys – that can headline.”
There were about 900 music festival events in the UK between May and September 2014, he said, and there is no way they can all continue. “Music festivals have probably run their course. What is going to happen is a growth in events where it isn’t just music but, like this one, with poetry or books or magic shows. There will be lots of small combination festivals that give something extra – not people standing around in a massive great field unable to go to the toilet because they might miss the band.”
Clearly, the way music is being delivered has changed, he said. “People don’t seem to want to listen to a body of work, an album, any more. And, most rock bands built a reputation on a body of work – they might take three albums to really hone their art, to become great, but young people don’t want that. They home in on a track, a sound, then, ping, off again to the next one. Pop pervades, not that there’s anything wrong with pop. I think it will come round again but it will take time.”
Goldsmith, 69, also revealed that he has teamed up with Robin de Levita, the Dutch producer of the Who’s 1970s rock musical Tommy, at a new 1,100-seat theatre in Wembley, which is due to be finished in time for the first stage adaptation of the phenomenally successful teen book and movie series The Hunger Games in June 2016.
De Levita would, said Goldsmith, be bringing his experimental SceneAround concept to London – theatre that puts the audience seating on a turntable that rotates round a series of scenes built around its circumference, accompanied by projections on panel screens. The concept was pioneered in an aircraft hangar outside Amsterdam and has proved hugely successful.
Goldsmith, who is already planning to bring a production of the Anne Frank story to the as-yet-unnamed venue, said: “It’s a whole completely different way of producing shows.”
During his Hay appearance, the impresario also revealed some of the “access-all-areas” secrets from his long career in the music industry, talking about Keith Moon putting dynamite down a Sydney hotel room toilet in an effort to unblock it and witnessing the paralysing stage fright that gripped John Lennon just before an appearance at Madison Square Garden in 1974 and led to him being dragged, vomiting, out of his dressing room and shoved out on stage. “It’s the most bizarre thing, really, how common that is among artists. It’s odd how stricken with fear they’ll get but, as soon as the first chord is hit, they’re fine,” he said.
He also laid to rest a long-running rock’n’ roll mystery: why Elvis Presley never performed outside North America. Presley’s long-time manager, Colonel Tom Parker, admitted to him over tea, he said, that the real reason why Goldsmith’s attempts to bring the singer to London had failed was Parker’s own uncertain immigration status.
“He explained that it was because he was an illegal Dutch immigrant. He didn’t want to risk leaving the US – it was him, not Elvis,” said Goldsmith.
And, his ultimate rock’n’ roll performer? “Freddie Mercury had to be our most powerful stage performer, the best live performer we’ve ever had. At Live Aid, he went out and saw that audience and just grabbed it.”
But, the next Queen was still far from being formed, he said. “We’re not producing a new generation of this kind of act. Coldplay is probably the last one to come up and that was ten years ago. There isn’t much out there that looks like it is forming the next generation of heritage artists.
“So, with no big acts to headline, there are no big shows. Glastonbury has got to the point where it can’t find any more big acts and that’s the pinnacle of the festivals. They are really over.” | 2adv
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What is it like to look at the very last of something? To contemplate the passing of a unique wonder that will soon vanish from the face of the earth? Sudan is the last male northern white rhino on the planet. If he does not mate successfully soon with one of two female northern white rhinos at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, there will be no more of their kind, male or female, born anywhere. And it seems a slim chance, as Sudan is getting old at 42 and breeding efforts have so far failed. Apart from these three animals, there are only two other northern white rhinos in the world, both in zoos, both female.
It seems an image of human tenderness that Sudan is lovingly guarded by armed men who stand vigilantly and caringly with him. But, of course, it is an image of brutality. Even at this last desperate stage in the fate of the northern white rhino, Sudan is under threat from poachers who kill rhinos and hack off their horns to sell them on the Asian medicine market – despite the fact that he has had his horn cut off to deter them.
Sudan doesn’t know how precious he is. His eye is a sad black dot in his massive wrinkled face as he wanders the reserve with his guards. His head is a marvellous thing. It is a majestic rectangle of strong bone and leathery flesh, a head that expresses pure strength. How terrible that such a mighty head can, in reality, be so vulnerable. It is lowered melancholically beneath the sinister sky, as if weighed down by fate. This is the noble head of an old warrior, his armour battered, his appetite for struggle fading.
Under his immense looming shoulder, his legs protrude like squat columns from the tough tank of his body. The way his foreleg emerges from his thick coat of skin reminds us how long human beings have been wondering at the natural spectacle that is the rhino. For Sudan does not look so different from the rhinoceros that Albrecht Dürer portrayed in 1515. They have the same little legs stuck out of a majestic body and they even lower their heads in the same contemplative way. Dürer was a Renaissance artist picturing an exotic beast from the exotic lands that Europe was starting to see more and more of. In 1515, a live Indian rhinoceros was sent by the ruler of Gujarat in India to the king of Portugal: he in turn sent it to the Pope but, on the way, it died in a shipwreck.
Human beings – we always kill the things we love. We have been doing so since the Ice Age. There are beautiful pictures of European woolly rhinos in caves in France that were painted up to 30,000 years ago. These ancient relatives of Sudan share his heroic bulk, mighty power and paradoxical air of gentleness. A woolly rhino in Chauvet Cave seems agile and young, a creature full of life. But the same people who painted such sensitive portraits of Ice Age rhinos helped to kill them off. As climate turned against the woolly megafauna with the end of the last Ice Age, human spears probably delivered the coup de grâce.
Today, immense love is invested in rhinos, yet they are being slaughtered in ever greater numbers. The northern white rhino is the rarest species of African rhino. There are far greater numbers of southern white rhinos and black rhinos. But the demand in some countries for rhino horn as a traditional medicine believed to cure everything from flu to cancer is fuelling a boom in poaching. From 2007, when just 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa, the killings have grown horrifically. In 2014, 1,215 rhinos were slaughtered for their horns in South Africa. 2015 already looks certain to beat that dreadful record.
The vulnerable northern white rhino has been hunted virtually to extinction – in spite of every precaution, in spite of the guards and their guns – and other varieties of African rhino are under a sustained attack from poachers that is totally out of control. The Javan rhinoceros is also on the verge of extinction. India has successfully protected the Indian rhinoceros after it was almost wiped out by British hunters in colonial times but here, too, poaching is a menace. What a majestic creature and what futile human destructiveness. Have we learned nothing since the Ice Age? | 2adv
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As colourful fish were swimming past him off the Greek coast, Cathal Redmond was convinced he had taken some great photos with his first underwater camera. But, when he looked at the results on dry land, the images were brown and murky. Having taken the pictures while holding his breath underwater, he blamed the limited time he had to set up the shots. All he needed, the industrial designer thought, was a little more time to properly capture the fish in their natural environment.
He vowed to make the little extra time needed a reality and the result is his invention of the Express Dive – a refillable air storage device, held in the mouth, that lets users swim underwater for two minutes. It is aimed at bridging the gap between snorkelling, with its limited scope, and scuba diving, which gives divers the freedom to breathe underwater but at the cost of using cumbersome and expensive gear. The prototype of the invention – which is still in the initial stages of testing individual parts – looks like a cross between a scuba mouthpiece and a water bottle.
“I wanted to enable people to do more. So, rather than just get in underwater and spend 30 seconds holding their breath, I wanted to do a little bit more than they were able to do,” says Redmond, 27. In 2006, the Irish designer completed a scuba-diving course and loved the feeling of being able to breathe underwater and observe fish in their natural environment. Less enjoyable, however, were the fins, the weight belt, the wetsuit, air tank, mask and all the other equipment.
“I was very keenly aware of the fact that I had about 50kg strapped to me and getting into the water was quite foreign when you are used to trying to keep yourself at the surface. It was a very surreal experience,” he says. “The real problem is that it is very limiting as to what you can do. Although it allows you to stay underwater for longer, you have to plan your whole day around it. You have 20kg to 50kg of gear with you – you can’t be walking on the beach and decide you want to go in. Planning is a very big part of it. It demands a lot. There is a lot of relearning required.”
It was during a final-year project for his product design degree at the University of Limerick that Redmond produced the Express Dive. The device has two main parts. When above the surface, the unit uses a fan to suck in air via a vent in the mouthpiece. The air, accelerated around the motor-driven turbine, is compressed through a series of valves and stored in the attached tank, which has a display light that flashes green when it is full. When air is no longer being taken in, the vent shuts off and, as the user dives, air is fed back via the mouthpiece.
That display, which is in the user’s eyeline, then acts as a health bar turning from green to red when the air runs low. The device can take in enough air for two minutes of diving and takes approximately the same amount of time to be refilled. “When you put the compressor into the unit with all of the rest of the stuff, the batteries and the electronics and the membranes for the scuba delivery, the big trick was to be able to get it small enough so that it would be able to be held through the teeth and out of the mouth,” Redmond says.
The electrics are shielded from the water in the casing and are recharged using inductive power transfer – a system using an electromagnetic field, similar to the pads which can wirelessly charge mobile phones, so that there is no need for exposed wires.
Redmond says the mouthpiece feels similar to using a snorkel. He likens it to an extension of the lungs in that the user is taking a deep breath and then using it underwater. “It is an extension of the body’s capacity to store air,” he says. The prototype, made from high-density foam, aluminium and silicone, has been tested in parts. Redmond says he has shown that the motor can compress two minutes’ worth of air into the unit and that the design can be effectively held in the diver’s mouth. What he has not yet done is test the device on a diver, fully submerged for two minutes. But, with enough testing, Redmond is confident he can get a fully functioning device that will not endanger swimmers underwater.
Redmond recently came runner-up for the International James Dyson Award, which will give him £5,000 to further develop the project. Early indications are that the device would be priced at £280, he says, and it is likely to weigh anywhere from 1kg to 3kg depending on the safety features needed.
To anyone who thinks two minutes of air is no more than a minor improvement on snorkelling, Redmond says it could make all the difference underwater. The typical swimmer can hold their breath for about 40 seconds while underwater, he says. “Two minutes is not a lot of time but it is a lot longer than that,” he says. | 2adv
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That millennials rely heavily on technology is no secret. More than eight in ten say they sleep with a mobile phone by their bed, almost two thirds admit to texting while driving, one in five has posted a video of themselves online and three quarters have created a profile on a social networking site.
Compared to other generations, millennials are the most active on social media, according to a 2010 report, with 75% of them having created at least one social media account. In contrast, only 50% of Generation X, 30% of baby boomers and 6% of those aged 65 and older use social media. But there is a small percentage of millennials who don’t use social media at all. Meet the millennials bucking the trend.
Celan Beausoleil, 31, Oakland, California Beausoleil is a social worker and has had an “on and off, more off than on” relationship with Facebook.
She last deactivated her account in December 2015 after finding the amount of personal information shared by others “too heavy” to deal with on top of her work demands.
“A lot of my job is listening to people’s lives all day, every day and it started to feel so overwhelming to go on social media and see every single detail of everybody’s life, including people that I don’t really have a relationship with,” she said. “It feels almost like intimacy overload.” She added: “I’m holding a lot in my work life for people and sometimes it felt like it was too heavy to do in my personal life also.”
But Beausoleil does love the way social media connects the world in a truly unique way, citing it as one of her only reasons for staying on Facebook for as long as she did. “One thing I really liked about Facebook was that I could sit for hours and click on a friend and then click on one of their friends and one of their friends and one of their friends and literally end up on someone’s Facebook page from the other side of the world,” she said. “I used to do that all the time.”
“One day, I realized I’m spending so much time doing this. These little seconds add up. I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t spend these seconds here and spent them doing something else. What if I was doing other things with these seconds? What would they become? Would I enjoy it?”
Mathias, who works for the Baltimore City government, had Facebook and Twitter accounts for years before deleting them both in November 2012. But he “quickly forgot that Facebook existed” after his impromptu decision to end his social media presence. He can still appreciate the benefits that come with having social media accounts, like when he met his girlfriend’s friends for the first time and realized “humanizing 20 people you’re meeting at a party” is much easier if you can connect their faces, hometowns and jobs to a photo later on. Or how easy it is to organize large events online. Mathias relies on friends for party invites and is sure there are times he “slips through the cracks”.
But, now, he relishes the time that’s freed up. He spends his lift rides and spare moments at work reading news articles and books rather than scrolling through a newsfeed. And with no friends’ accounts to follow online, he has to “pick up the phone and call them”, something he’s come to “definitely enjoy”.
Lauren Raskauskas, 22, Naples, Florida Raskauskas describes herself as a “pretty private” person. So social media, which can open you up to the scrutiny and analysis of others, is not that appealing to her. “I’m more privacy-minded and have concerns about giving out my data,” said Raskauskas, who is currently looking for a job.
She recently deleted her Twitter account and deactivated her Facebook account two years ago after realizing she “didn’t like everyone knowing what I was doing”. But Raskauskas, who was late to the Facebook game because her “parents were really strict with technology”, can see the positive sides of social media. When a friend of hers that she’d lost track of moved to Naples for a month, Raskauskas didn’t even realize she was there until after she’d left, which the 22-year-old said “was a bummer”.
But in the end, her privacy concerns outweighed any benefits social media could provide and she saw a definite upside when she went through a recent break-up. The last time a relationship of hers ended and she was online, it was not pleasant.
“One time, I did break up with somebody while I was on Facebook and I was like ’Oh my gosh, should I change my profile photo? Should I change my status?’ And, this time, I don’t have to worry about any of that because that kind of stuff is pretty hard,” she said.
Rajagopalan, a student at Boston College, doesn’t see any drawbacks to abstaining from social media.
He claims that he “hasn’t seen any effect at this point”. Even though classmates post about parties and events on Facebook, they make sure to send him a text message, too, he said. “Since I was young, I was always a step behind on that kind of thing so it never really mattered to me,” he said.
In fact, the only time Rajagopalan made use of social media was when it was unavoidable: it was the only way to reach his new roommate at college. Before starting his first year at college, he signed up for his first, and only, social media account. He joined Facebook in order to contact his future roommate and talk about their plans for that year.
Months later, he still has the account but he admits: “I don’t use it. I don’t check it or anything like that.” The most activity it sees is when his two sisters tag him in family photos. He has avoided social media accounts in all other situations, though he has felt the draw of Twitter. As a sports fan, he acknowledged that “it’s where most of the news breaks out”. But he refused to get an account, stating: “I don’t really need one to read tweets”. | 2adv
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The sight of colleagues and acquaintances taking a drag on an e-cigarette has become commonplace. But have we reached “peak vape”? Statistics suggest that vaping among smokers and recent ex-smokers, who comprise the vast majority of vapers, may already be on the decline. The figures will be studied closely by the major e-cigarette firms, which have poured millions into promoting a technology that was thought to have been growing in popularity.
Figures released in 2014 by the health charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) reveal that usage among adults in Britain of electronic cigarettes – which do not contain tobacco and produce vapour, not smoke – tripled from an estimated 700,000 users in 2012 to 2.1 million in 2014.
However, figures collated by the Smoking Toolkit Study, a research body backed by the Department of Health that provides quarterly updates on smoking trends, show vaping’s appeal may be waning. Vaping rates among smokers and ex-smokers rose steadily until the end of 2013, when some 22% of smokers and ex-smokers were vaping. But this proportion levelled out throughout 2014 before dropping to 19% during the final quarter of 2014. Early signs suggest the decline has continued into 2015. The drop is described as “statistically significant” by Professor Robert West, of UCL’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, who collates the figures for the Toolkit.
Smokers are the key group for e-cigarette firms because seven out of ten vapers are smokers. Only around 1% of people who have never smoked have tried an electronic cigarette. “Numbers who use e-cigarettes while continuing to smoke are going down,” West said. “We’ve only been tracking vaping for just over a year, so it’s a short time period, but we are not seeing growth in the number of long-term ex-smokers or 'never' smokers using e-cigarettes. That is not to say vaping rates might not change but, at this stage, it looks like they’re staying the same.”
The levelling off in popularity of vaping in the UK would appear to be at odds with what is happening in the US, where the technology has been promoted aggressively and where recent reports suggested it was growing in popularity. However, West questioned the interpretation of US data, which made little distinction between people who had once tried an e-cigarette and those who regularly vaped.
Fears that vaping could become fashionable among young non-smokers appear to be misplaced, according to experts. Only 1.8% of children are regular users, the ASH study found. Instead, e-cigarettes seem to be most popular among adults seeking to quit. “While the figures published this month by Smoking In England show that the use of electronic cigarettes by smokers has levelled off, their data also shows the huge increase in use since May 2011,” said James Dunworth, director and co-founder of ecigarettedirect.co.uk. “Our customers are still very happy with the product, and technology and innovation in hardware is improving user experience and helping them to switch from traditional cigarettes.”
“E-cigarettes are behaving like a souped-up nicotine patch,” West agreed. “They are more popular than nicotine patches and may or may not be more effective. One-third of quit attempts use e-cigarettes, which makes them by far the most popular method of stopping.”
Hazel Cheeseman, director of policy at ASH, said it was too soon to say whether vaping had peaked. “Although there are indications that the market hasn’t grown in the UK for about a year, there doesn’t seem to be a decline in the number of people using electronic cigarettes to help them quit smoking. Using an electronic cigarette is safer than smoking; some, but not all, people find them useful to help quit smoking and there is little evidence that they are leading to an increase in young people smoking.”
It emerged recently that the European Commission (EC) is looking at increasing taxes on e-cigarettes, something that could have an impact on their popularity. A new EC tobacco directive comes into force in 2016 that will limit the amount of nicotine in e-cigarettes to below their current levels. This may mean vapers will have to increase their usage to obtain the same hit, again something that may make e-cigarettes more expensive.
West suggested that policymakers should see e-cigarettes as a smoking cessation aid and not subject them to the same regulations as smoking. “There is a tendency among some local authorities and organizations to treat e-cigarettes as cigarettes and ban them in public places and outdoors,” he said. | 2adv
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Although much of his work, and arguably nearly all the best of it, was firmly within the discipline of the blues, BB King was always open-minded and interested when he found himself in other settings, bridging musical and cultural differences with affability and skill. Perhaps it is premature to speak of “the last of the bluesmen” but it is hard to imagine any future blues artist matching King’s influence over musicians by the thousand and audiences by the million in a career spanning 65 years.
Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) was born near Itta Bena, Mississippi and grew up with the limited prospects of an African-American agricultural worker, a barrier he gradually worked to overcome as he learnt the basics of guitar from a family friend and honed his singing with a quartet of gospel singers. In his early 20s, he moved to Memphis.
Within a couple of years, he was playing regularly at a bar in West Memphis, Arkansas. He also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on a Memphis radio station. His billing, “The Beale Street Blues Boy”, was shortened to “Blues Boy King” and thence to “BB”. After a single session in 1949 for a Nashville label, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
He had his first hit in 1952, with a dramatic rearrangement of Three O’Clock Blues, which topped the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it was the first of a list of successes such as Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby and Sweet Sixteen . On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history. He was always ready to praise the musicians who had influenced him and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first.
“I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told the Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close but never quite got it.” In an interview in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
He once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on the circuit of black-patronized theatres and clubs on an interminable series of one-nighters. In 1956, he is supposed to have filled 342 engagements. In 1962, he tried to change that working pattern by signing with a major label, ABC, but the first records under that contract, which tried to reshape him as a mainstream pop singer, were as unsatisfactory to his admirers as they were to ABC’s accountants.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, proved the durability of King’s blues repertoire and has become iconic, a turning point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss , and, in 1969, he hit the upper reaches of the pop charts – where no blues artist had been for many years – with The Thrill Is Gone .
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience, for whom the blues was largely defined by the Chicago school of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf but he was brought to their attention by musicians who admired him. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “all of a sudden, kids started coming up to me saying, 'You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.' And I’d say, 'Who told you that?' And they’d say, 'Mike Bloomfield' or 'Eric Clapton'. It’s to these youngsters that I owe my new popularity.” He acquired further rock credibility with the 1970 album Indianola Mississippi Seeds, on which he collaborated with Carole King and Joe Walsh.
From then on, King was firmly established as “the chairman of the board of blues singers”. Guided by his manager, Sidney Seidenberg, he embarked on international concert tours that took him to Japan, Australia, China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, experiences that led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.
In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring but not so much that his followers outside the US could not catch up with him every year or two. Though he would now deliver most of his act seated, the strength of his singing and the fluency of his playing were only very gradually diminished. The celebrations for his 80th birthday, in 2005, included an award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “farewell tour” that proved not to be a farewell at all.
In 2009, King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012, he performed at a concert at the White House, where the US President, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago. King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others predeceased him. | 2adv
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Vienna is the world’s best city to live in, Baghdad is the worst and London, Paris and New York do not even make it into the top 35, according to international research into quality of life.
German-speaking cities dominate the rankings in the 18th Mercer Quality of Life study, with Vienna joined by Zurich, Munich, Dusseldorf and Frankfurt in the top seven.
Paris has tumbled down the league, falling ten places to 37th, just ahead of London at 39th, almost entirely because of the city’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks.
The study examined social and economic conditions, health, education, housing and the environment, and is used by big companies to assess where they should locate and how much they should pay staff.
Viennese-born Helena Hartlauer, 32, said she was not surprised at her city’s top position. The municipality’s social democratic government has a long tradition of investing in high-quality social housing, making Vienna almost uniquely affordable among major cities.
“I live in a 100sq-metre turn-of-the-century apartment in a good area about 20 minutes’ walk from the city centre. But my rent is just €800 (£625) a month.” An equivalent apartment in London would cost upwards of £2,000 and even more in New York, ranked 44th in the table.
US cities perform relatively poorly in the study, largely because of issues around personal safety and crime. The highest ranking city in the US is San Francisco, at 28th; Boston is 34th. Canadian cities, led by Vancouver, far outrank their US rivals in the table.
“You don’t realize how safe Vienna is until you head abroad,” said Hartlauer. “We also have terrific public transport, with the underground working 24 hours at weekends, and it only costs €1 per trip.”
Vienna benefited enormously from the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming the gateway to Eastern European countries that often have historic ties to the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
“Our big USP is our geographical location,” said Martin Eichtinger, Austrian ambassdaor to London, who lived in Vienna for 20 years. “The fall of the Berlin Wall helped define Vienna as the hub for companies wanting to do business in Central Europe.”
According to the World Bank, Austria has one of the highest figures for GDP per head in the world, just behind the US and ahead of Germany and Britain, although quite some way below neighbouring Switzerland.
Zurich in Switzerland is named by Mercer as having the world’s second highest quality of life but the Viennese say their city is far more fun. “There are more students in Vienna than any other German-speaking city,” said Hartlauer. “It’s a very fast growing, young and lively city,” she added – though she conceded she works for the city’s tourist board.
Vienna has long been overlooked by British weekend city break tourists, who instead flock to Barcelona or Berlin and tend to think of Austria as somewhere for skiing, lakes and mountains. But, after an increase in budget flights from regional British cities such as Manchester and Edinburgh, Vienna is fast catching up as a popular destination. In 2015, there were 588,000 British visitors to Vienna, up 18% on the year before. The flow is both ways; Eichtinger said London has become the number one city destination for Austrian visitors.
“Vienna has ranked top in the last seven published rankings,” said Mercer. “It scores highly in a number of categories; it provides a safe and stable environment to live in, a high level of public utilities and transport facilities and good recreational facilities.”
The European migrant crisis, which has seen large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers pass through Vienna en route to Germany, has had little impact on the city of nearly 1.8 million people, said Eichtinger. “We have managed to accommodate 90,000 refugees in Austria but the numbers have slowed in recent months.” London has never been in the quality-of-life top ten, says Mercer, damaged by its poor scores for air pollution, traffic congestion and climate. After London, Edinburgh is the next-ranking British city, in 46th place.
Paris has suffered the biggest fall in the most recent rankings. “Paris remained stable for several years but has, this year, dropped ten places in the overall ranking,” said Mercer.
“The drop was essentially due to the terrorist attacks in 2015. However, it is important to highlight that safety issues are a very highly weighted factor within the ’basket’ so any small adjustments can have a big impact on the ranking.”
Auckland in New Zealand was the highest ranking English-speaking city in the survey, in third place, followed by Vancouver in fifth. Australian cities also perform very highly in the survey, with Sydney 10th and Melbourne 15th. The Economist has consistently ranked Melbourne as the world’s most liveable city, although its survey has been criticized as too Anglocentric.
War and political unrest are behind all the worst-ranked cities in the world. Surprisingly, Damascus is named as only the seventh worst, ranked better than not just Baghdad but also Bangui in Central African Republic, Sana’a in Yemen, Port-au-Prince in Haiti, Khartoum in Sudan and N’Djamena in Chad. | 2adv
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Introduction
Did you know that, in the UK, there is no legal requirement for restaurants to pass on tips to staff? It’s a fact that’s covered in a government-led review, released in May 2016, in which workers, employers and customers were asked their views on the tipping process. Off the back of it, ministers said they were keen to change rules and make sure low-paid workers get the money left for them by grateful customers. The government have announced a two-month consultation on proposals that they said would stamp out unfairness.
Among the review’s revelations was the fact that some waiters are charged up to a 15% administration fee on tips they are left by credit or debit cards. In some restaurants, the government has seen evidence of waiters being forced to hand over their own cash, if they don’t collect enough tips, to cover these fees. The government said it would consider prohibiting employers from charging workers an admin fee or any other deductions.
The government also said that it wanted customers to know that tips are voluntary, calling for the system to be made more transparent, with restaurants clearly displaying their tips policy.
We asked waiters around the UK what they think of the tipping process (including how much they take home from tips and whether it’s fair) and what would improve it for them.
1. Rodri, 37, London: 'Around 50% of a waiter’s income is tips'
Average tips: £60 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... the US Everything has got fairer since the tipping scandal was exposed in the summer of 2015. This is when it was revealed that dozens of restaurants were exposed for skimming tips from staff for administration fees. However, you still hear horror stories from new employees at some chains. I’ve heard of restaurants not paying their chefs a share of the tronc (a payment arrangement used to distribute tips). Some restaurants will take 4% of all sales to pay the chefs and as an admin fee. So, if you sell £1,000 worth of food, the company will take £40. This is regardless of how much you make in tips. This means that if a table has a £100 bill and doesn’t tip, the waiter has to pay £4 of their own money. This leads to a money-grabbing culture and, ironically, to bad service. If a table doesn’t tip, the waiter feels as if they are being robbed by the company and ends up resenting the customers.
I can average around £60 in tips per shift but, on a good night, this goes up to over £100 and, on a poor night, it’s around £40. Around 50% of a waiter’s income is tips. All restaurants should have to publicly state their exact tipping procedure. America has it pretty good – everyone tips.
2. Elle, 22, Edinburgh: 'We never know whether it’s fair'
Average tips: £20 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... France
I work three jobs, all on part-time zero-hours contracts, in catering and hospitality. My main day job is in a café where the small number of staff work both front of house and in the kitchen so all our tips get put in a pot and shared equally. My main evening job is at a restaurant where we don’t get our tips but our wages are minimum wage plus an extra £2.50 per hour (which apparently has been worked out to account for average tips when shared with the kitchen staff). My third job is events catering and nobody ever tips.
In restaurants, because a lot of customers add tips through card payments, the staff never actually see how much is getting tipped – so we don’t know whether we’re getting our fair share or not. The system seems better in France, where they don’t tip much but waiting tables is seen as a proper job, offering job security and a decent income.
3. Ashley, 22, London: 'Tips go towards customer breakages'
Average tips: £10-15 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Australia
I work in a south-east London pub in the evenings and I do day shifts at a local restaurant. In both places, tips are all collected and shared out at the end of the night. Money is also taken from the tip jar to cover breakages by either staff or customers. If a member of the team gets off early, they will rarely see their tips because they are shared out just before the pub closes.
It is incredibly unfair that our tips are shared out, especially when one member of the team underperforms. Equally, when a member of the team does incredibly well, they don’t get what they’ve earned. It’s really unfair that tips go towards breakages made by customers. The managers should have ways to pay for broken glasses and plates without docking our tips. I make around £20 a shift but would only be given £10-15 of that money. When I am tipped well, the tips hugely impact on my finances. Occasionally, I will earn over £50 in one night, which almost doubles my earnings for that day. However, I never get more than £30 of that money after it has been shared out. I really rely on tips because I am only paid £7 an hour.
I’d rather we earned a good basic wage (like in Australia) and therefore didn’t have to rely on tips to make ends meet.
4. Tom, Manchester: 'A big night of tips can help pay the rent'
Average tips: £40 per eight-hour shift
I think they treat waiters best in ... Italy
Where I used to work, floor staff kept 80% of cash tips and 40% of card tips. The other 20% of cash went into a pot for the commis waiters and service bar. The 60% went into a tronc system, which helped boost kitchen salaries. I’m not actually sure if this was to help pay the agreed salary or provide bonuses.
It’s hard to say how much I earned a shift; maybe around £40, £20 from card tips. It can make a massive change to your weekly finances. Sometimes, people needed a big night to be able to pay their rent.
They have got tipping right in Italy, where people don’t add a service charge but usually round up their bill so, if they get a meal for €19, they leave a €20 note and don’t ask for change. They respect the staff and you often see people making a career out of waiting and the experience shows. | 2adv
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On one day in August, one in seven people on Earth, 1 billion people, used Facebook, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg. In a decade, the social network has transformed people’s relationships, privacy, their businesses, news media, helped topple regimes and even changed the meanings of everyday words.
“A more open and connected world is a better world.
It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities and a stronger society that reflects all of our values,” wrote Zuckerberg in the post announcing the numbers. These are just some of the ways his company changed everything – for better or worse.
1 Facebook has changed the definition of “friend”
“To friend” is now a verb. And, unlike in real life, when the ending of a friendship can be deeply traumatic, it is easy to “unfriend”, a word invented to describe ditching a casual acquaintance when they are no longer enhancing your Facebook newsfeed. Although the meanings of the words “share” and “like” are essentially the same, Facebook has brought an entirely new weight to the terms. School and university reunions have become redundant – you already know whose career is going well, whether the perfect pair have split and you’ve seen endless pictures of your schoolmates’ babies. You won’t be surprised by an ex in the street with a new girlfriend or boyfriend: you already know they’re dating someone else from the romantic selfies.
But, unlike in real life, Facebook has no hierarchy of friendships. A classmate from one project at university who you haven’t seen in 15 years, a friend-of-a-friend from a stag do or a colleague you’ve never actually spoken to in person – they are all Facebook friends in the same way as your closest mate or your spouse or your mum.
It doesn’t necessarily mean we see them the same way. Professor Robin Dunbar is famous for his research that suggests a person can only have roughly 150 people as a social group. Facebook hasn’t changed that yet, he believes, but, in an interview with the New Yorker, Dunbar said he feared it was so easy simply to end friendships on Facebook that, eventually, there may no longer be any need to learn to get along.
2 We care less about privacy
There’s a wise saying: if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. Facebook embodies that philosophy and created an entire industry from it. The astonishing thing is that users know that and they willingly hand over that information.
Pew Research Center found that most young people are more than willing to hand over their details.
An overwhelming majority of 91% post a photo of themselves, 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%, more than half give email addresses and a fifth give their phone number. But, as so much of a person’s life is shared online, Facebook gives a platform for everyone to cultivate an image and a fanbase. In an article for the journal Frontiers in Psychology, academics described a new phenomenon, the emergence of the “Facebook self ”. More than 80% list their interests, allowing brands to target them most effectively. But most younger users do restrict their profiles, with 60% allowing friends only.
3 Facebook has created millions of jobs – but not in its own offices
Facebook has essentially created an entire sector, including indirect employment for people whose job it is to make the platform work for their brand.
“It is a tool like no other,” said Michael Tinmouth, a social media strategist who has worked with brands such as Vodafone and Microsoft. “Marketers have an understanding of a brand’s consumers like they have never had before. The data and analytics available to you are extraordinary. You know who your customers are, who they are friends with and how they engage with your brand.”
And advertisers pay a lot for that. Facebook reported ad revenue was up 46%, reaching $3.32bn. Facebook is also a minefield for brands. Suddenly, rather than complaint conversations taking place over the phone with a customer service representative or on a small specialist internet forum, angry customers can post their complaints for hundreds of their friends to see or even on the page where all loyal fans of the brand have been carefully cultivated. And an injustice can go viral.
4 Facebook has been the tool to organize revolutions
Though the Arab Spring was dubbed the Twitter revolution, organizing demonstrations and direct action has been revolutionized by Facebook. Manchester University’s Olga Onuch found Facebook had been the key medium for reaching half of all the Euromaidan protesters in Ukraine. Facebook posts signalled the start of the Maidan protests during the hours after it was announced that Ukraine would not sign a free trade and association agreement with the EU, Onuch found. The posts organized live action, not just online anger. Mustafa Nayyem, the Ukraine activist, posted: “If you really want to do something, don’t just 'like' this post. Let’s meet near the monument to independence in the middle of the Maidan.”
Many of those interviewed in Onuch’s research said they relied on Facebook for the truth about what was happening – unable to trust traditional media.
5 Facebook makes news, breaks news and decides what is news
Roughly 71% of 18- to 24-year-olds say the internet is their main news source and 63% of users overall, according to the Pew Research Center. About a third of Facebook users post about politics and government.
Most people will first encounter a piece of journalism or an item of breaking news via Facebook or other social media, and most of those encounters will be on mobiles.
Users might never have to leave the site to get their news: Instant Articles will see stories run within Facebook. It allows news companies to sell ads around their articles, gaining them 100% of that revenue, while Facebook can also sell ads around that article, with 70% of the revenue from the social network’s advertising also going to the news companies.
Facebook has also changed the ways journalists write stories. It is a resource many reporters cannot now live without. For better or (often) worse, it is a directory to find, contact and glean information for almost any ordinary person, who might suddenly find themselves at the centre of the day’s biggest news story. Facebook has its own newswire, sharing the most useful user reaction to breaking stories, including pictures and videos.
6 Users are changing Facebook
It used to be a site to get students connected, with only elite US universities allowed access.
In 2014, a decade after its launch, 56% of internet users aged 65 and older have a Facebook account. And 39% are connected to people they have never met in person.
Groups have given way to pages, writing on each other’s walls is passé and carefully curated albums have given way to instant mobile uploads. More than ever, the site is a gateway not just to your friends but to the rest of the internet.
We may as well get used to it, said David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect . “It might very well go away further down the road but something this big takes a long time to disappear,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Facebook has proven its ability to change and it will continue to be a very, very major player.” | 2adv
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If the amount of food wasted around the world were reduced by just 25%, there would be enough food to feed all the people who are malnourished, according to the UN. Each year, 1.3bn tonnes of food, about a third of all that is produced, is wasted, including about 45% of all fruit and vegetables, 35% of fish and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of meat. Meanwhile, 795 million people suffer from severe hunger and malnutrition.
Well-publicized attempts to combat the loss of food – such as recent laws in France that require supermarkets to distribute unsold food to charities – have highlighted the issue of food waste, identified by the UN as one of the great challenges to achieving food security. Estimates suggest that, by 2050, food production will need to have increased by 60% on 2005 levels to feed a growing global population.
Reducing food wastage would ease the burden on resources as the world attempts to meet future demand. The problem is global but manifests itself in very different ways. In developing countries, there are high levels of what is known as “food loss”, which is unintentional wastage, often due to poor equipment, transportation and infrastructure.
In wealthy countries, there are low levels of unintentional losses but high levels of “food waste ”, which involves food being thrown away by consumers because they have purchased too much or by retailers who reject food because of strict aesthetic standards.
In developed countries, consumers and retailers throw away between 30% and 40% of all food purchased, whereas in poorer countries only 5% to 16% of food is thrown away. According to a 2011 report, in Europe and North America, each person wasted 95 to 115kg of otherwise edible food annually, whereas, in sub-Saharan Africa and south and south-east Asia, the equivalent waste was just 6 to 11kg.
“In the developing world, food waste is virtually non-existent,” says Robert van Otterdijk, coordinator of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Save Food programme. “Food waste is happening in countries where people can afford to throw away food. One statistic is that the amount of food wasted by consumers in industrialized countries [222m tonnes a year] is almost the same as the total net food production of sub-Saharan Africa [230m tonnes]. But food losses, on the other hand, are really rampant in developing countries because of the underdeveloped conditions they have, from management of production to transportation and distribution.”
The environmental impact of food loss and waste is high. The carbon footprint of food produced and not eaten is estimated at 3.3 gigatonnes of CO2, meaning that, if food waste were a country, it would rank as the third highest national emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. About 1.4bn hectares, or close to 30% of available agricultural land, is used to grow or farm food that is subsequently wasted. And more surface and groundwater, or “blue water”, is used to produce wasted food around the globe than is used for agriculture by any single country, including India and China.
“The whole issue of climate change has to do with our economy of production and consumption being out of balance with what the Earth can provide,” says van Otterdijk. “Production of food is one of the biggest production sectors in the world and, if one-third of all this is just produced in vain, you can imagine what a huge impact this has on the natural resources – on land, water, energy and greenhouse gas emissions.” The worst food waste offenders are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where consumers waste 39% of all food purchased, followed by Europe, where about 31% of all food purchased by consumers is thrown away. In the UK, 15m tonnes of food is lost or wasted each year. British consumers throw away 4.2m tonnes of edible food each year. This means that 11.7% of all food purchased is avoidably wasted, at an estimated cost to each family of £700 a year or almost £60 a month.
The foods most commonly found in British bins are bread, vegetables, fruit and milk. According to a nationwide analysis of food waste in UK households, the most wasted food in the UK by weight is bread, with consumers throwing away 414,000 tonnes (22.4%) of all bread purchased. By percentage, the most wasted food is lettuce and leafy salads, of which consumers throw away 38% (64,000 tonnes) of all they buy.
The most wasted meat, by both percentage and weight, is poultry, of which 13% of all edible parts (not including bones) is wasted and the most wasted fruit by percentage is melon, with the equivalent of more than a quarter of each melon thrown in the bin.
The UK has made progress in the past ten years, after a concerted campaign to reduce wastage. It is singled out by van Otterdijk as “one of the great successes” in combating food waste. Between 2007 and 2012, the amount of avoidable food waste produced by UK households decreased by 21%, from 5.3m tonnes to 4.2m tonnes, largely due to greater awareness. Of the food that is not eaten, less is ending up in landfill. In 2000 –01, only 14% of household waste was recycled or composted but, by 2011-12, the amount of composted food had risen to 43%.
Van Otterdijk says there has been a “very encouraging, unexpected, continuing interest” in the subject of food waste, enabling grass-roots campaigns around the world to gain momentum. “We have to do much more and it needs the participation of public and private sectors,” he says. “But if it continues like this, with the same momentum, maybe, after ten years, we’ll have globally significant results.” | 2adv
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Clay Cockrell is sitting in his office at Columbus Circle, across the street from 1 Central Park West, which houses Trump International Hotel and Tower. In front of the tower is Central Park, where Cockrell holds his popular walk and talk therapy sessions.
Cockrell, a former Wall Street worker turned therapist, spends large parts of his days walking through Central Park or the Battery Park in downtown Manhattan near Wall Street, as a confidant and counsellor to some of New York’s wealthiest people.
“I shifted towards it naturally,” he said of his becoming an expert in wealth therapy. “Many of the extremely wealthy – the 1% of the 1% – feel that their problems are really not problems. But they are. A lot of therapists do not give enough weight to their issues.”
So, what issues are America’s 1% struggling with? “There is guilt over being rich in the first place,” he said. “There is the feeling that they have to hide the fact that they are rich. And, then, there is the isolation – being in the 1%, it turns out, can be lonely.” It seems F Scott Fitzgerald was right: the very rich “are different from you and me”.
Counsellors argue things have become worse since the financial crisis and the debate over income inequality that has been spurred on by movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Fight for $15 fair wage campaign.
“The Occupy Wall Street movement was a good one and had some important things to say about income inequality but it singled out the 1% and painted them globally as something negative,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a wealth psychologist and founder of the Wealth Legacy Group. The media, she said, is partly to blame for making the rich “feel like they need to hide or feel ashamed”.
“Sometimes, I am shocked by things that people say. You would never refer to another group of people in the way that it seems perfectly normal to refer to wealth holders.”
“It’s really isolating to have a lot of money. People’s reactions to you can be scary,” said Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. “We are all taught not to talk about money. It’s not polite to talk about money. Ironically, it’s harder to talk about having money than it is to talk about not having money. It’s much more socially acceptable to say 'I am broke. Things are hard.' You can’t say 'I have a ton of money.' You have to keep a lot of your life private.”
As a result, Cockrell points out, the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems.
The growing gap between the rich and poor is a global phenomenon. According to Oxfam, the richest 1% have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014 and are on track to own more than the other 99% by 2016.
In the US, over the last three decades, the wealth owned by the top 0.1% households increased from 7% to 22% even as the wealth of the bottom 90% of households declined.
The number of extremely wealthy people has also been climbing. According to research from Spectrem Group, in 2014, the number of US households with $1m or more in assets – excluding the value of their primary home – increased by 500,000 to 10.1m. In 2007, that number was 9.2m. Households worth $5m or more reached 1.3m and 142,000 households are now worth $25m or more.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the income gap has expanded and the situation “has gotten worse for the wealthy”, Cockrell said. The main reason? Not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money.
“Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don’t want anything from you. Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult,” said Cockrell. “As the gap has widened, the rich have become more and more isolated.”
These are real fears faced by the richest of the rich. In 2007, the Gates Foundation teamed up with Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy to document what it felt like to be in America’s 1%. For the next four years, researchers surveyed 165 of America’s richest households – 120 of those households have at least $25m in assets. The average net worth of those surveyed was $78m. The resulting study, The Joys and Dilemmas of Wealth, was 500 pages long and seemed to prove the old adage that money can’t buy happiness.
“Wealth can be a barrier to connecting with other people,” confessed a spouse of a tech entrepreneur who made about $80m. Some Americans have taken to keeping their wealth secret. “We talk about it as stealth wealth. There are a lot of people that are hiding their wealth because they are concerned about negative judgment,” said Traeger-Muney. If wealthy Americans talk about the unique challenges that come with their wealth, people often dismiss their experience.
“People say 'Oh, poor you.' There is not a lot of sympathy there,” she said. “Wealth is still one of our last taboos.”
Speaking in his soft, soothing voice that makes you want to spill all your worries, Cockrell said that a common mistake that many of his wealthy clients make is letting their money define them.
“I don’t think it’s healthy to discount your problems. If you are part of the 1%, you still have problems and they are legitimate to you. Even when you say, 'I don’t have to struggle for money', there are other parts of your life. Money is not the only thing that defines you,” he said. “Your problems are legitimate.” | 2adv
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Is this the moment when streaming goes truly mainstream?
According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), there were just 41m subscribers using music streaming services globally in 2014. It might be the biggest revenue growth area for the record business but it is still incredibly niche. Not only that, but a significant number of those subscribers come from bundled deals with mobile phone operators so it is debatable just how “active” its users are. Apple’s greatest conjuring trick is to take something that already exists in the market – downloads (iTunes), digital music players (the iPod) and smartphones (the iPhone) – and adapt it to make it irresistible to the mainstream consumer. Leaked information recently suggested that Apple is aiming to reach 100m subscribers, which, based on a subscription fee of $120 per year, would generate $12bn annually. To put that in context, the entire global worth of recorded music in 2014 was just under $15bn. Apple is good at mainstreaming products but it’s not that good.
Is this the end of downloading?
The iTunes Store arrived in 2003 (2004 in Europe) at a time when MP3 piracy seemed insurmountable. Apple managed to persuade consumers to pay for downloads and grew a huge business, which it dominated, with an estimated 70% market share. Downloads still hold the biggest share of digital income for recorded music, making up 52% of total digital income in 2014 according to IFPI numbers. Apple holds the lion’s share of this, making it the single biggest music retailer in the world. But download revenue peaked in 2013 in the UK at £283m and fell to £249m in 2014. The decline in download sales hit the US in 2013 so Apple bought Beats in 2014 for $3bn, not only to get into the premium headphone market, but also to make the transition from music ownership (downloads) to music access (subscription streaming). Apple, and the record industry, cannot afford to get rid of the download market just yet – so streaming and downloading will have to coexist under the Apple brand, one representing the future as the other gets progressively slower and sicker. The vast majority of people out there like music but don’t love it enough to pay $120 a year to listen to it; a sporadic download purchase here and there will suit them just fine. The average spend of a music buyer in the UK in 2014, for example, was just £39.52, according to research. Expecting most of them to triple their annual spend on recorded music is something that even Apple will seriously struggle with.
Has Apple Connect made Apple the most artist-friendly service?
Apple have previously tried to build an artist-friendly platform via iTunes. They called it Ping and it didn’t work. Apple Connect is something very different, somewhere in the middle of YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud, letting artists post music, videos, photos and more to their profile pages. It couldn’t be any more 2015 if it tried. Apple, partly because of its scale and also partly because it treats music as “art” rather than “content”, has generally had strong relations with not just the music industry but artists themselves and, generally, it has a good reputation among artists. Compare that to Spotify, which has been criticized by artists from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift. In contrast, Apple comes across as a benevolent uncle. There is the smell of revolution in the air and Apple is making sure it’s on the right side of the battle lines when they are drawn up.
Where are the artist exclusives?
This is going to be the interesting bit when the service actually goes live. Getting exclusives for big albums is going to become crucial to streaming. Spotify paid a lot of money to get Led Zeppelin and Metallica exclusively. Apple will have been watching this carefully and making its own notes. It already has AC/DC and the Beatles’ catalogues exclusively for download on iTunes but it remains to be seen if it can persuade these two to make the jump into streaming. It also managed to get the surprise Beyoncé album in 2013 before anyone else so it is inevitable that it will want more like that. There is plenty of speculation about Apple looking to get exclusive rights to the new Adele album.
Giving iTunes the download exclusive on an album was not that big a leap of faith for acts given just how much of the download market it controls but trying to do that in streaming is not the same thing. Add into this the fact that streaming now counts towards the album chart in markets like the UK and US and artists, who still see the chart as a measure of success, will not want to limit their audience by restricting themselves to one service.
Is this going to kill Spotify?
Some people are already saying that Apple Music will destroy rivals like Spotify. However, it’s not that simple. Apple is entering a market where others have been working and gaining experience for many years. It has a lot of catching up to do. The winner of this battle will not be the company with the best service; it will be the company with the most money. Apple’s competitors have a head start in the market but they are losing huge amounts of money. Spotify, for example, lost €93.1m in 2013. Apple, on the other hand, started 2015 by becoming the most profitable company in corporate history, with $178bn in the bank. If Apple Music loses Apple money, the company will not continue it for long but it will not stop investment without at least trying to beat the competition. | 2adv
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Setting aside epic disaster-movie moments such as volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes, there are two key natural factors that can make a city vulnerable to gradual disintegration or even total disappearance – water and sand.
Were climate change making the planet colder rather than hotter, we could add ice to the list – for nothing obliterates a city like a billion-tonne glacier grinding its way down a valley. The impact of a rare “ice tsunami” in 2013 on the Canadian municipality of Ochre Beach was just a taster: a wall of melting iceberg on Dauphin Lake was blown by winds on to the shore, splintering every house in its path.
But Ochre Beach was an anomaly. Elsewhere, the planet’s melting ice is making cities vulnerable by the less dramatic route of raising sea levels. A century ago, Venice – one of the most beautiful and low-lying cities in the world – used to flood around ten times a year. Nowadays, its lowest point, Piazza San Marco (only three feet above sea level) is inundated with water approximately 100 times annually.
But rising sea levels are not entirely to blame. In many parts of the world, the land is also sinking – in Venice’s case, subsoil compaction (a result of industrial exploitation of the surrounding area) lowered the city by 20cm between 1950 and 1970. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is also sinking by about 2cm a year – but that’s nothing compared to Jakarta, which is dropping 10 to 20cm annually. In the past three decades, the city has sunk roughly four metres, rendering its 40-year-old seawall ever less effective. Unfortunately for the Indonesian capital, it has pumped out so much groundwater to support its population that the land above is drying out and compacting, thereby creating a bowl. Rivers that used to flow through the city down to the sea have had to be diverted because they cannot drain uphill.
While there are many plans to save Venice – and Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta are taking the problem seriously – the same cannot be said for Miami, where politicians refuse to admit the city has a severe environmental problem.
Miami’s difficulties are threefold. The Florida resort lies less than ten feet above sea level; an increasing number of tropical storms are inundating the city; and it is built on porous limestone, which is absorbing the rising seawater. This water then fills the city’s foundations and bubbles up through drains and pipes, forcing sewage upwards and polluting its fresh water. There is every chance Miami may one day become uninhabitable.
In the Maldives, the populations of whole islands are now looking to abandon their homes. The capital, Malé, population 153,379 and only four feet above sea level, has used Japanese investment to build a ten-foot sea wall at a cost of $63 million – but, long term, only a stabilization of rising sea levels will save it and the rest of the islands.
And it’s not just the sea – rainfall is also endangering cities across the world. Recently, an entire summer’s worth of rain fell in one morning on Detroit, overwhelming its outdated sewerage systems. Impoverished by the collapse of America’s car industry, the city is struggling to build a system to cope. Drinking water is also affected because Detroit is particularly vulnerable to water-borne pathogens.
In Africa, desertification is causing the Sahara to spread south at a rate of 30 miles per year, threatening settlements in northern Mauritania. Over the past 20 years, for example, the desert has grown by more than 260 acres around the trading and religious centre of Chinguetti, which has seen its population decline from 20,000 people in the mid-twentieth century to just a few thousand now. Trading has all but ceased as sand piles up in the streets.
Likewise, the Californian resort of Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, may have to be abandoned in the next decade. This city is just one example of a problem caused not so much by global warming as human over-expansion in the face of finite resources. California’s dream of farming the desert made sense while its total population remained around half a million (in 1870) – but, now, the state is home to 38 million people, who, between them, own 32 million vehicles and expect to be surrounded by lawns and golf courses.
The daily water use in Rancho Mirage is more than 200 gallons per person, which is giving rise to a man-made drought. A 25% cut in water consumption has been implemented but this is unlikely to stabilize the resort, which is surrounded by sand and dust. The long-term answer in California’s desert is likely to be the abandonment of some cities while consolidating the populations of others.
Human flight is the final proof of a city’s disintegration. Once we stop maintaining a city, nature takes over very quickly. Japan’s Hashima Island was turned into a concrete city in 1887 to exploit undersea coal reserves – but, in 1974, with coal supplies nearing depletion, the mine was closed and Hashima was abandoned. Now, the sea spray is causing its concrete walls to collapse.
Fire is a growing threat to urban settlements in America – in fact, forest fires cause the most damage after severe storms, with 800 major fire disasters having been declared there between 1953 and 2014. A newly released report by the USDA Forest Service maps the increasing number of urban locations that are particularly vulnerable to wildfire.
Similarly, in Australia, some of Victoria’s resorts and several Melbourne suburbs have been placed on a list of the state’s 52 most vulnerable bushfire spots because long-term droughts are making trees highly combustible. It’s unlikely that a forest fire will ever destroy an entire city but a succession of fires could render it uninhabitable – and abandonment remains one of the most powerful causes of urban collapse.
Many cities are fighting a losing battle against the ravages of nature but is it possible to identify the world’s most vulnerable metropolis? Natural events are notoriously hard to predict but the prospects for Malé do look particularly grim for, even if its new sea wall continues to be effective, the islands around the Maldives capital are going to disappear before too long. And, if they disappear, so does Malé’s raison d’être. | 2adv
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How long can you hold your breath? I’m trying it right now. The first 30 seconds are easy. I’m ready to give up at 45 seconds but I push on through and it seems to get easier for a while. But, as the second hand ticks past a minute, I know I’m on borrowed time. My heart is pounding. I let out a tiny breath and this helps. Eventually, I give in, expelling the spent air in my lungs and taking a huge gasp. (And continue to gasp for a few more breaths, prompting my husband to ask what on earth I’m doing.) I manage one minute and 12 seconds. I’m quite impressed with myself.
Breath-holding ability becomes extremely important in some sports, particularly freediving. In 2006, I was filming a programme about the anatomy and physiology of the lungs for a BBC series called, slightly oddly, Don’t Die Young. I was lucky enough to meet Sam Amps, who was captain of the UK freedive team. At a pool in Bristol, she taught me some simple exercises to help me hold my breath for longer while swimming underwater. By the end of the session, I think I’d managed a prodigious 90 seconds of breath-holding, enough to let me swim a width. Sam swam three widths with ease. She could hold her breath for five minutes, while swimming. Five!
I asked how she did it: very slow breathing for several minutes prior to each dive, then a big, deep breath before diving in. She also said training helped her resist the urge to breathe for far longer than most people.
Some have suggested that the ability to voluntarily hold your breath is evidence of a watery episode in human evolution. It’s even been said that humans have an ability to lower heart rate and metabolic rate in order to breath-hold for even longer. Other anatomical and physiological bits and bobs – our hairlessness, the distribution of our subcutaneous fat and even our tendency to walk on two legs – have been linked to an aquatic phase of evolutionary development. Unfortunately, the cobbled-together “aquatic ape hypothesis” fails to hold water. It’s a romantic notion that may appeal to us but, with the cold light of day falling on the scientific evidence, it’s revealed to be nothing more than a fiction.
Looking at voluntary breath-holding, it turns out that we’re certainly not unique among non-aquatic mammals in being able to hold our breath. (Having said that, it’s a difficult thing to investigate in other mammals as, unlike humans, they tend not to comply when you ask them to breath-hold.) And experimental evidence shows that heart rate doesn’t drop during breath-holding. At least, it doesn’t if you’re breath-holding on land. When you’re submerged in cold water it’s a different story: cooling the face does lead to a slower heart rate in most people. But, once again, this isn’t evidence of an aquatic ape ancestry, as it turns out to be a very general characteristic of air-breathing vertebrates. This reduction in heart rate is just one of the physiological responses that are sometimes described together as the “mammalian diving reflex”. But physiological responses that could be useful in diving are also – and, perhaps, even more importantly – useful for not drowning.
While our ability to breath-hold may not be all that special, when we compare ourselves with other animals, it’s now proving very useful in one particular area of medicine. Radiotherapy for breast cancer involves directing radiation, very precisely, at the tumour. This may require several minutes’ worth of radiation and, so, it’s usually done in short bursts, between breaths. But, if the patient can keep her chest perfectly still for several minutes, it means that the entire dose can be delivered, in the right place, in one go. The problem, of course, is that most people, just like me, struggle to hold their breath for much longer than a minute. But doctors at University Hospital Birmingham have recently performed careful experiments that show that, if patients are ventilated with oxygen-rich air before attempting a breath- hold, they can manage to hold their breath for an impressive five-and-a-half minutes.
Surprisingly, the trick seems to lie not in fooling the body’s usual sensors for low oxygen or high carbon dioxide levels in the blood but in fooling the diaphragm. When you breathe in, you’re contracting the muscle of your diaphragm, pulling it flat so that the volume of your chest increases – and air is drawn into your lungs. When you hold your breath, you keep your diaphragm in this contracted state. Artificially raising oxygen levels and reducing carbon dioxide levels before a breath-hold, as in the Birmingham radiotherapy experiments, may work by delaying fatigue in the diaphragm. And – not so useful if you’re trying to keep your chest perfectly still – breathing out a little air lets the diaphragm relax a little, and helps you to prolong a breath-hold, exactly as I found when attempting my breath-hold.
And, so, it’s your diaphragm, the main muscle of breathing, that is also in charge when it comes to reaching the breakpoint of your breath-hold. Eventually, even if you’ve fooled it for a while, the signals from the diaphragm are just too strong and you have to give in – and take a breath. | 2adv
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Striding on stage, Donald Trump had a surprisingly humble confession to make for someone defying all the laws of political gravity.
“Unless we win, it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” the would-be Republican presidential nominee warned a campaign rally in South Carolina, despite finishing his fourth month in a row at the top of the opinion polls. “I want to pick my date for the election. I want it next Tuesday,” he confided to the 11,000-strong crowd – typical of the grassroots support that needs to flourish into March 2016 for him to win the nomination, let alone November’s general election. Such moments of self-doubt are fleeting, quickly replaced by the now-familiar bombast of a billionaire whose status as a “winner” has become his defining policy platform.
Trump is not the only one beginning to wonder whether his improbable campaign can confound the pundits and go the distance, particularly after a burst of recent controversy only seemed to cement his polling lead over bewildered rivals. Conventional wisdom holds that any one of these outbursts would have sunk most politicians by now.
First, there was the time he outraged prisoners of war by doubting the heroism of Vietnam veteran John McCain because he allowed himself to be captured. Then, there was the first television debate, where he insulted Fox News moderator, Megyn Kelly, because she asked him difficult questions.
As if PoWs, Fox News and women were not enemies enough, Trump has also insulted Mexican immigrants to the US, claimed that a Black Lives Matter protester who was violently ejected from a rally deserved to be “roughed up”, appeared to mock a New York Times journalist for his disability and falsely accused Muslim Americans of cheering on the 9/11 attackers.
Trump has complained that many of these incidents were exaggerated by the political media, 70% of whom, he says, are “scum”. But, he has nonetheless refused to retract any of the comments. “I could have said, 'Oh, I misspoke', but I am not big on that,” Trump told the crowd in South Carolina. Some rivals still hope that, eventually, even Trump’s supporters will tire of what critics view as his relentless attacks on minorities in particular. One poll shows his support among Republicans down by 12 points – although, at 31%, he still leads the field.
Other opponents question whether there is much overarching political ideology to Trump. “He is an egomaniac; he’s a narcissist. He’s not a conservative, he’s not a liberal – he believes in himself,” former presidential rival, Bobby Jindal, told the Guardian, shortly before dropping out of the race.
Liz Mair, a Republican strategist organizing an anti- Trump fundraising committee, worries that many of the comments seen as gaffes by the liberal media are, in fact, carefully designed to boost his standing with his core constituency. “I personally think it’s best that people who don’t like Trump and his policies do some work to try to actively undercut him,” she says. “And not just pray for him to commit real political suicide.”
Yet, there is more to Trump than attention-grabbing outrage. As he delights in telling supporters, the three issues that he rails against most – immigration reform, free-trade deals and Barack Obama’s national security policy – have become perhaps the defining issues of the election.
His policies for deporting every undocumented immigrant in the US and demanding that Mexico pays for a border wall – “A real wall. A very tall wall, taller than that ceiling.” – might sound unrealistic but they have arguably destroyed the campaign hopes of Jeb Bush, who favours immigration reform.
So what might it take to stop Trump? One source of optimism among opponents is the strong evidence that polls this far away from election day are an average of eight percentage points out, simply because most people have not made up their minds. Among Americans who identify as Republicans, current polls suggest he has 25-30% of the vote.
In the battle for hearts and minds, converting Trump’s passionate supporters will be hard. To blunt his lead, another candidate would need to tap into his support base without jeopardizing their own. Polling experts believe this to be unlikely, as it is hard to imagine anyone doing Trump better than Trump, let alone anyone doing Trump without sacrificing their own support.
This scenario can be best understood by looking at responses to the question: “Are there any of these candidates you would definitely not support for the Republican nomination for president?” While 20-30% of voters say they would support Trump, another 20-30% say they definitely would not.
Steve Deace, a prominent Iowa conservative, said that Trump’s antics are “both a good and a bad thing. On one hand, it produces a loyal following that is attracted to that persona which will not leave you. On the other hand, it limits your ability to grow beyond that.”
Top Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, believes Trump speaks for voters who, for the first time, feel as if they have a mouthpiece and like the fact that they feel like they are being heard. As the pollster notes: “Trump says what they’re thinking and, the more outrageous he is, the more they agree with him. He’s saying what no politician would say and that’s another reason they like him.”
That is certainly the feeling among ordinary supporters who have attended his increasingly packed campaign events in recent months.
“I like the way he speaks,” says Sandra Murray of Dubuque, Iowa. “This country is a huge mess and we need to get out of this and, honestly, he could be the man to do it.”
Other supporters offer a simpler explanation. “He’s not afraid of anybody or anything. That’s pretty cool.” | 2adv
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Sometimes life just isn’t fair. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook and is now worth an estimated $48bn. James Goodfellow also invented something used by millions of people around the world every day – the cash machine – but it didn’t make him rich. In fact, he earned just £10 from the patent and has not made a penny more from it since.
“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1m bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1m bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me but that’s the way of the world,” Goodfellow says.
It also annoys him that he’s not seen as a good role model for inventors and engineers. He came up with a groundbreaking invention that generated billions of pounds “and I got nothing, so who’s going to want to follow in James Goodfellow’s footsteps and get £10 if they have a fantastic success?”
There have been arguments for years over who should officially go down in history as “the inventor of the ATM” and, in 2005, a man called John Shepherd-Barron received a UK honour for services to banking as the “inventor of the automatic cash dispenser”. But, the UK government is now saying it was Goodfellow who invented the ATM – so it would seem that, after all the squabbling, his place in history is now assured.
Back in the mid-1960s, Goodfellow was working as a development engineer and had been asked to devise a way to enable customers to withdraw cash from banks on Saturdays. “Most people working during the week couldn’t get to the bank. They wanted a solution. The solution was a machine which would issue cash on demand to a recognized customer,” he recalls. “I set out to develop a cash-issuing machine and, to make this a reality, I invented the PIN [personal identification number] and an associated coded token.”
This token took the form of a plastic card with holes punched in it. The patent documents proposed a system incorporating a card reader and buttons mounted in an external wall of the bank and stated: “When the customer wishes to withdraw a pack of banknotes from the system, he simply inserts his punched card in the card reader of the system and operates the set of ten push-buttons in accordance with his personal identification number.”
Aside from the cards with punched holes, that pretty much describes today’s ATM. After Goodfellow successfully demonstrated the methodology by producing a model, prototypes were built and the first machines were installed in 1967.
At around the same time, Shepherd-Barron was developing a rival cash-dispensing device. His machine didn’t use plastic cards – instead, it used cheques impregnated with carbon-14, a mildly radioactive substance. The machine detected the carbon-14, matched the cheque against a PIN and paid out the cash.
It is widely accepted that the Shepherd-Barron ATM was the “world’s first” when it comes to being installed and used by the public; the first one, at a bank in north London, was opened on 27 June, 1967 – a month before Goodfellow’s ATM made its public debut. However, the patent for Goodfellow’s machine was lodged on 2 May, 1966, 14 months before the London ATM machine came into service.
The rivalry between the two men bubbled up when Shepherd-Barron received an official honour for his achievement. Goodfellow says: “My one big regret is that I never said anything about it until John Shepherd-Barron received the OBE in 2005. This honour was granted on the basis that he was the inventor of the automatic cash dispenser. That really stuck in my throat and I kicked up a bit of a fuss.” Shepherd-Barron is no longer alive to put his case but, in a 2005 interview, he was fairly withering about his rival: “I don’t know him but it’s clear that the difference between Goodfellow and us was that we thought through the whole system concept and that was important to the banks who bought it. His invention reminds me of the hovercraft, an elegant failure.”
The cash machine has become a world-conquering piece of technology and nothing – the contactless revolution, bitcoin, wearable technology, etc – seems to be slowing its growth: there are now 3m ATMs worldwide, with the number forecast to hit 4m by 2020.
Goodfellow accepts he didn’t invent the concept of a cash-issuing machine “but I did invent a way of doing it. When people talk about the Wright brothers, they didn’t invent the concept of flying – everyone was trying to do it – but they did it and got the credit for inventing the aeroplane so I think I should get the credit for inventing the cash dispenser.”
The good news for Goodfellow is that this is now starting to happen. The website ATMInventor.com concludes: “Who invented the idea of an ATM? We believe it was Luther George Simjian. Who invented the ATM as we know it? We have to think it was James Goodfellow in Scotland for holding a patent date of 1966. Who invented the ATM design we recognize today? We think it was John D White for Docutel in the US.”
Even better for Goodfellow, his achievement has been officially recognized in the latest edition of a 180-page guidebook called Life in the United Kingdom. In the section about “great British inventions of the twentieth century ”, it states: “In the 1960s, James Goodfellow (1937-) invented the cash-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) or 'cashpoint'.”
So after all these years, Goodfellow finally finds himself being talked about in the same breath as John Logie Baird (the television), Alan Turing (the Turing machine), Sir Frank Whittle (the jet engine) and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the World Wide Web). Asked what he did with the £10 he received back in the 1960s, Goodfellow says he thinks he blew it on a wild night out, adding: “It didn’t change my life.” But, he concludes, it’s been a good working life: “I was very happy doing the job I was doing.” | 2adv
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Our new international survey across 33 countries shows just how wrong the world is about a range of key social realities.
British people think the top 1% wealthiest households own 59% of their country’s wealth, when they actually “only” own 23%. Americans think that 33% of their population are immigrants, when in fact it is only 14%.
Brazilians think the average age in their country is 56, when it is only 31. Russians think that 31% of their politicians are women, when it is only 14%.
In Britain, people think that an extraordinary 43% of young adults aged 25-34 still live at home with their parents, rather than the actual 14%. In India, the online population think 60% of the whole country also has internet access, when in fact only 19% do.
Why are people across the world so often so clueless about these realities?
It is partly that we just struggle with basic maths and some of us clearly misunderstand the questions or interpret them differently. For example, most countries hugely overestimate how many people do not affiliate themselves with a religion: across the 33 countries, 37% do not, according to respondents, but the average is actually just 18%. This will be partly because we will be thinking of how many people practise their religion, rather than what they put on census forms.
People also take mental shortcuts, where they grab for easily available information even if it doesn’t quite fit the question. Our huge overestimates of the rural populations in most countries will be affected by how much of the physical landmass rural areas make up, rather than a careful calculation of how unoccupied it generally is. In Daniel Kahneman’s terms, answers to these sorts of questions are classic examples of “fast” thinking, rather than “slow”.
We are tied to our own perspective and struggle to imagine the variety in our countries, as highlighted by our Indian sample’s massively overestimating their population’s access to the internet. Our study was mostly carried out through an online survey – and, in developing countries, this will be representative of a more affluent, connected group rather than the population as a whole. In some ways, we may have expected this more educated sample to get closer to reality – those with higher education levels tend to be more accurate on these types of questions. But what we find, throughout the study, is that people grossly generalize from their own situations, forgetting how unrepresentative they are.
We suffer from what social psychologists call “emotional innumeracy” when estimating realities: this means we are sending a message about what is worrying us as much as trying to get the right answers. Cause and effect run both ways, with our concern leading to our misperceptions as much as our misperceptions creating our concern.
For Britain, this is likely to be part of the explanation for people’s huge overestimates of how much the wealthiest own, how many young people are still living at home and what proportion of the population are immigrants (the guess is 25%, when it is really only 13%, according to official estimates). People are worried about the concentration of wealth, the housing pressures facing young people and immigration levels, and this is reflected in them overstating the scale of the issues.
But, the survey suggests there are also some issues where people are not as worried as they should be. For example, most countries hugely underestimate how much of their population is overweight or obese. The worst case is Saudi Arabia, where people think only 28% are, when 71% are. Britons think it is 44%, when it is actually nearly half as much again – 62% are either overweight or obese.
And, in many ways, it is not our misperceptions but these realities across different countries that are the most interesting and important aspects of the study. The top 1% in Russia own 70% of the nation’s wealth, while the top 1% in New Zealand only own 18%. Half of Italians aged 25-34 still live with their parents, when it is only 4% in Norway.
The average age in India is 27; it is 47 in Japan. Only 10% of politicians are women in Brazil, Hungary and Japan, when 44% are in Sweden.
When the reality is so strange and varied, it is no wonder we’re so wrong. | 2adv
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James Hamblin, senior editor of American magazine The Atlantic, recently joined the unwashed masses. As part of his series, ’If Our Bodies Could Talk’, Hamblin, a relatively sane- looking man, took on a no-showering challenge to examine the effect of over-cleansing the body. He reduced the number of showers he had and eliminated shampoo and soap when he did. In doing so, he discovered what thousands of others have: the more we fervently try to clean ourselves with soaps, body washes and those silly little body polishers, the harder our skin works to restore equilibrium, encouraging us to begin the whole bewildering process again. Showering strips the skin of its own oil and bacteria – which, many would argue, is the whole point of showering – but, apparently, this sometimes works a little too well, especially when you add hot water and cleansing products to the mix.
You know that feeling after a shower when you feel like you’re stuck in a skin suit two sizes too small? That’s because much of your skin’s natural moisture has been washed down the drain. Additionally, our skin, much like our gut, plays host to millions of beneficial bacteria. Showering destroys these happy bacterial colonies; they’re completely wiped out by all of our frequent rubbing and scrubbing. And, when the bacteria washed off by soap repopulate, they tend to favour microbes which produce an odour – yes, too-frequent showering may actually make you smell more. When you stop showering and using soap, however, your skin goes through an initial (likely gross) adjustment period, after which the skin typically restores balance, oil production slows and healthy bacteria flourish.
After everything was said and done, Hamblin realized what other no-soap/no-shower devotees have known for years: that the human body, functioning on its own, is actually quite lovely. It’s not just scent or aesthetics, either – although dermatologists suggest that slowing down on soap use can improve acne and eczema.
Reducing the frequency of showers (and the number of cleansing products used) has very real implications for our environment. The average shower lasts seven minutes and uses 65 litres of water. That’s 65 litres of clean, drinkable water that we’re infusing with soap and washing down the drain each and every day – sometimes more than once.
The vital importance of clean water is becoming harder and harder to ignore, as California enters another summer of drought. It’s becoming clear that clean water is one of the world’s most valuable commodities and one that will soon be in short supply. Add in the environmental effect of all those body wash bottles and you’ve got yourself a handful of very compelling reasons to let your body go au naturel.
If this whole thing is giving you the heebie-jeebies as you recall the last time you were cheek by jowl with those who evidently already skimp on the showers – and have clearly not reached the scent-free stage yet – relax. Many cleansing- reduction enthusiasts still use deodorant if they find it necessary (everyone’s natural scent varies in intensity and can be affected by a host of factors including diet, hydration and exercise) and hand-washing with soap is still recommended as a vital way to reduce the spread of infectious diseases.
You don’t need to go cold turkey, as Hamblin did, but in between thrice-daily disinfecting sessions and giving up showers altogether there lies room for our familiar, simple advice. Reduce. Skip a few showers, put down the soap and let those lovely little bacteria flourish a little, would you? | 2adv
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Lots of us know we are sleep-deprived but imagine if we could fix it with a fairly simple solution: getting up later. In a speech at the British Science Festival, Dr Paul Kelley, clinical research associate at the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at Oxford University, called for schools to stagger their starting times to work with the natural biological rhythms of their students. It would improve cognitive performance, exam results and students’ health (sleep deprivation has been linked with diabetes, depression, obesity and an impaired immune system).
It follows a paper, published in 2014, in which he noted that, when children are around ten, their biological wake-up time is about 6.30am; at 16, this rises to 8am; and, at 18, someone you may think of as a lazy teenager actually has a natural waking hour of 9am. The conventional school starting time works for 10-year-olds but not 16- to 18-year-olds. For the older teenagers, it might be more sensible to start the school day at 11am or even later. “A 7am alarm call for older adolescents,” Kelley and his colleagues pointed out in the paper, “is the equivalent of a 4.30am start for a teacher in their 50s.”
He says it’s not as simple as persuading teenagers to go to bed earlier. “The body’s natural rhythm is controlled by a particular kind of light,” says Kelley. “The eye doesn’t just contain rods and cones; it contains cells that then report to the suprachiasmatic nuclei in the hypothalamus.” This part of the brain controls our circadian rhythms over a 24-hour cycle. “It’s the light that controls it. It’s like saying: 'Why can’t you control your heartbeat?'”
But it isn’t just students who would benefit from a later start. Kelley says the working day should be more forgiving of our natural rhythms. Describing the average sleep loss per night for different age groups, he says: “Between 14 and 24, it’s more than two hours. For people aged between 24 and about 30 or 35, it’s about an hour and a half. That can continue up until you’re about 55 when it’s in balance again. The 10-year-old and 55-year-old wake and sleep naturally at the same time.”
This might be why, he adds, the traditional nine to five is so ingrained; it is maintained by bosses, many of them in their mid-50s and upwards because “it is best for them”. So, should workplaces have staggered starting times, too? Should those in their 50s and above come in at 8am, while those in their 30s start at 10am and the teenage intern or apprentice be encouraged to turn up at 11am? Kelley says that synchronized hours could have “many positive consequences. The positive side of this is people’s performance, mood and health will improve. It’s very uplifting in a way because it’s a solution that will make people less ill, and happier and better at what they do.”
There would probably be fewer accidents as drivers would be more alert, he says. It could spell the end of rush hour as people stagger their work and school-run times. A later start to the day for many, says Kelley, “is something that would benefit everyone, particularly families. Parents go and try to wake up teenagers who are waking up three hours too early. It creates tensions for everybody.”
So, what time does Kelley start work? “I am 67 so that means I’m back to being ten years old and I get up just after six. I wake naturally.” And, yes, he says he finds the start of his working day much easier now than he did when he was younger. | 2adv
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How far away are we from a world where drones deliver packages? If Amazon is to be believed, not far at all. Others are not so sure: technical progress past this point isn’t merely a matter of invention; it’s a matter of public safety.
Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice-president of global public policy, told a congressional hearing recently that his company would be ready as soon as all the rules were in place – but Misener gave no hints as to what that would look like beyond joking with a congressman that there was a basket of fresh fruit on the way to his doorstep to demonstrate the technology’s viability.
The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) will finally have regulations governing the commercial use of unmanned aircraft by June 2016. But the technology has a long way to go before then and larger machines aren’t airway-legal at all yet – only drones up to 25kg will be covered and the FAA points out in the proposed rules that, if you’re going to crowd the skies with radio-controlled flying robots, they had better all be using different radio frequencies that nobody can jam or hijack. Professor Sajiv Singh of Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, who runs a “critical cargo delivery” company called NearEarth, said that piloting a state-of-the-art drone was a little more like leaving it a trail of breadcrumbs: go to this altitude, perform this short task, go back home. But even short flights from a mobile landing pad pose serious logistical problems, he said.
“They’re not proposing to deliver from one uninhabited place to another uninhabited place; they’re proposing to deliver from a warehouse to where the consumer is, which is likely an urban area or a suburban area,” he said. “In those particular cases, there are going to be hazards along the way that the vehicle is going to have to detect. Maybe there will be terrain that the map doesn’t know about, unless you’ve mapped that exact route before. Even then, maybe there’s construction equipment that wasn’t there but is there now. Maybe GPS signals are blocked or partially blocked, in which case it’s going to have an incorrect idea about where it is.” All this is surmountable, he said – but it’s difficult. One major problem is maintaining radio contact with a drone and planning for what happens if that contact breaks. “If you have an off-the-shelf UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle], it’ll just keep going and crash into the ground,” said roboticist Daniel Huber.
That’s not a hard problem for an engineer to fix; it’s just that the fix isn’t yet an industry standard.
Furthermore, “you can’t do everything with a 25kg aircraft”, said Jay McConville, director of business development for unmanned systems at defence and business contractor Lockheed Martin MST. Much of the focus at Lockheed Martin has been on making drone piloting interfaces less like elaborate flight simulators. “Those of us in the aircraft business have to remind ourselves that the operator doesn’t really care about every little thing about the aircraft and wants instead to focus on the end result,” he said. “Operators want to see vehicle status information; they want to see video on their handheld device or their laptop.” “Technologically, most of the things that are needed for this are in place,” said Huber.
He is working on a program that proposes using drones to inspect infrastructure – pipelines, telephone lines, bridges and so on. “We’ve developed an exploration algorithm where you draw a box around an area and it’ll autonomously fly around that area and look at every surface and then report back.”
Huber, a senior scientist at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, where he works on 3D systems imagery, said with respect to a program like Amazon’s: “I have heard them say that many packages are lightweight – a drone can carry a kilogram for 15 minutes. If you have a vehicle that can go into a neighbourhood, it can deliver from that base. You need a 15-minute distance and typical off-the-shelf drones have about that distance.” It’s one way, he said, of making sure the surrounding population is relatively safe. “The larger you get, the more dangerous you get.” Logistical problems are in the middle of being solved in some very dramatic ways, Huber said. At a recent conference, he said, a disaster relief drone firm, SkyCatch, demonstrated a robot that could autonomously take off and, when it got tired, land on its own charging station. “It would land and take off and, when it ran low on batteries, it would land, exchange the batteries and take off again,” he said.
Of course, safety remains a major concern – Singh points out that, for a commercial aircraft to be considered skyworthy, it has to prove a rate of one serious failure every 1m hours. Drones, he said, are “one or two orders of magnitude away” from that benchmark. “The Reaper drone has one failure in 10,000 hours,” Singh said. An oil leak, by the way, doesn’t count as catastrophic failure – something has to fall out of the sky. “We’re closing the gap,” Singh said. “There’s a lot of interest.”
Part of this is simply that air travel is inherently dangerous and, thus, standards are much higher. “If you fly commercial airlines, often they’ll say, ’Oh, a component has failed – we have to go back to the gate,’” Singh said. “And that’s an established industry with 60 years of legacy! I shudder to think that one of these things might come down on a crowded highway.” Part of the solution, Singh said, is simple contingency planning: “If things fail, the vehicle has to do something reasonable.” | 2adv
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Maria is sitting on a black plastic chair in a community centre on a cold Tuesday afternoon waiting for her number to be called. She is number 34.
When it’s her turn, Maria is called forward to pick up a brown paper bag filled with essentials including pasta, eggs and cornflakes, and is invited to choose between butternut squash or carrots as this week’s vegetables.
Maria is the 34th “client” so far today at East Hampton Food Pantry, a community initiative set up just streets away from some of the most expensive and exclusive properties in the world. By the end of the day, the food pantry’s organizers expect more than 400 families to have followed Maria through the doors to collect their weekly food parcel to help them get through the cold, dark Long Island winter.
In the summertime, the Hamptons, a collection of historic oceanfront towns and villages 100 miles from Manhattan, is a billionaires’ playground. But, come Labor Day in early September, when the rich and famous shut up their mansions and head back to Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the glitz gives way to the gritty reality of life for the mostly immigrant community who live here all year. “The people who come here are rich and famous but we who live here are not,” says Maria, who works 14-hour days in the summer cleaning mansions but goes months without any work at all in the winter.
Maria laughs when asked if she has enough money. “There is no work in the winter, only in the summertime,” says Maria, who, like many of the workers in the Hamptons, is from Latin America. “Here, lots of people live in a single room because they can’t pay the rent.”
She says some families with up to five children are crammed into basements and still pay more than $1,000 a month in rent. “People come here looking for work but, in the winter, there is nothing.”
Lots of her friends can’t pay for heating or medication and many would go hungry if it were not for the East Hampton Food Pantry, she says, which is just one of several food pantries in the town.
Vicki Littman, chairperson of the East Hampton Food Pantry, which provided more than 31,000 food parcels in 2015, says the number of people seeking out the food pantry is ever increasing. “Once Labor Day comes and the season is over and people’s hours start to be cut back, our numbers go up to about 400 families a week,” she says. “When they come to us on Tuesday, they get two to three days’ worth of food. Without us, they would struggle that much more.” Littman says it can be hard for outsiders to realize that there are people struggling to get by in a place known the world over for its excess.
“When I discuss with the summer community that comes out here about the food pantries, they’re always shocked because there is that glamorous side of the Hamptons where there are galas and the beaches and the mansions that are here. “But, what people don’t realize is that there is that service industry. It’s the landscapers, the nannies, the waitresses – they are all relying on that summer income to get them through the winter but people don’t see that when they’re coming out on holiday.
“There are seniors who have to sometimes pick between whether they are going to pay for their medications or pay their bills or buy food, and that shouldn’t be the case.”
Littman says the town has lost too many people working key jobs – such as teachers, police officers and even doctors and dentists – because they can’t afford to live in the community and the food pantry board is determined to do more to ensure people have a better shot at staying put. Housing is, by far, the biggest cost in the Hamptons. At $147m, the nation’s most expensive property is hedge fund manager Barry Rosenstein’s 18-acre beachfront estate at 67 Further Lane, a stone’s throw from Maidstone Golf Club, which is considered “the most elite, prestigious and difficult to get into” of all the Hamptons clubs.
Larry Cantwell, East Hampton’s town supervisor and lifelong resident, says homes regularly change hands at more than $25m and the rapid price inflation at the top end has trickled down to even the town’s most modest flats.
“Finding your first home is a challenge in an area like this,” Cantwell says. “Not just people who you would characterize as poor – working- and middle-class families are also having a hard time. If you can find a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for $500,000, you’re very lucky.” Cantwell says more than half the town’s homes are empty for most of the year, which causes the population to dwindle to as little as 10,000 in the winter months compared with 80,000 in August. “It’s kind of the tale of two cities. There’s certainly a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer,” says Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother. “But, the rest of us live here year round.
“There are famous and very wealthy people but then you have hard-working and poor people struggling to get by. You’ve got to remember that this community was founded as a farming and fishing community of people who lived off the land and the water – a real working-class community.”
Cantwell says saving up enough money to buy your first house while working as a farmer or fisherman is near-impossible in East Hampton today “and it’s not just the poor – police officers, teachers, young professionals and others all struggle to find a place to live here and many of them cannot afford to own their own home.”
Being homeless in the Hamptons means spending a lot of time on a bus. Various houses of worship have joined together to ensure there is somewhere for the homeless to spend the night over the winter. Churches up and down the north and south fork of Long Island take on the burden one night at a time and roughly 50 homeless people are bussed between them every day. Eddie Vallone, 22, is one of those on the bus every night. “People look at the Hamptons as some sort of rich town and there’s no problems going on. But there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs.
“It’s hard to really grasp –'OK, the summer is coming to an end. What am I going to do for the winter?'” Vallone says at Maureen’s Haven, a charity that coordinates the homeless shelter programme. “I want to work but there’s no work to be done.”
Vallone, who works cleaning pools and doing odd jobs on luxury estates, says that, if he saves well and doesn’t impulse-buy, he can make his summer earnings stretch out until November. “But, work doesn’t start again until May or the beginning of June.” | 2adv
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There are worse things to do in life than stroll along Rio's Copacabana beach in the sunshine on the way to watch a World Cup match, so it was perhaps not surprising that England fan Anthony McDowell from Liverpool was having none of the doom and gloom that preceded some of the build-up to the tournament in Brazil. “The place is lovely. The people are great. There’s a party atmosphere,” said McDowell. “The only thing that could be better is the England team.”
He and half a dozen friends are among the multitudes of supporters from around the world who have made the beachfront into a party zone of national colours and chants. Some danced, some posed for photos, some drank, but mostly they just walked and talked football, waiting for the next game to begin on the nearby FanFest big screen. The last time there were so many people here during the daytime, the pope was visiting.
The cheerful, largely peaceful mood was far from the protests, transport chaos and stadium problems that plagued preparations for the World Cup. But, now the football is well and truly under way, visiting supporters are determined to enjoy the experience. “If I had known, when I started planning, how complicated and costly it would be, I wouldn’t have come. But, now that we’re here, it’s great,” said Brian Hill, a retired chief executive from Sunderland.
The trip has not been problem free. Hill travelled for more than 20 hours to get to Rio, then hit long delays on the road from the airport at 6.30am. His son, Andrew, had his sunglasses stolen almost as soon as he sat on the beach. And, they have been surprised that many bars are not set up with big screens for the games. But, like many fans, they said they loved the atmosphere, if not the logistics, of this tournament which has got off to a spectacular start on the pitch.
Even the surliest cynic cannot have failed to be thrilled by Robin van Persie’s extraordinary diving header for the Netherlands against Spain. Elsewhere, there has been a glut of goals: 28 in the first eight games – almost three times as many as at the same stage in South Africa in 2010. Adding to the carnival mood on the streets, where the majority of fans are from neighbouring nations, Latin-American teams won in every game they played up until the time of writing.
So far, the tournament has avoided the worst Doomsday scenarios, though it is far from trouble free. The stadiums may have been delivered late and – in some cases – not fully finished, but there have been no reports of structural problems or difficulties entering the grounds since the kick off.
As at previous World Cups, ticketing has been a problem, with many empty seats at several games, including the Netherlands against Spain. FIFA spokesman Saint-Clair Milesi confirmed that only 48,000 of the 51,900 seats at the ground were filled. FIFA is also investigating security lapses that allowed Chilean fans to let off fireworks during their victory over Australia.
The Globo newspaper listed a number of shortcomings in the 12 host cities. Almost all suffered worse traffic congestion than usual. The worst transport problems were in Natal, where bus drivers have been on strike since 12 June. In Salvador, some journey times were five times longer than usual. “Traffic was already bad but this week it is chaotic,” Jecilda Mello, president of residents’ group the Association of Friends of the Historic Centre, told the paper.
But, protests have diminished since the opening day, when small demonstrations took place in several cities, prompting police to use tear gas and pepper spray. Since then, the only security threat has been petty theft and overexcited fans. A spontaneous street party of Argentinian fans was dispersed with pepper spray after the fans blocked roads.
The huge distances have led to some sharply contrasting World Cup experiences. The tournament has made only a small mark on São Paulo, South America’s most populous city, but, far away in Manaus – the remote Amazonian city where England played Italy – visitors said World Cup fever was in full swing with brightly decorated streets and flags fluttering on many cars.
The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, said the shift in mood was palpable. “We've had a really warm welcome in Manaus. It’s a big thing for them, even if it is a bit strange to spend so much on a stadium with no one to play in it. But we were in São Paulo for four or five days in the run-up to the opening match and you wouldn’t have known until the last day that there was even a World Cup on. It was weird.” | 2adv
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It is not just the world’s biggest burger chain; it is also a global emblem of American consumer capitalism. But, these days, the golden arches of McDonald’s are looking a little tarnished. After a decade of expansion, customers around the world don’t seem to be 'lovin’ it' any more. McDonald’s has revealed that worldwide sales dropped by 3.3% on 2013 in a set of results that were described as atrocious.
Problems are piling up almost everywhere. In China, sales plunged by 23% after a food scare when local media showed workers apparently caught on camera at a local supplier claiming to use out-of-date beef and chicken in products destined for McDonald’s and KFC. In Europe, sales are down by 4%, mostly because of unrest in Ukraine and the sour anti-western mood in Russia. Around 200 of McDonald’s 450 restaurants in Russia are being investigated by health inspectors in apparently politically motivated food-safety checks. Ten have been closed.
But it is in the US, where McDonald’s has around 40% of its restaurants, where the crisis runs deepest. Almost 60 years after Ray Kroc opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, consumers are losing their appetite for a Big Mac and fries.
McDonald’s has seen 12 straight months of declining sales in its massive home market, with sales down 4.1% in the latest quarter. Younger diners are deserting the restaurant in droves to eat out at rivals such as Chipotle Mexican Grill. The number of 19-to-21-year-olds visiting McDonald’s once a month has fallen by 13% since 2011, according to food analysts Technomic, while the number of 22-to-37-year- olds visiting has not grown.
To add to the company’s problems, McDonald’s hamburgers were recently named the worst in America in a poll of more than 32,000 American diners, who said they would rather eat a burger at Five Guys, Smashburger or Fuddruckers. Fast-growing US-only chain Chick-fil-A was considered to be best for chicken. McDonald’s is also widely perceived as less healthy than most of its rivals, especially Chipotle, which trumpets its antibiotic-free meat and “locally sourced, seasonal produce” – although 'local' for Chipotle can mean 350 miles away.
The depth of consumer mistrust of McDonald’s was exposed by a consumer outreach exercise the company launched in the US in October. “Have you ever used pink slime in your burgers?” was one question on the Our Food Your Questions website – referring to the controversial beef filler (gristle and fat) used for dog food that is sprayed with ammonia to make it “fit” for human consumption. The meat product, banned in Europe since the BSE crisis, was dropped by McDonald’s in 2012.
But pink slime has left doubts in US consumers’ minds. “Does McDonald’s beef contain worms?” asked another person (“No. Gross. End of story,” replied the company). Others wanted to know whether it uses real eggs or whether the McRib is made with the same plastic contained in yoga mats. McDonald’s Chief Executive Don Thompson acknowledged the company had a job to do in addressing misconceptions about the freshness, quality and integrity of its ingredients.
Yet, just as McDonald’s has been losing the customers who will pay a bit more for food perceived as fresher and healthier, it has also lost its edge in fast-food essentials: speedy service at low prices. Ever since it introduced $2 items on its dollar menu, it has gained a reputation for being more expensive than its rivals, while many consumers complain that service is slower.
The “expensive” tag was unjustified, said Mary Chapman at Technomic. “Prices have indeed gone up but they haven’t gone up as quickly as the rest of the fast-service chains in the US.” Prices at McDonald’s have increased by 4.8% since 2009, well below the “quick service” sector average (up 19.4%), while the cost of “fast casual” eating, a category that includes the much-hyped Chipotle, is up 16.9%, according to Technomic’s menu monitor. US consumer prices rose 11% over the same period.
But critics have a point when it comes to longer queues. McDonald’s has a bigger menu than some, with more complicated items – its chicken McWrap takes 60 seconds to make. “I think it is worth waiting but the guy behind me who wants his double cheeseburger for a dollar might not,” said Chapman.
In the UK, McDonald’s has turned around its business, making Britain a rare bright spot for the company. A competitive breakfast menu, improved coffee and free wi-fi had given McDonald’s a broad appeal in the UK, said Peter Martin of consultancy CGA Peach whose figures show that 56% of British adults have visited a McDonald’s restaurant at least once in the last six months.
Executives are promising to tackle misconceptions about its food in its home market. Thompson has promised more organic food and custom-made burgers but, to cut down queues, he also wants to introduce simpler menus. Analysts are scratching their heads about how the company can square the circle of simpler menus and greater choice over fillings.
“They want to simplify the menu but enhance its ability to customize and that sounds tricky,” said Mark Kalinowski at Janney Capital Markets. Only four out of McDonald’s 14,000 US restaurants had so far tested “build your own burger”, he said, raising questions about how it could be scaled up. “Right now, we are sceptical; we would like to see more detail.”
Meanwhile, despite the declining sales, the chain continues to expand globally: by the end of 2014, it expects to have opened 1,400 new restaurants. Kalinowski expects McDonald’s market share will continue to shrink but he, too, warned against writing off the company. “You can never really count McDonald’s out. We think it will be number one in terms of total sales for not just years but decades to come.” | 2adv
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In typical bad-boyfriend style, Dan Sullivan was late to breakfast with the Guardian because he got pulled over on his motorcycle.
Sullivan works too much, he says. He misses dinner dates. He forgets to give presents.
And so, like seemingly everyone in Silicon Valley, the 27-year-old venture capitalist has come up with a start-up to fix it: BetterBoyfriend.me, a service that sends girlfriends and wives a present every month for about $70.
Sullivan, who works in finance, has been quietly testing the program and has signed up about 350 boyfriends generating about $17,000 revenue every month. Most members, he says, are from his collection of Harvard and investor friends: venture capitalists, founders and employees of companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, whose girlfriends have been getting presents from Sullivan for the last year.
Each month, Sullivan’s members choose from a list of seven possible gifts (chocolate, tea sets, manicures). The package is sent to the boyfriend unbranded and unlabelled.
He tests his ideas by buying Facebook ads just to see what kind of traction they get. BetterBoyfriend.me took off. “BetterBoyfriend hit something,” Sullivan said. “It’s a pain point everyone has.”
BetterBoyfriend.me was not Sullivan’s first idea. For a couple of days, he thought about a dog-sharing pitch: “I see all these rich guys looking just miserable walking dogs and I realized: a dog is only valuable 5% of the time,” he said. “So, what if we got a guy who would babysit the dogs and other people could rent them out?”
Another start-up, called InvisibleBoyfriend, allows users “to design and build a believable social partner who is everything you want and is always available to talk, whenever you want”. The end result is a “boyfriend” who can text with you all day.
Founder Kyle Tabor launched it to give users a faux boyfriend to deter unwanted advances but has found people have grown attached to their algorithmic partners: “Many more users are seeking companionship through conversation rather than external 'proof' of a relationship to get people off their back.”
For Sullivan and Tabor, the surprise was the real relationships that have formed with their customers. Sullivan says he has begun to see himself as a sort of relationship consultant for the boyfriends.
Sullivan admits he’s made mistakes. Early on, the packages included receipts that had his name on them, Dan Sullivan. “One of the boyfriends wrote to me and said, 'Listen, dude, she’s not mad but Cynthia found out'.”
About 50% of the women BetterBoyfriend.me deliver packages to know about his involvement in their relationships: “It’s correlated with age. I think, after you’ve been married a while, you don’t keep many secrets.”
And over the year, the young founder says he’s got to know the boyfriends really well. They’ve even done a delivery to a hospital delivery room. The key, he said, is to remember that his relationship is with the boyfriend.
When he first launched his company, he attached tags that said BetterBoyfriend.me to flower bouquets and set off for Dolores Park, a popular lounging spot in the tech- and youth-heavy Mission District.
“I looked for couples and gave the bouquet to the girl but that didn’t go down well with the boyfriend. Like, not at all. It made sense, though. It was cool,” he said. “So, I reconsidered and started handing them out to the boyfriends.” | 2adv
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Thousands of people protested on Australia’s beaches against a shark cull in Western Australia. They asked the state’s prime minister to stop the cull, and RSPCA Australia and Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson criticized it. Catching and killing sharks longer than three metres began after a number of shark attacks on Western Australia’s coast. A 35-year-old surfer, who was killed in November 2013, was the sixth person to die from a shark attack in two years.
But the whole of Australia has had, on average, just one shark-related death a year for the last 50 years. Kate Faehrmann, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said, from a protest in Perth, the state capital of Western Australia: “We’ve always said that this idea won’t work. Drumlines, which they use to catch the sharks, kill sharks if they’re one, two, three metres or more, and also dolphins, turtles and other things. That’s why we don’t want the cull.”
Thousands of people protested on beaches in the cities of Perth, Sydney and Adelaide, and at beaches in Victoria and Queensland. Faehrmann said the protests showed that Australians wanted sharks to be protected: “What’s amazing is that so many people in Australia love sharks. This has shown that people are scared but thousands of people are coming out across the country to say, ‘That’s the sharks’ ocean. We respect them, we love them and we don’t want you to kill them.’ Anthony Joyce, a surfer who once had his foot caught in a shark’s mouth, said: “The number of sharks they are going to kill is going to make no difference.”
The state government will not say how many sharks they have killed, but some people say that sharks smaller than three metres were released after they were caught on drumlines, floating drums fixed to the sea bed with bait on hooks underneath them. Conservationists say there is no evidence the cull will reduce the number of shark attacks on humans, because no other cull has only used drumlines. Researchers at the University of Western Australia say the increased number of shark attacks in the state may be because Western Australia has the fastest-growing population in Australia, not because of a rising number of sharks.
Richard Peirce, of the UK-based conservation charity, the Shark Trust, said that the cull would not work and could bring more predators towards the coast. “The activity in Western Australia is adding to the human tragedy of shark attacks. It is very sad that a government has ignored the best advice and chosen a method that is ineffective and counterproductive,” he said, “and, even if they monitor drumlines through the day, leaving the lines in at night could attract other predators to the area, attracted by those sharks and other species hooked and injured.”
Worldwide, in 2012, there were 80 attacks by sharks. Seven of the attacks were fatal. This is compared to nearly 100 million sharks killed by humans each year. RSPCA Australia says it believes the cull is wrong. “There is no evidence that the increase in attacks is a result of increasing shark numbers. We think it is the result of a changing population and changing human behaviour; that is, there are more people in the water,” it said.
Richard Branson said the idea was not working. “I’m sure one of the reasons Western Australia Premier, Colin Barnett, did it was because he was thinking it would encourage tourism. It’s going to do the opposite, I think. You’re advertising a problem that doesn’t exist in a big way and you’re going to stop people from wanting to come to Perth and your beautiful countryside around it. All you’re going to achieve, I think, is to worry people.” | 2adv
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1 Race engineer
A race engineer liaises between the driver and the mechanics.
Typical salary: New graduates start at £25,000 to £30,000 and quickly progress to junior engineer roles, earning more than £40,000 with just a few years’ experience. Senior race engineers earn £50,000 to £90,000 and promotion often leads to six-figure salaries.
What the job involves: “A race engineer acts as the interpreter between the race-car mechanics and the driver,” says race engineer Jamie Muir. “The engineer takes feedback from the driver, analyses the data available and makes decisions about the set-up needed for maximum performance, then relays this to the mechanics to instigate.”
Qualifications: A university degree, typically in automotive/mechanical engineering or motorsport technology. Hands-on experience is essential.
To succeed as a race engineer, you need … to be able to deal with pressure.
Worst thing about the job: The long hours. “Race engineers work 24/7,” says Chris Aylett, CEO of the Motorsport Industry Association.
2 Ethical hacker
Typical salary: £60,000 to £90,000 at team- leader level, while a newly qualified hacker can expect a minimum salary of £35,000 to £50,000.
What the job involves: A company will pay an ethical hacker to hack into its computer system to see how well it might stand up to a real attack.
Qualifications: You don’t necessarily need a degree in computer science. The industry accepts individuals with a very wide range of academic qualifications and skills.
To succeed as an ethical hacker, you need … a passion for technology and detail. You should also have a very good analytical mind and enjoy solving difficult problems.
Worst thing about the job: When you are called in to test the security of a new customer’s network only to discover that they have already been the victim of a data breach.
3 Bomb-disposal diver
Typical salary: In the private sector, you can earn up to £100,000 working just two months out of every three.
What the job involves: Descending to the sea bed and searching for unexploded ordnance (bombs, shells, grenades and landmines), then either safely recovering and collecting the weapons or securely disposing of them.
Qualifications: To dive offshore, you must have diving-inspection and medical-technician qualifications. To be able to dispose of the bombs safely, you’ll also need an explosive ordnance disposal qualification and years of experience.
To succeed as a bomb-disposal diver, you need … to stay calm in stressful situations. You work on your own at depth, with nil visibility and, if you don’t like living in small confined spaces with lots of other people, forget it.
Worst thing about the job: Expect to be away from home at least six months of the year.
4 Social engineer
Typical salary: Between £50,000 and £80,000, on average. Graduates start on £25,000 but salaries increase rapidly with qualifications and experience.
The job: A social engineer is paid by a company to try to trick its employees into divulging confidential information that allows the engineer to access sensitive company data or the company’s computer network.
Qualifications: Typically, social engineers have a degree in IT, although an understanding of psychology is useful, as is a background in marketing, teaching and customer service.
To succeed as a social engineer, you need … the confidence to lie convincingly and the ability to fit in almost anywhere without looking too out of place. You also need a strong sense of personal ethics and an understanding of the law.
Worst thing about the job: Other people may misunderstand your job: social engineers are not spies but most people think they are.
5 Power-line helicopter pilot
Typical salary: £65,000
The job: To fly close to high-voltage power lines in a helicopter so that the lines can be inspected with a camera and any potential faults and issues can be identified by the power company.
Qualifications: A private-helicopter-pilot licence, a commercial pilot’s licence and around 2,000 hours of experience flying at low levels in the type of helicopter the company usually uses.
To succeed as a power-line helicopter pilot, you need … a steady hand and a cool head. Typically, pilots must fly beside the power line, sometimes as little as 20 feet away and just 30 feet off the ground.
Worst thing about the job: “There are no negatives,” says Robin Tutcher, chief helicopter pilot for Western Power Distribution overhead- power network.
6 Private butler
Typical salary: £60,000 to £90,000
The job: A private butler can be called on by his or her employer to do anything from wardrobe management to chauffeuring and pet care. Typical duties include managing other staff, serving at every meal, running errands, looking after guests, booking restaurants, house security, housekeeping, cooking and anything else the household needs.
Qualifications: You don’t need any specific qualifications but can do a course at the British Butler Academy or the British Butler Institute.
To succeed as a butler, you need … the mindset of someone who genuinely thrives on looking after others.
Worst thing about the job: Long hours and an unpredictable work schedule mean it’s difficult to have a family life. Butlers also suffer from isolation, cultural differences with their employer and “having to work for people who aren’t always nice”, says Sara Vestin, director of the British Butler Academy. | 2adv
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More than one million British workers might be employed on zero-hours contracts, new figures reveal, suggesting that British business is using the controversial employment terms far more widely than previously thought.
The figure – derived from a poll of more than 1,000 employers conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) – prompted renewed calls for the government to launch a full inquiry into the use of the contracts, after a week in which a string of organizations – from retail chains to Buckingham Palace – have faced criticism for hiring staff but offering no guarantee of work and pay each week. Employees on zero-hours contracts often get no holiday or sick pay and have to ask permission before seeking additional work elsewhere. The CIPD found that 38% of zero-hours contract workers describe themselves as employed full-time, typically working 30 hours or more a week. One-third of voluntary sector employers use the contracts and one in four public sector organizations.
The latest numbers also call into question the accuracy of official data on the topic. The Office for National Statistics has increased its estimate of the number of UK zero-hours workers by 25%, to around 250,000.
Peter Cheese, the chief executive of the CIPD, said: “There does need to be a closer look at what is meant by a zero-hours contract, the different forms that they take and clearer guidance on what good and bad practice in their use looks like. And this needs to consider both the advantages and disadvantages in practice for businesses and employees.”
Retailer Sports Direct recently became the focus of controversy on zero-hours when it emerged that the company employs around 20,000 of its 23,000 staff on the contracts. The retailer’s use of the contracts was followed by details of a string of other companies using the deals, including cinema chain Cineworld and Buckingham Palace, which uses them for its 350 summer workers.
Pub group J D Wetherspoon has 24,000 of its staff – 80% of its workforce – on the terms.
Vidhya Alakeson, from the Resolution Foundation, an independent think tank, added: “If it’s true that there are around one million people on zero-hours contracts, then that would be a substantial portion of the workforce – this could no longer be dismissed as an issue affecting only a tiny minority.
“The new estimate underlines the urgent need for a deep and thorough review of zero-hours by the government, which takes into account not only the scale of the problem but the effect these contracts have on workers’ employment rights, earning capacity and personal well-being.”
Unions and poverty campaign groups have accused employers of pressuring staff into signing the contracts as a way to evade their responsibilities and cut staff benefits.
Dave Prentis, of the trade union Unison, said: “The vast majority of workers are only on these contracts because they have no choice. They may give flexibility to a few, but the balance of power favours the employers and makes it hard for workers to complain.”
Workers on zero-hours contracts are often only told how many hours they will work when weekly or monthly rotas are worked out, but are expected to be on call for extra work at short notice. They should be entitled to holiday pay in line with the number of hours they work, but do not qualify for sick pay.
The charity National Trust, which employs many of its seasonal workers on zero-hours contracts, said it offered the same pay and benefits to those workers, pro rata, as full-time staff, but needed some workers to be on a more flexible arrangement.
“We believe zero-hours contracts are essential in our organization, as we are very weather- dependent,” a spokeswoman said. “Our properties have told us it’s important to be able to reorganize staff rotas quickly to respond to the weather and zero-hours contracts allow us to do this.”
Politician Chuka Umunna said the contracts should be the exception to the rule. “While some employees welcome the flexibility of such contracts, for many, zero-hours contracts leave them insecure and unsure of when work will come,” he said.
Some people have argued that the flexibility of zero-hours contracts may have allowed the UK to avoid higher levels of unemployment during the economic downturn, while the CIPD research suggests that only 16% of those on zero-hours contracts report that their employer frequently fails to provide them with sufficient hours each week.
The institute’s figures also suggest that 17% of employers in the private sector made use of zero- hours contracts, considerably lower than the 34% of organizations in the voluntary sector and 24% in the public sector.
Industries where employers were most likely to report at least one person on a zero-hours contract were hotels, catering and leisure (48%), education (35%) and healthcare (27%). | 2adv
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Low-income countries will remain on the front line of human-induced climate change over the next century, experiencing gradual sea-level rises, stronger cyclones, warmer days and nights, more unpredictable rainfall, and larger and longer heatwaves, according to the most thorough assessment of the issue yet.
The last major United Nations (UN) assessment, in 2007, predicted runaway temperature rises of 6°C or more by the end of the century. That is now thought unlikely by scientists, but average land and sea temperatures are expected to continue rising throughout this century, possibly reaching 4°C above present levels – enough to devastate crops and make life in many cities unbearably hot.
As temperatures climb and oceans warm, tropical and subtropical regions will face sharp changes in annual rainfall, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in Stockholm and published online in September.
East Africa can expect to experience increased short rains, while west Africa should expect heavier monsoons. Burma, Bangladesh and India can expect stronger cyclones; elsewhere in southern Asia, heavier summer rains are anticipated. Indonesia may receive less rainfall between July and October, but the coastal regions around the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand can expect increased rainfall extremes when cyclones hit land.
“It is virtually certain that, in the long term, global precipitation will change. High latitude countries, such as in Europe or North America, are expected to receive more rainfall, but many subtropical arid and semi-arid regions will likely experience less precipitation. Over wet tropical regions, extreme precipitation events will very likely be more intense and more frequent in a warmer world,” said the report’s authors.
They added: “Monsoon onset dates are likely to become earlier or not to change much while monsoon withdrawal rates are very likely to delay, resulting in a lengthening of the season.”
Scientists in developing countries and commentators have welcomed the report, which they said backed their own observations.
“The IPCC makes the case that climate change is real and happening much more strongly than before. We are already seeing the effects of climate change in Bangladesh and across south Asia. It’s not news to us. Most developing countries are facing climate change now. They do not need the IPCC to tell them that the weather is changing,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Dhaka.
Scientists have also lowered projections of sea-level rises. Depending on future greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels will rise an average of 40 –62 cm by 2100. Nevertheless, there will be significant geographical variations; many millions of people living in the developing world’s great cities, including Lagos and Calcutta, are threatened.
Weather disasters are also more likely in a warmer world, the report suggests. Although the global frequency of tropical cyclones is expected to decrease or remain essentially unchanged, they may become more intense, with stronger winds and heavier rainfall.
Life in many developing-country cities could become practically unbearable, given that urban temperatures are already well above those in surrounding countryside. Much higher temperatures could reduce the length of the growing period in some parts of Africa by up to 20%, the report said.
Dr Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, says: “Climate models are not yet robust enough to predict impacts at local and regional scales, but it is clear that everybody is vulnerable in some way.”
The charity Oxfam predicted that world hunger would worsen as climate changes inevitably hurt crop production and disrupt incomes. They suggested the number of people at risk of hunger might climb by 10% to 20% by 2050, with daily per-capita calorie availability falling across the world.
“The changing climate is already jeopardizing gains in the fight against hunger, and it looks set to worsen,” said Oxfam. “A hot world is a hungry world. If the remainder of the 21st century unfolds like its first decade, we will soon experience climate extremes well outside the boundaries of human experience.” | 2adv
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