Car and Driver, Road & Track, Automobile, Motor Trend and the rest of the magazines further down the car mag food chain are all supported by advertising. Unless a magazine is subsidized by a non-profit organization (e.g. Consumer Reports) or charges an exorbitant price per issue, it can’t survive without advertising. Few readers have problems with ads per se; they consider them literally wallpaper. But when the ads outweigh the content, questions begin to arise about who’s calling the editorial shots. Put a one or two-page ad for a new car in the middle of a glowing review of the same and those suspicions can easily turn to full-scale paranoia. Sneak in a multi-page “special advertising section” formatted to look and read like the rest of the magazine and credibility stretches to breaking point.
Category: Culture
The Case for Geothermal
Geothermal heating and cooling is based on one simple fact: that 6 feet down in the ground the temperature is the same—between 50˚F and 60˚F- the whole year round. This means that it is relatively cool in the summer, and relatively warm in the winter. Geothermal heating is thus quite different from solar heating: solar heating works worst when you most need it–in the cold, cloudy, snowy conditions of winter; the source for geothermal heating and cooling is not affected by the weather.
For geothermal cooling, all one needs to do is to circulate water in a pipe through the ground to cool it, and use this cool water to cool the air pumped through the house in the heating ducts.
Starwood Enters the Virtual Hotel Business
Steve Rubel jumped the gun on this news so I’ll feel free to blog it too: Starwood Hotels is building out a version of their new Aloft hotel brand in the virtual world of Second Life as a way to attract future customers and presumably get some feedback about the brand’s features before it hits the physical world. (It is not meant to be a functional hotel in SL, I’m told.) The SL project is being constructed by the Electric Sheep Company (sponsors of this blog), who are also blogging the process along with Aloft execs.
I like the idea of virtual hotel rooms being on view in SL. (How great would it be to be able to check out a bunch of rooms in your destination city before you booked a trip?) I’m more excited, though, about the fact that Aloft and the Sheep are blogging the process of building the project. This is something I wanted to do a while back at the Second Life Herald, but found it hard to find a builder who’d put up with being annoyed by my questions while building. The Sheep’s solution is great: get a talented builder who is also an articulate speaker and writer to do the job. Fortunately, they have SL resident Cory Edo (the real world’s Sara Van Gorden), who is both. The SecondCast crew interviewed Cory recently, which is how I know she’s articulate. Her builds speak for themselves.
The Herd Changes Course and Runs Away From SUV’s
THE herd instinct is as powerful in humans as in other animal species.
Anyone who doubts it should rent “What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?”, the 1970 film by Allen Funt, the creator of “Candid Camera.” The money scene portrays a man responding to a help-wanted ad. He is directed to a waiting room occupied by men who appear to be other job seekers but are actually Mr. Funt’s confederates. At no apparent signal, these men stand and begin to disrobe. The hapless job seeker’s dismay is evident. Yet, after a few moments, he, too, stands and disrobes. At scene’s end, the men are standing naked, apparently waiting for whatever comes next.
Clearly, the herd instinct can lead us astray. For the most part, however, the impulse to emulate others serves us well. After all, without drawing on the wisdom and experience of others, it would be almost impossible to cope with the stream of complex decisions we confront.
Frank believes that the SUV craze started when Robert Altman’s “The Player” was released in 1992 (Great Movie). “The film’s lead character, the studio executive Griffin Mill (played by Tim Robbins), could have bought any vehicle he pleased. His choice? A Range Rover with a fax machine in the dashboard.”
Check out Tesla – an electric car startup.
Fixed Gear Bikes Illegal in Portland
An Oregon judge has ruled that fixed-gear bicycles — which use the rider’s leg-power to brake them — are illegal, and must be outfitted with traditional lever/caliper brakes. The cyclist who was ticketed for the offense fought it in traffic court, and was represented by a pretty sharp attorney, judging from the partial transcript here. It seems obvious that “fixies” should be lawful, since they can satisfy the statutory requirement that bikes be “equipped with a brake that enables the operator to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level, clean pavement. strong enough to skid tire.” Nevertheless, the judge ruled against the cyclist — I hope she appeals.
Gopher
Gopher, developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota, is a text-only, hierarchical document search and retrieval protocol that was supplanted by the more flexible WWW in the mid-1990s. Some servers running this old protocol are still alive, however. The WELL, an online discussion board and community that started back in 1985, is still running a Gopher server. If you’ve got a recent version of Firefox, you can check it out in its original Gopher-y state at gopher://gopher.well.com/ or with any web browser at http://gopher.well.com:70/.
I remember using Gopher (and being quite impressed by it) in the early 1990’s via a UW supplied dialup internet account.
This was before the growth of local ISP’s (Internet Service Providers). The UW told non faculty/students/staff to move on once the internet started to take off (1994?).
The Hard Disk That Changed the World
The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue’s San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you’d pay about $250,000 a year in today’s dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving “heads” that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That’s not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.”
Yet those who beheld the RAMAC were astonished. “It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running,” recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-’50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM. “It really turned the tide [in the Information Age],” he says. “It was the first to offer random access, whereas before you would have to wind a tape from one end to the other to access data.”
UW Football PR heats up
Interesting: Both the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal ran features today on new UW Football coach Bret Bielema.
I recently saw well tanned UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez and Bret (also well tanned) riding around in Barry’s two seat convertible on a gorgeous Madison evening. Would have been a great photograph – had I been carrying a camera….
Luck & Business Strategy
Because we underestimate how much variation can be caused simply by luck, we see patterns where none exist. It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time. In 1999, after all, it was hard to find a business book that didn’t hold up Enron as the embodiment of one important principle or other. Of course, some strategies and structures work better than others, but real meaning emerges only over the long term.
Air Sickness Bag Advertising
But US Airways must be kidding when a company spokesperson says, “The airsick bag is not used like it was in the past — primarily with turbo-prop aircraft and cabins that weren’t pressurized — so the negative connotation of the sick sack has gone away.” Now that line makes this marketer wanna reach for a barf bag.