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The interview 11-28

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The interview
Many applicants wonder if we weight how and where they complete their interview, whether it’s on campus with an admissions officer or student, or an off-campus meeting with an alum. All interviews are evaluated the same way  that is, they’re your chance to tie everything together about your application, and go more in-depth on anything that will help us understand why Kellogg is right for you. Feel free to introduce new information, or to expand on something you touched on in the written application.
The interview is a piece of the application; it is important, but it’s just one piece.We look at all these things in context. They’re each a component to help round out the story that you want us to know about you. Above all else, be thoughtful, be honest and be yourself. Kellogg is very excited to get to know you.


Marketing Myopia 11-29

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Marketing    Myopia




We always know when an HBR article hits the big time. Journalists write about it, pundits talk about it, executives route copies of it around the organization, and its vocabulary becomes familiar to managers everywhere—sometimes to the point where they don’t even associate the words with the original article. Most important, of course, managers change how they do business because the ideas in the piece helped them see issues in a new light.
“Marketing Myopia” is the quintessential big hit HBR piece. In it, Theodore Levitt, who was then a lecturer in business administration at the Harvard Business School, introduced the famous question, “What business are you really in?” and with it the claim that, had railroad executives seen themselves as being in the transportation business rather than the railroad business, they would have continued to grow. The article is as much about strategy as it is about marketing, but it also introduced the most influential marketing idea of the past half-century: that businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather than on selling products. “Marketing Myopia” won the McKinsey Award in 1960.
Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

Fateful Purposes

The failure is at the top. The executives responsible for it, in the last analysis, are those who deal with broad aims and policies. Thus:
  • The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.
  • Hollywood barely escaped being totally ravished by television. Actually, all the established film companies went through drastic reorganizations. Some simply disappeared. All of them got into trouble not because of TV’s inroads but because of their own myopia. As with the railroads, Hollywood defined its business incorrectly. It thought it was in the movie business when it was actually in the entertainment business. “Movies” implied a specific, limited product. This produced a fatuous contentment that from the beginning led producers to view TV as a threat. Hollywood scorned and rejected TV when it should have welcomed it as an opportunity—an opportunity to expand the entertainment business.
Today, TV is a bigger business than the old narrowly defined movie business ever was. Had Hollywood been customer oriented (providing entertainment) rather than product oriented (making movies), would it have gone through the fiscal purgatory that it did? I doubt it. What ultimately saved Hollywood and accounted for its resurgence was the wave of new young writers, producers, and directors whose previous successes in television had decimated the old movie companies and toppled the big movie moguls.
There are other, less obvious examples of industries that have been and are now endangering their futures by improperly defining their purposes. I shall discuss some of them in detail later and analyze the kind of policies that lead to trouble. Right now, it may help to show what a thoroughly customer-oriented management can do to keep a growth industry growing, even after the obvious opportunities have been exhausted, and here there are two examples that have been around for a long time. They are nylon and glass—specifically, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and Corning Glass Works.
Both companies have great technical competence. Their product orientation is unquestioned. But this alone does not explain their success. After all, who was more pridefully product oriented and product conscious than the erstwhile New England textile companies that have been so thoroughly massacred? 
The DuPonts and the Cornings have succeeded not primarily because of their product or research orientation but because they have been thoroughly customer oriented also. It is constant watchfulness for opportunities to apply their technical know-how to the creation of customer-satisfying uses that accounts for their prodigious output of successful new products. Without a very sophisticated eye on the customer, most of their new products might have been wrong, their sales methods useless.
Aluminum has also continued to be a growth industry, thanks to the efforts of two wartime-created companies that deliberately set about inventing new customer-satisfying uses. Without Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation and Reynolds Metals Company, the total demand for aluminum today would be vastly less.

Error of Analysis.


Some may argue that it is foolish to set the railroads off against aluminum or the movies off against glass. Are not aluminum and glass naturally so versatile that the industries are bound to have more growth opportunities than the railroads and the movies? This view commits precisely the error I have been talking about. It defines an industry or a product or a cluster of know-how so narrowly as to guarantee its premature senescence. When we mention “railroads,” we should make sure we mean “transportation.” As transporters, the railroads still have a good chance for very considerable growth. They are not limited to the railroad business as such (though in my opinion, rail transportation is potentially a much stronger transportation medium than is generally believed).
What the railroads lack is not opportunity but some of the managerial imaginativeness and audacity that made them great. Even an amateur like Jacques Barzun can see what is lacking when he says, “I grieve to see the most advanced physical and social organization of the last century go down in shabby disgrace for lack of the same comprehensive imagination that built it up. [What is lacking is] the will of the companies to survive and to satisfy the public by inventiveness and skill.”1

Shadow of Obsolescence

It is impossible to mention a single major industry that did not at one time qualify for the magic appellation of “growth industry.” In each case, the industry’s assumed strength lay in the apparently unchallenged superiority of its product. There appeared to be no effective substitute for it. It was itself a runaway substitute for the product it so triumphantly replaced. Yet one after another of these celebrated industries has come under a shadow. Let us look briefly at a few more of them, this time taking examples that have so far received a little less attention.

Dry Cleaning.



This was once a growth industry with lavish prospects. In an age of wool garments, imagine being finally able to get them clean safely and easily. The boom was on. Yet here we are 30 years after the boom started, and the industry is in trouble. Where has the competition come from? From a better way of cleaning? No. It has come from synthetic fibers and chemical additives that have cut the need for dry cleaning. But this is only the beginning. Lurking in the wings and ready to make chemical dry cleaning totally obsolete is that powerful magician, ultrasonics.

Hexoskin, The First Biometric Shirt For Fitness Training And Sleep Tracking 11-28

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Hexoskin, The First Biometric Shirt For Fitness Training And Sleep Tracking



If made right, smart clothing could be the key to unlocking the future of health and fitness technology. Smart clothing, or clothes with sensors that measure different aspects of your health and fitness, is still rare, with only a handful of products on the market. The Hexoskin Smart Shirt ($399/£260 for a complete starter kit with one garment) has made some great inroads into this space. Available for both men and women, it’s a workout top with almost invisible sensors for measuring heart rate and breathing, plus a small tracker device that connects to the shirt to capture your motion, like cadence, steps, acceleration, and so forth.

The Tracker and Compatibility

The Hexoskin tracker device is a small, Bluetooth-enabled device that’s smaller than a credit card and fits into a secure pocket on the side of the shirt. Inside the pocket is a little connector that fits into the device and lets it collect data from the sensors. The device then sends the information it gathers to your phone, where it’s collected in a companion app for iOS or Android.
A USB charging cable comes with a Hexoskin device, too, and the battery lasts about 14 hours. The device can store about 150 hours worth of data, so if you forget to upload your workouts for a day or two, it’s no big deal.

Wearing and Washing Hexoskin

hexoskin
I don’t know if you’d want to wear the same shirt all day long and then to bed, but the point is you could. Or you can buy additional shirts for $169(£110) each. The shirts, which are made of polyamide microfibers, feel similar to bathing-suit material. They’re machine washable on the gentle or “hand” cycle, although you do have to disconnect and remove the Hexoskin device before submerging it.

The Hexoskin App

The Hexoskin app shows you whatever data point you want to see being plotted on a graph in real time: heart rate, speed, cadence, and so forth.
The other measurements appear at the bottom next to their icons so you can check in on other stats at a glance. You don’t have to leave the screen on, however, and can put your phone out of sight if you prefer.
The app comes with a lot. A huge list of activities are supported, from badminton to snowboarding. You can use it not only to track your workout times, speed, breathing, and heart rate, but also to conduct a heart rate deceleration test, which is an indicator of health. Faster deceleration from maximum heart rate is better, and the app is pretty clear about showing what your results mean. You can also use it to test your heart rate variability, which is an indication of whether your body has recovered enough from a previous workout to get at it again full-force today.

Smart Shirt, Middling App

Though expensive, the Hexoskin Smart Shirt is a great product that tracks a wealth of information about your workouts and activities. The mobile app has some wonderful functionality, too, but it could use some love and attention from the design side. The same can be said for the tracker device and its incomprehensible LEDs.
If smart clothing sounds like overkill for your fitness needs, check out the best activity trackers instead, as well as our advice on how to choose a fitness tracker that’s right for you.

If made right, smart clothing could be the key to unlocking the future of health and fitness technology. Smart clothing, or clothes with sensors that measure different aspects of your health and fitness, is still rare, with only a handful of products on the market. The Hexoskin Smart Shirt ($399/£260 for a complete starter kit with one garment) has made some great inroads into this space. Available for both men and women, it’s a workout top with almost invisible sensors for measuring heart rate and breathing, plus a small tracker device that connects to the shirt to capture your motion, like cadence, steps, acceleration, and so forth.

The Tracker and Compatibility

The Hexoskin tracker device is a small, Bluetooth-enabled device that’s smaller than a credit card and fits into a secure pocket on the side of the shirt. Inside the pocket is a little connector that fits into the device and lets it collect data from the sensors. The device then sends the information it gathers to your phone, where it’s collected in a companion app for iOS or Android.
A USB charging cable comes with a Hexoskin device, too, and the battery lasts about 14 hours. The device can store about 150 hours worth of data, so if you forget to upload your workouts for a day or two, it’s no big deal.

Wearing and Washing Hexoskin

hexoskin
I don’t know if you’d want to wear the same shirt all day long and then to bed, but the point is you could. Or you can buy additional shirts for $169(£110) each. The shirts, which are made of polyamide microfibers, feel similar to bathing-suit material. They’re machine washable on the gentle or “hand” cycle, although you do have to disconnect and remove the Hexoskin device before submerging it.

The Hexoskin App

The Hexoskin app shows you whatever data point you want to see being plotted on a graph in real time: heart rate, speed, cadence, and so forth.
The other measurements appear at the bottom next to their icons so you can check in on other stats at a glance. You don’t have to leave the screen on, however, and can put your phone out of sight if you prefer.
The app comes with a lot. A huge list of activities are supported, from badminton to snowboarding. You can use it not only to track your workout times, speed, breathing, and heart rate, but also to conduct a heart rate deceleration test, which is an indicator of health. Faster deceleration from maximum heart rate is better, and the app is pretty clear about showing what your results mean. You can also use it to test your heart rate variability, which is an indication of whether your body has recovered enough from a previous workout to get at it again full-force today.

Smart Shirt, Middling App

Though expensive, the Hexoskin Smart Shirt is a great product that tracks a wealth of information about your workouts and activities. The mobile app has some wonderful functionality, too, but it could use some love and attention from the design side. The same can be said for the tracker device and its incomprehensible LEDs.
If smart clothing sounds like overkill for your fitness needs, check out the best activity trackers instead, as well as our advice on how to choose a fitness tracker that’s right for you.

Seatylock, A Bicycle Saddle That Can Be Detached And Used As A Lock 11-28

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Seatylock, A Bicycle Saddle That Can Be Detached And Used As A Lock



Bicycle locks are going through a renaissance of sorts, as teams of engineers and designers are packing high-tech features into what used to be uninspired pieces of metal. Some bikes have even been designed to lock themselves without the help of an external lock. Now thanks to the Seatylock, some cyclists may be able to say that the best bike lock is the one right under their bum.
The Seatylock is, simply put, a bicycle saddle that can be detached and used as a lock in about 30 seconds. When it’s separated from the bike, the Seatylock extends to turn into a multi-jointed, one-metre (about 3.3 feet) long hardened steel bike lock. This means cyclists who use the novel bike seat don’t have to worry about lugging a separate lock along with them. It also means they don’t need to worry about their bicycle saddle being stolen.
Not to be overshadowed by its security features, the team behind the Seatylock makes it a point to highlight the thought and effort that went into the comfort and style of the bicycle saddle. The saddle comes in two versions: Trekking (slimmer) and Comfort (thicker). Each saddle is available in a variety of styles and comes with a universal adapter to ensure that the Seatylock fits with any standard bike.
The Seatylock’s Kickstarter campaign, which closed earlier this month, received $137,190 (more than three times its $40,000 goal) from 1,377 backers. It will retail at $129(£83), with initial deliveries scheduled for March 2015. Cyclists can pre-order the Seatylock for $90(£58).

Pantelligent Pan, A Smart Frying Pan For Your Connected Home 11-28

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Pantelligent Pan, A Smart Frying Pan For Your Connected Home






I’m a big fan of home automation gadgets – right down to my kettle – but even I would have thought a smart frying pan was a bit of a stretch. Seems not: a Kickstarter campaign for the $199(£130) Pantelligent pan is already fully-funded.
Frying pans have barely changed in thousands of years, but Pantelligent is the next evolutionary leap in the kitchen: a frying pan that actually helps you cook. Pantelligent has a temperature sensor inside it that communicates with the Pantelligent smartphone app. 

Together, the pan and the app guide you to cook everything perfectly, just the way a professional chef (or your mom!) would cook it. No more overcooked, undercooked, or burned food. You’ll know exactly when the pan is at the right temperature, when it’s time to flip or stir, and when your food is perfectly done.
The Pantelligent pan has a built-in temperature sensor, so it knows how hot it is and how hot it should be for the food you are cooking, letting you know when you need to adjust the heat up or down, and telling you when the food is properly cooked.
There are only a few dozen recipes in the app at present, but more are promised – and you can also enter your own, complete with temperatures and timings so that the app can alert you in the same way it does for the supplied ones.
The rather lengthy video below provides a complete, unedited demo. If you want to grab one, you can back the project for $199(£130) and expect to receive your smart pan in January.

.Wearable and Intelligent technology 11-29

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Hexoskin, The First Biometric Shirt For Fitness Training And Sleep Tracking




Available for both men and women, it’s a workout top with almost invisible sensors for measuring heart rate and breathing, plus a small tracker device that connects to the shirt to capture your motion, like cadence, steps, acceleration, and so forth.
Read more  

Pantelligent Pan, A Smart Frying Pan For Your Connected Home




Pantelligent is the next evolutionary leap in the kitchen: a frying pan that actually helps you cook. Pantelligent has a temperature sensor inside it that communicates with the Pantelligent smartphone app. 

Seatylock, A Bicycle Saddle That Can Be Detached And Used As A Lock 














Some bikes have even been designed to lock themselves without the help of an external lock. Now thanks to the Seatylock, some cyclists may be able to say that the best bike lock is the one right under their bum.




Down the memory lane.11-30

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These are some of the thoughts, that generally reverberate in the minds of people with atleast some achievements specially those born in 50s and 60s The more you move closer to your goals and objectives in life, the farther you keep moving from yourself. 

Anarchy in itself provides the unknown wholesomesness in life.The stage in your life when you are a vagabound poacher with absolutely no direction in life. Innuendos in galore from well wishers and so called wellwishers.The moments of joy, ecstasy, even melacholy. They all get enframed secularly in heart & mind.

There is a strange unfulfilled craving in heart for those moments.

दिल ढूँढता है फिर वही फ़ुरसत के रात दिन
बैठे रहे तसव्वुर-ए-जानाँ किये हुए
दिल ढूँढता है...



Schedule Sleep in Your Calendar to Protect Your Sleep Cycle 12-01

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Schedule Sleep in Your Calendar to Protect Your Sleep Cycle


One of the perks of becoming a grownup is you no longer have an imposed bed time. It still might not hurt to schedule one for yourself if you want to keep your sleep cycle steady, though.
As business blog Inc. suggests, sleep is an appointment just like any other. You need to make time for it, and there are consequences if you don't. Because sleep won't fire us if we miss a meeting, we tend to think it's less important to put it in the calendar. However, we schedule what's important to us. And sleep is incredibly important:
Sleep deprivation drastically impairs our judgment. You are more likely to achieve success and health with a regular and generous sleep schedule.
Treat your bedtime like an appointment, with the same urgency and importance that you give your work-repeated appointments. Determine what time you need to get up and count the hours backwards to allow for the seven or eight hours of sleep your body needs. Like a flight or important meeting, your sleep should be thought of as the fixed point of your day—everything else should be adjusted as needed.
Not only will having sleep in your calendar remind you that you need to do it, it also forces you to move it out of the way if you need to schedule something else. Friends want you to go to a party at 10PM on a Tuesday? When you enter that into your calendar, you see exactly how much sleep you're going to have to pay for it.


Use Behavioral Economics to Achieve Wellness Goals 12-02

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Use    Behavioral    Economics    to    Achieve    Wellness    Goals


Zhang Junya instant noodles (Wei Lih group) market a 5-pack hanging product, but tag each pack with a unique message according to its number in the line such as “Only two packs left! You need to be fast!” for the penultimate pack, making the consumer anxious they might miss out (loss aversion and scarcity bias) and also more aware that the product must be quite popular with other people if the other packs have already gone (social norms and social validation).

 Conventional wellness programs rely heavily on education and financial incentives to encourage employees, insurance plan members, or patients to lose weight, stop smoking, and manage their chronic health conditions. Those programs, though intuitively appealing, achieve less success than new, practical approaches derived from behavioral economics, which help us identify and overcome some of the psychological barriers that undercut our health goals. The first step in benefiting from behavioral economics is getting past our reliance on our old ways.

Education alone doesn’t work. Consider: on April 12, 2007, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was in the front passenger seat of a car involved in amotor vehicle accident. The accident lacerated flesh and broke bones, and he required mechanical ventilation in a trauma center before eventually recovering. Corzine had been a highly paid CEO of Goldman Sachs and a U.S. senator before becoming New Jersey’s governor. He was a controversial figure politically and financially, but no one would ever call him stupid. Nevertheless, he wasn’t wearing a seat belt, and reports suggest he never had.

Employers, health insurers, doctors, and health systems increasingly recognize that everyday behaviors are among the most important determinants of health. How we live our lives — whether we smoke, exercise, take our medications, and wear seat belts — substantially determines how long we live and the health we enjoy. Everyone is interested in wellness, yet everyone’s first suggestion for achieving it is education.

That approach seems reasonable, until you think through the implicit assumptions: If we tell people that smoking is dangerous, they will stop. If people are informed about the benefits of exercise, they will go for a run. If only someone had told Jon Corzine that seat belts save lives…

Health education is critically important, but if we devote resources to educating people about what they already know but don’t do, we may overlook more practical solutions.

The next step beyond education has been the use of financial incentives, which target behavior rather than knowledge. The implicit argument is that if we pay people for health-promoting behaviors, they will engage in them. It works to a certain extent, but typically not as much as program sponsors would like.
If we lower the co-payments on medications, as value-based insurance design suggests, adherence does go up, but not by enough to matter. 

The landmark MI FREEE study, which made medications free after a heart attack, increased medication adherence from a disappointing 39% at baseline to 44% — better, but still disappointing. If we pay employees for completing health-risk assessments, some fill them out, but most don’t. Increasing the payments improves participation, but that gets expensive as costs quickly outpace diminishing returns. If the savings or rebates for desired behavior are buried in other payments — as when employers reduce health insurance premiums for workers who meet certain health standards — the rewards are hidden among other paycheck deductions and become less salient. The results are often disappointing.

Money has its limits as a carrot, yet an enormous industry in wellness is devoted to this highly transactional approach of delivering points, badges, miles, or dollars to encourage good behavior. Section 2705 of the Affordable Care Act increases the amount of money employers can put at risk for improving these behaviors or outcomes. The transactions are more effective at changing behavior than education alone, but the premise underlying these programs is that people make decisions rationally.

However, several decades of research reveal that many of our decisions don’t reflect rational choices, but rather irrational thinking that occurs in predictable ways. Experts in behavioral economics have been able to harness this predictability and lead us to the healthful behaviors we seek.

Let’s say you want to improve medication adherence among your employees, the members of your pharmacy benefit plan, or your patient population (depending upon whether you are an employer, an insurer, or a provider). You start by offering an automatic prescription-refill program, but instead of a traditional opt-in program, present a required choice: (1) the inconvenience of refilling prescriptions manually each time or (2) having the refills sent automatically. This changes the architecture of the selection to that of an enhanced active choice: It highlights the disadvantages of the lesser alternative while retaining individuals’ freedom to decide. When we tried this approach with CVS Caremark members, the number of people choosing automatic refills more than doubled.

Or consider an employer who is unhappy with the completion rate for employee health-risk assessments (HRAs). Instead of merely doubling the incentive from $25 to $50, use existing groupings within the workforce and randomly pick one group each week to win at each worksite. Anyone within that group who has completed his or her HRA wins $100; if more than 80% of group members complete the HRA, each member of the group gets a $25 bonus. 

The odds can be structured to yield the same overall cost as the basic doubled-incentive approach, but the design harnesses the strong effects of social norms and avoidance of regret. People hate the idea that their team might be selected, other members of the team get a prize, and yet they themselves lose out because of something they didn’t do that was easily within reach. The result: The HRA completion rate rose from 40% to 64%, compared with the 40% to 44% increase yielded by merely doubling the incentive.

How can we encourage the adoption of behavioral economics approaches? The first step is getting employers, insurers, and providers to reconsider the assumptions that underlie conventional approaches like points, miles, and other traditional incentives. A key lesson from behavioral economics is that the size of an incentive matters far less than how it is framed and messaged, how it travels along existing pathways of social networks, and how it connects to individuals emotionally. Here are some specific suggestions for implementation:
The aim of behavioral economics is not just faddish games that work one time to achieve a minor health goal. Its techniques have been used to significantly increase weight loss, smoking cessation, and diabetes management. 


Behavioral economics approaches sometimes involve what is called automated hovering, whereby wireless data from internet-enabled scales, blood pressure cuffs, glucometers, or pill bottles help large numbers of patients stick to health-promoting activities. 

Substituting technology for otherwise expensive personnel helps achieve scale. We are currently running a large trial of automated hovering, funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Innovation Center, that aims to reduce rehospitalizations and new cardiovascular events in patients after a heart attack.

  • Instead of giving a reward (such as a cash payment for completing a health-risk assessment or for not smoking) only to people after they meet a goal, give it to everyone in an account that they can see (like an online bank statement or even a physical gift card that isn’t yet activated). And take it away only if success is not achieved. This approach makes the reward tangible and within reach today, when the action needs to happen. It also takes advantage of our natural aversion to loss (people work harder to retain something than to earn it).
  • Use separate checks or gift cards to deliver benefits that would normally be buried in a paystub. In short, make the smaller incentives easier to see and, therefore, more influential.
  • Construct teams so that individual efforts become group achievements. For example, rather than merely encouraging individuals to walk more, create teams whose success depends on each member walking a minimum amount (say, 7,000 steps a day). Teams would also compete against each other for prizes or bragging rights. By enlisting social norms, you capitalize on the most powerful of human motivators.
  • Turn repetitive activities, like taking medication, into a daily game in which people are eligible to participate only if they took their medication the previous day. Such an approach effectively pairs the routine with engaging and emotionally positive experience.
Increasingly, technology platforms can help deploy these science-based approaches in organizations that need them.

Veteran comedian Deven Verma dies at 78! 12-02

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Veteran comedian Deven Verma dies at 78!

Veteran comedian Deven Verma dies at 78!
Zee Media Bureau/Ritika Handoo
New Delhi: The popular face in Hindi cinema, known for tickling the funny bone of movie lovers during the golden period - Deven Verma - is no more. The 78-year-old actor suffered a cardiac arrest and succumbed to kidney failure, reports suggest.
Verma breathed his last around 2 am at his residence in Pune.
The actor worked with some of the best filmmakers of his time, such as Basu Chatterji, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and the likes.
He graduated in politics and sociology before joining the film industry.Deven Verma was married to actor Ashok Kumar's daughter Rupa Ganguly.  
Reports further suggest that the cremation will take place today at noon, in Yerawada crematorium, Pune.

FIFO vs. LIFO 12-03

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FIFO vs. LIFO




FIFO and LIFO accounting methods are used for determining the value of unsold inventory, the cost of goods sold and other transactions like stock repurchases that need to be reported at the end of the accounting period. FIFO stands for First In, First Out, which means the goods that are unsold are the ones that were most recently added to the inventory. Conversely, LIFO is Last In, First Out, which means goods most recently added to the inventory are sold first so the unsold goods are ones that were added to the inventory the earliest. LIFO accounting is not permitted by the IFRS standards so it is less popular. It does, however, allow the inventory valuation to be lower in inflationary times.

Comparison chart







FIFO

LIFO

Stands forFirst in, first outLast in, first out
Unsold inventoryUnsold inventory comprises goods acquired most recently.Unsold inventory comprises the earliest acquired goods.
RestrictionsThere are no GAAP or IFRSrestrictions for using FIFO; both allow this accounting method to be used.IFRS does not allow using LIFO for accounting.
Effect of InflationIf costs are increasing, the items acquired first were cheaper. This decreases the cost of goods sold (COGS) under FIFO and increases profit. The income tax is larger. Value of unsold inventory is also higher.If costs are increasing, then recently acquired items are more expensive. This increases the cost of goods sold (COGS) under LIFO and decreases the net profit. The income tax is smaller. Value of unsold inventory is lower.
Effect of DeflationConverse to the inflation scenario, accounting profit (and therefore tax) is lower using FIFO in a deflationary period. Value of unsold inventory, is lower.Using LIFO for a deflationary period results in both accounting profit and value of unsold inventory being higher.
Record keepingSince oldest items are sold first, the number of records to be maintained decreases.Since newest items are sold first, the oldest items may remain in the inventory for many years. This increases the number of records to be maintained.
FluctuationsOnly the newest items remain in the inventory and the cost is more recent. Hence, there is no unusual increase or decrease in cost of goods sold.Goods from number of years ago may remain in the inventory. Selling them may result in reporting unusual increase or decrease in cost of goods.
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Justice V R Krishna Iyer: Man who rescued Supreme Court from supreme shame 12-05

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Justice V R Krishna Iyer: Man who rescued Supreme Court from supreme shame

Justice V R Krishna Iyer has passed on to the other world. He scored a century. He was unwell in body al though his spirit was, as always, indomitable.

And yet, I cannot shake off a deep sense of grief. My generation, who learned from him of what the Supreme Court was all about, considered his body - as well as his soul and his wisdom -to be immortal.

Some eminent lawyers of the generation before us had mixed feelings about the man who led the revolution in jurisprudence which helped a then-floundering Supreme Court find its identity . He challenged the status quo and thus had his share of critics and followers. The gen next has his judgments to read. For my generation, he was the architect of the Supreme Court, post Emergency . As Professor Upendra Baxi said, from the Supreme Court of India he made it the Supreme Court for Indians. He defined fundamental rights as well as charters of freedom, not just to acquire and hold wealth, but freedom from poverty and misery . He ensured that the hesitation in reading due process into Article 21 was dispelled. The foundation for a whole jurisprudence was laid by reading Article 14 as a charter against nonarbitrariness.

By refusing an outright stay on the verdict setting aside Indira Gandhi's election, he showed that however high and mighty you are, the rules of the game do not change. The bar for future judges was set very high! This was what may be called the Krishnaiyerisation of Indian jurisprudence.

He rescued the Supreme Court from the supreme shame of the Shivkant Shukla judgment (in 1976, Justices P N Bhagwati, A N Ray ,YV Chandrachud and M H Beg agreed with the then Indira Gandhi government that even the right to life stood abrogated during the Emergency in ADM Jabalpur vs Shivkant Shukla case). The verdict constitutes one of the darkest chapters in the history of the court as it struck at the very heart of fundamental rights. It was a judgment that put a question mark on the credibility of the institution. If detention even on a mistaken identity was not amenable habeas corpus, and a detenu lacked the locus to question his own detention, then we could as well wind up the Supreme Court -and the high courts as well. Post Emergency , the Krishna Iyer jurisprudence breathed new , life into what was seen as a listless institution. Supreme Court today stands tall and is ! the most powerful institution of its kind in the world and its work has shown that it is sui generis. India needs such a court even if other countries do not have or need such a court. That other similar institutions do not do what our court does did not deter Krishna Iyer from redesigning constitutional remedies to address constitutional aberrations.




Justice Iyer wrote in a style that has been the envy of not just other jurists but also students of English literature. There was a flow - a natural ease -even if he used words like jejune that needed a dictionary to decode. He coined words too -and powerful ones at that.

Justice Iyer was spiritually highly evolved. He believed in the immortality of the soul. I had the privilege of conversations with him on communicating with those on the other side. I take comfort in the thought that he will, from the other side, continue to guide us as he did earlier. On a personal note, my tribute to his passing on will be to honor his beliefs - I am sure he saw death as Coleridge describes it: "..Greatness and goodness are not means but ends ! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love, light, And calm thoughts, regular as infants' breath: And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his maker and the angel death."


(The writer is former Solicitor General of India.)


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GMAT - All you want to know 12-05

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GMAT - All you want to know


GMAT*. For most it is synonymous with fear and dread, and yet the Graduate Management Admissions Test is nothing more than a standardized test, used by reputable business schools throughout the world to get an idea of how well a candidate is likely to perform in the classroom.



Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be running a short series on GMAT information and test-taking tips to help you on your way to a higher score.

So, what’s it all about?

The GMAT test comprises a total of 4 sections, two of which form the bulk of the test:
  •          Analytical writing
  •          Integrated Reasoning
  •          Quantitative section
  •          Verbal section

Two sections called Analytical writing and Integrated Reasoning, both of which take 30 minutes are done before the subsequent Quantitative and Verbal sections and give a separate score of 1-6 and 1-8 respectively. These scores do not influence the overall score out of 800, so are rarely taken into consideration by business schools.
The GMAT test comprises a Quantitative section made up of 37 questions to test quantitative analysis and logical reasoning, and an English Verbal section involving 41 questions based on reading comprehension, grammar and analytical writing. 75 minutes are allocated to both sections. The Maths in the Quant section is considered 11th Grade level, but calculators are not allowed.
The GMAT is a computer-adaptive test (CAT) meaning the level of difficulty of the next question depends on how you perform in the previous question so your score depends on the level of difficulty of the questions you answer and the percentage of questions you answer correctly. It’s important to spend time on the first few questions in particular to allow a higher score.  All answers are final so you can’t have second thoughts.
Few candidates score over 700 so it’s comforting to know that you can re-sit the test 31 days later if necessary. However, at $250 a time, it’s best to revise hard before attempting a first go! While all reputable MBA programmes require a GMAT score in their application pack, schools use this score in different ways. An engineer or scientist with a logical/analytical mind will probably do better than a creative profile so measure the time needed for revision and plan accordingly. Test centres are few and far between so it’s best to book a test date early  and work towards it with a revision schedule.
Why do the GMAT?

While there is a lot of debate into how relevant the GMAT is in an MBA programme, the EDHEC Global MBA admissions service is firm that no waivers should be granted. “The GMAT is an excellent warm up exercise for an MBA programme,” explains Nikki Harle, Global MBA Admissions Manager. “It puts candidates back into a test taking situation, obliges them to face the constraints of revision and generally reminds them of what it’s like to be a student again. Sure, it doesn’t test leadership skills or tell us how well the candidate will perform in some of the more creative classes, but these are elements that are tested elsewhere. The GMAT puts everyone on the same level and gives the selection committee an idea of who is willing to accept rules or who is ready to put in extra effort. Schools offering GMAT waivers tend to have lower admissions standards so while this might seem attractive, candidates should consider what this probably means in terms of the quality of the rest of their peers. Besides, our scholarship policy  encourages candidates to perform well on GMAT and invites the possibility to retake in order to benefit from a scholarship upgrade.”

India sets new world record for largest human flag 12-08

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India sets new world record for largest human flag






















An aerial view of the Indian National Flag formed by volunteers that created a new Guinness World Record for the largest human flag formation, at Nandanam YMCA ground in Chennai.
India today set a new world record for the largest human flag, formed by over 50,000 volunteers, beating the 
previous record held by Pakistan.
The event saw about 1.5 lakh volunteers, mainly youth, turn up for the event at YMCA Grounds here even as 50,000 of them formed the tricolour, Governor of Rotary 3230, organiser of the ‘My Flag My India’ campaign, ISAK Nazar, told reporters here.
The Guinness World Record for the largest human flag was previously held by the Sports Club of Lahore with 28,957 people forming the flag, he said.
“This is the first record (of its kind) in independent India and our aim was to infuse patriotism and nationalism in the present generation and next-generation youth,” he said, adding, youngsters formed the crux of the participants.
Guinness official Syeda Subasi presented the certificate validating the attempt. She described the effort as a ’historic moment’ for India and lauded the participants for turning up early in the morning.

This App Knows Your Drink Preference Better Than You Do 12-08

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This App Knows Your Drink Preference Better Than You Do



It's no big secret that the craft beer scene has e xploded in recent years, which means consumers are sometimes faced with an intimidating selection on store shelves. The choice is no longer "Sam Adams or Sierra Nevada," but "Allagash Curieux or Stone Ruination or Zombie Dust or Old Heathen Imperial Stout..."

A new app called NextGlass wants to help you manage all of your beer (and wine) options by personally crafting recommendations based on your tastes. You tell the app what you like, then hold your phone up to a drink's label in a store to receive its estimation of how much you'll like it:
nextglass taste profile
You tell NextGlass what you like, then it uses your phone's camera to scan drink labels and let you know how much you'll like them.
What makes NextGlass stand out is how it makes those recommendations. Unlike other recommendation apps, it's not predicting what you'll like based on similar brands or what other people say. Rather, it uses the actual chemical makeup of the drink. Trace Smith, the company's chief operating officer, said that around 30,000 bottles of beer and wine have been tested for the app using a high-resolution mass spectrometer -- a device that measures chemicals in a substance.
"Each bottle that we run through the mass-spec, we get over 20,000 individual chemical attributes. We're looking at each of these bottles at a molecular level," Smith told The Huffington Post during a phone interview. "We see the data of what they do and don't like, and based on that info, we see what other bottles they'll like."
nextglass beer
NextGlass also tells you how much alcohol, calories, and carbs are in a given drink.
Once you try a beverage, you can rate it on a four-star scale in the app. NextGlass looks for trends in the chemical makeups of the brands you like, and uses that information to predict how much you'll like something else. To make sure they had a good handle on how to use the data, the NextGlass team worked with Sean Owen, a former senior software engineer at Google and current director of data science at Cloudera.
NextGlass also has a social networking component, so you can add friends and cross-reference tastes -- if you're planning for a party, say.
Smith told HuffPost that moving forward, NextGlass may be available on desktops so you can network and look drinks up without your phone. He also said that, big-picture, the team would like to expand the data they look at beyond wine and beer.
"We'd love to be able to have our users walk into a Safeway or a Public or a Costco and scan a box of cereal or a jar of peanut butter or an Odwalla drink and be able to see a score and say, will I like this? Will my wife like this?" Smith said.
The app is free and available on iOS and Google Play. Smith said the app will always be free for users, but starting in 2015, NextGlass hopes to offer analytics from the app to retailers and breweries to help companies reach users based on their tastes.

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights 12-08

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How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights


If you believe in the Mayan Calendar our world is going to end this year

However, if you believe we will still be there you may want to have some better means of predicting the future.

The web has come to reflect the world

Twitter has become very popular in the marketing world because of the potential it provides for viral marketing and webcare.

 Because of it's enormous reach, Twitter is increasingly used by PR and news organizations to filter news updates through the community. Also Twitter is used to advertise products and services and to communicate news to stakeholders.

However, while monitoring of social media is not new, seeing into the future using social media is sizzling hot.

It takes social media from the marketing department upwards to the executive level where business intelligence is needed to support decisions.

Several scientists have conducted research into how we can use big data such as the massive amounts of Tweets and other publications to make reliable predictions about the future. 

Their thought is that social media can be construed as a form of collective wisdom.
Earlier we mentioned the article by Johan Bollen et al. in which he and his team used Twitter to predict the stock market. In this blogpost we'll feature the research done by Asur & Huberman of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs who, just like Bollen, used social media conversations as market predictor, only this time for box-office revenues.

The economics of attention: Predicting the future with social media

Asur & Huberman used the chatter from Twitter to forecast box-office revenues for movies. 

The reason for this is that the topic of movies is of considerable interest among Twitter users and real-world outcomes can easily be observed. Their hypothesis was that movies that are well-talked about will also be well-watched. As attention is scarce it's logical to assume that the movie getting attention online will get attention and consumption offline.

They looked at 24 movies and considered 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million different users. 

Using this data they constructed a linear regression model based on the tweet rate. Tweet rate is defined as the number of tweets for a specific movie divided by the time in hours. On basis of the rate at which people are tweeting they were able to project the revenue the movie was going to make two weeks ahead.

Once the movie opened they did a sentiment analysis of how people reacted with movies they saw to make even more accurate predictions. For this they used the P/N ratio which is the ratio of positive tweets to negative tweets.

Now why is HP studying social media?

Bernardo Huberman explains it in this video by Social Media Examiner:

Companies that use social media for business intelligence

What these scientific research teams are doing is all very sophisticated. 

But now businesses can tap into the wealth of online data and forward-looking insights.
Another example to inspire you is IBM. IBM used big data, specifically social media analysis, to predict women's heel heights. Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy says: "I'm surprised more companies haven't jumped the social media bandwagon. It's ripe for the picking. All this unstructured data is social media intelligence". IBM thinks the same logic could be applied to other industries.

In general from the way people are paying attention you can actually predict the success of your ideas. 

This has a wide range of applications from businesses (predicting product success) to even political (predicting elections).

Download the free eBook 'Grip on the Social Media Hype'

How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights 12-08

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How Twitter takes business intelligence & market research to new heights


If you believe in the Mayan Calendar our world is going to end this year

However, if you believe we will still be there you may want to have some better means of predicting the future.

The web has come to reflect the world

Twitter has become very popular in the marketing world because of the potential it provides for viral marketing and webcare.

 Because of it's enormous reach, Twitter is increasingly used by PR and news organizations to filter news updates through the community. Also Twitter is used to advertise products and services and to communicate news to stakeholders.

However, while monitoring of social media is not new, seeing into the future using social media is sizzling hot.

It takes social media from the marketing department upwards to the executive level where business intelligence is needed to support decisions.

Several scientists have conducted research into how we can use big data such as the massive amounts of Tweets and other publications to make reliable predictions about the future. 

Their thought is that social media can be construed as a form of collective wisdom.
Earlier we mentioned the article by Johan Bollen et al. in which he and his team used Twitter to predict the stock market. In this blogpost we'll feature the research done by Asur & Huberman of the Social Computing Research Group at HP Labs who, just like Bollen, used social media conversations as market predictor, only this time for box-office revenues.

The economics of attention: Predicting the future with social media

Asur & Huberman used the chatter from Twitter to forecast box-office revenues for movies. 

The reason for this is that the topic of movies is of considerable interest among Twitter users and real-world outcomes can easily be observed. Their hypothesis was that movies that are well-talked about will also be well-watched. As attention is scarce it's logical to assume that the movie getting attention online will get attention and consumption offline.

They looked at 24 movies and considered 2.89 million tweets from 1.2 million different users. 

Using this data they constructed a linear regression model based on the tweet rate. Tweet rate is defined as the number of tweets for a specific movie divided by the time in hours. On basis of the rate at which people are tweeting they were able to project the revenue the movie was going to make two weeks ahead.

Once the movie opened they did a sentiment analysis of how people reacted with movies they saw to make even more accurate predictions. For this they used the P/N ratio which is the ratio of positive tweets to negative tweets.

Now why is HP studying social media?

Bernardo Huberman explains it in this video by Social Media Examiner:

Companies that use social media for business intelligence

What these scientific research teams are doing is all very sophisticated. 

But now businesses can tap into the wealth of online data and forward-looking insights.
Another example to inspire you is IBM. IBM used big data, specifically social media analysis, to predict women's heel heights. Independent technology analyst Carmi Levy says: "I'm surprised more companies haven't jumped the social media bandwagon. It's ripe for the picking. All this unstructured data is social media intelligence". IBM thinks the same logic could be applied to other industries.

In general from the way people are paying attention you can actually predict the success of your ideas. 

This has a wide range of applications from businesses (predicting product success) to even political (predicting elections).

Download the free eBook 'Grip on the Social Media Hype'

How much data is generated every minute? 12-08

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How much data is generated every minute?

Data never sleeps.

It's generated every minute across different platforms as you can see in the infographic below 

Having a hard time catching up with mail after a long weekend?

 No wonder, as 204,166,667 e-mail messages are sent very minute. Some of these will land in your mailbox.

Do you think people are turning to social media to ask for information? 

Well, think again as Google is receiving over 2,000,000 searches a minute. It's not a matter of choices, people search and share everywhere! On Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and look at how much they shop online: every minute 272,070 US dollars are spent on web shopping alone.

How much data is created every minute?

BuzzTalk enables data mining and big data marketing

Imagine having to sift through all this data to get to something valuable.

A lot of data is generated, republished or just of bad quality. No wonder we sometimes feel overwhelmed with data. It's actionable information, not data, that we need to make better decisions in our work.

As such we need better filters to categorize these huge amounts of data.

We need to be able to look at the quality sources only and to have categories and filters that enable interpretation and analysis.

At Byelex we now scan 53,000 websites on a daily basis and we capture 150,000 tweets. 

These are 19,000 news sites, 16,000 blogs and 18,000 scientific journals. All of these publications are first translated to English and then tagged tagged using Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais and our own OpenDover tagging engines so analysis can be done on a live basis. This way about 125,000 documents are processed on a daily basis.

Do you know how much data this is?

 If we would print these publications on regular paper this would be a pile of 1.3 meter every day. This is almost 9 meters of piled paper every week!

All of these publications are stored in a large database which now holds over 46 million documents and 44 milion tweets which can be searched and analyzed using BuzzTalk. 

This way you can run reports to discover trends in your industry. In an early stage you can prepare your production facilities and marketing campaigns for trends that you otherwise would have missed.

104 Fascinating Social Media and Marketing Statistics for 2014 (and 2015) 12-08

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104 Fascinating Social Media and Marketing Statistics for 2014 (and 2015)

Looking at marketing surveys and studies from the past year, a few trends are clear, among them that buyers are firmly (and increasingly) in control of the purchase cycle. They prefer searching to being found, and will often be close to their final decision point before talking to a salesperson.
104 Fascinating Social Media and Marketing Statistics for 2014 (and 2015) image Trends in Marketing Mix 300x300.gifIn response, marketers are producing an increasing amount and variety of content to support all stages of the decision process. They’re distributing and promoting this content through all channels in the web presence optimization (WPO) model, to maximize their opportunities to be “found” online when buyers are looking.
And although digital is taking an increasing share of marketing budgets, the move to online is paradoxically making some old-school tactics even more valuable.
What do buyers say is the most important signal of vendor credibility? What type of content is most effective? What do marketers rate as the single most valuable SEO tactic? What are the top barriers to adopting social business practices?
Find the answers to these questions and many others in more than 100 social and online marketing stats from 20+ different sources.
1. People want to be in control of the content they receive:
  • • 86% of people skip TV commercials.
  • • 44% of direct mail is never opened.
  • • 91% of people have unsubscribed from company emails they previously opted into.
(NewsCred)
2. 72% of marketers think branded content is more effective than advertising in a magazine; 69% say it is superior to direct mail and PR. (NewsCred)
3. Nearly half (46%) of people say a website’s design is their number one criterion for determining the credibility of a company. (NewsCred)
4. 71% of companies planned to increase their digital marketing budgets this year, by an average of 27%. (Econsultancy)
5. 67 percent of marketers say increasing sales directly attributable to digital marketing campaigns is a top priority this year. (Forbes)
6. Internet advertising will make up 25% of the entire ad market in 2015. (Social Fresh)
7. Despite all the hype about online, 67% of B2B content marketers consider event marketing to be their most effective strategy. (Social Fresh)
8. Videos on landing pages increase conversions by 86%. (Social Fresh)
9. As one would suspect, Facebook is the most popular method for sharing interesting content. Surprisingly though, the fifth-most popular sharing method is offline (print) shares. (Heidi Cohen)

5 Online Demographics Stats

10. The Google+ platform has 67 percent male users. (Rocket Post)
11. There are 76 million millennials (born between 1981 and 2000) in the U.S. — 27% of the total population. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)
12. 63% of millennials have at least a bachelors degree. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)
13. 63% of millennials say they stay updated on brands through social networks; 51% say social opinions influence their purchase decisions; and 46% “count on social media” when buying online. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)
14. 89% of 18-29 year-olds are active on social media, as are 43% of adults 65 and older. (Jeff Bullas)

13 Content Marketing Stats

15. B2B content matters. 57% of a typical purchase decision is made before a customer even talks to a supplier. (Corporate Executive Board)
16. By 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. (Target Marketing)
17. Not all content has to be original. 48% of marketers curate noteworthy content from third-party sources weekly (this post is an example). (Design & Promote)
18. 62% of companies outsource their content marketing. (Iconsive)
19. $118 billion was spend on content marketing last year. (NewsCred)
20. 70% of consumers say they prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads. (NewsCred)
21. 90% of organizations market with content. 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (NewsCred)
22. Or maybe 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (Iconsive)
23. And yet…54% of brands don’t have an onsite, dedicated content director. (NewsCred)
24. There are 27 million pieces of content shared each day. (NewsCred)
25. Companies will spend $135 billion on digital marketing collateral this year. (Social Fresh)
26. Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for content marketing at 89%. (Social Fresh)
27. 17% of marketers plan to increase efforts on SlideShare this year. (Forbes)

7 Blogging Stats

28. 34% of Fortune 500 companies now maintain active blogs – the largest share since 2008. (Forbes)
29. Each month, 329 million people read blogs. (NewsCred)
30. 37% of marketers say blogs are the most valuable content type for marketing. (NewsCred)
31. Companies that publish new blog posts 15+ times per month (3-4 posts per week) generate five times more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all. (NewsCred)
32. 17% of marketers plan to increase blogging efforts this year. (Forbes)
33. Blogging increases web traffic by 55% for brands. (Rocket Post)
34. B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those without blogs. (Social Fresh)

7 Visual and Video Marketing Stats

35. Pinterest grabs 41% of the ecommerce traffic compared to Facebook’s 37%. Food is the top category of content on Pinterest with 57% of its user base sharing food-related content. (Rocket Post)
36. 16% of marketers plan to increase efforts on Pinterest this year. (Forbes)
37. The use of video content for marketing increased 73% this year; use of infographics grew 51%. (Digital Marketing Philippines)
38. Articles with images get 94% more views than those without. (NewsCred)
39. Posts with videos attract three times as many inbound links as plain text posts. (NewsCred)
40. 62% of marketers use video in their content marketing. (NewsCred)
41. Two-thirds of firms plan to increase spending on video marketing in the coming year. (Heidi Cohen)

5 SEO Stats

42. 81% of B2B purchase cycles start with web search, and 90% of buyers say when they are ready to buy, “they’ll find you.” (Earnest Agency)
43. More than half (53%) of marketers rank content creation as the single most effective SEO tactic. (NewsCred)
44. 57% of B2B marketers say SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation. (NewsCred)
45. Organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate, compared to 1.7% for outbound marketing leads. (NewsCred)
46. 33% of clicks from organic search results go to the top listing on Google. (Social Fresh)

15 Social Media Marketing Stats

47. 85% of B2B buyers believe companies should present information via social networks. (Iconsive)
48. And yet – only 20% of CMOs leverage social networks to engage with customers. (Marketing Land)
49. Marketers will spend $8.3 billion on social media advertising in 2015. (NewsCred)
50. “Interesting content” is one of the top three reasons people follow brands on social media. (NewsCred)
51. 87% of B2B marketers use social media to distribute content. (NewsCred)
52. 17% of marketers plan to increase podcasting efforts this year. (Forbes)
53. As consumer use of social media for brand comments and complaints continues to increase, brands are having a hard time keeping up. Only about 20% of consumer comments generate brand responses, and the average response time is over 11 hours. (eMarketer)
54. Nearly three-quarters of US marketers believe customer response management on digital channels is important (so…25% think it’s okay to ignore consumers?); however, just one-third say their company does a good job at this. (eMarketer)
55. Social media marketing budgets are projected to double over the next five years (Social Fresh)
56. 66% of marketers claim that social indirectly impacts their business performance but only 9%t claim that it can be directly linked to revenue. (Forbes)
57. Over 70% of US online adults use some form of social media networking. (Heidi Cohen)
58. 72% of all internet users are now active on social media. (Jeff Bullas)
59. The top two barriers impeding adoption of social business within organizations are lack of overall strategy and competing priorities. Just 11% of marketers cite legal or regulatory concerns. (i-SCOOP)
60. 78% of companies now say they have dedicated social media teams, up from 67% in 2012. (i-SCOOP)
61. By department, companies most often have dedicated social media staff (not surprisingly) in marketing (73%), communications/PR (66%) and customer support (40%). At the other end of the scale are legal (9%) and market research (8%). (i-SCOOP)

7 Facebook Marketing stats

62. Facebook accounts for 15.8% of total time spent on the Internet. (Rocket Post)
63. 71% of online adults use Facebook. 63% of Facebook users visit daily and 40% visit multiple times per day. (Heidi Cohen)
64. More than a third (36%) of online adults use only one social networking site. Of these, 83% use Facebook. 8% use LinkedIn. (Heidi Cohen)
65. One million web pages are accessed using the “Login with Facebook” feature. (Jeff Bullas)
66. Nearly a quarter (232%) of Facebook users login at least five times per day. (Jeff Bullas)
67. 47% of Americans say Facebook is their #1 influencer of purchases. (Jeff Bullas)
68. 70% of marketers used Facebook to gain new customers. (Jeff Bullas)

3 LinkedIn Marketing Stats

69. LinkedIn is the top social network for B2B marketing (not a shock). 83% of marketers say they prefer to use LinkedIn for distributing B2B content, and more than half of vendors say they have generated sales through LinkedIn. (Real Business Rescue)
70. The average time spent on LinkedIn per month is 17 minutes. (Rocket Post)
71. 91 of the Fortune 100 companies use LinkedIn for candidate searches. (Rocket Post)

7 Twitter Marketing Stats


72. The average time per month spent by users on Twitter is 170 minutes. (Rocket Post)
73. Only about half of the people who log in to Twitter once a month are actually taking the time to tweet. The rest are lurkers. (Rocket Post)
74. Ironically, the most-followed brand on Twitter is…Facebook, with more than 13 million followers. Google is #3. (AllTwitter)
75. eBay is the most engaging brand on Twitter. Starbucks is the fourth-most-engaging, and also has the fourth highest number of followers of any major brand. (AllTwitter)
76. Not a shock: retailers and restaurants are the most engaging industries on Twtitter. Surprising: apparel brands are the least engaging. (AllTwitter)
77. Twitter now has over 550 million registered users, and 215 million active monthly users. (Jeff Bullas)
78. 34% of marketers use Twitter to successfully generate leads. (Jeff Bullas)

3 Google+ Stats

79. 18% of marketers plan to increase efforts on Google+ this year. (Forbes)
80. There are now over 1 billion Google+ accounts, and that figure is growing 33% per year. (Jeff Bullas)
81. Google+ has 359 million monthly active users. (Jeff Bullas)

13 Email Marketing Stats

82. There are nine times as many marketing emails sent each year as direct mail pieces delivered by the U.S. Postal Service. (Mark the Marketer)
83. Email marketing delivers the highest ROI (about $44 per dollar spent, on average) of any digital marketing tactic. SEO is #2. Banner ads have the lowest ROI. (Mark the Marketer)
84. 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an e-mail marketing message. (Mark the Marketer)
85. Email subject lines matter. Really. 64% of people say they open an e-mail because of the subject line. (Mark the Marketer)
86. Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened. For B2C emails, the words “Alert,” “New,” “News,” “Bulletin,” “Sale,” “Video,” “Daily,” or “Weekly” (though not “Monthly”) all increase open and click-through rates. (Mark the Marketer)
87. For B2B companies, subject lines that contained “money,” “revenue,” and “profit” performed the best. (Mark the Marketer)
88. Timing is important too. 76% of e-mail opens occur in the first two days after an e-mail is sent. E-mail open rates are noticeably lower on weekends than on weekdays. (Mark the Marketer)
89. Only 8% of companies and agencies have an e-mail marketing team. E-mail marketing responsibilities usually fall on one person as a part of her wider range of marketing responsibilities. (Mark the Marketer)
90. 72% of B2B buyers are most likely to share useful content via e-mail. (Mark the Marketer)
91. Still, the average click-through rate for B2B marketing e-mails is just 1.7%. (Mark the Marketer)
92. Emails with social sharing buttons increase click-through rates by 158%. (Social Fresh)
93. 64 percent of marketers say increasing email click-throughs and open rates is among their top priorities this year. (Forbes)
94. 67 percent of marketers say that email is ke3y for attracting and engaging prospects, and the best path to increase marketing ROI. (Forbes)

10 Mobile Marketing Stats

95. 94% of CMOs plan to use mobile applications within the next 3-5 years. (Marketing Land)
96. 75% of smartphone owners watch videos on their phones; 26% at least once per day. (NewsCred)
97. Over half of all mobile searches lead to a purchase. (Rocket Post)
98. 78% of Facebook users are mobile-only. (Rocket Post)
99. E-mail is the most popular activity on smartphones among users ages 18-44. (Mark the Marketer)
100. 64% of decision-makers read their e-mail via mobile devices. (Mark the Marketer)
101. Almost half–48%–of all emails are opened on mobile devices. Yet 39% of marketers say they have no strategy for mobile email, and only 11% of e-mails are optimized for mobile. (Mark the Marketer)
102. Mobile is the channel of choice for keep relationships with existing customers alive because it cuts through the clutter of email and social. (Forbes)
103. 71% of users access social media from a mobile device. (Jeff Bullas)
104. 50% of millennials use their smartphones to research products or services while shopping, and 41% have made purchases using their phones. (leaderswest Digital Marketing Journal)


Correlation does not imply causation 12-09

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Correlation does not imply causation




Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there." xkcd

Correlation does not imply causation is a quip that events or statistics that happen to coincide with each other are not necessarily causally related. The reality is that cause and effect can be indirect and due to a third factor known as confounding variables, or entirely coincidental and random. The assumption of causation is false when the only evidence available is simple correlation. To prove causation, a controlled experiment must be performed.

The form of fallacy that it addresses is known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc or "affirming the consequent."

Simple example

Two events can consistently correlate with each other but not have any causal relationship. An example is the relationship between reading ability and shoe size across the whole population of the United States. If someone performed such a survey, they would find that the larger shoe sizes correlate with better reading ability, but this does not mean large feet cause good reading skills. Instead it's caused by the fact that young children have small feet and have not yet (or only recently) been taught to read. In this case, the two variables are more accurately correlated with a third: age.
The part age plays in this example is known as a "confounding variable" or "confounding factor," and is something that is not being controlled for in the experiment. In this case, age influences both reading ability and shoe size quite directly. A confounding variable can be what the actual cause of a correlation is, hence any studies must take these into account and find ways of dealing with them, usually by searching them out and trying to alter this variable directly.
The most common method to control confounding variables is with controlled studies. In these studies, the differences between the observations and the control group are minimised as best as possible, so that one can be more confident that a correlation is a valid indicator of causation. This is extremely important in compensating for the placebo effect in medical trials, but it is also important in other branches of science. In the age/shoe-size/reading-ability example, a controlled experiment would look for a correlation between reading ability and shoe size given a sample of people all the same age - or alternatively thehypothesis could be further tested by correlating age and reading ability given a sample of similar shoe size.

Risk factor

The term "risk factor" is used in medicine to mean "something that is positively correlated." For instance, obesity is a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes. The term is often incorrectly understood to mean "cause" (e.g. "I'm at risk for diabetes? But I'm not fat!"). Alternatively, a clear risk factor can be disputed on the basis that it's not a definitive cause - a classic use of the uncertainty tactic (e.g. "I smoke three packs a day and I don't have cancer!").]

In science

In science, correlation studies are often used to test for the existence of interesting patterns, but they are never used exclusively to claim a cause. In order to make a causal claim you must run an experiment or series of experiments and further studies using the scientific method— i.e., test to see if it really is a cause by altering parameters and performing more experiments, making predictions and testing them. This is in order to validate that one event is indeed directly influencing the other and is the reason behind the detected correlation.
Many woo and pseudoscience pushers conflate correlation with causation in order to make a claim of validity but forget to attempt the later scientific steps of compensating for confounding variables and thoroughly testing the causal relationship. For example, if someone gets acold, but takes vitamin C, their cold will go away in 5-7 days. The claim is then made that the vitamin C caused the cold to go away. However, the cold would have gone away anyway, whether or not the vitamin C was taken, and so the validity claim is false. The placebo effect is another correlation with "treatment" that quacks use to create false validity.
Correlations seem to tap into a deep part of human psychology. As pattern recognition machines, we are hyper-responsive to any potentialsignal in our environment. People will often take two completely unrelated events and decide that they must cause each other because they seem to correlate. Someone may decide that when they wear a given shirt they have good luck; this is often combined with a powerfulconfirmation bias to create magical thinking.

In parody

In the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster", a key "belief" is that global warming is caused by a lack of pirates sailing the oceans. This is shown by a graph correlating increasing surface temperatures of the earth with a decline in the number of pirates. While it is certainly true that piracy has decreased and temperatures have gone up, there is nothing directly connecting the two trends.

Fallacy engineering

Care should be taken not to assume the opposite (that correlation never implies causation). Woo spinners and quacks may try to walk around sound science or statistical analysis by citing this fallacy.Anti-vaccine proponents often discount all evidence that shows the use of vaccine followed by a reduction in the infection rate by claiming "correlation does not imply causation" as though "correlation cannot imply causation". Ironically they may then cite their own statistics showing the increase of cases of autism when a new vaccine is introduced. In such cases, their evidence is flawed; such correlations absolutely and utterly do not imply causation. Be very wary of climate change deniers and fanatical free market economists when they throw this fallacy on the table.

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