Agile Process and UX

Patty Fabricant, Diamond Fade, 2003 Watercolor 22" x 30"

As agile methodology gains traction, challenges to adapting are emerging.

Today at any given moment I am simultaneously working on projects with agile and waterfall methodologies. As a consequence, my teams need to switch mindsets and approaches as they move from project to project. This adds an additional layer of management complexity to our workflow and communications. And a big part of it is about managing responses and expectations.

“Now, not only do we need to balance multiple accounts, working groups and projects, we also need to change the way we respond to design challenges.”

In the projects that adhere to traditional waterfall method our response usually begins with scheduling a meeting while int he agile method we immediately jump to problem-solving. The former is consensus-based while the later is improvisational.

“The agile teams that I work with are smaller and more accepting of individual creativity.”

In an agile environment, individual members of the team are more empowered to solve problems without getting approval or seeking consensus in advance. And importantly, rarely is any formal documentation required. Instead the team-member comes up with a solution, implements it and then asks the rest of the team to review and comment. Most often, the other team members will adapt their own work to the new development and integrate this into the project on the fly.

For organizations that derive revenue from change orders, account management and recurrent meetings this can obviously create challenges. In the more traditional designed and planned projects, the team is often stuck seeking approval and consensus in lengthy meetings for a new idea, enhancement or revision. Downstream there must be documentation updates.

“While part of this is a consequence of working in a regulated environment (healthcare), it is also related to the fact that the development teams are fragmented and geographically separated.”

It’s probably not possible to create using an agile method in an environment where the development and design teams are on separate continents and time zones, but it sure would save a lot of time and money.

 

Image: Patty Fabricant, Diamond Fade, 2003 Watercolor 22″ x 30″

 

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Proliferate, Aggregate, Repeat: Why App Aggregation will be the Next Big Thing

Archimboldo, The Librarian, 1566

Looking at the path the internet has taken over the last ten years, a repeating pattern is emerging. The pattern starts with the establishment of a new asset or application class. It proliferates throughout the web. Then the aggregators come along and start skimming the cream off the top and presenting the best in single package. This pattern began with pages, moved on to shopping, news, reviews and downloads.

Today, with the proliferation of stand-alone applications, the environment is ripe for the next level of aggregation.

A Glimpse

An early entry into this space is If This Then That (ifttt.com).  ifttt is a meta application that allows users to build custom programs that uses separate apps as triggers and components.

How It Works

Using ifttt, you can create a task (or recipe) that automates a process that you used to do manually. For example, take a Facebook status update as a trigger to create a tweet, a new blog entry and update a photo automatically. Or, it might use a weather report or new information on an RSS feed to trigger a series of actions across personal sites, social networking pages, email or micro-blogging. While it is still rudimentary today, don’t shrug it off as just a novelty item.

Going Beyond the Individual

Consider instead how an application like this could integrate with Google’s social graph. The potential to trigger actions that are rules based, broadly social and widespread are staggering (and potentially virus-like).

While we shouldn’t underplay the concerns about security and the stultifying effect that automated messaging can have on human-based social interaction, the promise of this next phase of aggregation is beginning to come into focus.

Image: The Librarian, oil on canvas, Archimboldo, ~1566

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Social Listening Needs Standards

Robert Egert, 1992, Pinocchio, 72" x 72", oil on canvas, collection of Mary Ziegler

In the last two years smart brands have turned themselves inside out to focus on what customers are saying about them instead of focusing on their own marketing messages. This has begun a slow but steady sea change, shifting marketing focus from creative ideas to smart analytics.

Agencies (both traditional and media) are challenged to step-up to the plate and deliver insights based on social listening. Media agencies are often in a good position to take advantage of this opportunity since they have an infrastructure already in place around analytics—extending that to include social listening is a lot less challenging than establishing a new service.

The marketplace is overflowing with analytics tools that range from high-priced industrial strength products to free, web-based products that are open to anyone and new entrants are emerging ongoing. The products vary in quality and some have a deeper feature set, more expansive options or inclusion of third party research data that adds to the depth of the insights and comparisons that can be made as well as contextualize insights against demographics as well as media saturation and spend.

As this market expands and enters the big league what is really missing are industry standards. Conduct a sentiment analysis of the same terms in two or more different platforms and you can expect to get wildly varying results. The reason is partially inherent in the subjectivity of language. (What is social listening if it isn’t linguistic analysis?) But at every step along the way: rules that govern how data is collected, sample size and finally the analytics engine itself vary from platform to platform.

In the race to develop the best product we run the risk of undermining the value of the service if we don’t address the need for standards.

Image: Robert Egert, 1992, Pinocchio, 72″ x 72″, oil on canvas, collection of Mary Ziegler

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Healthcare or Products? We Shouldn’t Have to Choose

A prototype of a wearable sensor to detect symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease

The history of post-internet technology is littered with the corpses of companies that focused on selling products. With very few exception, the winners have been the owners and distributors of content and the innovators who overturned traditional means of distribution. If anything is accelerating, it is the speed at which once robust models collapse. Yesterday it was music publishers and desktop software, today its pay per text messaging and tomorrow it will likely be smart phones themselves.

Somehow while all this innovation and disruption has overturned our economy, the pharmaceutical companies are still operating in world where profits are directly tied to product sales. And what makes pharma even more vulnerable is that many paying customers have absolutely no relationship with the product they’re using. (Because of the way they are distributed many don’t even know what it is that they are taking.) While the second issue is a function of the regulated environment in which drugs are distributed, the former is an organizational attachment to a system that cannot persist indefinitely.

Marketers do their best to establish brands in the patient’s mind and have been very successful with products that treat large numbers of people but is this really viable with small population products? In the rare disease space it is much more likely that patients will have a higher level of knowledge about their disease–for rare diseases it is essential for them to become informed in order to pursue diagnosis. But does this knowledge translate to brand loyalty?

We need to start thinking about integrating drugs into larger systems of health support. The opportunity for us in the industry to think more broadly about how drugs fit into health systems. This includes social networks, financial support, education and employment. Disease impacts the total person and the whole of society. How can drug manufacturers and distributors envision their organizations embedding their products in these systems from conception and not just as a marketing function?

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Recover, Recoup, but Don’t Redact

Consultants and agency geeks all know that preparing for a new business presentation is part strategic brainstorming, part marathon and part mind-reading. The truth is that no matter how much you know about the industry and the players you never really know what they are looking for. Requests for Proposal (RFP) documents are notoriously obtuse (they are designed to extract information from you). The onus is on you to do the research and come up with your own hypotheses.

Ultimately, the only course is to propose what you believe is right for the assignment. That means clear, measurable objectives and concise explanation of how you came to your conclusions.

Your job as a presenter is, like a good author, to bring the audience into your world–your way of thinking–and allow them to come to the same conclusions that you’ve arrived at. You can’t do that by preaching. The trick is to present your ideas with conviction and a clear rationale.

There’s always the chance that someone in the audience has already made up their mind before you arrived. They may have decided that they prefer to hire one of your competitors for any number of reasons. Alternatively, they may have another approach worked out in their own mind and are just looking for the agency whose presentation most closely aligns with their own thinking.  This is why you need to build your argument like a lawyer addressing the jury. You need to build your argument on a strong research-based foundation, then present your hypotheses and finally point to examples or best practices to convince them to go in the direction you recommend. Your passion needs to be grounded in reality and needs to built from the ground up.

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Agility and Regulatory Reviews

On Your Mark, a 60 something foot party boat docked at Haverstraw Marina went up in flaames about a week about in the beginning of Spetember and just a few days after Hurricane Irene hit. The boat was up for sale for the previous 2 or more years and so you can speculate as to the cause o fhte fire. The boat sank in palce and had to be hauled up with a humongous crane. THe boats on either side and even a few slips away were damaged by the heat. Compass housing melted, sails got toasted. It was nasty. Add this to the fact that the river is filled with debris and mud as a result of the hurricane and it is not a pretty site.

As I write this it is late on Friday afternoon in early September and we’re rushing to put the final touches on a small website that needs to go live today. The site was on staging earlier but routine QA led to conversation and conversation led to critique and finally we decided to make some last minute improvements. This is not at all unusual for most development groups but it occurs to me that this kind of agile revisioning is virtually impossible in a regulated environment. It is really refreshing to be able to rapidly change up the copy, revise the style sheet and swap-out an element. In most of our work, the review process means we need to lock things down sometimes weeks or months before launch. I don’t mind the wait but what I do mind is the feeling that you are married to a creative solution for so long. Because, as all creatives know, there’s always something you can improve on but sometimes you just don’t see it right away.

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Pharma: Head in the Clouds

Thinking today about cloud computing and how the successful marketing of the concept has impacted my clients’ beliefs and expectations.

Software as a service and cloud computing is on everyone’s lips but it is surprising how much confusion there is about what it is. This is surprising considering how much good information is available on the topic. Perhaps it’s part of the downside of the successful marketing campaign around the cloud: non-technical clients seem to think it’s something new despite the fact that its been around for a long time.

Meanwhile in the healthcare industry, cloud computing represents a major challenge to the existing infrastructure that’s used to house and manage patient data. Pharma has gone to great lengths to ensure security, hygiene and compliance around this sort of personally identifiable information and it will take more than a marketing campaign to change existing relationships between database vendors and IT departments.

From a design and production perspective the implications of cloud computing are huge: especially for those of us involved in one-to-one marketing and dynamic health applications. Whether we design our applications for a web services/cloud model or for a traditional model will significantly impact design. Today that means applications that require data storage such as tracking tools and health diaries that will benefit from seamless access to data across disconnected wireless devices.

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Protecting Privacy on Remote Health Applications

Mobile app dev is setting a general UX standard for mobile security but we need a protocol for health apps

In the world of mobile app design it is the operating systems that are setting the user expectations for mobile security. This is because the OS are so closely tied to the design and by extension to the user experience. This could be just fine for most applications but we probably need a more specific protocol for health applications that store or transmit personal health related data.

For example, should these apps have a timeout due to inactivity? Many users do not leverage the built-in automatic logout that comes with the OS. If so, what is the trigger to log a user off? Is it a time delimited period of inactivity? If so, what’s the correct duration for an automatic timeout on a healthcare application?

Banking websites log us out after 5 minutes of inactivity. The same is true for most web-based applications that handle financial transactions such as those found on credit card and investment management websites.

When it comes to health applications HIPAA rules are generally applied (even for those sites that are not associated with insurance). And, of course, each client organization has its own internal privacy guidelines that need to be adhered to.

But remote, portable and embedded applications change the equation for this significantly. For example, how will symptom monitoring devices or related mobile applications manage security in a wireless world? Especially challenging when the application is always on or nearly always on.

One option will be to replicate the log-out due to inactivity model that has been adopted in the web space.But the implications of this need to be examined against the need to confirm trigger-based functions, such as alerts. What may be required is that blinded notifications display to the user for their confirmation without revealing any sensitive information.

Like shared public computers, mobile and embedded devices also present risks for unauthorized use and unintentional sharing of sensitive data.

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New in Pharma

waiting as envisioned in this production of waiting for godot...

According to FDA regs, you can only describe a product as “new” for six months following approval. Good and clear enough but what about educational and user-created content published online? We’ve come to expect new articles to mean new, as in the last 24 hours–max. But with pharmaceutical companies requiring regulatory approval of all published materials, new can take on an entirely different meaning.

Now that the age of product websites (i.e., brand.com) are on the wane in favor of less brand-centric, more credible endeavors, we’re seeing more and more sites aspiring to community and blog status. But wait! Despite the design conventions, the site content still needs to move through regulatory approval at a snail’s pace.

It’s no secret that design conventions set expectation and when those expectations aren’t met it can send the user experience down the tubes. Take this scenario: pharmaceutical company wants to build an online community site to support a widely dispersed rare disease community. The site looks and feels like a community site with chronological postings and a blog look-alike. But all the postings are months old and premeditated. When site visitors attempt to make postings on their own they shoot their text into a three to six month oblivion with no knowledge if it will ever get posted or not. Not the best user experience.

What this really calls for is a two-tiered system for regulatory review: one for branded promotional content and the other for legitimate non-commercial speech in the hosted sphere.

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Attacking UX/IA for Large Organizations

I don't know what the purpose of diagrmas like this are, except that this is a big pile of confusing crap and I feel compelled to document that fact.

Trying to clean-up sprawling, industrial-sized websites is always a challenge but it gets more difficult in direct proportion to the size of the company that owns the site.

The most predictable issues revolve around distributed ownership, inconsistent naming conventions and lack of a holistic understanding of the end users. Perhaps the biggest challenge isn’t related to UX/IA at all but instead has to do with getting access to the stakeholders who are empowered to authorize change. Too often in engagements like these, good ideas get nixed because someone more senior isn’t engaged in the process.

Some key elements in the UX / IA toolkit include taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, comprehensive navigation analysis and content audits. But perhaps the most powerful thing to do is a straightforward end-user analysis, complete with profiles and scenarios. A lot of designers have moved away from this approach int eh last couple of years influenced by agile methods and the demands of rapid functional prototyping. But when working on a larger project I still feel that they’re critical. And this in never more true than when working ona corporate project. This is because, despite all the doctrine to the contrary, most organizations are still reproducing their internal organizational structure in their website navigation.

This is understandable given the way that many of the larger corporate CMS systems are designed and implemented. They are built around a traditional model of corporate hierarchy and organization. Further, they are most often rolled-out and managed on a functional basis.

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Segmentation: Artifact of an Offset World?

When relationship marketing began print and broadcast media were the primary channels of communication. Television and radio provided only crude targeting. In print, presses could do split runs with different variations for different segments of the market. But, like broadcast television, these capabilities were crude by comparison with what we can do using information systems and social media to micro-target individuals.

Its no secret that extremely precise targeting can be accomplished today. SO much so that the chief concern is around the privacy issues around collecting personal information and selling it for the purpose of marketing.

Why then do marketers persist in thinking in market segments? Is this an artifact of the past that people won’t let go of or is it a convenient shorthand for making sense of the marketplace?

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Using PhoneGap to Deliver Mobile

Phone gap looks promising and today its free as a bird. What happens int he next year or two is still open. Perhaps it will be a new hybrid combination of marketing and technology platform. This is truly innovative.

J, one of our lead developers sprung on me that he’d used some downtime to prototype a “Build Once / Run Anywhere” mobile version using PhoneGap. After developing an iPhone app using an offshore development group (at no small expense) it’s nice to know we can leverage the investment across platforms (including blackberry) and tablets without having to fuss with multiple style sheets.

What’s odd is that if you use HTML to generate the UI you can end up with Android users looking at interfaces that look totally iPhone. (The opposite is just as possible, it only depends on where you start.)

But the real advantage is that updates are automatic and passive. this means that users don’t need to manually update their apps. All the while the app cam be tethered to a real remote SQL database in real time.

What’s really very innovate here is that Phone Gap aims to provide both a technology and marketing platform in one package thereby combining two domains of knowledge and organizational interests that have traditionally been worlds apart.

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Downgrading: A Cynical Political Manipultaion?

As Paul Krugman points out in his column in today’s Times, Standard and Poor’s downgrade of U.S. debt is the height of chutzpah; these are the same buffoons who gave Lehman Bros. aa triple A rating right until their collapse. They also were chief among the gangsters that fueled the economic collapse of 2008. So why do are they able to so powerfully impact world opinion and markets in 2011? It seems that the market, renowned to be unforgiving, is only selectively unforgiving. How did Standard & Poor escape the consequences of their utter failure to provide accurate ratings to securities?Oh, and by the way, they made and admitted to a two trillion dollar error (yes, you read that correctly) in their initial release of the document. Then, when the congressional budget office pointed out the error, they admitted to it, corrected it, and then maintained the downgrade.

Since they had earlier indicated that they were looking for at least a four trillion dollar debt reduction and the recent negotiations in congress resulted in a two plus billion dollar reduction, we need to examine why the downgrade occurs at all. We need to follow the money. Sophisticated investors can make money in a down market. One possibility is that this was a cynical manipulation of market forces that Standard & Poor and their clients could take advantage of. Another possibility is that Standard & Poor is playing politics. By fueling a financial panic the downgrade impacts the 2012 election by driving down the middle class’ 401K and further diminishing the hopes of the unemployed.

Tea party republicans gloat over their Phyrric victory over Obama, and their rank shout “No,” and “Obamacare,” the 2012 election is beginning to look more like a mutiny on a sinking ship.

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At the Intersection of Genomics and Marketing

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Drug marketing as we all know is big business. So big, in fact, that the largest pharmaceutical giants have organizationally shifted in many respects away from basic research and into product development and marketing. As a result they have a vested interest in sustaining the motif that drives consumer demand for healthcare products.

We witnessed one form of this beginning in the nineteen nineties with the concept of blockbuster drugs–drugs that were largely driven by consumer brand recognition and choice. It also gave rise to the commidification of conditions: ED (Erectile disfunction), Restless Knee Syndrome, and GERD (Gastro-intestinal Reflux Disease), conditions that some might argue were largely popularized to sell the products that treat them.

Perhaps the biggest and most successfully promoted condition is ADHD. That one required the coordinated efforts of the APA (and the DSM-IV, and the insurance companies). Some will argue that these are significant conditions and that the drugs used to treat them have vastly improved peoples lives, etc. And there’s no doubt that is often the case. Nonetheless, the interesting point is that the promotional plan for the product is predicated upon an aggressive condition awareness program and in the case of ED, building comfort around discussing the topic.

This leads us to genomic therapy. The initial phase of this type of medicine is tumor-targeted therapies but we can safely assume that it the years to come we will see embryonic and neonatal targeting. These will fall into two distinct categories: interdiction of diseases that are genetically predetermined and enhancement products. The later could target anything from aesthetics (height, weight, muscle mass, general facial characteristics, etc.) to neurological characteristics (intelligence, creativity, mood, etc.).

Because we live in a highly  religious society with a large portion of society that has demonstrated strong animosity to messing with the divine plan (think about the opposition to stem cell research), this will take some sophisticated and dedicated marketing efforts.

How will drug organizations drive consumer demand for products that predetermine the characteristics of our offspring without alienating large tracts of society and causing a religious-lef backlash?

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“Take Money In and Don’t Pay it Out,” or Why Health Insurance Companies Must Change

Mr. Dreysdale, Bank on the Beverly Hillbillies

This was originally said by Mr. Dryesdale, the banker, in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies: “The secret of the insurance business is this: You take the money in but don’t pay it out.” And we all knew this was true but now, finally, it is on the front page of the New York Times (little good it will do, though).

Read the entire article here.

When Obama began his overhaul of the U. S. Healthcare system I believed–I suppose it is more accurate to say, “I hoped”–that he was gunning for the insurance companies.

Why does the American public hate insurance companies more than big pharmaceutical companies? As much as the American public hates the big pharmaceutical companies, at the end of the day, they make drugs that help people. Why do they hate them more than doctors? As much as people are annoyed with the fragmented mosaic of  specialists that they need to manage when they have an illness that requires complex treatment, it is the doctors who heal them. Why do they hate them more than hospitals? Despite the sometimes wretched administration and often substandard hygiene of hospitals, it is these institutions that provide them with care–emergency and planned–when it is needed.

But insurance companies: what do they do?

Taking the devil’s advocate position,  insurance companies eliminate the financial devastation that disease can bring on families and individuals by spreading the risk throughout society. In their purest and most altruistic form they would collect some amount of money from each family equal to the amount necessary to care for all those who get ill. This way all of society would pay equally for the cost of treatment to all as it is needed. (I think this might be socialist!)

But in fact insurance companies are not altruistic nor are they pure. Instead they are for profit companies whose operational protocols are designed to maximize profit and minimize expenditures. As Mr. Dryesdale might put it: “To take the money in and not pay it out.”

Well, perhaps the insurance companies do do something: They drive us crazy. They drive us mad with their poorly designed forms, their malfunctioning fax machines and their inscrutable denial of service notices (which they call by the misnomer “explanation of services.”) But mostly, they drive us batwing by promising us coverage and denying it to us when we are in need. Let’s make no bones about it.

And this really points out what is essentially wrong about a purely capitalist system and shows why it is so critical for us to make a distinction between the healthy capitalism associated with business creation and innovation and the sickening (literally) impact of privitization on industries that should not be privatized: social services, health services, corrections, military and government. Add your own, if you like.

None of this is going to change until we move to a single payer system. And in my view it is inevitable that we will either move to this model or we will invent a new one that will not include the insurance companies as we know them today. To those of you who work in the insurance industry, I know this probably upsets you. Just start looking for a new gig now. It will take a while to destroy your industry. But I have no doubt that eventually it will be destroyed. How do I know this? It is simple: Things that can’t go on forever, don’t.

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Regulatory Thumbs

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Pharmaceutical companies endeavor to make direct to patient communications relevant. But anyone in the industry can tell you that we fight an uphill battle against an increasingly paranoid regulatory review process. Despite what brand managers may think, increasing scrutiny and risk aversion is not limited to one particular brand or company – it is now part of the zeitgeist.

Pharmaceutical companies and their agents have a mandated responsibility to provide fair balance under FDA guidelines and to avoid making unsubstantiated claims about their products. And well they should. However, so long as the regulatory environment remains locked-down, it will prevent healthcare companies from engaging in the most relevant and impactful communications.

This is because social media has totally transformed the way we communicate and consume information. Healthcare consumers can and do participate in the dialog around their health, treatment dynamics, drugs, and (yes) side effects. Not only are consumers the new publishers, but they are using channels that cannot support fair balance and AE reporting. The dialog around health is blossoming across blogs, twitter and social media and as a result pharmaceutical websites are increasingly detached from mainstream dialog and are threatened with irrelevance.

Is it the intension of the FDA’s regulation of direct-to-patient communications to prevent the pharmaceutical companies from participating? Probably not. What’s missing is an updated set of guidelines for emerging channels such as twitter, Facebook (and similar social media sites) and blogging. Approximately two years ago the FDA promised to issue regulatory guidelines on social media for drug makers. Given how rapidly the landscape is evolving and consumer behavior changes it is difficult to fault them for failing to arrive at a firm stance.

How should pharmaceutical communications use social media? How can we arrive at guidelines that will allow us to participate in the dialog?

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Getting Cozy with Radioactivity

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There’s something of disagreement now between US and Japanese nuclear authorities on how seriously to take the radioactive emissions from the damaged reactors in northern Japan. The Japanese authorities, perhaps concerned with seeding widespread panic in a nation that has a history of nuclear trauma dating back to WWII, has played down the health impacts. Meanwhile experts in the United States have characterized the danger level as very high and have recommended a broader evacuation zone than the Japanese.

The point has also been made that far more people have died and are suffering as a result of the tsunami than from radiation. It has been suggested that it the invisible nature of radioactivity that raises fears out of proportion to its actual health impact.

All of this leads me to believe that there is a campaign on by nuclear industry advocates to use the crisis in Japan to allay justified fears of radioactivity. Its even been suggested that coal use produces more radioactivity than nuclear power plants.

This information is misleading at best. The dangers of uncontained radioactive materials are significant for human health on scale that cannot be compared to natural disasters. This is because of the extended duration that these materials persist in the environment. This is also true because over time the radioactive elements will become dispersed in the environment, entering the food chain and probably affecting the genes of life forms that come in contact with it.

I suppose one of the traits that have helped humans survive and dominate the planet is our ability to adapt. So, one has to suppose that we can get used to this as well. Pass the iodide?

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