PM Mirko Cvetković believes that his cabinet “will be remembered” for the visa liberalization with the EU, something that is expected by the end of the year. “This government does not view reality through rose-tinted glasses and will not become complacent after the successes achieved so far, because we’re aware there’s much we haven’t done and that huge work lies ahead,” he told daily VeÄernje Novosti in an interview.
Posts Tagged ‘something’
Rachel Strugatz: J. Crew’s Jenna Lyons: See What’s In Her Office (PHOTOS)
July 12th, 2009 |
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Meet Jenna Lyons, the creative director of J. Crew, the face behind “Jenna’s Picks,” and the resident visionary responsible for catapulting the retailer into a realm of success never seen by the likes of most brands.
Sat Eye Candy: Cat Stevens
July 11th, 2009 |
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Today, like every other day,
We wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study.
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
We woke with this Rumi poem playing on repeat in our heads. And then, in a flash, it occurred to us what the perfect soundtrack for such poetic philosophizing might be – Cat Stevens. These days he goes by the name Yusuf Islam but the brave, yearning heart of what makes him tick is beating very, very strong. His new album, Roadsinger: To Warm You Through The Night, is a slow stunner (JamBase review), and it’s sparked us to explore his back catalog anew. And folks, there’s much we need to hear today, now, in this tumultuous moment we find ourselves in.
Like Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” there’s something prayerful and innocent about our opener. If there’s a gentler, more quietly blessed way to wake up then we haven’t found it.
It’s a beautiful thing to see him come back to his old songs, finding a way to fit them into his more pronounced spiritual path of recent years, realizing the great stockpiles of understanding and truth hiding in his “pop songs.” To wit, this thoughtful stroll through one of his best from 2007.
Love is a hard thing in his work. It’s something that requires much of us, demanding a patience and depth of understanding few of us can muster most of the time. And sometimes he distilled this concept into something wonderfully tough like this blues-tinged jewel from his 1976 Earth Tour.
His recent return to recording in the past few years has shown him to be a vigorous, funny, fiercely engaged musician with still a lot to say in his songs. This is a primo performance of one of the standouts off 2006′s An Other Cup.
Here’s a dark turn from the new album delivered with restrained style on Jools Holland grand BBC program.
And it isn’t always dark clouds and naval gazing. Sometimes he just tossed off a killer ditty that reminds you what a fine nuts ‘n’ bolts composer he can be.
Stevens’ music will always be inexorably liked to the cult film Harold And Maude, which seems to touch a nerve in each subsequent generation where liking the movie lets one know they’re amongst fellow freaks. Here’s Doug Martsch of Built to Spill performing Stevens’ centerpiece tune from the soundtrack.
The highway our feet travel may be long, rocky and full of unexpected twists and dead ends, but if we’ve tucked the right songs into our bindle we’ll be alright. It’s a true joy to have this man making music again. We conclude with the title tune from his latest offering and his 2006 Nobel Peace Price concert performance of perhaps his best known anthem.
And don’t forget, you can eyeball video sweetness 24/7 with JamBase TV.
Looking glass
July 10th, 2009 |
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By Ian Hardy
Click reporter, Silicon Valley
If you want to find something out these days, one of the first things you will do is type words into a box on the webpages of a search engine.
The result will be an avalanche of websites which contain the words you are looking for, hopefully with the most useful ones at the top of the list.
For much of the past two decades, search results have been triggered by straightforward keyword connections.
It has been an adequate solution, but it is far from perfect says Mike Elgan, a columnist at Computerworld.com.
"Human beings view the world in terms of associations – a classic example in the scientific community is when you say the sentence ‘I saw a bird with a telescope’.
"Human beings instantly know it was you not the bird that was using the telescope. But computers don’t know that," he said.
Human understanding
Search engines have never really understood the precise meaning or true intent of questions or phrases – semantic search is a process trying to improve this.
A new generation of web services is in development to offer results for words and picture searches, and attempt to understand users’ questions.
"The idea is for people to be able to scan it and find interesting things more like a magazine"
Anand Rajaraman,
co-founder of Kosmix
Kosmix is one of a new batch of search engines trying to incorporate human understanding into its complex mathematical computations.
Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, said the site’s goal is to encourage a kind of "serendipity" by displaying information in a visual way.
"The idea is for people to be able to scan it and find interesting things more like a magazine.
"You know how you are scanning a magazine and suddenly something catches your eye serendipitously," he said.
‘Exciting work’
Bing is the latest reincarnation of Windows Live Search and MSN Search which have never been as popular as Yahoo or Google.
To improve it Microsoft bought semantic search company Powerset that uses updated methods to produce their results.
Scott Prevost from Powerset told Click that despite advances, the problems of natural language are not even close to being solved.
"There’s a lot of exciting work that will happen particularly in the next five to 10 years," he said.
Also, increasingly search is moving beyond desktops. One recent survey in the US showed the number of search apps downloaded to mobile phones in the past year has doubled.
While a third more searches are being done on mobile web browsers – many devices have GPS and a constant stream of updated information.
Voice search
A search engine of the future will not just return a list of restaurants, for instance, but it will know you are inside a car, what time of day it is, and the traffic conditions.
So when you get to the restaurant, it will be able to guide you to the nearest parking space, and tell you what specific lunch specials are on the menu that day.
But typing on the go can be dangerous and even illegal in some places, so the physical way we search may change over time.
Scott Prevost, from Powerset said that as speech recognition improves, voice input will start to appear more in mobile phone searches.
"With a mobile device it’s easier to say what you want rather than type some keywords," he said.
"People speak in short simple sentences when they know there is a speech recognizer listening to them," he added.
It is a long way from the search engines of the 1990s which were not smart enough to generalise. Often they could only find something if you knew exactly what you were looking for, sometimes down to the exact filename.
Make connections
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, believes search is still in its infancy and that semantics is key to a more powerful internet.
He said it all comes down to the ability to make connections.
"The thing explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that was put there for one reason and realizes that they can connect it with something else".
He added that, for example, someone could "realise something about global warming because we’ve managed to get all of the data out there."
There is a race going on between the established players and the young startups to take search to the next level.
All are aiming to make it highly personalized, intuitive and more integrated into our lives.
Perhaps one day search engines will deliver the most suitable result you were looking for every time.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
‘I’m blessed with a certain amnesia’
July 10th, 2009 |
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After his comeback to performing and Hallelujah’s unlikely chart domination, Leonard Cohen has had a remarkable year. He talks to Jian Ghomeshi about love, death and taking risks
What have you learned from being back on stage?
Leonard Cohen: I learned that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve been grateful that it’s going well. You can’t ever guarantee that it’s going to continue doing well, because there’s a component that you really don’t command.
What component is that?
LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck. It’s hard to put your finger on it – you don’t really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. You never really know whether you’re going to be able to be the person you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there’s so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected – even when you’ve brought the show to a certain degree of excellence.
In 2001, you said to the Observer that you were at a stage of your life you refer to as the third act. You quoted Tennessee Williams saying: “Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act.” You were 67 when you said that, you’re 74 now – does that ring more or less true for you still?
LC: Well, it’s well written, the beginning of the third act seems to be very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, is when the hero dies. My friend Irving Layton said about death: it’s not death that he’s worried about, it’s the preliminaries.
Are you worried about the preliminaries?
LC: Sure, every person ought to be.
Let me come back to the beginning of the first act. This was a brand new career for you that started in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career?
LC: I’ve been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time – an edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems. At a certain point I realised that I’m going to have to buckle down and make a living. I’d written a couple of novels, and they’d been well received, but they’d sold about 3,000 copies. So I really had to do something, and the other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville – I thought maybe I could get a job. I love country music, maybe I’d get a job playing guitar. When I hit New York, I bumped into what later was called the folk-song renaissance. There were people like Dylan and Judy Collins and Joan Baez. And I hadn’t heard their work. So that touched me very much. I’d always been writing little songs myself, too, but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.
Some people would think it’s ironic to go into music to make money, given that it’s not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists.
LC: Yeah, I know. In hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folk singer. And I had not much of a voice. I didn’t play that great guitar either. I don’t know how these things happen in life – luck has so much to do with success and failure.
People talk about the fact that you’ve written songs that you’ve almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?
LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else’s songs.
You say you’ve always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as, and call yourself, a legitimate singer and musician?
LC: You cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one’s life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn’t go well, one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one’s life right to this moment.
Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?
LC: Good question. It’s not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can’t live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we’re invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who’ve closed down. And there are times in one’s life when one has to close down just to regroup.
Are there times when you’ve lamented the power that women have had over you?
LC: I never looked at it that way. There’s times when I’ve lamented, there’s times when I’ve rejoiced, there’s times when I’ve been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience. And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don’t. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they’re defeated and sometimes they’re manifested.
Do you think love is empowering?
LC: It’s a ferocious activity, where you experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And the affixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it’s going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it’s going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.
Do you regret not having a lifelong partner?
LC: Non, je ne regrette rien. I’m blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don’t remember what went down. I don’t review my life that way.
Even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future, do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?
LC: Well, it was a part of every process. The central activity of my days and nights was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, anguish, distress. A background of anguish that prevailed.
How important was writing to your survival?
LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It was not a luxury for me to write – it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves – it’s something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It’s a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it’s difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things. So in my own case I have to write the verse, and then see if it’s a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can’t toss it until I’ve worked on it and seen what it really is.
What do you consider your darkest hour?
LC: Well I wouldn’t tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don’t think I’ve had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we’ve really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.
How much do you reflect upon your own mortality?
LC: You get a sense of it, you know – the body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. So I don’t know if it’s a matter of reflection, I don’t know that implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation.
Is there a way to prepare for death?
LC: Like with anything else, there’s a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything. There are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death. And you can embark upon them and embrace them and give themselves to you. But I don’t think there’s any guarantee this could work, because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next moment.
Are you fearful of death?
LC: Everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one’s death. The actual circumstances, the pain involved, the affect on your heirs. But there’s so little that you can do about it. It’s best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We’ve got to live our lives as if they’re not going to end immediately. So we have to live under those – some people might call them illusions.
Let me ask you about Hallelujah, because it’s been an interesting year for Hallelujah – it took on a new energy. A song that you wrote in 1984, and it appeared at No 1 and No 2 on the UK charts, and your version was also in the top 40. What did you make of that?
LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions – [a] record Sony wouldn’t put out. They didn’t think it was good enough. It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said “Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?” And I kind of feel the same way. I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it.
• This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. Leonard Cohen plays Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, tomorrow, and the Liverpool Arena on Tuesday. Leonard Cohen Live in London is out now on CD and DVD (Sony).
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Is small the new big?
June 29th, 2009 |
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Are relatively mature car markets going to become fertile ground for highly specified small cars? It is perhaps a niche that has proven difficult to crack for manufacturers in the past. The Mercedes A-class, Daimler Smart and Audi A2 spring to mind. Each of those had a rough ride – for different reasons, perhaps – but the highly specced small car area is one to be treated with care.
BMW handled it well with Mini, but that success based on a modern take for a retro-brand is something of a special case and perhaps serves as a lesson on how difficult it is to hit the premium small car sweet spot.
However, markets change and it could be that the market environment is becoming better for well specified small cars. The regulatory/tax framework in urban areas, volatile/high fuel prices and changing societal attitudes to vehicles generally are all perhaps pointing towards higher sales of small cars.
And a proportion of the ‘new’ consumers who consider small(er) cars will want something comfortable and relatively highly specified. In the future, the argument goes, the small car area will be less dominated by low-cost driven ‘econoboxes’.
In this context, Toyota’s initiative with its IQ small car is certainly an interesting one. The car has attracted some flak on the basis of its relatively high price, but some people will be prepared to pay a little more for something that isn’t a low-cost Aygo. There are discrete customer sets for those two small cars with their different prices, spec and ‘feel’.
Things can get even more interesting when considering ‘sub-brands’, which is a part of Toyota’s strategy with IQ.
Even more intriguingly, Toyota is planning a collaboration with Aston Martin for a ‘luxury commuter vehicle’.
As ever, execution and properly aligning brand values with the product proposition and price will determine how successful future products will be. Is this a step too far for Aston Martin? Maybe not, but it is a gamble. If they get it wrong, it would be an expensive mistake with adverse consequences for brand image. At least they are trying new things and I think that is to be applauded. Collaborating like this also keeps costs down for Aston while Toyota gets an association that is potentially very positive indeed.
But the really big question is a great big fat unknown: just how many people out there will opt for a highly specced small car?
The latest Lotus proActive is out
June 19th, 2009 |
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The latest edition of Lotus Engineering’s proActive e-magazine is now out and available for free download. It includes a particularly interesting feature on City Cars first published in Automotive Engineer that is well worth a read. It’s key reading for anyone seriously interested in the segment and the fundamentals that drive design in small cars.
What else is in the latest edition? As John Cleese would say in Monty Python, ‘And now for something completely different…’
I interviewed the head of a company in the Netherlands that is about to commission the world’s largest second generation biofuel manufacturing plant (BioMCN makes bio-methanol from glycerine that is a by-product of biodiesel production). BioMCN’s CEO, Rob Voncken, was certainly an interesting interviewee: a trained scientist with a business brain who is also motivated by the idea of doing something good for the environment.
He was charming and cool as a cucumber when I talked to him, but it’s quite a project he is in charge of. He could be forgiven a bit of stress as commercial production inauguration approaches. The business opportunity? In the short-term it’s about substituting bio-ethanol for bio-methanol in the gasoline alcohol blend (it can be mixed and we get ‘A85′ rather than E85 with all its food chain incursion woes). There are some pretty powerful interests behind ethanol though.
And there’s also a fascinating insider view from the Lotus marketing department on how they approached the press launch for the Evora. It’s clearly a highly targeted exercise and they don’t do model launches often, so when they do, they put some serious thought into it. And they don’t exactly scrimp judging by the pic of the hotel on Loch Lomond. I just hope the Scottish weather was kind.
If you are signed up already for proActive, you should automatically receive an email with a link for the pdf. If not, why not get yourself signed up – it’s free.