Male bosses are being paid bonuses double the size of those given to female colleagues in identical jobs – a disparity that means men enjoy salary top-ups of £141,500 more than women over the course of a working lifetime.
The figures, released by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), reveal that men in UK management roles earned average bonuses of £6,442 in 2012 compared with £3,029 for women. In the most senior roles, female directors received bonuses of £36,270 over the past 12 months, compared with £63,700 awarded to male directors.
The latest figures highlighting the inequitable nature of pay in British business led to calls for action from campaigners on workplace equality. Ann Francke, the CMI’s chief executive, said: “It’s time to move this issue into the mainstream management agenda.
“This is about changing our approach to management to allow for greater flexibility, less masculine cultures, more emphasis on outcomes rather than time in the office and greater transparency around performance and rewards. “In solving this issue, we would actually raise the performance of organizations and the well-being of individuals at work. What are we waiting for?” Dr Ruth Sealy, a senior research fellow at Cranfield School of Management, added: “It is not surprising. Bonuses are a method of payment that can be used with discretion. As to what should be done about it, these things should be made more transparent.”
While statisticians warned that some of the data may be skewed by factors such as women entering occupations where there is less of a culture of bonus payments, the discrepancies in the sizes of awards do appear to be aggravating Britain’s pay gap, which the government says is closing but still sees full-time male employees earn 10% more than women.
Maria Miller, the Minister for Women and Equalities, said: “The CMI figures are yet another damaging example highlighting that, in the world of work, women still lose out to their male counterparts and that the playing field is far from level. “Changes in the workplace are happening and it’s good that the pay gap is closing – but there is still more to do before we see full equality in the workplace.
“The government is playing its part: we have made pay secrecy clauses illegal, given tribunals the power to force employers who break equal pay laws to carry out equal pay audits and signed 120 companies up to our Think, Act, Report scheme, which encourages companies to improve the way they recruit, promote and pay women. “We’ve also looked at other pay gap causes, such as having to juggle work and family responsibilities, by introducing shared parental leave and the right to request flexible working to all employees.”
Large companies such as Tesco, BT, Unilever and the international law firm Eversheds are among those signed up to Think, Act, Report. The scheme has only attracted 120 supporters in nearly two years of existence, having risen from 54 participants in November 2012. However, the CMI’s data did provide some evidence to support Miller’s contention that the overall pay gap is narrowing: the difference between the average salaries earned by male and female bosses has appeared to shrink, decreasing from an average of £10,060 in 2012 to £8,502 in the CMI’s most recent figures. However, the institute cautioned against direct comparisons between the 2012 and 2013 samples – which both polled around 40,000 managers – as they are not identical.
A sub-set of 17,000 individual managers, whose salaries and bonuses have been tracked over a number of years, showed that male managers’ earnings are rising faster than women’s for the first time in five years, with men enjoying total increases of 3.2% compared with 2.8% for women, when salaries and bonuses are combined.
At the most senior level, male directors’ earnings rose by 5.3% over the past 12 months, compared with just 1.1% for female directors.


Maria is sitting on a black plastic chair in a community centre on a cold Tuesday afternoon waiting for her number to be called. She is number 34.
When it’s her turn, Maria is called forward to pick up a brown paper bag filled with essentials including pasta, eggs and cornflakes, and is invited to choose between butternut squash or carrots as this week’s vegetables.
Maria is the 34th “client” so far today at East Hampton Food Pantry, a community initiative set up just streets away from some of the most expensive and exclusive properties in the world. By the end of the day, the food pantry’s organizers expect more than 400 families to have followed Maria through the doors to collect their weekly food parcel to help them get through the cold, dark Long Island winter.
In the summertime, the Hamptons, a collection of historic oceanfront towns and villages 100 miles from Manhattan, is a billionaires’ playground. But, come Labor Day in early September, when the rich and famous shut up their mansions and head back to Manhattan or Beverly Hills, the glitz gives way to the gritty reality of life for the mostly immigrant community who live here all year. “The people who come here are rich and famous but we who live here are not,” says Maria, who works 14-hour days in the summer cleaning mansions but goes months without any work at all in the winter.
Maria laughs when asked if she has enough money. “There is no work in the winter, only in the summertime,” says Maria, who, like many of the workers in the Hamptons, is from Latin America. “Here, lots of people live in a single room because they can’t pay the rent.”
She says some families with up to five children are crammed into basements and still pay more than $1,000 a month in rent. “People come here looking for work but, in the winter, there is nothing.”
Lots of her friends can’t pay for heating or medication and many would go hungry if it were not for the East Hampton Food Pantry, she says, which is just one of several food pantries in the town.
Vicki Littman, chairperson of the East Hampton Food Pantry, which provided more than 31,000 food parcels in 2015, says the number of people seeking out the food pantry is ever increasing. “Once Labor Day comes and the season is over and people’s hours start to be cut back, our numbers go up to about 400 families a week,” she says. “When they come to us on Tuesday, they get two to three days’ worth of food. Without us, they would struggle that much more.” Littman says it can be hard for outsiders to realize that there are people struggling to get by in a place known the world over for its excess.
“When I discuss with the summer community that comes out here about the food pantries, they’re always shocked because there is that glamorous side of the Hamptons where there are galas and the beaches and the mansions that are here. “But, what people don’t realize is that there is that service industry. It’s the landscapers, the nannies, the waitresses – they are all relying on that summer income to get them through the winter but people don’t see that when they’re coming out on holiday.
“There are seniors who have to sometimes pick between whether they are going to pay for their medications or pay their bills or buy food, and that shouldn’t be the case.”
Littman says the town has lost too many people working key jobs – such as teachers, police officers and even doctors and dentists – because they can’t afford to live in the community and the food pantry board is determined to do more to ensure people have a better shot at staying put. Housing is, by far, the biggest cost in the Hamptons. At $147m, the nation’s most expensive property is hedge fund manager Barry Rosenstein’s 18-acre beachfront estate at 67 Further Lane, a stone’s throw from Maidstone Golf Club, which is considered “the most elite, prestigious and difficult to get into” of all the Hamptons clubs.
Larry Cantwell, East Hampton’s town supervisor and lifelong resident, says homes regularly change hands at more than $25m and the rapid price inflation at the top end has trickled down to even the town’s most modest flats.
“Finding your first home is a challenge in an area like this,” Cantwell says. “Not just people who you would characterize as poor – working- and middle-class families are also having a hard time. If you can find a home to buy anywhere in East Hampton for $500,000, you’re very lucky.” Cantwell says more than half the town’s homes are empty for most of the year, which causes the population to dwindle to as little as 10,000 in the winter months compared with 80,000 in August. “It’s kind of the tale of two cities. There’s certainly a lot of wealth here but almost all of that wealth is in second homes only used in the summer,” says Cantwell, the son of a fisherman father and a house-cleaner mother. “But, the rest of us live here year round.
“There are famous and very wealthy people but then you have hard-working and poor people struggling to get by. You’ve got to remember that this community was founded as a farming and fishing community of people who lived off the land and the water – a real working-class community.”
Cantwell says saving up enough money to buy your first house while working as a farmer or fisherman is near-impossible in East Hampton today “and it’s not just the poor – police officers, teachers, young professionals and others all struggle to find a place to live here and many of them cannot afford to own their own home.”
Being homeless in the Hamptons means spending a lot of time on a bus. Various houses of worship have joined together to ensure there is somewhere for the homeless to spend the night over the winter. Churches up and down the north and south fork of Long Island take on the burden one night at a time and roughly 50 homeless people are bussed between them every day. Eddie Vallone, 22, is one of those on the bus every night. “People look at the Hamptons as some sort of rich town and there’s no problems going on. But there are a lot of problems here, especially drugs.
“It’s hard to really grasp –'OK, the summer is coming to an end. What am I going to do for the winter?'” Vallone says at Maureen’s Haven, a charity that coordinates the homeless shelter programme. “I want to work but there’s no work to be done.”
Vallone, who works cleaning pools and doing odd jobs on luxury estates, says that, if he saves well and doesn’t impulse-buy, he can make his summer earnings stretch out until November. “But, work doesn’t start again until May or the beginning of June.”


Robert Mysłajek stops dead. Between two paw prints on a muddy mountain track, the scientist finds what he is looking for. “Droppings!” he enthuses. Wolf sightings are so rare that the sighting of their faeces marks a good day, even for a seasoned tracker.
But it is getting easier. There are now an estimated 1,500 wolves in Poland. The number has doubled in 15 years. Wolves are – along with the brown bear, the lynx and the wolverine – Europe’s last large predator carnivores. Conservationists from Britain, Germany and the Netherlands are beating a path here to find out how the country has saved this protected species, slandered even in fairy tales.
Bits of bone and hair protrude from the precious black faeces. “It ate a red deer,” says the University of Warsaw biologist. “In my lab, I can tell you all about this wolf – not only its diet but its gender, sexual habits, age, state of health and family connections.”
DNA tests have established that Polish wolves are travellers. “One wolf reached the Netherlands, where unfortunately it was hit by a car. They have a tremendous range. They need space. The average territory required by a Polish pack is 250 sq km,” said Mysłajek.
“Is there any prospect of our ever being able to reintroduce wolves to Scotland?” asks student Alex Entwisle, 23, on a field trip to southern Poland from his college in the UK. The animal science students have spent the day observing droppings and paw prints in the spruce-clad Beskidy mountains of the Polish Carpathians.
Their hot discussion topic is whether to reintroduce wolves to the British Isles for the first time since the 18th century.
As the guest of a British charity, the Wolves and Humans Foundation, Mysłajek toured the Scottish Highlands in 2015 and took questions from villagers about the Polish experience. “The big difference between Scotland and Poland is that we eat pork. We do not have many sheep here.
“The similarity is that we have a lot of animals – 300,000 red deer and more than 800,000 roe deer. In Poland, we also have a massive overpopulation of wild boar – about 200,000 – and these are ravaging farmers’ cereal crops. Here, wolves are part of the solution,” he says.
The scientist, who is a familiar face on Polish television, says wolves are exceptional animals that are capable of moving up to 30km during a single hunt. “The Beskidy pack is a strong unit, eight or nine individuals. This year, we have recorded five cubs, two yearlings and two adults.
“We track them using motion-activated cameras in the forest and by following their prints in the mud and snow. In each family group, only one pair reproduces, once a year. All pack members care for the young with solidarity and devotion.”
Mys łajek, the son of a shepherd, is puzzled by wolves’ bad reputation. “Why does one speak of a 'lone-wolf gunman'? Why did we have to have Little Red Riding Hood?"
He is fascinated by these aloof canines who remained in the wild 33,000 years ago when others decided on a much more comfortable existence as domestic dogs.
Wolves are not pooches. Mysłajek says only scientific arguments – the need to regenerate forests and control the wild animal population – can save Europe’s wild carnivores, especially the unpopular wolf. “Natural predators balance the ecosystem. They keep herbivores in check, thus allowing trees to grow tall for birds to nest in.”
Shoot the deer? “It is only a partial solution,” he says. “In a diverse environment, you have the so-called 'landscape of fear', where herbivores no longer spend all day grazing on the tender riverside grass. They move away, as a precaution, to avoid being trapped by a predator. This gives the vegetation a chance.”
The ban on wolf hunting in the western Carpathians came into force in 1995 and nationwide in Poland in 1998. There are now resident packs in virtually all the country’s major forests. The predators coexist with humans rather than being fenced off, as they are in African safari parks.
The Polish government pays compensation for livestock killed by wolves. Mysłajek advises farmers on erecting electric fences. He has helped revive the use of two deterrents that, for reasons no one quite understands, wolves find particularly scary: red bunting (hung around sheep pens) and the bark of the fluffy white Tatra Mountain Sheepdog.
The survival and mobility of Poland’s wolves has been helped by the country’s belated infrastructure development. In 1989, when the communists relinquished power, Poland had only one motorway. Major road projects – requiring wildlife impact studies – began after Poland joined the European Union in 2004. The country now has one of the highest densities in the world of overhead crossings and underpasses for wild animals.
Attitudes have also changed. “For many years, hunting was cultural. In 1975, there were fewer than 100 wolves in Poland. Beginning in the 1950s, hunting wolves had been encouraged by the authorities. They paid a reward for killing a wolf worth a month’s salary. It was carnage.”
Mysłajek says the improvement in Polish wolves’ survival chances has been considerable but remains fragile. Packs are mobile across borders and hunting still goes on in neighbouring Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Slovakia.
He claims Poland’s new government, elected in October 2015, is hostile to wolves. “The Environment Minister, Jan Szyszko, makes no secret of being a hunter. There are 120,000 licensed hunters in Poland and they are influential in parliament.
“The hunters claim wolves are a pest and that there are 4,000 of them in Poland, which is a spurious figure based on an unscientific count. This government is capable of turning back the clock.”
Being a wolf advocate is not easy. “It is not as if you can argue to the politicians that wolves are a big tourist attraction. Most tourists want to see the animals but wolves stay away from humans. They have a tremendously sensitive sense of smell.”
The 12 British animal science students leave the Polish Carpathians without a wolf sighting; just photographs of paw prints and droppings. Entwisle is convinced that Scotland will never be able to match Poland’s success.
“It would be amazing for the environment to have them back because of the problem of too many deer. But it would just not be viable because of the roads and sheep.
“There would be problems with farmers. We had our industrial revolution too long ago. We ruined it for ourselves. In Britain, we like predators to be far away and to watch them on television, said Entwisle.


Intermediate
JMW Turner, one of Britains greatest painters, will appear on the new 20 note, after a nationwide vote.
It will be the first time an artist has appeared on a British banknote, after the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, asked the public to choose a deceased cultural figure they felt deserved to be on the banknote.
Turner, who is famous for his dramatic seascapes, beat off competition from 590 painters, sculptors, fashion designers, photographers, film-makers and actors put forward by 30,000 members of the public.
The list included Alfred Hitchcock, Alexander McQueen, Derek Jarman, Laura Ashley, William Morris and Vanessa Bell. This list was narrowed down to a final choice of five by a panel of artists, critics and historians.
The final five  Barbara Hepworth, Charlie Chaplin, Josiah Wedgwood, William Hogarth and Turner  were chosen because of their unquestioned contribution to both the visual arts and British society, as well as their enduring influence.
The announcement of the new banknote was made at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate. The announcement was made jointly by Carney and the artist Tracey Emin, who grew up in the town.
Carney said it had been so important to get this right and have a proper process that involved the public. He added that banknotes are not only a practical necessity  they can be a piece of art in everyones pocket.
The fact that we will have Turner on the 20 note shows that the British people are a nation of people who appreciate creativity and appreciate the arts, said Emin.
The note will show Turners 1799 self-portrait, as well as one of his most famous works, The Fighting Temeraire, the ship that played an important role in Nelsons victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The note will also contain a quote from the artist  light is therefore colour  as well as his signature. The signature is from his will, in which he left many of his paintings to the nation.
Historical figures were first shown on banknotes in 1970. Turner joins Winston Churchill and Jane Austen as the significant figures who will feature on the new polymer notes  a plastic-type material  Churchill on the 5 and Austen on the 10 note. The new 20 note will be available by 2020.
Turner was born in 1775 in London, the son of a barber, and he entered the Royal Academy Schools at the age of 14. In 1786, when he was sent to Margate, his love of painting and drawing the north-east Kent coast began. He returned to that coast throughout his life and it was where he painted some of his most dramatic oils and watercolours. He described its skies as the loveliest in all Europe.
Turner was a very prolific artist  he produced more than 550 oil paintings and 2,000 watercolours in his lifetime. His life was also the subject of a film, in 2014, by Mike Leigh, with Timothy Spall as the artist.
Victoria Pomery, the director of Turner Contemporary, said: The decision to celebrate JMW Turner, one of the greatest technical pioneers in the history of British art, is extraordinary. It has proven that Turner is the nations favourite artist.


There are worse things to do in life than stroll along Rio's Copacabana beach in the sunshine on the way to watch a World Cup match, so it was perhaps not surprising that England fan Anthony McDowell from Liverpool was having none of the doom and gloom that preceded some of the build-up to the tournament in Brazil. “The place is lovely. The people are great. There’s a party atmosphere,” said McDowell. “The only thing that could be better is the England team.”
He and half a dozen friends are among the multitudes of supporters from around the world who have made the beachfront into a party zone of national colours and chants. Some danced, some posed for photos, some drank, but mostly they just walked and talked football, waiting for the next game to begin on the nearby FanFest big screen. The last time there were so many people here during the daytime, the pope was visiting.
The cheerful, largely peaceful mood was far from the protests, transport chaos and stadium problems that plagued preparations for the World Cup. But, now the football is well and truly under way, visiting supporters are determined to enjoy the experience. “If I had known, when I started planning, how complicated and costly it would be, I wouldn’t have come. But, now that we’re here, it’s great,” said Brian Hill, a retired chief executive from Sunderland.
The trip has not been problem free. Hill travelled for more than 20 hours to get to Rio, then hit long delays on the road from the airport at 6.30am. His son, Andrew, had his sunglasses stolen almost as soon as he sat on the beach. And, they have been surprised that many bars are not set up with big screens for the games. But, like many fans, they said they loved the atmosphere, if not the logistics, of this tournament which has got off to a spectacular start on the pitch.
Even the surliest cynic cannot have failed to be thrilled by Robin van Persie’s extraordinary diving header for the Netherlands against Spain. Elsewhere, there has been a glut of goals: 28 in the first eight games – almost three times as many as at the same stage in South Africa in 2010. Adding to the carnival mood on the streets, where the majority of fans are from neighbouring nations, Latin-American teams won in every game they played up until the time of writing.
So far, the tournament has avoided the worst Doomsday scenarios, though it is far from trouble free. The stadiums may have been delivered late and – in some cases – not fully finished, but there have been no reports of structural problems or difficulties entering the grounds since the kick off.
As at previous World Cups, ticketing has been a problem, with many empty seats at several games, including the Netherlands against Spain. FIFA spokesman Saint-Clair Milesi confirmed that only 48,000 of the 51,900 seats at the ground were filled. FIFA is also investigating security lapses that allowed Chilean fans to let off fireworks during their victory over Australia.
The Globo newspaper listed a number of shortcomings in the 12 host cities. Almost all suffered worse traffic congestion than usual. The worst transport problems were in Natal, where bus drivers have been on strike since 12 June. In Salvador, some journey times were five times longer than usual. “Traffic was already bad but this week it is chaotic,” Jecilda Mello, president of residents’ group the Association of Friends of the Historic Centre, told the paper.
But, protests have diminished since the opening day, when small demonstrations took place in several cities, prompting police to use tear gas and pepper spray. Since then, the only security threat has been petty theft and overexcited fans. A spontaneous street party of Argentinian fans was dispersed with pepper spray after the fans blocked roads.
The huge distances have led to some sharply contrasting World Cup experiences. The tournament has made only a small mark on São Paulo, South America’s most populous city, but, far away in Manaus – the remote Amazonian city where England played Italy – visitors said World Cup fever was in full swing with brightly decorated streets and flags fluttering on many cars.
The FA chairman, Greg Dyke, said the shift in mood was palpable. “We've had a really warm welcome in Manaus. It’s a big thing for them, even if it is a bit strange to spend so much on a stadium with no one to play in it. But we were in São Paulo for four or five days in the run-up to the opening match and you wouldn’t have known until the last day that there was even a World Cup on. It was weird.”


Intermediate
Valdevaqueros is one of the last unspoilt beaches in southern Spain. Currently the beach just has an access road filled with camper vans from Germany, France, Italy and Britain, which bring windsurfers and kitesurfers who are attracted by the strong winds in the area.
For years it has been very different from the concrete-lined beaches of Torremolinos and Marbella along the coast, but earlier in 2012 the local council in Tarifa said yes to plans to build a tourist complex next to the beach. Environmental and conservation groups have protested that the project will harm the habitats of protected species, but for most of the council the issue is simple: jobs. Tarifa has 18,000 inhabitants and 2,600 are unemployed as Spain experiences its worst economic crisis in at least half a century.
Traditional jobs such as fishing are dying out so tourism is the only solution, but it must be sustainable, said Sebastin Galindo, a councillor from the Socialist party, which is in opposition in Tarifa but voted with the governing Peoples Party support the project. Galindo says the complex meets environmental standards. There is a law that was designed to stop more ugly developments like those that spoilt a lot of Spains beaches when mass tourism first arrived in the 1960s and 1970s. This law says that the complex must be at least 200 metres from the coast; it will be much farther than that  it will be 800 metres.
Opponents of the complex say more housing is not needed in a country that already has a million empty homes. The Socialist opposition in Madrid attacked the idea, and Galindo said it discriminated against migrant workers who came to Spain during the boom years, many of them from Morocco, whose coastline is just 14km away and can be seen from Tarifa.
Surfers fear that new buildings in Valdevaqueros would reduce the strength of the famous local wind but fail to attract traditional package holidaymakers. Its not really a family spot. Just wait until they see what the wind is like, said Henning Mayer, who has come here from Germany every year for 20 years. Ten years ago they said they would build a new highway here. It didnt happen, so I think it will be impossible to build new hotels.
At the southernmost point of Spain, Tarifa is where Africa and Europe meet, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic. Campaigners say it also has a vital role for migrating animals.
The campaign to save the beach was launched hours after the Tarifa council voted for the project. The campaign has a Facebook page and is supported by groups including Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Spanish branch of conservation network Birdlife. Also joining the opposition to the project is the Andalusian College of Geographers, which says that the site would disturb two wildlife conservation areas and cross the border of a national park.
Money is once again more important than urban laws and European environmental directives, said Ral Romeva, a member of the European Parliament. In Romevas view, another problem with the project is that the site has too little water in a town that already suffers from shortages in the hot summer weather of Andalusa.
Many locals are also wondering why a resort should be built 10km away, and not on wasteland near Tarifas picturesque old centre, with its typically Andalusian white walls and small streets, dominated by a 10th-century Moorish castle. We agree with the complex as long as it creates jobs in the town, but we are against it if it only benefits a few, said Cristbal Lobato, who has worked at the same beachside bar in Tarifa for 30 years. If they put it in the centre of Tarifa, where there is space, then clients could visit shops, tapas bars and restaurants.
Overlooking the green fields where the resort will be built, biologist Aitor Galn said, Anywhere else in Europe, this place would have the utmost protection, but here they want to get rid of it all and cover it with buildings. What they want to do is turn this into Benidorm, but what attracts people here is wildlife and the wind. But by taking advantage of the current crisis and unemployment, builders and mayors who agree with them can justify any amount of destruction.


Intermediate
The vice-president of Google has warned that piles of digitized material  blogs, tweets, pictures, videos and official documents such as court rulings and emails  could be lost forever because the programs we need to view them will become defunct. Our first steps into the digital world could be lost to future historians, Vint Cerf told the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting. He warned that we faced a forgotten generation or even a forgotten century because of what he called bit rot, where old computer files become useless junk.
Cerf says we need to develop digital methods to preserve old software and hardware so that out-of-date files can be recovered even if they are really old. When you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, peoples tweets and all of the world wide web, its clear that we could lose an awful lot of our history, he said. We dont want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be viewed far into the future, he added.
What is bit rot and is Vint Cerf right to be worried? Accessing digital content in the future could be less of a problem than Cerf thinks. His warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitized in order to ensure their long-term survival. But, while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to read the files are continually falling out of use.
We are throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realizing it. We digitize things because we think we will preserve them. But what we dont understand is that, unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitized, Cerf says. If there are photos you really care about, print them out.
Ancient civilizations did not have these problems because histories written on clay tablets or sheets of papyrus needed only eyes to read them. To study todays culture, future scholars would be faced with PDFs, Word documents and hundreds of other file types that can only be interpreted with special software and sometimes hardware, too.
The problem is already here. In the 1980s, it was routine to save documents on floppy disks and buy computer games on cassettes. Even if the disks and cassettes are in good condition, the equipment needed to run them is now mostly found only in museums.
Cerf warns that important political and historical documents will also be lost to bit rot. In 2005, American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. She went to libraries around the US, found the physical letters of the people involved and reconstructed their conversations. In todays world, those letters would be emails and the chances of finding them will be incredibly small one hundred years from now, said Cerf.
He concedes that historians will take steps to preserve material considered important by todays standards. But he argues that the significance of documents and correspondence is often not fully appreciated until hundreds of years later. Historians have learned how Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, considered the concept of infinity and anticipated calculus in 3BC after his writings were found hidden under the words of a thirteenth-century prayer book. Weve been surprised by what weve learned about an earlier civilizations from objects that have been preserved only by chance, he said.
Researchers in Pittsburgh have made progress towards finding a solution to bit rot. Digital snapshots of computer hard drives are taken while they run different software programs. These can then be uploaded to a computer that copies the one the software ran on. The result is a computer that can read defunct files.
Inventing new technology is only half the battle, though. It could be even more difficult to obtain the legal permissions to copy and store software before it dies. When IT companies go out of business, they may sell the rights to someone else, which makes it very difficult to get approval. To do this properly, the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing. Were talking about preserving them for hundreds to thousands of years, said Cerf.


A girl born today in the UK can expect to live nearly to the age of 82 on average, while her brother will live to 78. They would have a longer life in Andorra (85 and 79 respectively) but are marginally better off than in the US (81 and 76), while if they lived in the Central African Republic, they would barely make it out of middle age (49 and 44). Nonetheless, almost everywhere in the world, with the exception of countries such as Lesotho, which have been hit by HIV and violence, lifespans are lengthening and the best news is that small children are substantially less likely to die than they were four decades ago. There has been a drop in deaths among under-fives of nearly 60%, from 16.4 million in 1970 to 6.8 million in 2010.
That in itself is justification for the enormous project that the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle has led over the past five years, involving nearly 500 researchers, to assess the global burden of disease. Knowing how many children die and from what cause enables the world to focus its efforts and resources on keeping them alive. There are many lessons to be gleaned from the vast database they have put together, which will help global organizations and individual governments to better care for us all – from a renewed focus on diet to tackling alcohol to keeping up the efforts against HIV in Africa.
The seven papers published by The Lancet represent a big undertaking and are not without controversy. IHME has been ambitiously radical in some of its methods. In the absence of death registries or medical records, they have been willing, for instance, to take evidence from verbal autopsies – deciding the cause of death by an interview with the family. The most startling result has been the malaria figure, released earlier in 2012. IHME said 1.2 million die of the disease every year – twice as many as previously thought. The big increase is in adult deaths. Conventional wisdom has it that malaria kills mostly children under five.
“The way I was taught as a doctor and everybody else is taught is that, in malarial areas, you become semi-immune as an adult,” said Dr Christopher Murray, IHME Director and one of the founders of the Global Burden of Disease project. “We originally went with the prevailing opinion but there has been a shift as we have become more empirical. African doctors write on hospital records that adults are dying of malaria a lot.” But, he adds, their fever could be something else. The findings have prompted further studies.
Although Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, gave the IHME study a warm official welcome, some of the staff are cautious. “We need to be very careful in assessing the validity [of the figures],” said Colin Mathers, a senior scientist in the Evidence for Information and Policy Cluster. “We need to wait to be persuaded by evidence.” His colleague Dr Tiers Boerma, Director of the WHO Department of Health Statistics and Informatics, added: “People should understand that some of the numbers are very different and the WHO can’t jump with any academic publication that states a different number.” However, said Mathers, “the fact that IHME has pushed the envelope with some of these analyses is stimulating”. One of the main themes, said Murray, was “incredibly rapid change in the leading causes of death and the pace of that change is a lot faster than we expected it to be”.
Reduced fertility and longer life expectancies have meant a rise in the mean age of the world’s population in a decade, from 26 years old to almost 30. It has been dramatic in Latin America, for instance, where countries like Brazil and Paraguay had life expectancy of below 30 in 1970 and almost 64 in 2010. That is a 35-year increase in the mean age of death over four decades. “In a place like Brazil, the speed of change is so fast that most institutions are ill-equipped to deal with it,” Murray said.
The second theme, entwined with it, is the shift outside Africa from communicable diseases and the common causes of mother and baby deaths to what are sometimes termed “lifestyle” diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer – some of which have significant genetic triggers. That shift has been particularly marked in Latin America, the Middle East and south-east and even south Asia, he said.
The third big finding was, Murray said, “a surprise to us”. That was the sheer extent of disability and the toll it took on people who were living longer but not healthier lives. “The main causes of disability are different from the ones that kill you,” he said. They were mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, musculoskeletal disorders such as arthritis and lower back pain – complained of in every country in the world – anaemia, sight and hearing loss and skin disease. In addition, there was substance abuse. “The rates for these are not going down over time,” he said. “We are making no progress in reducing these conditions.”


Benjamin Carle is 96.9% made in France, even his underpants and socks. Six Ikea forks, a Chinese guitar and some wall paint stopped him being called 100% French, but nobody is perfect.
Carle, 26, decided, in 2013, to see if it was possible to live using only French-made products for ten months as part of a television documentary.
He got the idea after the Minister for Economic Renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, asked the French people to buy French products.
For the experiment, Carle had to give up his smartphone, television, refrigerator (all made in China); his glasses (Italian); his morning coffee (Guatemalan) and his favourite David Bowie music (British).
It is lucky that his girlfriend, Anaïs, and cat, Loon, are both French, so he didn’t have to give them up.
“I wanted to see if it was possible to do what the minister was asking us to do,” Carle said.
He had just three rules: eat only food made in France, not have any contact with foreign-made products and to do it all on €1,800 a month (above the minimum wage of €1,430 to cover the extra cost of living in Paris).
The journalist was shocked to find out at the start of the experiment that only 4.5% of the things in his flat were made in France. Everything not made in France had to go, including the lightbulbs (China) and green beans (Kenya).
Without a refrigerator (none are made in France), he had to chill his food on the window ledge.
His foreign-made clothes, including his underwear, were replaced with more expensive alternatives: French-produced underpants (€26), socks (€9), polo shirt (€75), espadrille sandals (€26), but no jeans because none are produced in France.
Going out with friends was a problem – no American films, no Belgian beer, no sushi or pizza. When he stayed home, with no sofa for the first few months and no television, he listened to French singer Michel Sardou and read French novels. French wine was, of course, allowed and French-Canadian singer Céline Dion, but not French bands such as Daft Punk, who sing in English.
He could not use his British-made bicycle or even a French car because he discovered that the only affordable Peugeot, Renault and Citroën cars are not made in France. So, he bought an orange Mobylette moped.
His computer was replaced by a Qooq, a tablet that connects – slowly – to the internet and the iPhone, which he swapped for an old Sagem mobile.
Carle said his aim was to “save the French economy”. He said the experiment was part serious and part fun. He even asked a French language expert to check if he should use the word “cool” and other English words – the expert told him swap it for the nearest French alternative: “chouette”.
At the end of the experiment, a special “auditor” said Carle was 96.9% “made in France” and Montebourg gave him a medal.
Carle’s conclusion: “It’s not entirely possible to live 100% ‘made in France’, particularly in terms of new technology.
“This wasn’t about French nationalism or patriotism. It was trying to show that we should think about the way we buy and make different choices, and that is the same in all countries. If we want to save jobs and industries, we should support them.
“A T-shirt is more expensive in France but I can be sure it has been made by workers who are correctly paid and have good working conditions. I cannot be sure about a cheaper T-shirt produced in Asia or Morocco. People could do more as consumers.”


A menu scandal at some of Japan’s top hotels and department stores is damaging the international reputation of Japanese food.
One luxury hotel group admitted that it lied about ingredients on its menus. Since then, there have been similar stories from restaurants run by famous hotels and department stores in Japan.
The story began when the Hankyu-Hanshin hotel group admitted that it gave false descriptions of menu items at some of its restaurants between 2006 and October 2013.
For example, the red salmon 'caviar' that customers ordered was in fact the eggs of the flying fish.
The hotel group’s president, Hiroshi Desaki, went on television to announce a 20% pay cut for himself and 10% for other executives. But this did not make customers less angry.
Days later, Desaki resigned – he said that the hotel group had betrayed their customers.
So far, the company has refunded 20 million yen to more than 10,000 consumers. In total, they will refund 110 million yen.
Customers who believed they ate expensive kuruma shrimps were told they in fact ate much cheaper black tiger shrimps.
The scandal started when a customer complained in a blogpost that a 'scallop' dish he ordered at the Prince Hotel in Tokyo contained a similar, but cheaper, type of shellfish.
The hotel investigated the complaint and as a result corrected more than 50 menu items at dozens of its restaurants. Its report scared Hankyu-Hanshin and other hoteliers into admitting that they, too, lied to customers who believed they were paying high prices for top ingredients.
The Hotel Okura group – where Barack Obama has stayed – said they also injected beef with fat to make it juicier and incorrectly described tomatoes as organic. “We apologize for lying to our clients,” it said.
The list of fraudulent ingredients gets bigger: orange juice from cartons that was sold as freshly squeezed; Mont Blanc desserts with Korean chestnuts instead of the French ones on the menu; shop-bought chocolate cream that the menu said was home-made; imported beef sold as expensive wagyu beef.
The menu scandal has come at the wrong time. Japan is trying to persuade South Korea and other countries to start to buy Japanese food again after the Fukushima nuclear accident.
Food industry experts said the global financial crisis in 2008 forced luxury hotels to save money.
“Menu descriptions were created to sound good to the customers, and, when hotels couldn’t get the ingredients on the menu, they just used food from different places,” Hiroshi Tomozawa, a hotel and restaurant consultant, told Kyodo News.


Intermediate
Not many exercise classes have a tea break halfway through. But Margaret Allens does. After a gentle warm-up and a few quick exercises, the 93-year-old great-grandmother lets her group relax with a cup of tea and a quick rest.
Some of the class of eight look as if they need to rest more than others. Allen herself, wearing a thick shirt, knitted waistcoat, slacks and sensible shoes, is not even sweating. Despite an extremely painful trapped nerve in one leg and a knee in need of replacement, she looks like she could go on for hours.
The general rule is that eating just before doing sport is not a good idea and especially not halfway through the class. But, on the afternoon I visit Allens class in Saltburn-by-the-Sea near Middlesbrough, slices of fruitcake are being passed around during the break. The cake has been baked to celebrate Allens recent birthday by her 89-year-old sister, Joan.
The ladies have just finished their cake when Allen is up again, leading the group through a lively Scottish tune with lots of toe pointing and leg kicking. Forty-five minutes later, the class is finally over.
Allen, a former volunteer with the charity Red Cross, has been leading classes in the north-east town for 45 years. She wasnt particularly sporty at school, but she started playing the piano for a keep-fit class during the second world war and eventually took over in her 40s when the previous instructor retired.
At one time, Allens class had more than 18 regulars, each paying 1 a time. But, these days, the group is getting smaller  during the tea break, the ladies discuss a funeral that most of them had attended that week for one of the younger members of the group who had just died, aged 68.
Allen is the oldest, followed by her sister. The baby of the group is 60-year-old Jean Cunion, who is a bit embarrassed to admit that she is perhaps the least fit of the group. I remember, the first time I came, Margaret said, Whos that huffing and panting? and I had to admit it was me. Ruth Steere, 76, says Allen always knows whats going on, although her back is always to the class: She always shouts at us if we go wrong. Shes remarkably good at knowing what we are doing.
Allen, a keen dancer, has never done any formal training to be a fitness instructor. Instead, she choreographs her own moves based on five tapes from the BBCs first ever fitness guru, Eileen Fowler. Allen thinks her good health is largely a result of keeping busy, especially since her husband died in 1997. She started writing poetry when she was 80.
I write poems about everything. Im a prolific writer. I just cant stop, she says, when she phones me a few days after the interview to read out a poem she has written about the joys of exercise. One of the class, 84-year-old former teacher Winnie Robertson, thinks the secret to staying fit is never letting yourself go: Use it or lose it, thats what I say.
Allen still plays the piano and gives speeches. She did a computer course when she was 88. Ageing is no fun, she admits, reading me a few lines from a poem she has written called That Beast Called Age. She happily remembers a doctor who saw her for the first time a few years ago, who said she couldnt possibly be more than 78: I said, Thank you, doctor. You can go now.
She also has a no-nonsense attitude to weight gain: I just think people shouldnt eat too much. Whenever I hear someone saying, Oh, I cant lose weight, I say: Sellotape. She mimes taping her mouth shut. I said this just the other day to a big fat man. Everything in moderation is my motto.
Earlier in 2013, Allen was watching the news and saw a woman being given the British Empire Medal. She was saying: Im 80 and Im the oldest fitness instructor in the country! I was thinking: No, youre not. But I shant be writing to Buckingham Palace.


Opposition to Western Australia’s shark cull has intensified as thousands of people took to beaches across the continent to call on the state’s premier to end the policy, and RSPCA Australia and Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson spoke out against it. The controversial catching and killing of sharks longer than three metres began after what the state government called an “unprecedented” number of shark attacks on Western Australia’s coast, which saw a 35-year-old surfer killed in November 2013. He was the sixth person to die from a shark attack in two years.
However, according to the Shark Attack File, Australia as a whole has averaged one shark- related fatality a year for the last 50 years. Kate Faehrmann, a board member at the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, said from a protest in Perth: “We’ve been saying all along that this policy won’t work. Drumlines, used to catch the sharks, are indiscriminate killers. They’ll kill sharks whether they’re one, two, three metres or more, as well as dolphins, turtles and other things. That’s why the community doesn’t want it.”
Thousands of people protested on Perth’s Cottesloe Beach and Sydney’s Manly Beach, as well as hundreds at Glenelg, in south- west Adelaide, and at beaches in Victoria and Queensland. Faehrmann said the protests had shown Australians wanted sharks protected: “What’s amazing is so many people in Australia love sharks. This has demonstrated something about the national psyche, that, despite Jaws, despite all the fear, people are coming out in their thousands across the country to say, 'That’s their ocean. We respect them, we love them and we don’t want them killed.'” Anthony Joyce, a surfer who once had his foot caught in a shark’s mouth, said: “The number of sharks they are going to kill is going to make no difference in the scheme of things.”
The state government has refused to provide a running tally of sharks killed, though there have been reports of sharks smaller than three metres being released after getting caught on drumlines, floating drums anchored to the sea bed with bait hanging on hooks beneath them. Conservationists argue there is no evidence the cull will reduce the number of shark attacks on humans, as no previous cull has solely used drumlines. Researchers at the University of Western Australia say the recent spate of shark attacks in the state may have more to do with the state having the fastest-growing population in Australia, rather than a rising number of sharks.
Richard Peirce, chairman of the UK-based conservation charity, the Shark Trust, said that the cull would be ineffective and potentially lure more predators towards the coast. “The activity in Western Australia is compounding the human tragedy of shark attacks. It is very sad that a government that could be seen to take positive initiatives with regards to shark – human interactions by trialling alternatives to indiscriminate killing has ignored the best advice and opted for an approach that is ineffective and counterproductive,” he said. “The indiscriminate nature of drumlines is often overlooked – even if monitored through the day, leaving the lines in overnight has the potential to attract other predators into the area, attracted by those sharks and other species hooked and injured.”
Globally, in 2012, there were 80 unprovoked attacks by sharks, seven of which proved fatal, compared to nearly 100m sharks killed by humans each year. RSPCA Australia released a statement saying it believes the cull is unjustified. “There is no evidence that the increase in attacks is a result of increasing shark numbers. Rather, it is consistent with a changing population and human behaviour; that is, there are greater numbers of people in the water,” it said.
Richard Branson told Fairfax Radio the policy was backfiring. “I’m sure one of the reasons Western Australia Premier, Colin Barnett, did it was because he was thinking it would encourage tourism. It’s going to do quite the reverse, I think. You’re advertising a problem that doesn’t exist in a major way and you’re deterring people from wanting to come to Perth and your beautiful countryside around it. All you’re going to achieve, I think, is to worry people unnecessarily.”


Intermediate
I got a Dyson vacuum cleaner but I dont even know if I want it. I just picked it up, Louise Haggerty, a 56-year-old hairdresser and waitress, said at the end of her trip to the Black Friday sales at one oclock in the morning. It was mental in there. It was crazy. It was absolutely disgusting, disgusting.
Haggerty went to a 24-hour Sainsburys supermarket in north-east London with a friend. She hoped to buy a bargain flat-screen TV. But so many people pushed in the queue that we didnt have a chance, she said. The poor woman who was second in the queue was pushed out by a crowd of youths. She didnt get anything. People were behaving like animals  it was horrible, she said. I only saw two security guards.
Frustrated when she was unable to buy a 40 TV reduced from 299.99 to 149.99, Haggerty rushed to pick up a vacuum cleaner, reduced from 319.99 to 159.99. I dont even know how much it costs; I dont know even know if Im going to buy it. I just wanted something, she said. There are lads in there with three, four, five tellies. Its not fair.
One of those lads was Andy Blackett, 30, who had two trolleys full of bargains. I got two coffee makers, two tablets, two TVs and a stereo, he said. I couldnt tell you the prices but I know theyre bargains. But his friend Henry Fischer wasnt as successful. Someone snatched my telly from me  its because Im the smaller one.
Blackett, Fischer and some friends had driven to Sainsburys at 12.45am after leaving the bedlam of a Tesco 24-hour supermarket, where the Black Friday sale started at midnight. Tesco was scary so we came here instead, Blackett said.
More than a dozen police officers went to another Tesco store because scuffles began between eager and frustrated shoppers. Customers removed cardboard hoardings that were holding back sale items until midnight. Tesco delayed the sale of its most popular sale items  TVs  for almost an hour until police brought the situation under control. One officer criticized the manager for not providing enough security and suggested the sale should be stopped altogether.
Police intervened at several other stores just before the doors opened at midnight. Meanwhile, Manchester Police said that at least two people had been arrested at Black Friday sales events. South Wales Police also received a number of calls from staff at Tesco stores after they became concerned due to the number of people who had turned up to sale events.
TV sales at the Tesco store began just before 1am. One of the first purchasers of a flat-screen TV was James Alled. He bought two and was already trying to sell one of them to someone further down the queue. I bought them for 250. Ill sell it to you for 350, 300 cash, he said. Further back in the queue, Christine Ball, 62, wasnt impressed. I got here at 10.15pm and Im further back now than when I got here, she said. These people dont know what a queue is.
Ball had not heard of the US-inspired Black Friday sales until now, like most of the shoppers. She said she had come out especially to buy her grandson a TV for Christmas. Not one of those massive ones; just a normal one at 100 or so, she said. In her basket was a pint of milk and a loaf of bread. Telly, milk and bread  the necessities, she said.
Mel Mehmet, 23, had been to Black Friday sales in 2013 and had expected queues but she said the atmosphere in Tesco scared her this time. Its crazy having the sale at midnight  the police must have more important things to do at night than come to sales. Were going to PC World first thing  their sale starts at 8am.


Intermediate
They may not know who Steve Jobs was or even how to tie their own shoelaces, but the average six-year-old child understands more about digital technology than a 45-year-old adult, according to a new report.
The arrival of broadband in the year 2000 has created a generation of digital natives, Ofcom (which checks standards in the UK communications industries) says in its annual study of British consumers. Born in the new millennium, these children are learning how to operate smartphones or tablets before they are able to talk.
These younger people are shaping communications, said Jane Rumble, who is head of media research at Ofcom. As a result of growing up in the digital age, they are developing completely different communication habits from older generations, even compared to the 16-to-24 age group.
800 children and 2,000 adults took Ofcoms digital quotient, or DQ, test, which attempts to gauge awareness of and self-con dence around gadgets from tablets to smart watches, knowledge of superfast internet, 4G mobile- phone networks and mobile apps.
Among 6- to 7-year-olds, who have grown up with YouTube, Spotify music streaming and online television, the average DQ score was 98, higher than for those aged between 45 and 49, who scored an average of 96. Digital understanding peaks between 14 and 15 years old, with a DQ of 113, and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age.
People can now test their digital knowledge with a short version of the questionnaire that will give anyone a DQ score, along with advice on how to improve their understanding and protect themselves and their families online.
The ways in which millennial children contact each other and consume entertainment are so different from previous generations that forecasters now believe their preferences to be a better indication of the future than the preferences of trendsetting young adults.
The most remarkable change is in time spent talking by phone. Two decades ago, teenagers spent their evenings monopolizing the home telephone line, talking about love affairs and friendships in conversations that lasted for hours.
For those aged 12 to 15, phone calls account for just 3% of time spent communicating through any device. For all adults, this rises to 20% and, for young adults, it is still three times as high at 9%. Todays children do the majority of their remote socializing by sending written messages or through shared photographs and videos. The millennium generation is losing its voice, Ofcom claims.
Over 90% of their device-time is message based, chatting on social networks like Facebook, sending instant messages through services like WhatsApp or even sending traditional mobile- phone text messages. Just 2% of childrens time using devices is spent emailing, compared to 33% for adults.
Away from their phones, 12- to 15-year-olds have a very different relationship with other media, too. A digital seven-day diary shows live television accounts for just half of viewing for this age group, compared to nearly 70% for all adults. They spend 20% of their time viewing short video clips, for example on YouTube, or news clips on Facebook and other social sites. The rest of their viewing is shared between DVDs, streamed content through Net ix or iTunes and recorded television programmes.
Young adults aged 16 to 24 are big media consumers. However, they consume hardly any live radio or print-based media.
Younger people are also moving away from live television and moving to streaming and catch- up services. Even among adults, television is becoming less important. Television viewing among 16- to 24-year-olds has been dipping each year since 2010, but 2013 was the  rst year that researchers found that viewing fell in all age groups. The theory is that easy-to-use tablet computers with large screens have brought many older people online.


A big international disagreement has started over the right of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian tribes to chew coca leaves, the main ingredient in cocaine. This could have a significant effect on global drugs policy. Bolivia has received a special exemption from the 1961 Convention on Drugs, the agreement that controls international drugs policy. The exemption allows Bolivia’s indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Bolivia said that the convention was against its new constitution, which says it must “protect native and ancestral coca” as part of its cultural heritage and says that coca “in its natural state … is not a dangerous drug”.
South American Indians have chewed coca leaves for hundreds of years. The leaves give energy and have medicinal qualities. People who support Bolivia’s position said that defending the rights of indigenous people was the right thing to do. “The Bolivian move is very important,” said Danny Kushlick, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. “It shows that any country that doesn’t want to continue the war on drugs can change its relations with the UN conventions.”
But the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which checks global drug agreements, says Bolivia may harm international drug controls. Many countries – including the UK, the US, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia – do not want to give Bolivia what it is asking for.
The UK told the UN that it “respects the cultural importance of the coca leaf in Bolivia”, but it adds: “The United Kingdom is worried that the exemption could lead to more coca production and – most importantly – more coca reaching the cocaine trade. The exemption would make it more difficult to control the illegal drugs trade.”
The right of indigenous people in South America’s Andean region to chew coca leaf was removed in 1964 when Bolivia was under a dictatorship and it signed the convention.
In 2011, Bolivia told the UN that it did not want to be part of the convention any more. It is now part of the convention again, but with an exemption so that its indigenous people can continue chewing coca leaves.
The exemption is the first in the history of UN drug-control agreements. It has led to worries that other countries may also ask for exemptions. The Russian government says that the exemption will lead to more illegal cocaine and warns that “it also sets a dangerous example that could be used by other states in creating a more liberal drug-control regime”.
The British parliament has recommended that the UK government should support Bolivia’s request. It says that it is important that countries stay in the convention. Bolivia’s return could be blocked only if a third or more of the 184 countries that have signed the convention opposed the exemption. Some people believe that the US and UK are telling other countries that they should block Bolivia’s request.
Nancie Prud’homme, of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, said people are wrong to oppose Bolivia’s request. “These objections are not completely legal,” she said. She added that, all over the world, it has become normal to support cultural and indigenous rights, so we should support Bolivia’s efforts.
The decision to ban coca chewing was based on a 1950 report. Some people say the report did not use any evidence. It is legal to grow coca leaves in Bolivia. As a result, cocaine production has decreased in the country and some experts see Bolivia as a model for other countries.


The small room looks like a classroom. The posters on the walls show letters of the alphabet and a map of Bangladesh.
But, it is hard to concentrate – there is the loud hammering and chemicals in the air that hurt the throat and eyes. But, the children who learn in this three-square-metre room are lucky. They have escaped working in the factories opposite.
For 14 years, SOHAY, a non-governmental organization (NGO), has worked in slums in Dhaka to send child workers to school. It especially tries to help children who do dangerous work.
The classroom is one of 23 centres that SOHAY has set up in Dhaka. The classes at the centres help children enter primary school. When they are in school, the children get extra help with their homework at the centres.
Alamin, ten years old, used to work in a plastic factory. He now goes to one of the centres. His parents are happy that he’s now in school and not doing dangerous work. His friend Rabi says he wants to forget his past in the factory. “I like school,” he says.
SOHAY also has classes for parents and managers to stop child labour. It can be very difficult for working children to go to school. They are not like other children. After they stop working, they sometimes find it difficult to make friends and adapt to school. It is also difficult to make sure they stay in school – lots of these children don’t finish school.
Seven-year-old Zhorna Akter Sumayya has two older brothers – they both work (one at a restaurant, one at a local club). But, she went to a SOHAY centre and she now goes to school. Her family live in the slum and her parents need the money their sons make but they want their daughter to go to school.
In 2015, SOHAY helped 1,540 children to leave dangerous work and helped 2,125 more children – those who would soon start work – to go to school. About 780 more children are preparing to start school in 2017.
The Labour Law of Bangladesh 2006 does not allow children younger than 14 to work but UNICEF says that, in Bangladesh, 4.7 million children younger than 14 are employed and 1.3 million children aged five to 17 do dangerous work.


A group of experts say that thousands of people are taking unnecessary medicines and have bad diets because of bogus allergy tests. Allergies and food intolerances are increasing very quickly but people do not understand the difference between an allergy and a food intolerance – this is causing problems, says the charity Sense About Science, who have written a guide to allergies.
“It’s a big mess,” said Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science. “There is unnecessary action for people who don’t really have allergies and not enough action for people who have allergies.”
Lots of people tell the waiter or waitress in a restaurant that they have an allergy. But some of these people don’t have an allergy – that have a food intolerance, which is not dangerous. Experts fear that restaurants hear so many people say that they have allergies (when maybe that is not true) that they may not be careful enough when they give food to a person who has a real allergy.
“It matters very much,” said Moira Austin of an allergy charity. “If a restaurant thinks somebody just doesn’t want to eat a food because it makes them feel uncomfortable, the restaurant may be less careful. There have been deaths where people have gone to a restaurant, told the waiter or waitress that they have an allergy to a food and the meal has been given to them containing that food.”
The guide says most allergy tests bought on the internet or in shops do not work. They include a test people can use at home, which looks for specific antibodies against different foods in the blood. These antibodies are part of the body’s response to infections but “the best medical evidence has shown high antibody levels do not suggest an allergy”, the guide says. The test often shows people have an allergy or a food intolerance when this is not true.
Another test also does not work. It uses a mixture of acupuncture and homeopathy. Testing hair is also pointless, the guide says. “Hair cannot show if you are allergic or not so testing hair cannot give any useful information on allergies.”
“I often see children who are on very limited diets – their parents believe that they have allergies because they have taken 'allergy tests' that do not work,” said Paul Seddon, an allergy doctor for children. “This needs to stop, which can only happen if we prove these 'tests' do not work.”
Allergies can cause tiredness, headaches and eczema in children. But you need to check if they have an allergy and this takes a long time and many tests. It may seem like a good idea to do just one test and get a quick answer. But, it will be a wrong answer.
Allergies are increasing in developed countries. There are three times more children with certain allergies now compared to 30 years ago. The Sense About Science guide lists a number of myths about the sources of allergies, for example the myths that fast food or E numbers in food colourings cause allergies.


Intermediate
The last time she went on stage, the mobile phone was having its first trials. Thirty-five years later, as she performs once again, singer Kate Bush is faced with a different world.
While most concerts are now aglow with phones and tablets, Bush does not want her fans watching her shows through a screen.
Before her highly anticipated series of concerts at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, Bush released a statement asking her fans to put down their mobile phones at her gigs.
Bush wrote on her website: I have a request for all of you who are coming to the shows. We have purposefully chosen an intimate theatre setting rather than a large venue or stadium. It would mean a great deal to me if you would please refrain from taking photos or filming during the shows.
I very much want to have contact with you as an audience, not with iPhones, iPads or cameras. I know its a lot to ask but it would allow us to all share in the experience together.
With her love of theatrics and opulent costumes, Bushs keenness to stop fans uploading footage to YouTube could also be an attempt to keep the show a surprise for the thousands of fans who have bought tickets for the 22 dates she is playing.
Bush is not the first singer or musician to speak out against the effect of phones at concerts. The Who front man Roger Daltrey recently said it was weird that people did not have their mind on the show when they had gone to a performance and were concentrating on staring at the screen rather than the artist on stage.
He said: I feel sorry for them, I really feel sorry for them. Looking at life through a screen and not being in the moment totally  if youre doing that, youre 50% there, right? Its weird. I find it weird.
In 2013, Beyonc berated one her fans at a gig for filming. You cant even sing because youre too busy filming, Beyonc told him. You gotta seize this moment. Put that damn camera down!
The debate around phones at live events is not restricted to music. Recently, Dutch football fans at PSV Eindhoven protested against the introduction of wi-fi in their stadium, holding up banners with messages like No wi-fi. Support the team, You can sit at home, and Stand united, while Manchester United have also told fans to leave their large electronic devices at home.
Jarvis Cocker has also criticized fans with phones in the audience  he says they drive him insane at concerts, adding: It seems stupid to have something happening in front of you and look at it on a screen thats smaller than a cigarette packet.
Johnny Marr said in 2013 that it meant that fans missed out on the sensory experience of live music in their desperation to film the event for later.
To stand and just be looking at it through your phone is a completely wasted opportunity. You know, I dont mean to be unkind but I think you should put your phone down because youre just being an idiot, really. Just enjoy the gig, he said.
Even in the world of classical music, one of the worlds leading pianists surprised concertgoers in June 2013 when he stormed off stage because a fan was filming his performance on a smartphone. Krystian Zimerman returned moments later and said: The destruction of music because of YouTube is enormous.
But Sam Watt of Vyclone, a phone app that encourages audiences to film at concerts and then brings together the footage to create a crowd-sourced video of the event, said that filming at concerts enhanced the experience.
Fans filming is now part of the concert experience  that is a just a fact  so we take the footage that people are filming at concerts and then it comes back to them mixed together with everybody else who was filming. You end up with really fantastic content, he said.
Our thinking is that filming at concerts adds to the experience, rather than taking away from it and I think, if Kate Bush came round for a cup of tea, we could have a really interesting discussion about this, he added. Knowing that people are going to film and want those memories is really important. Youve got to embrace it.


On the market square in Rjukan stands a statue of the town’s founder, a noted Norwegian engineer and industrialist called Sam Eyde. The great man stares northwards across the square at an almost sheer mountainside in front of him.
Behind him, to the south, rises the equally sheer 1,800-metre peak known as Gaustatoppen. Between the mountains, along the narrow Vestfjord valley, lies the small, but once mighty, town that Eyde built in the early years of the last century, to house the workers for his factories.
Eyde harnessed the power of the 100-metre Rjukanfossen waterfall to generate hydroelectricity in what was, at the time, the world’s biggest power plant.
But one thing he couldn’t do was change the elevation of the sun. Deep in its east –west valley, surrounded by high mountains, Rjukan and its 3,400 inhabitants are in shadow for half the year. During the day, from late September to mid-March, the town, three hours north-west of Oslo, is not completely dark, but it’s certainly not bright, either.
Recently, however, Eyde’s statue has gazed out upon a sight that even he might have found startling. High on the mountain opposite, 450 metres above the town, three large, solar-powered, computer-controlled mirrors steadily track the movement of the sun across the sky, reflecting its rays down on to the square and bathing it in bright sunlight.
“It’s the sun!” grins Ingrid Sparbo, disbelievingly, lifting her face to the light and closing her eyes. A retired secretary, Sparbo has lived all her life in Rjukan and says people “do sort of get used to the shade. You end up not thinking about it, really. But this ... this is so warming. Not just physically, but mentally. It’s mentally warming.”
Two young mothers wheel their children into the square and stand in the sun. On a freezing day, an elderly couple sit on one of the new benches, smiling at the warmth on their faces. Children beam. Lots of people take photographs. A shop assistant, Silje Johansen, says it’s “awesome. Just awesome.”
Pushing his child’s buggy, electrical engineer Eivind Toreid is more cautious. “It’s a funny thing,” he says. “Not real sunlight, but very like it. Like a spotlight.”
Heidi Fieldheim says she heard all about it on the radio. “But it’s far more than I expected,” she says. “This will bring much happiness.”
Across the road, in the Nye Tider café, sits the man responsible for this unexpected access to happiness. Martin Andersen is a 40-year-old artist who moved to Rjukan in the summer of 2001.
The first inkling of an artwork Andersen called the Solspeil , or Sun mirror , came to him as the month of September began to fade: “Every day, we would take our young child for a walk in the buggy,” he says, “and, every day, I realized we were having to go a little further down the valley to find the sun.” By 28 September, the sun completely disappears from Rjukan’s market square. It doesn’t reappear until 12 March.
Throughout the seemingly endless intervening months, Andersen says, “We’d look up and see blue sky above, and the sun high on the mountain slopes, but the only way we could get to it was to go out of town. It’s sad, a town that people have to leave in order to feel the sun.”
Twelve years after he first dreamed of his Solspeil, a German company specializing in so-called CSP – concentrated solar power – helicoptered in the three 17-sq-m glass mirrors that now stand high above the market square in Rjukan. “It took,” he says, “a bit longer than we’d imagined.”
It really works. There were objectors – and plenty of them – petitions and letter-writing campaigns and a Facebook page organized against what a large number of locals saw initially as a vanity project and, above all, a waste of money. But even they now seem largely won over.
“I was strongly against it,” admits Nils Eggerud. Like many others, he felt the money could have been better spent elsewhere – on a couple of extra carers to look after Rjukan’s old people, perhaps, or improved school facilities, cycle paths, a bit of rural road resurfacing.
“And I still have my doubts about the ongoing maintenance costs,” he says. “What will they be, who will pay them? But ... well, it does feel nice, standing here. And, really, you just have to look at the people’s faces.”
In his office overlooking the square, Rjukan’s energetic young mayor, Steinar Bergsland, is interested not so much in the cost but in the benefits the mirrors might bring to the town.
Already, Bergsland says, visitor numbers are up for the time of year and Rjukan’s shopkeepers have reported their takings following suit. A hi-tech company is interested in relocating to Rjukan, attracted by the cutting-edge technology on view at the top of the mountain and the publicity it has attracted.
“This is a powerful symbol for Rjukan,” Bergsland says, and, helped by assorted government grants and a donation from a local business, the town needed to find just 1m krone – £100,000 – of the mirrors’ total 5m-krone cost.
And, seen against the town’s 650m krone annual budget, he points out, 1m krone really wasn’t very much to pay for something that “gives us a far, far better chance of raising the money we need for better schools and more nursing care. And just look out of the window. Look at those happy faces. Now it’s actually here, people love it.”


Fit in four minutes. It sounds like a headline from a health magazine; an unattainable promise on late-night satellite TV. Then you attempt Dr Izumi Tabata’s training protocol – 20 seconds of all-out effort, 10 seconds of rest, repeat eight times – and between sounding like Darth Vader as you desperately suck in oxygen and collapsing in a messy bundle of sweat and defeat, you realize just how wrong you were.
Tabata has seen it all before. “They were dead!” he chuckles as he recalls the first time he inflicted the system that bears his name on his university students in the early 1990s. “After four minutes’ hard exercise they were wiped out. But after six weeks they saw the results and were surprised. We all were.”
His research followed extensive monitoring of Japan’s speed skating team in the early 1990s when he – along with the team’s coach Irisawa Koichi – noticed that short bursts of brutally hard exercise seemed to be at least as effective as hours of moderate training. Tabata set out to show this with a simple experiment. One group of moderately trained students performed an hour of steady cardiovascular exercise on a stationary bike five times a week. The other group did a ten-minute warm-up on the bike, followed by four minutes of Tabata intervals, four times a week – plus one 30-minute session of steady exercise with two minutes of intervals.
The results were startling. After six weeks of testing, the group following Tabata’s plan – exercising for just 88 minutes a week – had increased their anaerobic capacity by 28% and their VO 2 max, a key indicator of cardiovascular health and maximal aerobic power, by 15%. The control group, who trained for five hours every week, also improved their VO 2 max, but by 10% – and their training had no effect on anaerobic capacity. “We have also measured increases in heart size after three weeks of doing the protocol,” says Tabata. “And there is also forthcoming research that shows that it lowers the risk of diabetes in humans, something we have already shown in rats.”
But there are no half-measures here. You can’t go steady on a cross trainer, chewing gum and reading the latest issue of HELLO! The regimen demands head-down bursts on a stationary bike or rowing machine; explosive bodyweight exercises, sprints or suchlike. Remember how you felt after doing a 100m sprint at school? Imagine doing eight of them with only a ten- second break to recover.
“All-out effort at 170% of your VO 2 max is the criterion of the protocol,” says Tabata. “If you feel OK afterwards you’ve not done it properly. The first three repetitions will feel easy but the last two will feel impossibly hard. In the original plan the aim was to get to eight, but some only lasted six or seven.”
As one commenter on the popular exercise forum T-Nation puts it: “When done correctly you should meet God. Most people are incapable of doing it correctly and shouldn’t even try.”
Tabata doesn’t completely agree. “Everyone can do it but beginners should start with educated trainers so that they can work at the correct intensity for them,” he explains. He says that he will soon publish research showing that doing the programme just twice a week, less than half the volume in the original research, still provides significant health benefits.
Another soon-to-be-published finding, which Tabata describes as “rather significant ”, shows that the Tabata protocol burns an extra 150 calories in the 12 hours after exercise, even at rest, due to the effect of excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. So while it is used by most people to get fit – or by fit people to get even fitter – it also burns fat.
It’s slightly surprising, therefore, that the plan is still the preserve of the serious athlete and musclehead crowd – although that may change now that Tabata has agreed a deal with Universal Studios that will lead to a network of instructors and a DVD range released towards the end of the year. “I decided to do this because I often go on YouTube and, while I am honoured that people are doing it, some are doing it wrong because they don’t realize the intensity you need to work at,” says Tabata.
So should we all start incorporating this plan into our fitness regimens? Richard Scrivener, a former Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at Northampton Saints Rugby Club, says that while the benefits are clear, Tabatas are an addition, not a replacement, to a favoured sport or training method. “Runners, for instance, need a high level of running economy, which comes from skill acquisition and putting in the miles,” says Scrivener, “But they could effectively ease off the long runs and reduce the overall mileage by introducing Tabata training. This will unload the skeleton and give joints the chance to rest and recover, especially if one is prone to niggles or has a history of injuries – and you would probably therefore get more out of the long runs when you do undertake them.”
Gym rats can benefit by doing three strength sessions and three Tabatas a week. And the rest of us can build up session by session, week by week, all the time knowing that it will never get easier because every session calls for maximum effort. That’s the cruel genius of the protocol: it is unrelenting – and effective.


Back in 2005, when BlackBerry brought instant messaging to the mobile phone, the company was just entering its boom times. While the iPhone was still a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, BlackBerry’s innovations ensured its smartphone was one of Canada’s biggest exports.
Six years later, in the summer of 2011, as violence engulfed London and spread to Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester, so effective was BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) at mobilizing the rioters that politicians called for the service to be temporarily shut down. But two years later, it is the users themselves who are pulling the plug. As demand for BlackBerry handsets fades, the once noisy BBM grapevine is falling silent. Dozens of alternatives have sprung up to take its place, from Facebook’s and Apple’s own-brand instant messaging applications to independent start-ups such as WhatsApp and Kik (which is also Canadian). Free to download and use, they use the internet to swap text messages, pictures, voice clips,’stickers’, and even videos in WhatsApp’s case, between most types of phones.
In an attempt to retain its following, BBM has been released on Android and Apple phones. Despite the competition, the response has been overwhelming, with an announcement that there have been more than 20 million downloads. But, despite the initial interest, many believe BBM’s wider release will do little to save the service.
“The move to bring BlackBerry to the iPhone is four or five years too late,” says James Gooderson, an 18-year-old student who blogs on technology. “WhatsApp has removed the reason why young people would use a BlackBerry.” BBM claims 80 million monthly users after its upgrade, but WhatsApp has 300 million. Other services expose BBM’s limitations: unlike Skype and Viber, it does not yet offer video or voice calls; unlike Path, it does not do location sharing; there is no video sharing, as on iMessage; and the stickers (a more sophisticated version of the smiley face), adored by kids the world over, are also unforgivably absent. Even the contacts and calendar sharing that BBM made possible on BlackBerry handsets have not migrated to the Apple and Android versions.
Messaging is moving from verbal to visual. Photos uploaded to Instagram trigger a wave of comments and Snapchat’s pictures, which self-delete after ten seconds, have opened a world of other possibilities. Like BBM, all of these services are free for any phone with an internet connection. Yet as recently as 2011, BBM was so powerful it was credited with starting a revolution in Egypt; and, at the time of the London riots, it was a more urgent source of news than the television screen.
“We could see on our BlackBerry messages where the rioters were going next; TV news would catch up four hours later,” said Jean- Pierre Moore, 28. He manages a youth club in Stockwell, south London, an area with some of the highest levels of crime and economic deprivation in Britain. Moore mainly communicates on an iPad now. He dismisses the notion that the BBM curfew urged by some MPs would have stopped the looting. “The social networking wasn’t the reason,” he says. “I know a lot of people who were out rioting. People had been angry for a long time. Mention the words 'stop and search' around here and you immediately have a room full of angry young men.”
Nearly 80% of young smartphone owners regularly use a social networking application, says the research firm Enders Analysis, but two-thirds use more than one. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, 60% use Facebook every day but 46% use alternatives. “It’s a much more complex, multifaceted environment,” says Benedict Evans, a digital media specialist at Enders. “The smartphone itself has become the platform. All of these apps plug into your phone book and your photo library. Apps rise and fall like fireworks. Some, like Instagram, last; others disappear into thin air.”
Thirteen-year-old Bennett has three devices, all hand-me-downs from family members. He keeps his BlackBerry for messaging, uses an iPhone over wi-fi to play games and makes phone calls on an HTC-branded Android phone. His friends are still on BBM – the four phone thefts at his school so far this term were all BlackBerrys. At the touch of a few buttons, a single BlackBerry message can be sent to the phone owner’s entire contacts book – several hundred people in some cases; on WhatsApp, the limit for a broadcast message is 50. But, for Bennett, Instagram is now a major social network. “Instagram is Facebook without parents,” he says. “Facebook has been taken over by the older generation. Once I saw my mum on Facebook, I deleted my account.”
For families that may struggle to pay their heating bills this winter, the low price tag attached to buying and communicating on a BlackBerry retains its appeal. Unlimited BBM messages are available to anyone with a second-hand device and a £7-a-month deal from T-Mobile. But trust in the privacy of BBM’s system has been eroded. Part of the attraction to business people, revolutionaries, demonstrators and rioters was a belief that encrypted words sent over the company’s secure servers could not be traced back to their writers. Prosecutions after the riots put an end to that belief.
Across town from Stockwell, outside the gates of a private school in well-heeled South Kensington, the older pupils all have Apple logos on their handsets. They all use WhatsApp. For many, BBM is a distant memory. “I still have a Blackberry, but I’m the only one,” says a teenager standing with a circle of friends. And how does that make him feel? “Isolated,” he replies.


A major international row with wide-ranging implications for global drugs policy has erupted over the right of Bolivia’s indigenous Indian tribes to chew coca leaves, the principal ingredient in cocaine. Bolivia has obtained a special exemption from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the framework that governs international drugs policy, allowing its indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Bolivia had argued that the convention was in opposition to its new constitution, adopted in 2009, which obliges it to “protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony” and maintains that coca “in its natural state … is not a narcotic”.
South American Indians have chewed coca leaves for centuries. The leaves reputedly provide energy and are said to have medicinal qualities. Supporters of Bolivia’s position praised it for standing up for the rights of indigenous people. “The Bolivian move is inspirational and groundbreaking,” said Danny Kushlick, Head of External Affairs at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, which promotes drug liberalization. “It shows that any country that has had enough of the war on drugs can change the terms of its engagement with the UN conventions.”
However, the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which monitors implementation of the global drug treaties, has accused Bolivia of threatening the integrity of the international drug control regime. A number of countries – including the UK, the US, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Russia – opposed Bolivia’s demands.
The UK’s submission to the UN, which oversees the convention, said that it “acknowledges and respects the cultural importance of the coca leaf in Bolivia”, but it adds: “The United Kingdom is … concerned that the reservation could lead to increases in coca production and – crucially – the amount of coca diverted to the cocaine trade. As such, the reservation would weaken international law as it relates to the global effort to tackle the drugs trade and could weaken the international community’s response to that trade.”
The right of indigenous communities in South America’s Andean region to chew coca leaf was removed in 1964 when Bolivia was under a dictatorship and it signed up to the convention. But, under the terms of the agreement, Bolivia was given 25 years to implement the ban. This expired in 1989 and since then the issue has been under dispute.
In 2011, Bolivia – whose President, Evo Morales, is a former coca producer – formally notified the UN of its withdrawal from the convention. On Friday it reacceded to the convention, but with an exemption from the prohibition on the chewing of coca leaves.
The move is the first of its kind in the history of UN drug-control treaties and has sparked concerns that other countries may apply for amendments. The Russian government has argued that the move will lead to “an increase in illegal circulation of cocaine” and warned that “it also sets a dangerous precedent that could be used by other states in creating a more liberal drug-control regime”.
The British parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee has recommended that Bolivia’s request should be backed by the UK government, arguing that it was important that countries remained within the single convention. Bolivia’s re-accession could be blocked only if a third or more of the 184 countries that have signed up to the convention opposed its request. There are suspicions that the US and UK are frantically lobbying other countries to gain sufficient numbers to block Bolivia’s request.
Nancie Prud’homme, Projects Director at the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, criticized the co-ordinated opposition to Bolivia’s demands. “These objections are legally questionable,” she said. “They support an arbitrary and over-broad provision and apply international drug laws in a vacuum. This is not appropriate. No state has paid any attention to decades of developing international norms on cultural and indigenous rights, which support Bolivia’s efforts.”
The decision to ban coca chewing was based on a 1950 report produced by the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Coca Leaf, which proponents of drug liberalization say was not based on supporting evidence. In an interview in 1949, the head of the Commission, Howard B Fonda, signalled his opposition to the chewing of coca leaves before his inquiry had begun. Fonda told an interviewer: “We believe that the daily, inveterate use of coca leaves by chewing … is not only thoroughly noxious and therefore detrimental, but is also the cause of racial degeneration in many centres of population, and of the decadence that visibly shows in numerous Indians … Our studies will confirm the certainty of our assertions and we hope we can present a rational plan of action … to attain the absolute and sure abolition of this pernicious habit.”
The growing of coca leaves is legal and licensed in Bolivia. The policy has been credited with a fall in cocaine production in the country, leading some experts to see the Bolivian model as a way forward for other countries.


Intermediate
Police and intelligence agencies around the world have, for almost 100 years, used lie detectors to help convict criminals or find spies and traitors.
But the polygraph could soon be defunct. Researchers in Britain and the Netherlands have developed a new method that has a success rate, in tests, of over 70%. This new method could be in use in police stations around the world within a decade. It doesnt monitor facial tics, talking too much or waving of arms, which are all signs that someone is lying. The new method monitors full-body motion, which can show that the person is feeling guilty.
The polygraph is widely used in the US in criminal cases and for security clearance for the FBI and CIA but is much less popular in Europe. Many people in the scientific and legal communities do not believe that it is reliable. By contrast, the new method has performed well in experiments.
The basic thought is that liars fidget more and so the use of an all-body motion suit  the kind used in films to create computer-generated characters  will record this. The suit has 17 sensors that register movement up to 120 times per second in three dimensions for 23 joints.
One of the research team, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said that years of research show that an interviewer will know whether someone is telling the truth, and not lies, in only about 55 times out of 100
He said the new method, by contrast, was right over 70% of the time. And he was confident they would be able to do better. In some tests, the team has already achieved more than 80%.
Anderson said: Guilty people fidget more and we can measure this.
Anderson added that the research had a special significance at this time because of a recent US Senate report on torture by the CIA. There are problems with torture from a moral point of view but it is also a very unreliable way of getting accurate information. We have known for a long time that torture does not work, Anderson said. The new method offers a good alternative to interviews.
The research paper was written by Dr Sophie van der Zee of Cambridge University, Professor Ronald Poppe of Utrecht University, Professor Paul Taylor of Lancaster University and Anderson.
The polygraph was created in 1921 by policeman John Larson. It records changes in pulse, blood pressure, sweating and breathing to find out whether someone is lying.
In movies, the polygraph is always right, But, in 1998, the US Supreme Court ruled that there was no consensus that the polygraph was reliable. This conclusion was supported by the US National Academy of Scientists in 2003.
The experiment carried out by Anderson and his colleagues involved 180 students and employees at Lancaster University  half of the people were told to tell the truth and half to lie. They were each paid 7.50 for their participation in the 70-minute experiment, involving two tests.
Some were interviewed about a computer game Never End, which they played for seven minutes. Others lied about playing the game  they had only seen notes about it.
The second test involved a lost wallet containing 5. Some were asked to bring the wallet to a lost-and-found box. Others hid it and lied about it.
Overall, we correctly guessed whether 82.2% (truths: 88.9%; lies: 75.6%) of the interviewees were telling the truth or lying based on the movements in their individual limbs, the report says.
Anderson said: First, we looked at how much different body parts showed that someone was lying. We found that liars wave their arms more, but this is only at the 60% level that you can get from a polygraph.
The success came when we looked at total body motion. That tells truth from lies over 70% of the time and we believe we can improve it even more by combining it with optimal questioning techniques.
Another advantage is that total body motion is mostly the same in people who have different cultural backgrounds and different levels of anxiety  these things confuse other lie-detection technologies, Anderson said.
The use of all-body suits is expensive  they cost about 30,000  and they can be uncomfortable, so Anderson and his colleagues are now studying low-cost alternatives. These include using motion-sensing technology from computer games, such as the Kinect devices developed by Microsoft for the Xbox.
Anderson admits that intelligence agencies such as the CIA could teach agents how to trick the full-body motion method by keeping their bodies completely still. But he said that in itself would be a giveaway.