Brand Noise

Interactive Personal Care

Biotechnology firm Beacon Sciences has created a business unit that will specialize in technologies that change the color of personal care products. The new company Reveal Sciences has developed biomaterials that may be added to formulations to use color change as a means of indicating when or how consumers should use their beauty products. Such interactive personal care products may sound futuristic but they are already beginning to make their way onto the market.

Dial Corporation has just launched a soap called ColorClean which contains an active ingredient that causes the foam to change color after a specified washing time.

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David's Got a New Job

Here in a perfect case of cross-discipline learning, life imitates art:

For statues, stress injuries come from standing in place for hundreds of years. Using a novel technique, researchers have now developed a way to predict such fracturing, applying the procedure to Michelangelo's David in an analysis that proved simpler, faster and more accurate than previous methods.

In applying the technique to other objects -- including human bones -- the researchers are also gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail.

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College Students Demand Organic--Whatever That Means

College kids serve as a beautiful microcosm for the rest of the world demonstrating the importance of food education.

This from AdAge: College students, increasingly concerned about the source and quality of food they're eating, are demanding that schools purchase regional produce. The catch, though, is while students are demanding organic and local fare, they aren't always sure what that means -- or how it tastes.

Some think local means within 10 miles or inside the city, while others think it means within 150 miles. Many of these students, she said, also like to have bananas and strawberries for breakfast -- all year long.

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Tappening Taps into a Need

Not a new story, but certainly one of the most compelling ones in which a small group of influential consumers created a huge ripple effect of demand for a coveted item, like the bag at Whole Foods that everyone waited in line for.

When Mark DiMassimo, who founded and runs Digobrands, and Eric Yaverbaum, who runs Ericho Communications, founded Tappening, they intended the site, www.tappening.com, to be an educational website where the public could find up-to-the minute information about the detrimental damages the bottled water industry was causing the environment. They personally financed an inventory of reusable water bottles that were available for purchase on the site. DiMassimo and Yaverbaum expected these 39,000 bottles to sell throughout the first year of their new project and self finance their marketing message. Their initial inventory sold within 36 hours.

For a beverage company, a campaign like Tappening forever changes the value of bottled water. The question remains—how will the bottled water makers deal with that? So far, Coke is offering no comment. What remains is that there’s a value that lives on in regard to portability and functional aspects. But what price does that come at? Let’s look at the bottle. Will Coca-Cola encourage refilling their bottles?

The answers aren’t simple. This opens up a whole new set of issues. You’ll start to see filtration products on the horizon. Imagine a bottle with a built-in filter that you can refill, say 10 times. Each time the filter adds a functional aspect like electrolytes that you desire to your water.

Along those lines, Pur Water Filter known for its in-home filtration has been offering its Exstream portable bottle purification system to the outdoor sporting community. But no one has bought 39,000 units of it in 36 hours.

Expanding on Social Software Behavior

Google.org's technology project to help save lives in the event of natural disasters or public health threats is set to launch Thursday.

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization that ambitiously aims to help communities around the world use Web and communications technology to identify and warn others of outbreaks like Avian flu or disasters like Hurricane Katrina. That technology, which will include social software Twitter and Facebook, will be used to coordinate rescue responses and help save lives.

"We're not talking about pulling the red phone out of the bottom drawer here," said Eric Rasmussen, president and CEO of InSTEDD and a former adviser to U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, referring to Twitter and Facebook. "We're talking about using ubiquitous, free software that is repurposed when necessary to fit into a humanitarian need."

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Good Aligns With Lifestyle, And So Begins Paradox

Which of the following people would you say is the most admirable:

Mother Teresa, Bill Gates or Norman Borlaug?

Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.

Dozens of things that past generations treated as practical matters are now ethical battlegrounds, including disposable diapers, I.Q. tests, poultry farms, Barbie dolls and research on breast cancer. Food alone has become a minefield, with critics sermonizing about the size of sodas, the chemistry of fat, the freedom of chickens, the price of coffee beans, the species of fish and now the distance the food has traveled from farm to plate.

That said...Many of these moralizations, like the assault on smoking, may be understood as practical tactics to reduce some recently identified harm. But whether an activity flips our mental switches to the “moral” setting isn’t just a matter of how much harm it does. We don’t show contempt to the man who fails to change the batteries in his smoke alarms or takes his family on a driving vacation, both of which multiply the risk they will die in an accident. Driving a gas-guzzling Hummer is reprehensible (hence Hummer HX), but driving a gas-guzzling old Volvo is not; eating a Big Mac is unconscionable, but not imported cheese or crème brûlée. The reason for these double standards is obvious: people tend to align their moralization with their own lifestyles.

Read the whole story.

(Photo: Dr. Norman Borlaug, in his wrestling attire as a young man.)

More Mixed Messages: Non-Fat Milk Linked to Cancer

In an overall analysis of food groups, the consumption of dairy products and milk were not associated with prostate cancer risk, the authors of a recent study found. Further analysis, however, suggested that low-fat or nonfat milk did increase the risk of localized tumors or non-aggressive tumors, while whole milk decreased this risk.

In a similar analysis, Dr. Yikyung Park, from the National Cancer Institute at National Institutes (NIH) of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues investigated the relationship of calcium and vitamin D and prostate cancer in 293,888 men enrolled in the NIH-American Association of Retired Persons Diet and Health Study, conducted between 1995 and 2001. The average follow-up period was 6 years.

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(Image: Vermeer's Milkmaid.)

 

Italy Takes a Rational Approach to Condom Ads

Condom advertising is coming to Italian television -- more than 20 years after AIDS arrived in Italy. Cornicello or condom? La Lega italiana per la Lotta contro l'AIDS wants Italians to make the rational choice.

But until very recently, irrationality trumped reasonableness when it came to condom advertising on Italian TV. That will all change in January 2008, with the airing of a series of taboo-breaking HIV awareness ads that mention condoms by name. The ads, by film director Francesca Archibugi and paid for by the Ministry of Health, are designed to help Italians, and especially young people, overcome their embarrassment in asking for condoms in pharmacies and other outlets.

One ad, shot in a pharmacy at Rome’s Fiumicino airport, shows a young man trying to get up the nerve to ask for condoms. His impatient girlfriend charges up to the counter and asks for them. An older heterosexual couple follows her example. Suddenly the pharmacist is overwhelmed by customers demanding condoms.

The original blogger of this piece believes: Italy’s new condom promotion campaign, though a step forward doesn’t go far enough (citing massive condom giveaways in New York City and Washington, D.C.).

Alas, my fellow blogger, we here in the US still have far to go in getting the act of acquiring condoms to be as second nature as buying a pack of gum. Sure there’s plenty of grand gesturing, but little leg up to help shift the mindset.

Actually, we can learn a lot from the humanness of the Italian campaign. Getting past a Spring Break mentality is a big hurdle for the US to overcome…Maybe if we all wish on our cornicelli, it can happen.

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HyperLink My World, Please

The Green Holiday catalog from Barney's arrived in the mail yesterday filled with everything from Lanvin shopper bags to organic Levi's. But no sign of what color that fabulous lipstick is on the cover...
In my perfect little world even the Barney's billboard at Mulry Square would have a teeny Semapedia tag that would give me all the info I need--provided all colors were perfectly matched.

Lap Dancers "in Heat" Earn Higher Tips

To see whether estrus (heat cycle) was really “lost” during human evolution (as researchers often claim), researchers in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico examined ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by professional lap dancers working in gentlemen's clubs.

The researchers used ads and flyers to sign up 18 lap dancers from local clubs. Each woman was asked to log on to a Web site and report her work hours, tips, and when she was menstruating. Lap dancers generally work 5-hour shifts with 18 or so 3-minute performances per shift. They average about $14 per "dance"--all of which is called a "tip" because it is illegal to pay for sex in New Mexico.

Normally cycling participants earned about US$335 per 5-h shift during estrus, US$260 per shift during the luteal phase, and US$185 per shift during menstruation. By contrast, participants using contraceptive pills showed no estrous earnings peak.

Read more. Read the abstract. (Image: Hiro's Lapdance.)