Testosterone losing its Nuts?

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At last, some good news for civilisation.

ABC’s magazine circulation results for the second half of 2007, out last week, arrive full of blighted hopes and clouded futures. Are young men, oozing testosterone, the key to the future? Not when you see Loaded down 30 per cent in a year, Maxim 40 per cent, and Nuts and Zoo 8.9 per cent and 12.8 per cent off the pace respectively. Boobs and booty seem to be more of a turn-off than turn-on these days. And over in the celebrity gossip enclosure, too, Heat, Now and Closer are all down around 12 per cent (with 5.4 per cent saying Goodbye! to Hello!

Yippee!

Gordon Brown and the copyright lobby

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This morning’s Observer column…

The award for Fatuous Statement of the Month goes to Geoffrey Taylor, chief executive of the quaintly named British Phonographic Industry, aka the BPI. (Note for readers under 65: a ‘phonograph’ is an instrument that reproduces sound recorded on a grooved disk.) The winning statement reads: ‘For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music.’

The way that Robert went

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Slieve League is Europe’s highest sea-cliff. We were there on Wednesday afternoon, in glorious sunshine with barely a breath of wind.

In 1937, the Belfast naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, in his wonderful book about the Irish landscape — The Way that I Went — wrote:

A tall mountain of nearly 2000 feet, precipitous on its northern side, has been devoured by the sea till the southern face forms a precipice likewise, descending on this side right into the Atlantic from the long knife-edge which forms the summit. The traverse of this ridge, the “One Man’s Path”, is one of the most remarkable walks to be found in Ireland – not actually dangerous, but needing a good head and careful progress on a stormy day….The northern precipice, which drops 1500 feet into the coomb surrounding the Little Lough Agh, harbours the majority of the alpine plants of Slieve League, the most varied group of alpines to be found anywhere in Donegal.

I’ve been up here once in a Force 9 gale and, believe me, it needed “a good head”.

Why are governments so bad at IT?

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The Economist has an interesting survey section on this.

Why is government unable to reap the same benefits as business, which uses technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? The three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.

Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers stellar clarity and convenience, customers go elsewhere. But if your country’s tax-collection online offering is slow, clunky or just plain dull, then tough. When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead…

Internet 2 reinvents phone network

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From Technology Review

Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies–for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential–might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers…

This might be interesting as an academic experiment, but it’s nonsense on stilts in the context of the commercial internet. You cam imagine Hollywood and the multimedia companies slavering at the prospect of ‘premium’ Internet service “with a direct connection from our studios to your home”.