Introduction to the Portfolio
(with a nod to W.A. Mozart)
(with a nod to W.A. Mozart)
Some
of the samples that follow may be as old as you are.
A few will be older,
but I’ve already said I’ve been doing this a long time.
Some of the print has faded with age.
I haven’t.
Ad Copy
Trade Publication
Brochure
Newsletter
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A few will be older,
but I’ve already said I’ve been doing this a long time.
Some of the print has faded with age.
I haven’t.
Ad Copy
Trade Publication
Brochure
Newsletter
SEO
Len Diamond ¸ Technical/Marketing Communications
SEO
for Pool Maintenance - 500 words
A DIFFERENT KIND OF
POOL, A DIFFERENT KIND OF MAINTENANCE
If you like to swim in the ocean but don't have one
handy, a saltwater pool can be your answer. Something you might want to know, however, is
that saltwater pool maintenance demands may be different from the more
conventional type. A very closely controlled, scientific study conducted by an
industry association in 2010 concluded that once-a-week pool maintenance is not sufficient to
service a saltwater pool.
Chlorine and pH levels are both important to pool
condition, so the study tracked both over a period of five months. (pH is a measure of
relative acidity vs alkalinity, plotted against a scale from 0 to 14. Gastric acid, for
example, would have a pH of 1; laundry bleach would score a pH 14. Target for the study
was pH 7.4, close to neutral, which is considered optimal for recreational pools.)
A regular routine was established and strict
supervision and records were kept. Test pool maintenance was performed on Fridays, and
results were measured after each weekend. While chlorine levels did fluctuate, they
generally remained within acceptable limits, but pH was found to increase substantially from
Friday to Monday at each measurement. You would want to avoid this in your home
pool; the trend toward decreasing pH in the oceans has been going on for
300 million years, and you don't want to go against a winning streak like that.
In case you think the study may have been some
ivory-tower exercise -- it wasn't. The investigators allowed for real-world elements any pool
owner will recognize. While allowing people in the water would have meant loss
of investigative control, it was felt necessary to account for their presence
if the results were to have significance for real pool owners. Accordingly,
measured amounts of “BFAs” (Body Fluid Analogs) were added
on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, in line with typical use patterns, like when the
neighbors' kids come over. A mild increase in calcium hardness values was
observed after the dosage, but this was attributed merely to interference with
the function of the test kit. The real cause-and-effect function was related to
the BFAs in the "synthetic bather" solution.
(Scientific investigators like to give you the bad
news in neutral-sounding words. It turns out that's true even in pool
maintenance. They can talk about their BFA's and synthetic bather solutions,
but if you're the owner of the pool being reported on, you're going to have to
deal with the reality: urea and uric acid.)
We know the news is not good for the oceans of the
world (or the gulfs, as in "BP oil spill") and pollution may continue to increase
before we ever figure out how to decrease or end it. That's no excuse, however, to maintain
hazardous waste in your back yard. If you have a saltwater pool, you may want to bite
the bullet and think about getting your pool maintenance service to come by more than once a
week. And think about making one of the extra days a Monday.
Len Diamond ¯
Technical/Marketing Communications
SEO Air Travel - 700
words
Statistically, Flying Is the Safest Way to Travel
-- but do you really want to be an air travel statistic?
I think it was Shelley
Berman, in one of his comedy routines,
who commented that the
airlines could always prove
conclusively that "flying is the safest way to fly."
It's the old "passenger-miles" ploy that
does it.
The strategy is obvious,
isn't it? With commercial airliners seating hundreds
and distances in thousands,
you multiply "passengers" by
"miles" and one successful trip adds a couple of hundred thousand
markers in the "win" column.
The argument goes, “The
record of America’s scheduled airlines has averaged out to about one fatality
per billion passenger miles.” 1 That statistic is then translated
into a 1 in 10,000 chance of being killed. (Odds of being mutilated,
disfigured, or maimed aren’t posted.)
So are less successful flights reported in fractured-flyer miles? (To the airlines' advantage, the numbers would be
smaller, since these people didn't get to finish the trip.)
No, one accident is one accident.
Accident statistics -- the bad numbers
-- are reported in terms of individual events (keeping the mitigating "per passenger
miles flown," however).
But they don't mention passengers
at all. The reason, I've seen it
argued by an air safety expert,2 is that except for the people involved,
keeping score in terms of people killed is “a meaningless statistic. What counts is the number of individual
accidents,” number of people on board
being random.
Fair enough;
but let's apply the same standard to the safety statistics -- the good
numbers. If "people on
board" is irrelevant in reporting
accidents, why does it become significant when reporting
on safety? The fair comparison to "number of individual
accidents" is "number of individual flights
without accidents." Tell me how many flights touched the ground only when and where they were supposed
to. But that would bring the safety numbers down out of those
reassuring billions.
"Passenger-miles" isn't the
only gimmick in use, of course; this from an air
travel industry Internet page: 3
"The number of U.S. highway deaths in a typical six-month period -- about 21,000 -- roughly equals all commercial jet air travel
fatalities worldwide since the dawn of jet aviation decades ago. In fact, fewer people have died in
commercial air travel accidents
in America over the past 60 years than are killed in auto accidents in a typical three-month period."
Here we momentarily drop the "passenger-miles" device in favor of what seem like a couple of straight
numbers-to- numbers comparisons; but on examination these, too, turn out to be impressive-sounding yet uninformative factoids. Maybe more people travel on highways every six months today than traveled by air in all those decades ("since the
dawn..."). Maybe there
are more automobile trips every three months now than there have been commercial air travel flights over the past 60 or 70 years. We don't get real
numbers.
But it's the passenger-miles gambit that
provides the basis for the most competitive comparisons the air travel industry makes. Here's another quote from that Internet page:
"In the United States , it's 22 times safer flying in commercial air travel than driving in a car, according to 1993-95 study
by the U.S. National
Safety Council comparing accident fatalities
per million passenger-
miles traveled."
Why "passenger-miles"? Noticed
any 200-seat vehicles on the road? No, the automobile
figures are compiled at --
what? -- maybe two
or three passengers per mile? as compared to the airlines'
hundreds? Think how many more
individual trips highway travelers took -- the vastly greater number of opportunities for accidents they exposed
themselves to -- to rack up the same millions of miles. How many air
travel passengers would have
died in that number of trips?
But even if you accept passenger-miles as a concept, there's still the question of scorekeeping. One hundred
passengers fly 1,000 miles, at which point the plane crashes.
Sixty passengers die. Does the airline get 40,000
passenger-miles credit for the survivors?
No, "passenger-miles" may help the airlines figure their ROI or decide on
what type of equipment to buy
next, but as back-up for safety claims -- that
ain't getting me out of my car. Let me know, better, when they develop a jetliner that can coast over to the side of that
highway in the sky if its engines cut out, so you can ring up the aero club at the emergency callbox. You can improve your chances of surviving an auto accident
by wearing a seat belt.
What will your seat belt do for you if the view out the front window of your plane becomes cornfield?
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