Space Tourism - The Next Step

The first of two $150m (£91m) tickets for a pioneering tourist mission to the moon has been sold, and the name said to be in the frame is James Cameron, who has directed some of the highestgrossing films of all time, including Titanic, the Terminator series and Avatar.

Space Adventures, the American company offering the trip scheduled for 2015, would say only that the buyer of the ticket was a “well-known” personality.

The expedition will begin aboard a Soyuz spaceship launched from Kazakhstan.

The orbit of the moon during the 17-day trip, which will also include a stop-over on the International Space Station (ISS), marks a new departure for space tourism. Only seven tourists have travelled into space since 2001, when businessman Dennis Tito paid a reported £12m to spend nearly eight days in orbit on the ISS with the Russian space agency.

The moon trip is also a much bigger adventure than that planned by Virgin Galactic, Sir Richard Branson’s company, in which 430 people have signed up to be blasted at 3,000mph to the edge of space, starting in 2013.

Cameron, 56, has a record as an adventurer. Before his 1997 blockbuster Titanic, he helped to develop mini-submarines that could withstand enormous underwater pressures but were small enough to enter and film inside the real wreck. He has also commissioned a submersible vessel rigged with 3-D cameras capable of the seven-mile descent into the Mariana trench in the Pacific for his sequel to Avatar.

Associates of Cameron say he has been talking to both Nasa and the Russian space agency about mounting a 3-D camera on the ISS to shoot a documentary similar to Aliens of the Deep, a film in which he explored the bottom of the ocean.

“The technology is very similar, and Jim is fascinated by outer space. But the cameras have to be made a lot lighter than current models,” said a source.

Tom Shelley, the British president of Space Adventures, would not even disclose whether the buyer of the seat was male or female, saying the name must remain “top secret”. He added: “Only 24 people have seen the dark side of the moon, and the sight of the Earth rising behind the moon must be one of the most amazing moments in anyone’s life.”

Jeff Foust, an aerospace analyst who edits The Space Review, said it remained to be seen whether more missions would follow the one planned for 2015. “This could be the beginning of a brand new market for private adventurers or researchers, or this flight could be a onetime stunt,” he said.

In addition to Virgin and Space Adventures, other technology tycoons are backing plans for space tourism. They include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, whose planned craft is called New Shepard. John Carmack, developer of the Quake and Doom computer games, is planning his Fishbowl spaceship, which has massive windows designed to give tourists the best possible view. While Elon Musk, co-founder of the PayPal website, is building a rocket and capsule to be used for low-cost orbital flights.

William Flew - Can a typeface change your mind?

Can a typeface change your mind?

Sarah Palin has cultivated her reputation to be the opposite of all that Barack Obama stands for, but she is not beneath borrowing one part of his image. Experts in typography have noticed that she has adopted Gotham, the font credited by some with adding a winning finesse to his campaign.

Although only the most fanatical typographers would believe that a font could be decisive in an election campaign, Mr Obama’s adoption of Gotham throughout the 2008 presidential race was praised by graphic designers as lending freshness and authority that John McCain’s choice of Optima lacked.

The former Governor of Alaska, right, who has not yet declared whether she will compete for the Republican presidential nomination, has begun using Gotham in her publicity material, raising the prospect of a Gotham versus Gotham presidential race in 2012. Simon Garfield, who was speaking at the Hay Festival yesterday to promote his book Just My Type, said that the authority implied by Gotham’s bold lines subliminally helped voters to overcome any fears they might have had for voting Democrat. “I think you can make a strong argument to say it was a great help to Obama. Obviously, he was elected because he is who he is, but the whole campaign was such a fantastically clear, consistent one that the typeface did its job. You had the message: ‘Change. Hope. Yes, we can’. The font did not change from when he announced his candidacy all the way through his primaries, on television, online and in all the print advertisements.

“I think the fact that Sarah Palin is using Gotham a lot shows how influential the font has been.”

The typeface, which was invented by the American designer Tobias FrereJones in 2000, was briefly used by The Times in 2007. It has also become the font of choice for Hollywood studios marketing films that they believe could win an Oscar, including Invictus (two nominations), A Single Man (one) and The Lovely Bones (one).

Mr Frere-Jones, a keen Democrat, has not commented on whether he is happy about his font being used by Mrs Palin, but Mr Garfield said that he would not object. “He would be flattered that it was being considered as a way of turning around her fortunes. I don’t think it would make him warm to her cause.”

British politicians have not yet followed Mr Obama’s lead. In last year’s general election Labour went for Neo Sans Pro, a sans-serif font, on the front of its manifesto. The Conservatives chose a variety of heavy old-style fonts and the Liberal Democrats selected Helvetica, invented in the 1950s.

William Flew - We Can Feed the World

Oxfam’s chief executive, Dame Barbara Stocking, claimed this week in a BBC interview that there will “absolutely not be enough food” to feed the world’s population in a few decades’ time.

Such certainty about the future is remarkable, so I downloaded Oxfam’s new “report” with interest. Once I got past the fundraising banners, I found a series of assertions that there is a food crisis caused by failures of government “to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest, which means that companies, interest groups and elites are able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food”. Oxfam is calling for “a new global governance” — effectively the nationalisation of the world food system.

In the short term, yes, food prices have shot up. Why? The biggest reason — which Oxfam acknowledges in passing — is the lunatic policy of taking 5 per cent of the entire world’s grain crop and turning it into motor fuel. In a year of poor harvests such as 2010 that was enough to tip millions into malnutrition and poverty. Add in the pernicious tariff barriers we Europeans raise against African food and, yes, it is the fault of government, but doing too much regulating, correcting and protecting, not too little.

In the long run, even after this year’s price spike, according to data compiled by Daniel Sumner, of the University of California Davis, maize and wheat prices are in real terms only about half what they were in the 1940s and 25 per cent below what they averaged in the 1960s. Relative to wages, they have fallen even farther. By far the most significant reason for this long-term decline in food prices is that those beastly plundering capitalists have been inventing things like fertilisers, tractors, pesticides and new varieties to increase yields and cut costs.

The truth is that over the past 60 years the world’s farmers have trebled the yield of the big three cereals (rice, wheat and maize), which provide 60 per cent of human calories, without ploughing a single net extra acre. (Incidentally, yields are probably 10 per cent higher simply because of increased carbon dioxide in the air.)

In some places, food prices have been so low that land has come out of agriculture and back into forest. Malnutrition and hunger persist, yes, but mass famine now happens chiefly in countries with too much government, such as North Korea and Zimbabwe.

Recently, yield improvements have been slowing, partly thanks to the Luddites who fight new technologies. But population growth has been slowing even more. So although it will not be easy to feed nine billion people in 2050, it most definitely is not “absolutely” impossible. Those with long enough memories will know that breathless reports of Malthusian doom, such as Oxfam’s, recur whenever food prices spike upwards.

In 1968 the celebrity ecologist Paul Ehrlich promised that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” (The world death rate fell in the 1970s.)

The environmentalist Lester Brown has made a career out of calling the top of the food-supply market every time there is a price spike: in 1974, he said “farmers can no longer keep up with rising demand”; in 1981, “global food insecurity is increasing”; in 1989, “population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up”; in 1994, “seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people”.

The truth is that even as the human population has doubled since the 1960s, calories per person have increased by about one third. Of course, those calories are not all in the right place, and Oxfam is right that it is a scandal that obesity and hunger coexist on the same planet, but the solution is plain: get fertiliser to poor African farmers and get their goods to market so both they and their customers can afford to eat. If Oxfam were really serious about malnutrition, it would stop writing reports about corporate greed, climate change and the need for world governance and start trucking nitrates.

That’s roughly what others have done. The Swiss scientist Ingo Potrykus identified vitamin-A deficiency as one of the biggest causes of childhood disability and death, so he invented — free — “golden rice” with genes from daffodils in it. Fifteen years later it is still tied up in red tape, thanks to disgraceful lobbying from environmental pressure groups. Bill Gates identified childhood diarrhoea as a top priority and set out to tackle it via the Gates Foundation.

Speaking of which, the diarrhoea epidemic that has afflicted 1,000 Germans and killed 16, wherever it originated, is a timely reminder of how life used to be when we relied on manure and human “night soil” to fertilise our crops. There was a reason your Victorian ancestors ate less salad than you do: recycling even cattle manure, let alone human sewage, carries risks. With modern, high-tech precautions, organic farming can produce safe and tasty food for the rich in the West, but it is nothing like so safe elsewhere.

Nor can it feed the world’s current population, let alone the nine billion of 2050. Because organic farmers have to grow their nitrogen fertiliser rather than fixing it directly from the air, they require a lot more land. If the world were to try to generate as many calories as it does without artificial fertiliser, it would need an extra five billion cattle grazing 20 billion acres of extra pasture. As an Indian biologist, C. S. Prakash, said to me once: “Sure, organic agriculture is sustainable; it sustains poverty and malnutrition.” Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist

William Flew - Celebs Call For Drug Policy Reform

Dame Judi Dench and Sir Richard Branson join three former chief constables today in a call for the possession of all drugs to be decriminalised.

They are among the signatories of a letter to the Prime Minister urging the Government to review the effectiveness of the law tackling drug abuse.

It says those found in possession of illegal substances should be dealt with outside the criminal justice system, with drug users fined and those with an addiction referred to a treatment centre. Crucially, possession would no longer result in a criminal record, as happened to 80,000 people last year.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act and today’s letter, organised by the charity Release, begins a campaign for reform.

“It is clear that the present system of applying the criminal law to the personal use and possession of drugs has failed. Conversely, the harm caused by pursuing this approach has been significant,” the letter says. “Criminalising people who use drugs leads to greater social exclusion, making it more difficult for them to gain employment and to play a productive role in society.”

The signatories also include Julie Christie and Sting; the former chief constables who signed are Tom Lloyd of Cambridgeshire, Paul Whitehouse of Sussex and Francis Wilkinson of Gwent.

William Flew and Reputation Control

PR agencies use fake profiles to drive bad news from public’s view

Celebrities, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide secrets and damaging stories in Google search results. Celebrities, blue-chip companies and tourist attractions are using a new breed of PR company to hide their secrets and damaging press stories in Google search results.

Online “reputation management” agencies promise to suppress negative search results by driving them down the rankings. They typically use thousands of social networking profiles — set up using false names and operated using computer software to simulate the behaviour of a real person — to talk about and link to more positive results, pushing them above the negative stories.

The agencies do not identify their clients for fear of undoing the work they have carried out, but an investigation by The Times has discovered several cases.

Three public figures — an author and a Conservative politician, both of whom had extramarital affairs, and a married actor who paid a prostitute for sex — have approached agencies in the past week to help to keep their identities secret.

A further three — two actors and a prominent sportsman — have paid up to £20,000 a fortnight to use the services in the past six months.

Woburn Safari Park, owned by the Duke of Bedford, used an agency in Hertfordshire to hide press accounts of a damning government report that alleged animal mistreatment.

Google uses a complicated algorithm taking into account dozens of criteria to rank results for a search term, but one of the key factors is the number of links that a web page has from other websites.

Reputation management agencies work to improve the popularity of positive or irrelevant results, pushing them above those that are negative. As more than 90 per cent of users look only at the first Google results page, and only a tiny fraction go beyond the third page, well-hidden results are seldom read.

Although the media are gagged from reporting the names of many celebrities who have obtained injunctions, their identities are frequently the subject of fervent speculation online. The identities of several prominent individuals who have allegedly taken out gagging orders are visible online to anyone typing pertinent search terms into Google, and some have hired agencies to combat this.

Chris Angus, the 30-year-old founder of Warlock Media, confirmed that the company had recently been employed by two actors and a sportsman who had been granted injunctions, charging between £10,000 and £20,000 a fortnight.

He said that his work had been “incredibly successful”, adding: “If you put their names into Google you won’t find reference to their injunctions. You can’t stop an event happening, but you can stop it being seen. You can make sure that if it does appear in Google or Twitter it is completely suppressed and crushed.”

Chris Emmins, co-founder of Kwikchex, said he had been approached in the past week by three celebrities who panicked after seeing how quickly the footballer Ryan Giggs’s name had been spread online.

The company turned down the work “on principle”, but the three men — an actor, an author, and a Conservative politician — all wanted to stop the fact they had obtained injunctions over extramarital affairs being spread online. The politician “was also hoping it would help keep it from his wife”, Mr Emmins said.

Tourist attractions are particularly susceptible to damaging press reports and reviews online. In June last year, several newspapers published stories about Woburn Safari Park, in Bedfordshire, reporting the results of an inspection by government vets.

Inspectors from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had visited the safari park and their report criticised it for keeping lions in a “very crowded” overnight pen for 18 hours a day during the winter.

The newspaper articles also revealed that the park had moved its sea lions after an internal report found that chlorinated water was causing ulcers on their eyes, leaving one in such pain that it was biting the wooden sides of the pool. A bull elephant was found to be housed in an unsafe enclosure from which it had recently escaped and which had “potentially disastrous consequences” for staff and visitors.

A few weeks after the stories were published, the park hired the services of Keith Griggs who runs ReputationManagement. me, The Times can disclose.

On his website, he described how he started worked for “a wildlife park” in July last year, when three of the first ten search results for the park were news articles about the allegations. Within a week there were no longer any links to critical stories on the first page of results. A few months later there was only one negative report in the first five search result pages.

Woburn Safari Park admitted using the reputation management service, saying it felt that the articles had “unfair and inaccurate” information. The park has opened a lion house and the local council said it was happy that the park management “continues to work with us to ensure that Woburn Safari Park meets the requirements of the Zoo Licensing Act as well as health and safety matters with the premises”.

William Flew on Cavemen and Women

Women roamed the landscape while the men in early human tribes stayed close to their birthplace, according to scientists.

The finding, based on fossilised teeth between 1.7 and 2.4 million years old, suggest a “foreign bride” culture prevailed in two ancient hominid species.

The teeth were found at two sites in South Africa and belonged to Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, both part of a line of close human relatives that included the Ethiopian fossil “Lucy”.

Our female forebears would have grown up close to their birthplace, but moved to mate with males from other tribes early in adulthood, according to the study. Males, by contrast, strayed only a few miles from their birthplaces at the two sites, the fossilised remains have revealed.

“Here we have the first direct glimpse of the geographic movements of early hominids, and it appears the females preferentially moved away from their residential groups,” said Sandi Copeland, of the University of Colorado Boulder, who led the study.

Intriguingly, the female dispersal pattern seen in the two hominid groups, which were on the brink of becoming human, is similar to that in many modern human societies. “More often, the woman is the one that leaves,” said Dr Copeland. “In China and India, for instance, young women traditionally move to live in the husband’s family home.”

However, she said that it was not clear whether this trend emerged with the advent of agricultural society and the inheritance of land or whether it was rooted deeper in our ancestral past.

The work overturns previous assumptions that early hominids would have travelled for days to forage for varied food supplies, and indicates that they may have relied more heavily on grass and plant roots for nutrition. The study, which is published today in Nature, tested 19 teeth belonging to Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus from the Sterkfontein and Swartkrans caves in South Africa.

More than half the females grew up outside the local area and moved there as young adults, chemical signatures in the tooth enamel revealed. By contrast, 90 per cent of the males appeared to have lived within a few miles of the caves throughout their lives.

“This study gets us closer to understanding the social structure of ancient hominids since we now have a better idea about the dispersal patterns,” said Dr Copeland.

Why the males preferred to stay close to the cave sites remains unclear. One possibility is that they preferred the vegetation or a landscape dominated by dolomite rock where there would have been an abundance of caves. Another possibility is that close male co-operation and conflict between groups produced strong male loyalty towards their own group.

A. africanus lived between 2 and 3 million years ago and is believed to be directly on the human ancestral line. P. robustus, which lived between 1.2 and 2 million years ago, is likely to have been a side-branch on the human family tree.

William Flew on Drug Policy Reform

The recommendation was swiftly dismissed by the Obama administration and the government of Mexico, which are allied in a violent 4 1/2 -year-old crackdown on cartels that has killed more than 38,000 people in Mexico.

"The U.S. needs to open a debate," former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, a member of the panel, said by telephone from New York, where the report is scheduled to be released Thursday. "When you have 40 years of a policy that is not bringing results, you have to ask if it's time to change it."

An advance copy of the report was provided to The Times.

Three of the report's Latin American signatories, Gaviria and former Presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, made similar recommendations two years ago. Their views failed to change the enforcement-based approach that dominates drug policies worldwide.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, a conservative, has made the battle against drug cartels a centerpiece of his administration. Although the growing death toll has stirred widespread public dismay in Mexico, Calderon shows no sign of turning back before his six-year term ends next year. A poll on security matters released Wednesday found broad public opposition in Mexico to legalizing drug sales.

The U.S. government has backed the Mexican crackdown with law enforcement equipment, training and encouraging words from President Obama.

"Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe," said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Although the Obama administration has emphasized a "public health" approach to drug policy, officials have taken a hard line against legalization.

"Legalizing dangerous drugs would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences," drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said this year.

Administration officials dispute the idea that nothing can be done to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. A spokesman for the White House drug agency said U.S. consumption peaked in 1979, when surveys showed that 14% of respondents had used illegal drugs in the previous month. Now that figure has dropped to 7%.

"This is not a problem for law enforcement alone," Kerlikowske said in February at the George Washington University in Washington.

In its 2012 budget, the administration has requested $1.7 billion for drug prevention programs, a 7.9% increase from the previous year.

Administration officials have promoted the use of drug courts where judges can sentence offenders to treatment and other terms as alternatives to jail time. The White House also is working to expand reentry programs that aim to reduce recidivism rates by assisting the nearly 750,000 drug offenders released from prison each year to transition more easily back into communities.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has examined U.S. drug policy, said the Obama administration has pushed the issue in a "considerably better direction. Nonetheless, she added, "a lot of it stayed at the level of strategy and rhetoric."

"If [Obama] is going to spend his political capital on something, it won't be drug policy," said Felbab-Brown, author of "Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs."

Gaviria, the former Colombian president, said he saw signs of a shift in opinion last year, when Californians voted on a ballot measure that would have legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Although the measure failed, "people are changing their minds," he said.

The new report said the world's approach to limiting drugs, crafted 50 years ago when the United Nations adopted its "Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs," has failed to cut the supply or use of drugs. The report, citing figures from the world body, said global marijuana consumption rose more than 8% and cocaine use 27% between 1998 and 2008.