A New Start

River Valley Swimming Pool

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River Valley Swimming Pool

June 24, 2006

Top View showing one of the two pools.

Posted by ben on June 24, 2006 at 11: 57 AM
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2 Comments

Tan Wee Kiat

The River Valley Pool was one of several old public pools that are now closed. The other pools are Yan Kit Pool in Tanjong Pagar, Mt Emily Pool off Sophia Road and Farrer Park Pool. Fortunately, the Farrer ParK Pool was taken over by Ang Peng Siong who now runs a swim school there. Ang Peng Siong’s Father was the pool supervisor for many years when Farrer Park Pool was a public pool.
As for the Mt Emily Pool I recall that there were different sessions for males only, females only, and mixed sessions. The mixed sessions were popular with families and young men trying to impress their girlfriends with their swimming prowess.
When I was in secondary school (that is 50 years back), one of the highlights of a Saturday afternoon was to go with friends for a swim at Mt Emily Pool and then walk down the hill to the Food Alley next to the Rex Cinema where we had our Chendol. I remember the Chendol was good to the last drop and the last “green worm”. Ah! Those were the days of innocence and simple pleasures.

Posted on June 24, 2006 at 11:44 PM • Comment permalink

john

It’s interesting that u would want to know more about it. Or that u even noticed that old place. If u don’t mind, let me talk about it a little from my perspective as someone who worked there once before. If you look it up on the net, u will see it closed officially on 15 April 2003.

It was Singapore’s 2nd oldest swimming complex after Yan Kit at Tanjong Pagar. I worked at RVSC (River Valley Swimming Complex) as a lifeguard for a few years, till it closed. (probably cause of low revenue, and bigger and better pools opening elsewhere.) A few of the older staff (one was the SG Sports Council’s very 1st Lifeguard!!) retired along with the pool, so sad. In your 2nd photo you can see the tower where I once sat.

At that time, it was very quiet, not too many kids/teens went there. Opportunities for coaching were sparse. It was peaceful- imagine listening to the water lapping, the wind blowing through the palm trees, while the sun gently shone on the gleaming water.

The ‘bathers’, as we called them, were a mix of mostly foreigners and older people. White, hairy ang mo’s, and babes (Brazilian and Japanese, I remember) (oh why didn’t I learn Japanese earlier?) wearing thongs. Old ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’ who came at opening time to enjoy the morning. The older folks were always good for a chat. And then the occasional family with kids. The sunbathers were usually hot too, haha, esp. the foreign ones. I should have chatted them up more… I guess it Was a nice quiet place to tan.

I’ll be honest, a lot of gays frequented the place. My colleague often busied himself walking around ‘surveying’ the area. No bathers complained, so the rest of us tended to close one eye.

Every Thu, I think, a group would come in a van at night to train scuba diving at the deep end. It was damn deep, not like the pools now. It was 3 metres(!) I think.

The public toilets were quite clean, bright blue and airy.

The staff room was damn old, but comfortable. I remember that sofa..

Almost nobody stepped into the kiddy pool. It looked bad, sprung leaks often, had lots of dead leaves in it. We scooped up leaves, but tended to give that pool less care. No kids anyway. Man, there were always a lot of dead leaves. I remember the super-long scooper/net we always used.

There’re no more pools now like that, I think- using manual ‘chlorination’. We adjusted and checked the chlorine cylinders (daily checklist), and poured in some ‘cant-remember-what’ powder to be mixed into the filter stream.

Parking was non existent- a small space to fit max 2-3 cars.
I used to smoke-out at the office- the only place with air-con.

We could go to Daimaru opposite, for the foodcourt, Macdonald’s, video arcade, department store, newspapers/comics etc.

The best place to see it properly is now from the overhead bridge. I loved that pool, that time of my life. I still pass by once in while, to see what-once-was…

Posted on July 14, 2006 at 11:09 PM • Comment permalink

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NY Times: Re-engineering Engineering

 

 

Magazine

Matriculation

Re-engineering Engineering

Marc Asnin/Redux, for The New York Times

The Hands-On Approach: Building a different breed of engineer at Olin College.

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                                                          http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: September 30, 2007

WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it's usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: "How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He's the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you." Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers "comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines." Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. "I don't see how you can make a positive difference in the world," he emphasized, "if you're not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing."

Skip to next paragraph        

Marc Asnin/Redux, for The New York Times

Beyond Theory: An Olin senior working as part of a consulting team asked to develop a robotic agricultural tractor.

   

Olin College started with what would amount to institutional suicide. Named for its founder, a munitions manufacturer who died in 1951, the F. W. Olin Foundation had spent nearly six decades giving money to dozens of campuses for buildings, much of it for teaching engineering and science. In 1993, however, the board of the foundation floated the idea of doing something that well-financed organizations rarely do: go out of business. Lawrence W. Milas, the president of the foundation, said he had grown frustrated with a process that helped schools but didn't change engineering education, which he says he thought was in a rut. He wondered whether it might be a good idea to fold the foundation and devote its assets to the creation of a new college.

A conversation with an executive of the National Science Foundation, Joseph Bordogna, persuaded Milas that his idea was sound. As a major, engineering was slipping in popularity. And the schools and their graduates were suffering from many of the ills of higher education generally. More and more, the schools were demanding specialized courses of study instead of an interdisciplinary approach. Bordogna explained how the National Science Foundation had been lending support to schools that were trying to adopt reforms and foster an undergraduate experience that focused on learning through inquiry and discovery. Yet Milas understood that these programs were competing with a strong institutional inertia. Engineering schools had structured themselves, largely for the convenience of faculty, around a comfortable way of teaching but not the best methods of learning. There was too much note-taking in the classroom and not enough hands-on learning. Institutions stressed research over undergraduate teaching, because that's where the recognition and grant money come from.

The Bordogna meeting got Milas thinking. "That's when the light went on," Milas recalled. "We can start with a blank slate." He went back to the Olin Foundation and started to push. He recalled that the other members of his small board had reservations, but Milas was certain. "I was a little bit of a terrier on this," he said. "We went for it." Eventually, the F. W. Olin Foundation agreed to give more than $400 million to create a whole new school.

Milas began looking for someone to lead the school, and the president of Harvey Mudd College, in California, suggested that he take a look at Miller, at the time the dean of the college of engineering at the University of Iowa . To Miller, it was a unexpected call, and an unwelcome one. He had just turned down another job offer, "and my family was cheering." He had a teenage daughter who was hoping to graduate from high school with her friends. But Miller also wanted to see engineering make a change for the better, and he endured years of frustration in trying to put through modest reforms in Iowa and, previously, at the University of Southern California. When the call came from Milas, Miller said, he agreed to fly down to Sarasota, Fla., to meet him in the summer of 1998, "just to have a conversation."

The conversation went on over two days. Milas told Miller that the endowment would be large enough that the school would charge little or no tuition. "The primary job of the president wasn't going to be out there raising money," Miller told me. "It meant that you could spend your time doing the important work of trying to rethink engineering education." Even more important, Milas told him that he wanted to create a nimble institution that could continually reinvent itself and honor change. "I couldn't stop thinking about this on the way home," he said.

Not long after, he became employee No. 1. "My wife sort of thinks of it as my midlife crisis," he told me.

IT ISN'T EASY TO BUILD a college from scratch, although, to listen to Miller, it's a lot of fun. Miller recruited a leadership team, and the school invited 30 students (out of more than 600 applicants) to come in 2001 for a "partner year" in which they would help develop and test the curriculum. They helped come up with Olin's DNA: project-based learning. The first students built projects like golf-ball cannons: they worked with faculty members to master principles of physics, materials science and mathematical modeling on the fly as they planned and built machines that could shoot a golf ball 300 yards. The school officially opened in 2002; it secured agreements with Babson College next door to provide some business and humanities classes; Wellesley and Brandeis nearby also kicked in humanities courses, as well as life-science classes.

The result is a school with no academic departments or tenure, and one that emphasizes entrepreneurship and humanities as well as technical education. Its method of instruction has more in common with a liberal arts college, where the focus is on learning how to learn, than with a standard engineering curriculum. "How can you possibly provide everything they need in their knapsack of education to sustain them in their 40-year career?" Miller asked. "I think those days are over. Learning the skill of how to learn is more important than trying to fill every possible cup of knowledge in every possible discipline."

Though the school charges no tuition, room and board is about $12,000 a year, which is in line with the full cost of a year at some state universities. Olin has already garnered an impressive amount of attention in the college guides. A Kaplan/Newsweek "How to Get Into College" guide called Olin one of "the new Ivies." The Princeton Review says Olin "may well be the most dynamic undergraduate institution in the country."

And the students are good. Over lunch in the school's sunny dining hall, one student, Andrew Coats, recalled that in the summer after his freshman year he had an internship, and "we were all given our canned engineering project" to fill up the time. The topic was new to him, he said, but he had already tackled plenty of projects and climbed steep learning curves in just one year at Olin, so he dove in. "I was able to do my summer-long project in two and a half weeks," he told me with a smile. "Somebody who graduated from M.I.T. is probably a better formal engineer. They can probably recite better than I could. But I have other experience."

Alison Lee, a recent graduate now in South Korea on a Fulbright scholarship, said the process of solving seemingly insurmountable problems is an Olin rite of passage, like the project that was given to her and her fellow students: build a robot that can climb a wall. When it worked, she said, "it was the moment of realization that I could do anything." (In a field where female students are traditionally scarce, more than 40 percent of Olin's students are women.) The problem-based process is good preparation for the real world, said another student, Meenakshi Vembusubramanian. "You're not going to go into a job and get a thermodynamics problem set," she said. "You're going to have a problem that's badly defined."

The notion of taking part in something new is part of the draw for incoming students. Alyssa Levitz could have gone just about anywhere after high school — her grades and scores were great, and her equally accomplished sisters were accepted at the University of Pennsylvania and Brown. She had visited 15 colleges, and they were starting to blur. But Levitz, who says she is as comfortable with math and science as with historical fiction, and who plays flute, piccolo and piano, found that Olin "just stood out." She applied, attended candidates' weekend and says she loved the team project that required her to connect a series of foam slabs to form a kind of aqueduct. More important, she hit it off with an assistant professor of electrical engineering and music, Diana Dabby, who was studying the application of chaos theory to music. She heard a performance of the school's conductorless orchestra. ("Not even," goes the campus joke, "a semiconductor.") These were engineers, yes, but the teachers and students were also artists and musicians and, it seemed, passionate about teaching and learning. It didn't hurt that Olin charges no tuition, but that wasn't the point. After she was accepted and feeling the rush that comes with the fat envelope, she shared the news with friends back in Iowa City. One classmate said, "I always thought you'd go someplace like Brown, one of the Ivy Leagues." Another said: "That's the one without accreditation, right? What would be the point in going there?"

OLIN DID RECEIVE ITS INITIAL accreditation last December, after graduating its first class. The school is already causing a stir, even beyond engineering. The Harvard Macy Institute, a program affiliated with Harvard Medical School, has developed a case study of Olin. "The issues that the Olin case portrayed were very relevant for the kind of problems we're trying to encourage people to confront" in medicine, said Constance M. Bowe, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine and author of the study. "We need to be teaching them how to learn, as opposed to teaching them a whole lot of facts." She sees Olin as trying "to create more of a stem cell" — the kind of cell that can become any other kind of cell.

Miller is proud of the Harvard case study, and he showed it to me in his office, a high-ceilinged room decorated with astronomy photographs and attractive stones. Through the large second-floor windows, some of the school's 300 students could be seen below, crossing the oval formed by the handful of buildings that constitute the campus. Miller helped build the school and teaches in it as well: he created a course in leadership and ethics. He brings in whistle-blowers to talk about the pressures they are under and the importance of taking a stand. One of them was James Ashton, a former executive of General Dynamics who alerted the government to waste and fraud in the company's submarine division. Such people, Miller said, describe the accumulation of "seemingly inconsequential decisions along the way" that lead people into ethical crises — something not all schools teach but that students entering the real world need. In traditional academia, he would not be teaching such a course. He has no advanced degrees in philosophy or ethics, only passion for the topic. But, as he put it: "The problem at Enron was probably not the lack of a Ph.D. in a discipline. It was courage."

That message gets hammered home in the classroom, according to Benjamin Linder, an assistant professor of design and mechanical engineering. His classes have an art-school feel: students, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, shorts or pajama bottoms, are up and down and walking around the room, clustering around their projects and discussing them, cutting blue foam with a hot-wire cutter to make models. Linder told me he pushes his students not to just follow instructions. "Engineering," he says, "has traditionally been focused on doing it right, but not on what's the right thing to do." That means designing products that are environmentally friendly and that respond to the needs of the people using them and not just to what the purchasing department wants. He urges his students to be more than team players. The goal, Linder said with utter earnestness, was to teach fledgling engineers "how to be bold."

Some within the engineering profession are drawn to this side of Olin. Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the efforts of teachers like Linder to encourage questioning and pushing back. Bea, who worked on investigations into the New Orleans disaster and the loss of the Columbia, told me: "We are, as engineers, taught to be servants. We're trained to do things, not to tell you that we can't." Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research at Google, wondered if the Olin program might produce precisely the kind of students Google is looking for. "I absolutely believe that teamwork and experiential learning and understanding problems and bringing multiple disciplines together to solve problems is fundamental to the way that engineers work" in the real world, he said. "The skills they are trying to develop are very meaningful in environments that we try to build."

But not every company is Google, and Miller admitted he is concerned that few of the class of 2006 are going on to graduate study in engineering or jobs in the field. Some graduates have told him that they are not happy in their first jobs and feel like cogs in a machine. "I'm hoping to get the message to our kids that a little bit of patience and endurance could pay off in the end," he said. Still, "this is one of the things that keeps me up now."

In some companies, he says, the freethinking products of Olin might have trouble fitting in. "Does industry want people like that? I think that's a very good question, but I think this goes beyond what industry wants," he said. "This is the right thing to do — this is what industry needs. If the country had more people like this, we'd be in a much better situation."

John Schwartz is a science reporter for The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

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ST: Will kids lose ability to think?

Home > Review > Others
Sep 28, 2007
EASY ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE IN DIGITAL AGE Will kids lose ability to think?
By Maryanne Wolf
THE HIGHER AIM: Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves. -- PHOTO: REUTERS AS PARENTS invest in the latest academic software and teachers consider how to weave the Internet into lesson plans for the new school year in the United States, it is a good moment to reflect upon the changing world in which youths are being educated. In a word, it is digital, with computer notebooks displacing spiralled notebooks, and blogs, articles, and e-mail messages shaping how we read and communicate. Parents, teachers and scholars are beginning to question how our immersion in this increasingly digital world will shape the next generation's relationship to reading, learning and knowledge itself. As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically-rich society. Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realise that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Over the past 5,000 years, the acquisition of reading transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species. Yet, the reading brain is slowly becoming endangered - the unforeseen consequences of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader. Three unexpected sources can help us negotiate the historical transition we face as we move from one prevailing mode of communication to another: Socrates, modern cognitive neuroscience and Proust. The examined word SIMILARLY poised between two modes of communication, one oral and one written, Socrates argued against the acquisition of literacy. His arguments are as prescient today as they were futile then. At the core of Socrates' arguments lay his concerns for the young. He believed that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude them into thinking they had accessed the heart of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. To Socrates, only the arduous process of pro- bing, analysing and ultimately internalising knowledge would enable the young to develop a life-long approach to thinking that would lead them ultimately to wisdom, virtue and 'friendship with (their) god'. To Socrates, only the examined word and the 'examined life' were worth pursuing, and literacy short-circuited both. How many children today are becoming Socrates' nightmare, mere decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multi-task, integrate and prioritise vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more valuable, skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life and collective wisdom as a species? There is surprisingly little research that directly confronts these questions, but knowledge from the neurosciences about how the brain learns to read and how it learns to think about what it reads can aid our efforts. We know, for example, that no human being was born to read. We can do so only because of our brain's protean capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new. Using neuroimaging to scan the brains of novice readers allows us to observe how a new neural circuitry is fashioned from some of its original structures. In the process, that brain is transformed in ways we are only now beginning to fully appreciate. More specifically, in the expert reading brain, the first milliseconds of decoding have become virtually automatic within that circuit. It is this automaticity that allows us the precious milliseconds we need to go beyond the decoded text to think new thoughts of our own - the heart of the reading process. Perhaps no one was more eloquent about the true purpose of reading than French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote: 'That which is the end of their (the author's) wisdom is but the beginning of ours.' True knowledge THE act of going beyond the text to think new thoughts is a developmental, learnable approach towards knowledge. Within this context, there should be a developmental perspective on our transition to a digital culture. Our already bi-literate children, who nimbly traverse between various modes of print, need to develop an expert reading brain before they become totally immersed in the digital world. Neuroscience shows us the profound miracle of an expert reading brain that uses untold areas across all four lobes and both hemispheres to comprehend sophisticated text and to think new thoughts that go beyond the text. Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to deve- lop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge. As technological visionary Edward Tenner cautioned: 'It would be a shame if the very intellect that produced the digital revolution could be destroyed by it.' Socrates, Proust and the images of the expert reading brain help us to think more deliberately about the choices we possess as our next generation moves towards the next great epoch in our intellectual development. The writer is professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University, where she is also director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research. She is author of Proust And The Squid: The Story And Science Of The Reading Brain. This article first appeared in The Boston Globe.

Economist: The Marshall Plan

             

     
The Marshall Plan

From America with love

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe By Greg Behrman Free Press; 464 pages; $27 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

SIXTY years after its birth was announced by George Marshall, a general who in 1947 was America's secretary of state, the Marshall Plan remains oddly relevant. With American foreign policy scraping rock bottom, it is a reminder of a time when the country's popularity was at an all-time high—and demonstrates that the policy of promoting democracy and a free-market economy in other parts of the world can indeed sometimes work.

Greg Behrman's book is the first comprehensive history of the Marshall Plan since the end of the cold war. In the 1950s there were triumphalist accounts of the plan's achievements: between 1947 and 1952, it helped Western Europe to recover by providing some $13 billion-worth of technical and economic aid. But in the following decades the plan came under fire, mostly from American and British historians. Revisionist writers claimed that it was purely self-interested and its success overrated. Some argued that without it America could have agreed on a post-war settlement with the Soviet Union and thus avoided the horrors of the cold war.

Mr Behrman agrees that the Marshall Plan was certainly in America's strategic interest. America needed Europe as a political ally and a trading partner able to hold its own. In the immediate post-war years Europe was neither. Communist parties in Italy, France and elsewhere went from strength to strength as people fell out of love with capitalism. And Europe had a ballooning balance-of-payment problem with the United States.

But the plan, argues Mr Behrman, was cleverly designed and its positive effect hard to overstate. In notable contrast to the ill-fated reconstruction efforts in Iraq, America's best and most capable men ran the programme in partnership with European governments. Mr Behrman claims that the plan not only helped the continent to get back on its economic feet but gave it a much-needed psychological and political boost. Europeans, with their confidence returning, went forth, multiplied and buried many a hatchet. Rising fertility and Europe's integration became the main motors of the continent's economic boom.

Academic historians tend to patronise authors like Mr Behrman who write easily and popularise history with their fluid narratives of dramatic events. Yet his book is meticulously researched. It is a celebratory work, written by someone who has become disillusioned by what is going on today. For Americans in need of a confidence booster, Mr Behrman's fond look at what he considers to have been one of America's finest hours is just the job.

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe.
By Greg Behrman.
Free Press; 464 pages; $27

                                                

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Economist: The Magazine Industry

             

     
The magazine industry

Out of vogue

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Although healthier than newspapers, consumer magazines have problems

Emily Field

Who wants to buy some magazines?

THIS week bankers have a perfect excuse to pore over pictures of scantily clad models, fast cars and film stars: Emap, a British media firm that straddles consumer magazines, radio and trade exhibitions, is up for sale, and bids are due by early October. Emap has 50 magazine titles, which produced revenues of £408m ($773m) in the year to March 2007, and its sale will attract international attention. Foreign publishers are expected to bid, as are private-equity firms. The outcome will be a timely judgment on the prospects for consumer-magazine publishers in the developed world.

In America and Europe magazine publishers have a common lament: total circulation is either flat or declining slightly as people devote more time to the internet, and an ever greater share of advertising spending is going online. Magazine units are mostly a drag on growth for their parents. Time Inc, the world's biggest magazine company, has to fend off rumours that its parent, Time Warner, will sell it. People in the industry expect that Time Warner will soon sell IPC Media, its British magazine subsidiary. In Germany publishers reckon that Bertelsmann, a media conglomerate, may sell Gruner + Jahr, its magazine unit, when its new chief executive takes over in January 2008.

“It's a long, slow sunset for ink-on-paper magazines,” says Felix Dennis, a publishing entrepreneur, “but sunsets can produce vast sums of money.” He recently sold his firm's American arm, which publishes Maxim, a racy men's magazine, to Quadrangle Capital Partners, a private-equity business, for a reported $240m.

The business model for consumer magazines is under pressure from several directions at once, both online and off. Magazines have become more expensive to launch, and the cost of attracting and keeping new subscribers has risen. In America newsstand sales have been worryingly weak, partly because supermarkets dominate distribution and shelf-space is in short supply.

The internet's popularity has hit men's titles the hardest. FHM, Emap's flagship “lads” magazine, for instance, lost a quarter of its circulation in the year to June, its lingerie-clad lovelies finding it hard to compete with online porn. Not long ago consumer magazines were Emap's prize asset, but slowing growth from the division contributed to the company's decision to put itself up for sale. Men's magazines are in trouble in most developed-world markets. In France, America and Italy, the three biggest magazine markets for Lagardère Active, part of Lagardère, a French conglomerate, men have quickly switched from magazines to online services, says Carlo d'Asaro Biondo, the division's head of international operations. “We have solved the problem in the automotive sector with new web services,” he says, “but no magazine publisher has cracked the problem as a whole yet.”

There are good reasons why magazine owners should not feel despondent, however. For readers, many of the pleasing characteristics of magazines—their portability and glossiness, for instance—cannot be matched online. And magazines are not losing younger readers in droves in the way that newspapers are. According to a study carried out last year by the digital arm of Ogilvy Group, a communications company, appetite for magazines is largely unchanged between older “baby boomers” and young “millennials”.

On the advertising side, magazines are faring much better than newspapers, which are losing big chunks of revenue as classified advertising shifts online. Advertisers like the fact that in many genres, such as fashion, readers accept and value magazine ads and even consider them part of the product.

Unfortunately, magazine publishers have been slow to get onto the internet. “Eighteen months ago the internet was something they worried about after 4pm on Friday,” says Peter Kreisky, a consultant to the media industry, “but now it's at the heart of their business model.” Meredith, a magazine publisher from the mid-west of America with old-fashioned brands such as Better Homes and Gardens, recently held an internet “boot-camp” for its executives to teach them internet basics.

To their credit, big magazine firms are doing far more than replicating their print products online. Whereas newspapers have concentrated on transferring print journalism to the internet, magazines offer people useful, fun services online—Lagardère's Car and Driver website, for instance, offers virtual test drives, and Better Homes and Gardens online has a 3D planning tool to help people redesign their homes.

Magazine firms disagree on whether to take existing brands online or try to do something new for the internet. Condé Nast believes it can cast a wider net by creating themed websites that use some magazine content but also go beyond to appeal to a bigger market. “You've got to have scale on the internet, and magazine brands can be limiting online,” says Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the firm's internet division, which runs a number of portals such as STYLE.com. Some magazine editors have objected. Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, is said to have noted the popularity of STYLE.com and asked why it couldn't be called Vogue.com. (American Vogue will in fact get its own website soon.)

Time Inc, in contrast, has stuck to its big magazine brands with People.com and with SI.com, its website for Sports Illustrated. The price, competitors say, is that Time Inc cannot do the sort of sarcastic, bitchy celebrity gossip that people like on the internet for fear of tarnishing the brand of People, and therefore cedes first place for entertainment to TMZ.com (also owned by Time Warner), which excels at it. But People.com is able to charge advertisers a premium, points out John Squires, executive vice-president of Time Inc, because of the quality of its brand. And surfers are highly engaged with People online: in June each visitor to the site looked at an average of 85 pages, compared with 13 for TMZ.com. In financial terms, says Mr Squires, People.com would now rank among the firm's most profitable monthly magazines.

The internet still brings magazine companies a fraction of what they earn in print. Publishers have found that websites are good at winning and keeping subscribers, but few pay their own way. If Emap closed down all its magazine sites tomorrow, says a publishing executive, the company would make more money. Even though magazine firms have built attractive sites, says Andreas von Buchwaldt of OC&C Strategy Consultants in Hamburg, huge independent communities on the internet have often already formed, and it is hard for magazine brands to achieve leading positions. In six countries in Europe including France and Germany, for instance, an internet-only brand, auFeminin.com, dominates the women's category.

Before the credit crunch, observers expected some or all of Emap to go to private equity. Now publishing firms are perhaps better placed to win. It is possible that no one will pay a good price for consumer magazines at the moment. That would add to the industry's gloom. But it might also encourage media conglomerates to stick at magazines and have a proper go at revamping them for the digital age.

                                                

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Marcel Marceau

In 1976, he made a cameo appearance in Mel Brooks's "Silent Movie." When Brooks asks him, in subtitle, if he is willing to appear in the film, Marceau provides the only soundtrack line in the movie, a tart, distinctly French flavored, "Non!"

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Bip

Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Bip, the world's quietest clown, died on September 22nd, older than he seemed

Camera Press

WHEN the spotlight faded on Bip last week, leaving not even a hand or a flower illuminated, it caused only a sigh of surprise. Bip had tried many times to put an end to himself. He would cut his wrists with a blade, nicking and wincing away from it, in case his copious blood gushed over his pure white sailor's trousers. He would shake out into his palm a handful of pills from a bottle, open his wide red mouth, and fail to swallow them. Stepping on a chair that wobbled under him, he would knot a noose round his scrawny neck, test it, yank it, gyrate his neck like a pigeon and step out into the void. Nothing worked. He went on living.

That he should wish to die was also not surprising. Often he was kept, crouching or standing, in a small cage on the stage. One by one he ran his hands along the bars until, with all his strength, he pushed two apart and jumped nimbly out; but then, right ahead of him, behind him, all round him, he found his palms flattening against a wall of glass. Each cage was contained in another. His hands often became birds, flickering and fluttering out of his sleeves, and he made them fly swiftly from their prisons, laughing as they flew. But the bars soon closed again round him.

Like all human beings, he dreamed; but his dreams were rarely successful. He hunted butterflies with a darting net, only to break their wings. He plucked flowers, then picked their petals out, and was surprised they died. When he tried to tame lions, they ate him, scorning the thin hoop he flourished in their direction. He walked against wind and made no progress. His black-ringed eyes and black-lined eyebrows registered sadness, wonder, perplexity and terror. But he did not know what malevolence was. He was, said the man who knew him best, a romantic, a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and “alone in a fragile world filled with injustice and beauty”.

To the naked eye Bip had only the clothes he stood up in: trousers, jacket, soft ballet shoes, striped jersey, and a crumpled opera-hat topped with a red flower. His lean limbs and white face were his only language. The spotlight played on him, and nothing else. Yet the silence around him was filled with chairs, tables, animals, trunks and escalators. It swarmed with lounging waiters, officious policemen, dog-walkers pulled to right and left of the path, old ladies knitting. Railway trains roared through, and Bip, bouncing and swaying in his seat, struggled to keep his suitcase from falling out of the rack. The sea flooded in, bringing a ship that could take Bip on his constant travels to America, to Japan and to Australia, and he staggered manfully up and down the pitching deck.

He was born, some said, in the Paris acting school in 1947, bred by Jean-Louis Barrault in “Les Enfants du Paradis” and raised at the tiny Théâtre de Poche in Montparnasse. Others made him far older, dating from the Athenian drama and the Japanese noh plays, via the commedia dell'arte and Charlie Chaplin. Parts of all this went into the making of him, as well as the imaginings of the young Marcel Marceau, in Strasbourg in the 1930s, trying on his father's long trousers and contorting his body to make his friends laugh. His name, Bip, came loosely from Dickens's “Great Expectations”. His hat, flower and sailor-costume solidified over time.

Becoming the tempest

He never spoke. Mr Marceau's father died in 1944 in Auschwitz, and Bip's silence was a tribute to all those who had been silenced in the camps. It was a recollection, too, of the necessary muteness of resistance fighters caught by the Nazis, or quietly leading children across the Swiss border to safety, as Mr Marceau had done. In one of his acts, “Bip Remembers”, the sad-faced clown relived in mime the horrors of the war and stressed the necessity of love. In another, his hands became good and evil: evil clenched and jerky, good flowing and emollient, with good just winning.

His alter ego, who promoted him as Everyman all over the world, sometimes spoke for him. “Bip”, said Mr Marceau, “is a hero of our time. His gaze is turned not only towards heaven, but into the hearts of men.” Mr Marceau compiled his biography and painted his portrait, colouring him blue, rose and mauve as he walked through the city streets and sailed among the stars. He wrote a poem for him:

A silent, fragile hand has drawn in space a white flower emptied of its blood.

Soon it will open, blossom out.

Soon, though faded, bloom again.

Mr Marceau was garrulous and gregarious where Bip was not. He ran his own mime company for almost 60 years, staging mimodrames when they were completely out of fashion, and started an international school in Paris to teach his skills to others. No mime artist could touch him. Hollywood loved him. Mr Marceau gave interviews frequently, sometimes in Bip's clothes, explaining him to the crowd: “If I do this, I feel that I am a bird. If I do this, I am a fish. And I feel that, if I do this, it's like a song...To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. Mime expresses...the soul's most secret aspiration.”

Bip simply moved on the stage, bird, fish, song, wind, tempestuously without a word, until he too became invisible.

                                                

Copyright © 2007 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

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Home > Life! > Life People > Story
Sep 24, 2007
Obituary Marcel Marceau dies at 84
The legendary master of mime and Holocaust survivor continued to perform with the same agility as he aged
MIME HERO: Marcel Marceau performing during a photo call at the Victoria Theatre before his show in Singapore in 2003 (above) and without make-up in 2005. -- ST FILE PHOTO View more photos PARIS - Marcel Marceau, who revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, has died. He was 84. Marceau, a Holocaust survivor who performed around the world, died in Paris, French media reported. His former assistant Emmanuel Vacca announced the death on France-Info radio. His daughter, Camille, said he died last Saturday evening, adding that details of the burial at Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetery would be given out later. For decades, Marceau epitomised his silent art, eliciting laughter and tears from audiences around the globe. His comic and tragic sketches appeal on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way. 'Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities,' he once said. 'If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline.' On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure in harlequin suit, striped jersey and top hat. Off stage, with the costume and the pancake make-up removed, he was a slim, agile Frenchman whose eloquent description and explanation complement his mute mastery of the art of mime. In mime, he said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. 'To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea.' Marceau created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat. He traced his ancestry back through American silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of Europe's centuries-old Commedia dell'Arte, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and the Noh plays of Japan. His lithe gestures and pliant facial expressions gave life to characters from a peevish waiter to a lion tamer to an old woman knitting. A French Jew, Marceau survived the Holocaust and worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children. He inspired countless young performers - pop star Michael Jackson borrowed his famous 'moonwalk' from a Marceau sketch, Walking Against The Wind. In one of his most poignant and philosophical acts, 'Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death', Marceau wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes. Marceau was born Marcel Mangel on March 22, 1923, in Strasbourg, France. His father, Charles, a butcher who sang baritone, introduced his son to the world of music and theatre at an early age. The boy adored the silent film stars of the era: Chaplin, Keaton and the Marx brothers. When World War II came, his father was taken hostage and was sent to Auschwitz, where he died. In 1944, Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance. He joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war. He also changed his last name to Marceau to hide his Jewish origins. When Paris was liberated, Marcel's life as a performer began. He enrolled in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art, studying with the renowned mime Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault. On a tiny stage at the Theatre de Poche, a smoke-filled Left Bank cabaret, he sought to perfect the style of mime that would become his trademark. It was in Marcel Carne's famous 1947 film starring Barrault, Les Enfants Du Paradis, that Marceau, who played Arlequin, first became known as a mime artist. He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984. A veteran of dozens of films, one of his best remembered roles was a speaking cameo in Silent Movie, made by director Mel Brooks. As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level. On top of his Legion of Honor and honorary degrees, he was invited to be a United Nations goodwill ambassador for a 2002 conference on ageing. 'If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on,' he said in an interview in 2003. 'You have to keep working.' Married three times, Marceau leaves behind two daughters and two sons. AP, Reuters   'To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea' Marcel Marceau on his craft

Home > Life! > Life People > Story
Sep 24, 2007
Milestones
Marcel Marceau created the figure of Bip, a melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984 A veteran of dozens of films that helped make him a household name across the globe, he is best remembered for his speaking cameo in Silent Movie, made by director Mel Brooks Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher When World War II came, his f