Going national: The Ad Council today launched a nationwide public service announcement titled “Our Turn to Help” to raise awareness and encourage relief efforts to help victims of Louisiana’s great flood. The PSA highlights pictures of Louisiana homes with their roofs peeking out from floodwaters, as well as people in boats or walking through high water to save other people and pets. In the video, the line “it’s only the beginning” appears on the screen and then viewers are directed to OurTurnToHelp.org, a website where they can learn about the magnitude of the flood’s devastation and how to help. Roy Spence, founder of the GSD&M Idea City, worked with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to create the video.
Flooded fields: Experts in Louisiana say some sugarcane fields remain flooded, with water unable to drain into full rivers and bayous, The Associated Press reports. LSU sugarcane specialist Kenneth Gravois says farmers have been able to plant only 15-20% of their expected acreage—and need to finish planting and start harvesting, because sugar mills are expected to begin grinding in a month. He says that even before the August floods, wet weather had delayed planting, which ordinarily would have begun in late July. Sugarcane fields in St. James, Ascension, St. Martin, Iberia, Lafayette, Vermilion and St. Landry parishes were hit worst. St. Martin Parish farmer Justin Frederick tells the AgCenter that he has 350 acres to plant “and not a stalk in the ground.”
Keeping up: The oil and gas industry has long collected huge volumes of data, but it hasn’t always known quite what to do with it all. About a year ago, Michael Jones, senior director of strategy at the oil and gas software maker Landmark, and some of his oil industry colleagues set about to fix it, FuelFix.com reports. This week, at Landmark’s Innovation Forum & Expo at the Westin hotel in northwest Houston, the company unveiled the beginnings of a collaborative its members called groundbreaking. In a move to drive technology further, faster—and, perhaps, take a bigger piece of the burgeoning big-data market—Landmark is pushing its main computing platform into the cloud, for all to use. Read the full story.
