The first iterations of a new technology can seem astonishingly clunky, at least in retrospect. Often, they are more a proof of concept than a practical device.
The first hydrogen bomb, detonated in 1952, was the size of a three-story house and weighed 82 tons. No airplane in the world could have carried it. Within little more than a decade, however, the thermonuclear warheads atop missiles were roughly the size of garbage cans and weighed less than 700 pounds.
A century and a half earlier, the first steam engines were very large and heavy relative to the power they produced. The big engines that drove the Philadelphia waterworks in the early 19th century — the largest steam engines in the country at the time — were built using James Watt’s low-pressure design. They had 32-inch cylinders with a stroke of six feet. But they only put out 12 horsepower. Even the more-efficient high-pressure engines, independently designed by Oliver Evans in the U.S. and Richard Trevithick in Britain, were bulky, and they were ravenous consumers of coal.
5 Ogilvyisms That Still Apply to Digital Media
Before there was Don Draper, there was David Ogilvy. “The father of advertising,” as he is sometimes referred to, was all about valuing the consumer’s intelligence, testing and “the big idea.” He helped forge a new, creative path for advertising in the ’60s that we now all look back on as the Golden Age of the advertising industry.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of what Ogilvy had to say back then still applies to the industry today — and it is perhaps even more important to remember some of his soundbites now with technology and the pace of the digital world forcing advertisers to be faster, more agile and more creative in real time.
Here are five David Ogilvyisms — shown as Don Draper macros, because why not? — that are still relevant today.
We Are All Intelligence Officers Now
I am particularly fond of the late Peter Bernstein’s definition of
risk: “More things can happen than will.”[PB] I like that definition
not because it tells me what to do, but rather because it tells me
what comes with any new expansion of possibilities. Put differently,
it tells me that with the new, the realm of the possible expands
and, as we know, when the realm of the possible expands, prediction
is somewhere between difficult and undoable. The dynamic is that
we now regularly, quickly expand our dependence on new things, and
that added dependence matters because the way in which we each and
severally add risk to our portfolio is by way of dependence on
things for which their very newness makes risk estimation, and thus
risk management, neither predictable nor perhaps even estimable.
The Gordian Knot of such tradeoffs — our tradeoffs — is this: As
society becomes more technologic, even the mundane comes to depend
on distant digital perfection. Our food pipeline contains less
than a week’s supply, just to take one example, and that pipeline
depends on digital services for everything from GPS driven tractors
to robot vegetable sorting machinery to coast-to-coast logistics
to RFID-tagged livestock. Is all the technologic dependency, and
the data that fuels it, making us more resilient or more fragile?
Sorry Banks, Millennials Hate You
When Scratch polled 3,500 millennials to find out which industry was most prime for disruption, the results were clear: Not only did banks make up four of their top 10 most hated brands, but millennials increasingly viewed these financial institutions as irrelevant.
The three-year study from Scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom that consults with brands, found that a third of millennials believed they’ll be able to live a bank-free existence in the future. In the age of Simple, Square, and Bitcoin, these millennials, defined as those born between 1981 and 2000, overwhelmingly believed that the way they access money and pay for things will be completely different in five years.
A Brisk, Sunny Day At Grinnell College
NHS England patient data ‘uploaded to Google servers’, Tory MP says
A prominent Tory MP on the powerful health select committee has questioned how the entire NHS hospital patient database for England was handed over to management consultants who uploaded it to Google servers based outside the UK.
Sarah Wollaston, who is also a family doctor and Conservative backbencher, tweeted: “So HES [hospital episode statistics] data uploaded to ‘google’s immense army of servers’, who consented to that?”
The patient information had been obtained by PA Consulting, which claimed to have secured the “entire start-to-finish HES dataset across all three areas of collection – inpatient, outpatient and A&E”.
The data set was so large it took up 27 DVDs and took a couple of weeks to upload. The management consultants said: “Within two weeks of starting to use the Google tools we were able to produce interactive maps directly from HES queries in seconds.”
How the Medical Establishment Got the Treasury’s Keys
About half a century ago, organized medicine and the hospital industry in this country struck a deal with Congress that in retrospect seems as audacious as it seems incredible: Congress was asked to surrender to these industries the keys to the United States Treasury.
In return, the industries would allow Congress to pass a 1965 amendment to the Social Security Act, described as “an act to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged under the Social Security Act with a supplementary health benefits program and an expanded program of medical assistance, to increase benefits under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance System, to improve the Federal-State public assistance programs, and for other purposes.” We have come to know it as Medicare.
Medicine under the Ottomans
Medicine in the Islamic world can trace its roots back to the Greeks and such famous physicians as Hippocrates, Galen and Discorides. To this was added medicine as practiced in Persia, India and Byzantium. “The result was the creation of an extensive field embracing nearly every branch of the medical sciences, some 14 centuries of history and a vast geographical area stretching from southern Spain to Bengal, for in this particular field nearly all the regions of the Islamic world made some contributions.” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Islamic Science”)
Medicine was generally taught in medreses along with the Qur’an and the shariyah and often the medreses had hospitals attached where practical lessons were taught. Sometimes there were separate medical schools that also had hospitals that included pharmacological studies and surgery.
Global vehicle sales will likely peak in next decade
The world that Henry Ford put on wheels is poised for a stall.
In the globe’s growing megacities, pollution and gridlock are putting a damper on driving. In India, some commuters are leaving their cars at home to avoid traffic snarls and long prowls for parking.
More young Americans are forgoing the dream of auto ownership for public transport, bikes and vehicle-sharing. Cars on the road are lasting longer than ever.
All of that may herald a new era for an auto industry weaned on a century of global growth. The world will reach “peak car” — a point at which annual global sales growth will top out — in the next decade, several auto-industry analysts predict. Researcher IHS Automotive, for one, sees annual sales cresting at 100 million within that time.
Peak car is at odds with the ambitious expansion plans of global automakers, which IHS says are gearing up to produce more than 120 million vehicles by 2016 — almost 50 percent more than last year’s worldwide sales mark of 82 million. The dynamic also threatens the business plans of parts producers, suppliers of raw material and oil companies.
Driving this upheaval is a rapidly emerging reality: The vehicle that ushered in an unparalleled era of personal mobility in the last century is, in many cases, no longer the most convenient conveyance, particularly as more of the world’s population migrates to big cities.
No one is predicting that car sales will suddenly fall off or that today’s car companies are now dinosaurs. What the experts do see is a reckoning for car companies, which may have to adapt to a world with less car-buying and more car-sharing, more cars that drive themselves and fewer hot rodders on the highway.
“The key question is: Do you sell cars or do you sell mobility?” said Tim Ryan, vice chairman of markets and strategy for consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. “If you ignore these megatrends, you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.”
View the IHS Automotive Study here.
The shocking numbers behind corporate welfare
State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.
Boeing ranks first, with 137 subsidies totaling $13.2 billion, followed by Alcoa at $5.6 billion, Intel at $3.9 billion, General Motors at $3.5 billion and Ford Motor at $2.5 billion, the new report by the nonprofit research organization Good Jobs First shows.
Dow Chemical had the most subsidies, 410 totaling $1.4 billion, followed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway holding company, with 310 valued at $1.1 billion.
The figures were compiled from disclosures made by state and local government agencies that subsidize companies in all sorts of ways, including cash giveaways, building and land transfers, tax abatements and steep discounts on electric and water bills.
In fact, the numbers significantly understate the true value of taxpayer subsidies to businesses, for reasons explained below.