Times to charge £1 a day for access to online content

People who want to read content from the Times and Sunday Times online will have to pay £1 a day or £2 for a week’s access from June.

News International has announced the pricing and timeline for what is likely to be a highly-debated move behind a paywall, confirming previous stories that June would see a fee come in.

News International’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks told the BBC that it was a “a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition.” …

Times Online will split into separate sites for separate Sunday Times and Times sites in May, but payment will allow access to both sites when the fee comes in.

“[We are] at a defining moment for journalism, added Brooks. “We are proud of our journalism and unashamed to say that we believe it has value. This is just the start. The Times and the Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the UK to move to this new approach.

“We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers.” …

The Sun, the next News International title likely to disappear behind a paywall, took the opportunity to run a column from broadcaster John Humphrys backing payment for online content.

“We must not put the papers at risk by thinking we do not have to pay for them,” concludes Humphrys.

The debate will rage on about whether a paid-for model can work for an internet community used to free content, and many will watch with interest to see if the Times’ move is successful.

via Times to charge £1 a day for access to online content | News | TechRadar UK.

Times to fail at business by not understanding supply and demand. People will just read the free news sites.  Here are 20 free ones:

1	CNN.com
2	CBS News
3	ABCNews
4	Google News
5	Reuters
6	Yahoo News
7	BBC News Online
8	World News
9	MSNBC
10	FOXnews
11	USATODAY.com
12	CBC News Online
13	Time.com
14	The Associated Press
15	Guardian Unlimited
16	NewsLink
17	The New York Times
18	EmergencyNet News
19	Consortium News
20	News.com.au

US credit card hacker sentenced

Computer expert Albert Gonzalez has been jailed for 20 years in the US for his part in stealing more than 130 million credit and debit card numbers.

The judge who sentenced him described the case as “the largest and most costly example of computer hacking in US history”.

Gonzalez, from Miami, pleaded guilty at his trial in September 2009.

He was accused, along with two Russian co-conspirators, of hacking into retailer payment systems.

They targeted more than 250 US companies including payment processor Heartland Payment Systems, food and drink store 7-Eleven and American supermarket Hannaford Brothers Co.

Gonzalez was found to have used SQL injection attacks to exploit weaknesses in payment software programmes and access data, stealing millions of customer card details.

He blamed “curiosity and addiction” for his crimes. As part of a plea bargain, he had handed over to the court expensive jewellery, watches, his car and home.

He also gave $1m in cash that he had buried in his parents’ garden. …

via BBC News – US credit card hacker sentenced.

Sensors turn skin into gadget control pad

Tapping your forearm or hand with a finger could soon be the way you interact with gadgets.

US researchers have found a way to work out where the tap touches and use that to control phones and music players.

Coupled with a tiny projector the system can use the skin as a surface on which to display menu choices, a number pad or a screen.

Early work suggests the system, called Skinput, can be learned with about 20 minutes of training.

“The human body is the ultimate input device,” Chris Harrison, Skinput’s creator, told BBC News.

Sound solution

He came up with the skin-based input system to overcome the problems of interacting with the gadgets we increasingly tote around.

Gadgets cannot shrink much further, said Mr Harrison, and their miniaturisation was being held back by the way people are forced to interact with them.

The size of human fingers dictates, to a great degree, how small portable devices can get. “We are becoming the bottleneck,” said Mr Harrison.

To get around this Mr Harrison, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon and colleagues Desney Tan and Dan Morris from Microsoft Research, use sensors on the arm to listen for input.

A tap with a finger on the skin scatters useful acoustic signals throughout the arm, he said. Some waves travel along the skin surface and others propagate through the body. Even better, he said, the physiology of the arm makes it straightforward to work out where the skin was touched.

Differences in bone density, arm mass as well as the “filtering” effects that occur when sound waves travel through soft tissue and joints make many of the locations on the arm distinct.

Software coupled with the sensors can be taught which sound means which location. Different functions, start, stop, louder, softer, can be bound to different locations. The system can even be used to pick up very subtle movements such as a pinch or muscle twitch. …

Early trials show that after a short amount of training the sensor/software system can pick up a five-location system with accuracy in excess of 95%.

Accuracy does drop when 10 or more locations are used, said Mr Harrison, but having 10 means being able to dial numbers and use the text prediction system that comes as standard on many mobile phones. …

The prototype developed by the research team sees the sensors enclosed in a bulky cuff. However, said Mr Harrison, it would be easy to scale them down and put them in a gadget little bigger than a wrist watch.

Mr Harrison said he envisages the device being used in three distinct ways.

The sensors could be coupled with Bluetooth to control a gadget, such as a mobile phone, in a pocket. It could be used to control a music player strapped to the upper arm.

Finally, he said, the sensors could work with a pico-projector that uses the forearm or hand as a display surface. This could show buttons, a hierarchical menu, a number pad or a small screen. Skinput can even be used to play games such as Tetris by tapping on fingers to rotate blocks….

via BBC News – Sensors turn skin into gadget control pad.

A Xeno Song, Step by Step – (with audio examples)

As you can see, I’m taking a few days off from posting strange news to work on my music. – Xeno

Clone photo by Chrissie white (web site)

Mr. Nemo Nobody: Xeno, you’ve been posting songs on your blog, I wonder if you could break down the process. How is it done?

Xeno: First, write a song. Once you have a song you can play from start to finish, get your home recording studio set up.

Mine is simple and compact: 1 PC computer (Intel Core i7, 2.8 GHz, 6 GB RAM, Windows Vista Home Premium), a MIDI keyboard (88 key Williams Encore), some guitars (Takamine 12-string, Baby Taylor), a bass (Olp), a decent condenser mic (AT 3035), monitor speakers (KRK), good headphones (Sony MDR-V6), and a small mixer (Behringer MX 802A), and Cubase 5 software.

I’ll take you through it step by step so you can hear the progress.

The song is ”I’m Growing Your Clone” a twisted number I wrote about identity theft. ”Clone” won a song writing contest years ago and as a prize I got to record it at no cost in the Sacramento studio of Brian Wheat of the band Tesla. I learned some good things working with him.

Here is how I build a song:

Step 1 (Reference w/click) – Record a rough version of your song to a click track.

Performance doesn’t matter, but get the timing and chords and basic vocals right.  This reference track gives you the outline of the song and it allows all the parts you add later to synch up. You have to learn to play to a click track, but don’t be a slave to the click. In the example below I purposefully mess with the timing at the very start to create tension, then lock in for the rest of the song.  Some people like to speed up slightly on the chorus.

Step 2 (Rough Drums) – Drums and bass are the foundation.

I’m finding that I like the sound when the kick drum hits with the bass on notes that are basic to the rhythm. You can hear a good example of connecting the bass and drums in my song “Get off my head” (box left). If you lock the drums to the click track, for example by using MIDI drums, your original reference will sound wrong in places. This is to be expected since the drums are now correct and everything else will follow the drums.  In the next step, for example, the bass should lock to the drums, not to the original reference track.

Step 3 (Drums and Bass) – The bass is both rhythmic and melodic.

In addition to locking in with the drums, it should enhance the melody of the song as well as give a foundation. In this example I’m playing chord tones in part of the song but there is also a “walking bass line” which can have notes outside of the chords as long as it pulls forward to the next chord.

Step 4 (Rhythm Section) – Add guitars and keyboards. – Add any special instruments.

Play everything along with your reference track as you are writting, then drop the reference track and get the Drums, Bass and Piano/Guitar tight. This instrumental should be much tighter than your rough reference track.

Step 5 (Drum, Base, Piano & Rhythm Guitars)

At this point the foundation should be sounding fairly good and you may have the urge to play guitar solos over the whole thing…. As you add guitars, you’ll hear bass and drum parts that need to be fixed. Fix these as you go so it gets a little better each mix.

Step 6 (Add Lead Vocals) – - Record the lead vocals

This is the time to play with different expressions and melodies.  I don’t really like my voice but I do the best I can with it.

Step 7 (Add backing Vocals) – Record backing vocals

This is my favorite part.  I really enjoy arranging the vocal harmony for my stuff.  And I love my fake horns.

Step 8 ( Finally! )  I’m Growing Your Clone – ( Mix 1) – Give your ears a break for a few hours. Return to do the mixing.

Listen for anything that jumps out as being annoying and fix it. This means re-recording instrument parts or vocals, getting volume levels right, and so on. The first mix for me usually has level problems. It is good to listen at different volumes and with different speakers. If you listen very quietly, you can hear new things, like the lead vocal volume may be off in places.  In this first mix, I hear a lot I want to fix … but I think it is time to give it and me a rest.

I’m calling it a day. Tomorrow I’ll listen and may decide the thow away the whole thing…. or perhaps I’ll like it.

Nemo: Why do this? Why spend an entire day working on one song.

Xeno: (laughing)   I enjoy the finished product. It seems worth it.

Derek Paravicini’s extraordinary gift

There are some people we meet in our “60 Minutes” stories who we just can’t let go, whose next chapter we’re almost compelled to follow. Like Derek Paravicini, a masterful musician who is blind, with disabilities so severe he can’t tell his right hand from his left or hold anything but the simplest of conversations. When Derek is playing the piano, it’s hard to believe there is anything he can’t do, and yet when you meet him away from the keyboard, as we first did in London six years ago, the contrast is shocking. Derek is a musical savant, blessed with an island of extreme talent in a sea of profound disability. … Asked if he knows how old he is now, Derek said, “I don’t know how old I am, no.”

Today Derek is 30. He grew up in an upper class British family, the nephew of Camilla Parker-Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall. But none of that matters much to Derek.Derek was excited to show us the skills that make him so exceptional, the ability to instantly call up any piece of music he’s ever heard. Like the Village People’s “YMCA” or the show tune “My Favorite Things.” … But it isn’t just that Derek remembers them: he can transform them effortlessly and seamlessly into the styles of different musicians, like jazz greats. Asked to change to the style of Oscar Peterson, Derek changed style mid-song, playing “My Favorite Things” Oscar Peterson-style. He also wowed Stahl by playing the tune in the style of Dave Brubeck.

“It’s like he’s got libraries of pieces and styles in his head,” Adam Ockelford, Derek’s teacher, told Stahl. “And he can just whip out a piece book and a style book and just bring them together. It just kind of explodes.” How Derek’s fingers can do this but can’t button a button or zip a zipper remains a mystery. There are lots of theories about savants, but few real answers. Watch the entire video and read the full story at the “60 Minutes” site.

via ’60 Minutes’ exclusive: Derek Paravicini’s extraordinary gift – Yahoo! News.

It’s the law of the land: Health overhaul signed

Claiming a historic triumph that could define his presidency, a jubilant Barack Obama signed a massive, nearly $1 trillion health care overhaul on Tuesday that will for the first time cement insurance coverage as the right of every U.S. citizen and begin to reshape the way virtually all Americans receive and pay for treatment.

After more than a year of hyperpartisan struggle — and numerous near-death moments for the measure — Obama declared “a new season in America” as he sealed a victory denied to a line of presidents stretching back more than half a century. Democratic lawmakers cheered him on, giving the White House signing ceremony a rally-like atmosphere as they shouted and snapped photos with pocket cameras or cell phones.

Not everyone was cheering. The Democrats pushed the bill through Congress without GOP support, and the Republicans said Tuesday that those Democratic lawmakers would pay dearly in this November’s elections. Opinion polls show the public remains skeptical, too, and Obama will fly to Iowa on Thursday for the first of a number of appearances that will be more like a continuing sales job than a victory lap.

Aside from the huge, real-life changes in store for many Americans, the White House hopes the victory — even as a companion Senate “fix-it” bill moves through the Senate — will revitalize an Obama presidency that has been all but preoccupied with health care for his first year and two months in office. Vice President Joe Biden was caught whispering a profanity as he exclaimed to the president what a big deal it was.

Indeed, the reshaping of one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to be phased in over several years, ranks among the biggest changes ever devised by Washington. That was a main complaint from Republicans who characterize the measure as a costly, wrongheaded government power grab. Obama and the Democrats portray it as literally a lifesaver for countless Americans.

The core of the massive law is the extension of health care coverage to 32 million who now lack it, a goal to be achieved through a complex cocktail of new mandates for individuals and employers, subsidies for people who can’t afford to buy coverage on their own, consumer-friendly rules clamped on insurers, tax breaks, and marketplaces to shop for health plans.

The law’s most far-reaching changes don’t kick in until 2014, including a requirement that most Americans carry health insurance — whether through an employer, a government program or their own purchase — or pay a fine. To make that a reality, tax credits to help cover the cost of premiums will start flowing to middle-class families and Medicaid will be expanded to cover more low-income people. Insurers would no longer be allowed to deny coverage to people with health problems. …

via It’s the law of the land: Health overhaul signed – Yahoo! News.

We don’t have a health care crisis so much as a health crisis…  we don’t exercise, we don’t get enough sleep, we stress each other out, and we eat junk  … but I’m hopeful this national health overhaul will lead to more preventative care.

Increased physical health improves mental health, happiness and productivity.

Facial Aging is More Than Skin Deep

Facelifts and other wrinkle-reducing procedures have long been sought by people wanting to ward off the signs of aging, but new research suggests that it takes more than tightening loose skin to restore a youthful look. A study by physicians at the University of Rochester Medical Center indicates that significant changes in facial bones – particularly the jaw bone – occur as people age and contribute to an aging appearance. …

This loss of bony volume may contribute sagging facial skin, decreased chin projection, and loss of jaw-line definition. As jaw volume decreases, soft tissue of the lower face has less support, resulting in a softer, oval appearance to the lower face and sagging skin, which also affects the aging appearance of the neck.

“Physicians have long been taught that facial aging is caused by soft tissue descent and loss of elasticity,” Langstein said. “Though we have always known that bones change over time, until now, the extent to which it causes an aged appearance was not appreciated.”

… “The future of facial cosmetic procedures to restore a youthful look may include methods to suspend soft tissue – such as chin and cheek implants – to rebuild the structure that time has worn away, in addition to lifting and reducing excess skin,” Shaw said.

via Facial Aging is More Than Skin Deep – News Room – University of Rochester Medical Center.

Updating Darwin’s theory of evolution

Three years ago, researchers led by a professor at the university of Linköping in Sweden created a henhouse that was specially designed to make its chicken occupants feel stressed. The lighting was manipulated to make the rhythms of night and day unpredictable, so the chickens lost track of when to eat or roost. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they showed a significant decrease in their ability to learn how to find food hidden in a maze.

The surprising part is what happened next: the chickens were moved back to a non-stressful environment, where they conceived and hatched chicks who were raised without stress – and yet these chicks, too, demonstrated unexpectedly poor skills at finding food in a maze. They appeared to have inherited a problem that had been induced in their mothers through the environment. Further research established that the inherited change had altered the chicks’ “gene expression” – the way certain genes are turned “on” or “off”, bestowing any given animal with specific traits. The stress had affected the mother hens on a genetic level, and they had passed it on to their offspring.

The Swedish chicken study was one of several recent breakthroughs in the youthful field of epigenetics, which primarily studies the epigenome, the protective package of proteins around which genetic material – strands of DNA – is wrapped. The epigenome plays a crucial role in determining which genes actually express themselves in a creature’s traits: in effect, it switches certain genes on or off, or turns them up or down in intensity. It isn’t news that the environment can alter the epigenome; what’s news is that those changes can be inherited. And this doesn’t, of course, apply only to chickens: some of the most striking findings come from research involving humans.

One study, again from Sweden, looked at lifespans in Norrbotten, the country’s northernmost province, where harvests are usually sparse but occasionally overflowing, meaning that, historically, children sometimes grew up with wildly varying food intake from one year to the next. A single period of extreme overeating in the midst of the usual short supply, researchers found, could cause a man’s grandsons to die an average of 32 years earlier than if his childhood food intake had been steadier. Your own eating patterns, this implies, may affect your grandchildren’s lifespans, years before your grandchildren – or even your children – are a twinkle in anybody’s eye. …

If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply “offering up” a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were “obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them”. As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn’t right about how giraffes’ necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. “Today,” notes David Shenk, “any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . .”

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it’s not the only one. We’ve learned that huge proportions of the human genome consist of viruses, or virus-like materials, raising the notion that they got there through infection – meaning that natural selection acts not just on random mutations, but on new stuff that’s introduced from elsewhere. Relatedly, there is growing evidence, at the level of microbes, of genes being transferred not just vertically, from ancestors to parents to offspring, but also horizontally, between organisms. The researchers Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfield conclude that, on average, a bacterium may have obtained 10% of its genes from other organisms in its environment. …

via Why everything you’ve been told about evolution is wrong | Science | The Guardian.

Banana Museum Curator Must Split

Ken Bannister is going bananas because no one wants his bananas.

Over the past 38 years, Mr. Bannister has collected more than 17,000 banana-themed artifacts. He is the founder of the International Banana Club and Museum in Hesperia, Calif., in the High Desert northeast of Los Angeles.

On Jan. 8, he received a letter from the Hesperia Recreation & Parks District informing him the banana collection must go, because the district wants to bring in new blood to the city-owned space. It will be replaced by artifacts collected by the late John Swisher, a local historian. Mr. Bannister has until the end of the month to pack up his bananas.

“I guess it’s time to split,” he says.

The collection includes a banana golf putter, banana beverages, and a gold-sequined “Michael Jackson banana.” Mr. Bannister organizes the goods into “hard” (brass, lead, wood, plastic banana wares) and “soft” (stuffed bananas, banana beach mats, banana tents). He estimates the effort has cost him over $150,000 over the years.

There are other fruit and vegetable museums. The Carrot Museum in England boasts more than 1,000 items. The National Apple Museum of Biglerville, Pa., has a related Apple Core Band. And the Vidalia Onion Museum in Georgia will open a new 1,500 square-foot space in April. Still, the banana museum holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the “world’s largest collection devoted to any one fruit.”

It all began in 1972, when Mr. Bannister worked as the president of a photo-equipment manufacturing company. As a joke, a secretary handed him 10,000 Chiquita banana stickers to distribute at a manufacturers conference. She received them from her husband, a stevedore, and they were an instant hit at the conference.

Friends started sending in banana merchandise, which quickly crammed Mr. Bannister’s office. Soon thereafter, he opened his museum in Altadena, Calif., where it stayed until it moved 80 miles to its current Hesperia location in 2005. Most of the items are sent in from fans who hear about the collection.

via Banana Museum Curator Must Split – WSJ.com.

Sixteen UFO Cases Reported on Earthquake Night

The earthquake was followed by a boom in UFO sightings, but sixteen cases occurred on the night of the tragedy alone (some of them accompanied by significant visual material) which have been subjected to study by UFO researchers.

Researcher Rodrigo Fuenzalida told Publimetro that the highest concentrations of reports appear to be Las Condes, Peñalolén, Providencia and Colina. “We have eyewitness testimony from a couple that refused to sleep in their apartment on the night of the earthquake, choosing instead to spend the early morning hours in the street. They were able to see an object that looked much like the moon, but immediately realized that the moon was on the other side. This event may have been seen by residents of other communes,” said Fuenzalida.

Another major sighting took place on Isla Robinson Crusoe, part of the Juan Fernandez Archipelago, where people witnessed an object emerging from the sea shortly before the earthquake.

Regarding the case involving a humanoid — reported by passengers on a bus in Iquique — Fuenzalida notes that while startling, he is aware of other similar cases, but people “do not dare report them, fearing that they will not be believed.

“I’ve heard of the manifestations of these “luminous men”, said the ufologist. “We are in an ideal period for sightings. I would ask everyone to be alert, but be mindful to avoid confusion, or a state of hysteria.”

via Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology: Chile: Sixteen UFO Cases Reported on Earthquake Night.