Seed dispersers play a very important part in the survival and persistency of plant-species. The regeneration rate of a logged over area is very much dependent on seed dispersal agents. In this study, we focused on two different bird groups: bulbuls and babblers. Bulbuls and babblers are well known as seed dispersers in tropical rainforests; however, both bulbuls and babblers have different characteristics when it comes to habitat preference. We conducted our study to difference in the abundance of bulbuls and babblers between logged over forest and unlogged forest. The point count method was employed to study the different bird groups’ abundances. A total of 72 points were established in different study sites in the logging concession of Perak Integrated Timber Complex. Perak ITC constitutes part of the Temenggor Forest Reserve in the northeast corner of Perak and is currently using the selective management system for logging. Data collection was done over a 3 days period. Using two sample F- test, we concluded that there is a significant correlation between bird group and forest area. Our results show that bulbuls are more abundant than babblers in the logged forest area while babblers were found to be more abundant than bulbuls in the unlogged forest area.

Keywords: Perak Integrated Timber Complex; point count method; seed dispersers; Temenggor forest reserve.

It's a great list that is surprisingly long, but like most things with the good comes the bad, so there's a few that I don't think would be working too well. What's most encouraging about this list is that;
1. It shows that being in a low interest category doesn't exclude you from talking to your consumers in this space
2. Most industries are covered here, as are businesses of all sizes
3. Most forms of social media are utilised, to varying degrees of size & cost
4. There's a discussion happening here...it's about talking to your consumers & miost importantly, listening too.

To make it more digestable I'll publish these in groups rather than the whole bunch. Today, kids, it's the letter "A".

3 Italia.  Social networks:  Facebook Business and La3 DVB-H groups.

Abbott Labs.  Social networks:  Facebook Labs Are Vital scholarship contest.

Absolut Vodka:

• Online video:  ABSOLUTworld.
• Social networks:  Top Bartender page on Facebook.

Accenture:

• Blogging:  Nine corporate blogs.
• Podcasting:  Five corporate podcasts.

Accuquote:

• Blogging:  Life Insurance blog.
• Podcasting:  Life Insurance podcast.

Acura:

• Social networks: Facebook Acura TSX Connect fan page.
• Widgets: Acura RDX Traffic on Yahoo.

Acuvue.  Social networks:  Facebook "Wink" application.

Addison Avenue.  Crowdsourcing:  Suggestion box.

Adidas.  Social networks: adidas soccer on myspace; 70% of ROI driven by pass-along, aka "never-ending friending."

Adobe. Tagging: Delicious account used to bookmark primarily tutorials.

Airplay.  Social networks:  Baseball Gameday Challenge Facebook application.

Amazon:

• Social networks:  Shelfari.
• Blogging:  Web Services blog.

AMC's Mad Men.  Microblogging:  Fake Twitter accounts.

American Express.  Blogging:  OPEN Forum.

American Red Cross.  Blogging:  Red Cross Chat.

Animal Planet.  Widgets:  Killer Clips widget on Yahoo.

Annie's Homegrown.  Blogging: Bernie's Blog (offline).

AOL.  Blogging: Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel his account.

Apple:

• Blogging: iPod's dirty little secret.
• Social networks: Apple Students group on Facebook.

ArcelorMittal.  Virtual worlds:  Second Life presence.

Artful Home.  Social networks: Community site.

AT&T:³⁰

• Microblogging:  ATTNews, ATTblueroom, and OnwardSmallBiz on Twitter.
• Online video:  Share AT&T channel on YouTube.
• Photosharing:  Flickr photostream.
• Social networks:  Facebook fan page.

Austin Ventures.  Social networks: Facebook page.

Avaya.  Blogging:  The Contact Center Insights Blog.

Avis.  Blogging:  We Try Harder.

Avon.  Social networks:  Canada Breast Cancer Crusade on Facebook.

This entry is going to be different that all of the ones I have posted so far. I have a big question to ask, or more like a favor. I am doing two research projects concerning transgendered people. The first one is in my language and culture class and the project is going to be examining gender-neutral pronouns in English and how similar they are to gendered pronouns (and what that means). The second one is about hormone therapy, the experience (what happens, what changes, what are you told, how do you get them, support, etc), the medical field, and...Im not quite sure, but mainly transgendered people and getting hormones. If you have any information, personal, political, educational, whatever, send it my way and I would truly appreciate it. I havent been finding a lot of information of either (more so on hormone therapy, not much about pronouns) so any information you have would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your help!

D

It's called "fanfiction."

Fanfiction, in the simplest definition I can provide, is a story based off of a videogame or a produced work and written by a "fan" of such work. Stories written based on videogames are classified as fanfiction because they create their own stories based on the narratives already provided by the videogames. The Halo novels are not fanfiction because they are intuned with the game series' storylines (and also because I think they are written by Bungie employees, unless I'm mistaken). If a work is written in connection with the story line, it may not be a fanfiction. However, in my case, I actually follow along the Command & Conquer plotline, but I am not an employee of the games' creators (I hate to speak their names), Electronic Arts.

Fanfiction involves the act of analyzing the game or produced work in an effort to better understand it in hopes of producing a finely-crafted work of art based on information provided in the game. In my case, I take the weapons and soldiers and maneuvers presented in the Command & Conquer series, introduce my own character amongst them, authenticate all related military information related to the series and other military matters as they are in real life, and attempt to create a factual, believeable, and realistic format for retelling the Command & Conquer storyline with a heightened sense of graphic realism.

This process involves not only me playing the games to understand their plotlines, but also doing additional military research on certain weapons and tactics, maneuvers, vehicles, soldiers, doctrines, and even material which was not present in the C&C series. I have worked thus far for over 6 years on my work, and this process, like humanity's love and lust for war, will be a never-ending struggle in order to complete, what I feel, is an authentic and believeable work of art dedicated entirely to the Command & Conquer community.

"What do peer tutors take with them after graduation?"

http://www.marquette.edu/writingcenter/PeerTutorAlumniPage.htm

The rapid growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. This problem has made it difficult for marketers to fully exploit the Web’s promise as the most targetable and measurable medium in the history of marketing. Can digital advertising live up to its potential?

It’s going to take some time. A June 2008 McKinsey digital-advertising survey of 340 senior marketing executives¹ around the world shows the breadth of the gap between what’s needed and what’s available. Hobbled by nascent technologies, inconsistent metrics, and a reliance on outdated media models, marketers are failing to tap the digital world’s full power.

Unless this problem is addressed, the inability to make accurate measurements of digital advertising’s effectiveness across channels and consumer touch points will continue to promote the misallocation of media budgets and to impede the industry’s growth.

The Corporate Executive Board (recent IPO, NASDAQ: EXBD) is a business-to-business (B2B) content company. Our research addresses issues related to corporate strategy, operations and general management, and we focus on identifying management initiatives, processes, tools and frameworks that will allow our clients to avoid reinventing the wheel in addressing problems they share in common with their peers. At its best, our work is able to shape strategic debate and to accelerate tactical implementation in even the most progressive organizations.

We provide research and analysis on an annual subscription basis to a membership of 1,500 of the world’s largest and most progressive corporations. For a fixed annual fee, members of each subscription program have access to an integrated set of services, including:

• best practices research studies

• executive education seminars

• customized research briefs and

• on-line access to the program’s content database and other services.

Our business formula combines shared cost research economics and a membership-based client model, allowing us to provide data and insight at the quality standard of the premier strategy consulting firms but at a fraction of the cost. The formula also creates a closed loop for research: Each year, our clients develop a list of their most pressing business problems and then serve as case studies in our best practices research on these issues. We are guided by a strong sense of stewardship for our members’ confidences and financial contributions, and we strive in each interaction to achieve a level of service that is unparalleled in their commercial experience.

The Corporate Executive Board seeks two attributes in its employees. The first is force of intellect, the ability to move with some analytic rigor from topic to topic, industry to industry. The second attribute is a spirit of generosity. We value ideas and the words used to express them, and we encourage open debate and cooperative problem solving. We work hard, yet still find the time to cultivate ourselves both professionally and socially. We pride ourselves not only in upholding a spirit of generosity with our members, but also with our colleagues and peers.

http://www.executiveboard.com/careers/

The latest one I received concerns presenteeism and mental health so, being so close to World Mental Health Day, I thought it is worth mentioning.  The audio release is from Cigna Health Care, an American insurance company, and can be heard by clicking 35580_09ny08-0039-_cigna-w

Cigna has a couple of fact sheets in support of the survey findings and an article specifically concerning mental health and wellness which may be worth a look. 

An earlier posting on presenteeism is available and I recommend going to the World Health Organisation, UN or ILO sites for more independent information.

They were OK, but still: is this any way to learn how consumers will really act? Or is there a marketing variant of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that somehow renders all of our learning uncertain?

Maybe CPG marketers should borrow an idea from the researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center.  According to WIRED's Blog Network, Almaden is:

"seeding Apple's iPhone Applications Store with research projects in a bid to see how users in the real world take to them. (...) "

"In the first 24 hours of the program's release on the App Store it bagged about 60 reviews from real users. Now more than 500 reviews have been written of it," he says.

"You can never have a total sense of user experience by doing lab studies." 

According to Tim Bajarin, president of consulting firm Creative Strategies,  "Researchers as well as software developers often come up with great ideas but don't have ways to test them, especially from the standpoint of getting them to a lot of people. So this could be invaluable."

It would be just as fair to say, "marketers as well as their agencies often come up with great ideas but don't have reality-based ways to test them". How can the iPhone and other interactive media help?

Three Ways To Turn Digital Marketing Into A Lab

If we're paying attention, digital offers us all brand new opportunities to trade market research theory for a deep dive straight into reality.  If we're wrong, we can learn and adjust quickly. If we're on to something, we have the chance to learn while we earn.

Here are three ideas to consider:

• Use Google To Test Ad Copy. Paid search is a dirt-cheap way to find a set of consumers who are in the market for your product and find out what words and ideas are motivating.  Direct marketers do this today. There's no reason why brand marketers can't learn here too.
• Use YouTube To Get Feedback On TV Commercials. Every marketer I've ever worked with has had ideas that they love, but are so far outside of the box that they can't figure out how to test them. Why not do some cheap production of these ideas and put them on YouTube and see if the idea has any traction? Obviously, you can't do that if you're announcing major news that you don't want competition to know about. But, let's be honest: most of the time, our brands don't have major news.
• Pay Attention To How Your Users Are Talking About You. People who like your product may be talking about it in a fresher, more imaginative, clearer way than you are.  The atmosphere at corporate HQ is unavoidably polluted with corporate lore, personalities, and competing egos. Your users are free of all that. There's an excellent chance that they're more free to get your communication right than you are. Same goes for product images on Flickr. Look at how people shoot photos of products in your category. I'll bet those shots are a lot more exciting and a lot less constipated than what most of us have been shooting.If you have the budget, you can do what General Mills and Kraft have recently done: start their own word-of-mouth networks. General Mills' "Pssst" gives members the inside skinny on the latest product news. Members can also test new sample kits via snail mail. Kraftfirsttaste.com similarly shares news, coupons and sampling offers. (Hat-tip to Prophet, who picked up the Brandweek article before I did.)

I appalud both companies for not falling prey to the notion that "marketers are not in control of their brands anymore".  These marketing execs are doing exactly what they should do.

They're learning to move as fast as their consumers do, and to operate in the same reality. That reality does not exist in sterile conference rooms, or thick binders, or behind two-way glass in Philly.

It's where reality has always been: out there. General Mills and Kraft are out there.

Has your company been there lately? You may be surprised how different it looks lately.

OMG AND I'M POSE TO MAKE SOMETHING 15 YRS AHEAD OF THIS!!?

Erm ye.. just gimme a minute...

http://www.objetgraphik.com/Lego-Font-Creator.html?lang=en

...and the link below is worth the check as well:

http://www.lineto.com/

Plotted using concentric circles (# Walmart Stores)

Heatmap version of Walmart store openings 

From what I read on the BrightKite (here) blog see SpacialKey may be implemented with Brightkite (here) the location based social networking tool.

Sometimes, do you feel like e-mail has taken over your day and it's hard to accomplish anything? I used to feel that way until I decided to designate 3-4 times during the day to check e-mail. So for 30 minutes to one hour, I am completely focused on e-mail.

I go through every e-mail and decide in that moment what will happen with it. Creating folders helps to organize the e-mail. For instance, if an e-mail can be handled right then and there, I take care of it and delete it. The next e-mail might need some research before answering so I put it in my folder called "Action" and go back to it later in the day. Other folders I have are Incubate, Waiting, Reference. You get the picture.

Let me know if this tip was helpful. If you have a tip of your own, I'd love to read about it!

Let's work together.

Get the brochure

Get started: Send an e-mail describing your VA needs to info@exemplusonline.com

On what makes a good urban design: "cities are too complicated, too far beyond our control, and affect too many people, who are subject to too many cultural variations, to permit any rational answer."

"The modification of settlement is a human act, however complex, accomplished for human motives, however obscure or ineffective. Uncovering those motives gives us some first clues to the connection between values and environmental form."

Otesánek made by Jan Svankmajer's representative work in 2000. It's a fairy tales from Czech, but actually it is cannot make me happiness.

A childless couple learns that they cannot have children, so they take a piece of root for their baby. One day, the root baby living like a child but its appetite is much greater than a normal child. The black cat and the postman were missing, and the housekeeper, the old man, the root baby's parents, where have they gone? I saw the very long tongue and the bug-eyed on the screen that made me fears.

In the film, the director compares a root baby to the desire of human and the endless greedy. The desire appears in the way of a child because of the original desire is very simple that it is as the same as needs. The reason that the desire becomes more and more complicated was changed as individual as the person. So the desire likes a devil that can eat all of things. And each of the film characters are represented on a desire attitude.

In addition, there are a lot of different close-up shots in this film to describe the root baby. It zooms all of the things its own shortcomings. When close-up shots in my eyes, whether we look at the film, or look at the film in our hearts? And some scenes of animation weave in the film that comparison of the cruel reality.

Svankmajer wrote in his press notes for the film. "I think that now, after the mapping of the human genome, such myths are becoming increasingly relevant."

Let us not forget this. Let us not forget the dead.

Now and then I will write a post about war. Real war. A matter I take immensely serious, especially knowing those who lost comrades, friends & family. However, I will keep all the images that are of Death and Horror of and on the battlefields as a very small thumbnail (since the cut function does not seem to work).

All armies in World War I used underage soldiers. Recruiting Officers used to close their eyes when boys - clearly under the required age of 18 years - wanted to join. Boy soldiers, the youngest recording dead being 12, were sent to the trenches in Belgium, France, and Russia, where they fought, suffered the horrors and died with the adult soldiers.

WWI dead boy-soldier

Siegfried Sassoon wrote: "As I stepped over one of the Germans an impulse made me lift him up from the miserable ditch. Propped against the bank, his blond face was undisfigured, except by the mud which I wiped from his eyes and mouth with my coat sleeve. He didn`t look to be more than eighteen. Hoisting him a little higher, I thought what a gentle face he had." (in Memoirs from an Infantry Officer)

Dead German boy-soldier

Sometimes whole schoolclasses enlisted together - and died together, as can be read in Erich Maria Remarque's famous Great War-novel All Quiet on the Western Front.

Dead English boy-soldier

Dead French boy-soldiers

If any ask us why we died
Tell them, Because our fathers lied
(Rudyard Kipling)

Child Soldiers today

After the Great War there have been many attempts to put this to an end, and finally, on 2nd September 1990, the 'United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child' came into force.

Article 38 states:

1. States Parties undertake to respect and to ensure respect for rules of international humanitarian law applicable to them in armed conflicts which are relevant to the child.

2. States Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that persons who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities.

3. States Parties shall refrain from recruiting any person who has not attained the age of fifteen years into their armed forces. In recruiting among those persons who have attained the age of fifteen years but who have not attained the age of eighteen years, States Parties shall endeavour to give priority to those who are oldest.

4. In accordance with their obligations under international humanitarian law to protect the civilian population in armed conflicts, States Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure protection and care of children who are affected by an armed conflict.