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  • Brand Optimization And Why It Matters A Lot
    from The Brand Optimization Weblog by shuleatt
    Brand Reputation is a discipline separate from that of traditional branding campaigns. Brand Reputation recognizes that due to increased transparency and access to information, ’traditional branding’ whether through mission statements, marketing or affiliations can easily be verified and evaluated. Thus reputation plays an increasing role in keeping organizations honest and forcing them to take definitive actions, rather than simply making public statements. Both consumers and employees are getting into the game. Brand Reputation is sort of like ’Brands 2.0.’ Until recently brands had largely been considered ’intangible’ concepts. Accounting contributed to this conception by identifying ’goodwill’ as the excess over the book value one company was willing to pay for another. That excess was brand value. Times have changed. More than ever before brands are increasingly the key element of any business model. Much of this power is because people view brands as a means of personal identification. Brands now trump actual products in terms of importance. For example, Abercrombie & Fitch used targeted branding and outreach to drive incredible revenues despite its products being of questionable quality. Brands now must interact with an audience, as explained by the brothers Heath in ’Made to Stick.’ Another shift has been organizations coming to embrace themselves as brands. For example, the university one attends, or the organizations one affiliates are increasingly recognizable and monetizable. Knowing that someone attended a certain college, or is affiliated with certain brands conveys all sorts of ethnic and class related information. Globalization has further complicated branding due to differences in cultural and geographic interpretations. Still, the primary catalyst for these changes is the ever increasing prominence of the internet. As consumers have been given greater access to information they have become empowered (better informed) to decide how and where they spend their money. This empowerment has resulted in creating greater accountability on the part of businesses and organizations alike. Even Congress and international legislators have begun to demand increased accountability and sustainable practices partially as a result of online advocacy and scorecard groups who have now found an audience. In business school we learn that the ’goal of management’ is to increase shareholder value. As it turns out, the definition of a ’shareholder’ is increasingly broad and can encompass anyone from a holder of company equity to management to employees to vendors. While traditional business practices have focused on the bottom line, a shift toward focusing on brand reputation takes a more holistic approach and recognizes that revenue and corporate social responsibility are not mutually exclusive. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Think Patagonia, think Ben & Jerry’s. Think of the amazing things you hear about working at Google. Recent business trends have proven that brands by themselves are of increasing importance. Business leaders and financiers are recognizing that a strong brand can ultimately be monetized down the road. For example, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all companies with exceptionally strong brands but whose revenue streams (in recent memory) have been low or non-existent. Nevertheless, these companies all either received buyout offers or additional investments at valuations unrelated to actual cash flows. That says something. Brand Reputation is community driven. Its appeal is often on a more human or emotional level and is acted out through user-engagement. It is greatly enhanced by the interactions of community members with the brand itself and by community members interacting with other community members. As discussed previously, Brand Reputation Optimization has both internal and external components. The strongest brands are grown organically and start with a focus on building internal relationships - allowing collaboration to flourish and building passion to drive the organization’s mission and objectives. After establishing such internal buy-in, the potential for building a strong brand is limited only by the degree of external engagement a firm builds into its online presence, marketing and CRM efforts. See the original article... Read More >
  • Jon tries the awesome sauce
    from gooftroop by chris
    Chris: I'm at another I'm From Barcelona show! Jon: Fuck you!... Read More >
  • how to use tweakshifts
    from sukye by sukye
    step 1. multidrizzle -> *single_sci.fits *only the first step of drizzle is needed: static+ skysub+ driz_separate+ median- blot- driz_cr- driz_comb- *keep temporary files: clean=no step 2. tweakshifts -> shifts.txt undisturb=no step 3. multidrizzle -> new *single_sci.fits same as step 1. besides, shiftfile=shifts_mul.txt which is identical to shifts.txt with single_sci.fits replaced by flt.fits step 4. tweakshifts -> new shifts.txt: shifts2.txt same as step 2. besides, shiftfile=shifts_twe.txt which is identical to shifts_mul.txt with flt.fits replaced by single_sci.fits reference=tweak_wcs2.fits output=shifts2.txt step 5. shifts+shifts2 -> new shifts_mul.txt if the deltas are less than 0.1 pixel, run every step of multidrizzle with new shifts_mul.txt to get the final image, else repeat step 3 and so on. Thanks to Max Mutchler and Warren J. Hack. They are really experts. http://www.stsci.edu/hst/acs/documents/handbooks/DataHandbookv2/acs_Ch47.html http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfpc2/analysis/WFPC2_drizzle_registration.html http://forums.stsci.edu/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=172... Read More >
  • Ambassador Edward Peck
    from Lost in Translation by pekingli
    copy from wiki Ambassador Edward Peck Criticism of G. W. Bush plan to invade Iraq and of Middle East policy Edward Peck argued against invading Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion. He argued, in part, "when you take out Saddam Hussein, the key question you have to ask then is, what happens after that? And we don't have a clue. Nobody knows, but it's probably going to be bad. And a lot of people are going to be very upset about that, because that really is not written into our role in this world is to decide who rules Iraq." Peck has been highly critical of U.S. policy toward Israel, arguing through the Council for the National Interest (CNI) in which he plays an active role, that the U.S. should be more even handed in its Middle East policy. He argues that while Hezbollah could be considered a terrorist organization, it is no more terrorist than Israel or the U.S. itself. He supports a dialogue with Hezbollah. He claims that in 2000, at the Camp David talks, Israel offered the Palestinians "12 little Bantustans [see December 22 interview link below]." His speech was publicized in a documentary produced by If Americans Knew. Speaking in July 2006 to syndicated US radio news programme Democracy Now!, Peck said that: "In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us — this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group — they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331[1], and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says — one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder."[2] Jeremiah Wright  In September 2001, Reverend Jeremy Wright in a sermon quoted [3] Peck as allegedly having said on a Fox News broadcast: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." [3] In March 2008, during the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, spliced excerpts of these quoted statements from the sermon were broadcast on ABC News, and attributed to Wright. [4] References ^ US Code Title 18, Section 2331 ^ Democracy Now. ^ a b Video of Wright's sermon. Wright misidentifies Peck as Ambassador Anthony Peck ^ Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11 Brian Ross and Rehab el-Buri, ABC News, March 13, 2008 ... Read More >
  • 政治观点
    from Lost in Translation by pekingli
    我对中共的愚蠢和自大表示深切关注 西藏事件发生后，西方部分媒体歪曲报道，而旅外学子和有志之士发现后怒发冲冠，将种种证据和真相列于网上，Youtube成为我们抵抗无良媒体的有力武器。 而此时此刻，你们在做什么呢？... Read More >
  • Welcome
    from bsloane by bsloane
    Welcome to the jungle... Read More >
  • astro-ph 0802w1
    from sukye by sukye
    The Subaru/XMM-Newton Deep Survey (SXDS) http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.4017 B=28.4, V=27.8, Rc=27.7, i'=27.7 and z'=26.6, 1.22 deg^2 Measuring the Fraction of Obscured Quasars by the Infrared Luminosity of Unobscured Quasars http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3849 collected archival 24 micron MIPS photometry from objects with z~1 in SDSS, GOODS, and COSMOS. Although we find approximate agreement, our method indicates somewhat higher values of f_obsc, particularly in the middle range of luminosities, suggesting that there may be a significant number of heavily obscured AGN missed by X-ray surveys. tbc... Read More >

  • from abefroman by The Butler Rodriguez Family
  • We've been bad about updating JShare
    from abefroman by The Butler Rodriguez Family
    Chris just sent me a link to Christine, Dave, Ethan, and Grace's blog. Loved it! I think a blog will be easier for everyone than JShare. (I do have to thank the Seidmans for the idea to use JShare in the first place. Of course, they too are now using a blog for pictures of Ellen and Morris. I'm at work, so for now, I just have this one picture to share...... Read More >
  • astro-ph 0801w4
    from sukye by sukye
    NICMOS Measurements of the Near Infrared Background http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3825 he near infrared background is now spatially resolved and is dominated by galaxies in the redshift range between 0.5 and 1.5 Estimating the Redshift Distribution of Faint Galaxy Samples http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3822 assigns weights to galaxies in a spectroscopic subsample such that the weighted distributions of photometric observables (e.g., multi-band magnitudes) match the corresponding distributions for the photometric sample. The weights are estimated using a nearest-neighbor technique that ensures stability in sparsely populated regions of color-magnitude space. The derived weights are then summed in redshift bins to create the redshift distribution. Optical monitoring of the z=4.40 quasar Q 2203+292 http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3729 Confirmation of a correlation between the X-ray luminosity and spectral slope of AGNs in the Chandra Deep Fields http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3599 0.1 < z < 4 Large Scale Structures at High Redshift in the GOODS Field http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3557 GOODS-South, catalogue of overdensities, up to z ~ 2.5 *Detecting quasars at very high redshift with next generation X-ray telescopes* http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3482 modelling of the evolution of the optical and X-ray AGN luminosity function at 2 < z < 6 based on a CDM merger-driven model Difference Imaging of Lensed Quasar Candidates in the SDSS Supernova Survey Region http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3432 Difference imaging provides a new way to discover gravitationally lensed quasars because few non-lensed sources will show spatially extended, time variable flux. Can very massive stars avoid Pair-Instability Supernovae? http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3397 magnetic fields provide the strong coupling that is lacking in standard evolution metal-free models and our 150 Msol Population III model avoids indeed the pair-instability explosion. Astroparticle Physics: Puzzles and Discoveries http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.3028... Read More >

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