MONTHLY MEETINGS:

Online Registration is Closed!

Monthly meetings are usually held on the fourth Tuesday of each month.
An option to attend an Educational Hour presentation begins at 5 pm and ends by 6 pm. A cash bar is available from 6 to 7 pm during check-in. Dinner begins at 7 pm followed by a featured Dinner Speaker. We now accept PayPal for monthly meeting fees. Please use the buttons posted adjacent to each meeting and observe the payment deadline dates. Costs for the meetings are as follows:

Members with reservations..........................$40
Members without reservations.....................$48
Nonmembers with reservations...................$48
Nonmembers without reservations.............$58
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November Meeting

Dinner Hour Speaker for November Meeting

BIO:

Rolf Mast obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Leeds (UK) in 1966. For the most part, he has been involved in various aspects of R&D for the personal care industry ever since. His career started at Unilever, a large multinational, where he was involved in basic research in hair colorant chemistry. Since then he had worked for various companies large and small. These include Dial Corporation where he headed up a new idea development group, and Neutrogena where he was V.P. of R&D. Smaller companies include Lee Pharmaceuticals (remember Press-On Nails), and International Beauty Design, as well as several other assignments. For the last several years he has been R&D Director at Cosway Co., a contract manufacturer.

Rolf has taken numerous ideas from conception through commercial development, ranging from fingernail nail extensions sold in 99 cent stores to high end care skin products sold to the medical profession. Of necessity, he has also been involved in non R&D issues including regulatory affairs, claim substantiation, production plant, project management and marketing.

At present he is still at Cosway, but on a part time basis. For the remainder of his working week, Rolf is developing Coschemwiki.com, an information idea which is part of the subject of tonight’s talk.

Rolf has published several articles, and has been awarded several patents for different ideas. He is a former chairman of the California Chapter of the SCC. In 1994 he was given the chapter award for “most meritorious paper” for a presentation on in-vitro technology.

ABSTRACT:

Title: Information – From Tribal Secrets to a Light Speed Democracy.

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee combined hypertext with a computer network to create the World Wide Web. Information availability has moved faster in the 16 years since 1990, than in the prior 543 years following Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type As proof of concept, it took about 1 minute to look up the information for the previous sentence.

Other factors have been at work. Motive forces for the democratization of information have included legislation, safety concerns and the “right to know”. For instance, I remember early days in the business where if we wanted to know what a competitor was using, the analytical department would spend days in the laboratory, and maybe still have it wrong. Today we need but glance at the ingredient listing.

This talk will present ways that this brave new word of information affects corporate behavior. I also will introduce Coschemwiki.com which is a community informational resource for the SCC, inspired by Wikipedia.org. For the uninitiated a Wiki site is designed so that information can be added to, edited, and commented on by the community as a whole. A Jedi would say that harmony with his informational force brings enlightenment, those addicted to the “dark side” would predict chaos and confusion. For me, the very existence of Wikipedia, and the freely available software upon which it is based, proves the Jedi are correct.

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Contact D-D Chemco (818-349-4149) at least one week prior to the meeting.
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