Features

NEW YORK — Apple’s new streaming service went live Tuesday with a flashy radio station and artist exclusives, as the company that dominated digital music through iTunes looks to the future.

Apple Music got started with the tech giant in the unusual position of being on the back foot, as Spotify leads the fast-growing market for streaming which offers on-demand, unlimited music.

The service is betting big on celebrity names to draw attention and scored a coup when pop superstar Taylor Swift agreed, after a heated dispute, to stream her blockbuster album “1989” only on Apple Music.

The centrepiece of Apple Music is Beats 1, which bills itself as a first global radio station, and will include guest hosts such as pop legend Elton John and rap entrepreneur Dr Dre.

The radio station will remain free, even for users who do not pay the $9.99 a month to stream artists, and Apple has made the service integral to its latest operating system on iPhones.

But in a tacit acknowledgement that the company lags behind on streaming, Apple also eventually plans a version for users of rival Google’s Android smartphones.

Another feature is called Connect, which lets artists post messages — keeping listeners on Apple Music rather than switching to social media.

Seeking to be cutting edge

Apple Music went live at 1500 GMT, with Beats 1 initially playing ambient music by Brian Eno as users downloaded the new system.

Beats 1 took to the air an hour later with host Zane Lowe, the New Zealand-born DJ who was poached from BBC Radio 1.

In a signal of Apple’s effort to nurture a cool factor, Lowe’s first song was not a blockbuster hit but the song “City” by the Manchester indie pop-punk band Spring King.

Lowe, who earned a reputation as an indie rock tastemaker in Britain, said that Apple Music had debated for months about which song to play first.

Spring King put out an EP “with little or no fanfare” but the band’s growing following “is exactly the kind of story we need”, Lowe said.

“It’s not about fanfare. It’s about quality and consistency. We’re Beats 1, we’re worldwide, and from now on, we’re always on,” he said.

Lowe followed up with the new track “Dreams” by Beck, the critically acclaimed Los Angeles alternative artist who won the Grammy for Album of the Year in February.

Big artists onboard

But Apple is also betting big on mainstream artists. Beats 1 premiered “Freedom”, a danceable new single from “Happy” creator Pharrell Williams.

The Rolling Stones streamed a new live album recorded in Los Angeles of 1971’s “Sticky Fingers”, generally considered one of the rockers’ best albums.

Apple also succeeded in wooing Swift, whose “1989” is one of the best-selling US albums in recent years.

Swift had initially threatened to boycott Apple Music, speaking up for artists who had complained that Apple would not pay for streams during the initial three-month trial.

Apple quickly reversed itself and Swift — one of the highest profile critics of streaming, and especially Spotify — agreed to stream “1989” for the first time, on Apple Music.

In a sign of streaming’s growing acceptance, hard rock veterans AC/DC put their catalogue Tuesday on Apple Music as well as rival services.

Bjork’s latest album “Vulnicura”, a haunting reflection on a breakup, also appeared on streaming services after the Icelandic singer originally said she would withhold it out of “respect” for art.

But there remain notable holdouts. The Beatles, who refused to sell their music on iTunes until 2010, remain off Apple Music on-demand streaming.

Tough competition

Apple is going up against a crowded field led by Spotify, the Swedish streaming leader that says it has 75 million active users, of whom 20 million pay.

Other competitors include Deezer, Google Play, Rhapsody and Tidal, which was relaunched earlier this year with mixed success by rap mogul Jay Z.

But unlike most of its competitors, music is not Apple’s core business. iTunes and other product sales accounted for less than 9 per cent of the $750 billion company’s revenue in the last quarter.

Apple’s top goal is likely to preserve its image as being on the cultural vanguard — and to boost iPhone sales.

LOS ANGELES — The dinosaurs of “Jurassic World” stayed atop the cinematic food chain this weekend, snapping up another $54.5 million to keep Pixar’s “Inside Out” in second place at the North American box office, figures showed Monday.

“Jurassic World” completed its third weekend in US and Canadian cinemas with an overall haul of $500 million, shattering US and worldwide records, according to box office tracker Exhibitor Relations.

The fourth film in the popular “Jurassic Park” series, “Jurassic World” returns to the island featured in the first instalment. It follows an experiment to create an especially mean dinosaur and, unsurprisingly, things quickly go awry.

The film just bested “Inside Out”, the well-received animated tale depicting the emotions inside the mind of a young girl, which pulled in another $52.3 million in its second week.

The movie — which is generating major Oscar buzz — has so far taken in $185 million in North America.

“Ted 2”, the sequel to Seth MacFarlane’s 2012 hugely successful raunchy comedy starring Mark Wahlberg about an antisocial slacker teddy bear that comes to life, opened in third place at $33.5 million.

In addition to mediocre reviews, perhaps the shock value of seeing a raunchy stuffed animal has worn off a bit.

“It’s hard to maintain that hyper level of excitement once people have seen the talking Teddy bear,” Rentrak’s Senior Media Analyst Paul Dergarabedian said. “In comedy it’s about inventiveness, newness and the shock value of something original.”

Universal’s domestic distribution head, Nick Carpou, said that the positive response from exit polls indicates a promising life for the movie in the weeks ahead.

“We could have had a higher gross, but we get the gross we get. It was a very competitive marketplace this weekend,” said Carpou, who noted that the first film’s gross was a massive surprise to the studio.

Dergarabedian marvelled at the consistency of “Jurassic World” and “Inside Out”. “These are no flash-in-the-pan movies. Both are delivering exactly what audiences want,” he said.

Another new film, “Max”, about a boy who adopts an ex-military dog that had served in Afghanistan, opened in fourth place with $12.2 million, despite scathing reviews and a low 38 per cent critics’ approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Comedy “Spy” grabbed $7.9 million in ticket sales for the fifth spot. The film follows a CIA analyst (Melissa McCarthy) who leaves her desk job to go deep undercover to avenge former partner (Jude Law).

Earthquake thriller “San Andreas” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson took home $5.4 million for sixth spot. Coming-of-age film “Dope” came in seventh place with $2.8 million.

The prequel and third iteration of the “Insidious” supernatural horror films, “Insidious: Chapter 3”, got $2 million in sales for the eighth spot. 

Dystopian action flick “Mad Max: Fury Road” starring Charlize Theron got $1.8 million in ticket sales for the ninth spot.

Rounding out the top 10 was “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, which pulled in another $1.7 million, bringing its total haul to $452.5 million since its official US release in early May.

WASHINGTON — A rocket’s dead, blown to bits in public view. Now it’s time for “Rocket Science CSI”.

After 18 straight successful launches, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket broke apart Sunday morning minutes after soaring away from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Lost with the rocket was a capsule packed with supplies for the crew on the International Space Station.

In this whodunit, there are clues pointing to pressure problems in the second stage’s liquid oxygen tank, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted within hours. But that may be a red herring, and a former NASA shuttle chief warns against jumping to conclusions.

“First impressions never are right,” said Wayne Hale, who is on the board investigating last year’s launchpad failure of Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket, also carrying station cargo for NASA.

Russia also lost a supply shipment in April when its Progress capsule spun out of control.

The SpaceX investigation will be a lot like the crime dramas you see on television, complete with forensics examination of debris. Except it’s not over in an hour. Most mishap investigations take about a year, Hale said. Eight months later, Orbital’s investigation isn’t done yet.

The engineering detective work kicks in after all the information is saved, including more than 3,000 channels of data radioed from the rocket. In engineering-speak it’s called a fault tree analysis. Engineers calculate everything that could go wrong and why.

It’s painstaking. It’s precise. It’s logical, like the board game Clue, said retired space expert John Logsdon, who was on the board that investigated the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident.

“One by one eliminate everything that it could not be until you get down to hopefully relatively few possibilities,” Logsdon said. “It’s a complex mystery with multiple suspects.”

It all comes down to one question: Why?

“You have to ask why seven times, that’s the rule of thumb,” said Hale.

You find one thing that went wrong, then ask why that happened, and keep going, asking why about seven times until you find the root cause, he said.

Here’s what we know so far according, to SpaceX officials:

— The Sunday’s accident occurred about 45 kilometres off the ground when the rocket was going more than 5,000kph.

— The first stage of the rocket — the part that gets it off the ground — worked fine, even after the rest of the rocket started breaking apart. Its nine engines fired well.

— The second stage — which gets the capsule into orbit — had high pressure readings in the liquid oxygen tank, according to Musk’s tweet.

— The Dragon capsule survived at first and sent back data.

Before dawn Monday — about 16 hours after the rocket broke apart — Musk, tweeted: “cause still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review.”

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told reporters Sunday that because the private company made nearly all the parts in the rocket, it will be easier and quicker to investigate: “I’m sure we’ll find it rapidly.”

Logsdon thinks she might be right and an answer can be found, fixed and rockets launching again in six months or less. The California-based SpaceX, whose clients include governmental agencies and private firms, eventually plans to launch NASA astronauts to the space station as early as December 2017.

In the meantime, Sunday’s accident has postponed the SpaceX launch of a sea measuring satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scheduled for early August, according to NOAA spokesman John Leslie. That launch is also on a Falcon 9 rocket.

The SpaceX investigation, like the one at Orbital, will be run by the company itself with oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration, which will have to make sure the next flight is safe.

At SpaceX, they haven’t named a mishap investigation board yet, but said Hans Koenigsmann, the company’s mission assurance vice president, will be in charge.

Despite the loss of three cargo shipments, NASA said the space station has enough supplies to last until at least the end of October. Russia has a cargo launch scheduled for Friday and Japan has another shipment planned for August. There’s a crew of three at the station now, and three more men are set to join them in July.

PARIS — It may have slipped from its golden age into its golden years, but two decades into the Internet era the fax machine is still, perhaps surprisingly, holding its place in many offices.

While it has been reduced to a small player in the rapidly growing world of digital communications, “millions of people still use fax machines daily worldwide and probably will continue to do so in the near future”, said Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, who has written a book on the history of the once ubiquitous office machine.

Even more surprising, people and companies continue to buy new fax machines.

“Sales are dropping regularly due to e-mails, but the market is far from disappearing,” said Nicolas Cintre, deputy director in France for Japanese company Brother, the market leader in fax machines.

Around 20 million fax terminals were sold in 2005, manufacturers estimate, while sales today are on the order of several million.

“The market is holding up. Those who predicted the death of the fax 10 years ago were wrong,” said Cintre.

Part of the reason for the machine’s survival is an attachment among “older generations” who spent most of their careers using it, he said.

“Some habits are hard to break.” 

It is considered by some as a tool for older employees reluctant to learn new technologies, but the fact that it embraces handwriting — in particular signatures — has also helped the fax avoid obsolescence.

“Fax machines allow sending signed documents, which are considered as originals, which isn’t the case with e-mail,” said Jean Champagne, head of Sagemcom Canada, the unit of the communications equipment company that markets fax systems.

Coopersmith noted that “in most countries, faxing is concentrated in certain areas such as banking, real estate, legal communications and medicine — where a written signature is necessary.” 

Regulations may in fact require faxing in some countries, he added.

Champagne also pointed out that faxes offer advantages in terms of confidentiality and security, another reason why the machines remain popular in the legal and medical fields.

“It is nearly impossible to intercept fax transmissions. Documents cannot be manipulated,” he said.

Big in Japan 

The fax has aged better in some countries than others. 

In the United States, fax machines have pretty much disappeared. Xerox, which built the first machine for the general public, stopped selling basic models several years ago.

But in Japan, where they’ve long been an essential feature of homes as well as offices, faxes are still in widespread use. They were even deployed by the authorities in 2011 to disseminate some information during the Fukushima nuclear accident.

“Per capita, the greatest fax use still occurs in Japan, especially among older people who grew up writing by hand, not typing on a keypad,” said Coopersmith.

But it’s not just the elderly — many Japanese users of varying ages favour the fax for allowing them to send off hand-written notes using the thousands of characters in the nation’s language. 

“For many people and small businesses, faxing a written note or a form is easier than typing on a computer or smartphone,” added Coopersmith.

Nearly 1.2 million basic fax machines were sold in Japan in 2014 and sales are forecast to dip to 1.1 million this year, according to the association of telecommunications companies.

“The use of fax machines fell with the massive spread of computers and smartphones, but people over 60 who are not familiar with the new technologies prefer the fax,” said Miyuki Nakayama, spokesman for electronics manufacturer Sharp.

Europe is somewhere in the middle, according to Brother’s Cintre.

In France, some 40,000 basic fax machines were sold in 2013, according to the GfK market research company.

Just the fax, ma’am? 

Though sales of simple fax machines are declining, that does not necessarily mean that faxes are disappearing.

Instead, the fax is increasingly being wrapped into “multi-function” or “all-in-one” machines that are gaining popularity in the market. These offer consumers printing, scanning, photocopying and faxing functions.

This is the direction that Brother, Cannon, Epson and HP have taken.

Others are using software to mimic fax functions, essentially sending facsimiles as attachments to emails.

“This sector is booming,” said Sagemcom Canada’s Champagne, who said the “faxware” sector is growing by nearly 20 per cent per year.

So even if fax machines eventually disappear, the fax function will endure in other devices in homes and offices.

“Faxing will decline as its older users die but it will not disappear,” said the historian Coopersmith.

“If nothing else, faxing serves as an inexpensive and backup emergency communications system.”

The world’s most powerful regular production saloon, the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat — and its 2-door Challenger sister — is also the most powerful factory-built muscle car. With a supercharged 6.2-litre V8 developing 707BHP, the Hellcat not only eclipses the standard 485BHP Charger SRT, but in terms of brute power, out-performs Dodge’s own 640BHP Viper supercar. 

Large, luxurious and thoroughly well-kitted yet wearing an honest and unpretentious badge, the Hellcat’s power, design and name unapologetically celebrate its raw power and muscle car heritage. And a big part of the Hellcat’s appeal is its ability to out-muscle virtually any pricier and snobbier luxury saloon short of heavily modified and exorbitantly priced aftermarket tuner offerings. 

Dramatic demeanour

Arriving as the range-topping version of the revised 2015 Charger model line, the Hellcat features a more muscular take on the same face-lifted body. With new slim grille and rounded LED headlights and heavily browed face, the Charger’s already assertive, athletic and more urgently dynamic revised design is well complemented by the Hellcat version’s more dramatic treatment.

Sitting lower and massive trapezoidal lower intake and blacked out bumper segment, sharper front apron, rear diffuser, bootlid spoiler and hood scoop, the hot Charger SRT is already an aggressive and moodily dramatic take of the base car’s sculpted design. In addition to badges, little but additional and practical airflow styling changes differentiate the Hellcat.

Sitting below its bulging prominently scooped bonnet, the Hellcat’s intensely powerful and robust cast-iron block and aluminium head 6.2-litre supercharged V8 engine and immense hardworking ventilated perforated 390mm front and 3500mm rear disc brakes require more effective airflow solutions, And so, the Hellcat features additional side air ducts in place of foglights and bonnet extractor vents.

Devastating Dodge

A heavily reworked version of the Dodge’s faithful Hemi V8 engine, the supercharged Hellcat version uses 90 per cent new parts for reduced friction and enhanced cooling and robustness to withstand the stress and heat of its prodigious output. Developing 707HP at 6000rpm and gut-wrenching 650lb/ft
torque at 4800rpm, the Hellcat engine is the Chrysler group’s most powerful ever.

Devastatingly effective, with visceral deep bassy rumbles and intake gurgles the Hellcat’s soundtrack hardens to a thunderous bellow underlayed by distinctive supercharger whine at heavy load high revs. Capable of 328km/h and an 11-second standing quarter mile, the Hellcat’s acceleration has variably been quoted between 0-97km/h in 2.9-second and 0-100km/h
in 3.7 seconds using the launch control function.

Brutally volcanic at top-end, the Hellcat is however muscular and versatile throughout its rev spectrum. Ready to pounce from tick-over, torque and power accumulate with intense linearity at full load. With effortlessly accessible and vast reserves, it is understood that unhindered, the Hellcat would produce 830BHP without mechanical modification, but is electronically de-tuned for emissions and drivability purposes.

Composed and quick

Driven through a smooth and swift shifting 8-speed automatic gearbox, the Hellcat features three selectable gear shift modes with escalating aggressiveness, and can hold gears and can be manually shifted through steering-mounted paddle shifters. Meanwhile, a limited-slip rear differential varies power allocation to the driven rear wheels to crucially maintain road holding and improve agility through corners.

Surprisingly refined, accessible and with throttle control well-measured for precision and drivability, the Hellcat is composed and confident, but shouldn’t lull one into mistaking this for docility. Sensationally swift, the Hellcat’s brutal engine can break its admittedly strong-gripping 275/40R20 tyres’ traction if one carelessly comes back on power too early or too hard in corners.

More agile car than its 2075kg weight suggests, the Hellcat is more buttoned down composed and responsiveness than non-SRT Chargers. With quick direct 2.52-turn hydraulic-assisted steering and sports-tuned front double wishbone and rear multi-link suspension, it turns in tidily. Meanwhile taut Bilstein adaptive damping well-controls body roll through successive corners, while electronic brakeforce distribution ensures composed level braking.

Refined brute

Driven on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Formula One Circuit the Hellcat was stabile, pinned down and refined at speeds far north of 200km/h, while body control and lateral grip and body roll were reassuringly composed through sweeping fast off-camber corners. Smoothly firm riding, the Hellcat cabin was well insulated, while vertical control seemed well composed.

Spacious and comfortable inside, the driven Hellcat featured grippy, supportive and well-adjustable two-tone Alcantara seats, and with tilt and reach contoured sports steering adjustability, one could find a good driving position easily, even wearing a helmet. Spacious inside, the Hellcat also boast particularly good rear seat width and legroom, and features a spacious 467-litre boot.

Tastefully designed with driver-tilted console, the Hellcat is also well equipped with driver assist, convenience, safety and infotainment kit. Along with user-friendly controls and instruments including a 7-inch instrument display screen and intuitive 8.4-inch Uconnect infotainment system, from where driving modes are accessed, the Hellcat also features useful parking assistance and an extensive list of standard and option features.

BITAM, Gabon — “Nobody should sell this wood. It protects the forest. But those who sell it will be hunted by the spirits of the forest,” warns Daniel Messa-Abaga, a guardian of Gabon’s Kevazingo trees.

The elderly man, born around 1930, sits on his porch at Bendoussang in the north of the densely forested equatorial country, troubled when fellow villagers sell the hardwood — sometimes from trees five centuries old — to sawmills and collectors.

Better known in the West as Bubinga, Kevazingo is much sought after in Gabon and Cameroon, but unlike the equally prized and abundant Okoume, it is rare and trees take many years to mature. They can grow more than 40 metres tall, with a trunk diameter the size of a man.

Timber from Kevazingo trees is highly valued in Asia. The Japanese and Chinese use it to make chic tables and chairs, as well as wooden bells, panels and specialty guitars, which count among export products.

The wood is hard, heavy and dense. It ranges in colour from a pinkish red through ruddy brown with streaks of black or purple. One connoisseur told AFP that “Keva” is especially appreciated for the lovely designs in the grain.

Compared with other tropical hardwoods, Kevazingo comes at an astronomical price. Cut into a single piece with sufficient girth, a single cubic metre can fetch between 1 and 2 million CFA francs (1,500-3,000 euros, $1,700-3,400) in the capital Libreville, a source close to the trade says. But on average, a cubic metre sells for 300 to 600 euros.

“The leading buyers here in Bitam are Chinese. ‘Keva’ sells according to its diameter. The price can reach 200,000 CFA francs (300 euros) here if the diameter is large,” says Jimmy Amnvene Nkounou, owner of a company in the town named “Respect du bois” (Respect For Wood).

The business is totally above board, Nkounou adds. “I acquire Kevazingo with my permit and I do so in legal fashion in the areas where I’m authorised to operate.”

He points out, however, that there can be “disputes between villages. Sometimes there are people who don’t want any logging”.

‘Substantial trafficking’

Some trees are more than 500 years old, according to Nkounou. To chop down the biggest ones, the area around each tree must first be deforested, then a ramp is dug into the soil to hold the trunk when it falls. The extremely heavy wood can then be loaded on to a lorry.

High demand for Kevazingo wood has caused the rate of illegal logging to rocket upwards, according to the non-governmental organisation Conservation, Justice, Environment, which fears the consequences. “We have seen that there is substantial trafficking,” says the NGO’s legal adviser Wilde Rosny Ngalekassaga.

Gabon banned exports of untreated lumber in 2010. Every tree chopped down should be locally processed at least once before being shipped abroad. When it comes to Kevazingo, these provisions are not always respected, according to an expert who asked not to be named.

“Today, villagers canvas for the sawmills and the chain is quite organised. At the rate we’re going, there’s a major risk that Kevazingo will disappear in the next eight to 10 years,” Ngalekassaga says.

“It really is a wild hunt. Tracks, roads are specially opened to bring down Kevazingo,” he adds, pointing out that “pretty rich pickings get away from the Gabonese state”.

Ngalekassaga acknowledges that Kevazingo does not feature on the official list of five threatened hardwood species.

“Cutting down the Kevazingo tree is not banned, but loggers must declare when they do so. They must respect the permitted diameter. This is not always the case,” he explains.

‘They thank the tree’

The ministry of water and forests says that its personnel are doing all they can to stop smuggling. “In every country in the world where forests are exploited, there is illegal logging,” says Landry Nkeyi, provincial director of the town of Oyem, an administative hub.

“When it comes to Kevazingo, yes, illegal logging takes place, but our administration moves heaven and earth to decrease the amount of chopping down in our forests. We deploy each day to cut back the exploitation, which grows ever bigger,” he adds.

“The more we think [how to catch them], the more the thieves think to get around the problem. We cooperate with NGOs and locally elected officials who help us to track down the illegal loggers,” Nkeyi says.

“Billions of CFA francs,” or millions of euros, change hands every year in the illegal logging business, according to an anonymous source familiar with the trade.

Near Oyem, a forest warden, inclines himself respectfully before a Kevazingo tree. The remains of a ritual ceremony lie between its roots, with two poles placed across the trunk.

“People come to take bark. Some pieces have therapeutic virtues,” he says. “Then they thank the tree with ceremonies like this.”

For elderly Messa-Abaga, “the generation to come after us will have difficulty understanding that this wood is important, because it might have disappeared by then. We need to preserve it.”

NEW YORK — Google has teamed up with five leading orchestras in a bid to draw more classical music lovers to digital music as the streaming sector booms.

Dubbed Classical Live, the initiative will offer exclusive recordings through the Internet giant’s Google Play service from orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra.

Also involved are the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, with Google hoping eventually to invite further participants.

The classical audience is smaller and older than the fan base for pop music but also skews wealthier, offering a potentially lucrative demographic.

In turn, orchestras seek to rejuvenate their audiences by embracing new technology.

Classical Live is “hoping to broaden and grow the audience for classical music, which is exactly synonymous with our ambitions, making great music available to the widest group of people”, said Kathryn McDowell, the managing director of the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO).

McDowell noticed that previous digital works have often been downloaded track by track rather than as a whole — evidence, she said, that the audience consists of newcomers exploring classical music.

“If you look at what the average student has on their playlist, it will include all sorts of things, because I think young people’s tastes are much more eclectic than we might give them credit for,” she told AFP.

“So we want to get out there in all the possible new platforms with the chance that they encounter the LSO.”

Declining revenue from CDs

Classical music is readily available on streaming platforms including industry leader Spotify, but Classical Live marks the most concerted effort to target the audience.

While streaming generally entails subscriptions for unlimited content, Classical Live will sell by recording. At an introductory price of $4.99, a full work can be either streamed or downloaded onto a device.

Digital music last year matched physical sales in revenue for the first time worldwide, led by a 39 per cent spike from streaming services, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Strong regional variations persist. CD sales remain dominant in Germany and Japan, which are two of the leading markets for classical music.

But Mark Volpe, the managing director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said that media sales — which once provided up to a quarter of the orchestra’s revenue — now contributed no more than a few hundred thousand dollars to an $87 million annual budget.

“It’s not about making money. It’s about promotion, it’s about furthering the cause of Western art music and Eastern art music or anything we’re playing,” Volpe told a news conference at Google’s office in New York.

Selective works

For the Cleveland Orchestra, historically considered among the Big Five in US classical music, the Google project marks a new direction after it long insisted on recording only with major labels.

“We’ve held back primarily because we always felt that big players had better promotion and better distribution and we wanted to keep ourselves out of that end of the business,” said the Cleveland Orchestra executive director, Gary Hanson.

But Hanson credited Google with leaving artistic and pricing control to the orchestras, while offering “real power” in terms of distribution.

More than 1 billion people use Google’s Android phones, although Google Play faces tough competition from Spotify as well as other rivals, including Deezer, Rhapsody, Tidal and a new service being launched by Apple.

The orchestras each tried to select signature pieces for Classical Live, which will initially carry 22 full works along with three for free.

The London Symphony Orchestra’s performances will focus on Mendelssohn, led by acclaimed English conductor John Eliot Gardiner.

The New York Philharmonic is presenting Verdi’s Requiem, directed by its conductor Alan Gilbert.

NEW YORK — As much as I wish the Apple Watch could do more, I find it the best smartwatch available, given its polished design and wide range of apps.

But there may be reasons to consider something else. For one thing, Apple Watch requires an iPhone. Pebble Time, in particular, works with both iPhones and Android devices and excels at battery life. But it falls short elsewhere.

Whether you need a smartwatch at all is another matter. Many people are happy having one, but others will not need one yet. If you need to stay connected continually and find that pulling out a phone is inconvenient, you might be in the market for a smartwatch. The watch will give you regular updates, replicating notifications on your phone. You’ll also get apps like navigation and fitness.

Here’s a look at some of the alternatives to Apple Watch and how they compare:

Pebble Time

The original Pebble, the product of a public fund-raising campaign through Kickstarter, reigned as a leading smartwatch until Samsung, Google and Apple came along. Orders began this week for a new model, Pebble Time. Apps offer business listings from Yelp, playback control for Pandora radio and sports scores from ESPN. But the app selection is short of what you get with Apple Watch or watches that run Google’s Android Wear system. For instance, the most popular navigation app, MapsGPS, feels rudimentary.

What’s good: I can go about five days between charges, while rival smartwatches max out at a day or two (Apple Watch is officially at 18 hours, though I typically get several hours more). In addition, the display is always on, so you can use a watch as, well, a watch all day. With some smartwatches, the screen goes dark to save battery.

Compromises: Pebble Time achieves amazing battery life by using a paper-like display that makes graphics and text look dull and fuzzy, as though generated by a dot matrix printer from the 1980s. On a pedometer app, I couldn’t tell whether I ran 6,350 or 8,350 steps. Unlike most other smartwatches, Pebble Time lacks a touch screen and a heart rate monitor. Outside parties can make watch bands with heart rate and other sensors, but nothing’s available yet.

The bottom line: The no-frills smartwatch feels like a toy, but it’s also much cheaper than a $349-and-up Apple Watch. Pebble’s silicone band feels flimsy, though you can buy better ones from outside parties. Pebble Time supports both iPhones and Android; some apps and features work with just one or the other.

Android Wear

Any manufacturer can make watches based on Android Wear. If Pebble’s or Apple’s rectangular designs aren’t for you, you can get a round watch like Motorola’s $250 Moto 360 or LG’s $350 Watch Urbane. You can also get a model with built-in GPS like Sony’s $250 SmartWatch 3 (though it’s also rectangular). There are seven models so far, with more to come. Older models have steep discounts.

What’s good: Android Wear puts the “smart” in smartwatches by anticipating your needs — weather, travel times and appointment reminders, based on what Google learns about you. Creepy, but useful — at least during the occasional times when Google anticipates correctly.

Compromises: Android Wear is highly dependent on voice commands. I get self-conscious speaking to a watch in public, and it does not work well in noisy environments. Apple Watch does require voice for extensive message replies, but there’s a lot you can do through its touch screen and dial. A recent Android update makes it easier to launch apps and reach frequent contacts using the touch screen, but with more scrolling and tapping compared with Apple Watch.

The bottom line: It’s getting there. The year-old Android Wear app store and user interface are just starting to catch up to what Apple Watch had in its first week.

Samsung Gear S

Samsung’s latest smartwatch has a slick user interface and a vivid, curved screen. It’s also huge.

What’s good: Gear S stands out in having its own cellular connectivity, so you can do more when you leave your phone at home. It has built-in GPS, too, which makes tracking runs and bike rides more accurate. (Android Wear just started letting users get notifications over known Wi-Fi networks, but it’s not as ubiquitous as cellular. Apple Watch also uses Wi-Fi, but only when it’s on the same network as the phone.)

Compromises: Samsung shuns Android Wear, so apps need to be designed specifically for the watch. Many developers haven’t bothered.

The bottom line: The Gear S is a Third Generation smartwatch from Samsung. By now, I expect a robust app store. The hardware may be stunning, but that matters little without good apps to use it.

MILAN — The World Expo in Milan is all abuzz about a giant aluminium hive that hums in harmony with 40,000 bees making honey 1,400km away in Nottingham, England.

Artist Wolfgang Buttress’ innovative work is the centrepiece of a bee-themed British pavilion that is pulling in nearly four times as many visitors as anticipated and has become one of the must-sees of the six-month world fair in Italy’s economic capital.

Steve Jewlitt-Fleet, the pavilion’s deputy director, told AFP that, since its May 1 opening, over 500,000 visitors have come to admire a creation designed to highlight the importance of bees to the environment and showcase scientific research that could help reverse an alarming decline in their numbers.

“It’s been a real word-of-mouth success,” said Jewlitt-Fleet.

Visitors to the                100m x 20m pavilion follow the dance of a bee through British orchard and meadow landscapes featuring native apple trees and wild heather, buttercups and sorrel, before arriving at Buttress’ hive.

As they enter the 43-tonne structure, they start to pick up the amplified hum of the bees in Nottingham Trent University physicist Martin Bencsik’s experimental hive in England, where he is using accelerometer technology borrowed from high-tech engineering to monitor what is going on inside.

Accelerometers are highly sensitive devices used to monitor vibrations in rotating machinery, notably in the automobile and aviation industries.

Now mass produced for use in smartphones (they allow automated portrait/landscape display functions) Bencsik uses them to track the evolution of vibrations within the hive over days, weeks and months, and translates them as changes of the colony status.

Bee dictionary

This has enabled him to identify unintentional sounds as minute as the crackling of a single bee walking on honeycomb, and build up a kind of dictionary of bee vibrational pulses.

Bencsik hopes his research will lead to the creation of a simple tool that can be placed in the hive and alert keepers when something has changed, thus saving them the time and effort currently taken up with having to open and check hives individually at least once a week in spring.

“The main advantage is it will enable the keepers to leave the bees that are healthy alone to get on with making honey, and they will also know if something is going wrong,” explained the French scientist, who attributes his passion for bees to his father, a keeper of 50 years experience in the Beaujolais wine-growing region.

To enhance the soundscape in Milan, when the bee vibrations reach certain pitches they trigger occasional bursts of specially recorded pieces of cello, piano, guitar and human voice designed to harmonise with the “very meditative, low visceral hum” Buttress discovered when he first visited Bencsik’s hive.

“The irony is that bees are deaf, they communicate through vibration, but talking to Martin I saw the potential of using the sounds as a way of reflecting the connection between bees and man,” the artist told AFP.

Energy levels in the hive also dictate the colours and intensity of almost 1,000 LED lights which illuminate the Milan structure, which has become particularly popular at nightfall when the visual impact is greatest.

The hive was put together from 169,300 individual components without a single welder being employed.

“Basically it is like a giant Meccano set, a real piece of precision engineering,” said Tim Leigh, Marketing Director for Stage One, the British creative construction company which made the hive in 32 layers shipped out to Italy in batches.

Listen to the bees

Stage One, who made the cauldron for the Olympic flame at the London Olympics, won the tender for main contractor, three weeks before it was announced Buttress had won the design competition.

“That meant we were able to help choose the winning design,” Leigh explained. “Designers inevitably want to do something as flamboyant as possible but we had to ensure it was buildable on a tight schedule and within what was a relatively modest budget.”

Tristan Simmonds, a structural engineer who has helped ensure the stability of giant sculptures by Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, and BDP architects were also involved in a project, which required 4,500 hours of technical drawing to ensure all the pieces came together safely and on time.

The goal was to pay tribute to the bee’s role as the exclusive pollinator of 70 of the world’s 100 most important food crops, making it responsible for almost a third of the food consumed on Earth.

After its stint in Milan, the pavilion is destined to be dismantled and reassembled at a soon-to-be decided location in Britain.

“It would benefit from a background that promotes the countryside and sustainability,” said Bencsik.

“That is the message of the pavilion: bees are exquisitely sensitive to the well-being of the environment, if it goes wrong the bees will be the first to suffer so we should listen to them very carefully.”

It is perhaps time to take a new look, a fresh approach to social networks. The term is used here in its broad meaning and includes all the virtual communities that we have become accustomed to in a few short years; accustomed to as if they’ve been around forever.

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Skype, Google+, Viber, Snapchat and Instagram may be some of the largest and best known. Today, there’s also a plethora of other, often smaller networks, some specialised and others not, that people turn to for activities that have little to do with publishing your child’s last birthday photos, posting a selfie of your esteemed person doing nothing important at all, or checking what your long lost friend did over the weekend.

The fun part, the very element that initiated the trend, is still there of course, but these virtual communities also offer extraordinary opportunities for establishing professional contact and generating mutually beneficial business, finding work, improving communication and exchange of all kinds, and last but not least learning in ways that were absolutely unthinkable only 15 years ago. By the time you analyse and understand how one given application works on a major network there are already 5 new ones out there.

Learning and acquiring knowledge in countless fields through YouTube videos has almost become a “traditional”, “old” way, at least by Internet and information technology time measurement standards!

It is high time social networking and virtual communities are taken seriously by the population, beyond mere entertainment. 

The best recognition comes from schools and educational institutions in general. They do not just allow or encourage going to the networks and communities to learn, they even include them in homework, and this from ages as young as 8 or 9.

I was helping a young schoolboy with an interesting school assignment the other day. He started saying that he was to research, understand and then explain the military strategy that Romans applied when they were occupying Gaul some 2,000 years ago. When I asked him how he was supposed to do that all by himself, and to find the necessary sources of information, given that he is 9 and the subject not that simple or easy, he simply replied “the teacher wants us to do it using the Internet and social networking. Just give me some guidance to start and I’ll take it from there.”

The networks provide great opportunities for adult learning, more particularly, the one they want to get while they have a daytime job and a family and find it hard to go to college. Whereas a plain Google search will provide raw, one-way information, something that does not really qualify as learning or education, virtual communities let you establish a live discussion with other people about the topic you are exploring, with great interaction, an exchange of ideas, of thoughts, get guidance, advice. They let you ask specific questions and receive personalised answers. All the main ingredients that make structured learning and education are there.

 Of course one can always subscribe to formal online learning and even obtain university or university equivalent diplomas this way today. This, however, is different from the above for it is usually paid learning and a rather expensive one. Social networks and virtual communities on the other hand are free, because members help each other freely; they don’t ask you for a fee. Also, the fact that learning though them remains rather informal makes it pleasurable, more enjoyable and less stressful.

 The subject is vast, and some of the United Nations organisations already are recommending using virtual communities to improve learning in most fields.