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Grand Chief Ron Evans said Wednesday the H1N1 influenza virus, also known as swine flu, is spreading rapidly through native communities. With supplies taking nearly a month to be delivered, Evans said First Nations people are at too much risk — especially when just getting hand sanitizer is a political and bureaucratic nightmare.

this is precisely what I mean: if you leave any part of your population impoverished, no matter what their colour, no matter what their affiliation or their suitability for the assistance, no matter how remote and invisible you keep them, if you keep anyone in a vulnerable state, you are hanging a big biological sign on your back that tells the other microbiology, "BITE ME".

And it will.

"Why does the music industry persist in saying that every download is a lost sale? If you even think about it, it can't be true. People - even downloaders - only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs?

I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else.

What else, I mused, might they be buying? Hmm... young.. like the entertainment industry... ah, how about computer games and DVDs? Thus began a hunt for the figures for UK sales of games and of DVDs and of music to see if there was any consistent relationship between them."

While there are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics and in this chart no distinction is made between new-release (which may dominate the technology-driven game sales) and back-catalog (which may dominate DVD and music sales) the figure I would most like to see charted is the relationship between the post-Napster rise of file trading and the sales in the long tail of the back-catalog, the older releases and especially the older, really obscure and forgotten releases such as Martin Denny or Pentangle.

However that might pan out, what is really salient in the Guardian story is the simple observation that downloads logically cannot equate to "lost sales" -- as the absurd fines levied out clearly prove -- those charged downloaders are each exceeding their personal budgets by many orders of magnitude, several times over!  When you consider how the $40,000 required to fill an average iPod is simply not in the reach of any but the most exclusive club of elite teenagers, isn't it inescapable to reject equating their collections to a $40,000 corporate profit loss?

One of the most important aims of abc notation, and perhaps one that distinguishes it from most, if not all, computer-based musical languages is that it can also be read easily by humans. In other words, with a little practice, it is possible to play a tune directly from the abc notation without having to process and print it out. Even if this isn't of interest, the resulting clarity of the notation makes it very easy to notate tunes.In addition, the ability to write music in abc notation means that it can be easily and portably stored or transported electronically, hence enabling the discussion and dissemination of music via email.

While originally created as a means for traditional fiddle tunes to be traded over pure-ascii email messages, ABC has long since expanded its scope to support quite complex multi-stave instrumental and orchestral notations; contributions to the archive include Mozart and the complete 2nd movement of Beethoven's 7th. The power of Open Source on Open Standards: quality software for ABC editing, midi rendering and even professional publication quality printout are available for almost every platform and most often as free software.

T:Paddy O'Rafferty
C:Trad.
M:6/8
K:D
dff cee|def gfe|dff cee|dfe dBA|\
dff cee|def gfe|faf gfe|1 dfe dBA:|2 dfe dcB|]
~A3 B3|gfe fdB|AFA B2c|dfe dcB|\
~A3 ~B3|efe efg|faf gfe|1 dfe dcB:|2 dfe dBA|]
fAA eAA|def gfe|fAA eAA|dfe dBA|\
fAA eAA|def gfe|faf gfe|dfe dBA:|

Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems is the world's leading provider of airplay tracking for the entertainment industry. Employing a patented digital pattern recognition technology, Nielsen BDS captures in excess of 100 million song detections annually on more than 1,600 radio stations, satellite radio and cable music channels in over 140 markets in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico) and 30 Canadian markets.

On a tip from songwriter Paul Stewart (about to leave on his cross-Canada tour and wanting to track the airplay in his wake, Paul called from SoCan HQ with the URL) - Neilsons BDS is simple, and it is free: You send them your CD (or upload MP3s), they fingerprint the waveform and then ping your tally every time that fingerprint appears on any of the 1600 radio stations they monitor.

I wrote about this some years back, only I really thought it would be a product out of Google; I suppose it is often the case that the old-guard don't change, they just get pushed aside by the upstarts.

Ok, maybe it's not quite there yet, but this upstart is headed in exactly my ubiquitous computing direction. In my first essay I'd described The Last Computer You'll Ever Buy as a home appliance rack of computing components, sort of a personal google/amazon server farm where you upgrade by adding another 1U; it later occured to me, in The Google Cube, that our homemaker is not really terribly fond of adding Systems Administration to their skillset and leisure time schedules, and therein a really big impetus to move the modular rack off-site, cloud-hosted by people who are fond of SysAdmin chores. As the smartphone grew up, I saw there being no need for the 'personal' computer, only The Personal Computing Space where any device, a palm, a laptop, a cellphone, someone else's cellphone, any would be equal portals into this abstract hosted space.

That was the scenario I painted for the publisher at Macmillan back at the last Raleigh LinuxExpo. No more WinLinMac wars, no more MozExplorer nonesense, just people and their data, and always the latest most up to date and secure tools to bring them together, any time, any place, any device.

And a scant 7 years later ... here it is!

Listen carefully and you’ll hear the same refrain at a rising number of hospitals. From Massachusetts General to the Mayo Clinic, patients are hearing the first strains of a harmonious movement — the infusion and inclusion of music in the treatment of ailments, from brain disorders to cancer. This goes beyond the psychological smile favorite songs can induce.

Doctors are increasingly studying — and employing — the physiological dance music does with the body’s neurons and blood-carrying cells.

“We’re in the infancy,” said Dr. Ali Rezai, director of the Center for Neurological Restoration at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. During a surgery called deep brain stimulation — performed while patients with Parkinson’s disease are awake — Rezai and his team play classical compositions and measure the brain’s response to those notes. “We know music can calm, influence creativity, can energize. That’s great. But music’s role in recovering from disease is being ever more appreciated.”

Using music to help the ill has been employed for thousands of years, even though modern medicine is just starting to understand how it works

For nine days after his surgery at the Gagnon Cardiovascular Institute in Morristown, N.J., Fabry soaked up that tranquil, wordless strumming. And while he praised his surgeon, he raved about the musical score that accompanied his recovery.

His heart literally fell in rhythm with guitarist Tomaz Lima. The music became his medicine.

You might be surprised at how much you can learn from a site outside your area of expertise. Why not make it your goal this month to learn a new skill? Whether it's motion graphics, web development and design, music production, Flash, illustration, logo design or digital art