Gate to the Pacific Grove Methodist Camp Retreat, (ca.1881). Joseph Oscar Johnson, superintendent of the Grove Retreat in foreground. Photograph courtesy of California State Library, Sacramento, California.

Today the Pacific Grove/Monterey Bay area is a hub for people and organizations who wish to inspire stewardship of the environment in general and the ocean in particular. This focus in Pacific Grove,  on nature and the ocean, has a long history dating back to the late 1800s. The Chautauqua Assemblies held in Pacific Grove, beginning in the 1880s, served to influence the ethos of the appreciation and preservation  of nature, throughout the state of California and the American society at large.

Donald Kohrs is Branch Library Specialist at the Miller Library of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. He has researched three important components of this history and has made his findings and draft book chapters available on three websites.

Chautauqua: The Nature Study Movement in Pacific Grove, California outlines in twelve chapters, the history associated with the summer gatherings of the Chautauqua Assemblies in Pacific Grove. He draws particular attention to the strong emphasis the founders of the assembly placed on the instruction of the natural sciences, romantic literature, and the arts. It was California’s first summer school of science, held at California’s first seaside laboratory, where the goal was not the advancement of scientific research, but the training of schoolteachers in the proper method of nature study.

Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, (ca. 1894) Stanford University, Pacific Grove, California. Photograph Courtesy of Stanford University Archives.

The Hopkins Seaside Laboratory (1892-1917) Pacific Grove, California, eight chapters document the early history of Stanford University’s first marine science facility, when it was initially positioned at Lovers Point Park.  This summer education and research facility would relocate to China Point and become, what is  today, the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.

Bust of Edward F. Ricketts’ at the site of his fatal 1948 car-train collision along Cannery Row in Monterey. People continually place flowers in his hand, which holds a starfish. Photo by Amadscientist courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Science and Philosophy of Edward Flanders Robb Ricketts (1897-1948)

This site is a collection of the meta-data of the books, art, people and more that influenced the thinking of Ed Ricketts.  Ed Ricketts is one of California’s most renowned marine biologists, though he never acquired a college degree. He lwas great friends with John Steinbeck who based the character “Doc” in his novel “Cannery Row” after him. He is best known for the publication Between Pacific Tides (1939), a pioneering study of intertidal ecology.

Useful Resources

Don Kohrs researched these book chapters based on searches of digitized books and newspaper articles made available by the Google Books Project (http://books.google.com/books), Internet Archive  (www.archive.org), the California Digital Newspaper Collection (http://cdnc.ucr.edu/) and the Library of Congress, Chronicling America Historical Newspaper Project (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/).

Poster announcing employment opportunities in call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) operations on a wall next to the Shavij Nagar bus station in Bangalore. Image from Wikimedia commons.

I always think of the offshore outsourcing of work as the purview of large companies like Ford Motor Company, Nike, HP and Apple. But this is simply not true anymore. Now a company of any size, even individuals, can effectively find a person in another country to do a task cheaply.  If the task involves no physical shipping and only electronic transfer of files or information, you can conceive of a task and have someone in India working on it within hours.

I decided to try it with the making of a logo for this website. I used Odesk. There are many other sites out there. I created an account and had an ad up within 5 minutes. The hard part was how much to offer for the job.

My comparison is what I paid for logo design for my company’s logo. I could have had a local designer do a quickie for about $600 but decided to pay for quality. We had several meetings in person, my logo is brilliant, I love it. The total cost was $3,000.

Graphic showing developers and outsorcing. Image by Shunit Fainaro and taken from Wikimedia commons.

The Odesk logo was an experiment in outsourcing, which is supposed to be a huge savings, so a third of the cheapie bid seemed reasonable to me. I was a bit nervous and thought I might be insulting people, but I put in a $200 bid price and hit post.

Instantly, 10 thumbnail files of Indian faces that had the correct qualifications for my job were all staring at me. They all had their hourly rates posted and most were around $3.33 an hour. Really!? $3.33 for someone who knows Photoshop, has experience in logo design specifically, and speaks good English. Hard to believe.

Within five minutes I got a response to my ad. An Indian contractor would do it for $180. This sum would be about $50 more than he had earned on his 6 previous jobs (Odesk shows you this information). He was designing logos for a flat rate of as low as $6—and they were good.  Sure he would do it for $180.

 The amazing magnitude of the cost savings in offshore outsourcing hit home.

Then the moral dilemma set in. Oh god, now I feel obligated to hire him. He probably has kids. He is probably right now hoping beyond hope. Oh the responsibility. But wait! I do not have to pay that much! I could just pay $6!

In the past, it was easier to shove off any guilt for outsourcing on corporate America. Now me and my one-person, self-funded company are facing the same dilemma. I still haven’t hired anyone to make my logo. For some reason I have frozen on the issue. Perhaps I should pay the $180 and then we both get deals of our lifetimes. And if people like me drive the prices up for Indian workers, uhm thats good right?

The truth be told, I am just generally an informationophile. I like to know detailed information about a place, either close to home or when I travel. How come this gorgeous spot is still undeveloped and not a shopping mall? Are these plants native?

But how many people are like this?

The question is particularly relevant since I have just left a perfectly good career as an academic to create a startup company making natural history and human history “app-tours” for smart phones. I did this because I was convinced at least 5-10% of the population would be like the woman on the top cartoon and not the bottom cartoon.

I launched the product. It felt good. I was proud.

Six months later…5-10% of the locals and tourists have not bought the product. That’s putting it mildly. The question is do I just need better marketing than I currently have or is there simply no “product-market fit?”

So I talked my friend Robin into coming with me to Lighthouse Point, the center of my app-tour, to talk to potential customers. I brought donuts thinking it would lure them on over to my table. The main question we asked was “While you are here at such a pretty place, do you want to just look around, zone out, talk about yourself with your friend, or do you want more information about the place, i.e., its history, and what makes it unique?”

We were able to beckon seven “subjects”. Even with donuts you have to beckon hard. Perhaps being in Santa Cruz gluten-free muffins would have been better as hardly anyone took the donuts.

Two friends, twenty-something women, gave me the most hope. “Totally! We want information about the whales and where to see them.”  They were locals, dancers, and had even danced about the local surf history of Santa Cruz. They used elephant seals and sea lions to personify the East-side, West-side surf rivalry. They said they were just talking about wanting an app with this kind of stuff.

Conducting research on-site at Lighthouse Pont.

Now if my friend Robin blurted out, “Oh she is geologist, she made this app, here she will show you!” Then they said nice things and thought the app was great. Whether they simply did not want to hurt my feelings or were just convinced by my personal love affair with my own app, I don’t know.

In my first haphazard foray into market research, I learned that most people probably are content to just be at a place without finding out much about it. One person said  “I am a local, I am here all the time, I wish I cared, but I don’t.” Even she however, like most of the others, got interested when I showed her the app.

My sample size is too small to be very scientific but 1/7  genuinely wanted and were actually looking for this kind of information. My optimistic take home message: that is in the 5-10% range (technically 14%), maybe there is a market. The other 6/7 could be convinced. Take home message here, better marketing might get these people to buy the app, but probably best not to count on that.

Clearly this is just the beginning of my market research activities. I will fine tune, explore other methods and get back with an update.

Aerial view of Bonny Doon Beach, California. Picture is © 2002-2013 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.Californiacoastline.org.

This project consists of a time series of aerial photos of the entire California coast. It is an amazing resource and all thanks to the husband and wife team of Gabrielle and Ken Aldeman. Gabrielle does the flying in their Robinson R-44 helicopter and Ken takes the pictures. They have over 66,800 photographs of the current California coast online taken roughly every two to four years beginning in 2002. The project also contains as many images as possible from 1993, 1989, 1987, 1986, 1979, and 1972 and some from Santa Cruz County in 1928. 

All photos in the California Coastal Records Project are copyright protected by Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman. They are generous with granting permission for personal or educational use and you can use them commercially for a very reasonable fee. The complete terms and conditions can be found California Coastal Records Project website by clicking on “our license”.

Sources Used

California Coastal Records Project.

International Organization of Women Pilots. The Ninty Nines Inc.