That is why the three protagonists must resist the temptation simply to burnish their political lines. Severe cuts in public spending are inevitable; on the Micawber principle that more money is going out than is coming in, the result is misery for the public finances. It is incumbent on all three participants to do what, for political reasons, they might wish to avoid: to spell out in more detail how they intend to fix the hole.

mflow is a cracking new service which takes the best bits of Twitter and adds legal music sharing and discovery. It's as simple as that.

We are almost certainly closer to a hung parliament than we have been since the early nineties. Using some simple parliamentary arithmetic and breaking a few myths, we can calculate the likely outcomes.

With the third reading of the Digital Economy Bill in the House of Lords, the Bill is now looking like a home run in its present form. Whilst there has been widespread opposition to it from the public and the security services, it is likely to be passed with its most controversial elements intact.

choose an economist to run our economy…..

A survey of secondary school children revealed that more than a quarter are spending more than six hours a day on computers.

Some so-called “screenagers” are developing sleep disorders and depression as a result. Other symptoms of addiction include not eating properly, withdrawal symptoms, fatigue and a sense of isolation from society.

Women hold fewer than 15% of positions on boards in most countries, except in Scandinavia and Norway in particular where in 2005 the government gave listed companies two years to increase the proportion by 40% or risk closure. Cranfield University produce a yearly report of women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies, which you can find here.

The quality, convenience and competitive pricing (in Google's case, mostly free) of the products and services offered by both brands is what's keeping them dominant in their expanding (and no doubt soon to be overlapping) sectors. To what extent consumers will start factoring the volume, usage and transparency of personal data collected by these and other companies and how that will weigh against factors such as cost and convenience remains to be seen.

The Guardian's Ben Goldacre wrote on Friday that a Rentokil story on how 'Commuters share trains with 1,000 cockroaches 200 bedbugs and 200 fleas' was not all it appeared to be. (Guess what? The study wasn't, as reported, based on real-life tests. It was based on a theoretical model.)