Hasta La Creative!

For those of you who don’t know , Bodies: The Exhibition is an event created by german artist and scientist Gunther Von Hagens, where real human corpses preserved through the process of plastination are showcased to observe human anatomy at its core.
 
Yesterday I had the privilege of seeing this exhibition and even more, to see it with the lovely Paula, and without a doubt, this is a unique event.
 
With tours that go through each of the body systems, a disposition of the different body parts that allows thorough analysis of each, and assistance from young health related students; this exhibition is at first an obliged visit for anyone in the medicine field, but mostly it is an event that must be seen by anyone who wants to understand and be amazed by the wonder of the human body.
 
For further information visit Bodies’ official website.

Practice the Gettysburgh Address in PowerPoint format

Boston Globe: “If you’ve never heard of PowerPoint Karaoke, that probably means you’re neither German nor a hardcore techie. The phenomenon has been spreading geek to geek and conference to conference since it was invented by a German artists’ group in 2005.

In a typical event, a few brave people volunteer to “present” a random deck of slides pulled off the Web, or borrowed from friends or employers. The audience laughs, cheers, and yells out suggestions as the presenters gamely struggle to link one slide to the next, transforming something that probably started life as a tedious corporate monologue into a five-minute flight of creative irony.”

Living in Boston, while not without its advantages, isolates you from some of the more interesting things happening elsewhere in the country.

Creation Science Fair, 2001, high school:

1st Place: “Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria”

“Eileen Hyde and Lynda Morgan (grades 10 & 11) did a project showing how the power of prayer can unlock the latent genes in bacteria, allowing them to microevolve antibiotic resistance. Escherichia coli bacteria cultured in agar filled petri dishes were subjected to the antibiotics tetracycline and chlorotetracycline. The bacteria cultures were divided into two groups, one group (A) received prayer while the other (B) didn’t. The prayer was as follows: “Dear Lord, please allow the bacteria in Group A to unlock the antibiotic-resistant genes that You saw fit to give them at the time of Creation. Amen.” The process was repeated for five generations, with the prayer being given at the start of each generation. In the end, Group A was significantly more resistant than Group B to both antibiotics.”

“The New York Times in Russian. Tell Americans and the entire world about Russia.”

The New York Times has started an interesting project on LiveJournal (LJ), one of the first blogging platforms that was recently sold to a Russian company. The newspaper picks an article about Russia, translates it in Russian, posts it on a LJ, solicits comments, than translates the comments back to English and posts it under the original article. The newspaper’s editors moderating the site promised, “You’ll see that we are not afraid of critisism and willl post a large number of negative comments in our address.”

The first and so far the only article about the upcoming elections has attracted 1780 comments from mostly angry Russians. About 140 of the most civil were translated back. Here’s one of them: “I read the first paragraph [of the article] and it was enough. Sort out everything in your democracy first.”

Quite a while ago, when my interest for digital art started turning obsesive, I realized that most of the artists that blew me away then (and still do today), had one thing in common: They all were part of the Keystone Design Union.
 
It was then that I set myself as a long term goal to one day be a part of this select group of artists and visionaries I admire so much. And today finally, it’s true. I’m finally a member of the group I so admire.
 
My deepest thanks to the good David Harris for all his assitance and answering my ever-growing amount of questions, and of course to the great David Gensler for recruiting me.
 
It’s an honor to share up-close with such talented people.
 
So from now on around here, you can also trust The KDU.

Someone famous (Ogilvy?) said that it was a good idea to make a habit of picking up magazines that are outside of your usual set. The ones below would probably work.

“Each issue of American Cemetery offers in-depth coverage of issues affecting the cemetery profession in today’s competitive business environment, including grounds maintenance tips, national and state association coverage, preneed, marketing, cremation, insurance computers/software and much more.“

Onion World, because “onions are the third largest consumed fresh vegetable in the U.S.”

Plumbing Systems and Design is “the official publication of the American Society of Plumbing Engineers, is the magazine for plumbing engineers, designers, specifiers, code officials, contractors, manufacturers, master plumbers, and other plumbing professionals.”

Railway Age “leads, instructs, reports and commands a $20 billion industry to review your products and services. Penetrate the marketplace with Railway Age, the publication that has written the book on the railway industry since 1876.”

Supply & Demand Chain Executive is “the executive’s user manual for successful supply and demand chain transformation, utilizing hard-hitting analysis, viewpoints and unbiased case studies to steer executives and supply management professionals through the complicated, yet critical, world of supply and demand chain enablement to gain competitive advantage.” Now with podcasts.

YouBama. I’m also on the look-out for more innovative campaign stuff.

The great annual theater festival Santiago a Mil has been involved year after year in bringing to our humble country some of the most important and amazing performances worldwide, and this year it was no exception.
 
Today I had the privilege of seeing the beautiful “Players of Light” show, by the incredible Groupe F.
 
An outdoors and free event that involved everything I enjoy: Great music, mind-blowing fireworks, all sorts of lights and beautiful colors.
 
An experience that went on for a little over an hour that felt like ten minutesU, but I’m pretty sure it must have left the thousands of people that were there more than satisfied.
 
A sublime experience. A captivating game of lights of unmatchable quality.

Fast Company runs an article in which Duncan Watts, a network-theory scientist, puts to test the idea that trends are sparked by a handful of highly connected individuals, or the influentials, as they have become known after the bestsellers The Tipping Point and The Influentials.

“Watts believes […] a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an ‘accidental Influential.'”

Watts has published several books on the subject, including Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.

Update [Jan 27 ’08]: Mike Arauz from Deep Focus responds.

My own beef with the theory of influentials is its implicit assertion, in my understanding of The Tipping Point, that if you have influence over a certain social network, this influence will have the same weight over the entire range of topics. I don’t know if this Absolute Influence exists, and my own daily experiences offer nothing to support the idea: it is not a given that someone who is an apparel fashion trendsetter in one particular network will be have the same influence over the choice of others’ plasma TVs, for example. Likewise, one’s influence will also vary across different networks, which makes identifying and targeting The Influentials a much more complex task than it is suggested by the theory advocates.

From the mail that AdLab readers and PR people have sent in over the past couple of weeks:

Prudent People Brag: “According to a recent study conducted by the Mindset Media, people who report that they always pay their credit card balances in full each month, […] to be far less modest than the rest of the population at large — “Modesty 1’s,” who are, perhaps, unable to resist bragging about their highly responsible credit habits.

JunkieAd.com creator would like to let the world know about another blog collecting creative advertising.

USA Today’s Media Lounge accepts submissions from ad bloggers.

If I understand the terminology correctly, WebCollage.com lets downstream sales partners reuse the rich interactive functionality of the mothership site with less friction.

Spot Runner (one of the ad automation companies) has acquired GlobeShooter, a network of 1,200 independent filmmakers, videographers, producers and production companies across the U.S.

Flow automatically tracks the design process from idea to end result and manages assets and applications for the most complex workflows.

Hammerhead agency promotes itself with this video.

Luke Sullivan’s legendary “Mr.Whipple” guide to great ads is out in its second edition.

For dessert, some spam: “The NOKIA Electronic Email Promo,was established 1970 by the Multi-Million groups and now supported by the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), United Nations Organization(UNO), United Kingdom(UK) and the European Union (EU) was conceived with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development.”