Neurophilosophy Word of Mouth Is the Best Ad Pro: Consumers Trust Their Friends by Shawn P. O’Connor, Stratus Prep What’s more valuable for choosing a restaurant, dentist, gym, or new smartphone—an online review or a suggestion a close friend makes to you? Why? While there’s no single formula for word-of-mouth success, I’ve found it often starts with creating a culture that encourages your clients to consider themselves valued partners in your business. I’ve seen firsthand the power of word of mouth. Despite the multitude of media platforms available, verbal buzz about your business or product passed from one reliable person to the next is still the most cost-effective way to build a loyal following, expand your business, and reach new customers. Con: Multiplatform Works Best by Thomas H. Word of mouth is a marketing channel that most consumer marketers should explore. Think of all the channels to customers that an organization would miss if it pursued only word of mouth.
Internet Growth | Web Traffic | Brazil Please support our site by enabling javascript to view ads. RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice. New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. “If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. “Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth. The new walls dividing regions of the internet aren’t likely to stop there.
The discovery of the neuron « Neurophilosophy For most of the nineteenth century, there was an on-going debate among researchers about the organization of the nervous system. One group of researchers, the so-called reticularists, believed that the nervous system consisted of a large network of tissue, or reticulum, formed by the fused processes of nerve cells. The other group, the neuronists, argued that the nervous system consisted of distinct elements, or cells. Both groups used the same methods to study nerve cells, but came to different conclusions about the fine structure of the nervous system, which could not yet be seen in detail because of the low magnification and poor resolution of the microscopes available to them at the time. Just as the observable universe increased in size with the development of increasingly powerful telescopes, so did understanding of the organization of the nervous system improve with advances in microscopy. The popularity of the reticulum theory peaked during the mid-nineteenth century. Like this:
Needs-Based Innovation Reigns Pro: Innovation Is a Predictable Process by Tony Ulwick, Strategyn After working on the IBM (IBM) engineering team for the failed PCjr, I realized there must be a better way to guarantee a product or service’s success at launch. What I have found during the past 20 years of study and research is that most companies lack a disciplined, predictable business process for listening to customer needs and turning them into true innovation. Where most companies fail is in their thinking that innovation starts with an idea, when the reality is that only one in 14 million ideas is right the first time. Just as doctors need to know the symptoms of their patients before they can make a diagnosis, companies need to know the needs of their customers before they can develop the right solution. In this era of economic turmoil, the risks are even bigger. Con: Determining the Right Value Matters More by Jeff Thull, Prime Resource Group It’s more than recognizing a customer need.
The anti-web movement is gathering pace | Media It's created billions in sales, gave media companies their first taste of the internet, encouraged self-expression where there was oppression and caused an explosion in publisher plurality. But, after 15 years as the net's publishing platform of choice, a movement is growing that wants to put the web back in its box. Blame the 'app'. With little prior culture of mobile web consumption, publishers have barely given their HTML efforts five minutes in the sun before preferring to code snazzy, custom, closed interfaces instead in the likes of Xcode and Objective-C, in iPhone's case. After the desktop OS and browser wars of the late 90s settled down in to uniform web standards, many of us had thought the web, which runs through my veins, would become the mobile platform of choice in the same way. Many publishers now seem frustrated with the lack of profit and the loss of character that comes with formulaic, template-driven pages. What stands to be lost?
The incredible case of Phineas Gage « Neurophilosophy Phineas Gage (1823-1860) is one of the earliest – and most famous – documented cases of severe brain injury. Gage is the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients. Gage was foreman of a crew of railroad construction workers who were excavating rocks to make way for the railroad track. This involved drilling holes deep into the boulders and filling them with dynamite. On 13th September, 1848, 25-year-old Gage and his crew were working on the Rutland and Burlington Railroad near Cavendish in Vermont. Newspaper report about Gage’s accident The doctor who later attended to him, John Martin Harlow, later noted that the tamping iron was found “several rods [1 rod= 5.02m] behind him, where it was afterward picked up by his men smeared with blood and brain”. Digital reconstruction of Gage’s skull and tamping iron. References: Harlow J.
If the FCC had regulated the Internet: A counterfactual history of cyberspace. - By Jack Shafer The Federal Communications Commission recently issued new rules regulating the Internet—even though it doesn't appear to have such powers. A federal court gangster-slapped the commission last year, accusing it of regulatory overreach for attempting to dictate Internet policy to service providers. These new regulations got me to thinking of where we would be today if the FCC had regulated the Internet from the get-go. In January 1993, idle regulators at the FCC belatedly discover the burgeoning world of online services. The FCC ignores the standalone Internet because nobody but academics, scientists, and some government bodies go there. "Regulating the Internet would make as much sense as regulating inter-office mail at Michigan State University," says the FCC chairman. The online companies protest and vow to sue the FCC, but the heavily Democratic Congress moots the suits by passing new legislation giving the commission oversight of the online world.
Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants The boy exhaled. Before opening the car door, he recalled recently, he twisted open a capsule of orange powder and arranged it in a neat line on the armrest. He leaned over, closed one nostril and snorted it. Throughout the parking lot, he said, eight of his friends did the same thing. The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an prescribed for that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said. At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Observed Gary Boggs, a special agent for the , “We’re seeing it all across the United States.” Paul L. Keeping Everyone Happy
How the Internet Gets Inside Us When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. The scale of the transformation is such that an ever-expanding literature has emerged to censure or celebrate it. Even later, full-fledged totalitarian societies didn’t burn books.
Teens Taking ADHD Drugs to Get Good Grades: How Big a Problem Is It? There’s an epidemic afoot in the country’s selective high schools: ambitious students under pressure to succeed are increasingly abusing stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, which they consider as essential as SAT tutors for getting into an Ivy League college. At least that’s the case according to a most-emailed front page story in Sunday’s New York Times. But the data on stimulant use from national surveys tells a very different story. The Times‘ Alan Schwarz writes: At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. The story contends that an estimated 15% to 40% of students at high-achieving high schools use prescription stimulants to get ahead; these drugs, designed to ease symptoms of ADHD, can sharpen focus and enhance performance in people without the disorder.
Open University of Catalonia "The popular uprisings in the Arab world perhaps constitute the most important internet-led and facilitated change" The spontaneous social movements in Tunisia and Egypt have caught political analysts on the hop. As a sociologist and communication expert, were you surprised by the ability of the network society in these two countries to mobilise itself? No, not really. In my book Communication Power, I devote a large part to explaining, on an empirical basis, how changes to communication technologies create new possibilities for the self-organisation and self-mobilisation of society, by-passing the barriers of censorship and repression imposed by the state. Could we consider these popular uprisings as a new turning point in the history and evolution of the internet or should we analyse them as a logical, albeit extremely important, consequence of the implementation of the Net in the world? This figure is already out-of-date. It doesn't. The international media ?