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01 August 2021
Email Updates Discontinued
23 July 2021
Cleveland Guardians
A fresh look from the 216. pic.twitter.com/0W8VTtZ7b0
— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021
Another team has announced that they are changing their team branding - name, logo, mascot - so that it does not offend Native American Indians.
The Cleveland Indians are playing their final season this year under that name and once the season ends they will be known as the Cleveland Guardians.
Why "Guardians?" The "Guardians of Traffic" are 43-foot statues that have stood on the Hope Memorial Bridge for almost 100 years. In a promotional video announcement (narrated by Tom Hanks) you can see the statues and beyond them is the team's Progressive Field. How do they represent Cleveland or baseball? According to the franchise, the Guardians of Traffic symbolize the spirit of progress. "We are excited to usher in the next era of the deep history of baseball in Cleveland," owner Paul Dolan said in a press release.
And why Tom Hanks? Besides him being a beloved actor and voice we trust, he has been a fan of the Cleveland baseball franchise since the late 1970's when he was a young actor interning at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.
21 July 2021
Astroturfing
Astroturf is something that most people associate with the artificial grass (turf) that is often used on sports fields. But astroturfing - the verb - is something quite different.
Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization. It is when a message that is political, advertising, religious, or part of public relations is made to appear as though it originates from and is supported by "grassroots" participants. It is an attempt - a deceptive one - to give messages or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection(s).
The original AstroTurf is a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass. Astroturfingplays off the "grassroots" idea that the message wants to seem "true" or "natural" rather than "fake" or "artificial."
An example of the practice came in response to the passage of tobacco control legislation in the U.S. Tobacco companies including Philip Morris, Burson-Marsteller and others created the National Smokers Alliance (NSA) in 1993 which was an aggressive public relations campaign that ran until 1999 and attempted to inflate the amount of grassroots support for smoker's rights that existed.
In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint with Reverb Communications, which was using interns to post favorable product reviews in Apple's iTunes store for their clients.
15 July 2021
Slang for Money
07 July 2021
synergy
SYNERGY is the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.
It appears in English in the mid-19th century with origins from Greek sunergos "working together" from sun- ‘together’ + ergon ‘work’.
In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.
The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology to mean the correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.
The word appeared in 1896 from Henri Mazel in social psychology in his La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.
In technology and media, it is applied to the compression of transmission, access and use of information. Synergy can also be defined as the combination of human strengths and computer strengths, such as advanced chess. Computers can process data much more quickly than humans, but lack the ability to respond meaningfully to arbitrary stimuli.
In media economics, synergy is the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate. For example, when a movie also has a soundtrack, toys, and video games. Walt Disney is given credit for pioneering "synergistic marketing" techniques in the 1930s by granting dozens of firms the right to use his Mickey Mouse character in products and ads, and continued to market Disney media through licensing arrangements.