Month: October 2012

There is cynical marketing and then there is exploitation. But, some companies are now musing on the idea of heavenly pop-up ads, interstitial banners for the afterlife and infographics to accompany the song sheets for the choir invisible. Of course, you cannot take it with you, but if they can sell it to you before you go then the shareholders are happy either way.

Writing in a forthcoming issue of the economics research publication the International Journal of Business Performance Management, European marketing experts explain how fundamental religious experience can offer a novel perspective in commerce. Of course, of the centuries, there have always been individuals and institutions who would exploit faith to extract as much value from the flock, as it were. Whether that is taking a practitioner’s possessions in the name of the faith’s non-material ethos, simply taxing worshippers to pay for churches, temples and priestly accoutrements or selling candles, charms and other trinkets in the café-shop as you leave the building.

Jonathan Wilson of the University of Greenwich, UK and Svend Hollensen of the University of Southern Denmark suggest that companies might now be taking this idea to a new, higher level. “Customer lifetime value (CLV) is an established relationship marketing-centric approach to evaluating performance: based upon the significance of a customer, and what resources should be allocated towards maintaining relations — beyond short-term transactional views,” they explain. They now point out that given the billions of people who also believe in the possibility of life beyond death, there is a pressing need for business to also consider Customer afterlifetime value.

The researchers hint that the philosophical, scientific and metaphysical debates are quite irrelevant to many people. Those people simply believe in their god or gods and the fact of their continued existence in some form or another after they die. The team has considered the perspective of the various world religions and provides the fundations for understanding how different belief systems feed the followers’ attitude to commerce. Crucial to an improved understanding of selling to the faithful is perhaps to take the longer view, a lifetime and an after-lifetime view.

“Polemically it is argued that the fact that enough individuals live believing that an afterlife is present, means that from a business and economics perspective of supply and demand, these concepts should be viewed as rather than needing answered, instead should be served and evaluated,” the team states. In other words, if you want to improve those elusive factors such as brand identity and loyalty, it might be worth the commercial world adopting the perspective that those taxing priests had in days of yore. After all, if you cannot take it with you later, that doesn’t mean that they cannot take it off you now.

Wilson, J.A. (2013). Assessing the implications on performance when aligning customer lifetime value calculations with religious faith groups and afterlifetime values — a Socratic elenchus approach, Int. J. Business Performance Management, 14 (1) 94. DOI:

Hallowe’en is almost upon us, so now’s the time to start mixing toxic chemicals and getting ready to play some pranks on neighbours. Or maybe not.

Gizmodo had a few ideas, including spiking drinks with methylene blue and mixing match heads and ammonia to make a sprayable stink bomb! Methylene blue turns some people’s urine bluey-green (hilarious) but it also interferes with some prescription meds and could cause serious damage to the central nervous system in some people (not so hilarious). It’s not really a good idea to spike anyone’s drink with the stuff or indeed with any chemicals, drugs, whatever.

Spraying a mixture of ammonia and match heads around with a water pistol also seems to be a rather stupid idea and Hull University chemist Mark Lorch has an interesting response to the Gizmodo article.

I have written to the Royal Society of Chemistry regarding this matter and await their response. I think Gizmodo needs to offer a formal warning regarding their article.

I remember not being “allowed” by the publisher’s lawyers to include a copper sulfate crystal garden experiment in a kids’ science publication I worked on back in the early 1990s because it’s not an entirely safe chemical if ingested. I wasn’t even suggesting that the junior experimenters ingested their crystals, but you do have to be extremely cautious.

Techie websites dipping into the science realm ought to take more care in what they offer up as ideas to lay readers.

The same author mentioned an earlier article on the same site listing various rather hazardous pranks that one should not do and proclaiming via twitter that it had received 350,000 reads. That’s a lot of people who might misinterpret or abuse the advice. Among the pranks on that page he says we shouldn’t do are mixing two different types of household cleaner, making a flesh-burning laser out of a Maglite is another. Yes, those are best avoided…we could go on…

10 Accidental Inventions – Some taste good, others save lives but all 10 of these inventions came about by accident. Popsicles, the Slinky, Velcro, Teflon, Superglue, synthetic dyes and more. Music is Hokey Pokey by Bruce Maginnis and Daniel Weltlinger.

Thanks to Jenny Winder for drawing my attention to this video.

BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason discusses the current global economic crisis from a journalist’s perspective, asking – “When and how will the crisis end?” Writing in the International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, Mason argues that the global economic crisis needs to be seen as “an attempt to return to stability after the great disruption of the decade before the 2008 crunch.” He reported on the crisis of 2008 as it happened from the US and in his book Meltdown was apparently one of the first to describe publicly what went wrong. His hypothesis is that the strain of preventing a major slump as was experienced by the industrialised nations in the 1930s Great Depression has introduced significant “systemic tensions” in global financial and commercial systems that are yet to be released.

“The long-term choice involved in recovery is between rethinking the nature of the global economic and financial architecture and some type of competitive solution to the crisis,” Mason suggests. Unfortunately, we are to put it figuratively, stuck between a rock and a hard place, between the Devil and the deep blue sea, caught between Scylla and Charybdis because as he adds, “Both of these have unpredictable outcomes.”

In his paper, Mason concedes that he is not an economist, he does not even have a high-school qualification in economics. But, he says that has not hindered his understanding of the bigger issues. Indeed, there is one school of thought that an “outsider” attempting to grasp the intricacies of a specialist subject either gains a clearer understanding than many of those on the inside or else becomes a specialist through their research endeavours. Of course, as a journalist, Mason does have access to endless financial reports that the lay public simply never sees, including those published by Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered, the World Bank, the OECD and many other organisations.

From Mason’s perspective he sees two extreme outcomes of the releasing of those inherent tensions across global economics. On the one hand, there might be a competitive race, currency walls, runaway inflation resulting from quantitative easing (banks printing money) in which China perhaps emerges victorious and stronger, Japan and perhaps peripheral Europe lose, and the US is left in a kind of limbo. At the other extreme, a reinvention of globalisation in which the state takes a serious belly blow to allow the global economy to re-emerge. Unfortunately, no state could survive a second such injury. “This is the problem of the crisis,” Mason concludes.

Mason, P. (2012). When and how will the crisis end? An economic journalist’s perspective, International Journal of Management Concepts and Philosophy, 6 (3) DOI: 10.1504/IJMCP.2012.049945

Earlier this year, researchers at Argonne National Lab demosntrated how they could use sound waves to levitate individual droplets of solutions containing different pharmaceuticals. The aim being to allow solvent to evaporate with crystallisation occurring so that an amorphous form of a drug can be produced. Amorphous drugs are often more soluble and so have a higher bioavailability than crystalline forms hinting at lower dose or greater efficacy for the same amount of product.

No magic show: Real-world levitation to inspire better pharmaceuticals | Argonne National Laboratory.

Thanks to JLVernonPhD for Twitter heads-up on this video.

It’s nice to be in such esteemed company. Apparently, customers who downloaded the free pre-launch electronic sampler of my book Deceived Wisdom have also grabbed a copy of one or more of the following popular science books:

“How Many Friends Does One Person Need?” by Robin Dunbar (His theory gets a mention in DW!)

“The Self Illusion: Why There is No You Inside” by Bruce Hood (There should be a book called “The Elf Illusion” too, for those who worry about their inner Santa.)

“Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” by Kathryn Schultz (If you’ve ever trotted out any of the deceived wisdom in my book then this one will hit home too.)

“Rip It Up” by Richard Wiseman (One of this unleash your potential type books but this time by one of the brightest science writers rather than some random business person.)

Electronic version of Deceived Wisdom now available from Sciencebase in PDF, ePub and mobi formats.

Well-known popular science author John Emsley had this to say about my forthcoming book: “Bradley debunks more than a hundred popular misconceptions that govern the way we behave, and he does it in a light-hearted and enjoyable fashion.”

As I think I may well have mentioned before, you can grab something for the weekend from amazon. By the way, you don’t need a Kindle to read it, there are Kindle apps for Windows, Android, iOS etc that let you read Kindle books on your PC, iPad etc. Alternatively, you can download the book DRM free as a PDF, ePub or mobi file from Sciencebase. Also available in hardback in the UK, on Audible and on UK Kindle.

Atlas by Collins (launched today) pitches itself as the greatest app on Earth (geddit?). It’s a constantly evolving data visualisation tool for representing worldwide information on a selection of themed globes with over 200,000 places to explore.

I took a look and I have to say it is stupendous on the iPad.

Interactive spinning 3D globes have themes including energy and the environment, giving you the chance to tour the geographical and political world from the safety of your iOS device. If you have a well-thumbed atlas on your bookshelves then this is definitely for you.

Atlas app by Collins.