Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

What is it with the wind-power fanatics? Apparently, T Boone Pickens at www pickensplan com thinks America can build enough wind turbines within 10 years to replace 22% of the total energy needs of the USA! Does that seem fanciful to anyone else?

Here in the UK we’re committed to spending billions (£100 billion? $200 billion) on wind power, including building them at sea, which is a very tricky thing to do. We’re already subsidising each and every turbine being put up and the electricity they generate. Amazingly, we even fall for the marketing hype from the turbine manufacturers who quote “installed capacity” instead of the actual real-world output which relies on the wind to be, like, blowing. We also need backup power stations, presumably running “hot”, for when the wind isn’t blowing.

In the Telegraph, Christopher Booker says, “I have spoken before of “the great wind scam”, and how its only beneficiaries are the developers, who now make nearly twice as much money from the derisory amount of electricity their turbines produce as the companies that provide 99 per cent of our power by conventional means.

For each megawatt of capacity, a windfarm developer gets on average £130,000 a year from selling his electricity to the grid, plus another £109,000 a year in subsidy paid by the rest of us in higher electricity bills under the Government’s “renewable obligation” scheme.”

So what does T Boone Pickens say to that? Is the situation different in the USA because the wind always blows a gale down the Rockies… or is it the case that he is a tycoon developing wind farms and they earn a fortune in subsidies? In his movie he says, “we’re building a big wind farm here, at Pampa Tx, which will be the largest in the world” (movie is at www.pickensplan com). Hmmm.

I just found this. 25% ROI with little risk. Hmmm.

What do you think? Is Wind Power too expensive? Are we being ripped off in the name of “green” energy? Is there a better solution?

Sometimes I like to write about non-Internet marketing topics at this blog, and breast cancer is a topic I have an interest in dating back to when I did my Ph.D. on a molecular aspect of breast cancer.

It appears that there is strong evidence linking a newly discovered gene to the ability of breast cancer to spread. This ability is called “metastasis” and it means that a tumor spreads from one area of the body to many different locations… which makes it much harder to treat. Researchers have found, according to the journal Nature that “the gene, called SATB1, is thought to control the use of around 1000 others to promote the spread, says Dr Terumi Kohwi-Shigematsu of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California”. (reported in the Telegraph)

“When the researchers looked for SATB1 in breast cancer cells from more than 1,300 samples, they found a striking pattern. In almost all cases, the more SATB1 those cells contained, the more aggressive the tumour was.” (link to Nature paper)

This is similar to what I found in my Ph.D. thesis. I looked at the expression of one particular gene which coded for a drug-metabolizing enzyme. The more enzyme there was, the easier the cell could get rid of anti-cancer drugs. What I found was that gene expression was turned off in the drug-sensitive cells by DNA structural changes, which weren’t present in the drug-resistant cells. This is similar to what has been found by the Nature team who are saying that their “master gene” controls spatial changes in the actual DNA, resulting in increased activity of genes responsible for metastasis.

While the search for a “cure” is a long way off, this is exciting news from the forefront or breast cancer research. It also has implications for other cancer types because it raises the question of whether or not this “master” gene controls metastasis in other tumor types.