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发表于 2014-12-9 22:31:02
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Part II: Speed
Digging Up Ads From WWII—When They Pushed Products No One Could Buy
During World War II, companies stayed in the public eye by advertising products—often with the government's help—that weren't available to civilians.
Becky Little DECEMBER 7, 2014
[Time 2]
What are they selling? Nothing. In May 1944 National Geographic advertisement, a film and projection company explains that it will not be able to sell its products to civilians until the war is over.
In the May 1944 issue of National Geographic, an advertisement shows a U.S. military officer in a dark war room, using a Bell & Howell Filmo projector, instructing troops on "How to STOP a Tank."
"There aren't any Filmo Cameras and Projectors for personal movie making just now," the ad copy reads, "but our postwar products will be well worth waiting for."
After Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941—73 years ago today—the United States entered World War II and quickly launched a federal rationing program to support its troops. Government-enforced rationing meant that Americans could buy only limited supplies of common products like shoes, cars, and certain processed foods.
What it also meant was that some products—like Filmo cameras and projectors—were completely removed from the civilian economy.
But that didn't stop major companies from advertising their wares. On the contrary, firms like Bell Telephone System and General Motorspublished newspaper and magazine ads for many wartime products and services that Americans couldn't buy or use.
Why advertise something you couldn't sell? According to Inger Stole, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, companies advertised these products to "keep their brand names in the public consciousness. They knew that once the war was over, it was very, very important that the public [not forget] the brand names."
The ads also portrayed the companies' involvement in the war effort as a patriotic—rather than a profit-driven—act.
This period of marketing, which began just two months after the U.S. entered WWII, was part of an unprecedented collaboration between advertisers and the U.S. government.
[304 words]
[Time 3]
Finding Common Cause
"The tire crisis is still acute, of course, and you must conserve the tires you have," read a General Tire advertisement in May 1944.
The ad featured a U.S. military officer leaning on a white picket fence, gazing longingly at a young woman (who is presumably waiting for him on the home front). The ad didn't encourage readers to buy the company's tires, but it did advise them to "BUY MORE WAR BONDS."
"WWII involved a mobilization and cooperation between government and major corporations on an unprecedented level," says Daniel Horowitz, an emeritus professor of American studies at Smith College. It also promoted the "sense, widespread in the population, that this was a good war; that sacrifice was important; that we were all in this together."
In February 1942, the U.S. government wanted to encourage Americans to ration commodities, donate goods, and buy war bonds. To market the idea of nationwide sacrifice to the public, the U.S. Office of War Information teamed up with the Advertising Council. The new enterprise was called the War Advertising Council.
"The industry was, as you might imagine, super happy," says Stole. "Here you have a period when you have very little to sell; you're worrying about ... your brand name, [but you're also trying to] appear patriotic [at a time when] the public might look at anything you did as self-promoting. So by teaming with the Office of War Information, the Advertising Council managed to orchestrate all these campaigns that the government wanted."
Participation in the War Advertising Council was voluntary, and companies didn't receive direct compensation for it. But many joined up when they saw what a good deal it was. Corporations could deduct portions of their ad costs from their taxable incomes, for instance, which meant that the government might pay up to 80 percent of companies' advertising bills—regardless of whether they had anything to sell.
Another reason companies participated was to improve their public image after the Great Depression.
"During the 1930s, business was viewed in a very bad light," says Lawrence Glickman, a history professor at Cornell University. "And during WWII, business took this opportunity to once again be seen as the patriotic engine of the American economy—rather than the greedy bastards who caused the Great Depression, which is how they were often viewed during the [preceding] period."
[393 words]
[Time 4]
Selling a Postwar Dream
Yet another reason companies ran ads for goods and services that the public couldn't buy or use was to be well positioned at war's end, when an Allied victory was expected to usher in a new era of prosperity.
For many Americans, it was hard to imagine a thriving postwar economy after a decade-long depression and several years of obligatory wartime rationing. This gave companies all the more reason to assure consumers that a booming postwar economy was just over the horizon.
In 1944, Minneapolis Honeywell Temperature Controls hoped National Geographic readers would buy a booklet called "Heating and Air Conditioning the Postwar Home," which explained "how your present heating system, after the war, can furnish a uniform and continuous supply of heat."
The booklet promised to teach readers—after they'd cashed in their war bonds to buy Minneapolis Honeywell's product, of course—how to maintain their "bedrooms ... at 68 degrees, living rooms at 72 degrees, your built-in garage at 50 degrees, and so on."
As for a Bell Telephone ad that said the company had temporarily stopped making telephones for civilian use, Glickman says, "Why would a phone company advertise themselves when they weren't able to put phones in individual homes? Well, they're doing it because they want Americans to think well of them ... and because they're anticipating a [time] when people will rely on big businesses again.
"Companies wanted the war to be seen not just as a victory for the United States and freedom, but also for free enterprise."
[258 words]
Source: National Geography
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141207-world-war-advertising-consumption-anniversary-people-photography-culture/
Titan's giant dunes track ancient climate
Long-term orbital wobbles drive changes in sand patterns on Saturnian moon.
Alexandra Witze 08 December 2014
[Time 5]
Long sand dunes that ripple across Saturn’s moon Titan may have been there for thousands of years, results from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggest.
Radar images of the dunes — the most detailed ever taken — reveal that the winds that rearrange the sand probably change direction as Titan's orbit wobbles relative to the Sun. Those orbital variations are thought to alter which parts of the surface get the most sunlight, and the shape of the dunes reflect the resulting changes in weather patterns.
It may take as long as 3,000 Saturn years, or 90,000 Earth years, for a single dune to change direction, says Ryan Ewing, a geologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, who led the work.
The discovery appears on 8 December in Nature Geoscience.
Some large dunes on Earth, such as those in the western Sahara Desert, also preserve a memory of past climate change. Winds were stronger during the last Ice Age, when Earth’s wobbling orbit allowed glaciers to advance towards the subtropics and altered weather patterns there. The largest dunes formed during that time have not changed orientation in the intervening 11,000 years.
Shifting sands
Scientists have had a harder time pinning down the factors that shape Titan’s dunes. These are made of hydrocarbon particles — so they are more similar to mounds of soot than to Earth's sand, which is mostly silica — and are some of the biggest in the Solar System. They stretch for hundreds of kilometres over a total area as big as the United States (including Alaska). Various ideas for what shaped them include winds from the east or the west, which may be driven by daily, seasonal or other regular changes. Dunes can even assume different forms depending on how much sediment is available to feed them.
[295 words]
[Time 6]
Ewing’s team analysed about 10,000 dune crest lines mapped by a radar instrument aboard Cassini, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. They used an algorithm that enabled them to extract finer detail from the images than ever before. This sharper view allowed them to see features down to about 1 kilometre across — including, for the first time, star-shaped dunes where three or more crest lines intersect.
These 'star' dunes suggest that prevailing winds must be blowing from several different directions at different times. Crucially, the small star dunes are oriented in a different direction from the large, linear ones. That suggests that the star dunes are reworking the linear dunes.
The team then calculated that it would have taken several thousand years for the winds to change direction, so that they would stop forming the linear dunes and start making the star-shaped ones instead. “The timescale on that has to be long compared to what we traditionally think of as seasonal or daily winds,” says Ewing.
Titanic changes
Knowing that the dunes are shaped on such long timescales means that scientists can start looking further back in time, says Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “This work opens dune morphology as a window into palaeoclimate studies on Titan,” he says.
Ewing and his colleagues are now using global climate models similar to those developed to study the Earth's climate to understand how shifting orbital patterns may have changed Titan’s winds.
One relevant clue may come from a Nature paper also published on 8 December3. In it, a team led by planetary scientist Devon Burr of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, describes experiments in a wind tunnel simulating Titan's conditions of low gravity and thick atmosphere. The scientists found that it took higher wind speeds than expected to give sand enough of a bump to start moving.
“If moving the sand requires a stronger wind on Titan,” Ewing says, “then maybe we need to be looking for that stronger wind over these orbital-cycle timescales.”
[344 words]
Source: Nature
http://www.nature.com/news/titan-s-giant-dunes-track-ancient-climate-1.16501
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