Which is best-analogue or digital?

A MUSIC lover but no audio zealot, your correspondent has often wondered whether analogue recordings really are “warmer” than digital ones. In other words, do audio amplifiers and microphones with old-fashioned thermionic valves (“vacuum tubes” to Americans) inherently produce a sound more natural and satisfying than those with transistors and other solid-state devices?

He suspects it’s mostly a myth, stemming from the days when analogue was in its prime and digital recording in its infancy. ...

It is not just living organisms that evolve. Minerals do too, and much of their diversity has arisen in tandem with the evolution of life

EVOLUTION has come a long way since Charles Darwin’s time. Today it is not only animals and plants that are seen as having evolved over time, but also things that involve the hand of humans, like architecture, music, car design and even governments. Now rocks, too, seem to be showing evolutionary characteristics.

Rocks are made from minerals, which like all matter are composed of individual chemical elements. What makes minerals special is the way that the atoms of those elements are arranged in lattices which create unique crystalline structures and shapes. Today more than 4,000 different minerals can be found on Earth. When the planet began to be formed, however, few existed. ...

Planets are seen outside the Solar System

A FEW grainy smudges and computer-generated blobs are not much to look at. But these are the first images of planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets as they are called. The star they are orbiting, the mass of blobs seen in the picture, is known only as HR 8799. It is 128 light years from Earth, and is just visible to the naked eye in the constellation of Pegasus. The three red dots, marked b, c and d, are exoplanets.

Since the 1990s more than 300 exoplanets have been found and the number is growing. However, their presence can usually only be inferred through the gravitational influences they have on their nearby star. Images of the three planets at HR 8799, however, were captured directly using two high-altitude telescopes in Hawaii. ...

Good behaviour in Moldova’s separatist dispute reaps meagre rewards

“LET us live in poverty, but in a country at peace,” says Vasily Sova, Moldova’s negotiator with its breakaway territory of Transdniestria, when asked about the billions lavished on Georgia after its August war with Russia. Unlike the belligerent Georgia, Moldova has taken a gentle approach to its Russian-backed separatists, and it is not trying to join NATO. Yet it is barely nearer than Georgia to a deal over lost territory.

Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, went to Moldova this week to push a new initiative. Russia does not recognise Transdniestria’s independence, but it wants to keep troops there, a condition all other parties reject. The Moldovan and Transdniestrian leaders have not met recently. Moldova’s president, Vladimir Voronin, was turned back when he tried to visit his home village in Transdniestria. Mr Voronin called Transdniestria’s leader, Igor Smirnov, “an evil force who has turned his region into a festering wound on the body of Moldova”. ...

The European Commission is accused of withholding embarrassing data

ON NOVEMBER 17th an international meeting in Morocco will consider how much bluefin tuna should be caught in the Atlantic and Mediterranean next year. But it may lack crucial data. The group, called the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), meets every year to argue over quotas, of which the European Union’s is the biggest. The EU divides this among its members in December (when the big row will be about plans to slash cod quotas).

The population of bluefin tuna is crashing after decades of overfishing, mainly by Europeans. This year a European body, the Community Fisheries Control Agency (CFCA), has gathered data on bluefin and conducted inspections. Green members of the European Parliament asked for the study in September. But nothing materialised until Philippe Morillon, the French chairman of the parliament’s fisheries committee, got the CFCA to produce a ten-page summary on November 6th. It concludes that “it has not been a priority of most operators in the fishery to comply with ICCAT legal requirements”. Rules on reporting catches and banning spotter planes have been flouted too. ...

Eastern Europe awaits a new American president nervously but in hope

DETAINING the next president of the United States for three hours in what an eyewitness called a “malodorous” small room at an airport in the provincial Russian city of Perm looks, in retrospect, to have been a pretty bad idea. No matter that the Kremlin muttered an apology for delaying Barack Obama, along with his mentor on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar, in August 2005. The hold-up was blamed on a muddle over paperwork—although some Russia-watchers suspected it was a calculated Kremlin snub to the Republican Mr Lugar.

Mr Obama now plays down the episode, but his first-hand experience of the Russian bureaucracy’s capacity for at best capricious incompetence and at worst vindictiveness could yet prove telling. His team of hundreds of foreign-policy experts ranges from those who see the Bush administration’s policy as dangerously confrontational to those who think it too soft. Michael McFaul, a Stanford academic who has become a caustic critic of the Kremlin, is an influential Obama adviser. But it remains to be seen how many people Mr Obama will pick from his own team, and how many from the Hillary Clinton camp of experienced Russia hands. ...

Everything suddenly seems possible in British politics

FOR the plotters of coups, timing is all. Move too early, and they find themselves facing a firing squad, fleeing into exile or, in more sedate countries, being snubbed in the parliamentary tea rooms and excluded from the membership of select committees, with their supposed champion immortalised as the wielder of a banana rather than of power. That is the fate that seems to have befallen the Labour MPs who called for Gordon Brown to step down, just before the global economy imploded and the prime minister was extolled as its stalwart saviour. The plot, if not the plotters, is now dead—right?

There are two things that everyone now knows about British politics. One is that Mr Brown is safe: the rebels have been shamed; the doughty prime minister will lead his party into the next general election. The other is that he and Labour are doomed: their defeat on polling day is still near-certain, even if a narrow one now seems more probable than a rout. Both parts of this new conventional wisdom, Bagehot submits, are doubtful. ...

Greenery may create jobs—but not the ones its boosters think

IT HAS been a confusing time for Britain’s environmentalists. Dismay greeted reports on November 6th that BP, an oil firm, was ditching plans to build a wind farm at the Isle of Grain, a blowy expanse of industrialised desolation in Kent. In fact, said BP, it was pulling out of wind energy in Britain altogether in favour of an American market brimming with $15 billion (GBP10 billion) a year in green-power subsidies. Four days later moods lifted when Vattenfall, a Swedish company, said it was joining forces with Scottish Power to build a 300MW, GBP780m wind farm off Kent.

Britain is keen on windmills for two reasons. First, it has promised big reductions in carbon emissions (an 80% drop by 2050 compared with 1990) and a barely credible boost in the amount of energy it gets from renewable sources (15% by 2020). And second, ministers see green power as a growth industry. Gordon Brown said in June, for example, that renewable energy could provide 160,000 new jobs. The prime minister compared its potential with the explosive growth in the 1970s and 1980s of the offshore oil industry. ...

The Bank of England signals more cuts to come

THAT show-stopping cut in interest rates looked like a hard act to follow. But on November 12th Britain’s central bank rose to the occasion as it unveiled the dire forecasts that had prompted its decision a week earlier to cut the base rate from 4.5% to 3%.

Even after its hefty monetary easing, the Bank of England now expects a nasty recession. Its central projection, set out in the quarterly Inflation Report, shows GDP falling by almost 2% in the year to the second quarter of 2009 (see chart). This outcome is far worse than the bank envisaged in August, even though its forecast then seemed fairly gloomy. ...

Tax cuts make a cross-party comeback, thanks to economic woes

HOUSES, financial services, iPods—all sold well during the decade and a half of economic growth that preceded Britain’s incipient recession. One thing there wasn’t a market for was tax cuts. Labour increased the tax burden to splurge on public services. Far from feeling put-upon, voters spurned offers of lower taxes from the Conservatives at consecutive elections. And the Liberal Democrats saw their vote go steadily up between 1997 and 2005 as they made the case for higher taxes.

Yet such are the political changes being wrought by the downturn—the most profound of which remains the revival of Gordon Brown’s premiership—that soon all three parties could be standing on tax-cutting platforms. The pragmatic need to stimulate a flagging economy has achieved what years of principled arguments for lower taxes failed to do. ...

The wrong lessons learnt, and another horrifying death

ON NOVEMBER 11th two men were found guilty at the Old Bailey of killing a 17-month-old boy known to the public only as Baby P. The toddler had a broken back, eight fractured ribs, a missing fingernail and toenail, multiple bruises and an ear almost torn off. What finally killed him on August 3rd 2007 was a blow to the head so severe that the postmortem found a tooth in his stomach.

The two men, one the mother’s boyfriend, the other a lodger, were found not guilty of murder. They will be sentenced on December 15th for “causing or allowing the death of a child”, an offence that was placed on the statute books in 2005 to stop those jointly culpable for a child’s death from avoiding punishment by blaming each other. Earlier, the baby’s mother had pleaded guilty to the same charge. The maximum sentence is 14 years. ...

Were they reckless, badly advised or just unlucky?

BACK in 1991 scores of local authorities used newfangled financial swaps to bet and lose millions on interest rates. They were let off the hook by the House of Lords: the peers ruled the deals null and void because council officers had been acting beyond their legal powers.

No such defence can be used this time. Local governments—123 of them—stuffed GBP919.6m into accounts with Icelandic banks that paid over-the-odds interest rates until they collapsed and were nationalised in October, with deposits frozen. On November 13th council representatives were in Iceland to treat with Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm handling the bank work-out there. They have little chance of being repaid in full. ...

How one bank stuck to its last and prospered

AMID the hallucinogenic chaos of world finance today, it would be hard to find a duller bank than Airdrie, the only surviving, and currently thriving, independent savings bank in Britain. Customers love it. “We had an inflow of GBP8.5m in deposits in October,” says Jim Lindsay, the bank’s general manager.

That may not sound much, but it represents a 7.4% increase in deposits. Airdrie Savings Bank is tiny. It has seven branches, 60,000 customers and 104 employees to serve the county of Lanarkshire, east of Glasgow. It was born out of the savings-bank movement pioneered in 19th-century Scotland by the Rev Henry Duncan, concerned that his poor parishioners had nowhere to save money earned in good times to draw on in tough times later. Mr Duncan’s success rapidly spawned copies throughout Britain and, eventually, in America. In 1985 the little bank sturdily resisted heavy pressure from the Bank of England and the Treasury to join the amalgamation of most other such banks into the publicly quoted Trustee Savings Bank (TSB), which was later privatised and bought by Lloyds in 1995. ...

Recession is cutting into the nationalists’ popularity

ONE of Alex Salmond’s proudest boasts from his first year as nationalist first minister of the devolved Scottish government was persuading local councils to freeze their tax levels. He achieved it by giving them a generous 5% spending increase for the fiscal year to March 2009 and much more freedom in how they spent it. But now inflation and recession are biting chunky holes in council budgets, cuts are having to be made and a lot of the election pledges of the Scottish National Party (SNP) are being binned. Mr Salmond’s seemingly unassailable post-election popularity has suddenly plunged as a result.

The blows to the councils’ finances are big. Edinburgh thinks it will make only GBP23m from selling surplus land and property this year, rather than the GBP43m it expected. Extra fuel and energy costs will add GBP10m to its bills. Glasgow council says that the tanking property market will reduce its revenue from planning applications by about GBP1m a month. Fewer new homes also mean that council-tax receipts will be down by about GBP1.4m on the year. Councillors across Scotland are in a similar plight, and so are having to cut spending. ...

DHL gives up on its American dream

MANY an ambitious, long-nurtured growth strategy will be abandoned during this rapidly worsening downturn. Bravely sticking to their original plans may ultimately make heroes of a few bosses, but in most boardrooms caution is now the watchword as new schemes are abandoned in favour of defending what is already profitable. DHL, the overnight-delivery arm of Deutsche Post World Net, a logistics conglomerate, is a case in point. On November 10th DHL said it would shut down its express-delivery service within America, with the loss of 9,500 jobs.

Five years ago DHL, which had been acquired by Deutsche Post in 2001, targeted the American market with much fanfare, eager to demonstrate that it was at least equal to the two delivery giants, FedEx and UPS. This was a crucial step in the campaign by Deutsche Post’s boss at the time, Klaus Zumwinkel, to create a global “one-stop shop” for delivery. (The former McKinsey consultant stepped down in February this year after a raid on his home in Cologne, and on November 7th he was charged with tax evasion.) ...

Television advertisements can work in fast-forward

BACK in the 1980s, marketers could be certain of reaching 90% of American households with an advertisement on prime-time network television. Now they would be lucky to reach a third. With hundreds of television channels and millions of websites to choose from, audiences have become fragmented. To make matters worse, the rise of digital video recorders (DVRs) such as the TiVo, which record programmes on a hard disk so that they can be watched at any time, also makes it easy to skip past the advertisements. So here, at last, is some good news for advertising folk: it is still possible to get your message across on television, even when a viewer has his finger on the fast-forward button.

The finding arises from an observation made by Adam Brasel and James Gips of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College in Massachusetts. They noticed that when people fast-forward a DVR they actually concentrate intensely on the screen, looking out for the end of the advertising break so that they can get back to their programme. This means they are probably paying more attention than they would if the advertisements were playing normally. ...

Companies may still have too many heads at headquarters

DOWNSIZING is the undisputed global management trend of the moment. This week Nortel, a Canadian telecoms-equipment company, Britain’s BT and DHL, a logistics giant owned by Germany’s Deutsche Post World Net, were among a host of firms announcing thousands of job cuts. As well as pruning heads in business units, some chief executives are trimming their headquarters (HQs), too.

Nortel is a case in point. On November 10th the company said that it had lost $3.4 billion in its third quarter and was taking urgent steps to cut costs. These