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Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - Why companies watch your every Facebook, YouTube, Twitter move - 0 views

  • These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.
  • It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?
  • At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.
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  • 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."
anonymous

Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The ... - Google Books - 1 views

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    this is a book that discusses racism
Gideon Burton

Things as They Really Are - Ensign June 2010 - ensign - 0 views

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    A key talk about the digital realm from the point of view of an LDS apostle.
Erin Hamson

Transparent science - 1 views

    • Erin Hamson
       
      Of course they want mess with the data, other wise the fundung companies pulls out from under you...
  • However, whether consciously or subconsciously, the danger is that these data may sometimes be interpreted in a certain, more favourable, light. With private funding of basic research on the increase, potential conflicts of interest are becoming more With private funding of basic research on the increase, potential conflicts of interest are becoming more frequent frequent and scientists may have more than their reputations at stake when making their results public
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    Looks into how much is actually disclosed in scientific studies
Ariel Szuch

Should We Fear the Digital Economy Bill? - 0 views

  • This indicates that no proof of copyright infringement must exist in order to block a Web site, just an assumption that a violation has occurred or will occur. Such broad language means that Web sites large and small, from YouTube to your next door neighbor’s blog, are in danger if accusations of copyright infringement are made against them.
  • Without any obligation to provide proof of wrongdoing, the bill creates the potential for abuse and…dare we say it…censorship.
  • The other side of the argument is, of course, that entertainment companies and copyright holders lose billions of dollars due to online piracy and illegal filesharing of copyrighted works.
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  • People and companies that make a living on content and intellectual property have a very real need to protect their investments and creative assets. Measures such as DRM and ongoing legal battles don’t seem to have slowed down online piracy.
  • But are such extreme measures like the Digital Economy Bill really necessary to fight copyright infringement? Should the British government be allowed limitless power to block Web sites and Internet users?
Parker Woody

Communist Manifesto (Chapter 3) - 0 views

    • Kristi Koerner
       
      The conflict with Christianity is interesting.
  • disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour
    • Erin Hamson
       
      are these laid in contrast to the benefits?
  • It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation
    • Erin Hamson
       
      city upon a hill
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  • The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      want everyone to be like them
  • It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class
  • These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.
  • the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.
    • Parker Woody
       
      Interesting how they appeal to the family and the loss of morals
Andrew DeWitt

Learning in the Light of Faith - 0 views

  • When I was just out of graduate school, I attended my first meeting of the American Physical Society in New York City. A highlight was a special event arranged by the conference organizers: the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had been invited to speak to us.
  • Hour after hour he wrote down the stories he found in books in the university library about people protesting the invention of things like machines to spin thread and to weave cloth, steam-powered trains, automobiles, airplanes, etc. All of these advances were perceived by the general public either to be physically dangerous or to be a threat to the livelihoods of workers in trades that were about to be destroyed by these advances.
  • when he started to write science fiction, he remembered all of this work he had done. So while his fellow writers were all rhapsodizing about the thrill of rockets and space travel (long before such things were possible), he wrote a story about how the local populace showed up at the launch site with torches and pitchforks in opposition to space travel. Years later, when rockets and travel outside of the earth’s atmosphere became possible, there were protests, and many of Mr. Asimov’s colleagues were astounded that he had predicted so far in advance that this would occur.
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  • “Why,” Mr. Asimov then asked us, “among all of these talented and visionary writers, was I the only one who was able to predict that this resistance to change would occur?” He let us think about the question for an uncomfortably silent minute, then leaned into the microphone and said in an intense voice that I still vividly remember: “It’s because people are stupid!”
  • The lesson I take from my memory of this experience is that the proper attitude to have when confronted with the vast complexity both of the universe and of the ideas and activities of the people who live on this small planet orbiting an ordinary star far away from the center of things in our galaxy is profound humility.
    • Andrew DeWitt
       
      This is how we ought to deal with future shock: "humility"
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    Great Devotional Talk by Ross Spencer.  Includes a great reference to "Future Shock".
Kevin Watson

Reassessing the industrial revolution - 0 views

  • Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, which is launched this week, suggests that the era not only stimulated unprecedented progress and growth, but opened a "Pandora's Box" of hazards. While new wealth was created and entire populations lifted out of poverty, the nature of economies also changed dramatically - from forms that were naturally self-limiting, to models which involve plundering finite natural resources without heeding the attendant dangers.
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    New views on the negative side of the Industrial Revolution
Morgan Wills

Johanna Schmitt: 'Natural Selection in an Age of Global Change' | Today at Brown - 0 views

  • A famous early example of natural selection in action was actually discovered right here in Providence by a Brown professor, Hermon Carey Bumpus. Passing by the Atheneum (just a few blocks from here on Benefit Street) after a severe blizzard in January 1898, Professor Bumpus found a flock of English house sparrows that had been knocked down by the storm. A typical scientist, he picked them all up and took them back to his lab, where some revived and some didn’t. When he measured them he discovered that the living were morphologically different from the dead. That was a case of natural selection acting in a single night!
  • Some of those experiments have already produced results — such as the rapid, pervasive, and dangerous evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria.
  • And a Gallup poll on Darwin’s birthday this February showed that only 39 percent of the American public overall “believes” in the theory of evolution.
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    I've always wondered if Natural Selection is different for humans in a day and age where debilitating physical characteristics don't always prevent humans from reproducing. I found this article and highlighted some interesting points.
Brandon McCloskey

Real-time computing goes from Wall Street to High Street - 0 views

  • If the company could monitor sales of ice cream - or bottled water or sun tan cream - on hot days like this one and then gauge future demand, he said, it could alter the way the company behaved
  • Real-time - the act of responding to events as they happen - is changing the way that the world behaves.
  • The software has also been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis. Computer programmes automatically sold stocks as fear spread in the markets, because their algorithms have built-in "sell" orders.
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  • 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.
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    How real-time computing is affecting economics
Katherine Chipman

Nuclear Files: Timeline of the Nuclear Age - 0 views

  • The following Nuclear Age Timeline was created by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to preserve memory, and to awaken and educate new generations about the profound dangers and extreme risks posed by nuclear weapons.
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