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  • “Upward pointing fins mirrored the rise in affluence” — The Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design

    Eisner Museum Image

    The Eisner Museum of Advertising & Design is located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is appropriate since that is where William F. Eisner started his first advertising agency at the age of 33.

    The five online exhibits available to visitors on the museum’s website include The Art of the Album Cover, which features work from artist Alex Steinweiss, who in 1939 forever changed the way record modern albums were marketed. Visitors can learn about the power of advertising through the Burma-Shave signs exhibit, as it was one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

    The New Set of Wheels exhibit, contains print, radio, and television ads for some of the most popular cars of the 1920s-1960s, and teaches visitors how “advertising efforts of this time came to influence automotive consumer behavior as much as automotive engineering”:Interior of Museum

    “As a nation roared into an era where horse-powered buggies gave way to the horsepower under the hood of a shiny new automobile, a new form of class distinction was created. Chrome reflected social status. Upward pointing fins mirrored the rise in affluence. And the image that an automobile’s advertising projected had as much to do with people’s preferences as the latest technological and design innovations. Take a trip through this exhibit and explore the social impact of automobile advertising and design.”

    Stroll through the current exhibits in a virtual tour and discover more about the man for which the museum was named:

    William Eisner was a graduate of both the Layton School of Art (predecessor to the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design) and Marquette University, Eisner was both an innovator and an entrepreneur. By 1969, he had built a complex that housed several of his own companies, including an advertising agency, printing company, photography studio, recording studio, graphic design house, public relations firm and a Christian communications company. Through the years, Eisner’s clients represented a mix of Wisconsin’s top companies as well as nationally recognized brands in healthcare, food service and agriculture.Interior of Museum

    He led the National Federation of Advertising Agencies as president, shared his insights as mentor and teacher for students at Marquette University’s School of Journalism, and was active in the Milwaukee Advertising Club.

    Elaine Eisner began to formulate the idea of a museum after her husband’s sudden death in 1990. About a year later, Elaine approached Terrence Coffman, president of MIAD, with her dream. Her idea is now a reality.

    Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2011.  and additonal text from the Eisner site.

  • Vienna 1900:Style and Identity

    Oleaner

    The Neue Galerie New York has extended the exhibition, Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, for another six weeks .  The exhibit includes more than 150 paintings, sculpture, works on paper, fashion, and decorative art objects. Among the highlights are the paintings Hope II (Vision), 1907-08 by Gustav Klimt, Lotte Franzos, 1909, by Oskar Kokoschka, and Laughing Self-Portrait, 1908, by Richard Gerstl, and key decorative artworks by Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and Adolf Loos.

    Organized by Jill Lloyd, an independent scholar and curator, and Christian Witt-Dörring, adjunct curator of decorative arts at the Neue Galerie, the exhibition fills all the exhibition spaces of this exquisit museum. The Neue Galerie is its sole venue, where it will be on view through August 8th.

    “With this exhibition, and really our entire program at the Neue Galerie, we are bringing to life a time and a place of incredible richness,” said Ronald S. Lauder, President of the Neue Galerie. “Vienna 1900 — its intellectual strength, its sensuality, and its emotional directness — is at the core of who we are and what we do.”

    “As a native Viennese myself, I confess to being forever fascinated by the city and its extraordinary range of cultural expressions,” said Renée Price, director of the Neue Galerie. “It is my privilege to return to Vienna, and to enrich the public’s understanding with this exhibition.”corset

    At the end of the nineteenth century, traditional means of defining personal identity — namely, on the basis of gender, culture, religion, and nationality — were fundamentally challenged. As the conventions of the past hundred years were undermined by developments in the social, political, and philosophical realms, the very idea of the self was radically redefined. The aim of this exhibition is to show a common thread running through the fine and decorative arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna: the evolution of the concept of modern individual identity. In painting, the decorative arts, and music, this was borne out in a dialogue between surface ornamentation and inner structure and a search for a specifically modern, Viennese sense of self.

  • FDA Should Enhance Its Oversight of Medical Device Recalls

    GAO-11-468 June 14, 2011: Highlights Page (PDF)   Full Report (PDF, 57 pages)   Accessible Text Recommendations (HTML)

    Summary

    Recalls are an important tool to mitigate serious health consequences associated with defective or unsafe medical devices. Typically, a recall is voluntarily initiated by the firm that manufactured the device. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), oversees implementation of the recall. FDA classifies recalls based on health risks of using the recalled device — class I recalls present the highest risk (including death), followed by class II and class III. FDA also determines whether a firm has effectively implemented a recall, and when a recall can be terminated.

    This report identifies (1) the numbers and characteristics of medical device recalls and FDA’s use of this information to aid its oversight, and (2) the extent to which the process ensures the effective implementation and termination of the highest-risk recalls. GAO interviewed FDA officials and examined information on medical device recalls initiated and reported from 2005 through 2009, and reviewed FDA’s documentation for a sample of 53 (40 percent) of class I recalls initiated during this period.

    From 2005 through 2009, firms initiated 3,510 medical device recalls, an average of just over 700 per year. FDA classified the vast majority — nearly 83 percent — as class II, meaning use of these recalled devices carried a moderate health risk, or that the probability of serious adverse health consequences was remote. Just over 40 percent of the recalls involved cardiovascular, radiological, or orthopedic devices. FDA has used recall data to monitor individual recalls and target firms for inspections.

    However, it has not routinely analyzed recall data to determine whether there are systemic problems underlying trends in device recalls. Thus, FDA is missing an opportunity to use recall data to proactively identify and address the risks presented by unsafe devices.

    Several gaps in the medical device recall process limited firms’ and FDA’s abilities to ensure that the highest-risk recalls were implemented in an effective and timely manner. For many high-risk recalls, firms faced challenges, such as locating specific devices or device users, and thus could not correct or remove all devices.

  • Liberal Arts and Empathy in Medicine

    by Joan L. Cannon

    A doctor being interviewed on Public Radio about his autobiography made a comment that should resonate with those of us who came to maturity in the last century. It called to mind a recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. Both say what most patients never hear articulated is the importance of skills beyond the scientific and technical ones that may be able to save lives.

    It’s been in the news of late that family practice is becoming a rarity. The older we are, the more we understand the value of access to someone who knows us; someone who knows not only our cases and our history of diseases or injuries, but someone who knows our histories and our personalities.

    For over ten years such respected general interest journals as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as well a host of educational and medical publications have been printing essays about the values of “the Humanities.” That’s the best and most descriptive word to embrace the relatively new notion that to heal the body a physician needs to know more about the person to whom it belongs than purely quantitative and anecdotal evidence of abnormality.

    This slow-to-mature attitude has even been the means of adding students to medical schools who are not entering with undergraduate majors in any of the expected sciences. This may be the best thing to happen to patients as a class since the inventions of anti-sepsis and anesthesia.

    Familiarity over years is better than over weeks, but even if one must learn to be managed by a new physician, the adjustment necessary can be vastly eased with some time. The necessity of averaging a set number of minutes with each patient is unfortunate and counterproductive. Imagine being treated as an elderly person by a young doctor who has no classical arts background when his or her patient is a university authority on Greek drama and the author of books on the subject that has consumed the major portion of his or her life.

  • EWG Ranks Fruits and Veggies: Apples Top New Dirty Dozen List

    Environmental Working Group has released the seventh edition of its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce with updated information on 53 fruits and vegetables and their total pesticide loads. EWG highlights the worst offenders with its Dirty Dozen list and the cleanest conventional produce with its Clean 15 list.Apple from EWG

    Analysts at EWG synthesized data collected from the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration from 2000 to 2009. Produce is ranked based on a composite score, equally weighing six factors that reflect how many pesticides was found in testing of on each type of the produce and at what levels. Most samples are washed and peeled prior to being tested, so the rankings reflect the amounts of the chemicals likely present on the food when is it eaten.

    Notable changes in the new guide included apples’ rank as the most contaminated produce, jumping three spots from last year to replace celery at the top of the “Dirty Dozen” list. According to USDA, pesticides showed up on 98 percent of the more than 700 apple samples tested.

    Making an appearance in the guide for the first time is the herb cilantro, which had never been tested by USDA until now. The data showed 33 unapproved pesticides on 44 percent of the cilantro samples tested, which is the highest percentage of unapproved pesticides recorded on any item included in the guide since EWG started tracking the data in 1995.

    Also appearing in the guide for the first time are green onions, cranberries and mushrooms. Mushrooms made the Clean 15 list, while honeydew was the only item to drop off that list this year. Cherries dropped off the Dirty Dozen list, but lettuce, which has made the list in previous years, were back on.

    “Though buying organic is always the best choice, we know that sometimes people do not have access to that produce or cannot afford it,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Our guide helps consumers concerned about pesticides to make better choices among conventional produce, and lets them know which fruits and vegetables they may want to buy organic.”

    Pesticides can be extremely toxic to human health and the environment. US and international government agencies alike have linked pesticides to nervous system toxicity, cancer, hormone system disruption and IQ deficits among children.

  • Two Americas in Sharp Contrast; A Conservative States Agenda

    In an era of one-party rule, Republicans pass a sweeping state agenda

    By John Gramlich, Stateline Staff Writer, Pew Center on the States, a non-partisan, non-profit news agency

    Republicans controlled all the levers of government in a staggering number of states this year — and it showed.

    Holding a lock on the governorship and both houses of the legislature in 20 states, GOP conservatives advanced an agenda that may change the face of state government for decades. They honored pledges not to raise taxes by enacting huge spending cuts to balance budgets in Florida and Texas. They put tough abortion limits back on the agenda, passing laws in Alabama, Kansas and Oklahoma. Most famously, Republicans in Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin put new restrictions on the rights of public employees, whose protests made national news for a month. 

    Though Democrats proved powerless to stop those changes, they moved a profoundly different agenda in the 11 states where they enjoy total control of state government. Arguing that budget cuts could only go so far, Democrats pushed tax increases in Connecticut, Illinois and Maryland. Meanwhile, Vermont approved a health care law supported by liberals that could prove far more expansive in scope than the controversial overhaul passed in Congress last year. 

    These were the results of an historic election last November, one that created vast shifts in power in statehouses across the country. Almost all of it went in the Republicans’ favor. The GOP picked up more than 500 legislative seats, winning their biggest majority of seats nationally since 1928. Republicans snatched 13 House chambers, seven Senate chambers and 11 governorships out of Democratic hands, and in Maine and Wisconsin they wrested control of all three. 

    Even in some states where Republicans had long held power — such as Texas — they gained such dominant new legislative majorities that Democrats could no longer rely on procedural tactics they had previously used to derail proposals they vehemently opposed. 

    Turning politics into policy

    Suddenly, Republicans enjoyed not only a staggering amount of leverage in state legislatures but also support from discontented voters to make major changes. And in the ongoing fiscal crisis states have been experiencing, many Republicans saw not a calamity but an opportunity to actually shrink government by reducing spending. They dispatched Democratic opposition with ease as they approved major budget cuts alongside long-stalled policy changes that previously couldn’t attract enough votes to pass. 

    In Oklahoma, where Republicans took control of both the governorship and legislature for the first time ever, the GOP achieved a huge party objective: They rewrote tort rules to limit the damages that lawsuit filers can collect. 

    In Florida, Republican Tea Party favorite Rick Scott replaced the independent Charlie Crist in the governor’s office and oversaw a dramatic revamping of the state’s Medicaid system. Essentially, Florida is converting Medicaid entirely into a managed care model of service. 

    Maine’s new Republican leadership took concrete steps toward repealing the state’s Democratic-approved experiment in universal health care, known as Dirigo Health. A spokesman for Governor Paul LePage, another Tea Party-backed executive, pledged gleefully that “Dirigo will be Diri-gone.”

  • Woman of Note and Her Gallery: Marianne North

    Restoring The GalleryMarianne North Gallery at Kew

    It’s now 127 years since the Marianne North Gallery first opened its doors to great public acclaim.

    With television, film or ‘popular colour’ photography yet to be invented, visitors flocked to see the brilliantly-coloured flora, fauna and scenes of local people from around the world that Marianne North carefully recorded in her 833 paintings.

    The Marianne North Gallery was beginning to show its age. Unlike today’s purpose-built exhibition spaces, the building had no proper environmental controls so heat, damp and mould were damaging the paintings. The roof was no longer sound and the walls were not weather-tight. Conservation problems with the building also affected the paintings.

    Kew looked at how to deal with these problems and decided it was necessary to close the Gallery to the public so that a major restoration project could get underway. The Grade II building and hanging system are listed and Marianne North donated the Gallery and her collection to Kew on condition they remain together.

    Specialist staff across the organisation, from conservators and estate management to education and outreach, visitor services, training and volunteers, formed a team to work out how to restore the building and its collections.

    Conserving the Paintings

    The Marianne North Conservation Project began in 2008 in a newly built Preservation studio in the Herbarium at Kew. This project ran for two years to complete the 833 paintings and had a team of five conservators and one technician.

  • Are Facebook Users Too Trusting? Pew Examines Social Networking Sites and Our Lives:

    The Pew Internet and American Life Project‘s  report finds that Facebook users are more trusting, have more close friends, are more politically engaged, and get more support from their friends. Additionally, Facebook helps revive “dormant” ties with lost connections — the highest proportion of Facebook friends is high school classmates.

    Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement.social networking

    The findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.

    The number of those using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older.

    In this Pew Internet sample, 79% of American adults said they used the internet and nearly half of adults (47%), or 59% of internet users, say they use at least one of SNS. This is close to double the 26% of adults (34% of internet users) who used a SNS in 2008. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010.  Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35. Some 56% of SNS users now are female.

    Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.

    There is considerable variance in the way people use various social networking sites: 52% of Facebook users and 33% of Twitter users engage with the platform daily, while only 7% of MySpace and 6% of LinkedIn users do the same.

    On Facebook on an average day:

    • 15% of Facebook users update their own status.
    • 22% comment on another’s post or status.
    • 20% comment on another user’s photos.
    • 26% “Like” another user’s content.
    • 10% send another user a private message

    Facebook users are more trusting than others.

    We asked people if they felt “that most people can be trusted.” When we used regression analysis to control for demographic factors, we found that the typical internet user is more than twice as likely as others to feel that people can be trusted. Further, we found that Facebook users are even more likely to be trusting. We used regression analysis to control for other factors and found that a Facebook user who uses the site multiple times per day is 43% more likely than other internet users and more than three times as likely as non-internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.

  • Who Got What Right and Wrong in the New Hampshire Debate

    Summary of FactCheck.org’s ‘Debate’Accuracy Findings:

    In the first New Hampshire debate among 2012 presidential hopefuls, we found a number of incorrect, misleading or shaky factual claims:

    • Pawlenty was wrong when he boasted that he was “one of the few governors” to respond to a Bush request to send guardsmen to the southern border. In fact, all 50 states participated in that border operation.
    • Romney claimed that “we didn’t raise taxes in Massachusetts” to pay for his health care law. In fact, his successor imposed a $1-a-pack tax increase on cigarettes to pay for the new law.
    • Santorum claimed a Medicare advisory board created by the new federal health care law will result in a rationing of care for seniors. The law specifically says the board “shall not include any recommendation to ration health care.”
    • Santorum was wrong when he said the Obama administration is “against any kind of exploration offshore or in Alaska.” The administration has approved 296 new permits for new offshore oil wells since taking office, and it is considering granting the first permits in Alaska since 2004.
    • Bachmann claimed the Congressional Budget Office “has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs.” That’s a distortion. CBO said some Americans would work less or leave their jobs if they can get health insurance outside the workplace.
    • Pawlenty said that “[if] Brazil can have 5 percent growth, then the United States of America can have 5 percent growth,” showing his economic plan is not unreasonable. But the fact is, World Bank figures show Brazil has failed to achieve 5 percent growth for 23 of the past 30 years.
    • Gingrich again tried to rewrite history by claiming that his words “right-wing social engineering” were “totally taken out of context.” In fact, he called Paul Ryan’s plan “too big a jump” and “radical” change as well.

    Analysis

    Seven Republican presidential hopefuls for 2012 debated in New Hampshire June 13. The event was cosponsored and televised nationally by CNN. We present here a few factual claims that we found to be false or misleading — and an example of one claim the debaters got right.

    Pawlenty Not ‘One of the Few’

    Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty falsely claimed he was “one of the few governors” to respond when President George W. Bush asked states to send guardsmen to support Border Patrol agents in four states along the U.S.-Mexico border. In fact, all 50 states participated in the two-year program.

  • Does Our Personality Affect Our Level of Attractiveness?

    Part of what determines how much success you will have in the dating world is whether you have a good sense of whether people find you attractive. A new study, which will be published in an issue of  Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that certain personality traits contribute to being a good judge of whether someone else thinks you’re worth meeting again.Tom Hanks spotting Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail

    The study is one of a series to come out of a big speed-dating experiment held in Berlin about five years ago. “Most of the prior research had worked with hypothetical scenarios, where people are asked by a questioner, ‘What kind of people would you like to get to know?’ and so on,” says Mitja Back of the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, who co-wrote the new paper with Lars Penke of the University of Edinburgh, Stefan Schmukle of Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, and Jens Asendorpf of Humboldt University Berlin. The problem, of course, is that what people say they like — honesty, humor, and so on — may have little to do with what they actually like — for example hotness.

    In this case, Back was interested in another question: is there’s something about personality that makes some people better at predicting whether others will want to meet them? In 17 groups, a total of 190 men and 192 women met members of the opposite sex—basically the standard speed dating routine, but this time, with psychologists collecting a lot of data. Among that data was personality information and the all-important question after each three-minute date: for each person you talk to, do you want to see that person again? They were also asked if they thought the other person would want to meet them.

    On the whole, people are very bad at guessing how many of the other persons will want to meet them. Some people had no clue at all. But others did better. Success was correlated with particular traits that are stereotypically associated with the sexes: Men who have a more promiscuous orientation were better at guessing if a woman would want to meet them, and women whose personality was very agreeable were better at guessing if a man would meet them.

    Back thinks men who are inclined toward casual sex are displaying behavior that’s very stereotypically associated with their sex; this may in turn evoke more typical behavior in the woman they’re talking to, which could make them more accurate at predicting whether the woman will be interested. Women who are agreeable, on the other hand, might make men more comfortable and more willing to flirt — which could make it easier to judge whether the man will want to meet them again.

    “Speed dating is a very good context to study dating behavior” Back says. “It’s almost like psychologists could have invented this.”

    Photo by Brian Hamill of character Joe  (Tom Hanks) spotting Kathleen (Meg Ryan) in film, You’ve Got Mail