Group items tagged

rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.

immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation

An' logics can do a Iotta things that ain't been found out yet.

In theory, a censor block is gonna come on an' the screen will say severely, "Public Policy Forbids This Service."

The screen says, "Service question: What is your name?" She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters an' then says: "Secretarial Service Demonstration! You—" It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I've been pinched three times—twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy—and the interestin' item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks an' had her address changed to her folks' home. Then it says, brisk: "Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service."

Then I sweat!

Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run!

That couldn't be allowed out general, of course. You gotta make room for kids to grow up. But it's a pretty good world, now Joe's turned off. Maybe I'll turn him on long enough to learn how to stay in it. But on the other hand, maybe—

there was in every dream the attempted or successful gratification of some wish

many of our dream visions are symbolical

sexual desires play an enormous part in our unconscious

direct connection between dreams and insanity

"One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."

So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces?

"I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."

One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.

Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.

Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.

many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow

But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.

To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.

"don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"

"Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"

"If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."

it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.

When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.

"Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."

Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."

SAP's software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously high.

Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats. "It's difficult to think of an industry that isn't affected by real-time," Mr Palmer says.

The miseries of industrial urbanism and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects brought changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph's harnessing of a new power, offering instant communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered.