From Publishers Weekly
From “Soccer Moms,” the legendary swing voters of the mid-1990s, to “Late-Breaking Gays” such as former Gov. Games McGreevey (out at age 47), Burson-Marsteller CEO (and campaign adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton) Penn delves into the ever-splintering societal subsets with which Americans are increasingly identifying, and what they mean. For instance, because of “Extreme Commuters,” people who travel more than 90 minutes each way to work, carmakers must come up with ever more luxury seat features, and “fast food restaurants are coming out with whole meals that fit in cup holders.” In a chapter titled “Archery Moms?”, Penn reports on the “Niching of Sports”: much to the consternation of Major League Baseball, “we don’t like sports less, we just like little sports more.” The net result of all this “niching” is “greater individual satisfaction”; as Penn notes, “not one of the fastest-growing sports in America… depends substantially on teamwork.” Penn draws similar lessons in areas of business, culture, technology, diet, politics and education (among other areas), reporting on 70 groups (“Impressionable Elites,” “Caffeine Crazies,” “Neglected Dads,” “Unisexuals,” “America’s Home-Schooled”) while remaining energetic and entertaining throughout. Culture buffs, retailers and especially businesspeople for whom “small is the new big” will value this exercise in nano-sociology.
Daily Archives: October 29, 2007
Photographers
Great set of images.
Apollo 12 Pilot Alan Bean Interview
Alan Bean, Apollo 12 lunar module pilot, Skylab mission II commander, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project backup commander, backup astronaut for the Gemini 10 and Apollo 9 missions and eventually head of the astronaut candidate operations and training group within NASA’s astronaut office, spoke exclusively to Flightglobal.com about his time as an astronaut at the Autographica event in London on 12 October.
A member of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963 he became lunar module pilot for what was the second Moon landing in November 1969. He and mission commander Pete Conrad explored the ocean of storms, deployed several surface experiments and installed the first nuclear power generator station on the Moon. Richard Gordon, the mission’s command module pilot, remained in lunar orbit photographing landing sites for future missions.
Giant Atmospheric Waves Over Iowa
NASA:
Those giant waves—”undular bore waves”—were photographed Oct. 3rd flowing across the skies of Des Moines, Iowa. (Credit: KCCI-TV Des Moines and Iowa Environmental Mesonet SchoolNet8 Webcam.)
“Wow, that was a good one!” says atmospheric scientist Tim Coleman of the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama. Coleman is an expert in atmospheric wave phenomena and he believes bores are more common and more important than previously thought.