Surry Hills is city's hot spot of creativity, GPS study reveals.

Surry Hills is a Mecca to Sydney's artists.

That's the preliminary findings of a study that ''tagged'' a group of designers with satellite technology and tracked their movements around Sydney, in an attempt to find out where the people who fuel Sydney's creative economy live, work and play.

Fifteen designers wore small GPS tracking devices, similar to the ones used in cars, for several days, which recorded their location every five seconds.

While the fact that almost everyone in the first group of 15 visited the inner-city artistic hub of Surry Hills will come as little surprise, the study found other areas like the lower north shore or south-west rated strongly, too.

The results, said the head of the study, Wollongong University's Professor Chris Gibson, suggest state and local governments may need to rethink where public galleries, artists' studios and other pieces of ''creative infrastructure'' are located in the future.

''The story that we're getting is that there is a more complex geography to their activities than you might expect,'' he said.

''It tells different councils that they're part of the creative economy … incubating the creative industry should not just be left to the City of Sydney or Marrickville Council.''

Designer Simeon King, who admitted he was probably ''a stereotype'' because he lives in Glebe and works in Surry Hills, was one of the participants in the study. He said he would consider moving further west in Sydney if the cultural activities and spaces were there to support the arts.

''You need to move some of the critical cultural infrastructure out there,'' he said. ''Otherwise there is always going to be this magnetism towards the inner city.''

The findings of the pilot study, called Catch and Release, were presented as part of the Creative Sydney program at the Vivid festival on Saturday.

Urban planner Rod Simpson told the audience former industrial areas such as Surry Hills and Newtown were once natural homes for the creative industries because of their mix of cheap, dense housing, small warehouses and bustling, cosmopolitan main streets.

The Catch and Release project will tag the movements of several other creative industries in the coming months.

Pizza cooked with wood from coffins

Italian prosecutors believe pizza in the southern city of Naples may be baked in ovens lit with wood from coffins dug up in the local cemetery, Italian daily Il Giornale reports.

"Pizza, one of the few symbols of Naples that endures ... is hit by the concrete suspicion that it could be baked with wood from coffins," Il Giornale said on Monday.

Investigators in Naples are setting their sights on the thousands of small, lower-end pizza shops and bakeries that dot the city on suspicion that the owners may "use wood from caskets to keep ovens burning".

Naples's graveyard has long been a hunting ground for thieves: last year, 5000 flower pots were stolen from the cemetery.

"A gang might have set up a market for coffins sold to hard-hearted owners of bakeries and pizzerias looking to save money on wood," Il Giornale said.

According to tradition, Neapolitan pizza should be cooked in a stone oven with an oak-wood fire.

Neapolitan pizza was invented between 1715 and 1725, with the world-famous Margherita variant first cooked up in 1889.

Tradition has it that queen Margherita of Savoy asked one of Naples's famed pizzaioli to come up with a dish for the people.

The result, which provides the basis for most pizzas enjoyed around the world, represented the colours of recently unified Italy: green basil, white mozzarella and red tomatoes.

Italy's estimated 25,000 pizzerias employ about 150,000 people and account for a turnover of €5.3 billion (7.4 billion).

Starving yogi 'blessed by goddess' astounds doctors

An 83-year-old Indian holy man who says he has spent seven decades without food or water has astounded a team of military doctors who studied him during a two-week observation period.

Prahlad Jani spent a fortnight in a hospital in the western India state of Gujarat under constant surveillance from a team of 30 medics equipped with cameras and closed circuit television.

During the period, he neither ate nor drank and did not go to the toilet.

"We still do not know how he survives," neurologist Sudhir Shah told reporters after the end of the experiment.

"It is still a mystery what kind of phenomenon this is."

The long-haired and bearded yogi was sealed in a hospital in the city of Ahmedabad in a study initiated by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state defence and military research institute.

The DRDO hopes that the findings, set to be released in greater detail in several months, could help soldiers survive without food and drink, assist astronauts or even save the lives of people trapped in natural disasters.

"(Jani's) only contact with any kind of fluid was during gargling and bathing periodically during the period," G. Ilavazahagan, director of India's Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), said in a statement.

Jani has since returned to his village near Ambaji in northern Gujarat where he will resume his routine of yoga and meditation. He says that he was blessed by a goddess at a young age, which gave him special powers.

During the 15-day observation, which ended on Thursday, the doctors took scans of Jani's organs, brain, and blood vessels, as well as doing tests on his heart, lungs and memory capacity.

"The reports were all in the pre-determined safety range through the observation period," Shah told reporters at a press conference last week.

Other results from DNA analysis, molecular biological studies and tests on his hormones, enzymes, energy metabolism and genes will take months to come through.

"If Jani does not derive energy from food and water, he must be doing that from energy sources around him, sunlight being one," said Shah.

"As medical practitioners we cannot shut our eyes to possibilities, to a source of energy other than calories."

AFP


Inedia (Latin: "fasting") is the alleged ability to live without food.

2020 vision: A day in your life in 10 years time

It Is 2020, iPhones appear ancient and Tweeting seems as old-fashioned as sending a fax.

As we start one new decade, the science experts at BBC Focus magazine have revealed how technological advances will be shaping our lives as the next one comes into play.

So sit back and prepare to be amazed by a day in your life in 10 years' time...

6:45am

Your alarm clock goes off 15 minutes early because it is linked to the internet, and traffic reports predict delays due to a train strike.

The internet radio station streams the same music to every listener, but the HomeDJ service means that news, traffic and weather are local to you, and can be customised to provide the level of detail you want.

When you leave home, you carry on listening in your car - the first internet car radio was showcased at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas back in 2009.

GPS data automatically selects the most relevant traffic news stream for you and updates your sat-nav.

7:45am

For breakfast, you grab an apple from a FrootStore bag. This is a plastic bag from the supermarket impregnated with a compound that inhibits ethylene, the naturally produced gas compound that encourages fruit to ripen.

The FrootStore holds everything from apples to avocados in a preripe condition. When you want to eat them, you take them out and put them in a FrootRipe bag, which emits ethylene, for a few hours.

It means every apple is in perfect condition when you bite into it, so there is much less waste.

And the core goes into a back door composter. By opting for a two-thirds size wheelie bin, you have saved 20% on your council tax bill.

7:50am

Your journey to work is by car - the public transport infrastructure hasn't improved much in the last decade.

It's now almost impossible to buy a new car that isn't a hybrid, uses regenerative braking (which charges the battery as you brake) and smart idling (it cuts the engine if you stop for more than a few seconds).

The hybrid revolution started with the Toyota Prius back in 1997. A report published in 2009 predicted that 35% of cars made in 2025 will be electric - 25% will be hybrids and 10% purely electric.

Service stations now have fastcharge points. But it's bad news if you still have an old gas-guzzler - rumour has it petrol could soon break the £4.50 per litre barrier.

9am

Fewer people spend all their working day in an office now, with many companies ditching call centres for distributed Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems.

Calls are routed to individual operators around the country via internet data lines, meaning that many of us can work from home, with flexible working hours.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics in 2005 showed how workers had already started migrating out of the office.

Back then, 3.1 million Brits worked mainly from home, up from 2.3 million in 1997.

You've driven into town today for a meeting with your project team at a coffee shop - a venue that has become an increasingly important part of working life.


Many cafes are now making clever use of acoustic materials that make the music loud in the public areas but quieter in the discreet booths.

This makes it easier to talk in the booths, and harder for others to eavesdrop on confidential conversations.

3pm

You spend all afternoon trying to get a copy of a controversial biography of the Chinese premier, hard copies of which were banned outright in China.

The electronic version you downloaded won't play and the web filter in the cafe's Wi-Fi connection is blocking forums discussing China's censorship of the world wide web. As China's economy has grown over the past decade, its attempts to control the internet have become more sophisticated.

Filters that block content the superpower objects to are being installed in applications and even hardware.

Eventually you send a carefully-worded email that finds its way past the filters to a colleague in Finland who sends you a link to a file-sharing website. It might work - once you get home.

5pm

On the way home you stop off at a pharmacy to pick up a FluCheck which you use to swab the inside of your nose. The single-use device detects the pres-ence of antigens on flu virus particles.

It takes just 20 minutes for the "lab-on-a-chip" to give you a result.

Back in 2009, to diagnose something like swine flu required a sample being sent off to a lab. But in 2020 super-fast diagnoses are common for lots of conditions, including prostate cancer, hepatitis, TB and diabetes.

6:30pm

All the checkouts at your local supermarket are self-service, apart from one "assisted checkout", intended for customers with disabilities, which is manned on demand. Back in 2009, a Tesco store in Northampton became the first completely self-service supermarket.

Most food is now labelled with "food miles" - some products even have a "carbon foodprint" indicating the total carbon emitted during both production and transportation.

6:45pm

Dinner is Bosnian meatballs with kljukusa because Jamie Oliver is currently touring Central Europe for his latest video podcast.

Several broadcasters now transmit programmes simultaneously through the aerial and the internet. Commercial TV revenues continue to fall as fewer people are prepared to sit through live adverts any more.

The line between the internet and TV began to blur in 2009, when the number of videos watched online increased by 47% in a year.

7:30pm

You check your LifeSaver account, which has all the audio and video you uploaded today, recorded by a camera built into your glasses. LifeSaver picks out the most significant moments and sends out a video stream to everyone signed up to receive them.

Lord Stephen Fry has three hours of LifeSaver video for today - or you can catch the weekly summary on the Celebrity LifePeeks website. You also catch up on today's news on your e-reader.

11pm

As you snuggle down in bed, your iPillow plays the next chapter of your current audiobook through flat speakers embedded inside it. The pillow also adjusts the volume based on your activity and posture - it even switches to gentle music when it senses you are nearly asleep.

11:30pm

As you sleep, wind and wave power supply electricity to the National Grid. Some of this pumps water into reservoirs in the recently opened hydroelectric power stations in Scotland, proposed in 2009. Tomorrow, this water will feed electricity into the National Grid when everyone switches on their kettles and toasters.

Combined with the photovoltaic cells you installed on your roof three years ago, more than 15% of your electricity now comes from green sources.

Thanks to your smart meter you can keep tabs on your total electricity consumption - having the TV on standby is a thing of the past.

Life in 2020

The future of "ubiquitous computing" has been heralded for decades. It sounds grandiose-computing, everywhere!-but ironically, a future of ubiquitous computing is one where computers actually go unnoticed. That's 2020. It is when Nicholas Negroponte's assertion in 1995 of "being digital" switches to "been digital" because we will have been there and done that. Kids who have grown up stealing free views of recent movie releases online or regularly chatting with a friend in Bangalore or Atlanta will be working adults in a world where the notion of "work" has changed because of digital technology. But it's no longer "technology" in 2020 anymore-it's just how we get things done.


Consider attempts by schools to quell mobile phone usage in the classroom. In many parts of Asia, where the mobile phone took hold sooner than in the US, schools have given up. To a student in Hong Kong, their mobile phone is as vital as the beating of their heart. The word "mobile" means your world can all "go" with you, and by 2020 it will be too hard to imagine going without. We won't carry today's angst of feeling tied to our mobile devices in an apologetic sort of way. Instead, it will be the accepted norm, an innate part of daily life, and will vanish within our collective consciousness.


But if technology and the ability to be connected disappear further into the background, what will occupy our foreground? A bit of the humanity we've always valued in the "real world." Legislators who are currently fixated on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education as the key to innovation will realise that STEM needs some STEAM-some art in the equation. We'll witness a return to the integrity of craft, the humanity of authorship, and the rebalancing of our virtual and physical spaces. We'll see a 21st-century renaissance in arts- and design-centered approaches to making things, where you-the individual-will take centre stage in culture and commerce.

The software industry is poised to embrace its craft heritage. By 2020 software will return to a cottage industry, with bespoke applications made by many, rather than today's industrialised, Microsoft-esque mass-production and distribution model. It will be part of a larger world movement to make things by hand, infused with emotion and integrity. This phenomenon is already becoming visible in the rise of the "apps" market for mobile phones. With few dominant players and close-to-zero distribution costs, practically anyone can "ship" an app on the iPhone, Android or BlackBerry. These apps are often built with care and attention to the design that big companies' offerings lack. Look at the exquisite quality made by game companies like Iconfactory; or the many iPhone apps like ToonPaint that focus on letting users make "hand-crafted" creative content on their phones.


Rather than be content to accept corporate anonymity, we will rediscover the value of authorship. In 2020 technology will continue to enable individual makers to operate in the same way that once only large corporations could do. Witness the growth of individuals as "brands-of-one" in the social media space, broadcasting their news in the same fashion as major media outlets, or in software apps marketplaces, where "Bob Schula" can hawk his wares right next to "Adobe Systems," and it's just as easy to buy hand-stenciled napkins from a seller on Etsy as it is to buy them from Crate & Barrel. You might say it is a return to learning to trust individuals again, instead of relying on an indirect connection to a product through trust in its brand. Certainly our trust in those brands is already being tested right now.

Digital metaphors will reconnect to their original physical sources as a way to recapture what has been lost in translation. A creative director friend of mine recently commented how he noticed that younger designers were absolutely captivated when he used tracing paper in layers to develop a concept over an existing printed photograph. They commented to him, "Wow! That's so fast. I could never make those layers in Photoshop so quickly." Today we fill folders on our computer desktop to the brim with absolutely no sense of scale, no notion of what is a "full" or "less full" folder. They may be more easily searched, but there's a reason why paper-based systems comfort us so well with their tacit communication of what is more vs. what is less. Unable to let this go, we will see many new designs that best leverage what is good in virtual with what is good in the physical world. The subtleties and greyness that we can so easily grasp off the screen will make their way on to it.

The last 20 years have been so full of technological change that technology and the digital world has become the dominant narrative in our consumer culture. Educators, legislators, futurists and social scientists can't help but fixate on it. As we become more accustomed to it, happily, some breathing room will open up for a different conversation about what we want back in our lives.

So, what will take technology's place? It begins with art, design and you: Products and culture that are made by many individuals, made by hand, made well, made by people we trust, and made to capture some of the nuances and imperfections that we treasure in the physical world.