The Guardian Weekly Podcast 2q3qj

How is society to look after the ever-growing number of people with dementia? A curiously uplifting care home near Amsterdam may have the answersJo Verhoeff twinkles; there's no other word for it. She bounces from her sofa beaming, and takes your hand. Welcome, she says. It's nice here; you'll like it. The people are friendly and there's so much to do: shopping, cooking, bingo, the classical music club.So it's a nice place to come and visit, once in a while. Jo comes quite often when she's not at work; she's a secretary in an office, you see, in Amsterdam. Lives with her parents in Diemen, not very far from the city. Her father's a bookkeeper.Except ... wait. She has a husband, hasn't she? And two children, still small. Darlings, both of them. How can that all work? Especially since – now she comes to think of it – she actually sleeps here, sometimes. Doesn't she? She certainly eats meals here; very tasty.But never mind. "You really must," says Jo, pushing this unwanted rush of apparently irreconcilable realities firmly to one side, "come and meet my family. All of them. They would love it, I'm sure. If you like, one day next week you can come to my house and have coffee. Would you like that?"I would, like that very much, I say. But it's not going to happen, of course. Jo Verhoeff is 86. Her husband died a decade ago; her parents many years earlier. The kids are getting on a bit themselves now. Jo is confused. This is where she lives; doctors have diagnosed her as suffering from severe dementia. But like most of the residents at this curiously uplifting Dutch care home, she seems remarkably serene. In fact, she seems happy.Dementia is widely acknowledged to be one of the most pressing problems facing health and social care systems. A report published this year by the World Health Organisation predicted that a continually ageing population in the developed world would mean the number of people with the condition was likely to double, to more than 65 million, by 2030, and treble 20 years later.In Britain, an Oxford University study puts the number of people with dementia at more than 800,000, rising to more than 1 million by 2025. We spend £23bn a year on caring for the condition in this country, double the sum we spend on cancer and three times that on heart disease. A quarter of UK hospital beds are now occupied by people with the condition.In March David Cameron talked of a "national crisis". As we live longer, and more and more of us develop the degenerative brain illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, which are the most common cause of the condition, how society cares for people with dementia, he said, has become "one of the greatest challenges of our time".Over the past few months, experts from around the world – , the US, Australia, soon Britain – have been flocking to the unassuming small Dutch town of Weesp, half an hour south-east of Amsterdam, to see how one pioneering institution is dealing with that challenge. Hogewey, where Jo Verhoeff lives, has developed an innovative, humane and apparently affordable way of caring for people with dementia."What happened," says Isabel van Zuthem, Hogewey's information officer, sitting at a cafe table on the home's wide and welcoming piazza, an ornamental fountain playing behind her, "is that back in 1992, when this was still a traditional nursing home for people with dementia – you know: six storeys, anonymous wards, locked doors, crowded dayrooms, non-stop TV, central kitchen, nurses in white coats, heavy medication – two of the staff who worked here unexpectedly lost their mothers."Each said to the other: Well, at least it happened quickly, and they didn't end up here; this place is so horrible. Then they realised what they'd just said, and started to think: what kind of home would we like for a relative with dementia? Where might we want to live, maybe, one day? How would we like our life to be; what would we hope to experience?"The answer turns out to be this smart, low, brick-built complex, completed in early 2010. A compact, self-contained model village on a four-acre site on the outskirts of town, half of it is open space: wide boulevards, cosy side-streets, squares, sheltered courtyards, well-tended gardens with ponds, reeds and a profusion of wild flowers. The rest is neat, two-storey, brick-built houses, as well as a cafe, restaurant, theatre, minimarket and hairdressing salon.Hogewey's 152 residents – never, warns Van Zuthem, "patients" – have all been classified by the Dutch NHS as suffering from severe or extreme dementia. Averaging 83 years of age, they are cared for by 250-odd full- and part-time staff (most of them qualified healthcare workers, the rest given special training), plus local volunteers. They live, six or seven to a house, plus one or two carers, in 23 different homes. Residents have their own spacious bedroom, but share the kitchen, lounge and dining room.Two core principles governed Hogewey's award-winning design and inform the care that's given here, says Van Zuthem. First, it aims to relieve the anxiety, confusion and often considerable anger that people with dementia can feel by providing an environment that is safe, familiar and human; an almost-normal home where people are surrounded by things they recognise and by other people with backgrounds, interests and values similar to their own. Second, "maximising the quality of people's lives. Keeping everyone active. Focusing on everything they can still do, rather than everything they can't. Because when you have dementia, you're ill, but there may really not be much else wrong with you."So Hogewey has 25 clubs, from folksong to baking, literature to bingo, painting to cycling. It also encourages residents to keep up the day-to-day tasks they have always done: gardening, shopping, peeling potatoes, shelling the peas, doing the washing, folding the laundry, going to the hairdresser, popping to the cafe. "Those small, everyday acts are just vital," says Van Zuthem. "They stimulate; give people the feeling they still have a life."The homes belong to seven different "lifestyle categories": not periods frozen in time, such as the 50s or 60s, but more moods evoked through choice of furnishing, decoration, music, even food. One is gooise, or Dutch upper class – all ornate chandeliers, lace tablecloths, fine dark reproduction furniture, and a kitchen discreetly concealed behind a screen; here, says Isabel, "the carers behave like servants. Many of the people who are here will have had a maid."Here, too, is Johan Jacobs, resplendent in freshly ironed pink shirt, navy tros and polished loafers, sprawled in a damask-upholstered armchair, grinning. He is, he says, "a businessman, from Amsterdam. Buying and selling." What sort of stuff? "Oh, lots." In Hogewey, he appreciates "the classical music club. And dancing". He winks. You've lost none of your salesman's charm, I remark: "Not for the ladies, certainly," he shoots back.Across the courtyard is a house in ambachtelijke style, for people who were once in trades and crafts: farmers, plumbers, carpenters. The furniture is heavier, the curtains darker, the decor simpler. Huiselijke is for homemakers: neat, spotlessly clean, walls hung with wooden display cabinets for dozens of brass and porcelain ornaments.Toos Borst, also in her 80s, isn't sure she lives here: "Do I? I don't know really. It's very nice, though I'd really prefer to be home, in Wateringen. You know it? Near the Hague. My mother's there. My father has gone, sadly. He had his own business; don't what exactly, but it was his. Here are pictures, look: my great-grandchildren."Outside in the sunshine, residents sit at garden tables in front of their houses eating ice-cream. Washing hangs on a line. No doors – apart from the main entrance, with its hotel-like reception area – are locked in Hogewey; there are no cars or buses to worry about (just the occasional, sometimes rather erratically-ridden, bicycle) and residents are free to wander where they choose and visit whom they please. There's always someone to lead them home if needed.Across the square with its boules and giant chess set, others are gathered round an old-fashioned sweet stall, sucking on humbugs and liquorice bonbons and swaying to traditional Dutch oompah music from the 1950s. "They did it themselves," says Marjolijn de Visser, a cheery young careworker in jeans and T-shirt, pointing to the brightly-painted shutters on the stall."It's really important that residents feel they're contributing, doing absolutely as much as they feel able. And the sweets ... Well, they may summon up a few memories. Take them back a bit." Bang on cue, an elderly gentleman, Mr Stomps, inches past, pausing to pop a butterscotch in his mouth. "Lekker!" he exclaims, delighted. "Delicious! Exceptionally good."In the hairdressing and beauty salon, Ingrid Scheermeijer is finishing off a perm. "They do sometimes get a bit confused," she says. "Forget where they are, you know, try to leave. And you often have to explain what you're doing every five minutes. They just drift ... But the upside of it is, you don't need to bother with any of the normal boring salon chat. And you should see their faces when they look at themselves in the mirror aftewards. So happy."Other houses are designated christelijke, for the more religious residents; culturele, for those who enjoy art, music, theatre (and, says Van Zuthem, "getting up late in the morning"); and indische, for residents from the former colony of Indonesia (rattan furniture, Indonesian stick puppets on the walls, heating two degrees higher in winter, and authentic cuisine).Last comes urban, for residents who once led a somewhat livelier lifestyle: contemporary Scandinavian-style furniture, Do the Locomotion on the stereo. Here Theo Visser, who used to run his own road haulage business, is sitting playing cards with his wife Corrie, 79; he travels eight miles from Naarden to visit her every day."We've been married 57 years," says Theo. "She looked after me all that time; it's the least I could do." Hogewey, Visser says, is "unique. The people here keep their independence, as much as they can have of it, and they stay active. Here they still have a life. It's not the sort of slow, quiet death you get in other places. Here everyone feels at home."By the time Hogewey was finished, it had cost ¤19.3m (£15.1m). The Dutch state funded ¤17.8m, and the rest came from sponsors and local fundraising. The home is proud of its relationship with the community, says Eloy van Hal, the facility manager, in his office behind the reception area: anyone can come and eat in the restaurant, local artists hold displays of their work in the gallery, schools use the theatre, businesses hire assorted rooms for client presentations.Nor is the cost per resident of this radically different approach to dementia care much higher than most regular care homes in Britain: ¤5,000 a month, paid directly to Hogewey by the Dutch public health insurance scheme, to which every Dutch taxpayer contributes through their social security deductions. Some residents also pay a means-tested sum to their insurer. There is a very long waiting list.Hogewey was, in its early days, dubbed a Truman Show for the elderly and sick, after the Jim Carrey film in which reality turned out to be the set of an elaborate TV show. The home is, its Van Hal, "not completely normal. We pretend it is, but ultimately it is a nursing home, and these are people with severe dementia. Sometimes the illusion falls down; they'll try to pay at the hairdresser's, and realise they have no money, and become confused."We can still do more. But in general, I think we get pretty close to normal. You don't see people lying in their beds here. They're up and about, doing things. They're fitter. And they take less medication. I think maybe we've shown that even if it is cheaper to build the kind of care home neither you or I would ever want to live in, the kind of place where we've looked after people with dementia for the past 30 years or more, we perhaps shouldn't be doing that any more."Across the piazza, in the warmly lit, wood-led cafe, careworker Helene Westerink is leading 30-odd residents in the weekly classical music club. Slowly, as Strauss, Offenbach and Beethoven fill the room, white-haired heads lift off chests, eyes brighten, feet tap, hands start to clap. Joe Jacob smiles delightedly as he recognises the can-can.Now Mary-Ann van den Brug's fingers are playing Für Elise on an imaginary keyboard; she once taught at the conservatory. Another resident conducts the Blue Danube; a third starts tapping her teaspoon against her saucer in time to the Radetsky March. "There's one woman here," says Westerink, "who hasn't spoken for years. But she sings along to all these tunes. You know, sometimes it's not just the residents who feel good about being here."DementiaMental healthNetherlandsAlzheimer'sHealthEuropeSocial careJon Henleyguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Exclusive: Extension of surveillance powers 'a destruction of human rights'The government's controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped.Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state's surveillance powers would be a "destruction of human rights" and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials. In an interview with the Guardian, Berners-Lee said: "The amount of control you have over somebody if you can monitor internet activity is amazing."You get to know every detail, you get to know, in a way, more intimate details about their life than any person that they talk to because often people will confide in the internet as they find their way through medical websites … or as an adolescent finds their way through a website about homosexuality, wondering what they are and whether they should talk to people about it."The British computer engineer, who devised the system that allows the creation of websites and links, said that of all the recent developments on the internet, it was moves by governments to control or spy on the internet that "keep me up most at night".The government ran into a storm of criticism earlier this month when it emerged that it was planning to allow GCHQ to monitor all communication on social media, Skype calls and email communication as well as logging every site visited by internet s in Britain.Berners-Lee said: "The idea that we should routinely record information about people is obviously very dangerous. It means that there will be information around which could be stolen, which can be acquired through corrupt officials or corrupt operators, and [could be] used, for example, to blackmail people in the government or people in the military. We open ourselves out, if we store this information, to it being abused."He said that if the government believed it was essential to collect this kind of sensitive data about individuals, it would have to establish a "very strong independent body" which would be able to investigate every use of the surveillance powers to establish whether the target did pose a threat, and whether the intrusion had produced valuable evidence.But he said that since the coalition had not spelled out an oversight regime, or how the data could be safely stored, "the most important thing to do is to stop the bill as it is at the moment".The intervention of the highly respected internet pioneer creates a headache for Theresa May, the home secretary, who has said she plans to press on with introducing the new measures after the Queen's speech next month, despite concerns raised by senior Liberal Democrats. It will add to the woes of ministers mired in damaging battles over unpopular policy proposals on several fronts.Berners-Lee was speaking to the Guardian as part of a week-long series on the battle for control of the internet, examining how states, companies and technological developments are challenging the principles of openness and universal access on which the net was built.Berners-Lee has been an outspoken defender of the "open internet", warning in 2010 that web freedom was under threat from the rise of social network "silos" such as Facebook, "closed world" apps such as those released by Apple, and governments' attempts to monitor people's online behaviour.He said he remained concerned about the creation of "strong monopolies" but believed it was unlikely that internet giants such as Facebook and Google would enjoy their dominance indefinitely. "The battle lines are being drawn and things are in a huge state of flux, so it's very difficult to tell, when you look at the world now, what it's going to look like in a few months' time."He said that throughout the history of the internet, people had been concerned about the emergence of apparently dominant giants, but they were vulnerable to smaller companies that could innovate more effectively.In a coded reference to predictions that Facebook could in soon become, in effect, for most people, the internet, he recalled a "wise" colleague who pointed out more than 20 years ago: "It's amazing how quickly people on the internet can pick something up, but it's also amazing how quickly they can drop it."Acknowledging growing concerns about online privacy, he said computer s received significant benefits from the vast amount of data that big web companies accumulate about them, but that increasingly they would seek to apply limits to how the data could be used, as well as demanding access to the data themselves.Although Google now allows s to obtain all the data it holds about them and Facebook provides a similar, slower service, individual s were not yet being allowed to exploit all the information relating to them to make their lives easier. Armed with the information that social networks and other web giants hold , he said, computers will be able to "help me run my life, to guess what I need next, to guess what I should read in the morning, because it will know not only what's happening out there but also what I've read already, and also what my mood is, and who I'm meeting later on".Berners-Lee said big web companies would come under more pressure to make personal data more available, and that s might insist that the information was not held by the companies themselves. "Perhaps what you'd want in the future is to have this piece of cloud storage and to say to somebody like ... Google: 'Look, don't store it on your site, store it here. I will control who gets access to it.' That would turn the tables and leave me in control of the data."He was worried by the rise of so-called "native apps" such as those produced for the iPhone and iPad, because they were not searchable. "Every time somebody puts a magazine on a phone now and doesn't put it on to a web app [a form of open software], we lose a whole lot of information to the general public discourse – I can't link to it, so I can't tweet it, I can't discuss it, I can't like it, I can't hate it."But he said the rapid improvement of web apps, and their ability to offer functionality and slickness previously only available from Apple or Android apps, would return more information to the open internet.In a clear dig at Apple's highly restrictive ecosystem, he said: "I should be able to pick which applications I use for managing my life, I should be able to pick which content I look at, and I should be able to pick which device I use, which company I use for supplying my internet, and I'd like those to be independent choices."Berners-Lee, who is speaking at the World Wide Web Conference in Lyon on Wednesday, also warned people against assuming that major websites and social networks would be around for ever. "I think we need to be more conscious that places that seem very secure may in the future disappear. The long-time persistence of all this data … is an issue for all of us if we think that maybe our grandchildren, depending on which website we use, may or may not be able to see our photos."• Explore the seven-day special series on the Battle for the internetTim Berners-LeePrivacyInternetSurveillanceFacebookConservativesSocial networkingIan Katzguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

In part three of our series, how the rise of app stores and social networks is making the way we use the net cleaner, easier and far more controllableIt was in May 2008 that Jonathan Zittrain first sounded the warning. While the argument was raging, as it is now, about censorship of the internet by governments seeking to control what their populations read – in countries such as China, India and Pakistan – the professor of cyberlaw at Oxford and Harvard universities had another concern: what if it were actually the gadgets we used that were in effect censoring the world that we could connect to, and the things we could do?Zittrain fretted that smartphones, which were just beginning to take off, might actually limit what s could do online compared with devices such as personal computers. Besides the obvious difference – a smartphone is light and can be slotted in a pocket; a personal computer is power-hungry and bulky – there's another subtle but essential difference. Personal computers are "generative": they can be programmed to do more than they were set up to. Smartphones, on the other hand, generally can't be programmed directly by the . For the most part, they're appliances, as limited in what they can do as a coffee maker.In his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain noted: "We care little about the devices we're using to access the net … we don't think of that as significant to its future the way we think of [direct censorship]."But does the rise of appliance-like smartphones – and more generally of "walled gardens" such as Facebook, Myspace and Google+ – presage an age where we simply cut ourselves off from uncomfortable truths online because our devices, or the sites we use, won't show them to us, like a North Korean radio made so it cannot be tuned to unauthorised sources?The question is urgent. Facebook has ed 845 million s, and smartphones are outselling PCs so quickly that in 2010 the research company Gartner forecast that as soon as next year mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common way to access the web, used by 1.82 billion people, compared with 1.78bn net-connected PCs.But answering it is complicated, says Dr Richard Clayton of Cambridge University's computer laboratory, who has extensively researched the censorship and oversight systems used by many countries and companies, including the UK and British Telecom's "CleanFeed" system, used to filter child pornography."Facebook can cause people to disappear from history, vaporising their pages and everything they wrote on your wall, as if they were never there," he points out. For Facebook, everything – every , every wall entry, every photo – is just an entry in a giant database, which can be removed at any time by someone with access to that database. (It could be you, or an .) The complication comes in trying to suggest that doing that or not doing that is "wrong"."Everybody applauds the idea that there shouldn't be an open space where paedophiles swap material," says Clayton. "Or where al-Qaida can swap material and recruit. And then it gets harder – you have Facebook groups where you have Muslims who want to march through Luton to protest about our activities in central Asia. Facebook has a rather fun arrangement so that they can set up groups like that, but they aren't visible in the UK [where they would count as hate speech]."So Facebook roots out what it considers against good taste, which (as Clayton points out) generally means content that would not be allowed under the US first amendment, since it is an American company. A guidebook for its moderation staff recently became public, revealing that images of breastfeeding would be banned if nipples were exposed, but deep flesh wounds and crushed heads would be OK.While such rules seem peculiar in Europe, almost to the extent of being the reverse of what is expected, Google has also demonstrated the same American prudishness on its Google+ social network, which insists on people using their real names.As San Francisco-based journalist-turned-venture capitalist MG Siegler discovered, the site banned him from using a photo with a rude gesture – an extended middle finger – for his profile; when Siegler reposted it, Google removed it again. The key to the problem: Google wanted to show Google+ profile pictures in search results, and if those included pictures that some might find offensive, Google could lose business.Censorship? Heavy-handed US-biased restriction? Or reasonable move to keep the web clean? Tom Anderson, the co-founder of Myspace, who was automatically everyone's friend when they first ed, wrote an open letter (on Google+) to Siegler, in which he said: "Every social network has the policy you're decrying, and why shouldn't they? It's a public sphere." He compared it to wearing a racist T-shirt in a shopping mall: "Security would probably ask you to leave." He added that it had been very difficult at Myspace to keep up with "offensive" photos; without that control, a social network "turns into a cesspool that no one wants to visit … sorta like Myspace was".But social networks played a big role in the Arab spring of 2011, with Facebook and Twitter both cited as key to getting the message out from oppressed groups. More recently, Syria has become the source of many important videos showing the suffering of citizens attacked by their own government. Those can be seen on YouTube – though not, of course, by citizens within Syria itself.The fears about "walled gardens" sometimes reflect concerns that are as much about business models as principles.Facebook does not let Google or any other site index the vast majority of its content; a tiny file called robots.txt on its homepage stops search engines from grabbing details of photos, feeds or other data. Only the most limited information can cross that wall – and that worries Google, which relies on being able to index everything (don't forget its mission statement: "organise the world's information and make it universally available") and then to sell adverts against it.John Battelle, who runs online advertising network Federated Media, says Facebook poses an existential threat to Google. "The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb," he noted earlier this year, as Facebook prepared its flotation. "Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's 'public pages', but those represent a tiny fraction of the pages on Facebook, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning."In the same way, Apple's iTunes store is available on the web, and Google can index it, "but all the value creation in the mobile iPhone and iPad app world is behind the walls of Fortress Apple. Google can't see that information, can't crawl it, and can't make it universally available."In that sense, as Facebook gets bigger, and sells advertising to its s, it poses an increasing threat to Google – because to many, the space outside Facebook will look more and more like an untamed space where scams, malware and piracy thrive. "Google's business model depends on the web remaining open, and … that model is imperilled," Battelle adds. "The open web is full of spam, shady operators and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high-quality sites, most of the web is chock full of pop-up ads and other interruptive come-ons."It's nearly impossible to find a signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap. In the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the experience is just … better."Even video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo can be thought of as a form of walled garden: videos are removed at the request of copyright owners and law enforcement. Often, they're dismissed as just being repositories for "cute cats" videos (with -generated films such as "Charlie bit my finger" still near the top of the all-time list). But as Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Centre for Civic Media, pointed out in a Vancouver Human Rights lecture, Cute Cats and the Arab Spring, sites such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter are the best place for dissidents to post grievances and findings.Those sites don't offer the best protection for dissidents, Zuckerman argues – for people can often be identified through their posting or web identity – but their power is that governments, even repressive ones, block them at their peril. If YouTube suddenly becomes invisible, people begin to wonder why and begin to ask questions – which in time, given the connectedness of our modern civilisation, will mean that they find out.An earlier version, from 2008, pointed to how the overhead views of Google Maps had shown precisely who owned property in Bahrain – which often turned out to be the royal family. But what about the mechanisms that are increasingly being used to foment or report revolution – the smartphones with internet connectivity, or the computers being used to photos or video taken with cameraphones?Zittrain has expressed fears about how the devices we use to connect to the net have moved away from being fully capable personal computers – where in theory you can write programs that can use any capability of the computer – towards appliances such as the iPad or iPhone, with tightly limited functionality and access to the underlying operating system software, where only "allowed" programs can be installed from a vendor-maintained store. He calls such a process "tethering"."From the start my worries about appliances permanently tethered to their makers have been that the tethering won't be limited to smartphones," Zittrain sayss. "Rather, the closed smartphone architecture is the canary in the coalmine for all of consumer computing. That's why I've said the PC is dead, even as the PC's form factor may remain. In the past year we've seen the introduction of the App Store on the Mac PC – not just iPhone and iPad."Even Microsoft, which ushered in the era of the personal computer running software that in theory could be used to write any program, is heading in the same direction. Versions of Windows 8, to be released in the autumn, will also use Metro Store for apps, which Microsoft will control.Adding new programs will be hard; in effect, websites will become the new programs. Zittrain notes that although you can still side-load software – that is, transfer it from another source, such as the internet or a memory stick connected to the machine, that is a reversal from the paradigm that ruled for years."What a transformation: the principal way of acquiring software for the past 30 years is now through a side door rather than a front one," he says. "I'm both awed and worried about what's happened since 2008."Zittrain concedes that people like convenience and security – and they're entitled to. But he says there's a qualitative difference between now and then. "No one tried to get Bill Gates to alter Windows so that undesirable apps and associated content – undesirable to someone other than the – couldn't be accessed. Today is different: if Facebook or Apple allow objectionable apps on their platforms, or Google in the Android Marketplace, or Microsoft in the Metro Store, regulators can say: take it down."That's a subtle shift, but important. Media commentator Jeff Jarvis says Apple's iPad is "sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid ... I see danger in moving from the web to apps," he said. "The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again."The same broad criticism is applied to smartphones, where not just Apple's product, but almost all platforms prevent any sort of easy access to the underlying code; there's no "command line interface" for a smartphone, no black screen and blinking cursor as you can find on a Windows or Apple computer, if you look hard enough.Part of that is for the protection of the wider telephone network, says Clayton. "Because phones are talking to the wider telecommunications system, which isn't secure, the wireless side of phones tends to be locked down very tight."But on the app side, the extent of lockdown varies between platforms. Apple's iPhone is tightly controlled: you can't distribute an app on to iPhones except by putting it through Apple's App Store – and the company has previously removed apps in China at the government's behest, such as in 2009, when apps about the Dalai Lama were removed.In that, Apple was like Google, which at the time maintained an operation inside China, and self-censored its content, offering a link to Chinese searchers to explain why the content was censored – but not to ways to find the results they wanted. Apple offered no such indication that the store was censored.With smartphones now outselling PCs every quarter, and China forecast to become the world's largest smartphone market this year, ahead of the US, the question of whether smartphones are a "reductive", limited platform, or "generative" like a PC looks like an increasingly important one.Battelle says the shift to mobile is unstoppable. "The PC-based HTML web is hopelessly behind mobile in any number of ways," he wrote on his blog. "It has no eyes (camera), no ears (audio input), no sense of place (GPS/location data). Why would anyone want to invest in a web that's deaf, dumb, blind, and stuck in one place?"Yet that wealth of data on mobiles isn't necessarily leading to a more web-like experience. Clayton says that "we are seeing more locked-down platforms than before" on smartphones – pointing particularly to Apple, but not excepting others.The biggest, and best-selling, exception is Android, the smartphone software that Google offers free to handset makers. "With Android, there's a wider choice of where to apps from" – many companies, including Amazon, offer their own Android "app stores" – "and Google doesn't hold your hand as much." The search giant can still "kill" apps if it judges them to be malware.So far, there do not seem to have been any occasions when the Chinese government has demanded that an Android app is wiped from phones – though its Great Firewall can prevent people inside China accessing the official Android Market from which apps can be ed, rendering the problem moot. Indeed, Android Market has been blocked a number of times inside China, and many s there prefer the unofficial ones that have sprung up; though those, of course, will come under the eye of the government.In total, Android is outselling all other smartphone platforms – though probably not because eager would-be programmers and tinkerers are taking it up, but because carriers can offer them cheaply. "[Apple's iPhone and iPad software] iOS and [Google's] Android now represent fascinating hybrids," says Zittrain. "Third parties can write apps – and how they do! – but the manufacturer, to varying degrees, can control whether those apps can reach their audiences."Even so, there's no easy answer. For example, the success of Research In Motion's BlackBerry phones in many Middle Eastern countries has come about because they allow teenagers to communicate directly with the opposite sex, without having to meet face-to-face – because that could fall foul of strict religious laws. Similarly, Facebook offers a way for teenagers to "speak" in ways that might be banned in the physical world. To some teenagers – and activists – the fact that the BlackBerry's PIN-based Messenger system can't be tied to a phone, yet lets people stay in touch, is the perfect reason for using the platform. Though it can be decrypted – if the government goes to great lengths – in general it will be private, which suits its younger s perfectly.Zittrain's real worry is that "the personal computer is dead".His conclusion is a call to arms: "We need some angry nerds" – people capable of breaking out of the walled gardens.Indeed, the US government has found some: it has backed projects such as "the internet in a suitcase", which could set up a telecommunications network inside a country separate from the existing infrastructure.Zittrain acknowledges such projects, but for the wider world, he says, "convenience is great. I wouldn't call for a return to the green blinking cursor of [Microsoft's pre-Windows] MS-DOS or the [text-based] Apple II. But we should build architectures that permit innovation and experimentation if consumers wish to go 'off-roading'."InternetFacebookSmartphonesSocial networkingCensorshipMicrosoftAppleComputingTablet computersMobile phonesGoogleGoogle+AppsCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Kittler, who died this year, suggested we weren't masters of our technological domain, but rather that we were its pawnsThere's a section of Nessie the Mannerless Monster, Ted Hughes's poem for children, that unwittingly clinches many of the main theories about the role and function of the media. The Loch Ness monster, vexed that humans don't believe in her, rises out of the water and goes on a rampage. She lays waste to Edinburgh and then heads south to Hughes's native Yorkshire. Nessie is shocked by what she sees:"Everybody sits indoors in front of the TV with a dead stare. There is nothing in the streets but cats, dogs and the odd parked car. She peers in at the windows and whistles but nobody can hear for the TV and its laughter and uproar and gunfire. There is no other sign of life in all Yorkshire."When Canadian-American media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote "the medium is the message", what he had in mind was that it is worth reflecting on how technological innovation changes us. A TV broadcasts content, but what is most socially significant about it is not what we are watching, but what it does to old ways of living.In Understanding Media, he described the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. Immersed in Strictly Come Dancing, we miss the structural changes TV has made to us. It was once estimated that the average Briton spends 11 years watching telly: even the inventor of television, John Logie Baird, wouldn't have imagined that this was ever a possibility. Immersed in Facebook, we neutralise the hitherto dividing distance between us and strangers on the other side of the world. Only a monster rising from the primeval loch might have an insight into how humans have changed – or a media theorist taking the long view.A lightbulb, unlike TV, doesn't have content, but its invention changed human lives: thanks to lightbulbs, we can colonise the dark, extend our remit over part of the world that was beyond our mastery. "A light bulb," McLuhan wrote, "creates an environment by its mere presence." So do TVs, newspapers and the internet (McLuhan died in 1980, so he missed the rise of that technological innovation), but their content may blind us to how it has changed us.McLuhan had a relatively benign vision of technological innovation. It was our tool. The subtitle of Understanding Media was The Extensions of Man and his vision was of technological innovations as human prostheses.Friedrich Kittler, the German post-structuralist philosopher and media theorist who died in October, was of a more dystopian temper. "The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies," he once argued. "After all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us." Against McLuhan, he argued, "media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it".The intellectual revolution that Kittler and like-minded thinkers effected displaced humans further from the centre of the universe than even previous thinkers had envisaged. Copernicus had shown the universe did not revolve around us on Earth. Darwin had shown we descended from apes and did not control our evolution. Freud showed we were at the mercy of unconscious impulses. Now Kittler was suggesting we weren't masters of our technological domain, but rather that we were its pawns. It was a chastening view, and surely significant that he was producing his most potent work in the 1980s, when techno dystopias were the stuff of Hollywood nightmares, when, notably, Arnold Schwarzenegger came back from the future as a cyborg to terminate humanity.Like many of the greatest thinkers about the media in continental Europe – Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard – Kittler's dystopian vision of technology was influenced by early experiences during the second world war and his reading of the technophobic Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. Kittler argued that technology changed the nature of war: "It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows." These were thoughts later taken up by Baudrillard in his notorious series of articles The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.Kittler was born in Saxony, in the aftermath of the Nazis' defeat at Stalingrad. One of his earliest memories was seeing Dresden ablaze from a distance, bombed in February 1945 by the allies. He also recalled being frequently taken by his mother to a Baltic island to visit the site where Hitler's V2 rockets had been developed.Virilio, the French theorist, also had a childhood marked by war. He recalls living in occupied Nantes as it was bombed by 's allies. It's perhaps a mistake to extrapolate so readily from biography to philosophy, but it would be a worse mistake to think that Virilio's sense that innovation always had a dark underbelly had nothing to do with being on the receiving end of Nazi rule and allied ordinance. His best-known statement, "the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck", expresses in a nutshell his career-long scepticism for those Panglossians who argue technology is entirely about progress.Virilio developed the concept of dromology (from the Greek, meaning the science or logic of speed) and argued that our cult of speed, facilitated by technological innovation, would be our death. "The more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases," he wrote. He was writing about military innovation, but he could also apply the remark to your broadband speeds.Old wars were fought across distances. But technology destroys distance. New wars, inflected by technological innovation, were fought across time. He once wrote: "History progresses at the speed of its weapons systems", adding: The physical world ceases to be the battlefield and instead the battle becomes one of ideologies and economics and speed. By which he meant battles would be won by the fastest: "The class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency." This dromocratic vision of human society infects everything: the faster you can deploy (your weapons, your money, your ideology), the quicker will be your victory.Now that Kittler is dead, Virilio is the chief theoriser of the techno-naysayers. Next spring will see the publication of his book The Great Accelerator. In it, the professed Catholic casts a baleful eye over the attempts of scientists at Cern in Switzerland to discover the so-called "God particle". There is no coincidence, he suggests, that the high-speed hunt for the Higgs boson particle in an underground loop came off the rails in 2008 at the same time Lehman Brothers, titan of speeded-up global capital, filed for bankruptcy. Our love of speed leads to nowhere, or at least to nowhere good.The cult of speed and acceleration that technology has engendered, Virilio argues, will be the death of us all. His new book has been described as a reworking of the Book of Exodus: in the new exodus we aren't heading to a promised land but into a technologically advanced hell that makes Ted Hughes's vision of Yorkshire seem pleasant and McLuhan like the Pollyanna of the media age.PhilosophyInternetTelevisionTelevisionTelevision industryStuart Jeffriesguardian.co.uk © 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

It is chilling that so many thinkers, politicians and academics have signed up to the deadening consensus of globalisationEF Schumacher's Small is Beautiful was the first book on politics I ever read; it was the only book about politics I ever saw my father read or heard him talk about. It arrived in our cottage in rural North Yorkshire as a manifesto from a radical countercultural world with which we had no . Re-reading its dense mixture of philosophy, environmentalism and economics, I can't think what I could possibly have understood of it at 13, but in a bid to impress my father I ploughed on to the end.Looking back over the intervening almost four decades, the book's influence has been enormous. "Small is beautiful" was a radical challenge to the 20th century's intoxication with what Schumacher described as "gigantism". For several decades, mass production methods were producing more cheap goods than ever before; the mass media and mass culture opened up new opportunities to a wider audience than ever. It was creating bigger markets and bigger political entities – his book came on the eve of the vote on the European Common Market in 1975 – but he believed such scale led to a dehumanisation of people and the economic systems that ordered their lives.One of the recurrent themes through the book is how modern organisations stripped the satisfaction out of work, making the worker no more than an anonymous cog in a huge machine. Craft skill was no longer important, nor was the quality of human relationship: human beings were expected to act like adjuncts to the machines of the production line. The economic system was similarly dehumanising, making decisions on the basis of profitability rather than human need: an argument that played out most dramatically in the 80s coal miners' strike. What Schumacher wanted was a people-centred economics because that would, in his view, enable environmental and human sustainability.It was a radical challenge which, like many of the ideas of the late 60s and early 70s (feminism is another example), were gradually adopted and distorted by the ongoing voracious expansion of consumer capitalism. Niche brands such as The Body Shop in the UK or Ben & Jerry's ice-cream in the US attempted to build a "small is beautiful" model of economic enterprise that put relationship, craft and environment at the heart of their way of working. They were later snaffled up by corporate giants. Small became cool but only as part of a branding strategy which masked the ongoing concentration of political and economic power. Gigantism has triumphed.The power of the global multinational and the financial institutions was beginning to become apparent in the early 70s, but it has grown exponentially since, unable to national governments. Schumacher warned that a city's population should not rise above 500,000, but we are now living in an era of the megapolis and several cities around the world are heading towards 20m. Schumacher would be weeping over his herbal tea at the fate of his big idea.However, small is beautiful is an idea that keeps reappearing – the latest incarnations are farmers' markets, and local cafes baking homemade cup cakes – because it incorporates such a fundamental insight into the human experience of modernity. We yearn for economic systems within our control, within our comprehension and that once again provide space for human interaction – and yet we are constantly overwhelmed by finding ourselves trapped into vast global economic systems that are corrupting and corrupt.Many of the issues Schumacher raises we are still wrestling with. He questioned the shibboleth of economic growth as the central preoccupation of politics; he talked of resource constraints on economic development. Above all, he insisted again and again that human happiness would not be achieved through material wealth. He had a vision of human need that would strike a 21st-century reader as oddly puritanical, and his frequent references to Burma as a model jar badly.But his point is still valid as the wellbeing debate today demonstrates; despite our increased wealth since the 70s, we are no happier. Schumacher warned against exactly the issues we are now dealing with as levels of mental illness – depression, anxiety, panic attacks, stress – rise and the World Health Organisation predicts that depression will be the second most common health problem in western developed nations by 2020. This was what Schumacher feared, and his answer was "small is beautiful". Go back to the human scale: human needs and human relationships, and from that springs the ethical response of stewardship to the environment.What is most striking about the book now is its bold idealism. No one writes like that now; reading Schumacher's bracing prescriptions for our future, it is chilling to realise how so many thinkers, politicians, academics have all signed up to a deadening pragmatic consensus and our thinking has been boxed into a dead end of technocratic managerialism. Small is beautiful is the cry of the romantic idealist, and there seem to be none left.EconomicsGlobal economyGlobalisationPhilosophyMadeleine Buntingguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Sea Shepherd sends three ships to intercept the Japanese with Paul Watson promising 'aggressive non-violence'As the Steve Irwin approached the equator last week, word that Japan would be sending a strengthened whaling fleet to Antarctica next month reached the bridge of the old Aberdeen-built customs vessel. The crew of activists on board cheered, as their veteran leader, Captain Paul Watson, resigned himself to his eighth "whale war" among the icebergs and 100mph winds of the Southern ocean.Watson, on what is nearly his 350th voyage in nearly 40 years defending whales and other marine wildlife at the helm of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, is sending three ships to intercept, chase and harass the Japanese. He promises "aggressive non-violence", while the Japanese, still smarting from last year's humiliation when their fleet took only a fifth of its planned whale catch, say they will heighten security and take an armed government fisheries patrol vessel."We intend to carry out the [whale] research after enhancing measures to assure that the fleet is not obstructed," said fisheries minister, Michihiko Kano.The two fleets expect to meet in the Antarctic whale sanctuary before Christmas and will shadow and confront each other for at least 12 weeks. Both have helicopters and water cannon. In addition, the Steve Irwin has iron spikes to prevent the Japanese from boarding, and Watson's crew has a store of vile-smelling butyric acid stink bombs to fling aboard any vessel that comes close. Both fleets are expected to wage a media and diplomatic battle, as well as engage in a dangerous physical tussle on the high seas.But it was Australia, which fired the first diplomatic shots, this week condemning Japan and urging it not to send its fleet. "There is widespread concern in the international community at Japan's whaling programme and widespread calls for it to cease", said foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, this week. Australia last year took Japan to the international court of justice seeking an end to the harpooning which it conducts under a "scientific" loophole.Few people realise, said Watson in London before setting off for the Antarctic, how dirty this old-fashioned sea war can get, with hand-to-hand combat, collisions, bombardments and sinkings. "Some of the scenes look like out of world war two. There are a lot of ships at sea, seven or eight at a time, water cannons going … We get help finding them [the whaling vessels]. Tourist ships and fishing boats, research stations give us their co-ordinates."Although he is on Interpol's wanted list and is classed as an eco-terrorist in Japan, Watson says he has been on the side of the law since he was first mate on the first Greenpeace voyages of the early 1970s. "We don't protest, we intervene. We are not there to witness but to stop crimes being committed," he says. "They call me a pirate but what is a pirate? Drake and Raleigh were pirates. John Paul Jones, who started the US and the Russian navies, was a pirate. Pirates challenge the status quo."Watson, for years little known in Europe, has recently become a star of Discovery Channel reality TV programme Whale Wars. Although the show has been criticised for being more showbusiness than documentary, the TV exposure has tripled the group's hip and income.But Watson has his critics. He was savagely satirised in the South Park animation Whale Whores for being media-hungry, and a long-standing row with Greenpeace has resulted in the two organisations not talking to each other."[Greenpeace's international executive director Kumi Naidoo] should be running the Red Cross. He's not an environmentalist. He's an anti-apartheid organiser who has stated that the only way to save the planet is through alleviating world poverty. It can't be done. There are just not enough resources. Why does he want to do the job of Oxfam or the Red Cross? Greenpeace seems to have lost their direction," says Watson.Watson is a confirmed "biocentrist" who believes worms and cockroaches are more important than humans. "I say look at earth as a spaceship travelling at 500km a second. Our life system is the biosphere. It provides the air and temperature, and it's run by a crew, not us. We are just engers, busy entertaining ourselves, but the crew are the bacteria, the worms and the fish we are killing off. There's only so many crew we can kill before things fall apart. They are more important than we are. If the fish die the ocean dies and if the ocean dies we die. We cannot live without them. I measure intelligence by the ability to live in harmony with the natural world and by that criteria cockroaches are more intelligent than we are."Too many humans, he says, is by far the greatest problem facing earth. "Earth can probably only carry one billion humans. As long as human populations continue growing, the battle [to save the planet] will be lost."One of two things will happen. Some incredibly imaginative, intelligent person will come along or planet Earth will take care of it for us. The reason we had great age of affluence is we had four continents to exploit. But we have now far exceeded earth's carrying capacity which is why we're in the middle of this major extinction. There will inevitably be a resource crash, but we are in denial about it."There's a waiting list of thousands from dozens of countries wanting to sail with Watson, who prides himself on never having caused or sustained an injury in his 34 years of taking amateurs to sea in often dangerous situations."Because our crew are amateurs and not professional there's much more precaution taken in everything we do. Sometimes professionals get themselves into trouble because they take things for granted."ion is the most important thing."WhalingWhalesJapanActivismMarine lifeConservationAntarcticaJohn Vidalguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Crude interpretations of the economist's ideas are popular, but a new book suggests he was no cheerleader for small governmentIn the Oscar-winning documentary about the credit crunch, Inside Job, writer director Charles Ferguson spares some of his most vitriolic criticism for Ivy League free market economists. These US academics, argues Ferguson, gave Wall Street banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and their rightwing politicians on Capitol Hill the intellectual during the 1990s for a catastrophic bonfire of regulations on the financial sector. Let the invisible hand do the job, said the Harvard, Yale and Chicago school professors.Their economic philosophy was revealed in a series of interviews by Ferguson who filmed them arguing that a free market should be left to rule without a government hand on the tiller or taxes that distort economic behaviour. The market, they said, propels business people to conduct a relentless search for profit and produce economic goods that benefit all.The invisible hand releases such a flurry of activity that economic goods trickle down to labour, despite the concern of unions that from those who have first claim on them, the capitalists, will hoard their gains.Conflating free market theories with utilitarianism, these academics appeared to argue that allowing a free-for-all would bring the greatest benefit to the largest number of people.Warren Samuels, a professor at Michigan University who died in August, set about investigating what the originator of the term invisible hand, the influential 18th-century economic thinker Adam Smith, meant by the term and examine how it is applied.In his book, Erasing the Invisible Hand, he argues that free market thinkers, including Smith himself, were ambiguous about what the term means. A close examination of articles, books and speeches over the last 200 years shows it means different things to different people.Samuels says the academics – and in particular the monetarists and free market cheerleaders of the all-powerful Chicago school, who influenced many senior figures from Margaret Thatcher to Bill Clinton – tailored the term for their own political ends.Samuels spends much of his book dissecting all the many and contradictory definitions and supposed benefits of the invisible hand. In particular, he debunks the idea that Smith's for what Keynes later described as the animal spirits of business confidence and pursuit of profit also led him to demand small government."That Adam Smith stands for laissez faire, non-interventionism and minimal government is a dominant theme in economics and elsewhere. Was it a misperception to attribute it to Adam Smith?"Smith provided a spirited attack on mercantilism for its extraordinary restraints, but he did not extend the attack to government and law in general. Indeed, many of those who do extend the attack, wittingly or otherwise, are silent about Smith's candour."He then goes on to quote a age by Smith that libertarians, Tea Party and even property-owning middle classes would like to think is less relevant to the present than it so obviously remains."Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality … Civil government supposed a certain subordination. But as the necessity of civil government gradually grows up with the acquisition of valuable property, so the principal causes which naturally introduce subordination gradually grow up with the growth of that valuable property … Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."Sadly, crude interpretations of Smith have won important friends, especially since the 1960s, when widespread property ownership became a big issue for politicians. The Nobel prize for economics was first awarded in 1969, and since then has rewarded research into how markets work, with the emphasis on the examination of pure markets and the equilibrium they can achieve if only they are left alone by governments and regulators. All market failures are blamed on interventions. And that is still the case today, with many on the right arguing the banking crash was not the result of too little regulation, but of too much.EconomicsStock marketsEconomic policyGlobal economyRegulatorsPhillip Inmanguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its d companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Fifty years after Stanley Milgram's experiment, research is showing that awful acts involve enthusiasm, not just obedienceFifty years ago, in August 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that changed our understanding of the human propensity for evil for ever. Participants were invited into his laboratory at Yale, supposedly for a study looking at the effects of punishment on memory. Asked to assume the role of the "teacher", they were then told to ister an electric shock to a "learner" every time he made a mistake. The shocks started at 15 volts but increased in 15-volt increments every time an error was made, going right up to 450 volts – enough to kill someone twice over.In fact, the learner was an actor, and the electric shocks weren't real. The question that Milgram was really interested in was how willing people were to follow instructions. Would they stop at 150 volts (where the learner demanded to be let out, because his heart was starting to bother him), or at 300 volts (where he let out an agonised scream and then stopped answering)? How far would you go?Milgram's colleagues suggested people would only go up to about 100 volts – certainly not far enough to cause real harm. They also thought that only about 1% would go to 450 volts, assuming that only a sadist or a psychopath would go this far. However, as every student who has recently completed a psychology A-level knows, two-thirds of Milgram's participants continued istering shocks all the way up to 450 volts.Milgram's experiment showed us that even normal, "decent" people can engage in acts of extreme cruelty when instructed to do so by others – an idea consistent with Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil", which had derived from her observations of the trial of Adolf Eichmann – which came to a conclusion in the same month as Milgram's experiment. Arendt presented Eichmann as a bland office worker: not a monster, but a normal person more concerned with bureaucratic duty than questioning the ends to which bureaucracy is working.The empirical contribution of Milgram's experiment is as important today as it ever was, but how relevant are the conclusions that were drawn from it? Recently historians and psychologists have started to unpick the idea that evil is banal. Research indicates that decent people participate in horrific acts not because they become ive, mindless functionaries who do not know what they are doing, but rather because they come to believe – typically under the influence of those in authority – that what they are doing is right.David Cesarani's 2004 biography of Eichmann, for example, shows him to be no back-room pen-pusher, but an enthusiastic Nazi keen to play his part in developing creative solutions to "the Jewish problem". Yaacov Lozowick's study of Hitler's bureaucrats, likewise reveals them to be much more than small cogs in a big machine of which they had no understanding. The true horror is not that they were blind to the evil they were perpetrating, but they knew full well what they were doing, and believed it to be right.In these , Milgram's studies are still relevant, not because they provide a window on to the "banality of evil", but because they provide insights into the conditions under which evil can appear banal. In particular, the key question they throw up is why participants identify with the authority rather than with the victim, and hence are willing to follow him down the destructive path he sketches out.This same question continues to be pertinent to atrocities and abusive acts we see around us in the world today: the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib, genocide in Darfur, or even phone hacking in News International. In all these cases, followers have proved willing to work towards leaders not because they were blindly obeying orders but because they were working creatively towards the goals of a leadership with which they identified.In all these cases searching for orders fails to recognise the nature of the processes involved. They involve not just ive obedience but also dynamic followership.PsychologyTorturePhilosophyEthicsAlex Haslamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Although an icon of the counterculture movement, the man who coined 'the medium is the message' was no pill-popping hipsterMarshall McLuhan is ed by many for his rise to fame as the original "media guru", the subject of a multitude of newspaper and magazine articles and broadcast interviews, not to mention a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's finest film, Annie Hall.Because McLuhan was adopted first by the counterculture movement of the 1960s and, more recently, by web evangelists, people sometimes assume that the man himself was some kind of pill-popping hipster. They couldn't be further from the truth.Far from sharing sympathy for countercultural forms of life, or the forms of media they embraced, McLuhan made a point of withholding judgment, refraining from moral evaluation of the processes he was describing and explaining. If anything, it was the conservative side of McLuhan that sometimes shone through his stance as a scientific observer. He never condemned the Vietnam war, suggesting instead that it was more of a media event than an actual happening. He discussed the possibility of using media as a form of control, "using TV in South Africa … to cool down the tribal temperature raised by radio", with no acknowledgement of the Orwellian implications.As a conservative Roman Catholic, he tended to downplay the significance of the printing press in regard to the Protestant Reformation, a point stressed by many other media scholars. But the fact that his insights could be embraced by radicals and reactionaries alike is a testament to their brilliance, and to his ability to transcend his own human frailties and failings.Even though he was later hailed as a prophet, McLuhan insisted that he was only describing what was taking place in the present, while everyone else was fixated on the past (looking "through the rear-view mirror," as he put it). Looking at electricity, electric technology and electronic media such as Samuel Morse's telegraph and Guglielmo Marconi's wireless, he was able to understand television in ways that no one else had, and to glimpse the seeds of new media environments to come. It was because he understood the present, not the future, that his insights remain as valid today as half a century ago.McLuhan's approach is particularly well suited to helping us to understand new technologies as they are being introduced into a culture. His early rise to prominence was mainly due to his ability to explain the novel medium of television and the dramatic social upheavals that it generated. At a time when baby boomers were establishing a new, "cool" youth culture that ran counter to the "hot" outlook of their parents, McLuhan had an explanation. The "cool" cultural style was a product of the television medium, whose low-resolution image required more cognitive processing than the high-definition experience we might get from radio and the motion picture, and that processing, or participation, had a tendency to suck the audience member in, creating a great sense of involvement in the message. "Hot media", by contrast, require less cognitive effort, freeing audiences to act. This understanding led McLuhan to claim that Hitler could not have been successful in a televisual media environment.Moreover, television, in exposing viewers to the world with unprecedented immediacy and intimacy, was creating what he called a "global village", an entirely new form of tribalism that did away with private identity, individualism and the nation state – all products of print culture. The televisual window on the world was giving rise to a transparent society where we all find ourselves too close for comfort, with deep potential for aggression and violence (including, for example, terrorism).McLuhan's famous aphorism, "the medium is the message", goes to the very heart of his way of understanding media, packing together a dozen or more different meanings. First and foremost, it is a wake-up call. McLuhan asks us to pay attention to the medium, rather than being distracted by the content. The content is not without its import, but it pales in comparison to the impact of the medium itself.Instead of focusing solely on the content of television programming, for example, concerning ourselves with the depiction of violence, he argued that we needed to examine how the very presence of television as a medium was changing us, changing our very mode of thought from one that was characteristically linear and sequential (one thing at a time), to one that involved pattern recognition.Is all this really that far out? The bottom line is that the medium is the message because the medium has a great influence on what is communicated, on how it is used. How we go about doing a task has much to do with the way that task turns out. It is simple, commonsense stuff. We say "ask a silly question, get a silly answer" because the questions we ask determine the kinds of answers we obtain.Supposedly more "conservative" thinkers have argued along similar lines. Henry David Thoreau observed that "we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; Mark Twain quipped that "when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail", and Winston Churchill maintained that "we shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us". To this last, McLuhan's colleague, John Culkin, generalised that "we shape our tools, and thereafter they shape us", by way of explaining McLuhan's perspective.The medium is the message also means that the medium is the environment. Our media are extensions of ourselves, they go between ourselves and our environment, and whatever goes between us and our environment becomes our new environment. In this way, every new medium is a new environment, and affects us much as the natural environment shapes us. That is why, to understand our media environments, we need McLuhan's media ecology.TelevisionPhilosophyPhilosophyLance Strateguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

This week Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur are ed by Tom Loosemore to look at and analyse this week's biggest tech stories.We begin with Microsoft's purchase of Skype for $8.5bn. At the time of recording, the deal was only expected, and so the team look back at Skype's 7 year life, and how it has changed hands in that time. Charles finds it hard to see why Microsoft needs the VoIP service - and predicts a hard time for it within their Redmond HQ.Charles also takes a look at the latest sales figures of mobile phones in western Europe, and finds Nokia has been pushed into second place by… Samsung and Apple in the handset and smartphone markets respectively. It's more bad news for Nokia, and neither Tom nor Charles can foresee a rosy future for Nokia - with Tom predicting fatal consequences for the company.The team also discuss an apparent schism within Anonymous, and examine the group's denial of an attack in which credit card details were stolen from Sony's PlayStation Network. Aleks, Charles and Tom talk through the group's aims, ponder the ramifications of a split, and attempt to describe the structure and motivation of Anonymous - with mixed success.And finally, Tom talks to us about his attempts to build a single, central government website which will deliver information and services from recommendations made by the UK's digital champion Martha Lane Fox. Tom explains what his aims are for Alphagov and what it has been like working on such a large project, and within a huge government beauracracy.Another full programme from your Tech Weekly team. Please leave us your comments below, tweet and re-tweet us. And you can answer Aleks's poser about sites that sum up Britishness below too.Don't forget to ...• Comment below• Mail us at [email protected]• Get our Twitter feed for programme updates or follow our Twitter list• Like our Facebook page• See our pics on Flickr/Post your tech picsAleks KrotoskiCharles ArthurScott Cawley

Chimpanzees, along with the birds and bees, are busy doing it – but not in the way you might have imagined, as a new exhibition at London's Natural History Museum provesErica McAllister is excited (perhaps, in the context, not the most felicitous choice of word, but never mind. She's ionate, too, but that's not much better). "Flies," she enthuses, "are the best, because they're everywhere, and they do everything. They get up to the craziest stuff. Amazing genitalia. And some wild strategies."Downstairs in the Natural History Museum's magnificently arched Jerwood Gallery, staff are (as it were) mounting Sexual Nature, a new exhibition exploring the diverse and often startling sexual and reproductive behaviour of animals (or, as the museum's posters coyly put it, "nature's most intimate secrets"). It's the museum's first adult exhibition, aimed at those over 16, and containing what the same publicity calls "frank information and imagery about sex", so everyone is, naturally, quite excited."I'm looking forward to seeing visitors' reactions," says Richard Sabin, senior curator of the museum's mammal group, from whose collections a number of specimens – including a red deer stag, a hyena, chimpanzees and Guy the gorilla – have been selected for display. "They'll have seen animal courtship on television, but nothing quite as, um, graphic as here. It'll get them talking, certainly. What we hope is that it wipes away the whole thing about this being a taboo subject. Because, of course, nothing could be more natural."Natural it may be, but animal reproduction can be a mighty strange business. Barnacles, for instance, have a penis 30 times their body length. Male snakes have a forked organ, allowing them to dodge the female's tail and penetrate from either direction. Hedgehogs plug their partner's vagina with excess sperm to stop anyone else's getting a look in. Blue fairy wrens have testicles 25% their body weight. The female hyena picks and dumps her male as she sees fit, and has even evolved genitalia that look like a male's.Still, flies are best, says McAllister (she would: she's the musuem's entomology collections manager). The male stalk-eyed fly, she explains, pointing to a case of them – a tiny fraction of the museum's 20 million-strong insect collection – "takes in air and its eyes come out on stalks. Then it blows out again, and the stalks harden and set, for ever. And it's the ones with the widest stalks that get the most action. Male antler flies do the same, except they use their antlers to head-butt each other – to see off rivals."There's not much to beat the mating ritual of the dance fly, though. "They're into gift-giving," says McAllister. "The males catch a smaller fly and kind of dangle it in front of the females as they dance. But they've wrapped their present up in a little silk balloon, so it takes her a while to get at it – and while she's busy, he has his wicked way. Brilliant. And some of the males are even more devious. Once they've done the deed, if the gift isn't finished they'll just take it back and give it to another girl. Like a half-eaten box of Milk Tray, except it seems to work. And some really naughty ones haven't got a gift at all, they just pretend. It's crazy stuff."The whole palaver, obviously, has a point. Since it's the females who pick the males they'll mate with, the male dance fly's sole objective is to have his way as often as he can with as many as he can. It's all about making sure it's your DNA that get transmitted rather than anyone else's. It's this Darwinian process of sexual selection that's at the core of Sexual Nature."The point," says Tate Greenhalgh, the exhibition developer, "is that survival isn't always the key to evolution: it's reproduction that really counts." Take the peacock: the male's magnificent two metre-long tail feathers are a major obstacle to mobility and can be fatal when a predator pounces. But what's important is that those same feathers appeal to the hens. Females, Greenhalgh notes, "have to get it right" – so, often, males have to prove not just good looks, but good health.The cock's brilliant red comb, for instance, "takes an awful lot of testosterone to produce, which inhibits its defence against disease – so a particularly fine specimen isn't just aesthetically pleasing, it shows the bird is rampant and very healthy."Similarly, the gift-giving process isn't just about gentlemanly generosity: it could, in some species, demonstrate a particular male's prowess at capturing prey, and hence his capacity to feed the couple's young.When it comes to male mammals, says Sabin, surrounded by a staggering collection of deer, antelope, gazelle and elk horns and antlers down in the basement of the mammal collection, the name of the game is generally to see off potential rivals and have your pick of the available females. The monumental antlers sported by the adult male moose – they can grow to a spread of 1.2-1.4m (4-4½ft) in a single season – represent "a phenomenal amount of energy and resources, all devoted to providing a convincing visual signal to males of your physical dominance and to females of your gene quality".Some mammals, Sabin says, pulling out a tray of gelada (a species of monkey) specimens to demonstrate the sheer difference in size between male and female skulls, crests, teeth, neck and jaw muscles, fulfill the same role. If a male is sufficiently dominant, his reproductive kit need not be spectacular: Guy the gorilla, the adult male silverback whose 185cm (73in) chest and monumental neck muscles made him a favourite at London zoo until he died 30-odd years ago, probably had a penis measuring no longer than 3cm (1in) erect – as the alpha male, he had his harem and simply didn't need to compete.Others need a little help. Sabin hands over the substantial form of a walrus baculum, or penis bone. "There's still a lot of debate about the function of these," he notes. "Is it simply to prolong sexual intercourse? Some people speculate that, in some species, it's actually there to do damage to the female genitalia so as to ensure she won't mate again in a hurry. In any event, it's all about doing all you can to make sure it's your sperm that get through." (This is known as sperm competition, and some animals take the tactic to extreme lengths: the banana slug bites off its own penis to leave it in the female, preventing others from depositing more DNA.)Equally enthusiastic about her charges' proclivities is Jan Beccaloni, an entomologist specialising in arachnids. Adult male spiders, she explains, don't have a penis at all. Instead, they produce a sperm web, deposit their sperm on to the web, and then draw it up into the palps (a pair of small, claw-like structures at the front of their bodies). They then slot their palps into the female "like a lock and key", Beccaloni says. "And believe me, they've evolved a lot of strategies to do it . . ."Compared with your average male spider, humans have it easy, Beccaloni reckons. "Essentially, the male has to make sure the female is in the mood to mate," she says. "He also has to show her he's of the same species. And he has to demonstrate he's not food. If he gets any of those three things wrong, he may well get eaten, because in most cases the female is bigger than the male."A tarantula, she says, will "stroke the female's legs" to ensure she is receptive. A common garden spider will spin a web and then pluck its threads in a certain way to inform a female he's there; in another species, the female will produce a perfumed "drag line" – a single line of thread impregnated with pheromones – to provoke a male's courtship dance. Male crab spiders spin loops of silk around a female to "calm her down and get her in the mood".Some spiders are into gift-giving and, generally speaking, the bigger the gift, the longer the copulation lasts. Others are into vaginal plugs (the tip of the palp breaks off), or will fight off rival suitors after the act. Male jumping spiders semaphore with their palps and body parts, prompting a gender-specific female dance that sends the male into "a frenzy of sexual anticipation".For many male spiders the risk, of course, is that copulation necessitates placing his juicy abdomen in front of his partner's jaws (although some have evolved mechanisms to prevent those jaws closing). But in evolutionary that "makes good sense", says Beccaloni, "because males have a far shorter lifespan than females anyway, and if they get eaten, that means that he's been in the right position for longer and the female's well-fed. In short, his genes will get ed on. He's not been wasted."Sexual Nature grew out of the phenomenal success of the museum's Darwin exhibition last year, Greenhalgh says. "We're always popular with schoolchildren, with young parents and older adults," she says, "but we wanted to broaden our audience to include more young adults. We're hoping the playful tone and the frank language of this will appeal – and the exhibits too, of course. One of the first things visitors will see is some very explicit BBC footage of bonobos, the so-called erotic apes, who have sex however and whenever they see the opportunity. It seems to diffuse aggression. That pretty much sets the tone."And can we learn anything about human sexual behaviour from all this? Greenhalgh is cautious. "In of sexual selection, there's definitely something going on around symmetry. A symmetrical face is important in the idea of human beauty. But otherwise there are so many different cultural and social and media norms: in wealthy societies, for example, slim women are considered attractive; in poorer societies, it's plumpness that's considered a sign of wealth and wellbeing. And, of course, the really big difference is that we humans have managed to put our biology aside: animals have sex to reproduce, and we do it for pleasure. That's rather changed our perspective."Sexual Nature is at the Natural History Museum, London, from 11 February to 2 October 2011.ReproductionAnimal behaviourBiologyWildlifeJon Henleyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

University heads warn proposed cuts to science budget threaten 'an insidious grinding down of UK research community'• Datablog: Alok Jha explains how science funding worksBritain is facing a major brain drain as scientists abandon the country for better-funded jobs abroad, a Guardian investigation reveals today.Leading researchers, including an Oxford professor of physics and a stem cell researcher seeking a cure for the commonest form of blindness, say they are poised to quit Britain. Meanwhile the heads of several prestigious universities warn that proposed government cuts to Britain's science budget threaten "an insidious grinding down of the UK research community".This comes against a background in which universities say they are already struggling to attract the best candidates to important research and teaching posts, and warnings that this month's spending review could, according to some estimates, take as much as 25% out of Britain's total spending on scientific research.The Guardian has spoken to researchers in fields ranging from cancer and human fertility to nuclear physics, and found that many are preparing to emigrate. Professor Brian Foster, a particle physicist at Oxford, said he was likely to shift most of his research to , having been offered a professorship at Hamburg University which comes with £4.3m to spend on research.Dr Carlos Gias, a stem cell researcher at University College London, has decided to move either to Singapore or the US. Gias, whose research is focused on a form of blindness called age-related macular degeneration, said: "I have seen people from this department leaving to Singapore, and they have been trying to find jobs in Britain and they couldn't. It's not been just one or two [but] several of them, and [in Singapore] … they don't have any problems of funding."Professor Don Nutbeam, vice-chancellor of Southampton University, said fears of cuts to the science budget and greater investment in countries such as Singapore, and would exacerbate the problem.He said that he expected a steady loss of researchers and believed that Britain's world ranking in research could be undone within five years. "There will be an insidious grinding down of the UK research community if the sorts of cuts being talked about are enacted," he said.Even the most prestigious universities are concerned. Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, who will become the vice-chancellor of Cambridge tomorrow, said that while his university was relatively insulated by its status, he shared fears that Britain's international competitors were accelerating while Britain hit the brake. "Young researchers will always look to see where there is the greatest opportunity to fund the science," he said. "We're not talking about salary levels. For many researchers it is about the infrastructure, the facilities, the capacity to grow their groups, and anything which undermines that is going to make it more difficult for institutions to recruit high-level people."Even at Cambridge, the best candidates for posts in neuroscience and aeronautics have been lured elsewhere because of generous start-up funding. "Our competitors have resources to make available six-figure start-up packages for relatively junior staff; we can only do that, and at a stretch, for professorial staff," a Cambridge spokesman said.Major science funders have outlined areas of research that could be shut down if significant cuts materialise. The Medical Research Council is considering a withdrawal from cancer research to save £105m.The Science and Technology Facilities Council fears cuts could force it to mothball major laboratories such as the £145m ISIS neutron source in Oxfordshire. Britain's involvement in other international facilities, such as the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, is also threatened.The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council will close down studentships to manage a minor reduction in funding and will rescind up to £135m of grants already awarded if cuts are deeper.Nick Wright, pro-vice chancellor for research at Newcastle University, said his institution was already having recruitment problems."I've got recent direct experience sitting as the chair of a professorial recruitment and candidates from North America asking us whether UK research funding was going to be cut and what the prognosis was for the future," he said."We have to tell the truth and it's clear that disappoints them. I'm talking about a candidate from a Canadian university working in medical research, where [funding] was one of the clinchers."Additional reporting by Ian Sample and Alok JhaScience funding crisisResearch fundingUniversity fundingHigher educationResearchLiberal-Conservative coalitionScienceScience policyJeevan VasagarJessica Shepherdguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobileSir David Attenborough, 84, is a naturalist and broadcaster. He studied geology and zoology at Cambridge before ing the BBC in 1952 and presenting landmark series including Life On Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and, recently, Life. Richard Dawkins, 69, was educated at Oxford, later lectured there and became its first professor of the public understanding of science. An evolutionary biologist, he is the author of 10 books, including The Selfish Gene (1976), The God Delusion (2006) and The Greatest Show On Earth (2009). He is now working on a children's book, The Magic Of Reality.What is the one bit of science from your field that you think everyone should know?David Attenborough: The unity of life.Richard Dawkins: The unity of life that comes about through evolution, since we're all descended from a single common ancestor. It's almost too good to be true, that on one planet this extraordinary complexity of life should have come about by what is pretty much an intelligible process. And we're the only species capable of understanding it.Where and when do you do your best thinking?DA: I've no idea. All I know is if I'm stuck with something and go to bed, I wake up with the answer.RD: That's a fascinating phenomenon, isn't it?DA: That's if I find the answer at all.RD: Very few people say, "I think I'll have an hour's thinking now."DA: Mathematicians do. I had an uncle who was a mathematician, and one of his students said, "How long can you think for?" He said, "I sometimes manage two or three minutes." And this young man said, "I've never managed more than 90 seconds." Of course, that's abstract thinking, and by and large I'm not an abstract thinker.What distracts you?RD: The internet.DA: I used to work to music, but I can't now. Music is too important not to give it my full attention.What problem do you hope scientists will have solved by the end of the century?DA: The production of energy without any deleterious effects. The problem is then we'd be so powerful, there'd be no restraint and we'd continue wrecking everything. Solar energy would be preferable to nuclear. If you could harness it to produce desalination, you could make the Sahara bloom.RD: I was thinking more academically: the problem of human consciousness.Can you the moment you decided to become a scientist?RD: I only became fired up in my second year of a science degree. Unlike you, I was never a boy naturalist, to my regret. It was more the intellectual, philosophical questions that interested me.DA: I am a naturalist rather than a scientist. Simply looking at a flower or a frog has always seemed to me to be just about the most interesting thing there is. Others say human beings are pretty interesting, which they are, but as a child you're not interested in Auntie Flo's psychology; you're interested in how a dragonfly larva turns into a dragonfly.RD: Yes, it's carrying inside it two entirely separate blueprints, two different programmes.DA: I couldn't believe it! I asking an adult, "What goes on inside a cocoon?" and he said, "The caterpillar is totally broken down into a kind of soup. And then it starts again." And I  saying, "That can't be right." As a procedure, you can't imagine how it evolved.What is the most common misconception about your work?RD: I know you're working on a programme about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian fossils, David. A lot of people might think, "These are very old animals, at the beginning of evolution; they weren't very good at what they did." I suspect that isn't the case?DA: They were just as good, but as generalists, most were ousted from the competition.RD: So it probably is true there's a progressive element to evolution in the short term but not in the long term – that when a lineage branches out, it gets better for about five million years but not 500 million years. You wouldn't see progressive improvement over that kind of time scale.DA: No, things get more and more specialised. Not necessarily better.RD: The "camera" eyes of any modern animal would be better than what had come before.DA: Certainly... but they don't elaborate beyond function. When I listen to a soprano sing a Handel aria with an astonishing coloratura from that particular larynx, I say to myself, there has to be a biological reason that was useful at some stage. The larynx of a human being did not evolve without having some function. And the only function I can see is sexual attraction.RD: Sexual selection is important and probably underrated.DA: What I like to think is that if I think the male bird of paradise is beautiful, my appreciation of it is precisely the same as a female bird of paradise.Which living scientist do you most ire, and why?RD: David Attenborough.DA: I don't know. People say Richard Feynman had one of these extraordinary minds that could grapple with ideas of which I have no concept. And you hear all the ancillary bits – like he was a good bongo player – that make him human. So I ire this man who could not only deal with string theory but also play the bongos. But he is beyond me. I have no idea what he was talking of.RD: There does seem to be a sense in which physics has gone beyond what human intuition can understand. We shouldn't be too surprised about that because we're evolved to understand things that move at a medium pace at a medium scale. We can't cope with the very tiny scale of quantum physics or the very large scale of relativity.DA: A physicist will tell me that this armchair is made of vibrations and that it's not really here at all. But when Samuel Johnson was asked to prove the material existence of reality, he just went up to a big stone and kicked it. I'm with him.RD: It's intriguing that the chair is mostly empty space and the thing that stops you going through it is vibrations or energy fields. But it's also fascinating that, because we're animals that evolved to survive, what solidity is to most of us is something you can't walk through. Also, the science of the future may be vastly different from the science of today, and you have to have the humility to it when you don't know. But instead of filling that vacuum with goblins or spirits, I think you should say, "Science is working on it."DA: Yes, there was a letter in the paper [about Stephen Hawking's comments on the nonexistence of God] saying, "It's absolutely clear that the function of the world is to declare the glory of God." I thought, what does that sentence mean?!What keeps you awake at night?DA: Worrying about things I worked at too late in the evening.RD: I have the same problem.What has been the most exciting moment of your career?DA: One would be when I first dived on a coral reef and I was able to move among a world of unrevealed complexity.RD: Something to do with a puzzle being solved – things fall into place and you see a different way of looking at things which suddenly makes sense.DA: We are living in the most exciting intellectual time in history. In my lifetime we have discovered such profundities, such huge principles. When I was an undergraduate, I went to the professor of geology and said, "Would you talk to us about the way that continents are drifting?" And he said, "The moment we can demonstrate that continents are moving by a millimetre, I will consider it, but until then it's sheer moonshine, dear boy." And within five years of me leaving Cambridge, it was confirmed, and all the problems disappeared – why Australian animals were different – that one thing changed our understanding and made sense of everything. When I made Life On Earth, we had to start with really complex organisms because the ecology of the very first oceans was not known. But you're doing a child's book? Tell me about it.RD: It's about science more generally. Each chapter begins with the myths, so in the sun chapter, for instance, we have an Aztec myth, an ancient Egyptian myth, an Aboriginal myth. It is called The Magic Of Reality and one of the problems I'm facing is the distinction between the use of the word magic, as in a magic trick, and the magic of the universe, life on Earth, which one uses in a poetic way.DA: No, I think there's a distinction between magic and wonder. Magic, in my view, should be restricted to things that are actually not so. Rabbits don't really live in hats. It's magic.RD: OK, but what if you took a top hat and all you can see inside is some little boring brown things, and then one splits and out emerges a butterfly?DA: Yes, that's wonderful. But it's not magic.RD: OK. Well, you're rather dissing my title...DA: The wonder of reality? But that's rather corny.RD: Yes, it's a bit like "awesome".Who is your favourite fictional scientist?RD: The one I can think of is Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger, but he was a very irascible character and not a good role model.DA: I don't read fiction.What is the most difficult ethical dilemma facing science today?DA: How far do you go to preserve individual human life?RD: That's a good one, yes.DA: I mean, what are we to do with the NHS? How can you put a value in pounds, shillings and pence on an individual's life? There was a case with a bowel cancer drug – if you gave that drug, which costs several thousand pounds, it continued life for six weeks on. How can you make that decision?Richard DawkinsBiologyDavid Attenboroughguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobileProfessor Stephen Hawking, 68, is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He studied physics at Oxford, went on to do research at Cambridge and was the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge for 30 years. His books include A Brief History Of Time (1988), The Universe In A Nutshell (2001) and The Grand Design, published this month. Professor Brian Cox, 42, is a physicist and broadcaster. While studying at Manchester University, where he is now a research fellow, he ed the pop group D:Ream, best known for the Labour 1997 election anthem Things Can Only Get Better. He is a researcher on the Large Hadron Collider and this March presented Wonders Of The Solar System on BBC2. The accompanying book is out next month. What is the one bit of science from your field that you think everyone should know?Stephen Hawking: Science can explain the universe without the need for a Creator.Brian Cox: That's a wonderfully provocative sentence, actually. A beautiful answer. It's interesting, because you have previously used the word God in a similar way, in my view, to Einstein. I am thinking of phrases like "knowing the mind of God", which you used in A Brief History Of Time. In my opinion, Einstein was using the word God as a shorthand to convey the majesty and beauty of the laws of physics, and did not intend this to be taken as a sign that he subscribed to a particular religious doctrine. Is this the sense in which you have used the term before, and are you trying to clear up any misunderstandings caused by your previous use of the word "God", or have I read too much into your answer?SH: In A Brief History Of Time I used the word "God" like Einstein did as a shorthand for the laws of physics. However, this is not what most people mean by God, so I have decided not to use the term. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a God.BC: As for my answer, I think everyone should know a few basic facts about the universe. It began 13.7 billion years ago; our sun and solar system formed just under five billion years ago; there are 200 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. These are wonderful discoveries, and it's quite astonishing we've been able to find these things out from our vantage point on our tiny Earth.Where and when do you do your best thinking?SH: It can be anywhere I have time to think. I'm never any good in the morning. It is only after four in the afternoon that I get going.BC: I say that actually, and my wife thinks it's an affectation, I just don't want to get out of bed. I don't think at any particular time of day or night, or in any particular place. If I have the time and I'm not totally overwhelmed with things to do, then my mind constantly and gently chews over problems and often an answer or idea will pop into my head almost at random. Having the space to think is a genuine luxury, and vitally important if we want people to be creative in any job.What distracts you?SH: People asking me questions. I can concentrate and ignore everything else.BC: For me, it's TV. If I had more willpower, I would limit the amount I watch. When I was studying for my PhD in Hamburg, I only had German channels, and watched them very little. This was probably the most productive time of my life.What problem do you hope scientists will have solved by the end of the century?SH: Nuclear fusion. It would provide an inexhaustible supply of energy without pollution or global warming.BC: I share that view, that the provision of clean energy is of overwhelming importance. What frustrates me is that we know how to do it as physicists, how it works. It is an engineering solution that is within our grasp. I don't understand why we don't seem to want it enough at the moment. As a society, do you think we invest enough in scientific education and research?SH: I don't think we invest enough. They are why we are not still in the Middle Ages. Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.BC: I think the most important practical problem, which may be more of an engineering challenge than a scientific one, is to build economically viable nuclear fusion power stations. If we haven't dealt with our world's increasing appetite for energy by the end of this century, I think we will be in very deep trouble indeed. In physics, understanding why gravity is such an astonishingly weak force compared with the other three forces of nature is probably the great challenge. Also, understanding why the universe began in such a highly ordered state.Can you the moment you decided to become a scientist?SH: My father was a research scientist in tropical medicine so I always assumed I would be a scientist, too. I felt that medicine was too vague and inexact, so I chose physics.BC: I always wanted to be one – particularly an astronomer. I can't wanting to be anything else.What is the most common misconception about your work?SH: People think I'm a Simpsons character.BC: For me, the most common misconception is that particle physics, which is the quest to understand the forces of nature and the building blocks of matter, is a luxury and has no purpose other than to satisfy our curiosity. I understand why people think this about many areas of modern science, but it is a deeply flawed view of how progress happens. The great "useful" scientific discoveries – electricity, penicillin, the structure of atoms, the transistor – have rarely been a response to what governments or societies considered "useful" questions, whatever that meant at the time. History shows us that simply being curious about the universe and allowing ourselves to explore is by far the best way to make discoveries that eventually change everybody's lives.Which living scientist do you most ire, and why?SH: There are plenty of dead scientists I ire, but I can't think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.BC: I think that's a very important point. It's like, because you're judged against whether your theories agree with nature, whether what you say measures up against experiment, that means there's a delay in the award of the accolade great. I'd ask whether you think someone like Richard Feynman achieved greatness in his lifetime?SH: Yes.BC: The scientist I most ire would be you. You have combined a world class scientific career with a world class career in science communication. This is very difficult to do, but it is vitally important that our great researchers can also be great teachers.What keeps you awake at night?SH: If I have questions about the universe on my mind when I go to bed, I can't turn off. I dream equations all night.BC: Do you them?SH: No, I don't.BC: I worry about the lack of funding for research in the UK. I think it stems from a misunderstanding about the value to society of our science base and our universities. The university system really is the foundation upon which our economy rests – not to mention an industry that is immensely successful and in which the UK is genuinely world class. While all research and development in our economy doesn't come from universities, all the researchers do. This is something the government would do very well to when it comes to the spending review next month.What has been the most exciting moment of your career?SH: When I visited Antarctica in 1997. The Chilean air force flew a group of theoretical physicists to their base on King George Island off the Antarctic peninsula. My wheelchair did have snow chains, but they took me round on a snowmobile.BC: I think my early research career, when I actually sat down for days and months and analysed data from the Hera particle accelerator in Hamburg, was the most exciting time for me. I spent three or four years working on data 24/7, and there is nothing quite like it. Becoming successful as a science communicator is a double-edged sword in that, necessarily, your time for research diminishes. This is why I ire people like you who get the balance right – I aspire to do the same!Who is your favourite fictional scientist?SH: My mother used to tell me and my sisters stories she made up about a Professor Henbrain, who had all sorts of weird inventions. I'm trying to persuade her to write down some of these and other stories.BC: I thought Jodie Foster's character Ellie Arroway in was superbly written and wonderfully acted. But she was created by Carl Sagan after all.What is the most difficult ethical dilemma facing science today?SH: It is over genetic engineering. It should soon be possible dramatically to increase the intelligence and life span of a few individuals. They and their offspring could become a master race. Evolution pays no regard to social justice. It was not fair on the Neanderthals they were replaced by modern humans.BC: I think one of the great challenges for the scientific community is how to deal with arguments from people with genuinely held views that are demonstrably wrong and potentially damaging. I'm thinking of issues like the vaccination of children or the imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The science is very clear on these issues, and science really is the best guide we have to facing global challenges. The dilemma is how to convince quite vocal minorities that a rational and scientific approach is no threat to their political or religious beliefs – it's just the best approach. You see the problem immediately, of course, because this sounds rather arrogant and nobody thinks they are irrational! But we have to achieve the right outcomes in certain important areas.Another dilemma we face at the moment is how to lobby against possible dramatic funding cuts for science in the autumn. I strongly believe that a healthy science base is necessary for a healthy economy and vital for our society, but that can feel like special pleading in hard times. What do you think would be the consequences for the UK if we were forced to pull out of a major project like Cern because of science budget cuts?SH: It would discourage and damage the academic community whose task is to train the nation's next generation of scientists.BC: How can we make the case for an increase in spending in areas such as physics and cosmology?SH: Maintaining high standards in physics and mathematics is important for British industry. We don't have large natural resources. Our success depends on technical ability.. • The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking, is published by Bantam Press at £18.99. Wonders Of The Solar System, by Brian Cox, is published by Collins at £20. Both titles can be ordered from the Guardian Bookshop.Stephen HawkingPhysicsAstronomyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

Blacks don't read, according to a prominent African journalist. So how can such an event survive?"It's a fact," pronounced the read-me headline, "Darkies just don't read."Provocative? An understatement. Sihle Khumalo's column in the Sunday Times of South Africa last year said bluntly: "Go to any black household and you will find lots of music tapes, LPs, CDs and DVDs and a handful, if any, of general books. That, by the way, includes blacks in the suburbs. The lack of reading is a black thing, irrespective of where you live. It is way more fashionable to have loads of music than to be truly knowledgeable."Khumalo noted that the only general bookshop in Soweto, the country's biggest black township, had closed down because of lack of custom.The theme was taken up by the newspaper the Sowetan, which told the story of an ambassador who visited a Soweto school and hid a 100-rand note in a novel to see if anybody would find it. Four months later he went back and found the money exactly where he left it. The book had not been opened.So South Africa, where illiteracy runs high, stands accused of a deeply unliterary culture. Stephen Johnson, managing director of publisher Random House Struik, told the Mail & Guardian: "Books and reading are simply not on the national agenda at all. It's shameful."It doesn't sound like fertile soil for a literary festival. In Britain, these are now all the rage: barely a town or village is untouched by the invasion of wind-blown marquees, plastic chairs and superstar authors expected to prove as captivating in person as on the page. I have fond memories of Bill Deedes, Christopher Hitchens, John Pilger and John Updike at Hay-on-Wye and Martin Amis, Michael Frayn and Stephen Fry at Cheltenham.Yet South Africa has well-established book festivals in Cape Town and Franschhoek. Last weekend, after more than a decade in mothballs, the Mail & Guardian resurrected its version in Johannesburg. The venue was 44 Stanley Avenue, a maze of old warehouses, workshops and garages that have been converted into pleasant if self-consciously trendy boutique shops and restaurants. The main room featured four antique crystal chandeliers, five dummy chickens perched on the cross-beam ceiling and an elegant bookcase with no books in it.The festival theme was Being here now: South Africans in 2010, and certainly the gaze was inward rather than directed at trends in world literature. Indeed, it has been argued that much South African writing remains parochial, a notable exception being Craig Higginson's determination to "not worry about the local thing" in his novel Last Summer, set in Stratford-upon-Avon.But even last weekend, books were not always at centre stage; half of the eight sessions were more political or media debates. All were relaxed and conversational. They offered glimpses of a relentlessly complicated nation attempting to define itself, contest itself and wrestle with its internal contradictions.Moeletsi Mbeki, the political economist, itted he was weary of that unholy trinity: colonialism, apartheid and racism. "If I never hear those three words again, I will go to my grave a very happy person because I think those three words tell us very little about what is happening in South Africa," he said.It was remarked that South Africa might be like 19th-century America, where explosive change played out in ways that no one could discern at the time.From the country's crippling public-sector strike, Mbeki, brother of the former president, Thabo, arrived at a startling proposition: "The fact civil servants are fighting for justice is a good thing about South Africa, not a bad thing. America had a civil war and 600,000 died, but it was the only way they could get rid of slavery. How are we going to get rid of the massive inequality in this country? Do we need a civil war? We may need it."Another session marked the 25th anniversary of the Mail & Guardian itself. I asked if journalists had a kernel of nostalgia for the 1980s and 90s, when South Africa had an epic narrative - heroic Mandelas and apartheid villains - and the eyes of the world upon it.Nic Dawes, the editor, replied: "I suppose I am to a degree envious of what seems from distance like the moral clarity of that campaign. That's certainly something that we lack now, when people on all sides of the story seem to occupy a much more complex spectrum of positions. But I think that, actually, in some ways, some of that clarity is returning right now, because the story around governance, corruption and those sorts of things is acquiring a kind of epic quality. It's not just a minor nibbling away at the corners of the state any more."He added: "I do think there's a large narrative developing around the criminalisation of the state and the scale of assault on basic governance, which is now very large and very serious. The line between those who would govern and those who would loot is the difference between success and failure, so for me that's the kind of epic picture that we have to look at now."The following day, questions about identity and indigeneity were at the centre of debate. Curiously, Rian Malan, arguably the most gifted non-fiction writer in South Africa today, was relegated to a seat in the audience and could later be seen pursuing his other artistic talent, the guitar.The author Kevin Bloom recalled a Sunday afternoon in Soweto with a group of volunteers, one of whom opened up about how his mother was dying from Aids.Bloom recalled: "We stopped walking and he cried a bit. And then he looked at me and said, 'When are you going back to your country?' It remains the most profound thing that has happened to me ever as a journalist in this country, because I lived 15km away from him and so much is asked in that question. What is the notion of home? How do we explain home to ourselves in the context of that question? On the deepest level, certainly for people of my generation, 'When are you going back to your country?' is one of the most profound questions about the concept of home."Another list, the sculptor and writer Pitika Ntuli, treated the packed room to some poetry from TS Eliot and WB Yeats. One of the latter's best-known lines has become a firm favourite to describe the South African condition, possibly with a little help from Chinua Achebe, and is quoted almost daily in political commentary. Ntuli recited the stanza in full:Turning and turning in the widening gyre,The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of ionate intensity.South AfricaLiteracyDavid Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

David Smith attends a glamorous fashion show in Johannesburg and tries not to feel guilty for enjoying it"I don't know how they do it," said a friend, just back from Cape Town. "I don't know how people can sit in Camps Bay, eating and drinking, saying what a great place it is when there is such poverty just down the road."I knew what he meant, but I queried if we could really single out Cape Town and South Africa for special blame. There are swanky restaurants in central London, I ventured, where the destitute and homeless press their noses to the window.In South Africa, however, it must be said the contrasts are particularly jarring. It's often described as one of the most unequal societies in the world, and can sometimes seem dangerously close to a revolutionary brew of Versailles aristocrats and bread-starved masses.Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, wrote in a Daily Telegraph column last week about a jog through Westcliff in Johannesburg. "Among the trees, on either side of the well-kept street, I ed the kinds of homes you normally associate with Beverly Hills," he said. "Here was the honey-stoned palazzo of a diamond executive. There was the schloss of the most successful boob-job exponent in the neighbourhood."Each villa was the size of a country club, and through every set of gates you could see the carob-shaded tennis court or the ultramarine ping of the sunlight on the pool. Every property overtly proclaimed the determination of the haves to resist the depredations of the have-nots."I saw plenty of have-nots last week in Alexandra, a township in Johannesburg where people accused Zimbabwean refugees of taking their jobs and stealing from their homes. Witnesses recalled how a day earlier a pregnant Zimbabwean had been turned away from a health clinic and forced to give birth in the street. The baby died, they said. The witnesses pointed to a patch of dirt they had used to cover up the blood.Only a few miles from the patchwork shacks, the windblown dust and the boys kicking a football under a spaghetti web of power cables, the Sandton convention centre was hosting the second Africa fashion week.African designers from all over the world were in town to showcase their "trans seasonal" 2010 collections. Guinea Bissau, Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, Ghana, Somalia, Tunisia, South Africa, Mozambique, the United States and Britain were all represented.My fiancée was keen that we both attend the final show, and having never been to one before I agreed on the sole condition that I could first see the end of the World Cup match between Argentina and . For me, the living embodiment of What Not to Wear, it would be an intriguing journey into the canyon of my own ignorance, a sobering reminder that we go to our graves with vast hinterlands unmapped and uncomprehended.I didn't know what to expect as I entered the black box auditorium under dozens of spotlights. It turned out to be an intensely theatrical hour, with lighting, sound and performance all given forensic attention.It began with glittering confetti showering from the ceiling, hastily brushed from the shiny black catwalk lest the models slip and slide.The producers had chosen a circus theme as the backdrop to a collection by online portal 36boutiques.com.So on the stage were a giant ringmaster mannequin, a big egg-shaped clown's face and a model of a horse's head that might have been seen on a funfair carousel. A ringmistress in black hat and red cape sat like a statue. A jester, wearing a red nose, juggled beside the catwalk and gurned like a doe-eyed Forrest Gump at the ing models.A harlequin, his black coat sewn with silver sequins, rode the catwalk on a unicycle. A ballerina spun on point before showing off her dress.All of this was accompanied by a slickly produced musical soundtrack, bouncy and jaunty, blending Mozart and brass bands with folk and pop and familiar songs in foreign languages.The models, with their studied expressionlessness and peacock strutting, were part of the grand illusion. And the clothes? I'm afraid I'm not the man to ask about cuts and fabrics. Some were clever, some were outrageous, but I had no idea whether they were hits or misses, whether they distinguished an African style or were commodities of the global village.Sometimes I looked beyond them to watch the smartly dressed, mostly black audience checking their BlackBerries and toying with balloon sausage dogs. And I mused, should we feel guilty about sitting here, watching models parade in cellophane skirts and elongated eyelashes, while just down the road women give birth on the street in Alexandra?Not really. I don't think cancelling a fashion show in Johannesburg, or Paris or New York, is going to save any lives. But I wonder if Africa will experience more and more of these uncomfortable collisions between conspicuous affluence and squalor.Optimists say the continent is enjoying economic growth, greater political stability and fewer wars, which translates into booming cities, multiplex cinemas and showpiece events such as the World Cup.Africans can have world class fashion and football too.This is the new African dream. You too can drive a fast car and wear a designer label. But if the American experience is anything to go by, for every winner there will be a lot of Willy Lomans wondering how they missed their share of the cake.South AfricaPovertyRace issuesDavid Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our & Conditions | More Feeds

In this special podcast, we examine the G20 summit in London

Guardian Weekly Podcast No 102

In this week's show: green revolution in the US, culture shift in UK, Lithuania embraces capitalism, North Korea and Obama, smoking toad in Iran

In this week's show: US presses rewind button, problem of Pakistan, Sarkozy's challenge, and imperialism at the movies