The Times: Tech column - 3G phones/Pic to HTML/PC philanthropy

By David Rowan

It's an odd business, innovation. You invest billions in a communications network and develop award-winning content, then along comes human nature and spoils everything. So much for m-commerce - shopping by mobile - and Wap downloads: what we really want phones and PCs for, it seems, is to communicate. How very ungrateful.

Why else would we have sent 12.3 billion text messages in the UK last year - a service the phone companies originally rejected as a clumsy gimmick? For the same reason that we defiantly log on to friend-locating websites rather than high-fashion e-tailers. Too often, technology businesses forget that their products, however groundbreaking, will succeed only if they meet a consumer demand. Is there a lesson here for the mobile phone networks as they frantically ask what we'll actually want from third-generation (3G) handsets?

Here's our tip: start with the basic human needs, not the technology. People want to interact, to simplify their lives and to retrieve content of their choosing. Industry PRs might froth about network capacity and baud rates, but convenience is what matters to the rest of us - just as we watch TV for specific programmes, not a particular delivery mechanism.

Technobabble has been studying some of the applications the mobile companies are planning for 3G phones. With almost four times as many mobiles as PCs sold last year, the stakes are high: already 650 million of the world's billion cellphone customers use GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) technology, and within three years data rather than voice calls are expected to provide a third of the networks' revenues.

But will we want what they'll be offering? We will certainly warm to picture messaging - the use of inbuilt digital cameras to send images from phone to phone. This is bound to catch on, whether for sending back holiday postcards or sharing new pictures of a baby. Ericsson's T68 can already send pictures, and last week Nokia said its 7650 model with inbuilt camera will be out this spring. What a simple way to enhance communication.

Location-based services will also have some success, although not necessarily in the ways that phone companies predict. Yes, life will become easier if the phone tells us where we are and provides a map. We might also want to know that a friend is near by, or that our children are playing truant. But do we really need the ability to "geo-cache" a message - linking it to a location so that, for instance, we can warn colleagues that a restaurant is overrated? Texting is just as easy. Plus, if our phone tells the network where we are, won't advertisers target us in ever-more sophisticated ways? "They'll be able to segment their markets down to an individual," says Phil Stenton, of Hewlett-Packard's research labs."How we control that data will be one of the biggest issues we'll face."

Human nature being what it is, pornography will undoubtedly provide a lucrative revenue stream for network owners, as will instant betting during sports matches. Travelling workers will benefit from being permanently linked to corporate networks, and commuters might use phones to download MP3 music tracks.

But there are plenty of other promised applications worth treating rather more sceptically. Mitsubishi Trium is promising phones that tell women "when you are most likely to conceive" and "when to apply your lipstick". Gee, how did they cope until now? Payment-by-phone may also take a while to catch on, particularly if handset thefts remain crime flavour of the month.

Wap taught that "clever" technology cannot be imposed from above if human beings don't warm to it. Yes, some 3G applications will take off, but that will be up to the users, not the networks. "You can't predict the applications people will want," admitted Mike Short, director of industry at mmO2, at an Industrial Society conference last week. "You've just got to give them room to choose."

In other words, it's your call.

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We're all ones and zeros in the digital age. But what, exactly, would you look like as a combination of 1s and 0s? The latest cult time-wasting website lets you find out. "Pic to HTML" (confusingly, at http://pic3html.vvv.tf) takes an image of your choice (such as your face) and instantly turns it into a page of numbers. It's based on a scripting language called Pike, and there's absolutely no use for it beyond distracting your colleagues. A return, then, to the good old days of the internet ...

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What have you done today to combat anthrax? As scientists demand ever-greater computing power in search of answers, they want you to share your PC's unused processing capacity. In a trend known as "PC philanthropy" - you donate computing resources rather than cash - the University of Oxford is working with Intel in the hope of treating and beating anthrax and, eventually, cancer. You simply download a screensaver (www.intel.com/cure) that puts your computer to work when it's otherwise idle, and then wait to claim your stake in the Nobel prize.

They call it a "peer-to-peer" program, but it is actually a smart example of distributed computing - the use of masses of spare capacity that has most famously searched for extra-terrestrial life. The anthrax team still has 3.5 billion molecular com£left to test, but who knows - it could be your laptop that cracks it.

(The Times, January 28 2002)

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Evening Standard: The kosher sound of local radio

London now has its own Jewish radio station, replete with Elvis Shmelvis, rabbi presenters and an endless supply of bagels. David Rowan visits Shalom FM

WHEN Shalom FM began broadcasting to north London two weeks ago, listeners complained that the aerial - on the roof of a Jewish study centre in Hendon - was too low to deliver a strong signal. So a deal was struck with the neighbouring Methodist church to transmit from its steeple ladder. "Ecumenical co-operation," explains Barend Velleman, the station manager, with a smile.

It's the sort of deal Shalom FM, Britain's only Jewish radio station, has become good at. Some adept haggling with the Hendon Bagel Bakery has ensured a daily nosh supply in exchange for a few adverts, and a compromise with a local Brownie pack has meant the studio occupies the Yakar Educational Foundation's library. This must be one of the few live radio stations where Brownies regularly skip past the mix decks on their way to their storeroom.

When the Evening Standard dropped by on Monday evening, the station's owner, Richard Ford, was chatting on-air to Elvis Shmelvis, "the only Jewish trumpet-playing Elvis impersonator - the perfect cabaret act for weddings, bar mitzvahs and parties". Once Mr Shmelvis had alerted listeners to his availability, it was time for Denise Phillips, "mother of three children and a leading Jewish chef", to feed up her host as she demonstrated her chicken-withapricots special. As adverts rolled for Blooms and the Golders Green Kosher Deli, it became clear that this is one radio station that could not function with a rule against food in the studio.

"One presenter's wife phoned up while he was on air, to ask him, 'Lawrence, have you eaten?'" Velleman says, as the guests arrive for the Jewish Dating Show. It is, apparently, one of the station's early hits, alongside the shows run by DJ Neal, a club promoter, who takes calls and gives away tickets to balls and "Jew dos". Antony Costa, from the boy band Blue, is promised as a future studio guest; in the meantime, listeners have heard Denis Norden, as well as a Palestinian Authority representative and Simon Round, a journalist at the Jewish Chronicle.

"Everybody I know who's Jewish knows about Shalom FM, even if they don't listen," Mr Round says. "I suppose I'd listen myself every now and then."

The station broadcasts on 87.9FM for 24 hours, six days a week, offering a range of programmes, including a Jewish version of Streetmates, Rabbi Rosen's Thought for the Day, and a show from veteran DJ Emperor Rosko. At night it receives programmes from Voice of Israel radio. It is probably the only station to have a Lubavitch rabbi as a DJ, and certainly the only one to have received a message from the Chief Rabbi offering "special good wishes from my mum".

Operating on a restricted service licence until 2 February, Shalom FM is officially raising money for the Jewish National Fund, while gauging demand for a permanent station.

Richard Ford, a curtains and blinds salesman from Edgware who has been working 18-hour days, sees it as his mission "to bring young people back to Judaism, to ensure its continuation in this country in whatever form ... and to get out alive".

He explains that young Jews in London are frustrated that they lack a voice. " Whenever you get a representative of the Jewish community, it's always (Blair aide) Lord Levy or (Board of Deputies president) Jo Wagerman," he says. "They're not the future of this community; the young people are."

Mr Ford, a former presenter on Spectrum Radio, has raised around £20,000 to launch Shalom FM, and is backed by community organisations such as Jewish Care. Adverts have been sold door-to-door, and about 50 volunteers have offered their help, ranging from actresses to a former announcer at Tottenham Hotspur.

There is no time for strict job descriptions: Barend Velleman presents the Jewish news roundup that follows the IRN news headlines, as well as a classical music programme and chat shows. Yes, he admits, they make mistakes (such as the loss of the news feed for two hours on Monday - someone pulled out a wire), but "that's because people haven't seen a deck before. Still, they're taking a real sense of pride in it."

Velleman, who works for a housing association, hopes to persuade 20 wealthy benefactors to back the station if it goes permanent. Each would underwrite £25,000 a year to meet its estimated £500,000 overheads, but they would have a huge impact on a community he estimates in London at 150,000.

"The Jewish community's voice needs to be heard, especially now that magazines like the New Statesman are writing about the Zionist 'conspiracy' - I've never seen anything so offensive," he says. "Every Jewish community of more than 50,000 people in the world has its own radio station - why can't we?"

Richard Ford, however, is exhausted after two weeks. Would he go permanent? "Personally, no," he says. "I'd be dead within a month."

(Evening Standard, January 23 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Six degrees of separation/Microsoft inseecurity/Phone downloads

By David Rowan

A great virtue of writing for The Times is the knowledge that this column's readers are impeccably well connected. But here's an experiment to measure just how well: how quickly can you get an e-mail to the actor Kevin Bacon simply by passing it along a chain of personal contacts?

Start by e-mailing one friend, who must then do the same; as the circle fans out, someone will know someone who is in regular touch with the Bacon household. He'll probably wonder why Times readers are deluging him with e-mails, but tell him it's in the interests of science: we want to measure just how small the Internet has made the world. Besides, doesn't he know that Kevin Bacon's personal connections are the stuff of Internet legend?

When, in 1967, the Harvard sociologist Stanley Milgram calculated that two individuals could typically be connected through six associations or fewer, he was not to know that the Kevin Bacon Game would be his greatest legacy. The trivia game, in which every actor alive or dead can be connected to Bacon within six degrees, was one of the earliest Internet fads. Now, though, a number of leading universities have decided that there's some important science behind the game. And they are organising vast global experiments to test the Milgram thesis.

Dr Milgram sent 300 postcards to randomly selected people, mostly in Nebraska, and asked them to target a stranger in Boston. Sixty chains finally reached the man, and Milgram calculated that Americans were, on average, six acquaintances away from each other. Has that number fallen in a world wired for instant e-mail connection? Researchers at Columbia University in New York and Ohio State University have just begun to find out. In separate projects, they are mapping out how far e-mail has connected the planet. By getting 500,000 people to participate in electronic chains, they hope to map out the Net's social interactions - proving whether e-mail communication does in fact break down barriers of race and class.

As Duncan Watts, leading the Columbia project, explains, this is not simply an intellectual challenge. It should offer practical insights into the nature of online communication - helping us to understand how to impede computer viruses, or how to generate "buzz" for product launches. It might also produce better search engines. "The participants in our experiment have to solve what is essentially a global search problem - find a single person somewhere in the world - using only local information about the network (their friends)," he says. "If we can figure out how people solve the problem, and under what conditions they can and can't succeed, maybe we can design better search algorithms and better network structures for non-human applications. That would be a big step forward."

His team has chosen its targets - "across the globe and of different ages, races, professions, and socio-economic classes" - and needs volunteers who can start a chain by delivering a message to someone they know. Sign up at smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu, or, for the Ohio State project, at smallworld.sociology.ohio-state.edu.

But we recommend an entirely different website if you want to know what Internet users get up to together. The Sexchart (www.attrition.org/hosted/sexchart) is an online document that links more than 1,400 hackers and chatroom regulars who, you've guessed it, have shared sexual encounters. The current "winner", apparently, has had sex with 43 others on the chart. And not one of them is Kevin Bacon.

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Computer users have come to expect systems failures and security holes with Microsoft products. But finally, one company employee has blown the whistle. "Today we do not worry about electricity and water services being available," he wrote in an e-mail to Microsoft's 47,000 employees last week. "With telephony, we rely on its availability and security for conducting highly confidential business transactions without worrying about who we call or whether what we say will be compromised. Computing falls well short of this." For all Microsoft's boasts,"no trustworthy computing platform exists today". Gulp.

Was he fired? Actually, it was Bill Gates who sent the memo. The boss has vowed to make security his top priority this year, instead of new bells and whistles. It's about time - and very good news for PC owners if he means it.

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Funny what we'll pay for. Last year, Europeans spent 590 million (£364 million) on content for their mobile phones - ring tones, logos, football scores and other vital daily necessities. That's more than twice what they paid for PC-based content, according to the research company Jupiter MMXI - and 70 per cent of that was, you guessed it, from "adult" websites. The gap is predicted to grow, with phone-based content estimated to be worth some 3 billion (£1.85 billion) by 2006, with computers trailing way behind. You do have to take Jupiter's figures with a pinch of salt - its wildly optimistic forecasts helped to fire Internet fever - but the trend is clear. Newspaper and music websites would be well advised to remake themselves as phone services if they ever hope to make any money.

(The Times, January 21 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Top blogs/DVD format wars/Belgian enterprise

By David Rowan

HERE'S a trade secret that could get this column suspended from journalism's equivalent of the Magic Circle: there is a way to be stupendously well informed without reading absolutely everything. Just leave the filtering to other find minds, and scour the highlights in their weblogs - online journals that link to the best finds of an opinionated editor or community.

As commercial content sites continue to disappear from the Web, the number of weblogs, or "blogs", is growing exponentially. Three years ago, there were 23 known weblogs - so named because they log their writers' journeys through the Web. Today, according to MIT's Media Laboratory, there are 13,119 blogs influential enough to merit indexing, with thousands more offering individuals' observations to their niche audiences.

If you hunger for technology news, your one-stop shop might be Slashdot.org or Kuro5hin.org. There are blogs that monitor the absurd consumer detritus being auctioned at eBay (Who WouldBuyThat.com) or the daily movements of the band U2 (U2log.com). This cottage publishing industry even has its own annual awards, the Bloggies, to be announced on January 30. Thanks to free, easy-to-use software such as Pyra Labs' Blogger, anyone can become a publisher: you simply choose a template, type your entries and click a button to upload them to your own Web space. Blogger has more than 300,000 registered users, and some have reported 15,000 hits a day since the September 11 attacks.

Last week, Blogger was so overloaded that it had to stop users updating their sites. It now plans to launch a paid-for service - and founder Evan Williams will be sharing his thoughts on his own weblog, evhead.com.

The weblog phenomenon is proof that professional journalists can no longer claim a monopoly on deciding what's news. In the words of Rebecca Blood, author of the Rebecca's Pocket weblog, rebeccablood.net: "By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical Web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day."

Here are six blogs worth bookmarking:

Blogdex (blogdex.media.mit.edu): This ingenious project of the MIT Media Lab is a blog of blogs: by indexing the pages most linked to by thousands of weblogs each day, it reveals which stories are making the Web buzz.

MetaFilter (www.metafilter.com): A lively "community blog" whose 13,214 members (anyone can join) post links and comments, to which other members append their own thoughts.

Slashdot (slashdot.org): An established "news for nerds" community that focuses on technology.

Plastic (www.plastic.com): A Slashdot for a range of subjects, using professional and ordinary members.

Memepool (memepool.com): An intense community of links archived by subject from art to zoology. It takes a while to follow a sentence comprising nine hyperlinks.

InstaPundit (instapundit.com): Glenn Reynolds, a Tennessee law professor, offers a consistently lively guide to US and international commentary. "If you've got a modem, I've got an opinion," he states.

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REMEMBER Betamax v VHS? You'd think the consumer electronics industry would have learnt to work together by now, but no, we're in for another expensive fight over absurdly incompatible technologies.

The Digital Video Recorder (DVD) might be today's hot gadget, but hold your breath if you are planning to buy a recordable version as the prices come down. You see, nobody can agree on the format - and Panasonic's DVD-RAM system will be ranged against Pioneer's DVD-RW and Philips's DVD+RW, not all of which are compatible with today's hardware.

There's even a Recordable DVD Council that won't agree a common system with the rival DVD+RW Alliance, so don't expect to borrow a friend's movie. Our advice to consumers confused by the rival offerings: don't buy anything, until the industry has battled this one out.

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NEWSGROUPS were buzzing this weekend after the Belgian Deputy Prime Minister, Laurette Onkelinx, was reported to be planning to put a computer in every home at the Government's expense. She had even, apparently, started negotiating for the kit with Compaq and Microsoft. Alas, such forward thinking neglected to consider the views of a small but evangelical religion known as "Linux users". They are now bombarding her with e-mails demanding that their free-source operating system, rather than Mr Gates's, is the beneficiary of such an ambitious social experiment. If Robin Cook ever gets anywhere with his online voting plans, he ought to remember to put an extra box below Labour, Tory and LibDem: "Don't care, just as long as Linux is counting my vote."

(The Times, January 14 2002)

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The Observer: The pirate radio station that helps

Sandra Lewis needed £50,000 to save her child's life, but no one listened until an illegal radio station took up her cause. By David Rowan

Sandra Lewis stopped sleeping, lost weight and fell into deep depression when she learnt in November that her three-year-old daughter Sanjae had a year to live unless she had a lung transplant. She had already lost one daughter to the same rare lung-tissue disease and now she was told that only a hospital in St Louis, Missouri, in the United States, could operate on Sanjae - provided she could raise £50,000.

With little money in the bank and six other children and stepchildren to worry about, Lewis prepared herself for the worst, resigned to the brutal reality that the operation was beyond her means. Still, she contacted some newspapers and Children In Need in an attempt to generate publicity and, she hoped, donations. 'It wasn't a big enough story for them,' she told The Observer . 'Nobody was interested. But to me, my dying girl is a massive story. I was really down.'

Then something extraordinary happened. A weekly black newspaper ran a small item that was seen by a well-wisher Sandra knows only as George. He sent her £20 and suggested she call a pirate radio station that serves south-east London's black community. The station, Powerjam, began promoting a Sanjae In Need appeal a few days before Christmas. Within days, two other black stations had joined, one based near the Peckham estate where Damilola Taylor was killed in November 2000. Suddenly Lewis had powerful underground voices fighting her corner.

By last night the fund stood at £23,800, with a further £16,000 pledged, and five rival radio stations promoting it by the hour. 'The community has lifted up my spirits,' Lewis said in her Hackney council flat in east London, as she repositioned the oxygen mask that lets Sanjae breathe. 'I'm eating, sleeping, laughing again. I have a feeling we'll make it.'

The fund, and the illegal radio stations that are promoting it, have attracted pocket-money donations from five-year-olds and £2,500 pledges from a black entrepreneur. Prisoners in Belmarsh have sent £400 in cash and phonecards, while an eight-year-old raised £833 from a sponsored swim.

A man called Dave, whom Sandra had never met, bought her a mobile phone with £50 in credits after hearing that her own bill had reached £280. One woman returned the Christmas presents she had bought and donated the cash.

As word of the appeal has spread among black Londoners, prominent businesses have rallied to the cause. Last Saturday the management of Scenarios nightclub in New Cross, south-east London, donated its takings to Sanjae's fund. In one night it raised £5,012, including £10 from Kojo, a boy too young to attend but who had learnt of the collection on the radio.

'There's an old African saying that it takes a village to raise a child,' said Wayne, who, with co-presenter Kwaku, hosts the Nubian Forum talk show on Powerjam (its illegal status requiring first names only). 'Sanjae is our child. We've always known that the black community is not what the media paint it. We spend a lot of time dwelling on the negative - shootings, gangs, drugs, whatever. But this campaign has given the community something positive to focus on. It's not often you get a chance to save someone's life.'

IT BECAME clear that something was wrong with Sanjae soon after she was born, weighing 3.5lb. At six weeks she was frequently vomiting and by 15 months was short of breath and weighed only 7lb. Hospitals in Jamaica, where Sanjae was born, failed to diagnose anything beyond acute pneumonia. It was only when Lewis's husband, Lloyd - a plasterer who happened to be working at Great Ormond Street Hospital - approached a lung consultant, that fibrosing alveolitis was suggested.

This was the disease that had killed Sanjae's sister Jahna, aged three, in 1996. Within weeks Sanjae was in Great Ormond Street on oxygen and a high dose of steroids. Lewis was told her daughter needed a lung transplant or she would not reach five, but that surgeons at the hospital had never operated on such a small child: even now she weighs only 20lb. The hospital suggested specialists in the US, but only St Louis was prepared to take Sanjae, at a cost of £50,000, for what would be a 10-month stay. The hospital claims an 85 per cent success rate, although a further transplant would be needed after five or 10 years.

Six weeks ago Sanjae's condition worsened. 'You see her now, she's looking good, but in three days she could go down with another infection,' said Lewis, cuddling the strong-minded little girl who insists, at the mention of the word hospital: 'I'm not going nowhere.'

Lewis said: 'The hardest thing is to see her every day pumped up with steroids, with the oxygen mask as her life support, getting exhausted after two hours. No wonder she won't eat, with all that medication.'

Time is running short. 'We need to raise the money by the end of January, as Sanjae has to come off the steroids,' said Kwaku, 39, a part-time stand-up comedian who has led the grassroots campaign with Wayne, 32, a primary-school teacher. 'A lot of people think the Afro-Caribbean community don't stick together - but they do when given the chance. That £50,000 will be there, guaranteed. That's the amount of faith I have in our community.'

Kwaku raised his first £1,200 from family and friends; a comedy gig raised a further £200. South London community radio stations such as Genesis and Galaxy have each raised thousands. Lewis says that the mainstream media - with honourable exceptions, such as the Hackney Gazette - would not even return her calls.

Last week the Lewises' flat was busy with volunteers offering to leaflet outlying parts of London and to call schools, churches and old people's homes seeking collections. Well-wishers arrived with donations and toys for the children. Virgin has offered free flights to St Louis.

On his Powerjam show last Tuesday, Wayne talked of expanding the appeal to create a community fund 'which everyone pays into during the good times so it's there when hard times lick'.

Lewis is starting to think ahead. 'Everyone's been helping me so much, at least now I can spend some time with Sanjae and the other children, who've been telling me I must hate them. I have a great feeling about this.'

(The Observer, January 13, 2002)

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Interview: Don Hale, investigative journalist (Evening Standard)

Don Hale says he knows who the 'Bakewell Tart' killer is - and it's not the man his paper helped to free. David Rowan meets him

NEXT week, when the case of Stephen Downing finally reaches the Appeal Court after 28 years, a former Derbyshire newspaper editor will be rather more twitchy than usual. It's not that Don Hale, whose seven-year investigation led to Downing's release, doubts that the murder conviction will at last be quashed, 11 months after he was freed on bail. What worries him is that he knows who really murdered Wendy Sewell, known locally as "the Bakewell Tart". He fears that the powerful local interests who kept Downing in jail since 1974 will not like what he says next.

"Police say next week will be the most dangerous time for me," says Hale, the mild-mannered journalist who survived three attempts on his life to prove that they had the wrong man. "If they reopen the case, the real killer might think, well, if I'm going down for one, I might as well go down for two."

Hale, a 49-year-old grandfather in a grey pullover, is an unlikely media hero. Self-effacing and quietly spoken, he has come in a few months from editing the 10,000-circulation Matlock Mercury to fending off chat-show invitations and Hollywood studios. Last year his campaign won him 14 major awards, from the What the Papers Say Journalist of the Year to The Observer Man of the Year. Then came the film companies: if the plans move forward, Don Hale could be played by Liam Neeson, Wendy Sewell by Julia Roberts, and Don's wife Kath by Julie Walters. "Aw," says Kath in the kitchen of their neat Wirksworth home in Derbyshire, "all I want is a quiet life."

Today, Don's mobile is anything but quiet. The requests pour in from BBC News, Yorkshire TV, France Soir, Het Belang Van Limburg in Belgium. Now that he has parted from the Mercury (he left in August "by mutual agreement" after a dispute over subbing changes) he can spend next Tuesday and Wednesday in court and helping the media. When he was still employed - by bosses who made it clear his campaign was unwelcome - he had to take holiday time to attend court. "The subbing changes were brought in as a red herring to make me quit," he says. "It had been made clear that if the police decided to sue, I'd be on my own."

Hale does not miss editing. He has been busy writing a BBC drama on the case, and a book, The Scapegoat (Random House), out in March. He has also been investigating a number of other alleged miscarriages of justice. He helped get Terry Thornton, convicted for the "Sheffield nail-bombing", out of jail in 1999; later this month, Michael Philpott, jailed over what's become known as "the Wrong Body Murder", is expected to be freed after Hale's work; and then there is Iain Gordon, sent to a mental institution for allegedly murdering a judge's daughter 50 years ago and since given £500,000 compensation. "I can't claim much credit for the Gordon case," Hale says. "It was really just advice."

His high profile since Downing was released on bail last February has brought him around 500 letters from others claiming to be victims of injustice. He has been asked to help with the case of Barry George, jailed for murdering Jill Dando. "I've been given names about who did the Dando murder, and it's not the man they have," he says. "I reckon I could get him off quite easily. You see, barristers are not investigative journalists.

They'll go through the proper channels - but the people who give you the golden information are not the Rotary Club members, they're in the underworld, and these people feel an injustice has been done. Michael Mansfield (the human rights QC) won't find out who did it by cycling up and down on his bike in London."

Other letters in his correspondence files are from prisoners or their relatives claiming unfair convictions for murder and rape; prison officers who have been victimised after expressing concern over suicides; police whistleblowers; and claims of "bogus bankruptcy by the masonic judicial mafia".

There are letters relating to planning disputes, neighbours from hell, a missing Second World War airman and one man concerned about the surface of the Peak District roads. "I'm on the list now with the Queen, Princess Anne and their MP," Hale reflects without a hint of cynicism. "But where do they go? What paper would touch half of those? There's no Brownie points in it."

HALE started his investigations into the Stephen Downing case in late 1994. Once the first stories appeared, more witnesses approached him, and he spent his spare time (and £4,000 of his money) following up leads.

"Most people who contacted me said they'd gone to the police at the time but they weren't interested. It wasn't deemed in the public interest to expose the private life of Wendy Sewell and her associates - she'd just had a child out of wedlock with one lover, and was seeing eight prominent people. Yet it was said in court she had no children, and was an ordinary housewife."

The still local "well-to-do individual" he believes to be the murderer has, he says, threatened him with a shotgun. "Police know a lot more than they're letting on," says Hale. "We've identified five people who were in and around the murder scene. Three have deliberately lied; two have never been interviewed to this day. Now, with the benefit of DNA and the other witness statements, the first step is to pull these five in for questioning."

He questions why it took the rest of the media so long to become involved in Downing's case. "Suddenly everyone and his dog wants a say. The nationals are like vultures, picking meat off at the end. I've become a bit disillusioned." He is disappointed that investigative journalists he contacted at the time, from Paul Foot to David Jessel, did little to take the case further.

"These campaigns need dedication, determination and time. They seem to want it on a plate nowadays - all packaged in half an hour with all the paperwork photocopied in triplicate. This story wasn't about exposing a personality, going through dustbins and finding they've got a girlfriend in Timbuktoo. That's grubby journalism, and I don't approve of it."

The battle is still not over for Hale, even though the Crown Prosecution Service has urged him to end his involvement as "you've got your man out". But for Don Hale, who is still careful which pubs he drinks in, it remains a lonely fight.

"Downing has done very little himself, and potentially will become a national hero next week, and maybe make a couple of million quid. I don't begrudge him. I just wanted to tell people the truth."

(Evening Standard, January 9 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Internetspeak/Converged gadgets

Internetspeak is changing the English language by stealth. And if you dk how to keep pace, David Rowan explains everything you ntk

IT'S that time to review the tech pundits' predictions for the past year, and reflect smugly how foolish is their art: in 2001, we were told, the dot-com bloodbath would end, third-generation phones would fly out of Dixons, and we'd all be e-mailing from our fridge. Maybe next year, guys.

Here, though, is one trend that this column can predict with absolute confidence for 2002: the Internet will redefine how we write and speak.

The process is already well advanced. We've been busily eroding the rules of spelling and capitalisation in our quest for speed: text-messaging has turned Gr8 BritN into a land of shorthand thumb-typists, who when we e-mail, will never write "Yours faithfully" when "Bestest" or "Thx" will do. As for our ever-expanding vocabulary, lexicographers cannot data mine the information tsunami fast enough to record each new tech term entering the mainstream.

But now things are getting serious. For many, the PC and mobile handset have become our principal daily communication media. As we enter 2002, around 30 million of us are online in the UK, fielding a couple of hundred million e-mails daily, and firing off 38 million text messages. We are adapting to a language that goes beyond the spoken and written conventions we grew up with. Without realising it, we are learning a radically new set of linguistic rules.

For one, we are evolving new ways to inject emotional context into otherwise flat text. Your sarcastic opinion offered to a chat-room might be misread if taken literally, but you can emphasise your intention with emoticons - facial expressions such as :-( - or abbreviations such as fotcl - "falling off the chair laughing" (see panel below). When u or i use lower-case letters, we signal how busy we are. We are even evolving new forms of punctuation to suggest emphasis, something that has become *very* common practice ;)

Then there are the new expressions that are moving faster than an instant message from the IT desk to the dictionary. Last June, the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed a raft of Internet-related terms, from smileys and cookies to FAQs and B2B. Since then, Oxford has monitored the verb "to disambiguate", meaning "to clarify", and the rather more useful "dot gone" - a dot.com start-up that just stopped. Not all the new terms are jargon: some have moved from their original tech context to enrich the broader language. Think about that the next time you're multitasking.

David Crystal, for one, is excited by the Net's impact on the English language. "The sheer scale of the Internet has convinced me that we are on the brink of the biggest language revolution ever," says Professor Crystal, whose useful new book Language and the Internet (Cambridge, £13.95) attributes the change to the new ways in which the Web makes us interact. Until now we have relied on speaking, reading or writing, but increasingly this new computer-mediated language is dominating our social relationships. He calls it "netspeak" and celebrates it as "a development of millennial significance. A new medium of linguistic communication does not arrive very often in the history of the race".

If you doubt how quickly we have adapted, glance back over that e-mail you just sent the colleague sitting three feet away, or re-read your recent text messages that, more than actually saying anything, served to remind the world of your presence. This revolution is rewriting the rules of grammar, style and syntax, and its impact has barely begun.

Let's hope that this time next year we can still understand each other. hapE nu yr ;-)

Some current netspeak abbreviations that you ntk* (*see below)

awhfy: Are we having fun yet?
dk: Don't know
dur?: Do you remember?
fotcl: Falling off the chair laughing
fya: For your amusement
hhok: Ha ha only kidding
ianal: I am not a lawyer
icwum: I see what you mean
irl: In real life
khuf: Know how you feel
ntk: Need to know
o4u: Only for you
pmji: Pardon my jumping in
rtm: Read the manual (or its abusive f-word cousin, rtfm)
t+: Think positive
tmot: Trust me on this
tuvm: Thank you very much
4yeo: For your eyes only

++++

IT'S going to be a costly year for gadget addicts. In 2002 the big tech firms plan to saturate the market with a plethora of "converged" devices that will combine computers, phones, videos and music-players in a bid to get you spending. Watch out for the first video-equipped mobile phones, handheld computers that combine phones, cameras and MP3 players, and (if Bluetooth finally gains a foothold) domestic appliances that talk to each other.

Look out for early signs of in-car computing, and the erosion of cathode-ray tubes by cheaper liquid-crystal displays. And one that might just catch on: the personal DVD cinema embedded in your sunglasses. They're called i-glasses and give the illusion of an 80-inch screen. Better get saving.

(The Times, January 7 2002)

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Channel 4 News: Pirate Power

Pirate Power: The pirate radio boom that is now earning station owners big money

By David Rowan, reporting for Channel 4 News

(Broadcast transcript)

Presenter, Sarah Smith: It's hip, it's hyped and it's totally against the law. Tune your radio dial nowadays and the chances are, you'll enter a criminal underworld. Pirate radio is still illegal but today there are more stations than ever beaming everything from trance music to anarchy into Britain's homes. Some are now making so much money that the legally stations are seriously concerned. In this special report David Rowan joins the pirates on the rooftops to find out why the radio outlaws are now calling the tunes. David Rowan reports:


Across the radio dial a powerful new underworld is breaking down the established order. While commercial radio struggles with recession, pirate radio is booming, with hundreds of stations stealing listeners and profits that legal broadcasters say should be theirs. Today's pirates are slick professional operations filling Britain's airwaves with everything from street music to extreme political messages. There are now almost 300 stations, twice what there were 10 years ago and the profit some make suggests crime really does pay.

"Mr C", from Silk City FM says: "If you put the right infrastructure into place and your business ideas are correct, you can gross between from 30 to 60 grand a year if it's run properly."

The key is bringing advertisers to those young hard to find listeners. "Mr Kidd" sells adverts to half a dozen Birmingham stations taking his media to clubs and nail salons promising to undercut the legal stations rates. "If you come to a pirate station, for £1,500 you could get at least six months' advertising . A pirate station will give you the same quality, plus you're getting the DJs mentioning it with a little bit more heart - because they are told to."

Just as the 60s pirates led to Radio 1, todays pirates are leading to Number 1s. Acts like So Solid Crew have broken through from illegal radio to major record deals. It doesn't bother the pirates that they face two years in jail. "Mr C" says: "They are part of household culture now. Everyday household entertainment culture is pirate radio, especially in London, Birmingham and Manchester."

They leave their £400 transmitters on tower blocks and hope that they are safe from government raids and rival stations. Some pirates have cut the odds by keeping dogs on the roof, or booby trapping transmitters with CS spray.

A recent police raid in Lewisham, South London unearthed in a studio a guide to pirate radio called "Radio is my Bomb", a DIY pirate radio manual with everything from contacts to guides to building a transmitter. And then there is the internet.

Stations claim they are bringing new listeners to the dial and that this crime has no victims. But not according to Thames FM, a legal station which plays "adult cool" music to South London.

Mark Walker, programme controller of Thames 107.8, says: "There are people sitting in the sales area trying to sell this radio station and they don't want it being interfered with by people who have no right to be there. So yes, they are nibbling into our income and possibly taking away our listeners, who find it irritating and affecting the livelyhood of these people"

Legal stations are getting desperate. They say the fines for pirates, just £377 on average, are too low. They are suing individual DJs and are now calling in the DTI. But complaining brings its own risks. Greg Martin, managing director of Thames FM, says: "One of our presenters had his vehicle in the station parking lot smashed up and we believe this is the direct result of notifying the DTI about a pirate station".

In Glasgow, Club FM was raided after organising gang fights live on air. Another local station told us it was giving pirates like them a bad name. DJ "Miss-Chief", of Allusion FM, says: "They are advertising gang fights and we can't be bothered with that. We are all too old for that. Basically we are here to play the music and make sure everyone is listening to the tunes they want to listen to."

But some stations are speaking out for their communities. Sandra Lewis has a three-year-old daughter who needs a lung transplant in America. It will cost £50,000, which three London pirates are helping to raise. One of the stations has tried to go legal, but was turned down. Its supporters are not surprised. Galaxy FM urges its listeners to empower themselves against white oppression. A spokesman says: "What we are doing as a people's station is debriefing black people after going through 400 years of mental slavery".

For some stations, the politics are even more radical. Interference FM preaches anti-capitalism to London, Brighton and Bristol. On election day, its message was stark. "Chris Winton", from Interference FM, says: "Vote for nobody because nobody will change anything. The politicians promise and renege on their promises left right and centre, continually. We are dangerous because we are there offering alternative views. When we start giving out the actual facts, we are dangerous to the state. Stations that just play music last for two or three months. We last five or six hours."

The DTI sees raids as the most cost effective way of policing the airwaves. Yet for a station selling lucrative adverts, one lost transmitter is a mere business expense. If raids are meant to silence the pirates, then the system is clearly failing.

With more illegal broadcasters than ever jamming Britain's airwaves, their listeners and advertisers seem to want something they are not getting elsewhere. Yet every pirate station we spoke to said they would go legal if given the chance. Then it would be for the market to sort out who survives.

(David Rowan, reporting for Channel 4 News, January 4 2002)

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Evening Standard: Investigation - pirate radio in profit

By David Rowan

WHILE much of London's media faces its worst recession for a decade, one sector is positively booming. This business can earn its bosses £3,000 in a weekend, and has such a hold on street culture that it has created three number-one singles since the summer. Pirate radio might still be illegal - but in the capital, it is now making real money.

More than 80 illegal FM stations currently broadcast to London, up from around 25 a decade ago. For some owners, their stations are there to promote extreme political views.

But for many more, they are a lucrative way to profit from advertisers keen to reach niche audiences. At dusk on Christmas Day, the Evening Standard monitored 44 pirates from Waterloo Bridge, mainly playing music - garage, trance, jungle - and ignored by mainstream stations.

Yet despite constant raids by the Radiocommunications Agency, the government body that polices the airwaves, the pirates appear to be winning the battle.

According to the agency's most recent figures, its enforcement officers mounted 1,494 raids against illegal radio stations in 2000, around 1,300 of these in London. If caught, pirate broadcasters face up to two years in jail and unlimited fines. Yet, despite making three times as many raids as a decade earlier, the agency, part of the DTI, secured just 40 convictions. And when broadcasters are convicted, they face an average fine of just £377 - a fraction of their profits from organising a single party club night.

Stations in London that we spoke to charge between £50 and £150 to advertise every hour over a weekend - what a legal station might charge for one 20-second slot. The more established pirates promote up to 20 "clients" at a time: on music stations such as Unique FM and Station FM, the Evening Standard heard adverts for West End nightclubs, and even the police-backed Crimestoppers Trust.

Remarkably, last summer the Metropolitan Police planned to advertise Operation Trident, its antigun campaign, on north London pirates - until Scotland Yard lawyers pointed out that this was illegal under the 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act.

"There's no advertising recession among the pirates," according to Woody "Uptown Badboy", 29, a former station owner and "mixmaster" on a number of London pirates.

"Station, Kool, Taste, Delight - at least 10 are making a profit now bigtime. With 20 advertisers, you could easily make £3,000 a weekend. You charge the DJs for their slots, say £10. There's also talk of record companies paying DJs to play certain tunes. And stations like Kool FM are making plenty of money from their raves."

Some stations have become hugely influential in defining the nation's musical tastes. Just as Radio Caroline in the 1960s paved the way for Radio 1, the London pirates are turning garage and dance music into commercial hits.

Last year's number-one singles from DJ Pied Piper, Daniel Bedingfield and So Solid Crew were boosted by early pirate airplay. The Relentless record label, in particular, specialises in sourcing talent from the London FM pirates.

So Solid Crew retains close links to Delight 103FM, a commercially successful south London music station that now claims 10,000 listeners. Members of the station's management team, who met us in a Clapham bar, explained how, for legal reasons, the station was carefully distanced from the parent music-promotions company. "You could say that Delight Entertainment 'sponsors' Delight FM to promote its events," explained AJ (no radio pirate we met was prepared to give a real name). "If we didn't have the station, we'd find another way to promote the gigs - but it's very effective. Business is better than ever. " Delight makes DJs sign up to a strict set of rules - no swearing, violence, drugs, smoking or drinking - and eventually hopes to go legal. "My aim is to go international - to be the Puff Daddy of radio," management spokesman Mr C said. "We're a training school for presenters, and are giving listeners a reason to get on to the FM dial."

For most pirates, advertising profits more than compensate for the cost of transmitters regularly seized by the DTI. These cost from £350, including a "microlink" that allows a studio to be some distance from the tower block where the transmitter is sited. But money is not the only force driving the pirate boom. Some owners refuse adverts, lest they compromise their stations' calls for political agitation or "black empowerment".

Among the most radical voices is Interference FM, which broadcasts intermittently to London, Bristol and Brighton with an anti-capitalist direct-action message. On election day, Interference FM urged listeners to "Vote for Nobody"; it has also been active during Reclaim the Streets marches, anti-hunting demonstrations, and the recent protests against the Laeken European summit. "The fact that we're illegal doesn't bother me," explained cofounder Chris Winton (not his real name). "What's more of a crime is the way we're lied to by the corporate media with their constant onslaught of neo-liberal rubbish. " Winton believes that "most pirate stations nowadays are motivated by greed and profit. " He added: "Yet the music pirates are left alone for months. We're considered dangerous, so they pull us off the air before the day is out."

ANOTHER, very different, advertising-free station is Galaxy FM, in Peckham, whose mission is "to de-brainwash the black community".

Galaxy combines soca and reggae music with a robust articulation of "black empowerment" against a system "designed to oppress our brothers and sisters". In live phone-ins to mobile-phone numbers, listeners are urged to integrate "not with Europe, but with Africa", and warned against the "Freemasons and illuminati controlling the racist media".

Beyond its politics, Galaxy also supports a community otherwise unrepresented. Sandra Lewis, a Jamaican mother living on a Hackney estate, failed to interest the mainstream media in her three-yearold daughter's need for a lifesaving lung transplant in America. But Galaxy and two other black pirate stations launched an appeal before Christmas, which is well on the way to raising the £50, 000 needed.

The legal stations are not impressed.

"It's absolute bilge about pirates being needed by the community," said Paul Brown, chief executive of the Commercial Radio Companies' Association, the commercial stations' trade body. "These crooks broadcast at enormous power and obliterate legal radio stations. " Some are now so concerned at the growing competition from pirates that they fear for their own survival. Thames Radio, broadcasting legally from Kingston upon Thames, claims that pirate interference to its 107.8FM frequency is limiting its transmission area, and losing listeners and advertising revenue.

"We're the victims," said Mark Walker, the programme controller. "I rise and fall on my audience figures, and these stations come along and stop us reaching our listeners. We have to pay licence fees, wages, performingrights fees, taxes - while these guys just squat our frequency. If this carries on, people here are going to lose their jobs. "

Official complaints can be counterproductive: Thames Radio says one pirate responded by vandalising a presenter's car. Legal stations are also frustrated at the courts' "lenient" sentences for those caught.

So they have taken to suing individual broadcasters to keep them off the air.

Barry Maxwell, director of the Radiocommunications Agency, agrees that the courts could be tougher. "It would be nice to see some higher fines. There's a fairly villainous element behind (some of the) bigger stations. " But the agency faces a dilemma: "You can spend a very small time taking away lots of their transmitters. Or you can the pirate hunters spend a lot of time looking for a studio or going for a prosecution. It's a question of balancing resources. "

A constant priority for the agency is silencing stations that cause radio interference. Usually complaints relate to no more than disruption to television reception, but occasionally the agency is called out on far more urgent business. Two days before the Evening Standard went on patrol with the agency's north-west London enforcement team, the agency received an emergency "safety of life" call. Flight crews coming in to Heathrow had found one of their communications channels blocked by "Arabic music", which drowned out instructions from air-traffic control. Investigators traced the signal to a poorly constructed transmitter above Wembley Central station.

"We found the transmitter within an hour and called police for backup," one of the enforcement officers told us. "Unfortunately the police were busy dealing with two dead bodies, so we had to wait four hours for their assistance." Two days later, when the Standard returned to Wembley Central, a replacement transmitter was already in place.

At least 10 prosecutions have been brought since 1996 for pirate interference with aeronautical equipment.

One one occasion, an east London station was reported to have jammed Heathrow's automatic landing system. National Air Traffic Services, responsible for air-traffic control, confirmed that Heathrow calls out the Radiocommunications Agency around 10 times a year. A spokesman described pirate broadcasters as a "nuisance" to air-traffic control, who must then alert air crews to use a backup frequency.

Occasionally the agency can face the resistance of stations determined not to lose transmitters. "The established pirates put up grids on tower-block roofs so people can't gain access," explained Woody "Uptown Badboy" - mostly to prevent other stations stealing equipment. "One London station has kept two dogs on the roof of a Hackney tower block. Others brick up the rig (transmitter). One station has used CS spray inside a concrete enclosure so it's not tampered with." Lewisham Council says it found one tower-block rooftop booby-trapped by pirates "putting a 240V electrical supply on the locks".

DURING our tour of duty with the agency, its three-man team removed six transmitters in a morning.

Freeze FM came off first, from the roof of a 13-floor block in Newmarket Avenue, Northolt. The transmitter, encased in concrete, was hidden beneath the water tank. "We've removed a transmitter 20 times from here over two years, but they're still making money on ads," said John, an enforcement officer for 35 years. "It's a game. They'll reinstall the whole kit in less than an hour."

The team's Doppler signal box - built into its unmarked blue Nissan van - then detected an unlawful signal on 90.0FM. The signal strengthened as we approached Wembley. "It's payday," said a second officer as we reached Wembley Central station. "It's the transmitter that interfered with Heathrow. As we don't know who's behind it, we'll call for police protection. "

The police did not arrive, so the team broke the lock with its threefoot hydraulic cutter. They cut up the aluminium aerial pole before removing the transmitter.

"We're almost permanently carrying out risk assessments," said Paul, the area team leader. "If we're not familiar with a station, we never know what they're going to spring on us. We had a guy with a knife in Stratford, threatening us. But they're more concerned with rig thieves. "

Other victims that day included Street FM (silenced from behind a flat in Bolton Road, Harlesden) and Unique (above a Harlesden bakery). On a tower block in Palmerston Road, Acton, Cruise FM's transmitter was broadcasting on 95.4FM when the team removed it. "In May, we raided their studio on Goldhawk Road with 80 police in helmets," a radio investigator explained. "Unbeknown to us, below the studio was a crack cocaine den. Police knew we'd be walking past it. We found one bloke there, interviewed him under caution, and took the turntables and records."

But the agency's triumphs that morning proved short-lived. Since the Standard saw their transmitters removed, all these stations have returned to the airwaves.

--David Rowan reports on the national picture tonight on Channel 4 News at 7pm.

(Evening Standard, January 3 2002)

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Times Op-ed columns

What British Jews think of Israel's war (The Sunday Times, August 6 2006)
Hezbollah finally unites Britain's Jews (The Times, July 24 2006)
'Lost', a BBC internet drama (The Times, June 3 2006)
I'm not nuts: they really are out to get you (The Times, January 24 2006)
To survive, newspapers will have to learn the era of their ways (The Times, December 31 2005)
Disney, leave the kids alone (The Times, December 19 2005)
Don't be pinkwashed: the breast-cancer corporate bandwagon (The Times, October 27 2005)
Advertising's new hidden persuaders (The Times, September 30 2005)
Censor the internet? Try catching the wind (The Times, August 31 2005)
The morally dubious ban on medicinal cannabis (The Times, August 1 2005)
Tom Cruise, three questions for you (The Times, July 12 2005)
The wrongs of extending copyright (The Times, June 17 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part V (The Times, May 7 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part IV (The Times, April 30 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part III (The Times, April 23 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part II (The Times, April 16 2005))
A guide to electionspeak, Part I (The Times, April 9 2005)
Why MGM v Grokster matters for the consumer (March 2005)
Why the British Phonographic Industry's fight against file-swappers is misguided (October 2004)
God isn't dead - he just needs an upgrade to keep up with Google (April 2004)
Whacked by Google: Why the search engine war matters (February 2004)
The real reason Microsoft is giving up on chatrooms (September 2003)
What makes a computer-virus writer? (August 2003)
Beware, your pullover may be watching you: The privacy risks of RFID chips (July 2003)

Read more!

Writing on language

Times Op-ed columns for Election 2005:
A guide to electionspeak, Part V (The Times, May 7 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part IV (The Times, April 30 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part III (The Times, April 23 2005)
A guide to electionspeak, Part II (The Times, April 16 2005))
A guide to electionspeak, Part I (The Times, April 9 2005)

From A Glossary for the Nineties, by David Rowan (Prion Books, 1998):
A Glossary for the Nineties: Introduction
Chapter 1 - People types
Chapter 2 - Sex and gender
Chapter 3 - Crime and punishment
Chapter 4 - Politics and diplomacy
Chapter 5 - Computing and technology
Chapter 6 - The workplace
Chapter 7 - Advertising and marketing
Chapter 8 - Media and publishing
Chapter 9 - Business and finance
Chapter 10 - Sport and leisure
Chapter 11 - Jargon and euphemism
Chapter 12 - Trends and fads
Chapter 13 - Street slang
Chapter 14 - In black and white
Chapter 15 - Health
Chapter 16 - Eurojargon
Miscellaneous chapter dividers



More to follow (Evening Standard)

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Glossary For the Nineties: Press coverage

The Independent, September 7 1998: A phrasebook for a tour of New Britain

ONE THING to be said for the Nineties is that companies don't sack staff anymore. They "decruit", "downsize", "rightsize", "de-job" or "de-layer". These euphemistic redundancies might take place after a morning's "blamestorming" - debating who is to blame for a workplace fiasco.

If the employee won't leave quietly, then send for the "head- shunter" - the reverse of a head-hunter, whose role is to get you to leave the company without the costs of redundancy.

Neologisms (new words) are said to be the most acute barometer of the course our culture is taking. And a new book to be published later this month shows how the Nineties have given the language an armoury of neologisms - be they genuine attempts to define new cultural phenomena, or outlandish euphemisms dictated by political correctness or marketing agendas.

Marital status has its own Nineties labelling, as you will know if you are a "sinbad" (single income, no boyfriend, absolutely desperate) or even a "sitcom" (single income, two children and an oppressive mortgage).

But some of the most graphic additions to the language come in the arena of sex and sexual politics. On the disco floor one now apparently "binrakes" at the end of the evening. This means "to trawl around the dance floor in a last- minute bid to attract even the least desirable partner." The book adds that this is "particularly popular in Edinburgh," which is hardly complimentary to the young men and women of that city. Down south, one may not "binrake", but one does "downdate", which amounts to much the same thing, meaning "to seek a partner below one's expectations."

Lesbians have been on a linguistic journey in the Nineties - from the glamourous and chic "lipstick lesbian" to the "lug" (lesbian until graduation) to "lesbeing" (actively living the role), ending up with the vividly descriptive "hasbian" (a former lesbian who is now in a heterosexual relationship, as defined in Psychology Today).

A Glossary for the 90s, to be published by Prion, consists of words, all of which have been recorded in public use, whether in newspaper and magazine articles, or uttered by broadcasters and politicians. Others emerged from academic journals and billboard advertisements; specialist groups such as skateboarders and rap DJs; or were simply overheard by the book's author, the journalist David Rowan.

He said: " Some new words, already, have become so indispensable to modern life that it is hard to imagine how we coped without them: Was there really life before office workers had to 'hot desk' and newspapers worried about 'dumbing down'?

"At the same time, various subcultures are busy inventing their own words, often to stay ahead of mainstream society. Skateboarders, for instance, talk about 'bongos' and 'swellbows' so that only the initiated know they are referring to injuries.

"Professional groups also invent new terms to stay ahead of the pack. Doctors might talk about difficult patients as 'Gomers' (short for Get out of my Emergency Room!), or chat about treating a woman patient with a 'Tube' (totally unnecessary breast examination) - and all they are doing is reinforcing their group identity with terms designed to keep outsiders ignorant."

Many of the additions to the language are words that can be used to avoid saying what you mean, such as the Ambient Replenishment Opportunity advertised at Safeway in Stockport - a shelf-stacking job. And in America, used goods for sale are either "experienced", or the even happier- sounding "pre-enjoyed". (By David Lister, Arts News Editor)

++++

Evening Standard, September 7 1998: Are you a sitcom or a sinbad? It's the last word on Nineties life

THE ENGLISH language is in the grip of revolution, according to a dictionary of new words to be published at the end of this month.

David Rowan, the author of A Glossary For The 90s, claims the technological advances and media explosion of the past decade have led to a dramatic increase in communication which in turn has resulted in a raft of new words and expressions being coined.

He said: "The more talking people do, the more words they need. Language is not handed down from the Queen anymore. It's a verbal democracy now. I am thinking of sending Her Majesty a copy so she can keep up to date with modern culture."

Mr Rowan said neologisms (new words) were often invented by certain groups to make themselves feel exclusive. "Doctors might talk about 'tubes' (totally unnecessary breast examinations) or describe difficult patients as 'gomers' (get out of my emergency room) - all they are doing is reinforcing their group identity with terms designed to keep outsiders ignorant."

Similarly skateboarders talk about "bongos" and "swellbows" so only fellow enthusiasts know they are referring to injuries.

Retail analysts have devised jargon profiling various types of customer behaviour. "Splurchases" are the impulse buys made by supermarket shoppers of items they don't actually want. "Pester power" is the most common strategy employed by the nation's children to persuade their parents to cough up for clothes and computer games.

The glossary is compiled entirely from terms which have been recorded in public use, whether in television, newspapers, advertisements or simply overheard by the author. It covers every aspect of life in the Nineties. Sex, romance and marriage are dealt with exhaustively. Courtship on the disco floor ranges from arriving with "arm candy" (a good-looking member of the oppo- site sex on your arm), to "binraking" or "down-dating". These mean to seek a mate lower than one's expectations or, at last resort, "to trawl around the dance floor in a last-minute bid to attract even the least desirable partner", apparently "a practice particularly popular in Edinburgh".

Marital status is also labelled. Some couples grind under the penury of a "sitcom" (single income, two children and an oppressive mortgage). This is only a small improvement on life as a "sinbad" (single income, no boyfriend, absolutely desperate).

Lesbianism now enjoys a host of descriptions. They range from the transitory "lug" (lesbian until graduation) and "lesbeing" (actively living the role) to the turncoat "hasbian" (cited in Psychology Today as a former lesbian now in a heterosexual relationship).

Unpleasantness can also be etched from conversations. Those sacked in euphemistic "decruiting", "downsizing", "de-jobbing" or "de-layering" may have been the casualties of a "blamestorming session" - a debate deciding who is responsible for a workplace fiasco. They will then negotiate with the company's "head-shunter" - the reverse of a headhunter, whose role is to make them leave their job with a minimum redundancy payoff.

In America second-hand goods are now called "experienced" or the even cosier "pre-enjoyed". Even Safeway in Stockport shrugged off Northern bluntness when it advertised an "ambient replenishment opportunity" - a shelf-stacking job. (By Molly Watson)

++++

REVIEWS:

The Independent, September 27 1998: Paperback roundup 

Glossary for the 90s: A Cultural Primer, by David Rowan (Prion; £6.99). If you know what it means to go affirmative shopping, or recognise when you have suffered a negative gross profit, you won't need this guide to neologisms. On the other hand, if you're a techno-babbling, netspeaking dwerb, you'll love this frivolous addition to the fast-expanding lexicographical canon. David Rowan translates the lyrics of obscure rap songs, trawls web sites, infiltrates skateboarders' gangs and the criminal, media and medical fraternities to find out what the English language is up to these days. He also trawls the respective jargons of spin meisters (apparently, "to enterprise" means to leak) and doctors with their notorious TUBES ("totally unnecessary breast examinations"). Happily, Rowan's efforts are as edgy and buzzing with street life as the argot he describes.


Evening Standard, December 14 1998: All the latest lexical licks

A Glossary for the 90s, by David Rowan (Prion, £6.99): This is firmly in what might be termed the "wacky world of words" corner, more kindly termed popular lexicography - but in no way the worse for that. Rowan has been amassing his Nineties neologisms via a small weekly piece in The Guardian, and this is the fruit of several years' labours. Neologistic lexicography, even as filtered through the august pages of such major players as Chambers, Collins or Oxford, is always a gamble. Brag up one's boom new words only to see them quietly slip from popularity before the book's on sale. Rowan's words are all new, which makes them enormous fun, but in many cases, one fears, of limited longevity. For every "trustafarian", there's going to be a "shoulder surf", for every "narco-terrorist", a "full Clinton". But language hits and misses are half the fun: watch these spaces. PS: one gripe - where's the index? (By Jonathon Green)

Read more!

Trendsurfing columns

Trends of the Year (The Times Magazine, December 23 2006)
Synthetic diamonds (The Times Magazine, December 16 2006)
Wiki books (The Times Magazine, December 9 2006)
Cellphone cinema (The Times Magazine, December 2 2006)
Concept tourism (The Times Magazine, November 25 2006)
Social shopping (The Times Magazine, November 18 2006)
Flogs (The Times Magazine, November 11 2006)
Episodic gaming (The Times Magazine, November 4 2006)
Online petitions (The Times Magazine, October 28 2006)
Brain lie detection (The Times Magazine, October 21 2006)
Reputation pricing (The Times Magazine, October 14 2006)
Mapvertising (The Times Magazine, October 7 2006)
The new corporate names (The Times Magazine, September 30 2006)
DNA hacking (The Times Magazine, September 16 2006)
Hyphy culture (The Times Magazine, September 9 2006)
Online video trends (The Times Magazine, September 2 2006)
The 3D revival (The Times Magazine, August 12 2006)
Gangsta lit (The Times Magazine, August 5 2006)
Trends to forget (The Times Magazine, July 29 2006)
Neuro-optimised products (The Times Magazine, July 22 2006)
Robotic vending (The Times Magazine, July 15 2006)
Virtual-world stores (The Times Magazine, July 8 2006)
Dog tags (The Times Magazine, July 1 2006)
Crowdsourcing (The Times Magazine, June 24 2006)
Therapeutic gaming (The Times Magazine, June 17 2006)
Meal-assembly stores (The Times Magazine, June 10 2006)
UK Tribes (The Times Magazine, June 03 2006)
Life in 2020 (The Times Magazine, May 27 2006)
Green roofs (The Times Magazine, May 20 2006)
Art hotels (The Times Magazine, May 13 2006)
Brain training (The Times Magazine, May 6 2006)
Information saturation (The Times Magazine, April 29 2006)
Corporate organics (The Times Magazine, April 22 2006)
Consumer-created ads (The Times Magazine, April 15 2006)
Slivercasting (The Times Magazine, April 1 2006)
Publishing on demand (March 31 2006)
Designer treehouses (March 31 2006)
Philanthrocapitalism (The Times Magazine, March 25 2006)
Political ringtones (The Times Magazine, March 18 2006)
Chatbots (The Times Magazine, March 4 2006)
Hot economic trends (The Times Magazine, February 25 2006)
Edible adverts (The Times Magazine, February 18 2006)
Place tagging (The Times Magazine, February 11 2006)
Designer dogs (The Times Magazine, February 4 2006)
Carbon capitalism (The Times Magazine, January 28 2006)
Corporate graffiti (The Times Magazine, January 21 2006)
Camera tossing (The Times Magazine, January 14 2006)
Very light jets (The Times Magazine, January 7 2006)
Trends of the year (The Times Magazine, December 31 2005)
Map mash-ups (The Times Magazine, December 17 2005)
Bluespamming (The Times Magazine, December 10 2005)
Snowclone journalism(The Times Magazine, December 3 2005)
Naming your own species (The Times Magazine, November 26 2005)
Video-sharing websites (The Times Magazine, November 19 2005)
The organic funeral (The Times Magazine, November 12 2005)
Porncasting (The Times Magazine, November 5 2005)
The personal factory (The Times Magazine, October 29 2005)
New York's new shopping (The Times Magazine, October 21 2005)
Google hacking (The Times Magazine, October 15 2005)
Prediction markets (The Times Magazine, October 8 2005)
Jamskating (The Times Magazine, October 1 2005)
Freeganism (The Times Magazine, September 17 2005)
The virtual crimewave (The Times Magazine, September 10 2005)
"Sous vide" cooking (The Times Magazine, September 3 2005)
Tech trends (The Times Magazine, August 27 2005)
Reverse shoplifting (The Times Magazine, August 20 2005)
The celebrity designer (The Times Magazine, August 13 2005)
Pod hotels (The Times Magazine, August 6 2005)
Personal offshoring (The Times Magazine, July 30 2005)
Urban Gaming (The Times Magazine, July 23 2005)
Exertainment (The Times Magazine, July 16 2005)
Corporate drumming (The Times Magazine, July 9 2005)
Promise exchanges (The Times Magazine, July 2 2005)
Competitive eating (The Times Magazine, June 25 2005)
Design-it-yourself fashion (The Times Magazine, June 18 2005)
Fan films (The Times Magazine, June 11 2005)
Vlogging (The Times Magazine, June 4 2005)
Urban vinyl toys (The Times Magazine, May 28 2005)
The 'long tail' effect (The Times Magazine, May 21 2005)
Celebrity seeding (The Times Magazine, May 14 2005)
Sensory branding (The Times Magazine, May 7 2005)
Corporate trendspotters (The Times Magazine, April 30 2005)
Biblical diets (The Times Magazine, April 23 2005)
Scoubidous (The Times Magazine, April 16 2005)
Prefab homes (The Times Magazine, April 9 2005)
Child tracking (The Times Magazine, April 2 2005)
iPod parties (The Times Magazine, March 26 2005)
Krumping (The Times Magazine, March 19 2005)
'Free gadget' marketing (The Times Magazine, March 12 2005)
Travel-hosting networks (The Times Magazine, February 26 2005)
Skinvertising (The Times Magazine, February 19 2005)
Hotel-room ownership (The Times Magazine, February 12 2005)
Hot retail trends (The Times Magazine, February 5 2005)
Sponsored weddings (The Times Magazine, January 29 2005)
Car clubs (The Times Magazine, January 22 2005)
Toy hacking (The Times Magazine, January 15 2005)
Experimental travel (The Times Magazine, January 8 2005)
Green dry cleaning (The Times Magazine, January 1 2005)
Pop-up stores (The Times Magazine, December 18 2004)
Public knit-ins (The Times Magazine, December 11 2004)
Tech-enhanced fashion (The Times Magazine, December 4 2004)
Alternate reality gaming (The Times Magazine, November 29 2004)
Zine retail (The Times Magazine, November 22 2004)
Ebay drop-shops (The Times Magazine, November 15 2004)
Podcasting (The Times Magazine, November 8 2004)
Scam baiting (The Times Magazine, November 1 2004)
Mobile clubbing (The Times Magazine, October 25 2004)
Video mash-ups (The Times Magazine, October 11 2004)
Supermarket TV (The Times Magazine, October 4 2004)
Freecycling (The Times Magazine, September 25 2004)
In-game advertising (The Times Magazine, September 18 2004)
The nutrigenomic diet (The Times Magazine, September 11 2004)
Buzz marketing (The Times Magazine, September 4 2004)

Read more!

Magazine features

Where did all your Lottery money go? (Sunday Times Magazine, August 6 2006)

Parking hell: The parking industry investigated (The Times Magazine, February 11 2006)

Downloading Mr Right: How the internet took over dating (Sunday Times Magazine, January 8 2006)

Fuel economy: Hanging out with the Nymex energy traders (Daily Telegraph Magazine) (The Telegraph Magazine, November 19 2005)

Till dosh do us part: The new rules of big-money divorce (The Sunday Times Magazine, October 9 2005)

How food-industry money manipulates public debate (The Times, September 10 2005)

Playground rhymes and games: Have children really forgotten how to play? (The Times Magazine, May 21 2005)

The James Ossuary mystery: Is Oded Golan behind biblical scholarship's biggest fraud ring? (The Telegraph Magazine, May 14 2005))

Inside eBay, the powerhouse that's redefining business in Britain (Sunday Times Magazine, February 20 2005)

What intermarriage is doing to Britain's Jewish community (Sunday Times Magazine, February 6 2005)

How Bratz beat Barbie: inside the world of the 'tween' (The Times Magazine, December 4 2004)

Old Father Thames gets hemmed in: how haphazard overdevelopment transformed riverside London (The Daily Telegraph, October 9 2004)

Want to live to be 1,000? The new science of anti-ageing (The Times, September 3 2004)

Meet the new neurotics: Men and the rise of body dysmorphic disorder (The Times, June 19 2004)

How technology is changing our food - an investigation (The Observer, May 16 2004)

The dangers of the Kabbalah Centre - an investigation (The Times Magazine, April 3 2004)

Neuromarketing: The search for the brain's 'buy' button (Written for The Times Magazine, February 5 2004)

Spies like us - how camera phones have rewritten the rules of personal privacy (The Times Magazine, December 13 2003)

Mysterious radiation in the suburbs - Why Raymond Fox believes his Reading house has poisoned his body with plutonium (The Daily Telegraph, November 29 2003)

The billion-dollar fight over Winnie the Pooh: inside the 12-year battle between Disney and the Slesinger family (The Times Magazine, November 22 2003)

Marketing food to children - an investigation into the industry's unacknowledged tricks (The Observer, March 9 2003)

Inside the cannabis chocolate network: the magic 'medicine' that is changing the lives of MS sufferers (The Telegraph Magazine, February 22 2003)

Cannabisness - the people hoping to profit from legalised cannabis (Evening Standard, September 3 2002)

Hey, kids! The secrets of marketing to the under-fives (The Times, October 18 2002)

Teenage internet camgirls at risk - the schoolgirls trading raunchy photographs for gifts (The Observer, July 2 2002)