Jul 23rd 2009  From The Economist print edition

There is life in virtual reality after all

REMEMBER Second Life, the virtual world that was supposed to become almost as important as the first one? Now populated by no more than 84,000 avatars at a time, it has turned out to be a prime example of how short-lived internet fads can be. Yet if many adults seem to have given up on virtual worlds, those that cater to children and teenagers are thriving. Several have even found a way to make money.

In America, nearly 10m children and teenagers visit virtual worlds regularly, estimates eMarketer, a market researcher—a number the firm expects to increase to 15m by 2013. As of January, there were 112 virtual worlds designed for under-18s with another 81 in development, according to Engage Digital Media, a market research firm.

All cater to different age groups and tastes. In Club Penguin, the market leader, which was bought by Disney in 2007 for a whopping $700m, primary-school children can take on a penguin persona, fit out their own igloo and play games. Habbo Hotel, a service run from Finland, is a global hangout for teenagers who want to customise their own rooms and meet in public places to attend events. Gaia Online, based in Silicon Valley, offers similar activities, but is visited mostly by older teens who are into Manga comics.

Not a hit with advertisers, these online worlds earn most of their money from the sale of virtual goods, such as items to spruce up an avatar or a private room. They are paid for in a private currency, which members earn by participating in various activities, trading items or buying them with real dollars.

This sort of stealth tax seems to work. At Gaia Online, users spend more than $1m per month on virtual items, says Craig Sherman, the firm’s chief executive. Running such a virtual economy is not easy, which is why Gaia has hired a full-time economist to grapple with problems that are well known in the real world, such as inflation and an unequal distribution of wealth.

There are other barriers that could limit the growth of virtual worlds for the young, but the main one is parents. Many do not want their offspring roaming virtual worlds, either because they are too commercial or are thought to be too dangerous. Keeping them safe is one of the biggest running costs, because their sponsors have to employ real people to police their realms.

Youngsters are also a fickle bunch, says Simon Levene of Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm. Just as children move from one toy to another, they readily switch worlds or social networks, often without saying goodbye.

Even so, Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer, believes “these worlds are a training ground for the three-dimensional web”. If virtual worlds for adults, which so far have been able to retain only hard-core users, manage to hang on for a few years, they may yet have a second life.

2009 0808  from NY TIMES MOVIE

In an understated but nonetheless climactic scene in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her editor, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), struggle to come up with a title for the culinary doorstopper Julia has spent the past eight years composing. It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives Ms. Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement.

The book is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — not “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies,” but “Mastering the Art.” In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of skill, of practice.

The impact of that first volume of “Mastering the Art,” and of Child’s subsequent television career (which is mostly tangential to the movie’s concerns), is hard to overstate. The book stands with a few other postwar touchstones — including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” the Kinsey Report and Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat” — as a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued.

Not that Ms. Ephron’s breezy, busy movie traffics in such sweeping historical ideas, except occasionally by implication. Nor does she infuse the happy, well-fed life of her Julia (the main source for whom is a memoir Child wrote with Alex Prud’homme, her great-nephew) with too much grand drama. “Julie & Julia” proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity — a no-nonsense, plucky self-confidence embodied by the indomitable Julia herself — is easy to miss.

Most strikingly, this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men. Marriage is certainly the context both of Julia’s story and of Julie’s (about whom more in a moment), but it is not the point. The point, to invoke the title of a book whose author has an amusing cameo here (played by Frances Sternhagen), is the joy of cooking.

In the vernacular of many American kitchens, “Mastering the Art” is better known simply as “Julia,” and many a kitchen debate has been settled by an appeal to its authority. Should we separate the eggs? Turn the roast? What does Julia say?

In 2002, more than half a century after Julia and her husband, Paul, arrived in France — a debarkation that provides the movie’s opening scene — a young woman named Julie Powell decided to answer that question in the most literal and systematic way imaginable. A would-be writer working at a thankless office job and living with her husband in Long Island City, Queens, Ms. Powell spent a year cooking every single recipe in “Mastering the Art” and writing a blog about the experience. The blog led to the memoir that provided Ms. Ephron’s movie with its title and the lesser half of its narrative.

Trimming some fat from Ms. Powell’s rambling book (and draining some of the juice as well), Ms. Ephron’s script emphasizes the parallels between the lives of her leading characters, who never meet. (They appear on screen together only when Julie watches Julia on television). Julie (Amy Adams) and Julia have loving, supportive husbands — the affable Chris Messina is Eric Powell; the impeccable Stanley Tucci is Paul Child — who only occasionally express impatience with their wives’ gastronomic obsessions. (Paul by arching an eyebrow, Eric by storming out of the apartment.)

Both women take up cooking out of a restless sense of drift — “I need something to dooooo,” Julia exclaims — and both pursue it in the service of a latent but powerful ambition. Publishing success is the happy ending to both tales, and Ms. Ephron, a literary and journalistic star before she was a filmmaker, is unequivocal in her celebration of the joys of such triumph.

Julie, in an early scene, is humiliated by a table full of college friends who flaunt their BlackBerrys, assistants, real estate deals and lucrative glossy-magazine gigs. But by means of failed aspics and triumphant sauces, Julie shows them all up. And Julia, similarly, overcomes the xenophobia and sexism of the French culinary establishment and the myopia of an American publisher and becomes the person we know as Julia Child.

As does Ms. Streep. By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she’s done it again. Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly.

Often when gifted actors impersonate real, familiar people, they overshadow the originals, so that, for example, you can’t think of Ray Charles without seeing Jamie Foxx, or Truman Capote without envisioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Ms. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child has the opposite effect, making the real Julia, who died in 2004, more vivid, more alive, than ever.

In Mr. Tucci Ms. Streep finds, as in “The Devil Wears Prada,” a perfect foil. Like the character he plays, he is gallant and self-assured and able to assert a strong sense of his own presence even as he happily cedes the center of attention. Together, their mastery of the art is so perfect that even quiet, transitional scenes between them are delightful. (And when Jane Lynch shows up as Dorothy, Julia’s sister, the delight ascends to an almost indecent level of giddiness).

If only Mr. Tucci and Ms. Streep were in every movie, I thought to myself at one point, as, in a state of rapture, I watched them sit still on a couch looking off into space.

The problem is that when they aren’t on screen in this movie, you can’t help missing them. Ms. Adams is a lovely and subtle performer, but she is overmatched by her co-star and handicapped by the material. Julia Child could whip up a navarin of lamb for lunch, but Meryl Streep eats young actresses for breakfast. Remember Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada”? Amanda Seyfried in “Mamma Mia!”? Neither do I.

The deck is further stacked against Ms. Adams by the discrepancy between Ms. Powell’s achievement and Ms. Child’s, and by a corresponding imbalance in Ms. Ephron’s interest in the characters. The conceit of parallel lives is undone by the movie’s condescending treatment of Julie and also by its ardent embrace of the past at the expense of the present.

From the very start, Paris in the late ’40s and early ’50s is — well, it’s postwar Paris, a dream world of fabulous clothes, architecture, sex, food, cigarettes and political intrigue. And New York in 2002 is made, a little unfairly, to seem drab and soulless by comparison. Queens, demographically the most cosmopolitan of the five boroughs and something of a foodie mecca, is treated with easy Manhattanite disdain, as a punch line and punching bag.

The unevenness of “Julie and Julia” is nobody’s fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film’s premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms. Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. All the filmmaker’s artful whisking can’t quite achieve the light, fluffy emulsion she is trying for.

But an imperfect meal can still have a lot of flavor, and the pleasures offered by this movie should not be disdained. Julia Child knew what to do with a broken sauce or a half-fallen soufflé: serve it anyway, with flair and without apology. What would Julia say? What she always said: Bon appétit!

“Julie and Julia” is rated PG-13. It has mild profanity, and the indulgence — in exquisite moderation — of a few choice vices.

JULIE & JULIA

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron; based on “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, and “Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by Richard Marks; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Mark Ricker; produced by Ms. Ephron, Laurence Mark, Amy Robinson and Eric Steel; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Julia Child), Amy Adams (Julie Powell), Stanley Tucci (Paul Child), Chris Messina (Eric Powell), Jane Lynch (Dorothy McWilliams), Linda Emond (Simone Beck), Erin Dilly (Judith Jones) and Frances Sternhagen (Irma Rombauer).

Jul 30th 2009 | BEIJING  From The Economist print edition

What lies behind the gruesome death of a manager at Tonghua Iron and Steel?

WORKERS’ opposition to privatisation and job cuts is widespread but rarely takes so brutal a form as it did on July 24th in northeastern Jilin province, when steel workers chased down and killed an executive who had reportedly come to tell them that an imminent privatisation of their factory would bring massive job cuts. Hong Kong-based human-rights monitors reported that 30,000 workers were involved, though Chinese officials insist the number was lower. By all accounts, the ugly scene at the Tonghua Iron and Steel Plant ended in the bloody beating and death of Chen Guojun, general manager of the private Jianlong Group which already owned a minority stake in the plant.

The incident highlights not only China’s labour discontent but the country’s difficulty in dealing with it. Last year, China introduced a series of labour laws that improved mediation and set up an arbitration process to give workers better formal recourse for their grievances, both individual and collective. Workers have indeed been using the process in greater numbers (see chart). But only a small share of disputes are taken up, whereas discontents are multiplying. Whether in factories, mines or construction sites, workplace conditions in China are often atrocious, and workers’ safety an afterthought. Nominal legal provisions calling for minimum wages and guaranteed rest days are routinely ignored. One of commonest complaints is the failure to pay wages. Workers go months without being paid, leading to frequent sit-ins or demonstrations.

None of these actions is organised by unions. In name, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is a vast union bureaucracy running from the national level to small enterprises. In practice it is controlled by the Communist Party at the national level and, in companies, is mostly a tool of the management. According to Chris Xiaoyun Lin, a lawyer specialising in Chinese labour, unions may find ways to play a greater role in future, such as by drafting labour laws and representing workers in collective bargaining. But they are unlikely to gain independence from the party—or anything like the influence of unions in Japan or South Korea.

When Chinese labour disputes get unruly, local governments often respond by trying to placate the workers and maintain stability, according to Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. “They recognise that workers have legitimate grievances and are not rabble-rousers out to overthrow the government.” On the day of the Tonghua incident, the provincial government ordered Jianlong to abandon its plan to buy out the steel plant. Placating protesting workers may help calm a tense situation. But in the absence of genuine unions or better enforcement of the laws, it may also serve to encourage more protests.

Aug 5th 2009 | NEW YORK  From Economist.com

THE pictures may yet turn out to be the most significant aspect of Bill Clinton’s surprise trip to North Korea this week. Images of the American former president in Pyongyang, stern-faced and stiff on a stool beside the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, appeared on newspapers, television screens and news websites all over the world. The White House declared the trip a “private” one earlier in the week, although North Korea’s officials strained to suggest otherwise. Whatever its intended diplomatic weight, however, North Korea’s leader, who has craved bilateral talks with the United States over his nuclear programme, may claim a propaganda coup, after drawing an important American to pose at his side.

The immediate goal for Mr Clinton was to oversee the release of two young American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were arrested on the Chinese-North Korean border in March while reporting on a story about North Korean women forced by poverty into China. The two women had been sentenced to 12 years’ hard labour for allegedly entering North Korea illegally and committing “hostile acts”. Now pardoned, they left the country with Mr Clinton.

But there was more at stake than the two young women. Mr Clinton travelled with John Podesta, his former chief of staff who now runs a think-tank, the Centre for American Progress, that is close to the current American president. They were greeted by festivities in what looked more like an official state visit than one by a private citizen. The lead North Korean nuclear negotiator was seen in pictures greeting the former president. The state-run news agency claimed there had been an “exhaustive conversation”.

It is unclear whether Mr Clinton in fact carried any message to North Korea’s leaders on the nuclear issue. If so, it seems most likely that it would have been a call for North Korea to rejoin the six-party talks involving China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States. It is clear that America’s leaders should be wary of the bilateral talks that Mr Kim seeks: North Korea has a history of negotiating in bad faith. It signed a 1994 deal with the Clinton administration, only to cheat on it. Another deal was struck with George Bush’s government, only for North Korea to flounce out and, eventually, test short- and long-range rockets and at least one nuclear device. In similar fashion, South Korea has been given little in return for intermittent friendliness and substantial aid.

In America some conservatives have grumbled that Mr Clinton’s trip was an act of obeisance that encourages further kidnapping. Others asked why a similar presidential trip had not been attempted to free Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist who was held in Iran earlier this year. One answer may be that, in this case America is testing how much North Korea—weak, nervous, unpredictable and hostile to its neighbours—might be seeking ways to come out of its shell.

One other consideration is whether Mr Clinton’s appearance might have played some role in the domestic politics of North Korea. Mr Kim is rumoured to be frail (he seemed stony faced although not visibly sickly when posing beside Mr Clinton), perhaps as the result of a stroke last year. He has been absent from some public events where his presence would be expected and speculation flares that he is attempting to prepare the way for a successor. One possibility is that he is trying to arrange for his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, who is in his twenties, to take over the top job. To that end he may have been keen to demonstrate to domestic rivals—within the armed forces and the ruling party—that a leader with the clout and the diplomatic skill to bring an American ex-president for talks should also be trusted to guide any possible transition.

Jul 24th 2009 From The Economist

Timber-framed buildings are a marvel of structural engineering

OF ALL the physical structures known to man, the Japanese five-storey pagoda—with its gently sloping roof-lines and cantilevered eaves—is surely the most exquisite. Using nothing more than wooden pegs and wedges to keep itself upright, the pagoda is also one of the most ingenious pieces of structural engineering to be fashioned from wood.

In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, only two of these tall, slender buildings have collapsed over the past 1,400 years. Those that have disappeared (and many have, as only 500 or so are left standing today) were destroyed by fire. In seismically shaken Japan, it was only 40 years ago that the construction industry felt confident enough to erect office buildings of steel and reinforced concrete that were taller than the country’s wooden pagodas.

To this day, such post-and-beam construction—although clad in structural insulated panels in place of the more traditional adobe infilling—is favoured by house-builders throughout Japan because of the way such buildings “ride” the shaking during an earthquake.

When a traditional post-and-beam house starts to sway, the adobe between the wooden supports slowly crumbles and absorbs much of the energy of the seismic shockwave. Meanwhile, the heavy roof tiles—needed to cope with the high winds of late-summer typhoons—are shed and thereby relieve the load on the rest of the building. All that needs to be done when the shaking stops is to replace the missing roof tiles and replaster the crumbled infilling.

While in Britain recently, your correspondent could not help but notice the similarity between many of the traditional-style houses in his family’s neighbourhood in Japan and the mock-Tudor buildings that line the streets of Northwich, a town in Cheshire that has been mined for salt (as the suffix -wich implies) since Roman times. Both types of architecture are modern interpretations of a timber-framed tradition that stretches back to before medieval times.

Although Cheshire is not wracked by earthquakes, the ground on which Northwich and its surroundings stand has subsided continuously over the centuries as a result of the extensive salt mining. It got so bad in Victorian times that an act of parliament was passed in 1891 to change the local building regulations.

The act specified light, timber-framed structures with brick infillings between the vertical beams and studs. And instead of the usual brick foundations, the building had to rest on timber frames that incorporated numerous jacking points. Each time a building subsided, it could then be jacked up to street-level again, or moved on rollers to a new location.

Timber-framed buildings were still being erected in the centre of Northwich well into the 1970s. But a moratorium on building was imposed when test borings revealed the mines were in imminent danger of collapse. Since then, millions of tons of grout have been pumped into the empty caverns, which have now been sealed for good.

With the ground finally stabilised after two millennia of movement, Northwich’s rows of modern timber-framed shops, offices, banks and pubs could well be replaced by steel and concrete constructions. That would be a pity, for they are the last descendants of a local carpentry tradition that reached its zenith in Elizabethan times. Indeed, one of the finest examples of timber-framed construction in Britain, Little Moreton Hall, lies just 15 miles (24 kilometres) south east of Northwich.

Built for a prosperous local family between 1450 and 1580, Little Moreton Hall is a moated manor house that rambles around three sides of a cobbled courtyard. Medieval in origin, the building took three generations to complete, spanning both the Renaissance and early Elizabethan eras. In the process, it evolved to encompass every engineering concept available to carpenters of the day. The house features bays, porches, jettied upper floors, an extraordinary amount of glass and, crowning all, a 20-metre (68-foot) long internal gallery that spans the full length of the top floor of the south wing.

Despite its exotic design, each section of Little Moreton Hall follows the classic principles of timber-framed construction—an oak framework with wattle-and-daub infilling, with the vertical posts resting on stone footings. Sloping trusses and braces support the pitched roof’s gritstone tiles. Instead of nails or other mechanical fasteners, wooden pegs are used (as in a pagoda) to pin the timber joints throughout the building.

Because weathered oak is hard to cut and carve, its carpenters used unseasoned timber, knowing full well the posts and beams would shrink and twist with age. Today, the house is bowed and warped, and has had a steel frame inserted to support the heavy upper gallery. As a result, hundreds of visitors trudge daily through the building with nary a thought of it collapsing. As a history lesson on the evolution of timber-framed construction, it is hard to beat.

The only thing missing at Little Moreton Hall is the form of timber-framing that solves the two weaknesses inherent in all post-and-beam constructions—the limited weight that can be supported and the short distance needed between the posts. The Romans solved the problem with the arch, which medieval carpenters adapted as cruck frames for their great halls and barns.

The cruck-framed buildings that became popular in Britain during the 13th century use two or more A-frames, each made from matching halves of a bent tree that has been split lengthwise. In travelling from the ground all the way to the top of the building, where they are tied together by a collar beam, the cruck blades carry all the loads of the roof and walls directly to the ground. Not having to be load-bearing, the rest of the building can get away with a much lighter form of construction.

By coincidence, one of the best preserved cruck-framed barns in Britain is a mere five miles north of Northwich. Although the original timber-framed manor house at Arley Hall was replaced in the 1830s by an imposing pile of bricks, the house’s cruck-framed barn has changed little since Tudor times.

What your correspondent admires most about the cruck-framed buildings of Britain is the way their main load-bearing components communicate directly with the earth—just as the Japanese pagoda’s huge shinbashira timber column does as it dangles from the top of the structure down through the building to the ground.

The notion of a wooden pillar, with one end buried in the ground to tap the spirits of the inner world, has been a religious symbol in Japan since the earliest of times. That the shinbashira may be as much a religious object as a balancing device for damping the destructive forces of earthquakes and typhoons is a delightful thought. That cruck blades do much the same tempts your correspondent to believe that God is in the details.