No really, I am becoming a sufferer of GOMS. As I get older my demeanour is less upbeat and has started developing a distinct “Victor Meldrew” –type cast. Of course age and grumpiness have long been synonymous but a recent study indicates that this may be a natural result of the ageing process.

Some scientists in Japan have found ageing rats cannot produce a hormone called Corticosterone as easily as young rats and this hormone is used to dampen the effects of stress. The kind of stress is also important, simple one-off stresses show no significant difference between young and old rats but repeated low-level stress shows that while young rats produce high levels of Corticosterone older rats did not.

This only goes to show that if you are going to corner a rat then you better make it a young one!

Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, has obviously suffered repeated low-level amounts of stress from Google. This week he has called upon newspaper publishers to stop allowing Google and Bing search engines to display newspaper content for free. This is no idle comment as Murdoch already has plans to start charging for the content contained in “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” from June onwards and “The Sun” and “The News of the World” are expected to follow once they have sorted out some technical issues such as instructing their readership on how to use a website payment mechanism.

Google has already offered a micro-payment facility where a web-user can pay a nominal fee for every article they read. This is probably a better model for a web-user but a worse one for the Murdoch’s of this world as their revenue stream become dependent on Google or others of the same ilk.

An interesting battle will follow no doubt!