Monthly Archives: June 2006

Etherial music

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Here’s an idea to restore your faith in humanity.

Luke Jerram, a sound artist, working with international hot air balloon pilot Peter Dalby and composer Dan Jones has developed The Sky Orchestra, an ongoing research project that explores how one can perceive a sonic experience while asleep. It is an experimental artwork bringing together performance and music to create visual audio installations within the air and within the mind.

Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, take off at dawn to fly across a city. Each balloon plays a different element of the musical score creating a massive audio performance that many hundreds of people experience subconsciously as the balloons fly over their homes.

Many hundreds of people experience the Sky Orchestra event live as the balloons fly over their homes at dawn. The airborne project is both a vast spectacular performance as well as an intimate, personal experience. The music is audible, both consciously and subconsciously, to all those in the balloon’s flight paths….

The residents of Stratford-upon-Avon, Will Shakespeare’s home town, were treated to this delight this morning — with the added attraction of Royal Shakespeare Company actors reading bits of the Bard’s works. One resident emailed the BBC Today programme: “If music be the food of love, I’ve got indigestion”.

easyBully loses legal action against Easypizza

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Hooray! In a rare setback for the preposterous “Sir” Stelios Loadsamoney Haji-Ioannou, the ludicrous legal action launched by his group against the tiny Easypizza company has failed.

easyGroup IP Licensing Limited, the company that holds intellectual property belonging to companies controlled by the controversial Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, has abandoned its High Court action against Easypizza Limited and its directors. Easypizza Limited currently operates in Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington, and began trading in 1997 where it has developed a steady business in supplying its freshly baked pizza and Italian food and drink products to customers under the Easypizza brand. In 2004, Stelios’s company started its own similarly named easyPizza business serving re-heated frozen pizza on a delivery-only basis to certain parts of the Milton Keynes area and has since expanded in partnership with Famous Moes Pizza into Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton and Worthing.

Easypizza Limited were represented by Memery Crystal Solicitors and easyGroup were represented by Claire Algar of Collyer Bristow Solicitors.

The case became increasingly acrimonious and bitter and a High Court trial of the matter was originally due to commence in February 2006, but easyGroup served a Notice of Discontinuance shortly beforehand. Easypizza Limited then withdrew its own Counterclaim bringing matters to an end although not before the expenditure of several hundred thousand pounds in legal costs on both sides.

Bloggers and the Democratic Party

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Interesting piece about the effect bloggers are having on the Democrats…

Joe Lieberman has a fight on his hands. Until very recently, the three-term Democratic senator and former presidential candidate was cruising to re-election in Connecticut, his home state. But the 64-year-old grandee now finds himself in sudden danger of falling victim to a new political life form: the internet candidate.

Ned Lamont, a cable television entrepreneur, has come from nowhere to pose a serious threat, with the help of internet fundraising and anti-war bloggers outraged at Mr Lieberman’s gung-ho support for the Iraq invasion.

Reconsidering Bill Gates

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David Pogue has a thoughtful post about BillG. Excerpt:

Some people won’t be happy no matter what Mr. Gates does. They say he made the decision for P.R. value, or even as a plot to boost Microsoft’s software sales. “Interesting theory: ‘Buy Windows Vista. Do It for the Children,’” writes one critic online. “Ah, Bill, you are a shrewd weasel indeed.”)

But despite all this, and even despite Microsoft’s history, I find it almost impossible to remain cynical about Bill Gates’s intentions. I think he’s changed. Maybe when you’re in your 50’s, you start to think about how you’ll be remembered.
It’d be one thing if he were retiring to enjoy his fortune, or if he were using it to buy football teams or political candidates.

But he’s not. He’s channeling those billions to the places in the world where that money can do the most good. And not just throwing money at the problems, either–he’s also dedicating the second act of his life to making sure it’s done right.

In fact, when you step back far enough, Mr. Gates’s entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale.

I know this is going to earn me the vitriol of Microsoft-bashers, but I’ll say it anyway: Bill Gates has the money, the brains and the connections to really, truly make the world a better place. I admire him for the attempt. And I believe that if anyone can succeed, he will.

He just might be right. David also links to Bill Moyers’s remarkable interview with Gates.

Later… One of the comments to David’s post contained a link to an interesting New Yorker article about the Gates Foundation’s work.

Homeless connectivity

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Amazing Wired News story…

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he’s managed to run a ’round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. “I’ve always been trying to stay up on internet technology,” Ivy said.

Ivy isn’t the only homeless person who makes it a priority to keep gadgets handy even when a cooked meal is hard to come by.

Many of those now living without a permanent roof over their heads have cell phones in their pockets or laptop computers at their hips. While people living in shelters and alleys have found it difficult to cross social divides, the digital divide seems to disappear on the streets. Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “More have e-mail than have post office boxes,” Stoops said. “The internet has been a big boon to the homeless.”

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

“Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families,” Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel…

Thanks to Cory & BoingBoing.

Hello Mother, Hello Friendster…

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Tom Lehrer, where are you when we need you? This from today’s New York Times…

Summer camp directors have a new scourge, and it is not mosquitoes or impetigo. It is the Internet, specifically sites like MySpace, Facebook and Friendster, where young people often post personal or revealing information.

Camps say they are increasingly concerned about being identified in photographs or comments on these sites, even innocuously. They worry about online predators tracking children to camp and about their image being tarnished by inappropriate Internet juxtapositions — a mention, say, of the camp on a site that also has crude language or sexually suggestive pictures. “This is probably the No. 1 issue facing all camp programs,” said Norman E. Friedman, a partner at AMSkier Insurance, a major camp insurer.

Getting to the bottom of the car business

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Most motoring journalism makes one lose the will to live. The one shining exception is the writing of the Guardian‘s Giles Smith. Here he is on the new Renault Megane Sport Hatch 2.0 165 Turbo…

The Megane was the car with which Renault pretty much singlehandedly woke up a snoozing hatchback sector. While all the dynamic designers and blue-sky thinkers had gravitated towards the SUV department, or were squeezing their brains to come up with ever more malleable family wagons with internal bike racks and fold-out summer houses, the ancient art of hatchback-building had suffered a precipitous decline, leaving only a joyless amalgam of inseparable lump-alikes and blob-u-wants, each one categorisable according to how much it did or didn’t resemble a VW Golf.Renault shook things up by producing a hatchback in which the better part of the design budget had clearly gone into resculpting the rear end, producing an unusually curvaceous back window, wrapped tight around a self-consciously plump and pert boot lid.

I don’t know whether Renault was cannily ahead of the wave here, or whether it merely lucked out. But in an age much given to low-slung jeans, pan-generational adoption of the “builder’s crease” look, and long and surprisingly academic debates about the relative merits of rears belonging to Kylie and Beyoncé, a car whose prime and unashamed asset was allegedly its “shakeable ass” did indeed look inspired.

Renault, in short, gave us the boot as booty, and a grateful and amused Europe responded by buying Meganes in millions. The idea of the car as a penis substitute is familiar to the point of cliche. But the French company was surely among the very first to explore the possibility of the car as a bottom substitute…

The first MySpace lawsuit

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Here we go. As I envisaged in my column on Sunday, MySpace is being sued for allowing minors to wander into a dangerous space.

A 14-year-old Travis County girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a Buda man she met on MySpace.com sued the popular social networking site Monday for $30 million, claiming that it fails to protect minors from adult sexual predators.

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 “utterly ineffective.”

“MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online,” said Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, parent company News Corp. and Pete Solis, the 19-year-old accused of sexually assaulting the girl.

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace.com, said in a written statement: “We take aggressive measures to protect our members. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.”

Founded in 2003, MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the world’s third most-viewed Web site, according to the lawsuit.

Loewy said the lawsuit is the first of its kind in the nation against MySpace.

Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit.

In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.

The lawsuit includes news reports of other assault cases in which girls were contacted through MySpace. They include a 22-year-old Wisconsin man charged with six counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a 27-year-old Connecticut man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl.

MySpace says on a “Tips for Parents” page that users must be 14 or older. The Web site does nothing to verify the age of the user, such as requiring a driver’s license or credit card number, Loewy said…

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The social life of networks

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I was offline yesterday because I was giving the Beishon Memorial Lecture at the OU and needed to focus on important matters like logistics and car parking for guests. The title of the lecture was “The Social Life of Networks” and there’s a pdf here if you’re having trouble sleeping. There will also be a webcast, but it hasn’t emerged from editing yet.

Thanks to James Miller, eagle-eyed as ever, who spotted several typos and a glaring error in a calculation!

The Digger’s quest for eternal youth in cyberspace

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And here’s my take on what Rupert Murdoch is up to. (Also from today’s Observer.)

In less than a month News Corporation stunned everyone by paying $580m (£313m) for MySpace.com, a social networking site with annual revenues of about $20m. The following month it bought Scout.com, a college sports site. And in September it bought IGN Entertainment, an entertainment and videogaming site, for $650m. One analyst predicts that Murdoch will spend between $500m and $1bn a year on online ventures in the next three to five years.

Given his totemic status in the industry, other media firms are wondering what he’s up to. The answer is simple: Murdoch is chasing kids. That’s the only possible explanation for his decision to pay ridiculous prices for MySpace and IGN. (Scout.com looks more like a traditional old-media play.)

Here’s the reasoning: Murdoch has all the newspapers, TV stations and movie studios any mogul could want. But he’s noticed the media ecosystem changing…