No business case for Scottish independence say brands

Business leaders from brands including Baxters Food, Famous Grouse, The Co-operative Bank, HSBC, John Menzies and Harris Tweed, have written a letter claiming that the business case for voting “Yes” for Scottish independence has not been made.

Our Earth Has Endured Five Mass Extinctions

Reality is upon us.

From Adbusters #115: Blueprint for a New World, Part 4: Techno


Tailings Pond, Peregrine Falcon Effigy – Peter Essick

In 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River

when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, “hundreds — perhaps thousands — of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.” The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented. The bones were similar to an elephant’s, but no one had seen anything like an elephant near the Ohio River, or indeed anywhere in the New World. Perhaps the animals had wandered off to the uncharted wilds out west? No one could say. The captain packed up a massive circular tusk, a three-foot-long femur and some ten-pound teeth, carried them around for several months as he went about the tricky task of eradicating the Chickasaw Nation, and finally delivered the relics, after a stopover in New Orleans, to Paris, where they confounded naturalists for several decades.

A contemporary reader may guess, correctly, that the bones belonged to a species of animal that had long since ceased to exist—in fact, they came from the Mammut Americanum, the American mastodon — but at the time such an imaginative leap would have been very difficult, because it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone that an entire species could cease to exist. “Aristotle wrote a ten-book History of Animals without ever considering the possibility that animals actually had a history,” Kolbert writes, and in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published four years before Le Moyne’s discovery, “there is really only one kind of animal — those that exist.” The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc thought the bones might belong to a species that, uniquely in history and for reasons unknown, had disappeared from the Earth, but his conjecture was widely rejected. Thomas Jefferson put forward the consensus view in 1781, in his Notes on the State of Virginia: “Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”

In 1796, Georges Cuvier presented a new theory: nature did permit links to be broken, sometimes a lot of them all at once. Cuvier, just 27, was teaching at the Paris Museum of Natural History, one of the few institutions to survive the Terror, and had spent many hours studying its collection of fossils and bones. He noticed that the teeth of Le Moyne’s incognitum had unusual little bumps on them, like nipples. He was convinced they couldn’t be elephant teeth. He called their owner “mastodonte,” … “breast tooth.” Other remains were similarly unmatched to the contemporary world: the elephantsized ground sloth, called Megatherium, bones of which had been discovered near Buenos Aires and reassembled in Madrid (Cuvier worked from sketches); the meat-eating aquatic lizard (now called Mosasaurus), whose massive fossilised jaw had been picked out of a quarry near Maastricht; the Woolly Mammoth, whose frozen remains were everywhere in Siberia. Such creatures must have populated a lost world. “But what was this primitive earth?” Cuvier asked, “and what revolution was able to wipe it out?”

These were interesting questions, but Cuvier’s contemporaries were slow to consider answers. More and more they were coming to accept that occasionally species might disappear — Darwin would soon propose that “the appearance of new forms and the disappearance of old forms” were procedurally “bound together” by natural selection — but evolution was a gradual process. Mass extinction, “revolution,” was something else. The claim that nature could undergo a sudden radical shift seemed not just historically unfounded but scientifically (and perhaps politically) untenable. Charles Lyell countered Cuvier’s anarchic “catastrophism” with stately “uniformitarianism.” All change, geological or biological, took place gradually, steadily. Any talk of catastrophe, Lyell admonished, was “unphilosophical.”

The evidence of catastrophe accrued nonetheless. Geologists have understood since the 17th century that sedimentary layers of rock and soil mark the passage of time, the youngest layers at the top, the oldest at the bottom, and that sometimes geological forces will push up a slice of the world that contains several aeons’ worth of fossilrich strata, which we can read like the lines of a census report. The fossils in most layers did indeed demonstrate a uniform degree of biodiversity, but some indicated a massive decline. Where once there were many different forms of life, suddenly there were few.

The lesson that mass extinction is normal is hard to accept. Scientists are beginning to recognise that we’re in the middle of another event, perhaps the sixth mass extinction, but that recognition has been slow in coming.

Palaeontologists and geologists now generally agree that the Earth has endured five major extinctions, and more than a dozen lesser ones. The first took place 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician period, and the most lethal 200 million years later, during the Permian-Triassic — “the great dying,” when nine out of ten marine species vanished. The most terrifying of the mass extinctions, though, was surely the fifth, the Cretaceous-Palaeogene incident, which began 65 million years ago when an asteroid the size of Manhattan smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula with the explosive impact of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. The palaeobiologist Peter Ward, writing last year in Nautilus, calls it life’s worst day on Earth, when the world’s global forest burned to the ground, absolute darkness from dust clouds encircled the Earth for six months, acid rain burned the shells off of calcareous plankton, and a tsunami picked up all of the dinosaurs on the vast, Cretaceous coastal plains, drowned them, and then hurled their carcasses against whatever high elevations finally subsided the monster waves.

The lesson that mass extinction is normal is hard to accept. Scientists are beginning to recognise that we’re in the middle of another event, perhaps the sixth mass extinction, but that recognition has been slow in coming. In 1963, Colin Bertram, a marine biologist and polar explorer, warned that human expansion could destroy “most of the remaining larger mammals of the world, very many of the birds, the larger reptiles, and so many more both great and small,” and in 1979 the biologist Norman Myers published a little-read book called The Sinking Ark, showing with statistics that Bertram had been correct. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that large numbers of biologists began to take such concerns seriously. In 1991, the palaeobiologist David Jablonski published a paper in Science that compared the present rate of loss to that of previous mass extinctions. Other papers followed and by 1998 a survey by the American Museum of Natural History found that seven out of ten biologists suspected another mass extinction was underway. In 2008, two such biologists, David Wake and Vance Vredenburg, asked in a widely discussed paper, “Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?” The answer arrived in 2012 from a large team of biologists and palaeontologists writing in Nature: we almost certainly are. If we continue at the current rate of destruction, about three-quarters of all living species will be lost within the next few centuries.

Excerpted from Luke Mitchell’s “What Killed the Neanderthals?” — a review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History which appeared in The London Review of Books on May, 2014.

Source

Stretched glasses / Étiré par les cheveux?

Longglasses2001 longglasses2014
THE ORIGINAL? 
Estrel Mascara – 2001
Source : Cannes Archive, Adeevee
Agency : Bates Advertising (China)
LESS ORIGINAL
Pastel « Longer eye lashes » – 2014
Source : Adsoftheworld
Agency : Gode Istanbul (Turkey)

43 Examples of Ergonomic Tech – These Ergonomic Designs Make Gaming, Texting and Working Comfortable (TOPLIST)

(TrendHunter.com) Most people are guilty of having some sort of mobile device on them at all times, and spend a lot of time in front of a computer and a keyboard either for work or pleasure, which is makes ergonomic…

Marbled Mobile Accessories – This iPhone Case from Etsy's Dsbrennan Shop Finds Beauty in Nature (GALLERY)

(TrendHunter.com) This stunning phone case from Etsy’s dsbrennan shop features an image of a “Blue Agate” photograph that has been 3D-printed onto its back face.

The marbled mobile accessory finds…

Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari : My First Job In Advertising

How did you land your first job in advertising?
My first job in advertising was as a summer trainee in network advertising. I remember Rajan giving me my first assignment on Jet Airways. It was a bunting and dangler. And when it got printed i could not believe that this is my work. I had flaunted it to everyone i met.
Later I joined Leo Burnett as a trainee. And that was a very funny interview. I had gone with my huge portfolio and was called into Aggie’s room. I desperately wanted to join LB. He looked at my work and as he was about to say something there was a cockroach running on the carpet. It was the very old LB office. (but still my favorite one. we could hide or runaway from office and servicing would not know :) He asked me ‘ Are you scared of cockroaches? I was quiet smiling.. and then he said ” if you are scared I wont hire you” I took it very seriously and said “No i am not”. He laughed and said “There will too many here to hound you, including me” So when do you want to join… I smiled and said “tomorrow”.

The post Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari : My First Job In Advertising appeared first on desicreative.

William Greaves, a Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist, Dies at 87

Mr. Greaves was a co-host of “Black Journal,” the only national TV program on black issues in the 1960s.



Enrique Zileri, Crusading Publisher in Peru, Dies at 83

Mr. Zileri was the former publisher of the nation’s top newsmagazine, and was deported several times for his criticisms of the government.



Braincast 123 – A Influência do RPG

No Braincast 123, Carlos Merigo, Saulo Mileti, Cris Dias e Alexandre Maron discutem os conceitos do RPG e a influência que exerceu em diversos aspectos das indústrias criativas, desde a popularização dos universos ficcionais até os perfis em redes sociais.

Faça o download ou dê o play abaixo:

>

> 02m23 Comentando os Comentários?
> 16m19 Pauta principal
> 1h42m30 Qual É a Boa?

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Workshop9: Design e Estética

Nosso curso de Design voltou! E ainda mais: chegou o Módulo 2, de Estética.

Apresentado para mais de 600 alunos, o curso de Design visita a história dessa ciência e abre discussão para uma real compreensão sobre cores, uso de tipografia, construções baseadas no sistema áureo, suas modulações, metodologias de trabalho e muito mais.

Já o módulo 2, curso de Estética, vai fundo no estudo filosófico e prático, analisando peças criativas (do design, publicidade e até mesmo cinema), para compreendermos essa fundamental lógica dos símbolos que nos cercam.

>> INSCREVA-SE!

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Qual é a Boa? em vídeo!

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Críticas, elogios, sugestões para braincast@brainstorm9.com.br ou no facebook.com/brainstorm9.
Feed: feeds.feedburner.com/braincastmp3 / Adicione no iTunes

Quer ouvir no seu smartphone via stream? Baixe o app do Soundcloud.

Brainstorm9Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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As Online Video Surges, the .TV Domain Rides the Wave

The domain, owned by Tuvalu, a tiny South Pacific island nation, signals how people watch TV now — online and on apps — and makes the country a tidy sum, too.



100 Fall Food Ideas – From Bite-Sized Pumpkin Pies to Bursting Brown Sugar Apples (TOPLIST)

(TrendHunter.com) When you start to detect a chill in the air, you have to know it’s time to crack into the cookbooks for some fall food ideas to keep you cozy, well-fed and warm.

If you’re a fan of fall&…

Artisan Tool Storage – This Desk Caddy by Peg and Awl is Handcrafted from Reclaimed Materials (GALLERY)

(TrendHunter.com) This large Desk Caddy by Peg and Awl is designed with the design-conscious artisan in mind. Whether you’re a avid art lover or a carpentry enthusiast, you are sure to appreciate this…

Ricky Gervais “invade” séries em comercial da Netflix

Você já se envolveu tanto com os personagens e a trama de uma série a ponto de se imaginar dentro dela? Esta é a questão levantada por Ricky Gervais em Superfan, comercial da Netflix exibido na noite de ontem, durante a transmissão do Emmy Awards.

De repente, vemos o ator “invadindo” séries exibidas pelo serviço por assinatura, como House of Cards, Orange is The New Black – onde ele é abordado por duas detentas que tentam convencê-lo de que ele realmente está no lugar errado -, Derek e Lilyhammer.

Agora, tão bom quanto o comercial em si, são os erros de gravação, que você pode conferir logo abaixo. Vale o play.

 

Brainstorm9Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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Explaining Status Quo at Emmy Awards

Some Emmy voters may have felt threatened by streaming services like Netflix, potentially hampering its success at the Emmys.



Advertising: Comfort of Longtime Brands Inspires Campaigns

Marketers want to take advantage of the longevity of some venerable brands.



Models strip in River Island's first TV campaign

River Island, the high-street fashion retailer, has released its first TV campaign, promoting its autumn/winter range.

No Other Night Is Monday Night

Football season is upon us. Almost…

Green Bay comes to Seattle next Thursday to open the NFL season.

It is safe to say anticipation is rising across the American football loving land.

The 45th season of Monday Night Football kicks off on ESPN with a doubleheader on Monday, September 8 – New York Giants at Detroit Lions (7 p.m. ET) and San Diego Chargers at Arizona Cardinals (10:15 p.m. ET).

ESPN’s 17-game regular season prime time schedule in 2014 will feature all 12 playoff teams from 2013, including both the defending Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks and AFC champion Denver Broncos. ESPN will also televise the Pro Bowl and, for the first time, a NFL Wild Card playoff game.

Agency: Wieden + Kennedy/New York

The post No Other Night Is Monday Night appeared first on AdPulp.

Bionic Boat Cruises – The Quantum of the Sea Cruise Offers Robotic Bars and High-Tech Amenities (GALLERY)

(TrendHunter.com) The Quantum of the Seas boat cruise is set to offer travelers a luxuriously high-tech experience unlike any sea vessel has yet to do. Aboard the Quantum of Seas consumers can experience innovative…

Canalplay: Being a vampire

Advertising Agency: Buzzman, Paris, France
Creative Director: Georges Mohammed-Chérif
Art Directors / Copywriters: Victor Sidoroff, Mickael Krikorian
Production company: Henry
Director: Bar Timmer
Published: August 2014

ECPAT: Joel Kinnaman

Advertising Agency: Svensson, Sweden
Copywriter: Tomas Carrfors
Art Director: Filip Lindquist
Account Manager: Anna Lennström
Production Manager: Ewa Staël von Holstein
Designer: Perry Gustafsson
Final Art: Jonas Sahlström
Production Company: Vidory
Communication Agency: Prime
Director: Henrik Gyllenskiöld