Todd Sattersten :: Astronaut Projects

Mmmmm....

Cooking with Beer.

Need I say more...

[credit to coudal]

Your Choice in Power

I got a letter from my electric company, We Energies, with an interesting offering.

They are offering me the choice to use alternate resources to power my home. These are resources that are local to state and renewable. They say it is a combination of wind (17%), small hydroeletric (8%), and landfill gas (75%). They offer three participation levels with the highest being able to match 100% of your electricity with the purchases of renewable energy. That highest level adds an additional $15 a month to your bill.

I thought this was pretty remarkable. You typically do not have alot of choice over the energy you consume in your home. The old answer was consume less. Their new answer is renewable energy costs more, but here is option to pay for it if you value it.

This Week Over At More Space

I am going to be blogging over on More Space for the next week or two. The book officially comes out on Tuesday and we are going to start telling the whole story of how to the book came to be and what it was like to publish it.

You can still preorder the book and get all the extra goodies.

Home Soon

I am on my way home tomorrow from NYC.

It has been a great trip.

I have been able to meet Jory, Phoebe, and Arthur in person.

Nothing can replace meeting people in the flesh.

Busy Busy

I have been super busy with the More Space launch.

This week, I am in NYC all week on 8cr business.

If you are going BlogOn, we might see each other at one of the evening meetups.

Perfect for Boss's Day

Over at 800-CEO-READ, we have put together an ebook for Boss's Day called Nine Lives of Leadership. We are really happy with how it turned out. If you are looking for something for that favorite manager in your life, check out our entry here for the details.

There seems to be an awful lot going on this week. Or is it just me?

More Space Launches

It is hard to express how happy I am to announce the rollout of The More Space Project.

I came up with the idea last December and it is really a product of its time. You have to think back a little bit to remember the conversation that was going on. Bloggers were starting to gain prominence in the media. ABCNews went as far as making bloggers one of their people of the year. Pundits in these same media organizations started questioning the legitimacy of their new online cousins. There was another line of questioning by bloggers about how many people could keep blogging if there was no money to be made.

The idea with More Space was to see what would happen if you gave business bloggers more space to develop the ideas they write about every day. The common complaint with weblogs is that they are best for short-form writing. Each entry is normally a couple of hundred words containing a single thought—and that thought is normally a response to something someone else has written.

So I asked some of my favorite business bloggers to write 5,000 to 10,000 words on a business topic they were interested in. That kind of length requires careful thought and consideration. I saw it as an opportunity to showcase bloggers as writers and thought leaders.

The project was developed with the same sensibilities as where the project came from.

• It is self-published to match the self-publishing that bloggers do every day.


• All the content is available for free on the site. Seth and Wilco (among many others) have shown that the more you give away the more you sell.


• The essays are published under Creative Commons, encouraging anyone to repurpose and remix them.


• All of the photography is from the outstanding community at iStockphoto.

The one aspect that some may consider old school is that fact that we actually published a book. My only response that is there is still something important in the eyes of the world about books as idea carriers. If you say you have a book, people listen. There is a historical quality to it. I would also say that the length of most of these pieces is beyond the tolerance of most for online reading.

The last piece that is important to mention is the transparency. We are going to share everything with you- the sales, the costs, the trials, the tribulations. After we cover the costs for the project, all of the authors will share the profits equally. We'll share that to.

So, I really hope you'll check out More Space and support the project.

Attention Economists: People Are Not Rational

Forbes profiles economist Sendhil Mullainathan in the current issue. His specialty is the growing field of behavorial economics, the combination of psychology and economics. Mullainathan did some work with a bank in South Africa in developed a direct marketing campaign for short term loans.

They varied the interest rate and also varied a number of cues designed to trigger psychological responses such as a smiling photo in a corner of the letter and table that provded more- or less-information and choice. The sample was large, more than 50,000 letters, and the study was randomized and controlled.

The impact of some the small, nonfinancial cues surprised even then study's authors, though it probably wouldn't have been a shock to creative types on Madison Avenue. It turned out that having a wholesome, happy female picture in a corner of the letter had as much positive impact on the response rate as dropping the interest rate by four percentage points.

As they said, I am not sure marketeers would be surprised to find people are irrational.

TV Shows in Wisconsin

I always find it interesting that wherever I travel around the world people know about Miwaukee. The image they have is of Happy Days or Laverne and Shirley.

In the office yesterday, we got talking about all the TV shows that have been set in Wisconsin. I would say for we have had a disportionate number of programs based in our fine state. Here is the list we came up with:

• Young and the Restless (Genoa City, 1973-)
• Happy Days (do you know it was not set in Milwaukee, the Cunninghams actually lived in Brookfield, 1974-1984).
• Laverne and Shirley (Milwaukee, 1976-1983)
• Step By Step (Port Washington, 1991-1998)
• Picket Fences (fictional Rome, 1992-1996)
• That 70's Show (fictional Point Place, 1998-)
• A Minute with Stan Cooper (fictional Waterford Falls, 2003)

0-3 and dumb

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece Friday [sub. needed] where they looked at the Wonderlic scores for all the teams in the NFL. Each NFL draftee is given the test, which is a " tool that measures how well people comprehend problems -- and how quickly they can solve them." The test has 50 questions that need to be answered in 12 minutes. They gathered data from all over to provide a complete analysis of the 32 NFL teams.

In the #32 position, you will find the Green Bay Packers with a Wonderlic average score of 19.1. The highest scoring team was the St. Louis Rams at 24.6, scoring just below chemists.

The kicker (no pun intended) is that the lowest scoring of any occuption on the Wonderlic is "packer".