Cancer-stricken grandfather given just 12 months to live sees tumours killed in TWO DAYS after breakthrough treatment

By JESSICA SATHERLEY

A cancer-stricken grandfather given just 12 months to live has undergone a breakthrough treatment which killed his tumours - in just two days.

Brian Brooks, 72, received a devastating death sentence after a random bowel screening test showed his colon and liver was riddled with cancer.

With nothing to lose, the father-of-two put himself forward for a trial therapy for liver cancer called Foxfire, spearheaded by Cancer Research UK's Bobby Moore Fund.

Breakthrough treatment: Brian Brooks (pictured with his wife Nicky) had his tumours killed by radioembolisation in just two days at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge

The radical treatment, called radioembolisation, places radioactive material inside blood vessels which deliver a dose of radiation directly into the liver.

Remarkably, his tumours were killed off after only two days of treatment - which meant doctors were then able to treat the cancer in his colon.

Experts now believe the breakthrough treatment could now help treat thousands of cancer sufferers across Britain.

Mr Brooks, of Ely, Cambridgeshire, is one of only 40 Britons to receive the treatment and one of the first to be given the all-clear.

Delighted Brian is now in remission - and describes his treatment as a ‘miracle’.

He said: ‘I was given a death sentence, it's a very difficult thing to get your head around.

'My family were devastated and one of the worst things for me was thinking I may not see my three year-old granddaughter grow up.

'But they never gave up hope and were tremendously supportive, that helped me through the treatment.

'To be told you have 12 months to live and then to have completely healed 12 months down the line, we believe is a miracle.

'Obviously there is always the risk that the cancer can come back but I am now in remission and that is something that the doctors did not believe was possible.'

New lease on life: Brian taking his dog for a walk in Cambridgeshire after recovering from cancer which was previously diagnosed as terminal

His wife, Nicky, 67, said: 'It was completely random - Brian's name was picked and he underwent the trial alongside his chemotherapy.

'We've just had the results back and my doctors can't believe its success - they say they are astonished.

'If we hadn't been informed about this trial, Brian would not be here today.'

Brian, a retired boarding kennel owner from Ely, Cambridgeshire, went for a random bowel screening test at Addenbrooke's Hospital on September 6, 2010.

The scans showed a tumour in his colon and others in his liver - which doctors told him they were unable to operate on.

Brian and Nicky were forced to break the news to their son Iain, 45, daughter Joanne, 40, and grandson William, 3.

But they were given hope when Brian was accepted onto the Foxfire trial, to try radioembolisation therapy, which is not available on the NHS.

Brian was given the treatment at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge and went for the first stage, when doctors plotted the blood flow over his liver, on November 17.

The following day he was given the second part of the treatment which involved a blast of nuclear spores into the blood cells which were feeding the tumour.

Treatment: The grandfather-of-one and father-of-two had his treatment at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge

Four months later Brian was told the tumours in his liver had completely disappeared and he could now undergo chemotherapy to shrink the tumour in his colon.

He began 11 sessions of traditional chemotherapy to shrink the tumour in his colon, which doctors removed seven weeks ago.

Brian added: 'I remember seeing the results of my scan and reading 'Complete resolution of all liver tumours' - it was incredible.

'My family and I are so grateful to the Bobby Moore Fund, Cancer UK and of cause the wonderful doctors at Addenbrookes.'

Radioembolisation is a combination of radiation therapy and a procedure called embolisation to treat cancer of the liver.

Unlike traditional radiotherapy, which is directed at the tumour from outside the body, this delivers a high dose of radiation from inside the diseased area of the body.

Tiny glass or resin beads called microspheres are placed inside the blood vessels that feed a tumour to block the supply of blood to the cancer cells.

Once these radioactive microspheres become lodged at the tumour site they deliver a high dose of radiation with minimal damage to healthy cells.

The trial co-ordinated by Oxford University was launched in February 2010 and 40 patients have so far enrolled.

Worldwide 800 patients have been treated, half receiving chemotherapy and radioembolisation and the other 400 given chemotherapy alone.

Kate Law, Cancer Research UK's director of clinical trials said: 'Without clinical trials like Foxfire, we wouldn't be able to improve techniques for cancer that are hard to treat.

'It's a promising trial and we look forward to following its progress and seeing the results.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2032252/Cancer-stricken-grandfather-given-just-12-months-live-sees-tumours-killed-TWO-DAYS-breakthrough-treatment.html#ixzz1Wh3aoQHp

How Fraudsters Can Work out Your PIN from the Heat Traces your Fingers leave on an ATM

How Fraudsters Can Work out Your PIN from the Heat Traces your Fingers leave on an ATMBy DANIEL BATES

Fraudsters can work out your PIN by the heat traces your fingers leave on a cash machine, researchers have found.
Some 80 per cent of the time scientists were able to correctly identify the four-digit code using an infrared scanner on the ATM.
Even a full minute later the camera was able to show clearly which numbers had been pressed, giving a fraudster ample time to get what they needed.

Risk? Fraudsters using an infrared device can work out your PIN by the heat traces your fingers leave on a cash machine, researchers have found

All they would then need to do would be steal the person’s wallet and they could help themselves to their money.
The researchers said that using an infra red camera only told you the order 20 per cent of the time but that even then it was massively easier to work out because you knew the numbers.
The team from the University of California at San Diego built on previous research which used infrared cameras to work out safe combinations after workers had pressed the keys.

They found that even if the camera was used a minute later, it still showed the right digits on the ATM around half the time.
Pictures released by the researchers showed a plastic number pad on a cash machine with red spots where the PIN had been entered.
‘With plastic keypads, we can reliably detect which buttons were pressed, but it is really difficult to determine the order,’ said Keaton Mowery, a doctoral student in computer science at UCSD.
Using an infrared camera, however would not work with a metal keypad.

ATM blues: Fraudsters have over the years used a string of techniques to get the PIN numbers of people using cash machines

‘Essentially, if you pointed the camera directly at the metal keypad, it would show you the thermal fingerprint of you, the camera operator, rather than of the keypad itself,’ said Sarah Meiklejohn, another of the researchers.

‘However, we didn't push it, because the plastic keypad did work. It's possible that someone else could solve those issues.’
She added that another issue is the cost - a good quality infra red camera costs around £11,500 to buy new.

Fraudsters have over the years used a string of techniques to get the pin numbers of people using cash machines.

Among the most elaborate took place in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in which criminals put a fake ATM outside the front of a Tesco supermarket.

It included a ‘skimming’ device which allowed them to copy and read bank details and PINs while the machine paid out cash.

Other criminals have used tiny cameras in the ceiling to record people entering their pin numbers as they enter them in at the till.

The fraudsters then get the credit card details from the cashier and steal the person’s money.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2032204/Fraudsters-work-PIN-heat-traces-left-fingers-ATM.html#ixzz1WdBe2FIY

Video Stroboscopy of the Vocal Cords

The Human Voice

If you touch the front of your neck while you say something, you will be able to feel your throat vibrating. This is because you have two flaps of skin inside your throat called vocal cords.

When you speak or sing, air from your lungs is forced over the vocal cords causing them to vibrate. In turn, this makes the air in your throat and mouth vibrate at the same rate. Muscles in the throat stretch the vocal cords tighter to make high sounds and relax them to make deeper tones. Women generally have higher voices than men because their vocal cords are shorter.

The basic sound from the vocal cords can be altered a great deal through movements of the mouth, tongue, and lips. In this way, we can produce all of the many variations of found in human languages.

Vocal Cords Singing

Many different parts of your body influence how you sing, but understanding how they all work together to produce the best sound is the key to great vocal cord singing. Of course it is important to know about breathing for singing and singing posture, but knowing where the vocal cords - your muscles for singing - are located and how they make tone is just as important. When developing good vocal technique, you need to understand how your breath, posture and tension affect how your vocal cords work.

Where are your vocal cords?

Your vocal cords are inside your larynx (pronounced lar-inks), which is the source of your singing voice. Your vocal cords are two small bands of tissue stretching across your larynx that vibrate to create pitch.

Click Here for The Ultimate Guide To Professional Singing

How do vocal cords create pitch?

Your vocal cords coordinate with your breath to release a pitch by opening and closing (vibrating) as your breath passes through. Each vibration of your vocal cords is called a "cycle of vibration" or "glottal cycle". If you're singing the same note that an orchestra plays to tune their instruments, your vocal cords are vibrating at 440 cycles per second - yes that's fast. So in order to make your vocal cords vibrate quickly, you need to keep your breath flowing otherwise you run out of air and can't sustain the tone.
In addition we have to make sure that our posture is correct. If we are not standing correctly, our breathing mechanism doesn't work well so we can't get the air moving for singing. Allowing ourselves to get too tense also prevents the body from working efficiently, which in turn can affect the vocal cords. Tense jaws, chests, and locked knees all make it impossible to breath and produce good tone.

Male Vocal Cords and Female Vocal Cords

Males and females have different vocal cord sizes. Adult male voices are usually lower pitched and have larger folds. The male vocal folds are between 17mm and 25mm in length. The female vocal cords are between 12.5 and 17.5 in length. The difference in vocal cord size between males and females means they have differently pitched voices. Additionally, genetics also causes variances amongst the same sex, with men's and women's voices being categorized into differentsinging voice types.
The home singing courses in the table below will provide you with all the information and vocal cord exercises you need to master your voice and sing like a star.

New UD tissue-engineering research focuses on vocal cords

UD scientists Xinqiao Jia and Randall Duncan are shown with the novel bioreactor that Jia designed. The device can simulate the demanding, high-frequency environment in which vocal cord cells live, vibrating back and forth at up to 100 hertz (100 times a second). Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson

1:54 p.m., July 31, 2007--Damaged or diseased vocal cords can forever change and even silence the voices we love, from a family member's to a famous personality's.
Julie Andrews, who starred in such classics as The Sound of Music, is among the professional singers who have undergone surgery to remove callus-like growths that can form from overuse of these two small, stretchy bands of tissue housed in the larynx, or voice box. Sadly, Andrews may never fully recover her singing voice after surgery on her vocal cords in 1997.
Engineering pliable, new vocal cord tissue to replace scarred, rigid tissue in these petite, yet powerful organs is the goal of a new University of Delaware research project. It is funded by a five-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Xinqiao Jia, UD assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is leading the project. Jia's research focuses on developing intelligent biomaterials that closely mimic the molecular composition, mechanical responsiveness and nanoscale organization of natural extracellular matrices--the structural materials that serve as scaffolding for cells. These novel biomaterials, combined with defined biophysical cues and biological factors, are being used for functional tissue regeneration.
Randall Duncan, associate professor of biological sciences and mechanical engineering at UD and an expert in cellular biomechanics and signal transduction, is a co-investigator on the project. He will assist the interdisciplinary research team in determining how vocal cord cells respond to mechanical forces, which is the first step in engineering functional vocal cord tissue. Duncan is actively involved in Jia's career development as her senior mentor at UD.
Rodney Clifton, professor of engineering at Brown University and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, is providing the project with a unique testing capability, using a device he invented that can measure the mechanical properties, or elasticity, of tissue samples at human speech frequencies. Jia began working with Clifton a few years ago when she was a postdoctoral researcher and he was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Also collaborating on the project is Dr. Robert Witt, a head and neck oncologist at Christiana Care Health System, in Newark, Del. Witt will provide clinical expertise in vocal cord pathology. The research partnership was established through the Center for Translational Cancer Research, which is directed by Mary C. Farach-Carson, professor of biological sciences and material sciences at UD.

Dr. Robert Witt, a head and neck oncologist at Christiana Care Health System, is collaborating on the UD research project. Photo courtesy of Robert Witt.

According to Jia, the vocal cords are more accurately defined as “vocal folds.” Each vocal fold is a laminated structure consisting of a pliable vibratory layer of connective tissue, known as the lamina propria, sandwiched between a membrane (epithelium) and a muscle. These flexible folds of tissue, coated in mucous to keep them moist, operate like an elevator door and must come together to produce a sound.
When you talk or sing, the folds may vibrate more than 100 times a second from the air that is forced up from the lungs through the trachea. However, excessive use or abuse of the voice can lead to scarring of the vocal fold lamina propria, which disrupts their natural pliability, resulting in hoarseness and other symptoms of vocal dysfunction.
“The reduction of vocal-fold scarring remains a significant therapeutic challenge,” Jia said.
Jia and her colleagues want to explore two parallel tissue-engineering approaches to regenerate the lamina propria. One method focuses on injecting gelatin-like materials, composed of soft, strong and long-lasting hydrogels, into damaged tissue to improve its pliability and prevent scar formation.
In the second approach, the scientists want to form functional tissue from a combination of vocal fold connective tissue cells (fibroblasts), artificial extracellular matrix, and biological cues and mechanical stimuli that capture the mechanical and biological characteristics of the natural organs.
“In order to grow a functional tissue in vitro, you need to provide the cells with a biological and physical environment that is as close to that of the natural tissue as possible,” Jia said.
To mimic the complex and rigorous movement experienced by vocal fold tissue, the researchers have constructed a bioreactor capable of delivering well-defined vibrational and tensile stresses.
The device, which Jia designed, simulates the demanding, high-frequency environment in which vocal fold cells live, vibrating back and forth at up to 100 hertz (100 times a second). Not only do the vocal folds collide as they open and close, driven by air from the lungs, they also must be able to elongate as the pitch of the voice changes, a movement that occurs at a much slower frequency of 1-2 hertz (1-2 times a second), according to Jia.

Image of normal vocal cords, courtesy of the Milton J. Dance Jr. Head and Neck Center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Baltimore. For video of the vocal cords in action and vocal cord disorders,click here.

“The combination of vocal fold fibroblasts, elastic and bioactive artificial extracellular matrices, and a dynamic bioreactor offers an exciting opportunity for in vitro tissue engineering of vocal fold lamina propria,” Jia noted.
Earlier this year, Jia received the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development Award. The highly competitive award is bestowed on those scientists deemed most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
Jia received her bachelor's degree in applied chemistry and master's degree in polymer chemistry and physics from Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and a doctoral degree in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Before joining the UD faculty in 2005, Jia worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Robert Langer, a pioneer in tissue engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Langer recently was awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for science and technology.
Article by Tracey Bryant

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Compost raises orange yield

SOUTH AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT INSTITUTE

A South Australian Research and Development Institute study has demonstrated yield increases in navel and Valencia orange orchards of 17 to 63 per cent after the application of soil amendments including grape marc, animal manure and compost. SARDI senior entomologist Dr Peter Crisp said fruit measured in the trial increased in diameter by 5 mm to 7 mm on average. “This could provide growers an extra $100 per tonne, with the benefits of the compost lasting well beyond the first year after application,” Dr Crisp said. The SARDI study also evaluated a range of tree and soil health factors including levels of soil moisture, nitrogen and soil carbon. The SARDI research team found that compost application during periods of drought improved tree health compared to trees that did not receive compost.  “Where composted green organics had been applied, trees had dense foliage, good leaf colour and the highest flower production,” Dr Crisp said. “Improved tree health where compost was applied may be attributed to increased soil moisture levels in the root zone. “Moisture sensors 10 cm to 15 cm deep in the soil showed that moisture levels were consistently higher under trees treated with the highest rate of compost compared to control trees.” A cost benefits analysis from this study found all compost applications trialled showed a positive return on the initial investment.  The highest benefit was recorded when an application of 40 m²/ha of compost was used, giving a cost benefit of 5.4 over five years.  The benefits recorded giving a return of between $1.90 to $5.40 for every dollar invested in compost over a five year period. “These are conservative estimates as the potential water savings and improvements in fruit quality were not included in the analysis,” Dr Crisp said. Data from this trial site at Loxton will be collected for a further three years with support from Horticulture Australia Limited and a voluntary contribution from the Australian compost industry.

Stars affect dark matter: study

MARION LOPEZ, SCIENCENETWORK WA

"...when we look at galaxies alone, the gas and stars become relatively more important and begin to influence dark matter..." Image: Akirastock/iStockphoto The interaction of dark matter with stars and gas in individual galaxies is more complicated than previously thought, according to International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). After discovering a correlation between the concentration and mass of dark matter around clusters of galaxies, Dr Alan Duffy from ICRAR found this relationship breaks down around single galaxies, like our own Milky Way. “A basic assumption that astronomers often make is that the dark matter is so dominant that we can ignore the effects of gas and stars on its dynamics. “For massive clusters of galaxies this is a good approximation and there's a nice relation that drops out of the simulations between the mass of the cluster and the dark matter concentration, in full agreement with observations. “The problem is that when we look at galaxies alone, the gas and stars become relatively more important and begin to influence the dark matter, which causes the galaxies to lie off this concentration–mass relation.” Dr Duffy says that simulating the Milky Way is extremely computationally demanding and will require the use of the EPIC supercomputer housed at Murdoch University.   Dr Duffy hopes to find the answers as to why the dark matter around galaxies like our Milky Way is different, by creating some of the most detailed galactic simulations in the world. To verify these predictions as to the nature of Dark Matter, as well as its role in the formation of galaxies, Dr Duffy says the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)—prototype of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—is a key project. ASKAP will enable astronomers at ICRAR to survey over half a million galaxies and help to determine what dark matter is, although it will find only a fraction of the billion galaxies that the SKA will study. In fact, Dr Duffy says the SKA will take astronomers to the edge of the Universe and will therefore be crucial in unveiling the processes by which galaxies form, by looking at the very first objects that were ever fashioned in the Universe. “The hope is that through better observations of dark matter we can begin to understand the type of particle that’s making it up. “When ASKAP comes online, we’ll be able to answer a lot of questions, while probably creating more questions that we know the SKA will have the potential to answer. “By creating mock observations from the simulations I can bridge the gap between the theory of how galaxies form and the processes which make the Milky Way look like it does, and what telescopes such as ASKAP, and ultimately the SKA, will see.” interaction of dark matter with stars and gas in individual galaxies is more complicated than previously thought, according to International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

How a fish lives on land

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

The study throws new light on how animal life first evolved to colonise the land. Image: courtney morgans/UNSW One of the world's strangest animals – a unique fish that lives on land and can leap large distances despite having no legs – has a rich and complex social life, a new study has found. The odd lifestyle of the Pacific leaping blenny (Alticus arnoldorum) has been detailed for the first time in research findings that shed light on how animal life evolved to colonise the land. The Pacific leaping blenny is a marine fish yet is terrestrial in all aspects of its daily adult life, eking out a precarious existence in the intertidal zone of rocky shores in Micronesia, according to the study published in the journal Ethology , led by Dr Terry Ord, of the UNSW Evolution and Ecology Research Centre. "This remarkable little fish seems to have made a highly successful transition across the water–land interface, although it still needs to stay moist to enable it to breathe through its gills and skin," says Dr Ord, who is an evolutionary ecologist with a special interest in animal behaviour. "Our study showed that life on land for a marine fish is heavily dependent on tide and temperature fluctuations, so much so that almost all activity is restricted to a brief period at mid-tide, the timing of which changes daily. During our field study on Guam we never saw one voluntary return to water. Indeed, they spend much of their time actively avoiding submersion by incoming waves, even when we tried to capture them for study. "I can tell you they are very hard to catch and are extremely agile on land. They move quickly over complex rocky surfaces using a unique tail-twisting behaviour and expanded pectoral and tail fins that let them cling to almost any firm surface. To reach higher ground quickly, they can twist their bodies and flick their tails to leap many times their own body length." Working with Toni Hsieh, of Temple University in the US, Dr Ord found that adult blennies shelter in rock crevices at high and low tide, emerging at mid-tide to feed, breed and socialise in surprisingly complex ways – given their brief window of opportunity. The researchers discovered that males are territorial and use complex visual displays to warn off rivals and attract mates. Females were seen aggressively defending feeding territory at the start of their breeding season. At the same time, males displayed a red-coloured fin and nodded their heads vigorously to attract females to their closely defended rock holes. The team filmed females inspecting these holes before entering with a chosen mate. Little is known of the breeding and development of the young, but females lay their eggs in a chosen rock hole and then play no further role in parenting, leaving the male to guard the eggs. "The Pacific leaping blenny offers a unique opportunity to discover in a living animal how a water–land transition has taken place," says Dr Ord. "We know that our ancient ancestors evolved originally from lobe-finned fish but, today, all such fish are fully aquatic. Within the blenny family, however, are species that are either highly terrestrial, amphibious or entirely aquatic. Remarkably, representatives of all these types can be found on or around Guam, making it a unique evolutionary laboratory." Download: eType1.com/f.php

The New Entrepreneur: A Case Study

So far I’ve tried to lay the foundations for what I call the new entrepreneurial process—an approach to entrepreneurship with roots in design thinking, strategy in dynamic environments, and experimental processes that has been evangelized in several movements like Customer Development and Lean Startup. I thought I would try something different this time: give a concrete case study of the process. Then, we can drill down and more concretely identify traps that catch entrepreneurs and how they escape them. Let me know how you like this approach.

The Crime Reports Case Study

It was the process. Doing everything right was killing his business. It all started several years earlier when Greg’s apartment building had been robbed. Frustrated and feeling a need to do something about it, he joined a neighbourhood watch group and offered to map crimes that were happening in the area. As Greg continued, he came to believe that mapping the locations of crimes would align and empower the efforts of citizens and police to reduce crimes in each neighborhood.

When Doing Everything Right Leads You to Failure

With real motivation and passion, Greg did what all good entrepreneurs are supposed to do—he wrote a business plan and developed a website to report crime statistics (with an underlying revenue model built on advertising). Website in hand, he contacted a friend at the Washington DC police department and together, Greg and his friend convinced the police chief to commit to a trial run. Excited by his success, Greg took the next step and presented to venture capitalists, who were impressed by Greg’s vision and provided seed capital to grow the business. Capital in hand, Greg continued building CrimeReports.com and hired developers and sales people to expand before competitors could catch up. But then something perplexing began to happen. Despite all his efforts, the business didn’t take off. New deals with police departments seemed to hover in a state of limbo, never closing; and despite moments of hope and seeming progress, CrimeReports.com remained stuck in a purgatory that had now lasted for several years without producing any new customers. After investing the first two tranches of venture funding, Greg began to dig deeper and ask himself why. Why, when he had done everything right, had things gone so wrong?

Applying the New Entrepreneurial Process

After he’d spent many years of his life and hundreds of thousands of dollars of investors’ money, it still wasn’t clear if CrimeReports.com was a hobby or a business. When his investors requested that the next tranche of financing be contingent on the company running the Nail It then Scale It process, it created a crisis that drove Greg to stop selling and start listening to the customer and understand what was missing in order to break through the barrier of customer adoption. He created a road show to take his product prototype and business model hypothesis out to the market and really listen—and what he learned shocked him. Greg and his team set up meetings with the full buying panel (all the decision makers in a purchasing decision) at four different police agencies to get feedback on their “prototype” and business model. For police departments, the buying panel meant the police chief, the IT director, the crime analyst, and the police officer. Once Greg had his team and the entire buying panel in the same room, a rich discussion ensued in which a few key insights emerged.  First, the founders were on to something—police departments were feeling increasing pressure to share information with the public about crime and to increase transparency and their accountability.  Second, the police departments felt that the website was ugly and needed to be improved. Fair enough. Third, although the founders believed that the business model depended on hosting advertisements, police departments absolutely refused to have advertising hosted on the site.

At this point, the founders began to despair, but as they continued to listen (rather than sell), they found out some crucial pieces of information. For one, police officers were actually fascinated by the data possibilities of the website and were truly excitied about the possibility of leveraging the internet to increase the quality of their communication with the citizens of their town. The chiefs of police were interested in sharing data with the citizens and leveraging that data to increase the quality of their policing efforts. Many police chiefs were familiar with how New York City had used the “Comp Stat” model to decrease crime by identifying patterns and targeting “hot spots”; but for most departments, “hot spots” were tracked with a spreadsheet, cork board, and colored pins. If the data was hosted online,  police chiefs could use a data “dashboard” to track trends and daily activity. For the first time, police officers could see what had happened on their beat the night before. As it turned out, this was surprisingly difficult for existing departments to do. As one police chief stated, sometimes it took up to six months to see what happened the day before. As the enthusiasm built in each conversation, the CrimeReports founders learned that police would actually pay them to post their data—advertising wasn’t necessary. But they also learned, from the IT directors, that they needed to significantly improve their security protocols in order to allow CrimeReports to host the data. Last, the founders discovered that a touch-and-feel approach was the best approach to selling the new product. At the end of the day, by showing a “prototype” to customers and then listening rather than selling, the CrimeReports team learned crucial facts that had been hidden from view for years.

Greg Whisenant took all the feedback, refined his prototype, and then took it out on the road for another test. The new website was greatly improved in look and feel and had no advertising. And when the Public Engines team took the new version back to the potential customers, the feedback was astonishing. Their customers said things like:

“This blows other choices out of the water.”

“This is a great idea. You guys have really hit on something here.”

FROM RAGS TO RICHES: AN AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY

If you don’t know his name, John Paul Dejoria (of the hair care line John Paul Mitchell and the CEO of Patron Spirits) then you are definitely familiar with some of his businesses. But are you familiar with his unlikely, and incredible, story that beat the odds?

John Paul DeJoria, From Homeless To Billionaire

An Interview with John Paul DeJoria, owner of Patrón Spirits and cofounder and CEO of John Paul Mitchell Systems

John Paul DeJoria is one of the great stories of achieving the American Dream. Twenty years after being homeless, he was able to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Along the way he built two iconic companies — John Paul Mitchell Systems and Patrón Spirits. Today, DeJoria has a personal net worth of over $4 billion, but perhaps his most significant contribution is his business philosophy, which is at the intersection of helping the world, helping people individually and creating profit — all with a genuine smile on his face. He’s definitely having fun. I recently sat down with DeJoria.

What was your childhood like?

We grew up in downtown LA, in the Echo Park area. We didn’t know that we were really going through tough times because everybody was going through the same thing. I remember once in junior high school, on a Friday, my mom came home from work and said to my brother and I, “You know, between us, we have only 27 cents, but we have food in the refrigerator, we have our little garden out back, and we’re happy, so we are rich.”

Talk about the initial visions behind Patrón Spirits and John Paul Mitchell Systems?

With John Paul Mitchell Systems, we wanted to sell only to hairdressers, but we wanted something different. We came up with a shampoo that required only one wash to save time and money, and a conditioner that you left in. This acted as a sculpting lotion for the hairdresser, protected against the heat of a blow dryer, and helped neutralize chemicals on hairdressers’ hands. We knew we wouldn’t do what other companies did; many said they would only be in the professional hairdressing industry, but went full retail when they got big. In fact, today, 31 years later, if you ever see a Paul Mitchell product in the drug store or supermarket, it’s counterfeit or black market. We stayed true to our word.

As for Patrón, we wanted to produce the smoothest tequila people had ever tried; tequila that didn’t get you really sick the next day; something you could sip. That was our vision: to have something that could one day be an ultimate premium tequila. People would treat themselves by having Patrón. Once people in every segment of society are turned on to Patrón, they become hooked, because Patrón is not only an ultra-premium, high-quality tequila, but also it’s one that’s made with a lot of love.

Very different business models. Are there similarities?

If you are involved with Patrón Spirits or Paul Mitchell Salon hair care products, you’ve got to love the product, you’ve got to love your customer, and you’ve got to love the planet: It’s our culture. We hire people with that attitude, because if you don’t love what you do, within three months, you could leave us. At John Paul Mitchell Systems — the older of the two [companies] — we’re 31 years old, and our turnover has been less than 30 people in 31 years!

By loving yourself, you’re going to be a happy person.  A lot of people don’t like themselves for whatever reason. Being able to communicate with a loved one that you haven’t talked to in a while because of some communication break makes their life and your life in a much better place.  Now you’re getting along, and people are in more harmony.

So the love helps us a lot because, no matter what you do — whether it’s shipping, manufacturing of products, or putting ingredients in — you always make sure you do it the best because you love who your customer is and what you stand for.