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JAMIE KOMARNICKI
August 22, 2008
A fleet of cars wrapped with ads is ready to hit the streets, hawking brand names on roads, superstore lots and driveways across Toronto.
But their drivers aren’t trying to sell you anything; they just want to get where they’re going as cheaply as possible.
The vehicles belong to Toronto’s latest player in the auto-sharing industry, CityFlitz Advertising Inc., which launched this week. CityFlitz sells advertising on its fleet of Mini Coopers and Smart Cars, then rents out the “mobile billboards” for a dollar a day, said CEO and president Andreas Kotal.
“You get the car for a buck a day, and the cars are wrapped with cool advertising,” Mr. Kotal said.
The company has signed on three advertisers, including Yahoo Canada, and will rent out 10 of its 17 cars.
Car-sharing has enjoyed a relatively smooth ride in Toronto, propped up by rising gas prices and growing environmental awareness, said Kevin McLaughin, president of AutoShare. His company, which has 200 cars, about 8,000 members and 120 locations across Toronto, has boosted its numbers each year since it began a decade ago.
AutoShare is talking with a U.S. company interested in wrapping some of the cars, but Mr. McLaughlin said he’s in no hurry to take the plunge.
“People have all different kinds of relationships with advertising and branding that exists in our society,” he said.
“People have to be comfortable with it.”
A spokeswoman for rival Zipcar, a U.S.-based business with 300 vehicles at more than 130 pods in its Toronto branch, said the company has no plans to festoon cars with ads.
“That’s mobile advertising and we’re a car-sharing service. I think they’re two very different industries,” Kristina Kennedy said.
Cutting costs by selling ads might come with a few pitfalls when you add an uncontrollable variable: a driver, said University of Toronto marketing professor David Dunne. Pair an obnoxious driver with a branded car, and a vicious sideswipe will be linked with that logo, he said.
“You have no idea how people are going to behave as they’re carrying your brand around,” Dr. Dunne noted.
Companies of all type are welcome to apply for space on the CityFlitz cars, said Mr. Kotal, as long as the ads are legal and don’t “offend” the company’s image – a notion that gives pause to musician Jake Oelrichs, 30.
“For me, it would depend on who was advertising,” said Mr. Oelrichs, who said he’d have to support the brand he was inadvertently promoting.
“You’re indirectly contributing to whatever the company is advertising,” said Mr. Oelrichs, checking out one of the CityFlitz cars parked in the Harbourfront Centre parking lot.
Getting around the moral quandary is simple: don’t like the advertiser? Don’t drive the car, Mr. Dunne said.
CityFlitz customers pay a one-time, refundable $350 security deposit, $30 processing fee and $7 monthly fees, then get the cars – which are available 24/7 to members with access to lock boxes on CityFlitz parking sites across the city – for a loonie a day. Drivers have to travel at least 30 kilometres on each trip.
Rebecca O’Keefe, who sold her car when she moved to Toronto, didn’t like the look of the ad-wrapped car she saw in the Harbourfront Centre lot, but she said the price is right for weekend trips out of town.
“If it gets me from point A to B for a dollar a day, I would totally drive it.”
Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080822.CARS22/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/
Finding may explain how wayward elephants find their way back to herd
Researchers at Disney’s Animal Kingdom outfitted elephants with a GPS system and recorder attached to a collar made out of fire hose to monitor the rumblings of the animals. The elephants emit the rumblings to communicate with other elephants far away. Here, 27-year-old Moyo and her 5-year-old male son, Tufani, are shown.
By Jennifer Viegas
updated 11:23 a.m. ET, Tues., Sept. 30, 2008
Human friends and relatives keep tabs on their loved ones by phone when they’re apart, and now new research shows elephants do nearly the same thing with rumble vocalizations that can transmit over one and a half miles.
The finding helps to explain how elephants almost always find their way back to their herd, even after they wander far off.
Elephants can see and smell their fellow herd members over long distances too, but visual obstructions, such as rocks, trees and even other big animals, can block their views, while wind changes and smells can compromise odor detection.
“The auditory system seems to provide a method to detect and communicate with individuals over both long and short distances, and we know that individuals can use auditory information to determine the location and identity of herd members,” lead author Katherine Leighty explained to Discovery News.
Leighty, a behavioral ecologist at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida, and her team conducted the first systematic study of spontaneously produced elephant rumble vocalizations. These are typically infrasonic calls, with frequencies between 13 and 35 Hz, which fall outside the range of human hearing.
Their test subjects were five unrelated adult female African elephants at the spacious Disney Bay Lake site. Each elephant was outfitted with a GPS system and recorder attached to a collar made out of fire hose.
Like a person answering a phone call, elephants that detected a rumble would often rumble back, the scientists discovered. But the elephants were more inclined to answer if they had a close affiliation with the caller.
In fact, associations in the herd read like almost a MySpace page with trains like this: Fiki is friends with Thandi who, in turn, often hangs out with Moyo. Moyo and Fiki get along most of the time, but Moyo hardly ever associates with Donna and Vasha.
In addition to influencing elephant responses, these kinds of associations also affected approach behaviors, with closely affiliated elephants tending to move toward each other during rumble exchanges.
The elephants sometimes even appear to blow off detected rumbles.
“It could be similar to when a person overhears another speaking,” Leighty said. “They may not respond, but that doesn’t mean it was not heard.”
Iain Douglas Hamilton, a leading authority on elephants and founder of the charity Save the Elephants, believes the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Behavior, represents “a significant advance in our understanding of elephant communication and a building block towards a wider understanding of how individuals interact to make group decisions.”
Hamilton was also interested to learn from the finding that the further apart two affiliated elephants were, the stronger their rumbles became.
“This accords with what we see in the wild, that the longer individuals have been separated, the stronger the greeting ceremony when they come together, in which deep rumbling plays a significant role,” he said.
Leighty and her team are already planning future studies on elephant infrasonic vocalizations, such as investigating why elephants do or don’t respond to a friend’s rumblings.
© 2008 Discovery Channel
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26957207/
by Matthew McDermott, Brooklyn, NY on 07.22.08
We’ve written before about attempts to monkey around with the oceans in an attempt to increase their carbon sequestration abilities, so as to mitigate the effects of climate change: seeding the oceans with iron being one of the most prominent examples. Enter another candidate for planetary engineering: adding lime (calcium hydroxide) to seawater.
Adding Lime to Seawater Increases Alkalinity, CO2 Absorption
Though the idea has be advanced before, a new method of sourcing the lime has attracted the attention of Shell, who is funding a feasibility study for the idea. Basically, the idea is based upon the idea that adding the lime to the water will increase its alkalinity, thereby increasing its ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, as well as reduce its tendency to release it again.
The stumbling block so far has been financial, it would be too expensive to obtain lime specifically for the project, rather than environmental, it’s estimated that twice the amount of CO2 generated in making lime for the geo-engineering would be absorbed in the oceans afterwards.
The new solution to this really isn’t technical as much as logistical. According to Tim Kruger, of Corven, the firm pushing a reconsideration of the process, “[collecting lime] could be made workable by locating it in regions that have a combination of low-cost ‘stranded’ energy considered too remote to be economically viable to exploit—like flared natural gas or solar energy in deserts—and that are rich in limestone, making it feasible for calcination to take place on site.”
Source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/reducing-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-adding-lime-to-oceans.php
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