Chemist Lorraine Gibson is working on technology to analyse the condition of old books and treasures by the gases they emit Walk into a library or museum and you cannot fail to note a distinctive musty smell. This is made up of a cocktail of compounds given off by ancient tomes and exhibits. For some the experience is pleasant; for others, such smells are fusty. But for chemist Dr Lorraine Gibson, of Strathclyde University, these odours are the bread and butter of her research. Gibson believes smells can be used to expose the condition of a book or an artefact – without touching it – before it has decayed dangerously, so repairs and restoration can be applied early to avoid serious damage later on. The trick, she says, is to develop a device than could mimic our sense of smell, or at least part of it. This is the focus of her work at Strathclyde University’s department of chemistry. So how can smell help the heritage business? The smell produced by an old book or museum exhibit is comprised of hundreds of volatile compounds. Most of these will be of no interest but a few will be of great importance. We are trying to pinpoint the important ones so we can discard the rest. Consider paper. It is comprised of cellulose, lignin and many other compounds. As paper ages, it changes – anyone who works with old books knows it becomes brittle and fragile. Volatile
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Chemist Lorraine Gibson is working on technology to analyse the condition of old books and treasures by the gases they emit Walk into a library or museum and you cannot fail to note a distinctive musty smell. This is made up of a cocktail of compounds given off by ancient tomes and exhibits. For some the experience is pleasant; for others, such smells are fusty. But for chemist Dr Lorraine Gibson, of Strathclyde University, these odours are the bread and butter of her research. Gibson believes smells can be used to expose the condition of a book or an artefact – without touching it – before it has decayed dangerously, so repairs and restoration can be applied early to avoid serious damage later on. The trick, she says, is to develop a device than could mimic our sense of smell, or at least part of it. This is the focus of her work at Strathclyde University’s department of chemistry. So how can smell help the heritage business? The smell produced by an old book or museum exhibit is comprised of hundreds of volatile compounds. Most of these will be of no interest but a few will be of great importance. We are trying to pinpoint the important ones so we can discard the rest. Consider paper. It is comprised of cellulose, lignin and many other compounds. As paper ages, it changes – anyone who works with old books knows it becomes brittle and fragile. Volatile
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It’s fast and it lasts. Endurance races such as the Le Mans 24-hour event deserves higher status – and that might just be about to happen As Formula One hit the road today in Australia, it did so with a raft of rule changes and technical enhancements designed to improve the racing. That changes are mooted almost every season, largely focusing on encouraging more overtaking, will not have gone unnoticed, even to casual observers. Yet, in America last weekend, a worldwide series held its opening meeting, featuring cars comparable in performance to those of F1 going wheel to wheel. Fifty-six of them. For 12 hours solid. There was no shortage of racing, no shortage of overtaking and at the chequered flag the first three cars were separated by only 45 seconds. It is motor sport’s best kept secret. Britain’s Allan McNish drove in F1 for Toyota in 2002, but since 2006 he has been an Audi Sport factory team driver as part of its sports car programme in endurance racing – a form of the sport that most will be familiar with from the Le Mans 24 Hour race (which he has won twice) that this year forms the centrepiece of the first full season of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC), an endurance racing series set up by the Le Mans organisers, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest. McNish, who was driving in the series opener, the 12 Hours of Sebring, in Florida last weekend, admits that endurance racing was, at first, a surprise even to him: “Until I came to see it myself by racing in it, I didn’t appreciate it in totality, then I thought, why did I not look at this before?” The cars are sub-divided into classes by performance, a factor in the appeal. With the fastest cars 30 seconds a lap quicker than the slowest, it is dealing with this “traffic” that demands attention. Done with skill, it can be a race-deciding factor: “You’ve got a lot of constant excitement, it doesn’t dull down, it actually is a race from the start to the end, flat out with that constant focus. That’s why the drivers like it. Because they have to combine this intensity with a really fast car,” says McNish. It is also, he argues, easily comparable with F1. “If you’re talking about the cars and the technology, it’s equal to F1. In terms of performance, downforce levels, power, and torque, things like that, it’s Formula One standard. And that’s why I think now, there are a lot of drivers who have had good strong careers in F1 adapting very well to this style of racing.” Only the added 300 kilos of weight make a difference. And that means “you’ve got to throw the car around,” says McNish. Anthony Davidson, driving for Peugeot, another of these ex-F1 drivers who is enthusiastically embracing endurance racing, agrees: “It’s the closest thing to an F1 car I’ve ever driven. As soon as you wind them up, they’re great at high speed.” “After leaving the world of F1 and joining the sportscar scene, I suddenly realised it was like this secret of motorsport that no one has discovered. The cars are fantastic and the scene is brilliant,” he said. McNish also vouches for Davidson’s enthusiasm: “Anthony and [Giancarlo] Fisichella have come from the same sort of arenas – single seaters and you see a smile on their faces because we love to race, we’re racing drivers, we’re passionate about our racing.” That the greatest sports car race in the world, the Le Mans 24, has not formed part of a series since the World Sports Car Championship folded in 1992 and is now at the heart of the ILMC is no coincidence. It is central to the direction the manufacturers, teams and drivers want it to go. Becoming a fully-fledged World Championship is surely the purpose of this nascent series. Indeed, the FIA president, Jean Todt, who was boss at Peugeot in the championship’s last incarnation, has said “endurance racing could be an area we are interested in” regarding World Championship status. It is a realistic possibility, especially given the paucity of quality of opposition on offer in motor sport Championships at the moment, and, if it were granted, would make it the second most prestigious in the sport, below only F1. A goal not to be sniffed at. In the 1970s, the World Championship was as popular, in terms of crowds and coverage as Formula One. It was only the slow departure of manufacturers that caused the decline, a trend that is reversing rapidly. Where teams like BMW and Toyota had their fingers burned and withdrew from F1, huge investments offering little in terms of results, they are now returning to endurance racing. BMW in the form of a works team that has already won the American Le Mans series and Toyota providing the engine for the Anglo-Swiss Rebellion team – the source of a much-rumoured full-time return. They are not alone. Britain’s Aston Martin will be bringing a brand new prototype to compete with Audi and Peugeot at the next race at Spa, Nissan is providing engines for the Signature team and they are in the classes below joined by cars representing Ferrari, Lotus, Chevrolet and Porsche. The reasoning behind this renewed interest goes beyond just offering exciting racing for the fans and suggests that more manufacturers will follow. Audi Sport’s team boss Dr Wolfgang Ullrich sees it as two-fold at least. “We always try to have technology in our race cars first, before they then go into our road cars and are made available to out customers,” he explained, pointing out that the direct fuel injection and diesel technology that has seen his team win Le Mans nine times in the past 11 years both transferred directly into road cars. “That’s missing in Formula One, There is no connection at all. What you learn in F1 you can’t use for your customer. As long as the tehnology in Formula One is not relevant for our customers it makes no sense to go there,” he emphasised. There are also potential longer term gains in terms of marque prestige. A lesson Dr Ullrich also recognises and that for many has been long since forgotten: “Many big names in racing, like Ferrari – the brand – have this great name not because they’ve been successful in F1; they have it because they have been very successful many, many years ago in endurance racing – that’s where it comes from.” Success eluded McNish at Sebring. After having his car damaged by an ill-calculated overtaking manoeuvre by Marc Gené in the Peugeot he managed a creditable fourth having been laps down in his R15 – the car’s final race ( view the gallery from the race here ). He and co-drivers Tom Kristensen (an eight-times Le Mans winner) and Dindo Capello (three times) will be using their brand new R18 coupe at the remaining ILMC races, a prospect McNish relishes, especially for the British round, the Silverstone 1000km in September. “All of these cars, iconic cars that you would love to drive on the road, the fastest of today’s road generation in race trim, all the sights and sounds, whether it be a Corvette thundering out, a Ferrari screaming or one of our diesels, to watch that through Copse and then blast off down through the Becketts section will be a pretty spectacular sight, then to look back and see all the other cars chasing will make it an intense affair,” he said. But intense and memorable for the fans too: “If they come to Silverstone their eyes will be opened wide. They’ll be shocked by every level of it. How advanced from a technical point of view it is, at the hard cut and thrust of the racing, and how accessible it is … Anybody that goes to Le Mans or to Silverstone would come back for more.” It’s an opinion to take seriously. McNish is not going anywhere, the racing’s format and intensity is just too good: “We’ve won and lost races by seconds after driving multiple grand prix distances at just one event. There’s no waiting for somebody to drop out or a problem to happen, because of the reliability they don’t. You’ve got to grab a hold of these races and these cars, and drive the wheels off them. It’s the only way. The only way for success. “Its part of the reason I love it – there’s no hiding place,” he said. Something the sport’s best kept secret may find out itself before too long. Le Mans Series Motor sport Giles Richards guardian.co.uk
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It’s fast and it lasts. Endurance races such as the Le Mans 24-hour event deserves higher status – and that might just be about to happen As Formula One hit the road today in Australia, it did so with a raft of rule changes and technical enhancements designed to improve the racing. That changes are mooted almost every season, largely focusing on encouraging more overtaking, will not have gone unnoticed, even to casual observers. Yet, in America last weekend, a worldwide series held its opening meeting, featuring cars comparable in performance to those of F1 going wheel to wheel. Fifty-six of them. For 12 hours solid. There was no shortage of racing, no shortage of overtaking and at the chequered flag the first three cars were separated by only 45 seconds. It is motor sport’s best kept secret. Britain’s Allan McNish drove in F1 for Toyota in 2002, but since 2006 he has been an Audi Sport factory team driver as part of its sports car programme in endurance racing – a form of the sport that most will be familiar with from the Le Mans 24 Hour race (which he has won twice) that this year forms the centrepiece of the first full season of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup (ILMC), an endurance racing series set up by the Le Mans organisers, the Automobile Club de l’Ouest. McNish, who was driving in the series opener, the 12 Hours of Sebring, in Florida last weekend, admits that endurance racing was, at first, a surprise even to him: “Until I came to see it myself by racing in it, I didn’t appreciate it in totality, then I thought, why did I not look at this before?” The cars are sub-divided into classes by performance, a factor in the appeal. With the fastest cars 30 seconds a lap quicker than the slowest, it is dealing with this “traffic” that demands attention. Done with skill, it can be a race-deciding factor: “You’ve got a lot of constant excitement, it doesn’t dull down, it actually is a race from the start to the end, flat out with that constant focus. That’s why the drivers like it. Because they have to combine this intensity with a really fast car,” says McNish. It is also, he argues, easily comparable with F1. “If you’re talking about the cars and the technology, it’s equal to F1. In terms of performance, downforce levels, power, and torque, things like that, it’s Formula One standard. And that’s why I think now, there are a lot of drivers who have had good strong careers in F1 adapting very well to this style of racing.” Only the added 300 kilos of weight make a difference. And that means “you’ve got to throw the car around,” says McNish. Anthony Davidson, driving for Peugeot, another of these ex-F1 drivers who is enthusiastically embracing endurance racing, agrees: “It’s the closest thing to an F1 car I’ve ever driven. As soon as you wind them up, they’re great at high speed.” “After leaving the world of F1 and joining the sportscar scene, I suddenly realised it was like this secret of motorsport that no one has discovered. The cars are fantastic and the scene is brilliant,” he said. McNish also vouches for Davidson’s enthusiasm: “Anthony and [Giancarlo] Fisichella have come from the same sort of arenas – single seaters and you see a smile on their faces because we love to race, we’re racing drivers, we’re passionate about our racing.” That the greatest sports car race in the world, the Le Mans 24, has not formed part of a series since the World Sports Car Championship folded in 1992 and is now at the heart of the ILMC is no coincidence. It is central to the direction the manufacturers, teams and drivers want it to go. Becoming a fully-fledged World Championship is surely the purpose of this nascent series. Indeed, the FIA president, Jean Todt, who was boss at Peugeot in the championship’s last incarnation, has said “endurance racing could be an area we are interested in” regarding World Championship status. It is a realistic possibility, especially given the paucity of quality of opposition on offer in motor sport Championships at the moment, and, if it were granted, would make it the second most prestigious in the sport, below only F1. A goal not to be sniffed at. In the 1970s, the World Championship was as popular, in terms of crowds and coverage as Formula One. It was only the slow departure of manufacturers that caused the decline, a trend that is reversing rapidly. Where teams like BMW and Toyota had their fingers burned and withdrew from F1, huge investments offering little in terms of results, they are now returning to endurance racing. BMW in the form of a works team that has already won the American Le Mans series and Toyota providing the engine for the Anglo-Swiss Rebellion team – the source of a much-rumoured full-time return. They are not alone. Britain’s Aston Martin will be bringing a brand new prototype to compete with Audi and Peugeot at the next race at Spa, Nissan is providing engines for the Signature team and they are in the classes below joined by cars representing Ferrari, Lotus, Chevrolet and Porsche. The reasoning behind this renewed interest goes beyond just offering exciting racing for the fans and suggests that more manufacturers will follow. Audi Sport’s team boss Dr Wolfgang Ullrich sees it as two-fold at least. “We always try to have technology in our race cars first, before they then go into our road cars and are made available to out customers,” he explained, pointing out that the direct fuel injection and diesel technology that has seen his team win Le Mans nine times in the past 11 years both transferred directly into road cars. “That’s missing in Formula One, There is no connection at all. What you learn in F1 you can’t use for your customer. As long as the tehnology in Formula One is not relevant for our customers it makes no sense to go there,” he emphasised. There are also potential longer term gains in terms of marque prestige. A lesson Dr Ullrich also recognises and that for many has been long since forgotten: “Many big names in racing, like Ferrari – the brand – have this great name not because they’ve been successful in F1; they have it because they have been very successful many, many years ago in endurance racing – that’s where it comes from.” Success eluded McNish at Sebring. After having his car damaged by an ill-calculated overtaking manoeuvre by Marc Gené in the Peugeot he managed a creditable fourth having been laps down in his R15 – the car’s final race ( view the gallery from the race here ). He and co-drivers Tom Kristensen (an eight-times Le Mans winner) and Dindo Capello (three times) will be using their brand new R18 coupe at the remaining ILMC races, a prospect McNish relishes, especially for the British round, the Silverstone 1000km in September. “All of these cars, iconic cars that you would love to drive on the road, the fastest of today’s road generation in race trim, all the sights and sounds, whether it be a Corvette thundering out, a Ferrari screaming or one of our diesels, to watch that through Copse and then blast off down through the Becketts section will be a pretty spectacular sight, then to look back and see all the other cars chasing will make it an intense affair,” he said. But intense and memorable for the fans too: “If they come to Silverstone their eyes will be opened wide. They’ll be shocked by every level of it. How advanced from a technical point of view it is, at the hard cut and thrust of the racing, and how accessible it is … Anybody that goes to Le Mans or to Silverstone would come back for more.” It’s an opinion to take seriously. McNish is not going anywhere, the racing’s format and intensity is just too good: “We’ve won and lost races by seconds after driving multiple grand prix distances at just one event. There’s no waiting for somebody to drop out or a problem to happen, because of the reliability they don’t. You’ve got to grab a hold of these races and these cars, and drive the wheels off them. It’s the only way. The only way for success. “Its part of the reason I love it – there’s no hiding place,” he said. Something the sport’s best kept secret may find out itself before too long. Le Mans Series Motor sport Giles Richards guardian.co.uk
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Tanzania condemned for planned road, which critics say will be disaster for environment and ecosystem International pressure is growing on the Tanzanian government to shelve its controversial plans to build a two-lane highway across the Serengeti, one of the most important wildlife sites in the world. Scientists claim that the road will slice directly across the annual migration route of 1.5m wildebeest, effectively destroying the life cycle of the species and bringing the ecosystem of the national park crashing down with it. Amid growing anger from conservationists, scientists, tourists and holiday companies, the German government said last week that it would put money into an alternative route, looking at building new roads in areas bordering the Serengeti on the eastern and western boundaries without crossing the actual park. Germany also indicated this weekend that it would favour financing an international feasibility study for a southern bypass around the national park. So far the Tanzanian government has made no response. The wildebeest migration is one of the greatest wildlife shows on Earth, accompanied by tens of thousands of gazelles and zebras and their outriders, predators that include lions and hyenas. The herds go on an annual 500km round trip from the southern Serengeti to the northern edge of the Masai Mara in Kenya. The proposed road is planned for the northern part of the Serengeti, linking the Lake Victoria area with eastern Tanzania. Environmentalists are damning about the project, which they say will establish a damaging precedent, implying that Africa’s ecological and wildlife assets are up for grabs. Andrew Dobson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, led 27 wildlife experts who signed a letter to the government, begging it to reconsider the road. “Not only would we lose huge numbers of wildebeest who would simply die out, there would be the knock-on carbon effect,” he said. “The Serengeti is the biggest carbon sink on the planet and if the wildebeest go, the grass burns and we have a second environmental blow. The Serengeti is the world’s best studied ecosystem… economically, ethically and environmentally, this mustn’t happen.” The German move comes after the World Bank also intervened to offer the Tanzanian government help in financing an alternative route. In a letter to President Jakaya Kikwete, a leading American Serengeti expert, John Adams, urged him to accept the offer or risk losing western aid. He said that other environmentally unfriendly projects being pursued by Tanzania, such as an extraction plant at Lake Natron in Arusha that threatens the lake’s flamingo population, risk alienating the international community. “Foreign aid relies on goodwill and is less likely if Tanzania is damaging its secure revenue base in tourism,” he wrote, adding: “The proposed road would deny millions of animals the right to migrate to water and at the same time the Tanzanian government is asking for aid due to water shortage.” But to date, Kikwete has insisted that plans for the $480m (£300m) Arusha-Musoma road remain on course. The migration, which begins in April, when the wildebeest start to leave the depleted grasslands of the southern Serengeti, attracts tens of millions of tourist pounds. A road will not only force the animals to overgraze in the south, leading to the dramatic reduction in the sizes of the herds, but also allow in invasive species and lead to greater poaching. The Tanzanian Minister for Natural Resources, Shamsa Mwangunga, has made it clear that the road was a campaign promise made by Kikwete in 2005 that the administration is determined to carry out. She said the main reason was to help the country’s people, whose only present option to get across the country is a 418km route that skirts around the southern end of the national park. The route is expected to carry 800 vehicles a day, mostly trucks, by 2015, and 3,000 vehicles a day – an average of one every 30 seconds – by 2035. “Those criticising the road know nothing about what we’ve planned,” she said. “We’re all keen to preserve our natural resource. We’ll never compromise on that.” She said the road would not affect wildlife migration patterns because a 40-mile stretch would be left unpaved. David Blanton, co-director of Serengeti Watch, said the road will be “the beginning of the end” for the Serengeti: “The government is saying the highway is going to be a dirt road, but on the soft soil that’s there, a dirt road won’t work. It will have to be paved and fenced off because there will be a lot of collisions with wildlife.” This month a coalition of Tanzanian organisations petitioned the government to reconsider. The Mazingira Network said the road would compromise the ecological integrity of the park. “Direct, indirect and cumulative impacts… to the ecology would be significant,” said its chairman Zuberi Mwachula. He said the scientific consensus was that if constructed the road would, in a matter of decades, destroy the wildlife migration routes. Many Tanzanians are especially worried about their government squandering the legacy of the country’s first president, Julius Nyerere, who said: “In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare we will do everything in our power to make sure our children’s grandchildren will be able to enjoy this rich and precious inheritance.” Conservationist Richard Leakey has weighed in, pointing out that the road is intended to allow the towns it links to grow. “A dirt track may suffice today, the populations of these towns are only about half a million people each. Projecting forwards, say 50 years, and thanks to the new roads these towns will become cities of three to four million people each. The Tanzanians should not be assessing the impact of a narrow strip of road as we envision it today; it will not be a narrow strip in 30 or 40 years. A railway line will parallel it, and there will probably be a six-lane highway in each direction. This, for certain, will kill the migration.” Two alternative routes have been proposed that would allow the movement of trade to western Tanzania by going south of the Serengeti and north into Kenya, both are longer and more expensive construction projects and would mean an election promise broken to the tribes of the northern Serengeti. Leakey even suggested a raised road, elevated as it crosses the Serengeti so that the animals could move freely below it. But the cost and upkeep implications are huge for the economy of any African state. “It is a responsibility of the Tanzanian government to play it’s role in protecting the countries natural resource asset base for future generations, and by deliberately taking an action that could degrade one of the great spectacles of wildlife on the planet is a very heavy responsibility,” he said. Unesco, which lists the Serengeti as a World Heritage Site, has also warned against the road. “In terms of potential environmental deterioration, the damage to the park by the north road could be severe enough as to prompt inscription of the site on the List of World Heritage in Danger,” it stated.But internal pressures on the Tanzanian government could still prove too strong. People in the north Serengeti have been promised a road and developing countries need good transport links to survive. Dobson said: “The ecological reasons are insurmountable, but if you ever want to know why an illogical decision is being taken, look to politics.” Tanzania Wildlife Tracy McVeigh guardian.co.uk
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Dedicated teacher Leonora Rustamova wrote a book to engage five teenage rebels in her class. But after it went up on a website she was dismissed, a decision that was upheld at a tribunal For the five teenage “unteachables” in the class, sitting still was a challenge, never mind reading. But when their teacher, Leonora Rustamova , began to write her own stories, based on them and a fictional account of their lives, they were gripped. She wrote what quickly became a book in her own time, at weekends and on holidays, and promised to read them a chapter every Friday afternoon if they got through a week without any of them being excluded. The work “Miss Rusty” was doing to engage troubled and school-phobic 16-year-olds first gained her a promotion. Then dismissal. After 11 years as a teacher at Calder high school in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire, Rustamova was sacked when the book was made available on the internet, a decision upheld by an industrial tribunal in Leeds that threw out her claim for unfair dismissal by a majority decision of two to one. “It was baffling, utterly baffling. I still feel as though I am in some kind of dual reality,” she told the Observer . As a leaving present for her pupils, and with the approval of the headteacher, Rustamova, 40, had several copies of the book, Stop! Don’t Read This! , printed, using an online publishing website. The boys and their families were delighted; one parent told her it was the first book her son had read to the end. “It boosted their self-esteem; it engaged them. We were having conversations and discussions,” said Rustamova. “For a group of boys like this, that was incredible. I thought it would be a lovely gesture to have it printed for when they left school.” The school’s headteacher, Stephen Ball, who had at first described the project as a “triumph”, wrote her a note after reading the first four chapters that stated: “You’ve done a superb job with this. Let me know if I can help.” He told her he was extremely pleased with the work she had done in interesting alienated and difficult teenagers in literacy. Rustamova’s husband, Denis, had used a publishing website to have the book electronically formatted and for several months Stop! Don’t Read This was freely available as a download. It was that availability that led Ball to call an unsuspecting Rustamova into his office in January 2008, formally suspend her and have her escorted from the building. “I had no idea about the internet website so I rang my husband to get him to get it taken down and I just sat in the car park staring at the school. In all the time I had been at the school no teacher had been suspended. I was just dazed,” she said. “I thought the headteacher would smooth it all over with whoever had made the complaint and things would be back to
Continue reading …Ed Schultz Reveals His Inner Warmonger, Trumpets Obama’s Decision to ‘Invade’ Libya
March 26, 2011 No Comment
To tweak the punchline of an old joke — what's this talk of invading, Paleface? Unleashing the bellicosity that's been kept corked since MSNBC put the kibosh on his “Psycho Talk” segments, Ed Schultz has weighed in at The Huffington Post in an op-ed titled “Why I Support President Obama's Decision to Invade Libya.” Psst, Ed — we haven't invaded Libya , at least not yet. And I'd venture to say that most Americans don't expect we will, at least if Obama is to be believed. Remember how he said American troops would not be sent there? The president was pretty emphatic about it, as I recall. Agreed, it was all of eight days ago, distant enough that it slipped down your memory hole. What's most amusing about Schultz as shill for Obama's exercise in foreign-policy resume building is that Schultz vilified Sen. John McCain during the 2008 campaign as a “warmonger.” It brought considerable attention to Schultz at the time, which was surely his motivation for saying it, and Schultz has repeated it ad nauseum ever since. Now Schultz is gushing about actions taken by Obama that are indistinguishable from those that President McCain would have taken. Correction — this isn't amusing. It's pathetic. Schultz writes at HuffPo that after nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and eight years in Iraq, “I think many of us have war fatigue. I think we all deserve clarity on this issue. However, it's important to note, President Obama explained this won't be a long-term operation. Matter of days, not a matter of weeks. Not even months.” Obama, and Schultz, believing this based on the confident expectation that wars always go according to plan. Republicans, Schultz writes, “are hammering the president not because he is not invading the entire Middle East, but because he's not doing it the way they would want to do it.'” (italics in original). Wow, talk about getting tied up in nots. As for those shadowy Republicans who want to invade “the entire Middle East” — insert frantic Maddow hand-waving here — Schultz cites exactly none. “This president, President Obama, has made his choice,” Schultz writes. “And it is his leadership. He inherited Iraq. He inherited Afghanistan. And now, he has made a decision to invade Libya.” Enough with the hand-me-downs, he wants his own splendid little war.
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The designer on restrive jeans, transformative make-up, and high-waisted trousers 1) I created my first collection at 14. Bottle-green brocade trousers – like
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Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. As iPad 2 launches, Charles Arthur looks at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology, and five users tell us about how the iPad is feeding into the way they work A friend recently went to a business meeting. He prepared by pulling his laptop out of his bag. All of the clients responded by taking their iPads out of their briefcases. These were not gadget freaks or latte-quaffing Hoxton-based web designers, as some imagine iPad users to be. They were a large group of senior civil servants and bankers, in a country well beyond Europe and the US. To them, the iPad wasn’t a status symbol; it was a device they had chosen to use because it enhanced their ability to do their job. A year on from its arrival, and with the faster, thinner, second-generation model released in the UK on 25 March , Apple’s iPad tablet computer still divides opinion. A large group of people insist it is an “overpriced toy” with limited functionality – no keyboard, doesn’t run Microsoft Office, can’t play Flash video, can’t expand its storage. But a growing number believe that, on the contrary, the iPad represents a new frontier in computing. And they simply don’t care what the first group thinks. They’re getting on with using their machines. We have lived with the PC paradigm for around 30 years now, since IBM introduced its first personal computers and pushed them into businesses in the early 80s. Until the launch of the iPad last year the only comparable change in the market had been the laptop, which led to the emergence of an army of travelling salespeople whose most urgent need was always to find a power point where they could charge their machine’s fading battery. The iPad seems to be different – a third stage of computing. Horace Dediu, a former analyst with the mobile phone company Nokia who now runs his own consultancy, Asymco , argues that “the definition of a new generation of computing is that the new products rely on new input and output methods, and allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply”. That certainly sounds like the iPad. It shows that it is possible to have something that does all the computing functions you want with a big screen that also has long battery life and weighs almost nothing, certainly compared to a laptop. It is portable and durable, and the touch screen adds another dimension. Though it has the most prominent tablet in the market, Apple isn’t the only player (see its rivals assessed below). Dozens of companies are using Google’s free Android software to power tablets, and Google is helping them along with a custom version called “Honeycomb” , designed for iPad-sized Android tablets. An estimated 17 million tablets – from Apple and others – were sold in 2010 , and that number is likely to keep growing. But is it really changing the way we work? We interviewed a range of people in different professions to see whether the iPad is all hype – or whether in future we will all keep taking the tablets. CA Margaret Manning – businesswoman Margaret Manning first realised that her iPad was going to change how she worked when she was in hospital, recovering from a minor operation, about a month after buying it. “I realised I could comfortably do emails, download a book to read, watch a film, whatever,” she says. “There’s no other device that you can do that with. You certainly can’t read with a laptop in bed.” Manning, 50, is the founder and chief executive of Reading Room, a London-based web development agency employing 170 people. She takes the iPad with her to client meetings and presentations: “It’s got a wow factor,” she says. “I did a presentation that I ran off it, and all the people in the room went, ‘Ooh’,” she recalls, adding: “They were all bankers.” To Manning, the iPad’s chief virtue is its versatility. She can carry it in her bag to go to clients, check work emails in a coffee shop or train, and then take it to a bar later and kill some time playing a game. It’s become her laptop, TV screen, iPod and iPhone. “It’s adaptive to today’s digital age. You can create and consume content in a different way.” Key to that is the screen size. “The iPhone was a step towards this, but the format is vital. This allows businesses to start using it in a way they couldn’t with the iPhone.” She cites an app that Reading Room has developed for Grains Research Development Corporation in Australia which lets farmers examine crops for disease by comparing them, in the field, to pictures on the iPad. That could be done on a laptop – but it would be cumbersome compared to doing it on the handheld screen. She revels in the simplicity of the interface, and says battery life is key: “If it was shorter, that would change the relationship. If I had to travel with plugs and extra batteries that would change things. The iPhone’s battery life is too short – it hacks me off.” Are there any drawbacks? “There are two things that it doesn’t do well: the keyboard – if I travel with it, I have to take a lightweight keypad – and voice calls. You can use Skype [the free internet voice call service], but not everybody has Skype, and I can’t use it to call a client. ” CA Frasier Speirs – teacher “Nobody has lost a file for a year now,” says Fraser Speirs. “Which used to happen every week – someone coming along and saying they couldn’t find where they’d saved some work or other.” Speirs teaches computing studies at the private Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, and is also the IT co-ordinator there. Last year he went to his bosses with a radical plan: equip every one of the children in both the primary and secondary schools with an iPad. And not just for computing studies: for every lesson. Speirs wants them to replace textbooks, though he admits that is still some way off. But the iPads, with their simplified approach to filing (you can’t choose where to save a file), have made at least part of his life much simpler. The lack of a keyboard wasn’t an issue. “The problem with laptops in the classroom is the battery life, and the size and weight. When Apple said that it would last for 10 hours, and we realised it actually did, that was really important. And the size and weight matters too for younger children.” The primary pupils only use them in school; secondary pupils can take them home. And teachers have them too, which has changed their view of computing. Speirs thinks it is time to reconsider how and what we teach children in an internet-connected world. “Previously, we taught technology just for business needs – Excel, PowerPoint. But now technology is there to assist learning. What do we teach, when you can look up facts in two seconds flat? The answer I think is much more about challenge-based learning, where you give the pupils a high-level goal, and have the teacher support them in achieving it.” But what happens when those children leave school and encounter laptops and even desktops in businesses? Speirs isn’t worried for them. Children starting at Cedars now will graduate in 2024, he points out – and any company still using desktops by then will be hopelessly behind the curve. CA Richard Bowman – physicist Will the iPad soon become a fixture in science labs alongside Bunsen burners, microscopes and graduated cylinders? Richard Bowman, a 24-year-old physicist doing his PhD at the University of Glasgow, reckons so. His field is optics, and in partnership with colleagues at the University of Bristol he recently developed an app that allows users to manipulate microscopic objects simply by touching the iPad’s screen. Before iTweezers, Bowman employed a desktop computer and a mouse to control optical tweezers, an instrument that traps and moves microscopic particles using laser beams. Now, he does it all on his iPad. “It’s quite a natural interface,” he says. “It’s like you’re touching the actual particle and pushing it around. We can also move particles up and down with the pinch gesture, which is hard to do with a mouse.” It may be some time before iTweezers appears on the market – “there are loads of intellectual property issues” – but Bowman has already had interest from scientists in various fields, including chemists at Glasgow University who are using it in experiments with crystals. In the meantime, he’s developing a more commercially viable iPad app called LabVIEW with his colleagues in Bristol: “It puts virtual dials and sliders on the screen to let you control your experiments in the lab”. One serious limitation of the iPad, according to Bowman, is that “Apple are quite restrictive in what they’ll allow to run on it. You have to register as an Apple developer and use their tools to do things.” But, he adds, “I think the iPad is definitely here to stay – its capabilities are increasing all the time – and multi-touch interfaces definitely are the future. If you can control several things at once, it means you can interact with your experiment better, it can happen faster, and you can do things that you couldn’t do before.” KF David Kassan – painter When David Kassan bought an iPad last spring, his intention was to use it simply as a portfolio to show to prospective clients in the art world. Kassan, 34, is a Brooklyn-based artist who paints “really realistic lifesize figures” using oils on wood panel, and the iPad, he says, is “like a perfect art portfolio. You can adjust the colours, it’s a cool thing to hold, and it’s easier to update than a printout. That’s the reason I got it.” But on a trip to Europe last summer, Kassan started messing around with the ultra-basic Brushes app on his iPad. “I sketched people in subways and airports, and did studies of paintings in museums. I started using it as a completely portable, full-colour sketchbook. It meant I didn’t have to bring watercolours or an easel with me. I could just slide it out of my bag and start using it.” Now he finds himself painting much more when out and about. “I’m an observer of everything – that’s my job – and the iPad is a great tool to see things around me and be able to record them so that my eye gets keener. Also, if I’m in a museum I can do a study of the colour of a painting, not just the drawing and compositional aspects, which is all I’d really get to understand with pencil and paper.” Kassan believes that the device has improved his “real painting”, but does this mean that the paintings he does on the iPad will never qualify as “real”? Actually, he says, “I’m working on a piece right now, a lifesize head that I’m trying to do exactly like my real paintings.” Using a more advanced app called Artrage and a Nomad touch-screen paintbrush, he hopes “to make it as realistic as possible, print it up and sign it. I thought I might put it in my next solo show in October to see what it’ll sell for.” KF Richie Hawtin – musician/ DJ Early last year, the DJ and producer Richie Hawtin was putting together a live show to mark 20 years of Plastikman, the most prominent of his many musical alter egos. Due to its scope, the show posed a considerable challenge to the British-born techno megastar. “When you do an electronic performance, traditionally you have a mixing board with all these knobs and faders to create the sound,” he explains. “For this show, each song called for a whole different set of knobs and faders.” What Hawtin needed, in order to control all those diverse environments at once, was a touch-screen device. The iPad came out in April. Within two months, Hawtin and his team had integrated it into the Plastikman performances. Six months later, they formed a company, Liine [www.liine.net] , to turn the apps they’d developed into commercial products. One of these apps, Griid, “allows you to navigate a musical environment that would be hundreds of screens deep if you were trying to look at it on a normal laptop. With your hand movements you can zoom from left to right, find the instrument and the melody that you want, and start, stop or modify it with a quick touch.” Another app, Kapture, “allows you to take snapshots of different states of your performance. If something amazing comes together, you can capture that moment just by touching the screen, and return to it later. Then you can then morph all these moments of the show together.” Both apps interface with the popular Ableton Live sequencing software and can be used in the studio as well as onstage. Harnessing touch-screen technology, Hawtin says, is like “following a dark path with a torch and stumbling upon new techniques. The show has evolved into something that we didn’t even realise was possible.” Being able to use both hands on a screen, rather than being tethered to a mouse and keyboard, “transfers a bit more of your spirit into the technology you’re using”. Ever the restless techno-pioneer, Hawtin is now looking forward to future devices “that can sense not only left or right movements but how much pressure you’re applying to the screen. That, as far as musicians like me are concerned, will be the next huge development.” KF iPad Tablet computers Android Apple Apps Computing iPod iPhone Google Charles Arthur Killian Fox guardian.co.uk
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Tiger, Tiger, the graphic account of an abused child’s relationship with a 51-year-old paedophile, is already being hyped as the most controversial book of the year. A writer, a psychologist and a survivor give their verdict The critic – Rachel Cooke Picture a seven-year-old girl. She is called Margaux. She likes ice-cream and gum balls, though only red ones. She dislikes puzzles and the scary-looking jokers in a pack of cards, which she insists be removed before any game is played. Now picture her lover, Peter. Yes, you read that right. Her lover. He is 51 years old, and a self-taught locksmith. He has limp, grey hair, cut in a bowl, and a collection of exotic pets. One of these pets is a cayman, “part alligator, part crocodile”. The cayman, living in captivity in the oppressive fug of Peter’s apartment, is tiny, just half the size of Margaux’s arm. But his owner likes him that way. For Peter, small is beautiful. He would like Margaux to stay small, too. Her birthdays make him more than usually tearful, for they remind him – as if he needed reminding – that she is rapidly approaching the end of what they both think of as her “nymphdom”. If you want to know more about Margaux and Peter’s 15-year relationship – conducted in full view of a number of perfectly sentient adults, it ended only when Peter killed himself by jumping off a cliff – then you should head out to your local bookstore and reserve a copy of Tiger, Tiger , surely the most hyped memoir that 2011 is likely to produce (already sold to 20 countries, this is a book, its publisher insists, which “has to be talked about”). But, first, have a think. How much more do you want to know? Or, to put it another way, how much more can you take? There is plenty to unsettle and upset in Tiger, Tiger , not least those sentient adults, seemingly complicit in Peter’s crimes in the interests of an easy life. But the most troubling thing by far is the attitude of its author, Margaux Fragoso, who is determined to spare us absolutely nothing, and so details not only every dubious “tickling game”, but also such things as the way Peter’s penis looks, his fondness for frottage, and the reasons why they were never able to enjoy full intercourse. Is this, as some American critics have politely suggested, a sign of her great survivor bravery? I’m not sure. It felt as blank as pornography to me – and the more it went on, the more convinced I was that only a voyeur or a pervert could admire it. Can Fragoso write? Yes. But not so well that you would read her for her style alone. Inevitably, I’ve already heard Tiger, Tiger described as “Lolita, from Lolita’s point of view”. But this is lazy. When Margaux and Peter read Nabokov’s novel together, he is upset that “Lolita didn’t really love Humbert”, a reaction that convinces poor Margaux she can be the best “nymph” ever, as loving as she is loved. Why does she need this love? Because she is otherwise entirely without affection. The book is set in Union City, New Jersey, where Margaux lives with a mother who is mentally ill and a father who is distant and furious, and it is this home life – brutal and mean – that drives her into Peter’s arms. She sees him at the swimming pool, splashing around, and asks if she can join in. Thereafter, she is smitten. He is so kind. A curious man-child who at first asks very little from her – even later, his line when it comes to sexual favours is “only if you want to, sweetheart” – Peter tunes into her likes and dislikes with exquisite enthusiasm, with the result that she comes to see him as a soul mate. The unwavering laser of his attention makes her feel wanted and alive. In a prologue to her story, the adult Margaux writes that spending time with a paedophile “can be like a drug high”. In her own case, it was a drug she was unable to give up. All this is beautifully done: a dark door unlocked with the snugly fitting key of experience. But still, something salacious lurks here, too. Why did Fragoso include such graphic intimacies? It seems to me that there are only two possibilities. Either the post-traumatic stress disorder she describes in an afterword has left her so numb, so utterly anaesthetised, that a part of her is still unable to grasp what adult-child sex means in the real world – in which case, a kindly editor should have stepped in and saved her from herself. Or, she knows exactly what she is doing, and a part of her relishes these passages: their power to horrify and, perhaps, their power to thrill, to shift books. Naturally, I am unable to judge her on this score. But reading her memoir made me feel exploitative, prurient and sometimes rather sick. Is this cowardice on my part? No. Contrary to what Fragoso’s supporters seem to believe, a desire not to have certain images imprinted on your mind isn’t at all the same thing as burying your head in the sand and hoping that child abuse will simply go away. The psychologist – Oliver James I will be surprised if many readers of this book enjoy it, find it enlightening or recommend it to their friends. That is not because of the sexual explicitness. Exaggerated by publicity-seeking publishers, the intimate details should not disgust or trouble most adults, although there is more information than we need (Nabokov’s restraint in this area remains the standard for how much is required for us to get the gist). No, the difficulty is really that Fragoso has simply not created a memoir which is compelling to read or contains any deeper message (and I suspect it would have been the same had she told the same tale as fiction). The main emotions it evokes are depression and, occasionally, the feeling of being the voyeur of a lot of domestic nastiness. A brief afterword offers this justification for the book: “By setting down the memories I’ve worked to break the old, deeply rooted patterns of suffering and abuse that have dogged my family through the generations.” Doubtless this is sincerely meant. It might be that she was also impelled by a desire to launch a literary career through a shocking idea: that a vulnerable, emotionally needy girl could feel love (though not sexual desire) for a man who sexually exploited her for a decade from the age of seven. Unfortunately, that is all she offers, a no-holds-barred account of the relationship. In writing books for the public, it is not enough to just make others feel as depressed or empty as you. This is a sorry tale which just makes you feel… sorry. If her motive truly was to break destructive patterns, good luck to her, I hope she succeeded. By all means write it out for herself. Why do we need to hear the story? The model for how to convert the lead of horrendous maltreatment into the gold of valuable literature is Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose books, the final volume of which, At Last ), is eagerly awaited in May. Its central character, Patrick Melrose, was abused by his father, a man of appalling sadism and some psychopathy. St Aubyn has stated that his father also abused him in real life. However, the books go far beyond this maltreatment, subtly exploring Melrose’s mother’s motives and confronting questions of importance to everyone. They show how all of us are either robotically reproducing or reacting against the care we received. Whether from affluent or poor homes, whether hideously mistreated or just averagely neglected, this is the human predicament. In a triumphant end to the books, St Aubyn provides a moving and optimistic basis for seeking real independent volition. By contrast, Fragoso offers us undigested fact. In being so frank, perhaps she feels relief. But she simply transfers the damaged feeling from herself to the reader. Of course it is a massive task to do anything else if you have been abused. As the Human Genome Project is proving, genes play little role in severe mental illness, and it is clear from this book that, at times, Fragoso was made schizophrenic by the abuse. There are 14 different studies showing that at least half of people diagnosed with this problem suffered abuse. On average, a woman who suffered it when young possesses 5% less of a crucial part of the brain for emotional regulation (the hippocampus) than an unabused woman. There are similar findings for maltreatment in the histories of people with personality disorder and depression. But whatever the form that the subsequent emotional distress takes, alas, just evoking it in others does not make for enlightening or readable books. If writing it all down helped Fragoso to break the cycle, great. But in needing to share it with us in this form, you cannot help feeling she still has much work to do on herself. Oliver James’s latest book, How Not to F*** Them Up is out in paperback The survivor – anon Why anyone would read Tiger, Tiger of their own volition is beyond me. When I was invited to review it I did what I think anyone would: shrink internally and shudder. Sexual abuse is a harrowing topic and, as a victim of it, my initial response was to feel culpable and apologetic for the book’s existence. I’ve never read about abuse before: it is something that happened to me that can’t be undone and the less I allow it to affect my life and to define who I am the more power I have over it. As I read it, clenched, I went through myriad emotions: outrage, repulsion, sadness, grief, empathy, anger. The only redemptive feeling it prompted was admiration for Fragoso’s unwavering candour: she is a talented writer and her memoir is executed without judgment or shame. But Fragoso’s portrayal of herself seems almost completely defined by Peter’s idolisation of her. I felt she was objectifying her child self in the descriptions of how imaginative she was and how conscious she was of her sensuality. That Peter has infected her self-image in this way sickened me more than the deeply disturbing graphic sexual content. At points in the narrative, I felt it was an affectionate commemoration of Peter and a startling study of Stockholm syndrome. Perhaps the most significant thing about it is that every adult in Margaux’s life is complicit in her abuse. By telling her story I do think, to some degree, she empowers victims of sexual abuse by forcing the world to bear witness. But who are these willing witnesses? Who is it written for? Herself, as a cathartic act of self-empowerment? Fellow victims? Paedophiles? Or those people with a morbid fascination for perverts? It is a truly horrible read. As Peter insinuates himself into Margaux’s affections, I was in the grip of suspense, awaiting the inevitable abuse of trust. And this is what I found distasteful – the sensationalism which will undoubtedly sell many copies. The real question is whether this book is necessary. Victims shed their victimhood by voicing their experience. I, too, write to cope but I want to create things of beauty that defy the ugliness of abuse. I’m pleased Fragoso has spun her flax into gold, but the cynic in me can’t help but feel it was, in part, published to capitalise on the inevitable controversy, thereby continuing the cycle of exploitation. Relationships Rachel Cooke Oliver James guardian.co.uk
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