Business Blog

19 April 2013 Last updated at 18:04 ET By Kevin Peachey Personal finance reporter, BBC News

The UK shivered its way through the second coldest March on record. So there has been little motivation for gardeners to fetch the tools out of the shed and start digging and planting in their beds and borders.

As a result, staff at some garden centres have given gloomy reports of custom so far this year.

Tammy Woodhouse, of the Millbrook Garden Centre in Gravesend, Kent, says that typically half their sales for the year come in March, April and May. This year, takings are 35% down on the norm.

"It has been tough," says Mrs Woodhouse, a spokeswoman for the Garden Centre Association.

Bargains

For many garden centres and growers, the bad weather has led them to throw stock away.

In the short term, that could mean bargains for gardeners, with items heavily discounted before being dumped.

Primroses are being sold for 99p and pansies are being offered at knockdown prices.

"Some plants have had to be thrown away. They've been affected by the cold and by the frost, and they have been damaged too much," says Mrs Woodhouse.

"Some prices are coming down. There are discounts to be had. We'll always discount before we throw away, and some of the suppliers are offering us discounted products just to make space."

But in the long term, Mrs Woodhouse warns that prices could go up and some garden centres and growers could be pushed out of business.

Her parents started in the business 35 years ago, and now have three centres, but the family say this is the worst start to the season that they can remember.

Like many other centres, they have been relying on alternative sales, such as gifts and refreshments, and are hoping for a good summer.

Gardens network

Gardeners may face the threat of rocketing prices in the long term, but they are already used to seeing costs rise steadily.

Official figures show that the cost of gardens, plants and flowers rose by 0.6% in March, compared with a year ago, typical of much of the past year.

The good news for gardeners is that this remains lower than the overall inflation rate - the rising cost of all good and services - which stood at 2.8% in March.

And the Office for National Statistics data shows that the cost of tools and equipment for the home and garden has actually fallen, down 1.9% in March compared with a year earlier.

Community spirit

Many groups of enthusiasts who get green-fingered on a strict budget can be found in the network of community gardens across the UK.

Often funded with the help of local authority grants and run by volunteers, they are designed to improve the wellbeing of residents in low-income areas.

And those involved hope the low costs mean that things look healthy for their finances too.

The Coplow Street Community Garden in Ladywood, Birmingham, has 26 plots where members of the 500-household community can grow fruit and vegetables.

The site was transformed from old garages on the estate in 2009, and began with some soil-filled builders' bags.

For a membership fee of £10 a year, residents now get a small custom-built bed to grow their produce, and access to seeds and plants at cost price.

Co-ordinator Chris Blythe, part of the North Summerfield Residents Association, says it is terrific way to build community spirit as well as encouraging the grow-your-own culture.

It also gives a chance to people living in flats, or with only small yards, to get outside with their families and involved in affordable gardening.

"It is an inner-city area. This is a great way for people to just have a small space to grow vegetables and fruit to benefit their health and their family," he says.

There are also social events and educational days organised by the group.

"It is a great way of getting involved in gardening. It is not just about growing, but getting people together as a community and supporting each other," he says.

Plant tips

For others with access to a little space, but without much money to spend, what are the top tips for gardening on a budget?

Alys Fowler has written a number of books on gardening and has presented Gardeners' World on BBC Television.

She says it is vital not to start too quickly.

"Go to lots of car boot sales. You can get fantastically good old tools. They will be really well made and you can pick them up for about a fiver," she says.

"You just need a spade, a fork, a hand trowel, a hoe and a rake. That will be all that you need. You don't have to get everything out there."

Other gardeners are often generous with cuttings and some vital equipment, ranging from plastic to bricks for the garden, are simply discarded by other people, she says.

But one item that is worth investing some funds in, she says, is good soil.

"If I was going to spend money anywhere, I would spend it on the best-quality compost that I can buy. For everything else, just use the cheapest seed trays, recycle all the labels. I make my own out of lollypop sticks," she says.

So those inspired to get out in the garden, to an allotment, or to their local community plot, may find it is easier than they think to control the budget.

It is just a shame that the same cannot be done with the weather.

19 April 2013 Last updated at 18:32 ET By Alex Hudson BBC Click

With new devices allowing two photos a minute to be taken automatically, critics warn that over-sharing could be mean people become unwitting subjects of surveillance.

"People are using more and more technology and hardware devices to track their lives," says Martin Kallstrom, co-founder and CEO of Memoto.

His company has produced a device which clips onto clothing and automatically takes geotagged photos two times a minute, producing around four gigabytes over an active 24-hour period.

If worn for 12 hours each day, that is 10,000 photos a week.

"Lifelogging", as it is known, means that entire lives are becoming not just a series of memories but a series of photos, videos, tweets and status updates.

Though people share some strange things online.

"Um serious question! I'm doing my taxes how do I claim my cat as a dependent?!?!?!?!?! I need to know by tonight!"

Photographic memory

The phrase "information overload" has been overloaded into articles fearing the worst - about the death of privacy, of personal security, of remaining anonymous or even being able to find anything worth viewing.

But some businesses are capitalising on the fact that people now want every special moment to be recorded so it will never be lost.

Microsoft is already selling a device called SenseCam which takes photos every 30 seconds in a similar way.

The list goes on with Google Glass for video that can be streamed along with photos, Twitter for instant written updates and a large number of others for nearly everything that could be thought of.

But the small size of Memoto has caught the imagination even before its launch.

Promoted as a "searchable and shareable photographic memory", it raised money using the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.

In a bid for $50,000, they raised $550,000 (£360,000). It seems like having an "always-on" attitude to photography intrigues a large number of people.

Could it be that too much information for some is just enough for others?

"Memoto is something on the frontier right now and it will take a couple of years before there is any mainstream potential for it," says Mr Kallstrom.

"People will find what is the appropriate level for themselves. Some people take a large number of photos and keep them for family and close friends. Some want to share it with everyone."

The photo is taken, stored online and only shared when the user chooses the photos to make more public, reducing the risk of anything regrettable appearing online.

TMI?

Attitudes towards sharing have definitely shifted since the advent of social media. But what is so bad about being public if it just your friends reading it?

"We're now at a moment where mass observation is a global phenomenon," says Henry Jenkins, a media scholar at the University of Southern California.

"We are recording aspects of our lives for each other, and God knows what the next generation of historians would be able to do with the sheer number of pieces of data we've collected through lifelogging and these other phenomena.

"We've seen our culture become more exhibitionistic but we've also seen people become more uncomfortable with too much information. That's the tension that we're going to see playing out over the next decade."

If on Facebook you share posts with friends of friends, an average of over 150,000 people can read it, according to Pew Research Center.

Around 25% of people on Facebook do not make use of the privacy settings at all.

"You can choose to broadcast your life but the bystanders around you don't choose," says Sarah Downey, analyst at the online privacy group Abine.

"The disconnect is that you're wearing these sorts of technology, you end up being a vector for surveillance. Everyone around you is your unwitting subject."

Continuing with the theme of overload, rarely a new way to share content launches without some reference to the principles of George Orwell's Big Brother.

As a proof of how prevalent and how easy it is to be Big Brother now, I searched for an 18-year-old picked at random from a Twitter search.

Within an hour, using only information in the public domain, I had his home phone number, postcode, school he attended, views on gender discrimination, his approach to casual homophobia - even golf handicap and the club at which he plays.

Nearly half of teenagers questioned in a BBC survey said they had or knew someone who shared something online they later regretted. Of those "oversharing", one third thought it damaged their reputation.

But there are a number of positives of recording what is happening around you.

"When someone in a position of power can select certain material from a surveillance camera, the selection they make can be incriminating but you can still be innocent," says Mr Kallstrom.

"There is a movement called 'sousveillance', which instead of government watching from above, people are watching from below."

This means offering a personal viewpoint instead of just what people are shown by traditional sources. This is shown from recent big events where thousands of photos were recorded.

What this could mean though, privacy advocates believe, is that what is recorded changes because people know they are being watched.

"You can live forever through your digital records and through your online footprint," says Ms Downey.

"Everybody wants to live forever. You can do that very easily now through data.

"Without privacy, you can't live a full explorative, uncensored life, the kind of life you should be able to live. People act differently when they know they're being watched. You check and censor yourself."

But it is the moment that would have been lost that Memoto are hoping people will cherish the most.

It's the thing you didn't realise at the time was important that could become the most significant.

"Months after it happened, you realise you met a person some time ago, you can look it up and remember it," says Kallstrom.

"It might be someone you met and maybe now in a relationship with. These photos would never be taken otherwise."

For more technology features, visit the BBC Click website.

19 April 2013 Last updated at 18:24 ET By Bob Howard Reporter, Fast Track

The classic sounds of Los Endos by Steve Hackett, formerly of Genesis, and Close to the Edge by Yes pound out from the stage as musicians who made their names selling millions of albums back in the 70s play in front of their adoring fans.

"Phenomenal," said Terry, from Ontario, who loved what he saw and heard. "Rub shoulders with a few celebrities, see them perform up close. You can't buy those tickets nowadays."

But this is a concert with a difference. Musicians and fans are all on board the 3,000-passenger cruise ship Poesia for a five-night rock cruise through the Caribbean.

The fans are being enticed on board by the lure of sharing a trip with musicians from a number of veteran British rock bands.

This year, musicians from the Moody Blues, Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer have all played concerts on cruises from Fort Lauderdale in Florida to the Caribbean.

The last of the series was called Cruise to the Edge - echoing the title of the celebrated 1972 Yes album, Close to the Edge.

Between performances, the ship called in at Grand Cayman and Ocho Rios in Jamaica, giving the fans and stars a chance to explore ashore.

Meeting the musicians

The gigs have attracted prog rock fans from all over the world. They have each paid from about $800 to several thousand to be on board.

For this they get five nights of concerts in an intimate setting, along with special events for those fans who buy a VIP package.

These include meet-and-greets, where they get a photo with one of their heroes and a chance to hear rock stars talk about the inspiration for their music.

On board is Scott Richards, a psychiatrist from southern California. He has seen Yes in concert more than 100 times already and this experience alone must have cost him several thousand dollars as he opted for the VIP package.

Prog rock fans are not normally known for dancing but Dr Richards was so entranced by the occasion that he stood up to whirl along to the music.

The cruising experience was clearly new to many of the musicians. The guitarist playing with drummer Carl Palmer was unsure if the giant food plates provided for passengers were in fact trays.

'Cruising with their band'

Being on a cruise ship threw up its own musical challenges. A massive ridge of low pressure that had settled south of Florida meant stormy weather and rough seas.

On some nights, anything not taped down on stage, including the performers, was in danger of sliding back and forth precariously.

Yes guitarist Steve Howe was less than amused to see his slide guitar continuously sliding across the stage, though a few nights later he was able to see the funny side.

Most of the bands on board played two concerts, varying the set list so passengers did not see exactly the same performance twice.

Drummer Carl Palmer, of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, says the idea of playing on a cruise had obvious attractions for the fans and the musicians.

"They're on holiday, cruising with their favourite band. That's what they get out of it. There we are in the morning and you can see us having breakfast."

The stars also benefit from the sale on board of merchandising, such as T-shirts, CDs and DVDs. Palmer was also showing to prospective buyers works of art he had helped create.

Star experiences

One night the former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett was woken by the sound of his TV falling off its arm and crashing to the floor. Jokes followed about stars in their 60s now being too old to trash their hotel rooms.

Hackett said that in the past he would very much have guarded his privacy but on experiences like these he accepted he was effectively public property.

Fans regularly asked him for pictures and photos during breakfast in the buffet restaurant.

Lee Donovan, from Pittsburgh, believes the price of his cruise ticket was money well spent.

"I'd never taken a cruise before. I honestly think the concept of the theme cruise is really something which will catch on.

"Your friends would never believe you're eating 10ft away from Steve Hackett from Genesis."

These niche cruises are helping to maintain growth in the sector. The industry says it has averaged about 7% per annum in recent years.

Globally, about 20 million people go on a cruise every year, with the majority of passengers coming from North America.

William Tatham, vice-president of cruise shipping and marina operations at the Port Authority of Jamaica, says cruise lines and charter companies have been aware for some time that there is money to be made from catering to customers' interests.

"They've continued to be innovative and reinvent their product, being able to go from general cruising to be able to now start focusing on the interests of their passengers."

Industry innovation

Michael Vanderbeek, business development director for Port Everglades in Florida, one of the busiest cruise ports in the world, agrees that the customers are now being given a choice of cruises that may be targeted at their interests.

"There's really a niche market for everyone."

"If you're into music, there's jazz and rock. Dancing with the Stars also appears on sea cruises, and you have culinary cruises and sports - baseball, football, soccer."

Larry Morand, from the company On The Blue, produced the Cruise to the Edge. He also helped organise this year's Monsters of Rock and Moody Blues cruises, which also started at Fort Lauderdale.

He is confident that prog rock fans will want to repeat the experience.

"I think it will help rejuvenate the progressive rock style of music. We'll be back on next year in April 2014."

19 April 2013 Last updated at 19:53 ET By Ruth Alexander BBC News

This week, economists have been astonished to find that a famous academic paper often used to make the case for austerity cuts contains major errors. Another surprise is that the mistakes, by two eminent Harvard professors, were spotted by a student.

It's 4 January 2010, the Marriott Hotel in Atlanta. At the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Professor Carmen Reinhart and the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Ken Rogoff, are presenting a research paper called Growth in a Time of Debt.

At a time of economic crisis, their finding resonates - economic growth slows dramatically when the size of a country's debt rises above 90% of Gross Domestic Product, the overall size of the economy.

Word about this paper spread. Policymakers wanted to know more.

And so did student Thomas Herndon. His professors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst had set his graduate class an assignment - pick an economics paper and see if you can replicate the results. It's a good exercise for aspiring researchers.

Thomas chose Growth in a Time of Debt. It was getting a lot of attention, but intuitively, he says, he was dubious about its findings.

Some key figures tackling the global recession found this paper a useful addition to the debate at the heart of which is this key question: is it best to let debt increase in the hope of stimulating economic growth to get out of the slump, or is it better to cut spending and raise taxes aggressively to get public debt under control?

EU commissioner Olli Rehn and influential US Republican politician Paul Ryan have both quoted a 90% debt-to-GDP limit to support their austerity strategies.

But while US politicians were arguing over whether to inject more stimulus into the economy, the euro was creaking under the strain of forced austerity, and a new coalition government in the UK was promising to raise taxes and cut spending to get the economy under control - Thomas Herndon's homework assignment wasn't going well.

No matter how he tried, he just couldn't replicate Reinhart and Rogoff's results.

"My heart sank," he says. "I thought I had likely made a gross error. Because I'm a student the odds were I'd made the mistake, not the well-known Harvard professors."

His professors were also sure he must be doing something wrong.

"I remember I had a meeting with my professor, Michael Ash, where he basically said, 'Come on, Tom, this isn't too hard - you just gotta go sort this out.'"

So Herndon checked his work, and checked again.

By the end of the semester, when he still hadn't cracked the puzzle, his supervisors realised something was up.

"We had this puzzle that we were unable to replicate the results that Reinhart-Rogoff published," Prof Ash, says. "And that really got under our skin. That was really a mystery for us."

So Ash and his colleague Prof Robert Pollin encouraged Herndon to continue the project and to write to the Harvard professors. After some correspondence, Reinhart and Rogoff provided Thomas with the actual working spreadsheet they'd used to obtain their results.

"Everyone says seeing is believing, but I almost didn't believe my eyes," he says.

Thomas called his girlfriend over to check his eyes weren't deceiving him.

But no, he was correct - he'd spotted a basic error in the spreadsheet. The Harvard professors had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation (of average GDP growth in countries with high public debt).

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark were missing.

Oops.

Herndon and his professors found other issues with Growth in a Time of Debt, which had an even bigger impact on the famous result. The first was the fact that for some countries, some data was missing altogether.

Reinhart and Rogoff say that they were assembling the data series bit by bit, and at the time they presented the paper for the American Economic Association conference, good quality data on post-war Canada, Australia and New Zealand simply weren't available. Nevertheless, the omission made a substantial difference.

Thomas and his supervisors also didn't like the way that Reinhart and Rogoff averaged their data. They say one bad year for a small country like New Zealand, was blown out of proportion because it was given the same weight as, for example, the UK's nearly 20 years with high public debt.

"New Zealand's single year, 1951, at -8% growth is held up with the same weight as Britain's nearly 20 years in the high public debt category at 2.5% growth," Michael Ash says.

"I think that's a mistaken way to examine these data."

There's no black and white here, because there are also downsides to the obvious alternatives. But still, it's controversial and it, too, made a big difference.

All these results were published by Thomas Herndon and his professors on 15 April, as a draft working paper. They find that high levels of debt are still correlated with lower growth - but the most spectacular results from the Reinhart and Rogoff paper disappear. High debt is correlated with somewhat lower growth, but the relationship is much gentler and there are lots of exceptions to the rule.

Reinhart and Rogoff weren't available to be interviewed, but they did provide the BBC with a statement.

In it, they said: "We are grateful to Herndon et al. for the careful attention to our original Growth in a Time of Debt AER paper and for pointing out an important correction to Figure 2 of that paper. It is sobering that such an error slipped into one of our papers despite our best efforts to be consistently careful. We will redouble our efforts to avoid such errors in the future. We do not, however, believe this regrettable slip affects in any significant way the central message of the paper or that in our subsequent work."

Accidents do happen, and science progresses through the identification of previous mistakes. But was this a particularly expensive mistake?

"I don't think jobs were destroyed because of this but it provides an intellectual rationalisation for things that affect how people think about the world," says Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London.

"And how people think about the world, especially politicians, eventually affects how the world works."

Discovering a spreadsheet error was never going to end the debate over austerity - and nor should it, according to Megan McArdle, special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

"There is other research showing that you can have these slowdowns when you get to high levels of debt," she says. "We have a very vivid [example] in Greece."

Thomas Herndon 's view is that austerity policies are counter-productive. But right now he's delighted that the first academic paper he's ever published has made such a splash.

"I feel really honoured to have made a contribution to the policy discussion," he says.

19 April 2013 Last updated at 20:17 ET

The pre-historic stones of Stonehenge are to be cared for by a general manager for the first time.

English Heritage says it needs "a dynamic and inspirational leader" to look after the site in Wiltshire.

Duties for the £65,000-a-year job include leading the Wiltshire monument's 180 staff and volunteers and liaising with druid leaders.

Other responsibilities include overseeing arrangements for summer and winter solstices.

'Brightest and best'

English Heritage's Tim Reeve said it was "important to ensure we keep the dignity of the stones".

"You could be up at the stones one minute, in outdoor garb trying to help visitors, then you can be back in a state-of-the-art visitors' centre," he added.

"The next time you could be in a suit, representing our site."

He said it was also important to make sure "solstice celebrations aren't in some way compromising the mystery and integrity of the stones".

English Heritage has called for only "the brightest and best" candidates to apply for the position.

The closing date for applications is 5 May.

Meanwhile, an excavation by volunteers on a shoestring budget has shown that the site of Stonehenge was a settlement 3,000 years before it was built.

19 April 2013 Last updated at 11:11 ET By Helen Bushby BBC entertainment and arts reporter

Fourteen pilot shows - including Alpha House and Zombieland - are to be put to the public vote on Lovefilm and Amazon.com.

Viewers can submit feedback influencing which shows get made into full series.

The 14 shows are made by independent production companies and produced by Amazon Studios, the film and series production arm of Amazon.

"This is the first time Amazon Studios has done this," said Simon Morris, Lovefilm's chief marketing officer.

Eight adult comedies and six children's animation series will be put to the public vote.

The shows will be aired on Amazon's pay subscription services - Amazon Prime in the US, and Lovefilm in the UK - but Morris told the BBC they would be available to everyone and not just subscribers.

The adult pilot shows include Alpha House, about four senators who live together in a rented house in Washington DC and stars John Goodman, who was recently in Oscar-winning film Argo.

"Bill Murray has got a cameo in Alpha House, looking a bit older, a little bit more bedraggled, but definitely Bill Murray," Mr Morris added.

Onion News Empire is set behind the scenes of the Onion News Network, a satirical daily news service, and "shows just how far journalists will go to stay at the top of their game", according to Amazon Studios.

It stars Arrested Development's Jeffrey Tambor as the "egomaniacal lead anchor".

Musical comedy Browsers stars Cheers and Frasier actress Bebe Neuwirth as the "terrifying" boss of a news website in Manhattan.

Other pilot shows include Zombieland - based on the film of the same name - featuring four survivors attempting to outwit zombies, while animated comedy Dark Minions, written by Big Bang Theory's Kevin Sussman and John Ross Bowie, is about two "slackers" working on an intergalactic warship.

The children's shows include animations Sara Solves It, where Sara and Sam solve maths-based mysteries, and Creative Galaxy, an interactive art adventure series.

"This isn't X Factor for some new titles where you get to vote and they're fairly gimmicky," Mr Morris said. "It has a unique position in the world in that it has a platform that's a pay platform, it has an entertainment platform."

He said that the "world of digital has been growing, driven in large part by the BBC iPlayer, from about 2008" and that he saw this move as the next stage.

"Mass-market digital consumption and streaming have come of age in the last few years," he added.

'Promotional tool'

But Toby Syfret, TV analyst for Enders Analysis, was sceptical about the venture, describing it as a "gimmick" and said he did not think it would make much of a dent in the TV landscape.

"I think the success of this will have a huge amount to do with the publicity they can get for it."

Amazon and Lovefilm were able to put pilots to the public vote because "they are not TV channels with set budgets", he said, adding that "you cannot sustain a programming operation if you let viewers decide - you're losing control of the purse strings".

He also queried whether programme-makers would want the public vote to potentially leave them "committed to the most expensive thing which is least good".

"Programme makers may end up saying 'we'll go with it, but it's a bit expensive so we'll cut the budget' - and then you've done what the public's asked but it's been slashed by half," he added.

"Ultimately, this is a promotional tool - Amazon's thinking that Netflix has done it this way [by broadcasting Kevin Spacey's House of Cards drama series] so we'll come at it from another way."

Earlier this year, the streaming TV and movie service Netflix made and broadcast House of Cards, and revealed plans to make at least five new shows a year.

YouTube, owned by Google, also recently launched its original channels initiative with 20 new channels coming from the UK.

Mr Morris said that the key thing that marked his venture out was that "the platform is open".

"Not everyone has the opportunity to go and pitch an idea to HBO in New York, not everyone can get on a plane to Cannes and pitch a script," he said.

"But there is now a vehicle whereby people are in a place that independent writers - whether they've got a track record or not - can put content through and it can be evaluated and brought to market. And that's the exciting thing about this."