Andy Roberts

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  Steve Tilston: The Reckoning – review

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/22/steve-tilston-the-reckoning-%E2%80%93-review

  A Four Star review from the Guardian for Steve Tilston‘s album ‘The Reckoning‘   This article titled “Steve Tilston: The Reckoning – review” was written by Robin Denselow, for The Guardian on Thursday 21st July 2011 21.31 UTCIn the Pennine hills in Yorkshire there lives a singer-songwriter and guitarist who has never achieved the public attention he deserves, but has always been praised by fellow musicians. Steve Tilston writes thoughtful, highly personal songs and is one of the finest instrumentalists on the folk scene, with a style that echoes the elaborate, rhythmic “folk baroque” guitar work of Bert Jansch and Davy Graham. He writes about anything that takes his interest, and the songs here range from unashamedly lyrical pieces about the countryside to others concerned with memory, nuclear waste, or a cheering story from the Spanish civil war, given a flamenco edge. There’s even a thoughtful meditation on the existence of God, Doubting Thomas, given a slinky, bluesy backing, and an update of the traditional Nottamun Town, now treated as a contemporary political nightmare. There’s occasional backing from accordion, harmonica and even a string section, but the album is dominated by Tilston’s exquisite guitar work, and features two spirited solo instrumental tracks, including a suitably virtuosic tribute to Graham.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSteve Tilston: The Reckoning – reviewRelated posts:The Unthanks: Last – reviewRadiohead: The King of Limbs – reviewGolden rower Tom James forces his way back into Olympic reckoning

  

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  July 22 2011, 5:46am | Comments »

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  Björk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/05/bjork-manchester-is-the-prototype

  Björk, the Icelandic singer’s Biophilia project incorporates handmade instruments, iPad apps, David Attenborough’s nature films and an album too – and she’s showcasing it all at Manchester international festival.“There will be an album in September, with an app to go with each of the 10 songs“.Extraordinary.This article titled “Björk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’” was written by Alex Needham, for The Guardian on Monday 4th July 2011 19.00 UTCOriginally formulated by scientist Edward O Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that human beings have an innate affinity with the natural world – plants, animals or even the weather. Yet it’s not biophilia but good old-fashioned fandom that has drawn a small band of Björk obsessives to queue outside Manchester’s Campfield Market Hall since 10am this morning. Not that there’s anything old-fashioned about the woman they are here to see. Biophilia is the Icelandic singer’s new project – the word means “love of living things” – and promises to push the envelope so far you’ll need the Hubble telescope to see it.A collection of journalists have already had a preview at a press conference in the Museum of Science and Industry over the road. Björk is absent, preparing for tonight’s live show, her first in the UK for over three years, which will open the Manchester international festival. Instead, artist and app developer Scott Snibbe, musicologist Nikki Dibben and project co-ordinator James Merry talk through Biophilia’s many layers. There will be an album in September, with an app to go with each of the 10 songs. There will be an education project, designed to teach children about nature, music and technology – some local kids will embark on it next week. There will be a documentary. And then there will be tonight’s show, performed in the round to a 2,000-strong crowd including journalists representing publications from New Scientist to the New York Times, as well as the diehard fans waiting outside. One, 20-year-old Nick from London, is a classical violinist who has loved Björk since the age of 14. “I wasn’t really into pop at all until I heard Medúlla,” he says, citing her most challenging album. “It was like a gateway drug from me liking difficult 20th-century western art music to liking pop.”It’s a journey in the opposite direction from the one most music fans make, and one which speaks volumes about the complexity of Björk’s work. “More classical musicians respect Björk than any other pop star,” he adds.At the museum, Snibbe is demonstrating the apps. The app that goes with the first single, Crystalline, includes a game in which you collect crystals in a tunnel, through which process you alter and customise the music. The app also includes an abstract version of the musical score; and an essay by Dibben that explains, in this case, how the structures of crystals relate to the musical structure of the song. The app for another song, Cosmogony, presents a 3D cosmos you can navigate. Each app has been created by a different – often rival – developer. “To me, it feels like the birth of opera or the birth of cinema,” says Snibbe.Yet Björk didn’t have such lofty aspirations in creating the project. “My main aim is to not get too bored myself,” she says, via email (she rests her voice between shows). “I feel that if I’m curious and excited there is a bigger chance the listener might be. At the end of the day, it’s more about the feeling of an adventure rather than the details of the adventure itself. So in short: whatever turns you on.”That said, the change from a passive to an active listening experience is a radical one. “The apps are mostly made for headphones and a private experience,” says Björk. “What you see live is only us playing our version. You can play a totally different versions at home.” If you’ve no desire to do that, Merry is at pains to point out that Biophilia will still exist as a CD or download – and indeed only those with access to an iPad or iPhone can experience the apps. So far, the project has been too expensive to adapt to other handheld devices.At the show venue, the journalists are being given a tour of the new instruments that have been specially built for the project. One contraption looks like a giant silver mangle decorated with two massive ear trumpets, but is called a sharpsichord. There are two giant pendulums, which have strings plucked by a plectrum as they swing past. There’s a Tesla coil that descends in a cage from the ceiling; two prongs that emit purple flashes of lightning – and, with it, sound. There’s also a celeste, which has been gutted and fitted with the pipes of a gamelan. These fantastical devices are controlled by an iPad. Above the performance space is a circle of screens that show the apps for each new song; moving tectonic plates for Mutual Core; invading pink cells for Virus (“Like a virus needs a body, as soft tissue feeds on blood, I will find you, the urge is here,” go the lyrics).It must be one of the most complex pop shows ever, and according to Björk, it could have been more elaborate still. “Manchester is the prototype,” she says. “We had to leave many things out because of budget and time and stuff.” As it is, the whole project has taken three years and cost so much money she told Rolling Stone that “we’ll be lucky if we earn zero”.Yet, on purely artistic grounds, it’s hard to regard Biophilia as anything other than a success. As the lights go down, Björk’s childhood hero David Attenborough’s unmistakable voice, recorded just that day, fills the room to explain the songs. The show includes Björk’s favourite footage from BBC nature documentaries playing when she performs older songs. Hidden Place is illustrated by a beautiful but disturbing clip from Attenborough’s Life – of a seal’s corpse being devoured by psychedelically coloured worms and starfish. All 10 tracks from the new album are played. Such an onslaught of new material would try the patience of most audiences, but this one is rapt – no one even goes to the bar.Much of this is due to the sensory bombardment of music, images and costumes – not least Björk’s bright orange wig, which a comment on the Guardian’s review says makes her resemble a tamarin monkey. Her decision to ban cameras and other recording equipment from the venue has also played its part. “I feel since everyone has made such an effort to be there all together at the same place and time, we might as well go for it,” she says. “It can be hard to play music for people who are filming you for Twitter or whatever. It’s like going to a restaurant with someone who keeps texting their friends while you are speaking to them – hard to concentrate.”Then there’s Björk’s extraordinary voice, once compared by Bono to an icepick, and still imperishable at 45. “My voice has changed,” she says. “I thought it had gone a little deeper. On my last tour I got nodules [on the vocal cords] but managed to stretch it out with three years of vocal work, so I’m back to my old range now.” Björk “adores” a whole range of singers: “Chaka Khan, Beyoncé, Antony” – the latter being Antony Hegarty, a former collaborator who is here in the audience – though her “favourite singer alive today” is Azerbaijani devotional singer Alim Qasimov. She is accompanied by a 24-piece Icelandic choir she discovered on YouTube.After spending so long meticulously making Biophilia, performance feels liberating. Live shows and making an album are, says Björk, “extreme opposites. After noodling for ever on an album, gathering together the best moments, it’s refreshing and healthy to have to do it all in one whack. Then you sort of have to take real life into it and accept that you only have whatever you have that day – and that is  enough.”Right now Björk is at the intersection of music, nature and technology, exploring how the three together might help build a more sustainable future. But is it still pop? “Yes, absolutely!” Björk claims. (Dibben, who wrote a book about Björk, says the singer is wary of having her music hived off into the rarified world of the academy.) “Or perhaps I would rather call it folk music – folk music of our time. I was never too much into Warhol and the whole pop thing – it felt a bit superficial. I prefer folk. People. Humans.”• Bjork plays Manchester international festival on 7, 10, 13 and 16 July. Biophilia is released in September<br /> <a href=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” _mce_href=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” rel=”nofollow”><br /> <img src=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” _mce_src=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” alt=”Ads by The Guardian”></img><br /> </a><br />guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBjörk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’Related posts:who is itExclusive Radiohead artwork plus The King of Limbs album streamCanterbury Cathederal

  

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  July 5 2011, 8:45am | Comments »

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  The day I (nearly) met Bob Dylan

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/14/the-day-i-nearly-met-bob-dylan

  Ten years ago, John Harris was within seconds of a meeting Bob Dylan – until Eric Clapton stole him away. Now he talks to those who have been granted an audience with rock’s greatest enigma.

  This article titled “The day I (nearly) met Bob Dylan” was written by John Harris, for The Guardian on Saturday 14th May 2011 11.05 UTC Imagine this: since you were 11 years old, you have been convinced Bob Dylan is a genius. You own every album he has ever made, and your shelves are full of books whose titles attest to the great cloak of mystery that surrounds him: Behind the Shades, Wanted Man, Invisible Republic. You can quote his lyrics, and play dozens of his songs on the guitar. There are days when you find yourself revering him more than the Beatles, which is saying something. And then it happens: someone points you in the direction of a set of stairs and says it’s time for you to meet him, which produces an attack of nerves so strong that you fear you might pass out. As he winds down after playing in front of 10,000 people, what exactly are you going to say? “Hello Bob, you’re the reason I made a harmonica holder out of one of my mum’s coathangers in 1983 and tortured the neighbours with repeated renditions of Like a Rolling Stone, and I just wanted to say thanks”? No. “Hello Bob, I’ve always had trouble making narrative sense of your 1978 song Changing of the Guards, and wondered whether you could help?” Absolutely not. “Hello Bob, great show”? Please. Sadly, to kill this shaggy dog story before it runs away with us, when the dressing room door eventually swung open, Dylan wasn’t there: he’d been spirited away by Eric Clapton, someone reckoned. Which makes 11 May 2002 – the day I nearly met Bob Dylan – nothing to tell the grandchildren about, really. Thanks to favours pulled by a musician friend, I did, though, watch Dylan perform from the wings of the London Arena that night, and studied him as he left the stage. I noted that he was smaller than I imagined (5ft 7in, apparently), and that he walked with a strange gait, shuffling on his toes, almost like a boxer. He passed a foot or so in front of me: I nodded at him, and I think he nodded back. To me that was quite something, but that’s an indication of what hero-worship can do to you. On 24 May, Dylan will turn 70, an occasion that has already given rise to celebration concerts, cover stories, radio shows and more. Maya Angelou has dutifully praised him as “a great American artist”. To Bruce Springsteen, Dylan is “the father of my country”. There is much more of this stuff to come – a renewed outpouring of the kind of questions that tantalise me, and the millions of people who have been profoundly touched by his music. Most of them boil down to two conundrums: Who is Bob Dylan? And what does he want? Like most of the high-achieving musicians of his generation, Dylan will never quite escape the shadow of the 1960s, but he is one the few alumni of that decade whose new work still seems vital and interesting. His last album, 2009′s Together Through Life, had its moments, but if you really want to understand how great his recent-ish work has been, you should sample Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006): albums streaked with wit, existential insight and the rare sound of a rock musician building age and experience into every note they sing. Dylan’s voice is now shot to pieces compared to how it sounded 40-odd years ago, but I think that’s part of what makes his latterday stuff so good. Mick Jagger shakes his bum and attempts to convince his audience that time has stood still since the mid-70s; Dylan confronts us with not just his own mortality, but ours, too. As ever, he is surrounded by a cloud of ephemera and apocryphal chatter. No one really knows anything about his politics: he has expressed approving sentiments about Barack Obama, but recently caused howls of dismay when he played in China; yesterday, a very unexpected post appeared on bobdylan.com, in which he acknowledged that a collection of recent setlists had been given in advance to the authorities, claimed he hadn’t been censored (“we played all the songs that we intended to play”), and said nothing at all about whether he should have followed the advice of some outraged commentators and spoken at least a little truth to power while he was there. In 2000 I watched him in talkative mood at Wembley Arena, expressing his pleasure at being in the UK with reference to Britain’s efforts in the second world war. What he said probably had more to do with his Jewish upbringing than anything else, but they didn’t sound like the words of the liberal peacenik of common assumption: “We all know how Britain stood alone. That always meant a lot to the people I grew up with.” Dylan has starred in ads for the lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret and for the iPod. He is said to have been married at least three times, although only one of those unions has been public. An infinite number of questions buzz around the internet, none of which are ever anwered: having embraced born-again Christianity circa 1978, but then apparently rediscovered his Judaism, where is his spiritual head at? Does he really leave his tour bus parked in motorway service stations and go for spontaneous moonlit rambles across fields? And did he really once consider relocating to Crouch End? I can well remember the source of my idea of Dylan as a shadowy, unbelievably enigmatic presence: a BBC film titled Getting to Dylan, first screened in 1987, in which a team from the Omnibus programme followed him as he played the part of a faded rock star in a risible film called Hearts of Fire (also starring Rupert Everett). Weeks went by before he consented to be interviewed, but it eventually happened, in an on-set trailer near Toronto – and in 20 minutes, he allowed a rare glimpse of his essential condition. You can see the entire Getting to Dylan interview on YouTube (have a look for “BBC Dylan interview”): it remains an enduring portrait not just of who he was, but who he will probably always be, and what a strange and lonely business being Bob Dylan actually is. So I place a call to his interviewer, Christopher Sykes, now 65, who has the rare distinction of being one of the only film-makers who has trained a camera on Dylan and asked him questions. (Though he directed the acclaimed Dylan documentary No Direction Home, not even Martin Scorsese managed that.) “I really liked him,” Sykes tells me. “He was tremendously funny. Charming, I thought. And he is incredibly charismatic. You find yourself wondering: is this something about him, or is this something you bring to someone that famous? But sitting a few feet away from him is pretty scary. He’s got a way of looking at you that’s frightening. When he looks straight at you, you really do feel like he’s got some sort of x-ray vision; that he sees right through you.” It was partly the memory of that look that threw me when I thought I was about to meet him. “He looks like a … funny old Gypsy person,” Sykes continues. “You have this sense that he’s been around for an awfully long time. I remember thinking, ‘I bet if you look through medieval paintings, there’ll be a picture of him somewhere.’ It really does feel like he’s been around for ever.” Sykes is nonplussed by suggestions that Dylan did the interview in a state of narcotic refreshment (“He liked drinking Johnny Walker black label, and I think he smoked dope”), and recalls a recent occasion when he had dinner in Los Angeles with Dylan’s son, Jesse – who was reminded of the interview, and offered a very telling question: “Was he kind to you?” “Tender and really helpful,” is the verdict of the writer Adrian Deevoy, who was summoned to Philadelphia a few years later to interview Dylan for Q magazine. They ended up talking in the seaside town of Narragansett, Rhode Island – and Deevoy’s memories chime with one regular observation of Dylan’s lifestyle: that whereas some artists glide through a world of luxury, Dylan seems to live and work in a fascinatingly higgledy-piggledy way. “It sounds weird,” he tells me, “but we were all on a double bed in a very small motel room: Dylan, myself, his manager Jeff Rosen, a willowy Scandinavian woman, and a massive dog.” Mike Scott, the singer and chief creative mind in the Waterboys, became a smitten Dylan fan at much the same age that I did, watching his appearance in the film of George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh, and realising that “he was the great poet of the times”. In 1978, Scott and a friend went to see Dylan play at Earls Court, then followed his tour bus back to a hotel where they spied him sitting in the bar. “That was exciting,” he says. “‘Fucking hell! I’m going to meet Bob Dylan!’ We got half way across the bar, and these blurred, giant shapes suddenly appeared in front of us: bouncers, who escorted us off the premises.” Seven years later, when Dylan was in London recording with the ex-Eurythmic and rock Zelig Dave Stewart, Scott and two of his band got a call, and were summoned to a north London recording studio. “That felt like crossing the other half of the room,” he says: the collected musicians spent two hours jamming, while Dylan spurned singing in favour of playing “burbling, non-stop lead guitar”. Scott recalls being perplexed by his refusal to step up to the microphone, but feeling thrilled when Dylan told him he was a fan of the Waterboys’ big hit The Whole of the Moon. Some time later the phone rang again, and Scott found himself in a rented house in Holland Park. “We hung out with him for a couple of hours. He played us a record by the McPeak Family, folk musicians from Ulster, and he gave me a cassette of an American Indian poet called John Trudell.” And what was Dylan like? “Puckish. Humorous. In the studio, he’d been very quiet and closed in on himself. But now he was gregarious: exactly what I’d want Bob Dylan to be like. It was great.” Dylan told them tales about the presence of Vikings in his native Minnesota, introduced Scott to his kids, and shared a herbal moment with him. “I don’t know whether you can say this,” says Scott, “but I’ve smoked a joint that Bob Dylan rolled, and he’s smoked a joint that I rolled.” Self-evidently, I cannot compete with any of that, but still: during 30-odd years, Dylan has powerfully spoken to me about love, loss, life, death, sadness and contentment, and he still does. When I recently moved house, it rather pains me to admit that a freshly acquired set of his CDs, faithful to the original mono versions, came with me in the car, lest anything should happen to them. Thanks to a moment of carelessness in Mississippi, I am proud to say that I own a speeding ticket issued on Highway 61. The last book I finished was a collection of writing about Dylan by the American author and thinker Greil Marcus; I’m about to start an updated version of the aforementioned biography Behind the Shades, by Clinton Heylin – 902 pages, which seems to me a very satisfactory length indeed. I have seen Dylan play at least 15 times, and I’ll probably keep doing so until his so-called Never Ending Tour comes to a close. It can be a frustrating business – certainly, I wish he wouldn’t endlessly change the phrasing of just about everything he sings, sometimes in the manner of a wheezing pub crooner. But in between the moments you’re left guessing which song he’s actually playing, there are always enough flashes of greatness to justify the effort, and occasions when just about everything aligns correctly. In 1995, Dylan leapt on stage at the Brixton Academy without his guitar, sang while waggling his legs in the style of the young Elvis, and delivered a fantastically rambunctious show that had me laughing with pleasure. In 2001, I saw him at Stirling Castle: probably the single best concert I have seen him play, full of restraint and tenderness perfectly suited to a summer twilight. The essential thing, though, is this: whatever happens, you can surely take great delight in looking toward the stage and saying, “Look – it’s Bob Dylan.” And then there is the excellence of so many of the songs he has written as he tumbles towards old age – such as Ain’t Talkin’, the final song from Modern Times: “Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’/ Through this weary world of woe,” he sings. “Heart burnin’, still yearnin’/ No one on earth would ever know.” How beautifully put, and how very true.

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  May 14 2011, 3:17pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Welcome to WikiMaths – home of hard sums

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/09/welcome-to-wikimaths-%E2%80%93-home-of-hard-sums

  WikiMaths The Polymath Project throws mathematical conundrums open to all to tackle, but it isn’t a wiki, is it?

  This article titled “Welcome to WikiMaths – home of hard sums” was written by Matt Parker, for The Guardian on Sunday 8th May 2011 19.00 UTC Mathematicians are not known as a social bunch, but a new “WikiMaths” project is allowing anyone to join in their cutting-edge research. A study into the effectiveness of the world’s first virtual mathematics project will be released this week. It all started in 2009, when Cambridge mathematician Tim Gowers wrote about the possibility of an open online group allowing unprecedented numbers of people to work on the same problem, hopefully solving conundrums much more quickly. He suggested the “Hales–Jewett theorem” as a good first target. Analagous to a complicated game of noughts and crosses played on a 4×4 cube in five dimensions, the theorem shows how many squares you would need to block to make it impossible to complete any straight lines. On a 3×3 grid, you can do this by blocking three squares; in five dimensions, things are a bit more complicated. This theorem had already been proven, but the solution was long and complicated and no one had found a much-needed basic proof. Contributions poured in – a staggering 1,228 significant comments across 14 blog posts with 39 people providing meaningful contributions. Within six weeks the answer had been found. It was published under the collective pseudonym “DHJ Polymath”. But was the process truly collaborative? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, think so. Much of the work was done by professional mathematicians, but a number of smaller, vital contributions came from those without serious credentials. The 39 contributors to the Hales–Jewett theorem solution ranged from the world’s top mathematicians to secondary school maths teachers. Several seminal ideas came from inexperienced mathematicians. Which all means that the exercise could redefine who is considered a mathematician – and offer new insight into unsolved problems. The researchers are presenting their results in Vancouver next week, while the “Polymath Project” as it now known, continues to work on seven different problems with more than 5,000 comments from 275 unique contributors. Why not join in at polymathprojects.org?

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  May 8 2011, 6:09pm | Comments »

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  The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/01/the-cyberplague-that-threatens-an-internet-armageddon

  The unchecked rise of malware could culminate in a massive global event that would change forever the way we use the broadband internet

  This article titled “The cyberplague that threatens an internet Armageddon” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Saturday 30th April 2011 23.04 UTC In 1971, Bob Thomas, an engineer working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Boston company that had the contract to build the Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, released a virus called the “creeper” on to the network. It was an experimental, self-replicating program that infected DEC PDP-10 minicomputers. It did no actual harm and merely displayed a cheeky message: “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” Someone else wrote a program to detect and delete it, called – inevitably – the “reaper”. Although nobody could have known it 40 years ago, it was the start of something big, something that would one day threaten to undermine, if not overwhelm, the networked world. For as we became more and more dependent on information and communications technology, we were also subjected to a plague of what came to be called “malware”. It’s an ugly term, as befits something that covers a multitude of sins, all involving computer code designed with destructive or malevolent intent. It includes not only viruses, which are programs that replicate by copying themselves into other programs, but also worms (self-replicating programs that use a network to send copies of themselves to other machines on the network, with or without human assistance) and Trojans (similar to viruses but instead of replicating they infiltrate a computer and perform some illicit activity, possibly under remote control). Malware also refers to other evils: the junk mail we call spam; “phishing”, or trying to hoodwink internet users into revealing bank account passwords etc; page-jacking, which makes it difficult or impossible for a victim to get rid of a web page; and other scams. The malware plague has gone through several phases. It began in a harmless and experimental way with the creeper and a worm released on to the internet in 1988 by Robert Morris, a student from New York State’s Cornell University. Morris wanted to find out how many computers were connected to the internet so he wrote a small program that would install itself on every machine it found and send back a “present and correct” message. But there was a flaw in his code that meant the worm replicated. On 2 November 1988, network administrators realised something was up because their machines – and the network itself – had slowed to a crawl. In the end, the culprit was identified and carpeted, though it doesn’t seem to have done him any lasting harm: Morris is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Malware began on the internet, but its next phase involved the stand-alone machines we now call personal computers. In 1982, a Pennsylvanian teenager named Rich Skrenta created the “elk cloner” virus that infected the Apple II, then the most popular personal computer in upmarket US households. Skrenta’s virus covertly altered the floppy disk needed to boot up the computer, displaying some doggerel on the screen on start up. It was annoying but harmless. Early PC malware tended to be like that – irritating but not terribly destructive. And malware spread slowly, because most of these PCs were not networked; infections spread by “sneakernet” – ie users sharing floppy disks. The real trouble began when domestic internet use exploded in 1993. From then on, an infected PC was a potential menace not just to its owner, but to other machines with which it communicated. For many people, early malware was a baffling phenomenon. It was seen as something akin to physical vandalism in the real world – hooligans despoiling an environment for no obvious reason. What motivated them? Nobody knew, though several psychologists had a go at explaining it. The notion that malware was motiveless destructiveness was fuelled by the fact that much of it was imitative, carried out by “script kiddies” – non-programmers who downloaded DIY virus-construction kits. In the 1990s, malware development accelerated. When Microsoft released Windows 95, it rapidly became the de facto standard for the PC industry and the world’s IT systems came to exhibit the characteristics of a monoculture: millions and millions of PCs across the globe, all running the same software, all sharing the same security vulnerabilities. At the same time, domestic broadband connections became common. Suddenly, there were millions of machines, operated by people with little understanding of computer security, with shared vulnerabilities and fast connections to the network. Most importantly, malware found a business model in the late 1990s. The fragility of the monoculture could be exploited for profit. Spamming – junk emailing – could now be done on a truly gigantic scale. Hitherto, it had required identifiable servers with broadband access to the net. But the new broadband environment offered a better infrastructure. All you had to do was find machines with fast connections, unpatched security vulnerabilities and non-savvy owners and infect them with a Trojan that would turn them into relay stations for spam (and which could be turned off just as easily, to avoid detection). Spamming works because it can be very profitable. It costs very little more to send 10m emails than it does to send 100. If you’re selling a packet of Viagra for $20 and you have a response rate of 0.1%, you’ll make $20 from 1,000 emails. But if you send out 10m and have the same response rate you’ll be earning $200,000 a day. This is the kind of serious money that makes organised criminal gangs sit up. The idea of covertly suborning networked PCs was a critical breakthrough for malware because it enabled malefactors to set up “botnets” – networks of compromised machines that could be remotely controlled. Nobody knows how many of these botnets exist, but there are probably thousands of them worldwide and some are very large. A list of the 10 largest in the US in 2009, for example, estimated that they ranged in size from 210,000 to 3.6m compromised machines. In addition to spamming, botnets can be used for a wide variety of purposes. They can, for example, launch “distributed denial of service” (DDOS) attacks on e-commerce or other web sites. Each machine in the botnet bombards the targeted site with simultaneous requests, repeated incessantly, to the point where the site’s servers buckle under the load or the site becomes unusable by legitimate customers. More sinisterly, botnets can be used for blackmail, effectively extracting protection money from retail sites to ward off the threat of a DDOS attack. Nobody talks about this in public, but it goes on. Domestic PCs that have been compromised by Trojans can be put to other uses too. For example, they can covertly monitor their user’s keystrokes when logging into banking and other sites, thereby stealing passwords and credit card details. At a recent presentation by officers from Soca (Serious Organised Crime Agency), I was struck by a slide that showed how highly developed the online market in stolen credit card data had become. It showed a marketplace for “USA 100% APPROVED TRACK2 DUMPS” in which Visa debit card details were going for $8 and American Express details were $10. On another such marketplace, American MasterCard details cost $15 while European credit card details were going for $40 a pop. “Buying large quantities,” it said, “prices are negotiable for every customers.” (Grammar and spelling are not a speciality in this particular netherworld.) We’ve come a long way from the creeper and elk cloner. The driving forces behind contemporary malware are financial gain and organised crime, much of it with its headquarters in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe. One of the most blatant examples of an online marketplace in stolen credit card data was CarderPlanet.com, a website ostensibly based in Vietnam, but operated by people based in Russia and Ukraine, and now shut down. A senior US secret service official described CarderPlanet as “one of the most sophisticated organisations of online financial criminals in the world” which had been “repeatedly linked to nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community”. Some of the principals behind CarderPlanet were arrested after an intensive campaign by the US authorities. But one of them, Dmitry Ivanovich Golubov, was subsequently released by the Ukrainian authorities and has allegedly started a political organisation called “the Internet Party of the Ukraine”. The latest round in the malware saga came in June last year when the Stuxnet worm finally broke cover. Stuxnet infects Windows computers and spreads mainly via infected USB sticks, so it doesn’t require the internet for dissemination. Once a USB stick infects a machine, it uses a variety of tricks to infect other machines on the local network and to take control of them, but with an added twist. It looks for a special kind of programmable logic controller (PLC) made by the German company Siemens. If a PLC is found, the worm infects it using a vulnerability in the controller’s software and changes its code and thus its behaviour. This is scary because these Siemens controllers play a critical role in virtually every industrialised plant in the world, including water treatment plants, electricity grids and oil refineries, and nuclear reprocessing facilities. One target of Stuxnet was Iran’s controversial nuclear weapons programme, specifically the gas centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium. It is claimed that the worm reprogrammed the Siemens PLCs to cause over 900 centrifuges to spin uncontrollably while at the same time feeding back “normal” data to the plant’s operators, thereby concealing the problem until it was too late. The fact that this has set back Iran’s nuclear programme by several years has led to speculation that the worm was the creation not of criminal hackers, but of a state agency (possibly Israeli or American). This hunch was supported by the fact that Stuxnet seems a pretty sophisticated piece of malware. Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert, estimates that it would have taken eight to 10 accomplished programmers six months to design, implement and test it under laboratory conditions. It’s difficult to imagine the criminal hacking fraternity having the resources to do that. Why has malware become so pervasive and so difficult to combat? The main reason is that malevolent innovation is the downside of the open architecture of the PC and the internet. The combination of an open, programmable PC and a network that is open to anyone created a “generative system” which was uniquely hospitable to what has come to be called “permissionless innovation”. This had some amazing benefits – it gave us the world wide web, for example, Wikipedia, the Linux operating system and the Apache web-server software that powers a majority of the world’s web sites. But it has also given us the malware plague. There is another, deeper, fear – that the mysterious botnets that have been assembled by the merchants of malware may one day be used in some co-ordinated way to engineer a massive global event – cyberspace’s equivalent of 9/11, if you will. If something like that were to happen, then the response of governments everywhere would be draconian. Just as civil liberties in western democracies were massively eroded by the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing “war on terror”, so the freedoms we have hitherto taken for granted in cyberspace would be correspondingly curtailed. The day might come when you’ll need a government licence to connect to the internet. Bob Thomas’s creeper could have a creepy inheritance.

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  May 1 2011, 9:06am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Can a family of four be fed for £50 a week?

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/30/can-a-family-of-four-be-fed-for-50-a-week

  Sainsbury’s is launching a deal that promises it can be done. We asked three leading food writers if it’s really possible

  This article titled “Can a family of four be fed for £50 a week?” was written by Fiona Beckett, Simon Majumdar and Richard Ehrlich, for The Guardian on Friday 29th April 2011 23.05 UTC Fiona Beckett: Yes you can Sure you can feed your family for £50 a week, just as you can restrict yourself to 1,200 calories a day if you need to. But it takes willpower, and supermarkets aren’t always the best places to exercise that. Everything – well, practically everything – will have to be pre-planned. You can’t afford to be deflected by impulse buys, though it’s worth keeping, say, a £5 float to take advantage of offers on non-perishable foods like pasta and tinned tuna and for stocking up on basics like herbs and spices (which are cheaper in independent shops than supermarkets). You’ll have to stop pandering to your kids. On this kind of budget you can’t afford to let everyone eat what they like whenever they feel like it. Shared mealtimes are easier to control than 24/7 fridge raiding. Set whatever you don’t need aside for another meal rather than leaving it on the side for scavengers to dip into. Insist that kids ask you when they want a snack rather than just helping themselves. (Frugality, I’m afraid, requires a degree of fascism that doesn’t come easily to today’s laid-back parents.) Forget heavily advertised brands (despite moans from the kids) and buy – or at least try – own label. Discover when your nearest supermarket tends to have reductions. I used to find the one at my local petrol station would virtually give away unsold meat and veg on a Sunday night. The main challenge on a low budget is keeping some variety in your diet. If you build a couple of days round mince (say, a spag bol one night and chilli con carne the next), you could then switch to seafood like frozen prawns, veg and rice for the next two to three days. Forget the idea that every meal has to have expensive lumps of protein – do as our parents and grandparents did, and pad out meals with carbs and puddings. Not all the old wisdom applies though, it has to be said. Veg aren’t always – sadly – cheaper in season. (Frozen berries are almost always cheaper than fresh, for instance.) “Cheap” cuts can be anything but. It can, bizarrely, be more economical to buy steak on special offer than mince, if you stretch it by slicing it thinly. Sometimes ready-made foods like cakes or puds are cheaper than baking them yourself (though in general anything pre-sliced, grated or cubed is a rip-off). And remember that no one shop has all the bargains. You can bet your life that if Sainsbury’s – or any other supermarket – is promoting products to make them look as cheap as chips, they’ll be marking up other lines that will cost you less elsewhere. The old adage that does still apply is “shop around”. Fiona Beckett is author of The Frugal Cook, published by Absolute Press. guardian.co.uk/profile/fionabeckett

  Simon Majumdar: No you can’t In 1994, Sainsbury’s ran a campaign promising to feed a family of four for less than £50 a week. I had my doubts then, and I have them even more now that the company is offering almost exactly the same deal some 17 years later. The simple fact is, that while it may be feasible to feed a family of four for £50, it is, I believe, almost impossible to do it well for such a lowly sum. One may be able to meet people’s basic nutritional needs, but it will give little variety in the diet and extract all joy from the experience of dining. Some might suggest that, if people are financially stretched, they should be prepared to forgo certain pleasures to make ends meet. However, for me, such a notion is only a short remove from Ebenezer Scrooge’s impassioned cry of “are there no workhouses?” and has no place in this discussion. A £50 a week budget equates to £1.79 per person, per day. This amount is less than is allocated to guests of Her Majesty’s Prisons and only marginally more than is spent on the daily meals of the majority of National Health Service patients. While one doesn’t hear of too many people dying of malnutrition in hospitals and prisons, one also doesn’t hear of too many people clamouring to change places with them when dinner time comes around. It is possible, of course, to wheel out some well-intentioned nutritionist to talk about “wholesome soups” or “hearty bowls of pasta” in defence of the notion that it is possible to eat well, cheaply. However, anyone who has ever spent time subsisting as a student will testify that, while such dishes might do the job of filling a person’s stomach, the regular arrival of bowls of soup or dishes of spaghetti bolognese, night after night, can be enough to drive a person to bloody murder. Such a view also labours under the incorrect assumption that while people may be economically troubled, they can still find the time to seek out cheap, fresh ingredients and labour over a hot stove to make sure that their families receive all they need from their three square meals a day. If there ever was an era when such a thing was true, it is certainly not the case today when both parents are probably holding down jobs to pay the bills. Sainsbury’s latest promotion might seem like one possible solution to the issue. However, to me, it confirms only two things. One, that marketing people are incapable of ever coming up with new ideas. And, more worryingly, if the cost of this basket of food, meant to feed two adults and their offspring, remains the same nearly two decades on, there must be serious concerns about the quality. Whatever one thinks of our supermarkets, few people would ever consider them exemplars of altruism. For food to be sold at this price must mean that corners have been cut, costs have been shaved, and producers have been squeezed. The cynic in me can’t help thinking that all three are probably the case. Accepting this heady combination of uncertain food quality, a lack of variety and little enjoyment, it may well be possible to physically sustain a family of four people on the meagre sum of £50 a week. But, I have to admit, if I was in such a situation, Her Majesty’s Prisons might begin to look pretty appealing. Simon Majumdar is the co-writer of Dos Hermanos, one of the UK’s most widely read food blogs. guardian.co.uk/profile/simon-majumdar

  Richard Ehrlich: Well, maybe It would certainly be possible to feed a hypothetical family of four on a budget of £50 a week – the big question is whether it would be any fun. Before going any further, I have to add that all bets are off if the household includes teenage boys. The UK Department of Health’s Estimated Average Requirements call for a daily calorie intake of 1,940 calories per day for women and 2,550 for men. Teenage boys seem to need at least 5,000 or they start eating their own fingers. For the rest of us, £12.50 a week is just about do-able. It means avoiding many processed and pre-prepared foods: ready-meals for four can devour your whole daily budget. Favour porridge over boxed breakfast cereals, cheap seasonal veg over fancy salad leaves or sugar snap peas from Kenya, fresh fruit over fruit juice. It also means relying on cheap sources of protein. But remember that you don’t need much protein, far less than most omnivores eat. Try to use meat as a seasoning instead of the main event of the meal: four rashers of top-notch bacon will flavour a whole pot of beans or a pasta sauce. If you sometimes need an identifiable piece of meat on the plate, forget about steaks and chops. Cook stews from cheaper, tougher cuts such as shin of beef or knuckle of pork. Chicken legs are cheaper (and tastier) than breasts, and whole chickens, which can produce four meals for four people at a stretch, are cheaper still. A major cost-cutting option lies open to those who have a big garden or an allotment: grow your own vegetables. Even if you only have space for a few pots, growing herbs can save you a pound or two a week. And a final cost-cutting strategy: don’t assume supermarkets are cheap. When I compared prices on five items at my local Sainsbury’s with the fruit and veg stall across the road, the stall was cheaper on three items, the same on one, and more expensive on one. But the loose carrots at Sainsbury’s (35p/kg, compared with 77p/kg at the stall) were as flexible as garden hoses. Fresh ginger at the stall was £3.30/kg as opposed to £10.72 chez Sainsbury’s. But back to the F-word: will £50 be fun? It can certainly be made less painful by deploying cheap seasonings that deliver maximum pleasure. Bags of spices bought from an Asian shop cost a pound or so and last for many months. A knob of ginger, a fresh chilli, a head of garlic, a lemon – all cost little and can be used with anything. Ultimately, your fun-quotient will be determined by your enthusiasm for inexpensive starchy foods: potatoes, pasta, rice, pulses. Well used, these deliver great flavour at minimal expense. Macaroni cheese, curried lentils, any of numerous dishes combining a lot of rice and a little chicken or lamb – all can be made for as little as 30-50p a head. I know I spend more than £50 a week when there are four of us in the house, probably more like £80. If I had to cut down to £50, I could probably do it. But I love macaroni cheese. Richard Ehrlich’s latest book is ’80 Recipes for Your Pressure Cooker’, published by Kyle Cathie, £12.99. guardian.co.uk/profile/richardehrlich

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  April 30 2011, 6:57am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  The wacky world of May Day

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/30/the-wacky-world-of-may-day

  From a horned Justin Lee Collins, to a big biscuit tin with the face of a vampire cat, Stuart Goodwin rounds up some of the best bets for a bonkers bank holiday and May Day.

  This article titled “The wacky world of May Day” was written by Stuart Goodwin, for The Guardian on Friday 29th April 2011 23.05 UTC Another long weekend – yay. But also boo. Because with the big wedding out of the way (my auntie Doreen’s, it’s her third), you might be struggling to think of things to do. But worry no longer! May Day is a treasure trove of, how shall we put it, eccentric British days out. Basically Christmas for grown men who like lobbing around with bells on their toes, your May Day weekend starts here … Jack-In-The-Green Festival Hastings, Sat to Mon Traditional May Days have tended to go one of two ways; fire or fauna. For fire go to Edinburgh. But in Hastings it’s all about the shrubbery. Essentially a garland competition that got out of hand, where folk used to sport tasteful daisy chains, some poor soul now has to spend the bank holiday drowning in leaves, roaming the streets like a panto triffid. Thankfully, some nice morris men are on hand to make him feel less of a prick. Cerne Abbas May Day Dorset, Sun For fans of impressively chalked tips, there’s two options this week – but if you can’t be doing with the snooker in Sheffield, join the Wessex Morris Men at dawn on this hillside near Dorchester, home to the Cerne Abbas Giant and his 40ft alabaster cock and balls. There’ll be singing, there’ll be dancing, there’ll be dew. Also present will be the Dorset Ooser, a masked morris man that’s basically a startled, oversize Justin Lee Collins with horns. Dorset Knob-Throwing Contest Cattistock, Sun More knob-based fun in Dorset, albeit of the non-phallic variety. A “hard, dry, savoury biscuit”, the Dorset Knob is ideal for throwing about. Current record: 26.1m. Not only will the Knob appear in the main event, it will also star in a Knob & Spoon race, Knob Darts and a Hunt The Knob competition. Thomas Hardy was apparently partial, although it’s unclear if he was ever a proud owner of a commemorative “I’ve thrown a Dorset Knob” carrier bag. Stilton cheese rollingCambridgeshire, Mon Note: not the event at the sharply-inclined Cooper’s Hill in Gloucestershire, scene of many broken limbs and jolted tail-bones.That’s now cancelled, due to danger, so head to Cambridgeshire, where teams coax a large wheel of cheese along a disappointingly flat high street. Risk of paralysis: minimal. Meh. Rochester Sweeps festival Kent, Sat to Mon Three days long this, but the main event is a flashmob of gleeful Dick Van Dyke wannabes, evoking a time where men were men and children could reasonably be asked to scrape toxic dust off brickwork that nobody ever sees. Eliza Carthy features, so we’ll tread carefully for fear of having to give her two pages of a future issue where she tells us off for making light of dying artforms. Padstow ‘Obby ‘OssCornwall, Mon Apparently a stallion, but really an oversize biscuit tin with the face of a vampire cat – the ‘Obby ‘Oss plucks women from the crowd, drags them ‘neath his cloak and daubs them with coal, all in the name of aiding fertility. Yep, that old chestnut. Evidence from last year showed the ‘Oss to be sporting a smart pair of white old-school Nikes.

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  April 30 2011, 6:50am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  I can’t get up worked up about the royal wedding, AV or the Olympics

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/28/i-cant-get-up-worked-up-about-the-royal-wedding-av-or-the-olympics

  I can’t be bothered to argue with Fielding about the royal wedding, and I asked him about AV but it’s a bit like the Olympic tickets business. It’s into the void with both of them

  This article titled “I can’t get up worked up about the royal wedding, AV or the Olympics” was written by Michele Hanson, for The Guardian on Thursday 28th April 2011 20.01 UTC Three huge events going on and I can’t get worked up about any of them: the wedding, the AV decision and the Olympic ticket deadline. Fielding is fairly ratty about the wedding. “I don’t want to sound like Dave Spart,” says he, “but England is all about class, and they absolutely reinforce it. Do you know they own England?” He’s ashamed that his own mother used to go to Ascot to admire the bonnets of the ruling classes. Yawn. What a spoil-sport he is. At least his mother had a jolly day out, which we’re all trying to have today. And I know this is a fiercely republican newspaper, but Olga and Olivia have met the Queen, and they assure me that after all these years and a squillion handshakes, she’s still perky and amusing. How could one not love the darling creature? Her grandson is perfectly pleasant, the bride seems to want the job, and the costumes and the  horses are heaven. So what is Fielding griping about? I can’t be fagged to argue. I asked him about AV. We both tried to sit up straight and not glaze over, but it’s like the Olympic ticket business. You’re into the void with both of them. You tick your boxes or send your credit card details, and who knows what you’ll get, whether you’ll like it and how much it will cost? Could be the Euro-Sausage Party in charge, or first-round ping-pong, or everything or nothing that you asked for. At least buying Olympic tickets isn’t compulsory, but I suppose we have to vote. People have died so that we can. But which way? We can’t understand it, so Fielding plans to vote Yes, because Osborne is voting No and Eddie Izzard (below) is voting Yes. But that method is flawed. John Prescott and union people are for No, Nigel Farage and Cleggy for Yes. The nice and the nasty people are mixed on both sides. Now down in Dorset, Fielding has gone off to drink ale at a village wedding party. The turncoat. What does it all mean? Don’t know, don’t care.

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  April 28 2011, 3:58pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/25/jemima-kiss-how-i-kicked-my-digital-habit

  Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload? I wondered whe Jemima Kiss had gone too. But of course, managing the information overload IS your job.

  This article titled “Jemima Kiss: How I kicked my digital habit” was written by Jemima Kiss, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.05 UTC We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son’s face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for. Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son’s life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live. That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn’t much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn’t online. What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn’t wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

  We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I’ve had to try and commit to my own fallible memory. Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this “variable interval reinforcement schedule”; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We’re no better than slot-machine addicts. The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes. As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet’s BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives. “The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward,” he writes. “There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on ‘out there’ in the bustling otherworld, rather than ‘in here’ with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty.” That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. “In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth.” Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of “embodied interaction” asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. “Writing tables”, as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can’t be sure Shakespeare used one, we’re shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology. “Yea, from the table of my memory,” Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father. I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca’s “spa of the mind” as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That’s exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. “Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it.”

  At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I’m checking a screen. It’s reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I’m teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do. Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet’s BlackBerry and what Powers calls the “vanishing family trick”, when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It’s a familiar story. “What’s lost in the process is so valuable, it can’t be quantified,” Powers despairs. “Isn’t this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can’t be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens.” As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn’t have a missed call or message between us.

  Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

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  April 25 2011, 10:45am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/22/angela-hartnetts-roasted-pollack-with-crushed-new-potatoes-and-chorizo-recipe

  This is a wonderful recipe combination of spicy chorizo sausage and meaty sustainable fish. The vinaigrette could be made with apple cider vinegar.

  This article titled “Angela Hartnett’s roasted pollack with crushed new potatoes and chorizo recipe” was written by Angela Hartnett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 20th April 2011 16.30 UTC Pollack is a member of the cod family – a greeny-brown carnivore that can grow up to a metre long. It is common off the coast of Britain and Ireland, especially around wrecks, where it is popular with amateur anglers. It has traditionally been less of a hit with cooks, but with the push to eat more sustainable fish, pollack has emerged as a viable alternative to cod and haddock. Most supermarkets stock it, though you may find it labelled, French-style, as colin. Not only is it cheaper than cod; as far as I’m concerned it’s just as tasty. Like all flaky fish, pollack can break up during cooking; a quick solution is to salt it beforehand. Just cover the fish with rock salt and leave it to firm up for 30 minutes, before giving it a quick rinse and patting it dry. If you do this, remember not to salt the fish again before cooking. I love this combination of spicy sausage and meaty fish, but you can leave out the chorizo and finish the dish with extra vinaigrette. Ingredients (Serves 4) 4 100g portions of pollack fillet 12 large new potatoes, washed, with skin on 1tbsp diced black olives ½tbsp chopped basil 50ml vinaigrette 100g chorizo, chopped into lozenges 3tbsp olive oil Rock salt   Method Fill a pan with cold water, a little rock salt and the potatoes, and bring to the boil. Cook for about 15 minutes, until just done. Drain the potatoes well, crush with a fork, and mix while still warm with the vinaigrette and olives. This ensures that they take on the full flavour of the vinaigrette. Set aside. Season the pollack with salt (unless you have previously salted it to firm up the flesh). Heat the oil in a non-stick pan (medium heat) and add the pollack, skin side down. Give the pan a quick shake to prevent the fish from sticking. To cook it should take about two minutes each side, depending on the thickness of the fillets. The fish is ready when you can easily push the handle of a spoon through it. Remove the fillets from the pan and place them somewhere warm. Add the chorizo to the now-empty pan and lightly sauté until it starts to release its oil. To serve, dress the potatoes with the chopped basil. Place the fish on top and finish with the chorizo lozenges and the oil from the pan. Any extra potato can be served on the side.

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  April 22 2011, 10:23am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/16/never-has-londons-atmosphere-as-a-rich-city-state-felt-so-extreme

  Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London feels different to anywhere outside. By London, though, we are only talking about a small area of central, west and north london. Out in the banlieu, you might as well be in Bradford.

  This article titled “Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme” was written by Ian Jack, for The Guardian on Saturday 16th April 2011 07.30 UTC In Bradford on a winter’s night 25 years ago, I stood in front of an estate agent’s window and made a calculation. For the price of our terrace house in north London – two up and two down and a bit of garden at the back – I could buy 10 similar houses in Bradford. This month I read that Burnley has the lowest property prices in England, and made another calculation. For the price of our London house I could buy 40 houses in Burnley that were averagely cheap and 80 of the very cheapest. This doesn’t mean that the differential in house prices between London and northern England has grown by more than 400% since 1986. I live in a bigger house now, and Burnley isn’t Bradford. But the gap is certainly widening: according to Halifax figures, houses in Newcastle-on-Tyne cost on average 28.8% less than they did in 2007, while in Islington they’ve risen 9.7% in the past year after changing very little – up or down – in the previous two. I look at pictures of the cheap houses in Burnley. They’re Victorian terraces. Their doors open straight on to the street, but they look solidly built from Pennine stone, no frills, but handsome. I imagine workers came home to them from cotton mills. Our house is certainly more imposing, three floors rather than two, with bow windows and ornamental red brick. But it has shallow foundations in London clay, so whether it’s sturdier is doubtful. I imagine someone who earned money in a suit, a senior clerk or a shopkeeper, first moved in when the terrace was completed in 1890. Without substantial inherited wealth, not even two-income families in the modern equivalent of those jobs could move in now. Newspapers sometimes write that the coalition cabinet contains “18 millionaires” as though it were a peculiar outrage, but everybody who’s paid off their mortgage in my street is a millionaire, if property is counted among their assets. And I stress that this is an ordinary street; until 30 or 40 years ago, a schoolteacher or a Fleet Street sub-editor could have afforded a house here. What explains my good fortune? To some extent many of my generation share it, especially if they worked in a trade or profession that blossomed in the 1980s (better, on the whole, to have been a national-newspaper journalist than a mechanical engineer). Most people I know have grander homes than their parents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. If they live in favoured parts of cities such as Edinburgh and Leeds, their homes are often enviable for their architecture and space. Only the very grandest of them, however, could be swapped for 40 cheap houses in Burnley. Above every other consideration – career, age – the combination of judgement and happenstance that made me a London house-owner is what explains my relative wealth. To a certain degree, this is an old story, and common to every metropolis. Moving to London four decades ago, I discovered one-bedroom flats were double the price of those I’d left behind in Glasgow. But then the 1980s arrived and the British economy’s centre of gravity shifted sharply (and to date, permanently) south. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million; 94% of jobs lost in every sector in those years were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. The traditional idea of Britain – one taught in school geography books – was a country that made its money in the midlands and the north (including Scotland, and not forgetting Wales) and spent the profits mainly in the south. But now both the generation and consumption of wealth grew concentrated in the same place, and the north-south divide suddenly marked something more fundamental than dialects and traditions. It was during this time, soon after the miners’ strike, that I stood with a notebook in a Bradford street and worked out the house price ratio. I wondered then if it could last. It didn’t seem possible that it could get worse – and for several years around the turn of the century it didn’t. Public spending financed by European grants and taxes raised in the City of London secured for many northern towns at least the suggestion of a viable future, if viability is measured in warehouse conversions, art galleries, warm cappuccino and rising property costs. The crash has since jeopardised all these simulacra of metropolitan living. The odd thing – the unfair thing, considering where the crash originated – is that the metropolis itself is immune. Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London now feels different to anywhere outside, as though you leave through city gates at turn-offs on the M25. Never has its atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme. “Revenues have bounced back and we are again seeing strong sales growth. The outlook for the UK as a whole may be gloomy but I think the long-term prospects for London, especially with the Olympics, are very good.” These are the words of Des Gunewardena, who runs a chain of expensive restaurants (Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino’s) and I read them last week in the Evening Standard, underneath the headline, “Surge in dining out feeds a flurry of restaurant launches”, next to a picture of Sienna Miller arriving at Sheekey’s. Each in the list of a dozen new restaurants still to open has the name of a chef attached. One of those already opened, the Pollen Street Social in Mayfair, took 5,000 calls looking for reservations in its first day. Beyond the hope that manufacturing industry can rebalance the economy, and the faraway prospect of a high-speed rail line to Birmingham, no government strategy exists to spread this wealth further north. The political tone is southern – look at the party leaders, or many of the Labour candidates parachuted to northern seats. It has been left to the BBC to do a little social engineering by – bravely or foolishly – relocating departments to Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow, so that half of its output will be produced outside London by 2016. Will better programmes result? Very few BBC staff seem to think so; on the evidence of BBC2′s Review Show, now made in Glasgow, extra expense in travel and hotel costs looks the likeliest difference. But three formerly great industrial cities will have BBC budgets and salaries added to their troubled economies; there will be job opportunities; the middle class in each place should grow a little larger. The staff who refuse to go are easily mocked. Haven’t they heard about the better quality of life, the Lowry, the easily accessed countryside, the “creative buzz” that’s now reported along the banks of the Clyde and the Manchester ship canal? Their reluctance to move is usually expressed in personal and professional terms: of not wanting to interrupt their children’s education, or being too far away from their show’s guests. But perhaps among their worries there’s something less easy to define; that by quitting London they’re removing themselves from its cultural, political and economic heft, which has grown so remorselessly and, whether or not BBC Breakfast gets done in Salford, will carry on regardless. The country’s centrifuge: both awful and interesting.

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  April 16 2011, 11:21am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  What to say about … Betty Blue Eyes

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/15/what-to-say-about-betty-blue-eyes

  A rasher of pocine metaphors breaks out among the theatre critics as a ham-imatronic animal makes a pig of herself in the West End. No porkies. It’s just a theatre review for Betty Blue Eyes.

  This article titled “What to say about … Betty Blue Eyes” was written by Patrick Kingsley, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 15th April 2011 14.52 UTC Way back in 2008, when Barack Obama was but the junior senator for Illinois, he was involved in a right rumpus with the then-governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, about whether one could or could not “put lipstick on a pig”. At the time it seemed a debate into which Britain’s theatre critics were reluctant to wade. But people change. Would they put lipstick on a pig? Almost certainly, at least if that pig were animatronic, had the voice of Kylie Minogue and were on stage at the West End‘s Novello theatre as part of a heartwarming new musical called Betty Blue Eyes, directed by Richard Eyre and produced by Cameron Mackintosh.

  “[W]itty, rude, lovable, warm, dramatic, hilarious,” proclaims the Times’s Libby Purves, a writer with more than a few adjectives up her sleeve. “[A] new smash musical is born.” The Telegraph’s Charles Spencer agrees, calling the show “popular entertainment at its very best”. Not for the first time, however, your correspondent was concerned for the safety of those sitting next to him, as the show left him “grunting and snorting with pleasure, and just occasionally snuffling with sentimental tears”.

  Part of BBE’s appeal lies in its timely plot, which draws (conveniently enough) on the dual themes of recession and royal matrimony. “How fortuitous that it’s set in 1947,” point out bloggers West End Whingers, “with austerity and recycling paramount and preparations for a royal wedding celebration at full tilt.” It’s against this backdrop that we meet the show’s protagonists, Gilbert (Reece Shearsmith) and Joyce (Sarah Lancashire), the social-climbing Yorkshire couple who steal the pig that’s due to be roasted in honour of those royal lovebirds of yesteryear, Elizabeth and Philip.

  It’s a story that, for the Guardian’s Michael Billington, trumps even A Private Function, the 1984 film part-scripted by Alan Bennett from which it is adapted: “The show’s creators [first-timers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman] preserve the satire on small-town snobbery, greed and racism from the Alan Bennett-Malcolm Mowbray movie script, while sharpening the storyline and using music genuinely to enhance character”. They’ve done this, notes Paul Raven of West End Theatre, despite being American! “[H]aving a bit of distance from a subject is not a bad thing,” Raven explains, helpfully, “and they’ve written some pacey, witty dialogue that captures the spirit of the times without paying undue reverence to the movie.” But the show-stealer is Betty herself: “an animatronic, blue-eyed and weirdly flirtatious porker with a permanent smile and the singing voice of Kylie Minogue,” writes Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. “What a star she proves,” enthuses Spencer, who was particularly captivated by Betty’s “amazing repertoire of grunts, squeaks and, above all, farts”. “It’s a great pig,” Purves confirms. “And I am happy to relate that, despite the usual desperate first-night deadline scuttle, two of us critics remained riveted by the escape door long enough to hear it sing in the final curtain call.” Some of the bloggers weren’t so easily impressed. “By the standards of modern stage wizardry,” complains Peter Brown at London Theatre, “this is not exactly an all-singing, all-dancing kind of mechanical hog.” Ian Foster, blogging at There Ought to Be Clowns, thought the pig “a bit freaky”. Brave man.

  Meanwhile, not everyone admits to being fond of the rest of the show. “Some of the humour is clumsy,” says Hitchings, “and some reminiscent of pantomime.” And if you detected a characteristically arch tone in the West End Whingers‘ remarks earlier, give yourself a sausage: they simply didn’t like it. “Sadly, we weren’t smiling much,” whinge the Whingers. “Our (in the) minority report puts Betty on the butcher’s block along with our own necks, yet again.”

  But hey, at least they’ve got in the spirit with that butcher’s block analogy. For if there’s one thing that unites our reviewers, it’s their utter inability to avoid porcine metaphors. Bacon, for instance, has either already been “brought home” by Mackintosh (Spencer) or it’s in the process of being brought there by Eyre (Purves), or even by the show itself (Billington/Hitchings). It gets worse. For Michael Coveney at the Independent, Betty is “piggy in the muddle, all right”; for Hitchings, the play is no “mere pork scratching”; and Spencer, perhaps the most outrageous of the pigging punners, promises us “I’m telling no porky pies”. Not that I’m immune to hamming it up a touch.

  Do say: [Some random aspect of the show] brings home the bacon …

  Don’t say: … and [he/she/it] is laughing all the way to the piggy bank.

  The reviews reviewed: Pigs can fly. Sometimes. If they’re animatronic.

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  April 15 2011, 10:25am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Click to Download: YouTube, Cut Copy, Stereogum Monthly Mix

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/13/click-to-download-youtube-cut-copy-stereogum-monthly-mix

  YouTube is already fundamental to online music, but now it’s expanding its official content and moving into live streaming.

  This article titled “Click to Download: YouTube, Cut Copy, Stereogum Monthly Mix” was written by Chris Salmon, for The Guardian on Wednesday 13th April 2011 15.30 UTC At last year’s BT Digital Music Awards, YouTube beat Spotify, Last.fm, MySpace, SoundCloud and BBC 6 Music to the publicly-voted title of “Best Place to Hear Music”. That, as well as the genuinely rapturous response to the site’s win from the audience of young pop fans, underlined the fact that, for many, YouTube is as much a cherished on-demand music listening resource as it is a video site. Now, they’ve expanded that service. Following a number of one-offs, YouTube has unveiled a dedicated streaming section, youtube.com/live, where selected YouTube partners can webcast live. One of the first to take advantage is the Coachella festival, America’s nearest equivalent to Glastonbury, which will broadcast a selection of its acts, from today until Sunday. Head to youtube.com/coachella from tonight to watch live footage of artists, slated to include the National, Mumford & Sons, Duran Duran, PJ Harvey, Interpol and Cut Copy. That last act is also the latest band to appear on the excellent Swedish music TV programme Klubbland, a 20-minute show which features a short interview with a particular artist alongside live highlights of their gig in a Swedish venue. The Cut Copy episode, which you can watch in full at klubbland.se, features the groovesome Australians wandering around Malmo searching out good coffee and old records, before belting out three songs in the city’s Kulturbolaget venue. Meanwhile, the previous episode features Glasvegas discussing their success and playing some of their new songs in snowy Stockholm. Trawl back through the other 27 shows uploaded so far and you’ll find Lloyd Cole, Teenage Fanclub, Lykke Li, Beach House and, perhaps best of all, Robyn. It’s hard to think of a British music TV show as tasteful and enjoyable as this. According to a study of 4,500 US high-school students published last week, only 22% of teenagers would be willing to pay 99¢ to download a single track, despite the fact that 77% of them admitted to downloading music from the internet (with almost two-thirds getting it from file-sharing sites). In that climate, the offer of a (seemingly) legal free download isn’t as exciting as it once was, but it’s still worth checking out the latest Monthly Mix from Stereogum, the mighty US music blog. The compilation, available from bit.ly/sgapril, features 10 mostly-excellent tracks from acts recently featured on the site, including their three latest Bands to Watch, all of which happen to be impressive, female-fronted indie/electro popsters. With the album also featuring a gorgeously sparse track from the new solo album by Smog’s Bill Callahan, it’s definitely worth a download. Send your favourite links to chris.salmon@guardian.co.uk

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  April 13 2011, 11:14am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/12/30-new-music-apps-for-iphone-android-and-ipad

  New iphone iPad and Android apps range from popular artists to social location services aimed at music gig-goers.

  This article titled “30 new music apps for iPhone, Android and iPad” was written by Stuart Dredge, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 12th April 2011 09.15 UTC There’s something of an explosion in music apps happening on iPhone and Android at the moment, from official artist apps that look to go beyond pure news and audio samples, through to social location services aimed at gig-goers. Here’s a list of 30 apps that have launched in the past few months, from big stars and startup developers alike. It offers a glimpse at the trends and technologies that make apps as potentially habit-changing for music fans as they are for gamers and TV viewers. Note, this list is focused on apps that involve listening to or interacting around music, rather than actually creating it. Not because the latter isn’t just as interesting – there is a similar boom in innovative music-making apps – but because, well, those apps will sit better in their own list. Meanwhile, the focus on recently launched apps is why the likes of Spotify, Pandora Radio, Last.fm and others are not included. They’re still innovative and important, but this piece is about new contenders in 2011. The History of Jazz This sits alongside The Elements as one of the iPad apps showing that tablet book-apps can be far more than a scanned-in PDF with a bit of extra video. The History of Jazz offers an interactive timeline tracing the chronological history of jazz, with music samples, videos and curated playlists to dive into featured artists’ catalogues. Discovr This is less of a timeline, and more of a flowchart plotting connections between artists whose music is broadly similar. Discovr gets you to type in an artist, then tap your way through the chart of related bands, double-tapping to bring up biographies, videos and blogposts. MusicDrop and BoxyTunes Two apps that both have the same aim – to turn online storage service DropBox into a fully functioning cloud music service. Both MusicDrop and BoxyTunes stream music from your DropBox account, pulling in cover artwork and other information. They will increasingly face competition from pure cloud music services in 2011, but for existing DropBox users they may be a good stopgap. Decoded by Jay-Z This universal app for iPhone and iPad is based on a physical book collecting together rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics, and adding in video interviews. People paying $4.99 for the app can choose 10 of the 36 featured songs to unlock, or pay another $9.99 to unlock all 36. The actual music is not included – the app focuses on lyrics – but if the songs are already on the user’s device, they can be played in sync with the words. BEP360 will.i.am likes apps so much, he started his own development studio to make them. BEP360 was the first app to emerge. It’s described as a ’360 mobile music video’, which gets fans to hold up their iPhone and spin around for a 360-degree view of the video for the Peas’ The Time (Dirty Bit) single. Augmented reality features and photo-sharing are also included, making this an app worth admiring even if you’re not so keen on the music itself. Mike Scanner Part of the promotional effort around the final album by the Streets, Mike Scanner is one of the first artist apps to use the kind of barcode-scanning technology that’s been seen in numerous mobile shopping apps. The idea here: fans scan household items to unlock exclusive music, videos and ticket offers. Erykah Badu As we reported in February, soul singer Badu is the first artist to use the platform of startup FanTrail to try to connect with her fans – although she’s since been followed by the Roots and Quiet Company. The Erykah Badu app brings gamification to music fandom, with users filling up their ‘LoveMeter’ by sharing news with friends, buying music and checking in at gigs. The more full the meter gets, the more personal the recorded voice messages from Badu accessed through the app will be. Lykke Li Scandinavian pop artist Lykke Li’s app uses another platform, from Steam Republic. Here, the innovation is less about gamified rewards, and more about linking the app with her existing website, so fans can create profiles and share content across both. That includes blogposts and photos, while the app also has the now-obligatory gig check-ins feature too. Pocket Hipster We covered this app in February too: it’s a collaboration between two music technology startups, The Echo Nest and We Are Hunted. Pocket Hipster includes two avatar hipsters, who sneer at your music collection and suggest alternatives to listen to. The hipster aspect is for fun, but the recommendation technology is very serious – it uses The Echo Nest’s API, which is being licensed to a range of app and service companies in 2011. we7 Radio Plus Personalised radio is all the rage in the US thanks to Pandora Radio, but licensing arguments led to the company pulling out of the UK a few years ago. That’s left the way clear for Last.fm, and now we7 to see how the concept flies among British music fans. Released for Android this year, we7 Radio Plus creates radio stations on the fly based on specific artists and genres. SoundTracking Released by developer Schematic Labs in time for SXSW this year, SoundTracking lets people share details of the song they’re listening to there and then, including photos and comments. Other users of the app will be able to listen to 30-second samples courtesy of iTunes, and it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Roxette Singbox Who knew Roxette would be the subject of an innovative music game in 2011? That said, who knew the Smurfs would be the subject of one of the most lucrative iPhone social games in 2010… Roxette Singbox brings the SingStar karaoke game model to iOS, using in-app purchases to download individual songs, with email and Facebook challenges for a social spin. Spin Play US music magazine Spin launched an iPad app in March this year, but it went beyond simply reproducing the print edition’s articles. Each $1.99 issue includes a playlist of 60 streaming songs and 30 streaming videos, chosen by the Spin team to complement the editorial content for that issue. The aim is for readers to listen to bands while reading about them. Play by AOL Music Launched for Android smartphones in March, Play by AOL Music is another music discovery app, released by the newly-editorial focused US internet giant. It’s a music player app with social features baked in, enabling people to easily tweet or Facebook share the song that’s currently playing. Friends’ posts and comments are pulled into a real-time feed. Tune Drop and Pioneer Air Jam Everyone’s a wannabe DJ at house parties nowadays, but usually whoever controls the device gets to choose the tunes. Apps are emerging to make the process more collaborative, though. Tune Drop is an iPad app that lets party guests cue up requests from your iPod music library, while Pioneer Air Jam handles the process wirelessly – albeit only for Pioneer hi-fis. Kling Klang Machine Techno pioneers Kraftwerk were similarly innovative with their first iOS application this year, billing Kling Klang Machine as an ‘interactive 24-hour music generator’. Fans can browse a music map of the world divided into timezones, and mix Kraftwerk loops and samples together – overseen by wireframe models of the group itself. DJ Rivals US startup Booyah has had success with its Nightclub City Facebook game and MyTown iPhone social location game. DJ Rivals brings the two ideas together, as players build up their virtual DJ through rhythm mini-games and location-based DJ battles. Roqbot Roqbot won this year’s SXSW Music Accelerator contest, and is another collaborative playlist app, except this time designed to be used in bars and restaurants rather than the home. The iPhone and Android app lets users vote for the songs they’d like to hear, making it an app-centric incarnation of the traditional jukebox. Nirvana Classic Album: Nevermind In itself, this app isn’t technically innovative: it’s basically an existing documentary film ported to iPad, with bonus material and social commenting. However, it’s a sign that labels – Universal Music Group in this case – are keen to see how much demand there is for tablet apps focused on their back catalogues, as well as newer bands. McFly Live – Above The Noise Punk-pop band McFly teamed up with UK firm LoveLive recently, to release an app for a specific gig, rather than the band as a whole. It let fans watch a live stream of their concert at Wembley Arena in early April, while entering a contest and chatting to other fans on a forum. Swedish House Mafia – Until One iPad Edition Scandinavian dance supergroup Swedish House Mafia are already exploring multiplatform content, having released their own book and video documentary around latest album Until One. Now there’s an iPad app too, based on the book and videos, but with all nine tracks of the album streamable from within the app. Impressive technically, but also for the ability of label EMI to get the necessary publishing licensing signed off to include the full tracks. Owl City Galaxy While fans await new material from Owl City, they can dive into his US-only Galaxy application, which offers similar gamification to the Erykah Badu app – points for ‘future Owl City bonuses’. Social is the key feature, with fans invited to ‘customise your own planet and connect with other fans’, with an exclusive track dangled as the reward for doing so. Eavesdrop, MyStream and PairShare These three apps all launched around the same time, aiming to provide a modern-day equivalent of the two headphone sockets found on vintage Walkmans. All three allow people to listen to music at the same time, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth streaming in the case of Eavesdrop and MyStream, and just Bluetooth for PairShare. AudioVroom Originally developed as part of a Music Hack Day event, AudioVroom styles itself as a ‘multi-user internet radio station’, where people earn points for recommending the app to friends, which can then be spent on listening to ad-free personal radio stations. Foursquare-style badges are thrown into the mix, while the sharing happens using the Bump app’s API, requiring people to physically knock their iPhones together to connect. US-only for now. The National Mall This ‘hyperlocal’ app isn’t much use to fans who don’t live in Washington DC, where US duo BlueBrain reside. The National Mall is an interactive album designed to be listened to on a walk around the National Mall in DC, with the rhythms and beats changing as they go. The app is due out imminently. iheartradio for iPad US radio group Clear Channel’s iheartradio apps have racked up millions of downloads on iPhone and other smartphones, but the newly-released iPad app shows what can be added for larger screens. Listeners can see related tweets when listening to one of the 750 US radio stations streaming within the app, while also perusing videos and photo galleries. That’s our selection, so what do you think? Which of these apps has most potential, and which will sink without a trace? And have we missed anything out that’s been released in 2011? Post a comment to let us know your feedback.

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  April 12 2011, 4:54am | Comments »

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  Exclusive Radiohead artwork plus The King of Limbs album stream

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/exclusive-radiohead-artwork-plus-the-king-of-limbs-album-stream

  See artwork exclusively created for the King of Limbs project and listen to the new Radiohead album in full.

  This article titled “Exclusive Radiohead artwork plus The King of Limbs album stream” was written by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 28th March 2011 09.06 UTC Six weeks after Radiohead issued The King of Limbs as a download – engendering a flurry of excitement – the band are releasing the CD version of the album. At noon on Monday, the record will be launched at three special events in London, Manchester and Glasgow, where a free newspaper created by the band called the Universal Sigh will be handed out to fans. Radiohead are also releasing a “newspaper album” version of the King of Limbs priced at £30 – although this will involve a different newspaper than the one handed out to fans. The London event will take place at the Truman Brewery on Dray Walk, London, E1 6QL, the Manchester event will be outside the Bread and Butter Cafe on Tibs St in the Northern Quarter and the Glasgow event will take place on Dundas Street. There are another 59 similar events worldwide – and fans in New Zealand have already got their hands on the paper. You can listen to a stream of The King of Limbs above, and below are two exclusive examples of artwork created for the project, credited to “Zachariah Wildwood & Donald Twain”. The Universal Sigh features writing from authors Robert MacFarlane (whose books include Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places) and Jay Griffiths (winner of the Discover award for the best new non-fiction for Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time). The Guardian will be bringing you our own view of Radiohead’s newspaper, plus our own special response to it later today. . .

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  March 28 2011, 3:49pm | Comments »

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  The sale of Warner Music is a turning point for the whole music industry

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/28/the-sale-of-warner-music-is-a-turning-point-for-the-whole-music-industry

  Recorded music, record labels, the breaking of new bands and the selling of their work is a business in crisis. The old music industry is dying and Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world

  This article titled “The sale of Warner Music highlights a turning point for the whole industry” was written by Dominic Rushe, for The Guardian on Monday 28th March 2011 06.00 UTC Edgar Bronfman Jr, the music mogul heir to the Seagram whisky fortune, deals in trophy assets the way other people swap knick-knacks on eBay. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building, Picassos, Rothkos, huge chunks of the family’s business – Bronfman has traded them all. In the process of moving his family back from London, he is selling his $28m Manhattan townhouse, once owned by the Muppets’ creator Jim Henson, and looking for another. It’s the third piece of prime property he’s sold in less than two years. But it’s another set of assets that Bronfman has on the market that is attracting the most attention – Warner Music, the home to Led Zeppelin, Bruno Mars and Plan B. Given the parlous state of the music industry in recent years, when Goldman Sachs was appointed to look at Warner’s options back in January, the big question was would anyone care at all? Now a colourful set of contenders are cutting up rough as they line up bids for all or part of the firm. There’s Len Blavatnik, a Russian-born oil magnate turned media player; Ron Burkle, the politically connected supermarket mogul dubbed the “Billionaire Party Boy” by the New York Post; music rivals Sony, and maybe Universal; and a whole host of financial players. And hovering in the wings is the man who killed the music industry, Sean Parker, who co-founded Napster, the downloading service that kick-started the digital revolution, before first joining and then quitting Facebook. A casual observer might surmise that the music industry is hot again. A look at the numbers suggests otherwise. Warner was Bronfman’s comeback deal after his 2000 merger of Universal and Vivendi went disastrously wrong. Backed by Thomas H Lee Partners and others, Bronfman paid $2.5bn for Warner Music in 2003 when the music industry was already struggling. It’s got a whole lot worse since. If Bronfman does decide to sell, he will only make a profit thanks to a successful IPO in 2005. He and his investors made their money back then; subsequently the shares, listing at $17, peaked at $30 in 2006, but are now worth less than $6. Part of the problem is that nobody, not even Bronfman, really knows what is going on. Rumours and counter-rumours are circulating. No one talks on the record. Bronfman had wanted to sell his publishing assets and then bid for EMI, say some well-placed industry sources: a marriage between the two smallest of the sector’s major companies has been on and off for the better part of a decade, and Bronfman sees a future where music firms make their money in “360″ deals – owning rights to everything from merchandise to tour tickets and digital sales. He believes he could turn EMI’s troubled recorded music division around. Scott Sperling, the co-president of Thomas H Lee, is said to have disagreed and pushed for the whole company to go on the block. The sale has not been made any easier by EMI. Its disastrous takeover by Guy Hands’s private equity firm Terra Firma ended in court and control by the deal’s largest backer, Citigroup. The bank has begun tentatively talking to potential bidders about selling all or part of the business. EMI arguably has better publishing assets, Warner is stronger and certainly better run in recorded music. The two music firms could argue, and have argued, about who has the stronger assets. In the end it’s like asking who do you like better, EMI’s Beatles or Warner’s Led Zeppelin? The end price is likely to be much the same for either firm. There are probably so many permutations to this fugue that even Bach, let alone Bronfman, couldn’t resolve them. Sadly the same holds true for the entire music industry. Both Warner and EMI have outstanding publishing assets, collecting royalties from a catalogue of the world’s best-loved music. Music publishing is a steady, low-risk business that generates lots of cash – just the sort of thing private equity types love. But recorded music, the breaking of new acts and the selling of their work, remains a business in crisis. As Hands will tell you, it will take more than money to change that record. Glenn Peoples, a senior editorial analyst at the music industry bible Billboard, says he has been surprised by the level of interest. “Publishing I understand, but recorded music? I wonder what the attraction is. The digital age has been great for consumers but it’s been catastrophic for music companies, and the bottom isn’t in sight. You are probably looking at another decade before anyone comes up with a solution.” In 2000, when the industry and the CD market were at their peak, the total number of music buyers in the US was close to 160 million. Over the course of the past decade that number has fallen to below 130 million. Worse still, the average US music consumer now spends $43 a year buying it, down from $60 in 2000. Apple’s iTunes solved one problem for the music industry, offering a legal alternative to Napster and other free download services. But it presented a new one. Instead of selling CDs at $12 a pop, the industry now sells singles at 99c. “We have moved from a dollars business to a pennies business, sometimes a fractions of a penny business,” says one music executive. In this environment only the big survive, he argues. The same holds true for stars. Lady Gaga can cut a deal to promote Polaroid, Justin Bieber can make 3D movies and shill for Proactiv spot cream, but the cash they make from recorded music will not rival the cash Madonna or Michael Jackson made from selling CDs. Lesser stars have little to prop them up, says Peoples. It’s a sad song that is playing across the industry. Warner’s revenues fell 13% between 2004 and 2010, EMI’s fell an estimated 22%. Cushioned by a big company like Sony or Universal’s Vivendi, the leading majors can wait it out, hoping digital dollars will emerge. EMI has already lost its independence. Warner may be the better-run company, but its prospects of keeping running for long don’t look healthy. However, developments over in California could offer a glimpse of salvation. Marissa Mayer, Google’s hotshot vice-president of consumer products, is pushing the search firm to focus on music. She recently interviewed Lady Gaga, for example, for its Musicians@Google series. Google now sees music as a crucial battleground in its fight with Apple in an increasingly mobile world. Its service is likely to provide an alternative to the iTunes model – offering subscriptions, making all of a consumer’s music available anywhere on any device, and moving away from Apple’s death by singles sales approach. Google’s entry will shake up a market Apple has so far defined, and coincides with a second wave of music services coming online from Spotify and others catering to a smart phone, iPad and tablet PC customer base that’s expected to reach nearly 1.5 billion by 2015. Maybe, just maybe, there is a way the music industry could make some money out of all the music that will get played on those devices. That future seems a long way off to Peoples, however. “At the moment all the music companies are leaky ships bailing water,” he argues. Although they may be getting better at bailing, he adds, the leaks are far from plugged. Still, as bids for Warner start to take shape, Bronfman must be encouraged that someone is crying “land ahoy!”

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  March 28 2011, 5:16am | Comments »

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  Spring’s here: skylarks overhead, moles in the garden, moths in the bathroom

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/27/springs-here-skylarks-overhead-moles-in-the-garden-moths-in-the-bathroom

  After a long, hard winter, the seasons have turned and at last the days are lengthening. Spring is here with skylarks, moths, moles, chiff chaff, rowan tree buds, wagtails, catkins and lambing.

  This article titled “Spring’s here: skylarks overhead, moles in the garden, moths in the bathroom” was written by Rob Penn, for The Observer on Sunday 27th March 2011 00.05 UTC Winter was very long in the Black Mountains. We’ve been embattled by the weather since snow fell in late November and the temperature hit –15C. I’m not expecting a campaign medal. I can’t remember anticipating spring so eagerly, though. There is no universally accepted event that heralds the new season, but it arrived incontrovertibly for us last week, with a period of high pressure that brought warm sunshine, temperatures in the teens and stirrings of new life in the dead land. For meteorologists, who like to tidy the year into four neat sections, spring begins on 1 March. For astronomers, the vernal equinox (20 March this year) marks the turning of the season. For some, it’s the moment the clocks go forward. For trout fishermen, it’s the first hatch of March browns or even grannom, the drab fly that erupts in clouds over rivers at the beginning of April. Others identify more intimate ambassadors: the first dashing yellow daffodil, the rising dawn chorus of birdsong, the earliest appearance of frogspawn in ponds and ditches, the first cut of grass, a pied wagtail over ploughed land and yellow catkins dangling from hazel branches all symbolise spring’s arrival for someone. . For me, spring is evidenced in many ways. On dewy mornings, when the sun rises over the hill behind our house and illuminates the lawn, lighting the million pearls of moisture suspended from the tip of every blade of grass, I know the waiting is over. When there are moths in the bathroom, moles in the garden and the moor is full of the liquid trill of skylarks, spring has arrived. When I can cycle down the hill to my office in Abergavenny in a T-shirt, with sunshine on my forearms and warm air funnelling over the creases in my face, I feel the wheel of the year has turned. It’s an elementary pleasure, a madeleine moment that validates my existence at this time, year after year. Observing the coming of spring is part of the British condition. I’m told it’s the moment in the year when expats pine for home the most: Oh, to be in England/ Now that April’s here, Robert Browning wrote in Home-thoughts, from Abroad in 1845. There is satisfaction in knowing that its arrival is timeless: a joy identical to me and to someone who inhabited the iron age hill fort a mile from my home, 2,750 years ago.   Exactly 275 years ago, we started documenting it. In 1736, Robert Marsham saw the first swallow of the year wheeling and banking over the open fields at Stratton Strawless in Norfolk, eating insects on the wing in celebration of having completed an epic, 6,000-mile journey from southern Africa. Marsham wrote the event down, in effect inventing a new field of study, phenology – the effects of cyclic and seasonal phenomena on plants and animals. Marsham recorded 26 “Indications of Spring”, as he called them, without interruption, for 62 years. He noted the dates different trees first came into leaf, blossom and flowers came out, frogs first croaked and butterflies appeared. In collating his observations, Marsham, a friend of the more famous naturalist Gilbert White, crystallised a British fascination. It’s a fascination that could be as old as the seasons themselves and which is still manifest today, not least in the popularity of the BBC series Springwatch. For farmers in the Black Mountains, spring means lambing: an arduous, 24-hour vigil that lasts for up to eight weeks, leaving many of the protagonists looking as if they’ve just been released from a POW camp. “Most farmers are lambing by the end of March,” said Mark Morgan, a farmer in the Llanthony Valley. “It’s the most important time of year. Everything depends on these few weeks. It’s hard work, but it’s fulfilling and something we take pride in. For me, spring starts with lambing. It’s like waking up from some primeval nightmare.” The winter preparations for this moment are complete and the monochrome landscape looks ordered. The hedges are laid and trimmed or “flail cut”. Gates have been rehung. The fields have been “chain-harrowed”. Though the grass is still pallid, the effect of this raking is visually dramatic from afar: the green, two-tone strips are the first hint there is life in the long-dormant earth. In our garden, growth meets decay when spring arrives. The decay is a reminder that I’ve been idle over the winter. I’ve pruned some of the fruit trees and cut the raspberry canes, but there’s still a mountain of clearing and pyres to be set alight. Last week my wife and I dug over and weeded the vegetable patch – another winter task we didn’t get round to before the earth turned to iron in November. We like to toil over the veg patch together each year, satisfying an immemorial urge to provide food. Lettuce, coriander and rocket seeds have been planted in the greenhouse. In a rare fit of exuberance for gardening, my kids have planted sunflowers, alpine strawberries and a packet of wild flower mix. The first wee shoots of basil are showing on the windowsill in the kitchen. The old spaniel, who was all but written off by the vet a month ago, has a touch of his swagger back. He loves the warmth and passes the afternoons in a suntrap in the lee of the byre. The young spaniel stalks under the copse of birch trees, thrusting his snout into the rabbit holes and intermittently exhaling hot air from his nostrils into the burrows. Inside the house, the mice have thankfully moved off to their summer residence. The coat cupboard has had an interim clearout: arctic boots, salopettes, woollen hats and a diverse selection of single children’s gloves have gone to the attic. It snowed in the Black Mountains in late March last year; the rest of the coats stay out for now. In the wood we manage as a community group, high up on Hatterall Hill, the rush of activity to coppice the stools of hazel is over and the chainsaws are quiet for now. In fact, we stopped all tree felling at the beginning of March, as birds are nesting earlier and earlier. There’s still plenty to do: the trunks and thicker branches of hazel need to be cut into 2ft lengths, ready to be loaded in the burner we’ll use to make barbecue charcoal over the following months. The hazel sticks will be bundled up and left in a pond for a fortnight, until they’re used for making hurdles. The firewood, most of it windblown, will be stacked and left to season. The clocks go forward today. The extra hour of daylight in the evenings is always welcome, but the more significant milestone for me is the passing of the equinox. Daylight hours are now longer than the hours of darkness and increasing by three or four minutes every day. It’s a psychological crossroads: for the first time in the year, I feel I can be profligate with daylight. I can be outside and content doing nothing. I walk the dogs because I want to, not because I have to. There is time to lean against a tree, look up and let the sun burn golden palaces on to my closed eyelids. Of course, spring is the time to be social too. Human interaction redoubles as the sun strengthens, turning even the dourest farmers into extroverts. On the lanes, people stop to chat on the thinnest premise. In town, every face offers a smiling reception. It is no wonder spring is pregnant with pagan mating rituals. It’s the season of possibility, for us as much as nature. For that alone, we should celebrate its arrival.   Rob Penn is the author of It’s All About the Bike: the Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (Particular Books).

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  March 27 2011, 9:57am | Comments »

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