Knife crime is endemic in the UK, at least according to our media. Scotland has a particular problem with this, which is why the police there are field-testing kevlar-armoured metal-detecting gloves. The idea being that they can be used to scan a suspect for concealed knives without the need for a separate gadget, and protect the wearer should a knife be present (and its bearer willing to use it). Fellow body-piercing afficionados may want to get their disclaimers prepared in advance…

As a kid, I would frequently compose soundtracks to accompany the scenery that flashed by my window in one of the many interminable car trips we used to take. LocoSound proposes a similar experience, music composed to match the scenery of a specific train voyage and broadcast over low power FM radio to the denizens of a single car.

How do you reconcile a humanitarian need (vaccines for diseases that effect millions in the developing world) with the necessary exigincies of the free market (people in the developing world can’t afford to pay enough for the vaccines to justify the research necessary to develop them) without substituting heavy-handed and ineffective government coercion for market efficiencies? One option is to fund advance market commitments, in which a developed world government promises to buy a certain (substantial) quantity of vaccines if and when they’re developed.

In Robert Cringely’s world, everything is a lot simpler, and logic is enough. Like in a recent column, where he suggests we solve the last mile problem by building it ourselves, with Microsoft’s help.

Galileo is Europe’s answer to the US tax-funded GPS system. GPS is free to use to anyone with a receiver – but Galileo needs to reimburse its investors somehow. Because they share bandwidth, there was a deal that said some of the codes for Galileo had to be put in the public domain. When this failed to occur, a team of Cornell University researchers reverse-engineered the signals and cracked the codes anyway. Information wants to be free, but sometimes it needs a little help, I guess.