Pharmaceuticals-in-the-water-cycle

How many drugs are you taking that you don’t even know about? (Hint: a lot.)

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Antibiotics, antidepressants, blood thinners, ACE inhibitors, calcium-channel blockers, digoxin, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, painkillers, anti-seizure drugs, cholesterol drugs, diabetes drugs and more – it’s all in your drinking water. Here are five steps to help clean it up.

Pharmaceutical PollutionWe’ve all read and heard a great deal about pollution in our society – carbon emissions in our air, toxic chemical dumping poisoning our water supply, garbage and industrial waste on land, plus newer concepts like noise and light pollution. The message is clear: our world is dirty, cluttered and getting worse.

There’s another type of pollution, though, that we hear comparatively less about. Unfortunately, it’s one with potentially harmful implications for the air and water we’re leaving our children.

This new category of dangerous pollutants? Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs).

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America appreciates teachers, but we don’t value them

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CATEGORY: EducationIn the contemporary world, a society’s ability to compete in just about everything – scientific and technical innovation, business innovation, public health, and on and on – depends on making sure that every student is as smart as humanly possible. Your future is literally a direct result of your commitment to education. If the country next door starts with the same basic potential, but dedicates greater resources to developing it, the gap is going to be widening noticeably within a generation. And right now everyone in the developed world has a greater commitment to teaching than the US.

In other words, the better your teachers, the brighter your future. (Teacher quality isn’t the only variable, but it’s a huge one.) However, we entrust that future not to the brightest and best, but to whomever will do the job for what it pays (and whomever will deal with the ridiculous condition under which teachers are often asked to work). We’re lucky in that a lot of the brightest and best are truly committed to the mission and are willing to make the sacrifice. Sadly, the rest of those jobs goes to – and forgive me if I’m a bit harsh here – folks who can’t land a better paying job. Continue reading →

Facebook’s worst nightmare: what if social media is just that – social?

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New research suggests that social media is a bubble – how long before it bursts?

Facebook - UnshareThese are heady days for social media interests. Facebook and Twitter run rampant, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine and Instagram are booming, Ello is all kinds of interesting, and somehow or another Google+ and StumbleUpon are still hanging in there. While there isn’t literally a new social net rolling out every 15 minutes, it sometimes feels that way.

The money in social is just insane. Take the leader of the pack, for instance. Facebook’s market cap is just north of $200B and NASDAQ’s analysis is all kinds of bullish. Why not? Have a look at their revenue projections. Continue reading →

Retailers and plus-size women: a disgusting insight from Big Data

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Plus-size fashion? Sure, as long as you don’t care about color.

plus-sizeI had kind of a WTF? moment at work today, that turned into a moment that made me think, and finally into a full-blown depressing moment.

We’re working on a project for a retailer that sells a wide range of clothing to women. We were examining the strategic keyword analysis workbook looking for patterns and insights in the search data for an upcoming presentation, when we tripped across this disheartening realization.

In every category – Dresses, Blouses, Skirts, Prom, Formal, Homecoming, etc. – there’s a huge volume of search for color: [blue prom dress], [red skirt], [green top], etc. Every category except one, that is: Plus Size. When you look at the search data for plus size queries, there’s almost no volume for color. The only term that shows any life at all is [white]. Continue reading →

Dear Human Resources: four ways employers can help America’s job hunters (and themselves)

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“Hiring managers” say only apply for jobs you’re qualified for. Fine. Now, here are some things HR needs to do in return.

Only-Post-JobsI subscribe to a number of industry mailing lists and content services as part of my work, and periodically they’ll publish stories aimed at helping job seekers – how to find opportunities, how to network, résumé tips, that sort of thing. Recently one of them posted an article where they elicited advice for job hunters from “hiring managers.” (Actually, these folks weren’t hiring managers at all – they were HR staffing managers, who have nothing to do with the hiring decision. But they’re the gatekeepers, so their opinions matter. )

The key bit of insight in this one particular piece was fairly straightforward: only apply for jobs that you’re qualified for. Continue reading →

The Denver Garden Railway: Colorado’s coolest railroad

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Denver Garden Railway 1

This Mason Machine Works locomotive, which belongs to Joe Foss (who repainted it and the cars it pulls), steams past a reconstruction of Dallas, Colorado, a defunct town near Ouray. Several alternate versions of the shot are posted at 5280 Lens Mafia.

WikiPedia’s List of Hobbies page is a long one – over 170 entries. Included are some you’d expect: cooking, birdwatching, knitting, stamp collecting, all manner of sporting activities, etc. There are also some you may not have thought of. For example: Continue reading →

Denver visitors guide: the best 5280 steakhouses

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Denver has long struggled against a reputation as a cow town. However, one thing you can always count on in a cow town is a good steak.

And Denver is steak nirvana. As a guy who has lived in various parts of the country I can promise visitors to the Mile High City that our run-of-the-mill beef is better than the best stuff you can get most other places. Our best beef – tender, juicy, immaculately marbled USDA Prime Cut – is out of this world. (Note the “prime” in that last sentence – most steak you get around the country is “choice” cut, and choice can be pretty good. But prime is to choice as choice is to McDonald’s.) Continue reading →

Biscotti Goddess

Biscottii Goddess is awesome. Just saying.

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I don’t normally pimp products and services, although perhaps I should. I, like most of the staff and many of our readers, am a dedicated consumer of local, hand-made, craft and independent everything and tend to avoid mass production/corporate retailers and goods when possible.

Not long ago I reconnected, thanks to the magic of social media, with an old college friend, Wheeler Wood. Turns out he now runs a small biscotti business. Well, I loves me some biscotti, and he kindly offered to send me a sample or two to see what I thought.

Holy hell, this stuff is good. Continue reading →

Fake Cause Marketing: Bob Garfield takes Jane Seymour and Kay Jewelers to the woodshed

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It turns out that one of my favorite business writers, MediaPost’s Bob Garfield, hates those Jane Seymour Kay Jewelers ads as badly as I do.

Awww. Every kitsch begins with Kay.

But wait. Open your heart? No, unless by “heart” they mean “wallet.” Ladies and gentlemen, I give you open-heart sorcery: the black art of combining celebrity, cheap sentimentality, self-delusion, greed and borderline consumer fraud.

…

The practice exploits consumers’ emotions and invites them to delude themselves into thinking a product purchase is an act of charity. But it is not charity. Continue reading →

Say Ello: six observations about the world’s newest social network

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elloA month ago most of you had probably never heard of Ello. By now a lot of you have. And at the pace the news has been getting around in the past few days, this time next week even hermits will know about it.

The short version is that Ello is the brainchild of a team of designers and developers who are committed to preserving user privacy. Sort of an anti-Facebook, if you will. As you can imagine, there’s going to be interest in something predicated on that kind of philosophy, and interest this past week got so intense that they had to throttle new user add/invites briefly to make sure the system could handle the load.

I was one of the early adopters – I heard about it and went to the site to request an invite months ago, and I was in the door quickly when they opened it up to beta last month.

Here are some observations, in no particular order.

1: The creative factor is through the roof. Continue reading →

Infographic best practices: learn how math works

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What would happen if you put Yogi Berra in charge of making infographics?

We’ve written about the problems with infographics before, but this one takes the cake.

There’s a fun one from Ethos3 up at SlideShare.net addressing the importance of nonverbal communication when making presentations. It’s generally pretty helpful, but it also provides us with a lesson in the value of not overreaching.

See if you can spot the problem.

Infographic

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