| Radio review: Mind Your Language Konnie Huq's report on mother tongue languages was terrific. What a loss the BBC Asian Network will beThese must be frustrating times to work at the BBC Asian Network. Never supported as noisily as 6 Music, when closure of both stations was mooted, the Asian Network remains doomed despite increased audiences and some terrific output. Last night's Mind Your Language, presented by Konnie Huq, was a case in point: a well-researched report on the survival of mother tongue languages among British Asians.Huq addressed her listeners first through her personal experience of losing her native tongue, along with her siblings and wider family, as she grew up in London. "Now, none of us can speak fluent Bengali," she explained. "Have I lost out?" She then spoke to families taking a very different route, insisting that their children maintain their Asian language, and academics who argued the virtues of doing this.What distinguished the report from, say, a Radio 4 programme, was how it spoke directly to its specific audience. We heard that community colleges, where much language teaching takes place, offer more than linguistic coaching. As one researcher explained, they provide a forum for discussing wider issues, such as what it means to be British and Asian: "That was a safe space for them to turn that over and explore it." This is what the Asian Network offers, too, and what a pity to lose it. RadioAsian NetworkBBCRadio industryLanguageElisabeth Mahoneyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
In a parallel universe known as Nokia world, the future's bright | John Naughton The mobile giant is a master of hardware. But software is more important nowIt's not often that a newspaper column can resolve a dispute that has troubled the finest minds of an abstruse academic discipline, but hey, what else is the New Review for? The field is cosmology, and the dispute concerns the issue of whether there exist parallel universes that together include "everything that physically exists: the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and constants that govern them."Today we can reveal that at least one such parallel universe exists. It is usually found in Finland, but last week alighted on the ExCel Centre in London, where it was visited by several observers known to this columnist. It is called the Nokiaverse (though some call it Nokia World) and it is populated by people who believe that it is possible to go backwards into the future.The London manifestation of the Nokiaverse was opened by a stirring speech by an important Nokia person named Niklas Savander in which he declared that Nokia was a Very Big Company. Then there was a presentation by Anssi Vanjoki who explained why Nokia's new phone, codenamed N8, would blow the opposition out of the water. The hardware was better, he burbled, the software was "superb" and something called "the Ovi services" outshone anything that the likes of Google's Android could offer. "The message was clear," reported the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones, "the fightback has begun". Spoilsport that he is, Cellan-Jones then went on the web and discovered that "Mr Vanjoki had made the same claim in a blog back in July".One characteristic of the Nokiaverse is that its reality distortion field is even more powerful than the one that dominates the Appleverse, another parallel universe centred on Cupertino, California. An innocent space traveller who had wandered into the London manifestation would not have guessed that this was a company in deep trouble: its market cap is down 75% over the last three years; it is losing senior executives like the government loses personal data; and it's been forced to make a hurried appointment of a new CEO, Stephen Elop from Microsoft, to replace his expelled predecessor. But if our space traveller really wanted to know what's wrong, then all s/he needed to know is that this is a company that thinks the N8 will be a world-beater because it has a 12 megapixel camera with a Xenon flash.Nokia's problem, you see, is that it's fundamentally a hardware company. In the early days of the mobile phone industry, that was a good thing to be, because then it was all about handsets, and Nokia was very good at designing and making them. It was also astute in spotting the strategic importance of the GSM standard, and pushing hard for its adoption – which is what enabled Europe to leapfrog the fragmented US mobile phone market. So for a long time, Nokia flourished – as a hardware manufacturer. Of course its phones had software, but in those days it was very much a secondary concern because it wasn't expected to do very much.This ethos was brilliantly captured in an email sent by a former Nokia engineer to John Gruber, a well-known tech blogger. "Here's the problem," the Nokia guy wrote. "Hardware rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field."But there came a moment in the evolution of the mobile phone when suddenly the software was more important than the hardware. That moment was the arrival of the iPhone. And Nokia missed its significance for two reasons: its senior people – being hardware-focused – didn't see it; and the company lacked the software capability to compete. It didn't, for example, have a mobile operating system that was up to the job. In fact, it still doesn't, which is why it will eventually be forced to buy one in from outside. The only available options are Windows Phone 7 and Google's Android. So, in the end, it looks as though Nokia's future will be as an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) of handsets running someone else's operating system.And the moral of the story? Simple: software rules OK.NokiaMobile phonesJohn Naughtonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Claims to BP Fund Attract Scrutiny People are submitting questionable claims that range from grocery money to $20 billion, with little documentation. feeds.nytimes.com |
Lucy Mangan: They can't pull the wool over my eyes. Well, not any more Maybe it's late-onset teenage rebellion, or some kind of early pre-menopausal hormonal adjustment, but a new questioning spirit is stirring within meI am not one of life's natural interrogators. It wasn't the way I was brought up. In fact, looking back, I suspect there were North Korean children who questioned aspects of the regime under which they laboured more closely than I did. It never occurred to me to ask why we couldn't have a drink with soup1, why bumphled cushions couldn't be sat on before 2pm2, why butter was for grown-ups and margarine for children3 and why napkins had always to be folded so the motif was in the bottom left-hand corner4. (Answers, extracted much later in life, below.)However. Things change. Maybe it's late-onset teenage rebellion, maybe it's some kind of early pre-menopausal hormonal adjustment, but of late I have felt a certain new questioning spirit stir within me, a light but distinct scepticism colouring my vision and displacing some of the head-bobbing compliance that has led so many to dismiss me, rightly, as eight-tenths mud turtle.Two recent stories have encouraged me across the threshold into this new world. First, there was the article in the British Medical Journal on how drug companies tried to parlay a claim that 43% of women suffered from "sexual dysfunction" into a lucrative market for Viagra-like pills among the female population. I remember thinking, back in 1999, when the survey in question first appeared, that it seemed more likely – based on anecdotal evidence, common sense and possession of a vagina – that most of those women were, in fact, suffering from "crap shag syndrome". Due to the simpler and happier arrangement of their genitals, men can enjoy themselves by putting said genitals more or less anywhere, as Portnoy's Complaint famously testifies. Julie Burchill once wrote a column opining, in passing, that most men would have sex with mud if there was nothing else on offer. She got a letter from one reader the next day saying that in his adolescence he had done exactly that. Quod erat, possibly on a bit of boggy wasteland near you, demonstrandum.Until they are much older, wiser and/or forcibly instructed otherwise, men approach ladies' bits in the same gung-ho manner. Disappointment is bound to ensue. Such a survey makes you suspect that there are no women involved in science at all. Anyone who has been drinking with her girlfriends and heard the vastly differing sexual experiences that dwell within any one of them, let alone the group, will tell you there's no such thing as a genital attrition rate of 43%. It's all down to chemistry (in the metaphorical rather than pharmaceutical sense) and the dextrous or otherwise wielding of the penoid. I knew that. We all did. But an assertion came from an authoritative-looking group and I thought, "Oh well, there must be something in it." Fool.Ditto the news last week that women being "too posh to push" was a myth. Again, I always thought that one didn't stack up. I know a lot of women. I know quite a lot of doctors. And knowing what I did about them all, I never could visualise a situation in which they'd ask for and agree to (respectively) a caesarean in order to avoid the messy business of natural birth. But again, I presumed that somebody, somewhere knew better. And now, new research reveals, they don't. The vast, vast majority of C-sections are apparently done for medical reasons. That makes a lot more sense.Of course, eventually I shall have to question the new answers, but for now I'm going to concentrate on following up old questions. At last, I'll have a hobby. I'm going to start by asking my mother why the napkins always have to be folded so that the motif lies in the bottom left-hand corner. "Because that's the right way" will no longer suffice. It is a new dawn, and I need answers.1 Because soup's a drink and a meal. 2 To make the bumphling worthwhile. 3 Because of the war. 4 Because that's the right way.Medical researchSexual healthHealthRelationshipsLucy Manganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
George Osborne should introduce a Rooney tax | Aditya Chakrabortty In these austere times, economists suggest that higher taxes should be imposed on the people who earn huge amounts of moneyNaturally enough, the first thing I did on hearing that Wayne Rooney had squeezed another £42m out of Manchester United was wonder what economists would make of such a jackpot. The second thing I did was read a bunch of monographs to find out. Yes, I'm serious. No, I can't help it. Stop shaking your head.Pug-faced footballers interest me about as much as conveyancing solicitors, who have had far more impact on my life. There was even a brief period at school when I thought this Man U everyone else was talking about was actually a Burmese military dictator. So if you want an in-depth discussion about whether Rooney just wanted to play alongside his mate Carlos Tevez, then my advice is to move on to the sports section, whose writers will take good care of you.What interests me is how a striker who has only scored one goal this season, who had a terrible World Cup, who is in what's widely described as the worst form of his career, can command a weekly wage reportedly between £200,000 and £250,000. And for that, economists have some answers. Even better, whether left or right, Chicago or Cornell, their arguments yield some common suggestions for what can be done about it. Best of all, in these austere times, those suggestions involve imposing higher taxes on the people who earn such huge amounts. We can even call it a Rooney tax, and demand that George Osborne introduces one in his next Budget.The first thing economists suggest about the explosion in players' wages is that there is little incentive for the clubs to stop paying out so much. Put bluntly, clubs pay top dollar for top talent because it keeps them at the top of the table. Studying the performance of 40 English clubs over two decades, the sports economist Stefan Szymanski found that their wage bills accounted for 92% of the variation in their league positions. In Italy, the link was a tad stronger at 93%.Set aside precise calculations of value for money, put out of your mind the (very real) prospect that a manager might overpay for a forward who then spends most of his time on the bench or in physio, and turn a blind eye to the recklessness that some clubs have shown in running their finances. The implication of this finding is clear: a club that wants to go places is under a huge amount of pressure to spend a lot on players. The same goes for directors hiring staff at investment banks and producers casting actors for a film.I'm lumping Cristiano Ronaldo together with Bob Diamond and Robert Pattinson for a reason: they're all examples of what economists sometimes refer to as superstars. And the second thing economics teaches us about superstar pay is that it is fruitless to work out whether Yaya Touré really is that much better than other midfielders. In The Economics of Superstars, published in 1981, the Chicago academic Sherwin Rosen argued that those generally agreed to be the best in their field generally scoop the vast majority of the rewards."If a surgeon is 10% more successful in saving lives than his fellows, most people would be willing to pay more than a 10% premium for his services," Rosen wrote.The other point Rosen made was that when it became possible for more people to witness a brilliant performance, then the top performer would make even more money. And if you think about it, audiences from Nepal to Nebraska are better able than ever before to witness the same performances – through satellite TV, DVDs and iTunes.Rosen's work on superstars is probably the most widely quoted in the entire field – proof perhaps of his own theory. As a description of a process it is both ingenious and elegant. But it is less good for football and other team pursuits (banking, films) than solitary sportsmen and novelists. Still, here is the main point to take away from his argument: a significant sum of the wages paid to superstars is not merited solely by their talent, but by the simple fact that they are in pole position in their field. It is the rank that is being rewarded, not the person.Put that argument together with Moshe Adler's work on superstars. Adler believes that people are naturally attracted to what other people value – it gives them something to talk to others about, and a common culture. So it is that hordes of people will read the latest Dan Brown or teenage girls will all get into the Saturdays.Ranking, the spread of technology, and the development of a common culture: superstars benefit from all of these and yet have little to do with any of them. There is therefore no reason why film stars, footballers or financiers should hold on to so much of their earnings.The lesson from Rooney's negotiations, according to my economics monographs, is that we would be quite entitled to levy a higher rate of tax – call it the Rooney rate – on superstars. It's hard to see what harm it would do. RPattz is unlikely to throw in his job to work at Tesco. Tevez is unlikely to retrain as a corporate lawyer. As for Rooney, it might even encourage him to spend more nights indoors with Coleen.PsychologyWayne RooneyGeorge OsborneEconomicsCelebrityAditya Chakraborttyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |