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Hell's Bells | Feb 05, 2010 12:26

I'm damned if I can see the point of musichy.pe, the venture for which the Mint Chicks have apparently ditched Warner Music, or tell whether it's really any kind of record deal, as opposed to a promotional launch for their new EP. But best of luck all round, I guess.

One thing though: when Dave Moskwitz, of Wellington-based musichy.pe backer WebFund declared that "If you publish on I-Tunes for 99 cents a track, you might see 2 cents of that. With MusicHy.pe, it's more like 90 cents," he was way off the ball. Artist with major label distribution deals don't do as well as they should from iTunes, but they make a damn sight more than two cents a track.

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I had fears for the Laneway promoters on Monday morning, I really did. The weather was uncertainly poised, a screw-up with Ticketek delayed the gate sales an hour, and I wondered how the site was going to accommodate 5000 with no shelter and no pass-outs.

Turned out, I needn't have worried. The rain largely held off, the site was bigger than you'd think and the musical fare was very tasty. Tastier, anyway, than most of the food for sale – and a damn sight easier to access. Simon Pound earned my undying gratitude for giving me a half a steak sandwich for which he had queued for an hour.

I appreciate the reasons that there were no pass-outs – it would make managing the gate much more difficult, run the risk of punters getting tanked offsite, and tread on the interests of the winemaker that had its name on the festival – but if you're going to keep 5000 people onsite, you need to be able to feed and water that many people for the day.

So, yes, there are a few obvious problems to fix next time, but it was nice to see the Australian Laneway promoter, the veteran Michael Chugg, take the stage and declare as much (he also advised anyone who'd "dropped a trip" that they'd be onto a winner once night fell). Credit also to the promoters for abandoning the overlapping sets schedule after Daniel Johnston's joyous set was blighted by the locomotive sound of Cut Off Your Hands starting their show on the other stage.

I arrived in time for the Phoenix Foundation, who were clearly enjoying themselves (but why was Sam wearing a burqa?), and was subsequently blown away by the Xx and the pure musical goodness of the 3Ds. Chris Knox and the Nothing was a love-in scored by the Stooges, and Echo and the Bunnymen weren't bad either.

By the time Florence and the Machine came on, I'd been blagged backstage to see my buddies, and the headliners didn't really make much sense to me from the side of the stage. But I didn't hate anything, and, like everyone else, I revelled in the opportunity to hear the music in an urban setting. Well done, everyone: I'm looking forward to next year already.

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Thumbs up also to the AC/DC promoters for selling Western Springs as a rock show, and not some premium-priced version of Christmas in the Park like the disgracefully oversold Rolling Stones show three or four years ago. They sounded good from Point Chevalier – and, I am told, Mt Albert, Kingsland and a number of other suburbs.

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Giving the assertion of copyright a bad name: Larrikin Music has won its case claiming that Men At Work's 'Down Under' infringes its copyright in the venerable folk song 'Kookaburra Sits In the Old Gum Tree'.

Larrikin, a corporate music publisher, picked up the rights to the 1934 composition in a firesale in 1990, after 1988 death of the author, schoolteacher Marion Sinclair. The rules of the contest for which it was written made it the property of the Girl Guide Association of Victoria – and it passed to the South Australian Public Trustee, where it was snaffled up by Larrikin.

The Men At Work composition itself is wholly original, but Greg Ham's flute break in the song as it has been recorded and performed has been deemed to be infringing, if not identical. Australians who thought they might have some cultural ownership in the old song have another think coming.

Well, that's the way the world works. But the declaration by Larrikin's lawyer that the court decision was "a big win for the underdog" is, frankly, offensive. Larrikin's copyrights are administered by New York-based Music Sales Group, which controls nearly a third of all music copyrights in Australia and New Zealand.

These copyright trolls are about as much the little guy as Rupert Murdoch is.

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On another plane entirely, I ran into my old friend David Merritt in Cuba Street yesterday, and bought one of his hand-made books, geek prayers. He insisted on also giving me two more: why I copyleft and the 12 steps of the Microsoft addict.

David's slim books are a deliberate and winning collision of digital thinking and rustic materials. The "prayers" include:

Lord,
May I remember where all my files are when they are buried in nested folders and directories

And:

Lord,
May the OSX spinning rainbow ball of death never appear moments after clicking on a complex Photoshop filter combo that forces a reboot of the entire computer

And:

Lord,
May direct marketing loyalty programmes and data mining companies nor organs of the state never capture my entire personal financial history, burn them to DVD along with 2 million others and then leave them on a Wellington bus

There's also more work on scribd, and you can contact Dave at Landroverfarm Press, Box 243, Whanganui, New Zealand; or lrfpress@gmail.com. geek prayers cost me $5.

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Hey kids!

Connan Mockasin has a free track for you! It's called 'It's Choade My Dear' and it's from his new album Please Turn Me Into The Snat.

On Connan's website you can also see a chat with the Phoenix Foundation's Samuel Flynn Scott.

Speaking of which, the Phoenix Foundation have a spiffy new Tumblr-based website, which, rather brilliantly, has a fan fiction section. You might wish to sketch out your fan-fic ideas right here.

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Start with your conclusion | Feb 03, 2010 11:52

'Final chapter in the MMR-autism scandal' reads the headline over Peter Griffin's summary of the devastating ruling by Britain's General medical Council against Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues.

Well, you would hope that was an end to the matter. Wakefield, the author of a study that claimed a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism, was found to have acted dishonestly, unethically and unprofessionally, and to have shown a "callous disregard for the distress and pain" of children.

And yet, there were parents of autistic children cheering him from the gallery, and later outraged at his the council's detailed and damning verdict.

The desire to believe in a cure beyond reason is strong in some autism parents: spawned in the grief that the child you expected was not born, or cruelly departed at the age of two or three; and reinforced by the unexplained changes and improvements that can be characteristic of development on the autistic spectrum.

And, especially, in this case, is it sometimes amplified by the news media. The British media – sensing a flaw in the system, a scandal, and the reliable emotional tug of desperate parents – were all over Wakefield and his study. It was huge.

And then there was Brian Deer, a reporter for The Sunday Times, who actually looked for the truth and sought to discover why Wakefield's study had never been reproduced. From Deer's first stories, in 2004, it has taken until now for what ought to be the final verdict: The Lancet has, finally, formally retracted Wakefield's 1998 study.

Ben Goldacre, who devoted the last chapter of his book, Bad Science to the Wakefield debacle, concludes a new blog post on a gloomy note:

But there is the wider context: Wakefield was at the centre of a media storm about the MMR vaccine, and is now being blamed by journalists as if he were the only one at fault. In reality, the media are equally guilty.

Even if it had been immaculately well conducted – and it certainly wasn't – Wakefield's "case series report" of 12 children's clinical anecdotes would never have justified the conclusion that MMR causes autism, despite what journalists claimed: it simply didn't have big enough numbers to do so. But the media repeatedly reported the concerns of this one man, generally without giving methodological details of the research, either because they found it too complicated, inexplicably, or because to do so would have undermined their story.
As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable. Then, after Tony Blair refused to say if his son had received the vaccine, the commentators rolled in. Experts from Carol Vorderman to Fiona Philips from GMTV have all shared their concerns about MMR with the nation. Less than a third of all broadsheet reports on MMR in 2002 mentioned that the overwhelming evidence showed no link between MMR and autism.

The MMR scare has now petered out. It would be nice if we could say this was because the media had learnt their lessons, and recognised the importance of scientific evidence, rather than one bloke's hunch. Instead it has terminated because of the behaviour of one man, Andrew Wakefield, which undermined the emotional narrative of their story. The media have developed no insight into their own role, and for this reason, there will be another MMR.

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I'm guessing there'll be no retraction or apology from Ian Wishart, who has used Investigate magazine to propagate the claims of Wakefield and others as fact, and even to throw in bizarre curveballs such as the claim that "if your kids have been vaccinated with MMR, they're carrying a little piece of [a] dead child inside them."

You may wish to bear in mind Wishart's past conduct if you are to approach the new Investigate cover story. The Truth About Marijuana Reform.

As usual, Wishart begins with his conclusion and works hard to select evidence that meets his purpose. In this case, it's tempting to conclude that it's all simply a path to his real goal: the George Soros conspiracy. That being that the billionaire Soros, a notable donor to evidence-based projects, is the money-man behind a global liberal plot.

Specifically: Soros's Open Society Institute contributed $35,000 last year to an international drug policy conference hosted by the New Zealand Drug Foundation. The majority of those who attended take the view that that the key to drug policy is reducing the harms caused by drugs.

Wishart, on the other hand, praises the ultra-prohibitionist approach of Sweden, and presents some figures on marijuana use in comparison to the Netherlands, but doesn't note that Sweden's rate of youth cannabis use is above the European average, and above that of Germany, which effectively decriminalised marijuana some time ago. How, he wails, could any decent person believe that harm minimisation is a better approach than Sweden's zero-tolerance?

Here are some starters: Sweden's rate of drug-related deaths is twice that of the Netherlands. In the period where Sweden's ultra-prohibitionist policies have been implemented, the prevalence of heroin use has remained at about 1% (the same as the Netherlands) – but the number of heroin-related deaths has increased by 42%. Overall, the number of drug-related deaths annually in Sweden has nearly doubled between 1995 and 2007.

Bear in mind also that Sweden's official drug rate has actually been suppressed since it opted for a narrower definition in the 1990s.

A paper by Henrik Tham of the Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, Swedish Drug Policy and the Vision of the Good Society, confronts the "Swedish model" head-on. From the abstract:

Swedish drug policy has according to official declarations been successful. The picture has recently been challenged through rising drug use and rising drug related mortality. This development has taken place in spite of the restrictive Swedish policy with further penalization of drug consumption, increasing number of police officers working with drug crime and rising number of persons sentenced to prison for drug offences …

The picture that emerges is a denial of the failure of the old Swedish model but at the same time an alarmist stand with demands for increases of resources for information, treatment and control. The strategies chosen can be derived from two central themes in Swedish drug debate: 'a drug-free society' and 'total rehabilitation'. The two in turn seem to be aspects of an underlying vision—the vision of the good and integrative welfare society.

These examples should, to any rational reader, help explain the philosophy behind harm minimisation.

But Wishart has a more exciting idea as to "a character like George Soros [would] have an interest in ''harm minimisation'":

Legalising narcotics worldwide worldwide would allow business financiers like Soros to control large chunks of the drug trade "legitimately". They could own the opium poppy field, pay poor peasants to harvest, control distribution and supply of drugs to market …

Of course. That'll be it.

I'm a bit pressed for time today to turn over the rest of the story, but I've posted it here for purposes of criticism and review and you are welcome to do both. I believe this falls under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act, but if the owner objects, I'll remove the link.

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Do Want? | Jan 28, 2010 10:59

It's the iPad. The most striking thing about today's big reveal is the price: from US$499; and Apple's productivity apps for US$9.99 from the App Store. Then there's the support from book publishers, which does not bode well for Amazon's Kindle. And the unveiling of what is essentially a new operating system, which blends the characteristics of the iPhone OS and Mac OS X.

The big surprise, for me, is the absence of a user-facing camera – so no Skype, let alone facial recognition. And there was no "one more thing"; no everything-will-be-different-after-this. But I want one, oh yes.

Juha Saarinen and Ben Gracewood already have some thoughts posted – the former sees problems with 3G specs in New Zealand and the latter decodes the announcement as meaning that there will be no iBook Store in New Zealand for the time being. And every woman I know is making sanitary towel jokes.

Your thoughts?

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