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 »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  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 »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Support wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackouts

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/30/support-wind-farms-it-would-be-less-controversial-to-argue-for-blackouts

  By rejecting all the means by which renewable electricity can be generated, such as wind farms, tidal barrages, hydro elcric dams etc, the UK has set a very dangerous courseThis article titled “Support wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackouts” was written by George Monbiot, for The Guardian on Monday 30th May 2011 20.00 UTCWhy do those who oppose wind power insist on spoiling their case with gibberish? In his column on Friday, Simon Jenkins claimed that onshore windfarms were being planned “with no concern for cost”. But the only reason for building them is a concern for cost. If it weren’t for this issue, they would be the last option governments would choose – God knows they cause enough trouble.As the government’s Committee on Climate Change reports, large onshore windfarms are “already close to competitive” with burning natural gas, and are likely to get there by 2020. They are the cheapest renewable sources in this country by a long way. Offshore wind costs roughly twice as much, and its costs have been escalating. After attacking the high cost of wind power, Jenkins argued that we should instead invest in “sun and waves”. The committee shows that while the expected price of electricity from onshore wind in 2030 is between 7 and 8.5 pence per kilowatt hour, solar power is expected to come in at between 11 and 25p, and wave between 15 and 31p. Talk about no concern for cost!Incidentally, the cheapest low carbon option, the committee says, is nuclear power, at 5-10p. But, because of public objections, new plants are likely to be confined to existing sites, which means a maximum of about 20 gigawatts (a quarter of our current power capacity). Planning objections also restrict the spread of onshore wind. The only viable means of getting carbon off the grid, the committee suggests, is a mixture of sources: renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage.But those who oppose wind power can’t help themselves. In parliament earlier this month, Glyn Davies, the MP who is leading the fight against windfarms in mid-Wales, insisted that “Welsh windfarms have a load factor of just 19% – the lowest ever recorded” and that “the carbon impact of the development can never be compensated for by any possible carbon benefit”. Rubbish again. The capacity factor for Welsh wind (the amount the turbines produce as a proportion of their idealised output) is 26%.Professor Gareth Harrison of Edinburgh University estimates that the carbon payback time for the wind developments in mid-Wales will be roughly 12 months (all references on my website). Davies, like Jenkins, also claimed that “so much more” could have been done with the same money had it been spent on wave and tidal power, offshore wind and solar photovoltaics. Should MPs not be obliged to do some research before they open their mouths in parliament?Anti-wind campaigners are also highly selective. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, obsessed by windfarms, says nothing about the opencast coalmines ripping south Wales apart. Nor do you hear a word about the destruction of the ecosystems of upland Wales (and England and Scotland) by sheep grazing. These champions of the countryside want to save it from only one threat.For all that, it’s a real one. While the windfarms themselves divide communities, everyone hates the new power lines required to connect them to the grid. Here in mid-Wales, I have yet to meet anyone who will speak up in favour of them. Because they have to march across so much countryside, their visual impact is greater per pound of investment than that of any other technology.Though you could see this issue coming as clearly as the pylons themselves, the green movement is completely unprepared. Greenpeace tells me “we haven’t done any work on pylons”. Hardly anyone seems to be aware of how perilous this situation is: how easily renewable energy could be killed by the power lines issue.This is about to become a national struggle, in which opponents of the new pylons will be cast as heroes. Promising direct action, reminding us of the great battles against the reservoirs supplying England, those who marched against the new lines in Wales last week will put us, unless we act quickly, in a dangerous position. Green activists will be outflanked by green activism. The same battle will then be fought all over the United Kingdom, wherever a new power line is planned.Many of the areas affected by proposals for new lines are either Tory constituencies or Lib Dem seats the Tories will hope to take (all of which are now contestable). It is hard to believe that the Conservative commitment to low-carbon energy could withstand a major rebellion within the party: Tory environmentalism is easily uprooted.The greens need to decide where they stand. The only position that makes sense to me is unequivocally to support the campaign against overhead lines. Where new powerlines are built they must go underground. If they can’t go underground, they shouldn’t be built. If we are not against pylons marching over stunning countryside, what are we for?But here too there’s a problem. Like the windfarms, overhead lines are favoured by the government because of its concern for cost. According to the National Grid, burying the lines connecting the turbines in mid-Wales to the rest of the system would cost 3.2 times as much as putting them on pylons (£562m vs £178m). But how much does that add to the cost of electricity?Calculating this is easy (there’s an explanation on my website) – as long as you know the capital costs of the whole project. But neither the National Grid nor anyone else I’ve spoken to is prepared to hazard a guess about the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, so I can’t yet tell you whether burying the power lines makes onshore wind here more expensive than competing technologies.In fact my efforts to obtain relevant data of all kinds from the government, the National Grid and the wind industry reveal that, like the environment movement, they are completely unprepared for this backlash. Dismayed by the collective failure to address the pylons issue, the campaign against windfarms now confidently tells the same story about this technology as others do about nuclear: the turbines are erected by big, greedy corporations; they are unfairly subsidised by the government; they will cause untold damage to human health. In view of the flack you get for supporting any power technology, I’m beginning to think it would be less controversial to argue in favour of blackouts.So this is where the United Kingdom stands. We cannot keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the biosphere. We don’t like nuclear power. We don’t like onshore wind. We won’t like the costs of the other technologies. We reject all the means by which electricity is generated. Yet no one is volunteering to stop using it.• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot’s website guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSupport wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackoutsRelated posts:Architects worried by tower blocks and windPbwiki supportWild parakeets seen as a threat in the UK

  

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  May 30 2011, 5:41pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/how-gold-farmers-reap-huge-harvest-from-online-gaming

  Estimates suggest 400,000 people are employed to build up credits in online games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest by virtual gold mining or r such ways of building up in-game credits that can be translated into real value.This article titled “How gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gaming” was written by Josh Halliday, for The Guardian on Wednesday 25th May 2011 19.15 UTCTens of millions of people spend hours and pay big money for virtual gains on the most popular multiplayer online games, including World of Warcraft, Eve Online and EverQuest.Behind these games are “gold farmers”, who spend hours within the games each day, gathering virtual credits and selling them to gamers for real world cash.The most recent estimates, from 2009, suggest that 400,000 people are employed as gold farmers across the world, with 85% of those in China and Vietnam, according to Professor Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester.These gold farmers are almost entirely males between 18 and 25, and most are either cash-strapped college students or unemployed rural migrants. They sell in-game advantages – an increased skill level, or a virtual ore – to players eager to boost their online reputation.The multiplayer online games industry has boomed in recent years thanks to increased internet access and the rise of social networks. World of Warcraft, easily the most popular of its kind, had 12 million subscribers last year.According to a report published by the World Bank last month, gold farming was worth about $3bn (£1.85bn) in 2009 – most of which was kept by developing countries. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogHow gold farmers reap huge harvest from online gamingRelated posts:Farmers collaborate online to face rural uncertaintyOnline advertising in the UKRolling Your Own Online Office

  

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  May 29 2011, 9:16am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Zapatero’s socialists defeated by People’s party in regional elections

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/zapateros-socialists-defeated-by-peoples-party-in-regional-elections

  Results seen as protest vote against Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s handling of the Spanish economy since 2008This article titled “Zapatero’s socialists defeated by People’s party in regional elections” was written by Giles Tremlett in Madrid, for The Guardian on Monday 23rd May 2011 17.28 UTCThe socialist party of Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is licking its wounds after defeat by the conservative opposition People’s party (PP) in municipal and regional elections.In what was widely seen as a protest vote against Zapatero himself and his handling of Spain’s economy, his party lost control of key city halls in places such as Barcelona and Seville while the PP took control of most of the country’s powerful regional governments.The central Castilla La Mancha region, Aragon and the Balearic islands all ejected socialist administrations.“We are aware of the situation that had distanced people from our party and caused them to criticise us with their vote or abstention,” party spokesman José Blanco said.The socialist drubbing came just 10 months before a general election and appeared to clear the way for PP leader Mariano Rajoy to take possession of the prime minister’s Moncloa Palace residence on his third attempt.The voting coincided with the eruption of numerous popular protests against established politics across Spain, with demonstrators camping out in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and in dozens of other cities. A backdrop of 21% unemployment and sluggish growth has spread pessimism throughout Spain as the country struggles to find its feet after the 2008 crash.The socialists lost one in five voters on Sunday, compared to the municipal elections of 2007. Not all those votes were picked up by other mainstream parties, however, and the number of spoilt ballots doubled. But overall turnout was a high 66%.Zapatero is blamed by some for mismanaging a debt crisis that saw Spain on the edge of disaster last year. Others dislike the austerity measures he has since imposed in order to avoid a Portuguese- or Greek-style debacle in Spain.His popularity has plunged since a U-turn last year saw him bring in a strict deficit-cutting plan, which he has pledged to stick to, along with labour and pensions reforms.Markets reacted nervously to the poll result on Monday, pushing up the price of Spanish bonds and pushing down Spanish share prices.The PP urged Zapatero to call a snap general election. “Zapatero and the whole socialist party must reflect on what has happened. Spain cannot waste another year like this,” said the party’s general secretary María Dolores de Cospedal.The one socialist leader to have survived Sunday’s debacle, the head of the Extramadura regional government Guillermo Fernández, also suggested that an early general election might be considered.The socialists must first choose a new leader to take them into those elections, with deputy prime minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba and defence minister Carme Chacón as favourites.Party officials said that a timetable for electing the new leader would be set on Saturday.With a general election due in Portugal on 5 June, and with opinion polls showing that socialist prime minister José Sócrates will struggle to hang on to power, the rolling back of leftwing politics that has already taken place in northern Europe now appears to have moved south. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogZapatero’s socialists defeated by People’s party in regional electionsRelated posts:Blair to go, now give back the Labour PartyCatalan independence boost after Barcelona voteZapatero says Spain safe from bailout

  

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  May 23 2011, 12:35pm | Comments »

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  Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/23/cut-red-meat-intake-and-dont-eat-ham-say-cancer-researchers

  World Cancer Research Fund advises people to limit consumption of beef, pork and lamb and avoid processed meatThis article titled “Cut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchers” was written by Denis Campbell, health correspondent, for The Guardian on Sunday 22nd May 2011 23.06 UTCCancer experts have issued a fresh warning about eating red and processed meat after “the most authoritative report” on the subject blamed them for causing the disease.The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) is advising people to limit their intake of red meats such as beef, pork and lamb, and to avoid processed meat such as ham and salami altogether. “Convincing evidence” that both types of meat increase the risk of bowel cancer means people should think seriously about reducing how much they eat, it recommends.The charity kickstarted a global debate in 2007 when it published a study which identified meat as a risk factor for a number of different forms of cancer.WCRF-funded scientists at Imperial College London led by Dr Teresa Norat studied 263 research papers that have come out since then looking at the role of diet, weight and physical activity in bowel cancer. An independent panel of leading cancer experts then reviewed their conclusions. “For red and processed meat, findings of 10 new studies were added to the 14 analysed as part of the 2007 report. The panel confirmed that there is convincing evidence that both red and processed meat increase bowel cancer risk,” said the report .“WCRF recommends that people limit consumption to 500g (cooked weight) of red meat a week – roughly the equivalent of five or six medium portions of roast beef, lamb or pork – and avoid processed meat,” it added. About 36,000 Britons a develop bowel cancer every year, and some 16,500 die from it. It is the UK’s second biggest cancer killer after lung cancer.About 17,000 cases a year (43%) could be prevented if people ate less meat and more fibre, drank less, maintained a healthy weight and kept active, the WCRF says.Its 850-page report, releasedon Monday, is “the most authoritative ever report of bowel cancer risk”, cancer prevention experts claim.Professor Alan Jackson of Southampton University, the chair of the WCRF’s continuous update project expert panel, said: “On meat, the clear message that comes out of our report is that red and processed meat increase risk of bowel cancer and that people who want to reduce their risk should consider cutting down the amount they eat.”Growing concern about red and processed meat prompted the government in February to advise consumers for the first time to consider cutting down. That came after the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), experts who advise the government, examined the evidence on the subject. It decided that those meats probably increase the risk of bowel cancer.People who eat 90g or more a day should cut down to the UK average of 70g, SACN recommended. It advised having smaller portions or eating those meats less often. A 70g serving could be three slices of ham, a lamb chop or two standard beef burgers.WCRF’s review has also firmed up from “probable” to “convincing” its view of the protection against bowel cancer afforded by eating foods containing fibre, such as wholegrains, pulses, fruit and vegetables.Milk, garlic and dietary supplements containing calcium also “probably” reduce the risk, the expert panel concluded.But farmers’ leaders denounced the WCRF’s new report and accused it of deliberately choosing the first day of National Vegetarian Week to publish it in order to maximise publicity for conclusions which the charity first reached years ago.Chris Lamb, a spokesman for BPEX and EBLEX, which represents England’s pig, beef and lamb farmers, said: “Average consumption has been in or around 500g a week for a few years. The vast majority of consumers aren’t exceeding this and don’t have to worry about [this]“, he said.The risks identified by the WCRF were unchanged, he stressed.Lamb argued it was unfair for the WCRF to highlight meat as a contributory cause of bowel cancer when the main risk was to people who are generally unhealthy, for example by consuming too much food, alcohol or fizzy drink.“They aren’t assisting consumers. Consumers eat and enjoy meat as part of a balanced diet, and meat plays a valuable part in that balanced diet”, said Lamb. “If you eat or drink anything in excess it’s a danger. Therefore, if you can pick on meat in order to get headlines, then you aren’t actually helping consumers.”Professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said red meat can form part of a healthy, balanced diet. “It is a good source of protein and vitamins and minerals, such as iron, selenium, zinc and B vitamins,” she said, “but people who eat a lot of red and processed meat should consider cutting down. The occasional steak or extra few slices of lamb is fine but regularly eating a lot could increase your risk of bowel cancer.”Bowel Cancer UK chief executive Deborah Alsina said: “The report significantly adds to the available evidence into the increased risk of bowel cancer from eating too much red and processed meat; and strengthens the evidence of how eating food with fibre in it protects people against the disease.Hazel Nunn, a senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “With barbeque season just round the corner, this is a timely reminder that how much alcohol you drink, how active you are, your weight, and how much red and processed meat and fibre you eat can all have a bearing on your risk of bowel cancer.”• Growing numbers of lung cancer patients are having life-saving operations thanks to advances in surgical techniques. The proportion of patients with the disease who undergo surgery has risen from one in 11 in 2005 to one in seven last year, according to a study by the NHS Information Centre. Lung cancer kills more people than any other form of cancer. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogCut red meat intake and don’t eat ham, say cancer researchersRelated posts:Alcohol to blame for 13,000 cancer cases a year in UKTurkey Ham?World Development Report: Why no mention of Paris?

  

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  May 23 2011, 4:36am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  London Olympics organisers appeal to protesters not to disrupt flame route

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/18/london-olympics-organisers-appeal-to-protesters-not-to-disrupt-flame-route

  Lord Coe says he is confident balance can be struck between security and celebration as he unveils locations of the Olmpic torch’s 70-day journey around the UK to herald the start of the London 2012 Olympic Games.This article titled “London Olympics organisers appeal to protesters not to disrupt flame route” was written by Owen Gibson, sports news correspondent, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th May 2011 16.03 UTCLondon 2012 organisers called on protest groups not to disrupt the 8,000-mile journey of the Olympic flame around the UK, after unveiling its route for the first time.Lord Coe, chairman of the London organising committee of the Olympic Games (Locog), said he was confident the balance could be struck between guaranteeing the safety of the 8,000 torchbearers and ensuring a celebratory atmosphere.“We will make sure that the torch flame gets around the UK in the safest and most secure way, but at the same time we want communities to celebrate it and not [put it] behind a cordon of steel. I think we’ll get the balance right,” he said.He appealed to protest groups not to target the route of the torch, which according to tradition will be lit on Mount Olympus before beginning its journey around the UK at Land’s End on 18 May next year.“This is friendship, this is respect, this is showcasing extraordinary talent in local communities. I really don’t sit here thinking this will be a catalyst for massive demonstrations. I think people get this,” he said.The Beijing torch relay in 2008, the last that ventured beyond the borders of the host country before the International Olympic Committee (IOC) changed its policy, was chiefly remembered for protests and heavy-handed security. In Vancouver, protesters disrupted the last few days of the event, sparking counter-demonstrations from those supporting it.Coe, unveiling the first 74 locations on the torch’s 70-day tour of the UK, said the relay would be vital in igniting enthusiasm for the London Games beyond the capital and insisted that it would not be a giant marketing exercise for sponsors.“I am proud and excited as I envisage the moment that really marks the start of our Olympic celebrations in the UK and far beyond,” said Coe, who ran with the torch ahead of the Vancouver Games.“As it made its way around Canada, it drew renewable power from every community it passed through. As it made its journey across that huge land mass, Vancouver’s Games became Canada’s Games.“That is London 2012′s intention too. Ours will be a Games that takes place on your doorstep.”The 8,000 torchbearer places are divided between Locog and the three “presenting partners” – Coca-Cola, Lloyds TSB and Samsung – who will help fund the events that will take place at each overnight stop.As the only part of the Olympics that can be branded, it is likely the sponsors will have a heavy presence but, like Locog, they have promised to make the vast majority of their torchbearer places available to members of the public.Coe said more than 90% of places would be taken by the public, with half of the torchbearers aged between 12 and 24.Locog has already launched its own nominations campaign, inviting the public to put forward members of their community with inspiring stories.The sponsors will take a similar approach in distributing the tickets to the public and staff. The cast of public torchbearers is likely to be augmented by athletes and celebrities.The announcement has also sparked speculation about the likely identity of the final torchbearer who will light the cauldron in the Olympic stadium at the climax of the opening ceremony, with bookmakers installing Sir Steve Redgrave as favourite.The final route will take the torch to within an hour of 95% of the population across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and six outlying islands. It will visit the Isle of Man, Guernsey, Jersey, Shetland, Orkney and the Isle of Lewis. Coe said Locog was also in advanced talks to take the torch to Dublin.British IOC member Sir Craig Reedie said the route would also pass UK sporting landmarks including Wimbledon, Old Trafford, St Andrew’s and Much Wenlock in Shropshire, the birthplace of the modern Olympics.The event will also be crucial to the cash-strapped British Olympic Association. Under the terms of its recent settlement with Locog after it backed down in a row over the division of any surplus from the Games, it will receive the royalties to two branded items of Olympic merchandise.In Vancouver, more than 3.5m pairs of red mittens were sold to those who lined the route to raise money for Canadian sport. The BOA will unveil its branded merchandise next year. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Olympics organisers appeal to protesters not to disrupt flame routeRelated posts:London Olympic organisers defend ‘peculiar’ ticket payment processLondon 2012 Olympics countdown clock stopsIran claims London 2012 Olympics logo spells ‘Zion’

  

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  May 18 2011, 11:57am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  London Olympic organisers defend ‘peculiar’ ticket payment process

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/18/london-olympic-organisers-defend-peculiar-ticket-payment-process

  London Mayor Boris Johnson brands Olympics 2012 ticketing process ‘an oddity’ Locog gives itself until 24 June to inform successful applicantsThis article titled “London Olympic organisers defend ‘peculiar’ ticket payment process” was written by Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Wednesday 18th May 2011 16.51 UTCLondon Olympic organisers including Lord Coe have been forced to defend their ticketing process in the wake of criticism from consumer groups and after the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, called it “peculiar”.Consumer groups including Which? have criticised the fact that money started coming out of applicant’s accounts this week but Locog has given itself until 24 June to inform them which tickets they have received, if any.Coe denied the policy was an attempt to avoid a scenario where customers may cancel their orders if they had only received tickets for less popular events. He argued instead it was an attempt to create the breathing space to solve any problems with payments.“The important thing here is, let’s not be coy or naive about, we want to make sure that people have the funds to be able to do this. We’re talking £500m here, this is not chopped liver,” said Coe. “We want to make sure people have funds available. In the event they don’t, we don’t want to rip up that application on the first day.”Which? has said the ordering process forced people to take “a gamble with their finances”. Johnson told a parliamentary committee that taking payment before emailing successful applicants was “a bit peculiar” and “an administrative oddity”, though he added it was “not the end of the world”.Locog’s head of ticketing, Paul Williamson, said up to 25% of ticket payments may not go through first time due to lost cards, technical problems or because there were insufficient funds, adding an extra layer of complexity to a system that had 6.6 million tickets on sale across 648 sessions at five price points and numerous venues. He said the ticketing process had been well trailed and that he had no regrets about the strategy.“We can’t tell people what tickets they’ve got until we’ve charged their card. We need to make sure it’s a fully paid for order before we inform people. That’s sensible business practice,” said Williamson. “The second reason is the sheer scale of this enterprise. More than 1.8 million applied and more than 20 million tickets were applied for. The sheer scale of it is why it takes time. If we told people the day after their credit card went through, we’d be telling people across three or four weeks. You might be told and your next door neighbour wouldn’t.”He said that by the middle of next week Locog expected to have charged well over half of all payments. The emails to inform applicants whether they were successful will all go out on the same day.“We’re trying to be fair to people. No one is going to be allocated a ticket they haven’t applied for. On average, people have applied for 12 tickets worth a total of £500. People are applying for tickets they’ve chosen,” said Williamson.He also defended the fact that Locog has not informed buyers where they will be sitting, effectively asking them to take on trust that more expensive tickets will have better views.“The higher price points are closer to the action and more central, the lower price points are further away and higher up. That’s quite normal in major events where you’re selling tickets a year beforehand,” said Williamson, drawing comparison with other events such as Wimbledon and the FA Cup final that sold tickets in price bands.In June, anyone who didn’t get any tickets at all will get “first bite at the second chance cherry”, said Williamson, followed by those who didn’t get everything they applied for. All the remaining tickets will go back on general sale in November. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogLondon Olympic organisers defend ‘peculiar’ ticket payment processRelated posts:London Olympics organisers appeal to protesters not to disrupt flame routeWill the 2012 Olympics be a sell out?London 2012: Ten best of the web

  

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  May 18 2011, 11:55am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/18/write-hit-songwriters

  Songwriters work in the shadows, knocking out tunes to order – sometimes in a matter of hours. The songwriters who work for Jay-Z, Adele, Florence and more tell Alexis Petridis how they do it – and why times are getting tough

  This article titled “Write me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters” was written by Alexis Petridis, for The Guardian on Tuesday 17th May 2011 20.30 UTC Two years ago, Al “Shux” Shuckburgh found himself catapulted straight into songwriting’s premier league. The Londoner hadn’t expected much from the track he’d produced and co-written at a songwriting session with American tunesmiths Angela Hunte and Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic, about how homesick the pair were for Brooklyn. Later, Hunte sent it to Jay-Z‘s label, Roc Nation, but received a frosty response. Then EMI’s head of publishing overheard it at a barbecue, and decided it would be perfect for Jay-Z. The following night, the rapper wrote his own lyrics, recorded them, and then excitedly told Alicia Keys he had “a song that was going to be the anthem of New York” and asked her to perform on it. Back in London, Shuckburgh wasn’t even allowed to hear the track. “Well,” he says, “I could have heard it if I’d flown out to New York. But they were being so careful about anything leaking. At that point, I didn’t really have a track record, they didn’t really know who I was, so they didn’t know if they could trust me.” In fact, the first time he heard Empire State of Mind was when The Blueprint 3, the Jay-Z album it appeared on, finally leaked online. “It was very weird. I remember listening to it in my studio thinking, ‘Is this for real?’” Shuckburgh sounds more sanguine than might be expected for a man who was actively prevented from hearing a song he co-wrote. Perhaps the subsequent effect of Empire State of Mind on his bank balance and status has eased his pain. The track shifted 4m legal downloads and spent five weeks at No 1 in America, making it Jay-Z’s first US chart-topper. “It’s not like everything’s easy now,” says Shuckburgh. “But everything’s easier.“ Maybe that’s just how professional songwriters tend to be: whatever other attributes the job may require, a giant ego and a sense of preciousness aren’t really among them. This may be why songwriting tends to attract so many former performers, who have either tired of the limelight or watched it fade, and are now making some pragmatic decisions about their futures. Among the more improbable credits on recent hits were the three songs on Beyoncé‘s last album co-written by Ian Dench, formerly the guitarist of 1990s British indie dance band EMF (big hit: Unbelievable); then there’s She-Wolf by Shakira, partly the work of Sam Endicott, moonlighting from his day job as frontman of New York-based the Bravery. The washing machine technique “It’s the kind of job where the best thing you can be is invisible,” says Shuckburgh’s former mentor Eg White. “The very idea of a professional songwriter gets in the way of the singer.” White should know. He began his career as a performer – in boyband Brother Beyond and then in the critically acclaimed Eg and Alice, makers of glossy adult pop. He then went on to become one of Britain’s most successful songwriters for hire. He’s been responsible, or at least partly responsible, for Will Young‘s Leave Right Now, James Morrison‘s You Give Me Something, Adele‘s Chasing Pavements and Florence and the Machine‘s Hurricane Drunk. Tomorrow, as they have been doing for half a century, the Ivor Novello awards will turn a brief spotlight on to the shadowy world of professional songwriters, those people who ply their trade in studios and writing sessions, half-hidden from view, despite being the backbone of the music industry. Up for songwriting awards this year are the composers of such inescapable hits as Tinie Tempah‘s Pass Out, Katy B‘s Katy on a Mission and Plan B‘s She Said. As pop and R&B dominate the charts again (indie bands tend to write their own songs, or if they don’t, they keep quiet about it), the songwriter-for-hire is back in demand. At the top of the UK singles chart sits Bruno Mars, whose songwriting credits include Travie McCoy’s Billionaire and Cee-Lo Green‘s Fuck You. These songwriters do something that seems to go against every romantic notion we have about artistic creativity: they write songs to order (and apparently the current craving among UK labels is for songs that sound like Mumford and Sons, or Florence and the Machine). White, himself the winner of two Ivor Novello awards, is prevailed upon to meet an artist, form a bond, and come up with something chart-topping in the space of a day. “Sometimes less,” he says cheerfully. “Sometimes I get two hours. Someone comes over at three, we have a cup of tea, chew the cud for a bit, go: ‘All right, shall we write a song?’ And by six, they’ve gone home and we’ve fucking done it. Chasing Pavements, that took two or three hours.” Enormously affable, White seems to love every aspect of the process, even being forced to make friends with artists he’s never met before. “You immediately stop observing the niceties of gentle human contact between strangers,” he says, adding that he subscribes to “the washing machine theory” of songwriting. “I tend to play a few records and discuss them: what we need is the beat from that one, the fragility of that one. We try to keep it open, but we talk about the ways it might have precedents in different genres, smash them all together and get something different. If you just put one thing in the washing machine, you’re going to get one thing out; but if you put two or three colours in, who knows what colour’s going to emerge? Pop music is built out of pop music.” This is not an approach adopted by everyone. Jim Duguid, co-author of five songs on the debut album by Paolo Nutini, says: “Some record companies will give you a list of five songs and say, ‘We want something like this.’ But that’s like someone turning up with a BMW, giving you a load of parts and saying, ‘Can you build something like that for me?’ It’ll kind of look like it, but it won’t be right.” Duguid, who was drummer and songwriter with the old band Speedway – of which Nutini was a huge fan, doesn’t care much for knocking out a collaboration in a couple of hours, either. “I try to avoid that like the plague. A lot of industry people think, ‘Yeah, we’ll throw you together and you’ll write a hit in a day.’ But we did that in Speedway and it’s not the way the best music comes out. I like more of a social occasion, maybe three days of chatting and listening to music, then getting a couple of ideas together that reflect that.” The one thing professional songwriters seem to agree on is that times are getting tough. “Having had some success,” says Duguid, “it still shocks me how little money there is in it. I’m lucky in the sense that Paolo is one of the few artists who still sells physical CDs, and there’s money in that. With downloads – at one pence a download between three songwriters – you’ve got to be shifting a heck of a lot of records. The real money’s in getting your song on an advert or on television, but that’s getting harder, because everyone’s trying to do it.” A glorious bloody nose It’s a situation that is changing the nature of recording, says White: “Nobody wants album tracks any more, they just want singles. Before, you weren’t just chasing the money and the radio play – you could do something you really wanted to do, and had thus far been thwarted. Nobody wants the beautiful slow song that ends up as track 11 on an album but that everyone who buys the album will end up loving best of all. It’s down to iPod playing, cherry-picking, downloading. Fifteen years ago, you would hope that albums would outsell singles two to one. Now, I hear stories about Taio Cruz selling 13m downloads and 300,000 albums. And it’s not just him. Katy Perry: massive singles sales, small album sales. For publishing companies, that’s not a disaster – 13m singles is fantastic. But it’s a disaster for record companies and it’s a human disaster. The album is no longer the way people define themselves: there isn’t enough meat in there.” For a moment, White’s ebullience seems to desert him. Then he mentions Adele’s LP 21, which has just spent its 15th week at No 1 in the UK, and suddenly he perks up: he has a song on that. “Oh, that’s a glorious bloody nose to the music industry. Short-termist arses. Start fucking making music with your hearts! The record industry was saying no one was buying records any more, and then someone makes a very stoical, honest, beautiful record and people are buying it in shedloads. Because it’s nutritious.” Anyway, he says, album tracks or not, it’s a great job. “I’ve had Matt Cardle in today. We’ve both been making a fuck of a lot of noise, turning the guitars up really loud.” Matt Cardle off The X-Factor? Loud guitars? Noise? Really? “Yeah,” White chuckles. “Songwriting really is great fun.”

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

  Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWrite me a hit by teatime: the world of professional songwriters

  Related posts:Can you learn how to write lyrics? The Songwriters Circle The demise of professional photographers

  

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  May 18 2011, 4:56am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/14/bob-dylan-posts-web-message-about-china-shows

  Bob Dylan on his own websites claims the authorities did not censor his setlist for the recent China concerts.

  This article titled “Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows” was written by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th May 2011 18.12 UTC Confounding seasoned Bob Dylan fans, the 69-year old song and dance man has posted a message on his official website addressing the controversy surrounding his concerts in China in April. Dylan has never previously communicated with his followers in this way, but he has now refuted the suggestion that he allowed the Chinese government to censor his setlist.   Several critics – if not all – questioned his motivation, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that Dylan “sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.”   In response to such accusations, Dylan wrote on bobdylan.com that the Chinese authorities had not refused him permission to play there, and while “according to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats”, there were not many empty seats and this was not true. “If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came,” he continued.   Dylan added: “The Chinese press did tout me as a 60s icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn’t have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”   In respect to the idea that the Chinese government vetted the setlist, Dylan wrote: “We played all the songs that we intended to play”.   The singer turns 70 on 24 May, and with an oblique reference to the happy occasion, the sometime author and radio show host concluded this novel missive: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  May 14 2011, 3:20pm | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  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 »

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  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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  Health agency issues Olympics emergency warning

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/05/health-agency-issues-olympics-emergency-warning

  Health Protection Agency says upheaval caused by its abolition could pose ‘extreme risks’ during the London 2012 Olympic Games

  This article titled “Health agency issues Olympics emergency warning” was written by James Meikle and Owen Gibson, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th May 2011 16.30 UTC The NHS’s main public health body says its planned abolition weeks before the 2012 Olympics could compromise emergency responses if there are serious incidents at the games. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) warns the upheaval generated by huge organisational changes across the health service could pose extreme risks when Britain hosts the world’s biggest sporting event next summer. There is “high potential” for funds aimed at protecting the public at the event to be cut, it says. In the past, the risk to public health at the Olympics has come from incidents as diverse as food poisoning and terrorism. The agency is responsible for disease control and monitoring as well as scientific and public health advice during emergencies. Its responsibilities are to be absorbed within the Department of Health. Other authorities which tackle such crises are also in turmoil, with staff leaving primary care trusts well before they are abolished in 2013, while local councils are being hit by spending cuts. Labour has demanded the shakeup should “at the very least” be put on hold until after the London Olympics. Diane Abbott, the shadow health minister, said: “David Cameron seems to be prioritising driving through his NHS reorganisation above public safety during the Olympics. “For this Tory-led government to push our public health services into a state of chaos and abolish the current agency right before London 2012, with people from all over the world arriving in London, and the eyes of the entire world on Britain, is nothing short of a disgrace.” The revelation of the HPA’s concern over the Tories’ NHS plans comes as public health professionals fear their voice is being ignored, even during the government’s two-month listening exercise. They have no members on the Future Forum group overseeing the exercise, headed by GP Steve Field. The timetable for the shakeup has already been hit by the break in the progress of legislation – meaning the first changes are now scheduled for July 2012, the month in which the games begin, instead of April. That shift has led the HPA to say the risk of “compromising” national emergency responses during the Olympics is now even higher than when it first raised the issue in its official response to the shakeup in March. It warned then that there might be “considerable risks to the national capability to launch multi-agency responses to incidents and emergencies”. The agency said the planned changes would create “considerable uncertainty” and “preparation for, and response to, incidents arising in association with the Olympic and Paralypmic Games will be compromised” unless an appropriate structure replaced the current one. In a statement to the Guardian, the agency said: “Deferring the changes to July 2012 would increase the risk. We have made the Department of Health aware of our views concerning the risks in delaying.” It said a small number of its 3,850 staff had already left, citing concerns about the independence of their work and advice if they were moved to the health department. The HPA’s March document states that the move could also undermine wider public and professional confidence. Abbott said: “It is time that this government listened to public health professionals. Alarm bells are now ringing within the Health Protection Agency, local authorities and also local primary care trusts, and increasingly there will also be concern amongst the public. “We have worked hard to bring the Olympic Games to Britain. It should be a time in which we showcase what Britain is about to the rest of the world. The priority should be public safety and ensuring that we are prepared to respond robustly to major incidents and emergencies.” Lindsey Davies, former national director of pandemic influenza preparedness at the Department of Health who is president of the Faculty of Public Health, said: “The entire public health community has grave concerns about the potential risks from the timing of the changes.” Although there have been few major health scares linked to past Olympics, there was a terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a bombing which killed two people in Atlanta in 1996. A stomach bug struck competitors at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi last year. The agency says the games will raise the risk of diseases spreading due to the influx of international visitors and from mass gatherings in restricted spaces during the games. Early identification will help reduce the risk of widespread exposure and minimise the impact on visitors as well as local communities. Other concerns include heatstroke among crowds. About 300,000 people a day are expected to be in the Olympic Park during the height of the games. The Department of Health said it was working to ensure “business continuity” was maintained during the transition. A team had been established to ensure the the ministry and the NHS is able “to respond to major emergencies continues to be robust and to ensure the requirements of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games are met. Work is under way to test how the proposed new systems would function during the 2012 Games. This work will focus and strengthen safety at the 2012 Games”. It is understood Olympics organisers are aware of the concerns but have not been directly involved in discussions. Thousands of athletes begin arriving in Britain for training camps in the UK in June 2012. The Olympic village opens in mid-July and the games run from 27 July to 12 August 2012. The Paralympics run from the end of August into September. A total of 17,000 athletes and officials from about 200 countries will stay in the village on the Olympic Park, in east London. In total, more than 10,500 athletes will compete in 26 sports based in various venues around the capital and beyond. Sailing will be based in Weymouth and the Olympic football tournament will be played in various grounds around the country. According to the detailed transport plan released last month, the busiest day of the games – Saturday 4 August – will see 700,000 ticket holders moving around London to watch sessions at 11 venues. In all, 8.8m tickets are available for the Games, with 6.6m on sale to the general public. About 20,000 broadcast and print journalists will also descend on London.

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  May 5 2011, 12:51pm | Comments »

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  Flybe profit warning sends share price crashing down

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/05/flybe-profit-warning-sends-share-price-crashing-down

  Flybe shares drop 25% as airline admits cash-strapped consumers are cutting back on air travel

  This article titled “Flybe profit warning sends share price crashing down” was written by Dan Milmo, for The Guardian on Thursday 5th May 2011 16.42 UTC Flybe’s £215m flotation has come crashing down as the carrier’s shares shed 25% of their value in the wake of a profit warning over waning consumer appetite for air travel. The Exeter-based regional carrier bases its appeal on “affordable travel from the most convenient airport” but admitted that lower high street spending in the UK had affected demand for cheap flights since the new year, with domestic routes among the hardest hit. Despite warning of cash-strapped customers, Flybe also announced a £3 fuel surcharge on all flights from September. Flybe said the slowdown in consumer outlay, already indicated by trading woes at high street names such as HMV and Mothercare, had affected “discretionary spend” on air travel and triggered significant analysts’ downgrades. Flybe said it expected pre-tax profits for this year to be broadly in line with the 2010/11 figures, which put it heavily out of kilter with analysts’ expectations. Investors ignored Flybe’s defence of its “resilient and flexible” business model of flying from small airports such as Southampton and Norwich, and sold the shares heavily. Shareholders had expected a pre-tax profit of about £36m, not the £22m indicated in the trading update, and Flybe’s shares slumped 25% to 172.50p, far below the flotation price of 295p last December. Flybe’s new investors included George Soros, the hedge fund tycoon, who acquired a 3.4% stake on flotation and whose more assured bets included starting a run on the pound in 1992. British Airways owns a further 15% of the business. One of the pioneers of add-on charges including baggage fees when it rebranded from British European in 2002, Flybe said the £3 fuel surcharge would be dropped if the price of Brent crude fell below $75 (£45.60) per barrel for 28 consecutive days; its current price is $117 per barrel. Flybe also indicated cutbacks on its domestic routes as it flagged the possible disposal of surplus aircraft, believed to include the Bombardier Q400 turboprop planes that are used on its UK services. In its trading update the company did not expand on its strategy of building its presence in continental Europe but it is understood that Flybe is standing by plans to add 35 Embraer aircraft to its 68-strong fleet, with the option of buying 105 more. The £66m float proceeds have been earmarked for the expansion, which includes codeshare deals where it operates flights on another carrier’s behalf. Iata warning The International Air Transport Association (Iata) warned that the financial markets have taken a bearish stance on airlines. Airline share prices have underperformed stock markets by 17% this year, Iata said, and investors now fear that carriers will be hard hit by higher fuel costs – about a quarter of the industry’s cost base – and the consequent effect on demand as higher prices hit sales. “Financial markets, bullish over airlines through 2010, now believe the industry will suffer more than most in this high fuel cost and demand-shock environment,” said Iata. Flybe said demand from business travellers, who account for 45% of its customers, remained strong. “This sector has proved very resilient,” said Flybe, echoing recent comments by Iata, which said demand for business class travel was holding up more strongly than in the back of the cabin. The premium airline market grew 7.7% in February, compared with a 3.3% improvement in economy class traffic.

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  May 5 2011, 12:46pm | Comments »

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  Wildfires blaze across parts of Britain after hottest April on record

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/04/wildfires-blaze-across-parts-of-britain-after-hottest-april-on-record

  Wild Fires hit Northern Ireland, north-west England, and several areas of Scotland including the Balmoral estate, as well as Swinley Forest in Berkshire

  This article titled “Wildfires blaze across parts of Britain after hottest April on record” was written by Helen Carter, for The Guardian on Wednesday 4th May 2011 12.53 UTC Heathland fires have been burning across parts of the UK for days amid unprecedented dry weather, with no respite on the horizon until the weekend. The hottest April on record, which registered only 21% of expected rainfall in England and Wales, has hampered the efforts of firefighters and caused vast areas of parched land to go up in flames. Blazes fanned by high winds have been seen in areas of Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, with hundreds of firefighters called in and helicopters used to drop water in the worst-affected regions. The weather forecast shows little chance of any substantial rain falling before Thursday, with central and eastern England having to wait until the weekend. Roads have been closed and 170 firefighters have been called to the Swinley Forest area of Berkshire, where a number of fires broke out. In the north-west of England in Lancashire, fires began on moorland in Belmont, near Bolton, as well as in Ormskirk and Bacup. Police in Northern Ireland are investigating reports of a man seen with a petrol can close to one of the worst gorse fires for years in the Mourne mountains. There were reports of two youths lighting fires in south Armagh. Hundreds of acres of land are being destroyed and homes and livestock threatened by fires which burned for much of the bank holiday weekend in counties Down, Armagh and Tyrone. Scotland, where the royal estate of Balmoral is affected among several other areas, and Northern Ireland had just two-thirds of the rain normally expected in April. The average temperature in England was the hottest since records began 353 years ago. Despite the dry weather, the Environment Agency is not planning a hosepipe ban. A spokesman said: “We feel confident there is enough water to see out spring and summer without restrictions on the public supply.”

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  May 4 2011, 10:56am | Comments »

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  Portuguese learn price of €78bn debt bailout

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/04/portuguese-learn-price-of-e78bn-debt-bailout

  Health and education spending in Portugal to be cut by €745m, state pensions reduced and major building projects axed

  This article titled “Portuguese learn price of €78bn debt bailout” was written by Giles Tremlett, for The Guardian on Wednesday 4th May 2011 15.20 UTC

  Portugal woke up to the price of its €78bn (£70bn) bailout on Wednesday as new airports and high-speed rail lines were sacrificed in a package of austerity measures and the government pledged to freeze pensions and shrink the civil service. Lisbon’s new international airport, already on hold, and the building of a high-speed rail link between Lisbon and Oporto will now be put back until after 2013, according to state news agency Lusa. Health and education spending will be cut by €745m, civil service pay and pensions will be frozen, and people on state pensions above €1,500 a month will have them reduced. Civil service staffing is to be squeezed by 1% a year in central government, while regional administrations and town halls will be told to shed 2% of their employees annually. Portugal’s banks will take up to €12bn of the bailout funds to rebuild their capital ratios, according to reports. The banks would have to raise their core tier one capital ratio – a gauge of higher quality capital that mainly comprises equity and retained earnings – to 9% at the end of this year and to 10% by the end of 2012, Reuters said. The country will also carry out a fire sale of the nationalised Banco Português de Negócios (BPN) bank. “The authorities are launching a process to sell BPN on an accelerated schedule and without a minimum price,” according to a memorandum of understanding seen by the Guardian, which added that the sale should be finished in July. Portugal is expected to reduce public spending by 3.4% of its GDP this year and raise an extra 1.7% of GDP by raising taxes on cars, tobacco and electricity and getting rid of income and corporation tax loopholes. A detailed investigation of public-private partnerships (PPPs), which have been used for building hospitals, roads and rail lines, will be carried out to see if they are hiding extra government debt. New PPP projects will be suspended. José Sócrates, Portugal’s caretaker prime minister, announced the areas that would remain untouched when he explained the bailout during a television address to the nation on Tuesday night. These included pensions for the worse-off and the retirement age. But he failed to reveal what austerity measures came with the bailout package, beyond saying they would be similar to those rejected by parliament in March. The March defeat brought down his minority socialist government and a snap election was called for 5 June. Polls show the opposition Social Democrat Party (PSD), which rejected the March austerity package, may win that vote. Representatives of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank met Social Democrat leaders on Wednesday morning to seek their backing for the plan. “The PSD will give its opinion on what it has read and heard late today or early tomorrow,” said Carlos Moedas, the party’s economics advisor, after the meeting. Social Democrat leaders had already indicated they might change elements of any bailout-related austerity package if they were elected to government, although always with the aim of hitting this year’s target of reducing the budget deficit to 5.9% of GDP. The IMF said: “We have said from the start that it is important that any agreement have multi-party support and we shall continue in our efforts with opposition parties to show that this is the case.” Portugal managed to raise €1.12bn euros in three-month treasury bills today with demand almost doubling the offer, but investors insisted on a 4.65% interest rate – up from 4.05% two weeks ago. Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics in London, said the bailout might not be enough to stave off restructuring: “It won’t put an end to speculation that – along with Greece and perhaps others – it will sooner or later need to undertake some form of debt restructuring.”

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  May 4 2011, 10:30am | Comments »

• I posted to distributedresearch.net

  Supermarkets kill free markets as well as our communities

  http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/03/supermarkets-kill-free-markets-as-well-as-our-communities

  Across the country local shops have been wiped out by supermarkets.

  This article titled “Supermarkets kill free markets as well as our communities” was written by Peter Wilby, for The Guardian on Tuesday 3rd May 2011 20.00 UTC A few weeks ago our last local butcher closed. When we moved to this suburban Essex town 40 years ago, it had six specialist shops selling fresh meat. The last independent greengrocer disappeared nearly two decades ago. Happily, we still have an independent baker close by, and even a fishmonger a brisk 25-minute walk away. But for how long? Across the country the small retailer is being wiped out. In the whole of Britain there are fewer than 1,000 specialist fishmongers, 7,000 butchers and 4,000 greengrocers, and barely 3,000 independent bakeries. In all these categories, the number of specialists has fallen by 90% since the 1950s, and at least 40% in the last decade alone. They have been driven out by supermarkets, which now sell 97% of our food, with four chains accounting for 76%. Next to the motor car, nothing else has so radically changed the look and texture of our environment over the last half-century – creating what the New Economics Foundation calls “clone-town Britain” where every high street has the same shops. Until now politicians have had almost nothing to say about it. However, last Sunday the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was asked about the “Tesco-isation” of high streets – a subject prompted by two riots in Bristol over a Tesco store – and said: “I think that is an issue, yes, and it is something that we’re looking at.” Hardly a rallying cry, but an encouraging change from the standard political response, endorsed by the Competition Commission in 2008, that consumers like the low prices, range of goods and quality offered by supermarkets. An advance too from Labour’s position in Scotland: in February it helped defeat the SNP minority government’s proposal to impose a “supermarket tax” on retail premises worth £750,000 or more. Even the “good for consumers” defence of the big stores requires scrutiny. Supermarkets may offer mangoes and kiwi fruit as a blessed relief to generations who recall the surly greengrocer grunting “no demand for it” when asked for anything out of the ordinary. But the option to buy locally grown produce is increasingly closed off; many varieties of English fruit disappeared long ago. Supermarkets stock food not for its taste, but for its longevity and appearance. Conventional economists count numbers, assuming that a huge increase in toilet roll colours represents an unqualified gain to the consumer. They neglect more subtle dimensions of choice. The central issue, however, is whether “what the consumer wants” should close down the argument. What people want as consumers may not be what they want as householders, community members, producers, employees or entrepreneurs. The loss of small shops drains a locality’s economic and social capital. Money spent in independent retail outlets tends to stay in the community, providing work for local lawyers and accountants, plumbers and decorators, window cleaners and builders. US research finds that every $100 spent at a local store generates 60% more local economic activity than $100 spent in a chain store down the road. It also finds that, after the arrival of a big supermarket, participation in local charities, churches, campaign groups and even voting declines sharply. As Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1960), communities are created by myriad small daily encounters: getting cooking tips from the greengrocer, hearing about a job from the butcher, recommending a good plumber at the bakery, exchanging opinions in the pub. “The sum of such casual, public contact at the local level,” wrote Jacobs, “…is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.” Supermarkets minimise human contact in the interests of efficiency and convenience, most recently by introducing self-service lanes for payment. As one critic put it, they “cut the threads that hold an engaged community together”. Such issues should concern the right as much as the left: indeed, the most hard-hitting recent report on supermarkets came from ResPublica, the “red Tory” thinktank, and points out that only 12% of Britons hold business assets – and that, when monopoly goes unchecked and a sector of the economy is in effect closed to new entrants (as the grocery sector largely is), we start to “practise capitalism without capitalists”. Becoming a small retailer once allowed an ordinary working man or woman, and particularly an Asian migrant, to aspire – often after redundancy – to independence, self-reliance and upward social mobility. Moreover, supermarkets have become not only a monopoly, giving consumers a diminishing choice of food outlets, but also a monopsony, giving suppliers little choice of buyers for their produce. They have used this power ruthlessly, forcing down prices and increasingly dictating to suppliers what they produce, where they produce it and how they package it. The casualty rate for small producers, unable to survive on the supermarkets’ terms, is almost as great as for small shops. The effect on wages and working conditions in the food industry is well known, but the effect on what is supposed to be a free market is less often considered. Eastern European regimes, dictating from remote, central offices who could grow how much of what, were once regarded with horror. Even western governments were denounced when they adopted industrial policies to choose “winners” and “losers”. Tesco does that every day, and its suppliers have as little recourse to legal or political redress as a Soviet peasant.

  The supermarkets are classic examples of what has been called the tyranny of small choices. Any rational individual will buy most of his or her food and household goods from a big store because prices are lower, choice greater, quality more consistent, and service speedier. I may have the time and money to tour smaller shops. My neighbour, while recognising he may get something better from a specialist retailer, may judge that it will not be so reliably better (for my parents’ generation, supermarkets were liberators from the risks of mouldy cheddar and maggoty apples) as to justify the extra cost and time. Neither of us will take much account of community cohesion or local employment, still less of the dangers of monopoly and monopsony. This is where we should look to politicians for a larger view. They need not confront supermarkets directly, which clearly terrifies them. But they can partially re-create, and preserve what is left of, the independent retail sector through, for example, tax concessions; a community right to take over or find buyers for threatened businesses; and enhanced powers for local councils to protect retail competitiveness. This is an issue – straddling political and ideological boundaries and putting flesh on the abstractions of communities, big societies and social mobility – that Miliband and the Labour leadership, encouraged by the stirrings in Bristol, should seize.

  guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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  May 3 2011, 5:17pm | Comments »

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