Personas hacen fila mientras un guardia de seguridad abre la puerta de una sucursal del banco Laiki en Nicosia, el viernes 29 de marzo de 2013. Los bancos abrieron normalmente por segundo d?a pero contin?an los l?mites a los retiros de dinero ante la crisis financiera. (AP Foto/Petros Giannakouris)
Personas hacen fila mientras un guardia de seguridad abre la puerta de una sucursal del banco Laiki en Nicosia, el viernes 29 de marzo de 2013. Los bancos abrieron normalmente por segundo d?a pero contin?an los l?mites a los retiros de dinero ante la crisis financiera. (AP Foto/Petros Giannakouris)
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) ? Big depositors at Cyprus' largest bank may be forced to accept losses of up to 60 percent, far more than initially estimated under the European rescue package to save the country from bankruptcy, officials said Saturday.
Deposits of more than 100,000 euros ($128,000) at the Bank of Cyprus will lose 37.5 percent in money that will be converted into bank shares, according to a central bank statement. In a second raid on these accounts, depositors also could lose up to 22.5 percent more, depending on what experts determine is needed to prop up the bank's reserves. The experts will have 90 days to figure that out.
The remaining 40 percent of big deposits at the Bank of Cyprus will be "temporarily frozen" until further notice, but continue to accrue existing levels of interest plus another 10 percent.
The savings converted to bank shares would theoretically allow depositors to eventually recover their losses. But the shares now hold little value and it's uncertain when ? if ever ? the shares will regain a value equal to the depositors' losses.
Emergency laws passed last week empower Cypriot authorities to take these actions.
Europe has demanded that big depositors in the country's two largest banks ? Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank ? accept across-the-board losses in order to pay for Cyprus' 16 billion euro ($20.5 billion) bailout. All deposits of up to 100,000 are safe, meaning that a saver with 500,000 euros in the bank will only suffer losses on the remaining 400,000 euros.
Cypriot officials had previously said that large savers at Laiki ? which would be absorbed in to the Bank of Cyprus ? could lose as much as 80 percent. But they had said large accounts at the Bank of Cyprus would lose only 30 to 40 percent.
Analysts said Saturday that imposing bigger losses on Bank of Cyprus customers could further squeeze already crippled businesses as Cyprus tries to rebuild its banking sector in exchange for the international rescue package.
"Most of the damage will be done to businesses which had their money in the bank" to pay suppliers and employees, said University of Cyprus economics Professor Sofronis Clerides. "There's quite a difference between a 30 percent loss and a 60 percent loss."
With businesses shrinking, the country could be dragged down into an even deeper recession, he said.
There's also concern that large depositors ? including many wealthy Russians ? will take their money and run once capital restrictions that Cypriot authorities have imposed on bank transactions to prevent such a possibility are lifted in about a month.
Cyprus agreed on Monday to make bank depositors with accounts over 100,000 euros contribute to the financial rescue in order to secure 10 billion euros ($12.9 billion) in loans from the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund. Cyprus needed to scrounge up 5.8 billion euros ($7.4 billion) on its own in order to clinch the larger package, and banks had remained shut for nearly two weeks until politicians hammered out a deal, opening again on Thursday.
But fearing that savers would rush to pull their money out in mass once banks reopened, Cypriot authorities imposed a raft of restrictions, including daily withdrawal limits of 300 euros ($384) for individuals and 5,000 euros for businesses ? the first so-called capital controls that any country has applied in the eurozone's 14-year history.
Under the terms of the bailout deal, the country' second largest bank, Laiki ? which sustained the most damaged from bad Greek debt and loans ? is to be split up, with its nonperforming loans and toxic assets going into a "bad bank." The healthy side will be absorbed into the Bank of Cyprus.
On Saturday, economist Stelios Platis dismissed the rescue plan as "completely mistaken" and criticized Cyprus' euro area partners for insisting on foisting Laiki's troubles on the Bank of Cyprus.
Clerides said it appears that some euro area countries such as Germany and Finland wanted to see the end of Cyprus as an international financial services center, while others, such as eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem, wanted to use the country as an "guinea pig" to send the message that European taxpayers would no longer shoulder the burden of bailing out problem banks.
But German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble challenged that notion, insisting in an interview with the Bild daily published Saturday that "Cyprus is and remains a special, isolated case" and doesn't point the way for future European rescue programs.
____
AP business correspondent Geir Moulson contributed from Berlin.
Antidepressants are commonly prescribed for the treatment of depression, but many individuals do not experience symptom relief from treatment. The National Institute of Mental Health's STAR*D study, the largest and longest study ever conducted to evaluate depression treatment, found that only approximately one-third of patients responded within their initial medication trial and approximately one-third of patients did not have an adequate clinical response after being treated with several different medications. Thus, identifying predictors of antidepressant response could help to guide the treatment of this disorder.
A new study published in Biological Psychiatry now shares progress in identifying genomic predictors of antidepressant response.
Many previous studies have searched for genetic markers that may predict antidepressant response, but have done so despite not knowing the contribution of genetic factors. Dr. Katherine Tansey of Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London and colleagues resolved to answer that question.
"Our study quantified, for the first time, how much is response to antidepressant medication influenced by an individual's genetic make-up," said Tansey.
To perform this work, the researchers estimated the magnitude of the influence of common genetic variants on antidepressant response using a sample of 2,799 antidepressant-treated subjects with major depressive disorder and genome-wide genotyping data.
They found that genetic variants explain 42% of individual differences, and therefore, significantly influence antidepressant response.
"While we know that there are no genetic markers with strong effect, this means that there are many genetic markers involved. While each specific genetic marker may have a small effect, they may add up to make a meaningful prediction," Tansey added.
"We have a very long way to go to identify genetic markers that can usefully guide the treatment of depression. There are two critical challenges to this process," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "First, we need to have genomic markers that strongly predict response or non-response to available treatments. Second, markers for non-response to available treatments also need to predict response to an alternative treatment. Both of these conditions need to be present for markers of non-response to guide personalized treatments of depression."
"Although the Tansey et al. study represents progress, it is clear that we face enormous challenges with regards to both objectives," he added. "For example, it does not yet appear that having a less favorable genomic profile is a sufficiently strong negative predictor of response to justify withholding antidepressant treatment. Similarly, there is lack of clarity as to how to optimally treat patients who might have less favorable genomic profile."
Additional research is certainly required, but scientists hope that one day, results such as these can lead to personalized treatment for depression.
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Elsevier: http://www.elsevier.com
Thanks to Elsevier for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
Tampa, Fla.-based Brandon Rental Centers is celebrating 40 years in business with parties for customers March 30. The company is holding customer appreciation parties at its Riverview and Seffner, Fla., branches with yard sales of used equipment, music, games, raffles, and 40-cent hot dogs. Owner Bob Glass told the Tampa Bay Times the party is his way of giving back to customers.
The Glass family purchased the business in 1973. Glass took over the business from his father Red Glass in 2006. Glass said the company survived the recent recession because it primarily bought its equipment by paying cash.
More than most other products, condoms seem to arouse people's creative ingenuity.
There are glow-in-the-dark condoms, Scotch whiskey-flavored McCondoms, dinosaur-shaped condoms and condoms printed with ruler measurements (presumably for men who feel they have something to prove).
And now, a bacon condom. It was only a matter of time.
J & D's Foods, whose corporate mission statement is, "Everything should taste like bacon," has announced its latest product, a condom that's patterned to look like a pinkish-red slab of bacon and is flavored with the company's Baconlube, according to the New York Daily News.
The company claims the condoms are "made in America of the highest-quality latex and rigorously tested to help ensure the utmost reliability and safety for when you're makin' bacon," Fox News reports.
Sexual health experts recommend condoms as a means of preventing unintended pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. But a recent study revealed that many people don't use the prophylactics correctly, either removing them too early, storing them incorrectly or using no lubricant or the wrong kind of lubricant.
And though a 2011 study found that young, male college students with higher levels of testosterone were more likely to use condoms, the practice is not universally popular: Research from 2012 involving young, unmarried men and women revealed 25 percent considered using a condom every time during sex to be a "hassle."
Could the bacon condom change that? Perhaps.
The condoms join an already lip-smacking array of J & D's bacon-oriented products, including bacon-flavored envelopes, bacon lip balm, Baconnaise sandwich spread, bacon-scented sunscreen and ? for those who love bacon to death ? a bacon-themed coffin.
Follow Marc Lallanilla on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Most commonly associated with such maladies as "mad cow disease" and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, prions are increasingly recognized for their ability to induce potentially beneficial traits in a variety of organisms, yeast chief among them.
Now a team of scientists has added markedly to the job description of prions as agents of change, identifying a prion capable of triggering a transition in yeast from its conventional single-celled form to a cooperative, multicellular structure. This change, which appears to improve yeast's chances for survival in the face of hostile environmental conditions, is an epigenetic phenomenon?a heritable alteration brought about without any change to the organism's underlying genome.
This latest finding, reported in the March 28 issue of the journalCell, has its origins in work begun several years ago in the lab of Whitehead Institute Member Susan Lindquist. In 2009, Randal Halfmann, then a graduate student in Lindquist's lab, identified dozens of proteins in yeast that have the ability to form prions. That research greatly expanded the known universe of prion elements in yeast, but it failed to answer a key question: What function, if any, do these prions actually have?
In search of an answer, Halfmann, now a fellow the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and colleagues in the Lindquist lab attempted to exploit the fact that several of the prion-forming proteins they had identified acted to modify transcription of yeast genes. It stood to reason that if they could identify which genes were being regulated, they might be able to determine the prions' function.
"We looked at the five transcriptional regulators that are known to be prions in yeast, and we found that in fact, only one gene in the entire yeast genome was regulated by all five transcription factors," says Halfmann.
That gene, as it turns out, was FLO11, a key player in multicellularity in yeast. Indeed changes in FLO11 expression have been shown to act as a toggle, switching yeast from spherical to filamentous form. Halfmann notes that FLO11, which has been shown to be regulated by epigenetic elements, is also highly responsive to environmental stress. Knowing that the prion form of a protein is essentially a misfolded form of that protein, and that stressful conditions increase the frequency of protein misfolding and prion formation, the scientists began to consider the possibility that the prions themselves might be among the epigenetic switches influencing the activity of FLO11.
The group focused on one transcription factor known as mot3, finding that yeast cells containing the prion form of this factor, [MOT3+], acquired a variety of multicellular growth forms known to require FLO11 expression. This was a clear indication that prion formation was causing the differentiation of the cells and their subsequent cooperation. But what about the stress aspect of the hypothesis?
By testing yeast cells against a variety of stressors, the scientists discovered that exposure to a concentration of ethanol akin to that occurring naturally during fermentation increased [MOT3+] formation by a factor of 10.They also found that as the cells exposed to ethanol shifted their metabolism to burn surrounding oxygen through respiration, the prions reverted to their non-prion conformation, [mot3-], and the yeast returned to the unicellular state. In essence, prion formation drove a shift to multicellularity, helping the yeast to ride out the ethanol storm.
"What we have in the end is two sequential environmental changes that are turning on a heritable epigenetic element and then turning it off," says Halfmann. "And between those two changes, the prion is causing the cells to acquire a multicellular growth form that we think is actually important for their survival."
Lindquist, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has long argued that prions have played a vital role in yeast evolution and has amassed a body of strong supporting evidence.
"We see them as part of a bet-hedging strategy that allows the yeast to alter their biological properties quickly when their environments turn unfavorable," Lindquist says. She also theorizes that prions may play such roles beyond yeast, and her lab intends to take similar approaches in the hunt for prions and prion-like mechanisms that are potentially beneficial in other organisms.
For Lindquist lab postdoctoral scientist Alex Lancaster, who is also an author of the new Cellpaper, these latest findings hint at a potentially novel approach to understanding basic mechanisms underlying the complexities of human diseases, including cancer, whose hallmarks include protein misfolding, epigenetic alterations, metabolic aberrations, and myriad changes in cell state, type, and function. Lancaster likens the opportunity to that of opening a black box.
"It's exciting to think that this could become another tool in the toolbox in the study of multicellularity," Lancaster says. "We know that some tumors are a heterogeneous population of cells and we know that tumor cells can evolve within in their environments to help ensure their own survival. This system could help us further understand the role of epigenetic inheritance within tumors and how it might be influencing cell-cell interactions and even affecting the effectiveness of drug therapies."
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Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research: http://www.wi.mit.edu/index.html
Thanks to Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
Like its namesake, Clearpath Robotic's Grizzly is most comfortable in the wild. Sure, this unmanned ATV is perfectly capable of handling paved streets. But the 26-inch wheels and eight-inches of ground clearance are really built for offroad excursions. The 80-horsepower all-electric motor is capable of reaching speeds of 11 mph and of towing loads over 1,300 pounds. In short, this thing is beast. Clearpath suggests the bot would excel at agricultural tasks, but it seems to us that plowing fields would be a waste of Grizzly's skills. Unless, of course, those fields happened to be on another planet. To see this mobile monster in action check out the gallery below and the video after the break.
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) ? Authorities say the son of professional wrestler Ric Flair has been found dead in a North Carolina hotel room.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police says officers were called to a hotel on the city's south side around 10:30 a.m. Friday. When they arrived, they found the body of 25-year-old Reid Fliehr, who also was a wrestler.
A statement from police says there are no signs of foul play, and that the cause of death will be determined by the medical examiner's office.
Flair's agent released a statement Friday describing Reid as "an incredible son, brother, friend, and professional wrestler."
Ric Flair's real name is Richard Morgan Flair. The peroxide-blond wrestled for some 40 years and also was known as The Nature Boy.
The 64-year-old won many pro wrestling titles including in the WWE.
?Buyers know what goods cost.? Some version of that assumption comes up in the very first weeks of just about every introductory econ course. It becomes one of the few assumptions that we make to build the model of consumer demand. But every once in a while, life gets in the way and asks ?Is that something you really can assume??
I had to test that assumption recently. I just moved and after unpacking, I was in the mood to make dessert for myself. Of course, I?hadn't?brought many kitchen supplies with me, so that quickly posed a problem. To make cookies, I needed to buy some wooden spoons, measuring cups, and a cooling rack. None of those are hard items to find, and I happened to live just minutes away from a shopping center that had a regional grocery store, a Wal-Mart, a Target, and a regional department store. I knew that all four stores should have what I want, so the question of where to go really came down to where it would cost the least. And that?s when I realized that one of the most basic assumptions of microeconomics?didn't?hold true. I?didn't?know which store would be the cheapest, or even what the prices of the goods should be!
I had some free time on a Saturday and a strong enough curiosity that I wanted to sample prices from each store. Here?s what I found:
STORE
WOODEN SPOON (Dollars per spoon)
COOLING RACK (Dollars per rack)
MEASURING CUPS (Dollars per cup)
GROCERY STORE
$1.50
$4.50
$1.22
WAL-MART
$2.97
$2.99
$1.32
TARGET
$2.03
$3.67
$4.97
DEPARTMENT STORE
$12.00
$7.00
$7.50
I was also shocked by the spread in prices. While I did expect to see some markup at higher-end stores, the range was wider than I expected. I was also surprised that there?wasn't?one store that had the cheapest prices, across-the-board, for all the goods.
When economists create models, the goal is to make a few assumptions about the world to describe the ?typical? human response and show how that response leads to a ?general? outcome. My behavior in this case is not what economists would call ?typical.? (My friends might even call it weird!) But even for the typical consumer, are the assumptions of the supply and demand model always appropriate?
In a lot of cases, the classic supply and demand model does gives accurate results, but sometimes the assumption that consumers know the distribution of prices?isn't?appropriate. In those cases, it?s important to understand how behavior will change if an assumption is violated. The classic model does not involve consumers looking for prices, they just know them. As economists, we often say we are assuming ?complete information.? When consumers don?t have complete information the market price typically?doesn't?match the equilibrium price the model predicts. Most of the time the market will be inefficient (contrary to what the model suggests) and both producer and consumer surplus will be lost.
Throughout economics, every conclusion that we draw from a model depends on the assumptions that are used to build that model. Whenever I learn about a new model, I always list the assumptions made and focus on how the results change if the assumption would be removed. Understanding the relationship between assumptions and results is the critical step to applying what we learn from theory and using it to understand what happens in the real world.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:?
1. When I was getting my information I found that stores rarely carry the exact same goods. (Even if they are the same brand, the packaging might be different. It?s why I calculated my information in per unit prices.) Since I was able to find the goods in multiple locations, but they were not identical, which market structure is the most appropriate to describe kitchen supplies: Monopoly, Oligopoly, Monopolistic Competition, or Perfect competition? Why?
2. While my shopping behavior was a bit different than most people for kitchen supplies, people do ?search? when they buy certain goods. Name some items where the supply and demand model?isn't?as appropriate as a consumer search model would be. Why is it more appropriate to think about consumers searching for these goods?
3. An important part of search theory talks about the cost of searching. Suppose I?didn't?live near a shopping center and the stores were all 20 minute drives apart. How do you think that distance (and the opportunity cost associated with traveling between them) would change my behavior when I search? How would it change the pricing behavior of the stores?
Labels: Assumptions, Economics of Search, Supply and Demand
Normally, a trip from Earth to the ISS takes about two days. Thursday, a Soyuz capsule docked with the orbiting laboratory after less than six hours of flight time, setting a record. Accelerating the trip wasn't an issue of newer technology or more powerful engines, necessarily, but of better math and planning. The Russian vehicle essentially took a shortcut that required precisely timed steering over the course of four orbits, putting three crew members (including one American astronaut) on the space station at 10:28pm ET -- just five hours and 45 minutes after takeoff from Kazakhstan. Russian engineers are already looking at ways to trim more time off the trip, by cutting two more orbits from the route. Obviously the human cargo appreciates spending less time in the cramped quarters of the Soyuz. But getting equipment and materials for experiments to the ISS quicker should also yield better and more reliable scientific results. For a few clips of liftoff and the docking itself check out the NASA link in the source.
NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya's Supreme Court said on Saturday it would issue its ruling no later than 1400 GMT (10 a.m. EDT) on legal challenges to Uhuru Kenyatta's win in a presidential election seen as a test of democracy, five years after vote disputes triggered widespread bloodshed.
The country's outgoing president called for calm ahead of a decision that will either confirm the victory of Kenya's richest man Kenyatta or force another vote.
Defeated candidate Raila Odinga says the March 4 poll was marred by technical problems and widespread rigging. Both politicians have promised to abide by the court's final word.
"Compatriots: The Supreme Court will deliver its decision not later than 5 p.m. today, Inshallah (God willing)," Chief Justice Willy Mutunga wrote on his Twitter account.
The ruling is expected to address a list of challenges to the result. It was not immediately clear if the timing announced referred to when the court would start reading details of its verdict or the time by which it expected to complete that task.
Police formed a security cordon around the court. Many ordinary Kenyans insist they will not allow a repeat of the violence that killed more than 1,200 people and hammered the economy following a dispute over the last election in 2007.
"We have moved on," said Monica Njagi, 28, owner of an Internet cafe in the port city of Mombasa. "Whatever the ruling, we shall go by it ... We have enough useful lessons from our past."
The peaceful voting in this year's election, and the fact that the dispute is being played out by lawyers not machete-wielding gangs, has already helped repair the image of east Africa's largest economy.
Saturday's ruling will test whether Kenyans trust their reformed judiciary and whether supporters of rival candidates accept the result quietly in a nation where tribal loyalties largely determine political allegiances.
"As the country awaits the Supreme Court ruling which is due this Easter weekend, I call upon all of us to accept the ruling and maintain peace," outgoing President Mwai Kibaki said in a message to mark the Christian Easter holiday.
"ESSENTIAL CONTACTS"
Kenyatta comfortably beat Odinga in terms of votes won, with 50.07 percent versus 43.28 percent, but only narrowly avoided a run-off by just edging above the 50 percent threshold.
Western donors are watching the fate of a regional trade partner and a country they see as vital to stability in a volatile area. They also face a headache if Kenyatta wins.
He is facing charges at the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity, accused of helping incite the violence after the 2007 vote. Kenyatta denies the charges and has promised to cooperate with the court to clear his name.
Western nations have a policy of having only "essential contacts" with indictees of the court. They say that will not affect dealings with the Kenyan government as a whole, but will worry the issue could drive a long-time ally of the West closer to emerging powers such as China.
Neighboring African states are also keeping a careful eye on proceedings after they were hit by the knock-on effects when vital trade routes through Kenya were shut down five years ago.
Kenya's economy has yet to recover fully from the pummeling it took after the vote violence, with growth rates still yet to return to levels before that bloodshed.
"My worry is that if the court orders another election, tourism will suffer further," said Mohammed Hersi, general manager of the Whitesands hotel, a top Mombasa resort, saying clients were waiting to decide whether to come.
In the Supreme Court's hearing on Friday, the legal teams reviewed results of recounts ordered in 22 of the 33,400 polling stations after Odinga said more votes had been cast than there were registered voters. Both sides said the recounts supported their arguments.
Odinga's team argued that the failures undermined the vote. Rival lawyers said any irregularities or technical hiccups had an insignificant impact and did not change the overall outcome.
International observers said voting itself was credible, but diplomats say observers did not watch the full five-day count.
(Additional reporting by Joseph Akwiri in Mombasa, Hezron Ochiel in Kisumu and James Macharia in Nairobi; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
The in-house versus agency debate is largely over because for 90% of businesses, it is no longer possible to run a significant (large budget/large volume) online marketing program without agency help.
Since I?m an online marketing agency CEO, it?d be fair of you to accuse me of bias and self-interest in making this statement, but please put away the rotten tomatoes until you have at least heard my argument.?For what it?s worth, it?s an informed one; I spent eight years as an in-house SEM and used to hate agencies.
The argument is as follows:
Online marketing today is more complex and convoluted than it has ever been. As such, to conduct a robust and effective marketing campaign, a business needs lots of experts, lots of tools, and, well, lots of help. Only the very largest spenders can afford to maintain this army of experts internally, which leads to the need for outside help.
In this post, I?ll describe the layers of today?s online marketing landscape ? and explain how your company can evaluate its needs and decide which kind of agency it might need to bring on.
The Five Vectors Of Online Marketing Complexity
As I see it, online marketing success requires execution on five vectors, which I?ll describe below. If you currently work for an in-house marketing team, how many of these vectors does your team handle on their own? My guess is that you do some of these well, some of them not as well as you?d like, and some of them not at all.
Vector #1: Multiple Marketing Channels
I was reared as an SEM expert, and I?d like to think I know a fair amount about this space. Of course, SEM is just one of many channels that make up online marketing today. The list includes:
SEM
SEO
Facebook PPC
Facebook Ad Exchange
Facebook (earned)
Twitter PPC
Twitter (earned)
LinkedIn
YouTube
Google Display Network
Ad Exchanges
Direct Media Buys
Email Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Pinterest
Vector #2: ?Big Data
Cookie-based data is great, but it is no longer the only data source that savvy online marketers are using to analyze results. Here are a few more that are gaining a lot of traction:
In-store data
Digital fingerprinting
View-through incrementality and attribution
Cross-device interaction
Database-driven offline conversions
Lifetime value
Vector #3: Tools
If you enjoy product demos of technology, online marketing is a great space to be in right now. The display landscape has dozens of tools, and the search world isn?t too far behind. Among the many tools that online marketers must evaluate today are:
SEM campaign management software
DSPs
Ad serving
Attribution
Tag management
Creative optimization
Reporting
Facebook optimization
Analytics
Call tracking
SEO platforms
Vector #4: Devices
Desktops are no longer the only game in town. Just a few of the fun devices that we need to create optimized funnels and ads for these days include:
Desktops
Tablets
Smartphones
Feature phones
Internet-enabled TVs
Google Glass (well, maybe someday)
Vector #5: Geography
Technology has made the world flat, enabling small companies to build a global footprint faster and easier than any other time in history. But with international expansion comes additional challenges, like:
Ad copy and landing page localization
New marketing channels (think Baidu, Yandex, and Naver, for example)
Different time zones to manage (want to stay up 24/7?)
Different laws and regulations
The In-House Solution: Now, Discover Your Strengths!
A jack of all trades is a master of none. This adage applies equally to both ad agencies and in-house teams. Any agency that promises you that they can handle the 40 or so challenges elucidated above is selling you a bill of goods; it is simply not possible to be an expert at all things marketing.
Similarly, unless you work at Amazon or eBay and have an enterprise level online marketing team of 50 or more people, it?s unlikely that you can really handle all of these challenges on your own.
As such, to master online marketing, you need to find outside help, which almost always means a combination of technology providers, agencies, and consultants. So the question is not ?whether? you need an agency, it?s ?which? do you need? To keep with the ?vector? theme, I have four more vectors through which to evaluate an in-house team?s agency needs.
Vector #1: Your Company?s Core Competencies
Amazon decided that fulfillment was core to their business, so they kept it in-house. Zappos values customer service and keeps that as an internal function. What does your business value? Are you a tech-driven company? If so, perhaps your data analysis and tools selection should be managed internally, but your marketing should be outsourced.
If you are content-driven, keep earned media internally; whereas, a direct-response marketing shop might want to keep paid media inside its walls. In sum, craft your in-house marketing team to mimic the core strengths of the company and consider outsourcing the tasks that aren?t.
Vector #2: Your Marketing Team?s Expertise
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the concept that to become an expert, a person needs 10,000 hours of experience. Expecting your team of very-smart, but inexperienced, marketers to handle new channels with aplomb is like expecting them to learn to fly a commercial airliner after a few lessons.
Google, in particular, has worked hard to convince marketers that AdWords is easy to start and easy to manage (?start with just $5!?). AdWords ? and every other online marketing channel, tool, and task ? are all complex. Agencies offer ?for rent? expertise in areas where your hiring budget for experts falls short.
Vector #3: Cost-Benefit Analysis
Believe it or not, there are times when working with an agency is cheaper than keeping everything in-house. For example, agencies can negotiate technology deals across all of their clients at a rate that is much more affordable than what you could negotiate for your individual company. And sometimes, hiring an agency to handle a few marketing challenges is outright cheaper than bringing on full-time employees to do the same tasks.
Vector #4: Does It Matter?
To be clear, I am not making the argument that online marketing success can only be achieved by implementing all 40 of the points described above. Indeed, many of these points are likely totally irrelevant to your business. And many of these might be ?nice-to-haves? but not vital to your success.
So, just because you could create a mobile-ready micro-site in 25 languages and run a StumbleUpon campaign to drive visitors to the site doesn?t mean you should! Many agencies are more than happy to sell you something that wins them a shiny award but does nothing for your bottom line.
Are You Convinced Or Am I A Shill?
As I said earlier, I worked in in-house marketing for eight years prior to founding an online marketing agency. In general, I hated agencies when I was on the in-house side. But, when I left in-house for the agency dark-side in 2008, it was still more or less possible to manage all things online marketing in-house with just a few people.
Fast forward to today, and the marketing world is exponentially more complicated than it was then (just look at how much more complex Google AdWords is today than it was in 2008, for example). New devices, new channels, new technology, more data and more geographies ? this is no longer a task that a few smart folks can handle on their own. So, pick your battles to fight internally and pick up the phone to find great outsiders to help you fight everything else if you need additional resources.
Let the rotten-tomato throwing commence!
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Researchers at UC Davis and the University of British Columbia have shed new light on methylation, a critical process that helps control how genes are expressed. Working with placentas, the team discovered that 37 percent of the placental genome has regions of lower methylation, called partially methylated domains (PMDs), in which gene expression is turned off. This differs from most human tissues, in which 70 percent of the genome is highly methylated.
While PMDs have been identified in cell lines, this is the first time they have been found in regular human tissue. In addition to enhancing our understanding of epigenetics, this work could influence cancer research and help illuminate how environmental toxins affect fetal development. The paper was published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Since it was unraveled more than ten years ago, the human genome has been the focus of both popular interest and intense scientific focus. But the genome doesn't act alone; there are many factors that influence whether genes are turned on or off. One of these is an epigenetic process called methylation, in which a group of carbon and hydrogen atoms (a methyl group) attaches to DNA, adjusting how genes are expressed.
"I like to think of epigenetics as a layer on top of your genetic code," said senior author Janine LaSalle, professor of medical microbiology and immunology. "It's not the DNA sequence but it layers on top of that ? and methylation is the first layer. Those layers provide a lot of information to the cells on where and when to turn on the genes."
How and when genes are activated (or inactivated) can have a profound impact on human development, cancer and the biological legacy of environmental toxins. Prior to this research, PMDs had only been found in cultured cell lines, which led some scientists to wonder if they existed outside the test tube. This study confirms they exist in placental tissue, a critically important window into fetal development.
"The placenta is the interface between mother and fetus," said LaSalle, who is a researcher affiliated with the UC Davis MIND Institute. "It's a time capsule from when a lot of important methylation events occurred."
In addition, placental tissue was interesting to study because it has a number of invasive characteristics often associated with cancer. In fact, a number of cancers, such as breast and colon, have widespread PMDs. LaSalle notes that anti-cancer epigenetic therapies that adjust methylation could be refined based on this improved understanding of PMDs.
This work could also enhance our ability to detect genetic defects. Methylation, and other epigenetic data, provides information that cannot be found in the genome alone. For example, the vast majority of cells in the body contain identical genetic code. However, the added information provided by methylation allows scientists to determine where specific DNA came from.
"Methylation patterns are like fingerprints, showing which tissue that DNA is derived from," LaSalle said. "You can't get that information from just the DNA sequence. As a result, methylation studies could be a very rich source for biomarkers."
In the study, PMDs encompassed 37 percent of the placental genome, including 3,815 genes, around 17 percent of all genes. When found in low-methylation regions, these genes were less likely to be transcribed into proteins. Researchers also found that PMDs also contain more highly methylated CpG islands (genomic areas with large numbers of cytosine-guanine pairs), which are often associated with gene transcriptional silencing of promoters.
Because the placental PMDs contained many genes associated with neuronal development, and specifically autism, LaSalle notes that future research could investigate how epigenetics impacts autism genes at birth.
"We are looking for biomarkers that predict neurodevelopmental outcomes," LaSalle said. "Now we have a series of snap shots from a critical period where we think environmental factors are playing a role in the developing brain."
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University of California - Davis Health System: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu
Thanks to University of California - Davis Health System for this article.
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Let's be honest: We make a point of looking at Ryan Gosling as much as possible. Whether he's on the red carpet, the big screen or sitting right in front of us, it's easy to get lost staring at his handsome face. That's why we've noticed that Gosling's character in The Place Beyond The Pines has a dagger tattoo dripping a drop of blood right below his left eye.
SAS Institute, the world?s largest private software company, is mainly known for two things. It was the pioneer maker of sophisticated software for analyzing data, long before anyone was using the terms analytics or Big Data.
SAS is also known for the seemingly lush life on its corporate campus in Cary, N.C., with on-site doctors, gyms, swimming pools, day care, even barbers. In 2012, SAS ranked second in Fortune magazine?s annual list of the best companies to work for, trailing only Google.
With big companies and start-ups plunging into the data analysis business in recent years, SAS looked vulnerable. The company?s software was not built for the new computing architecture of highly distributed, parallel computing, in which digital chores are cut up and spread across many microprocessors. And its software was designed for a world of mainly captive data, housed in corporate and government data bases, rather than the unruly realm of unstructured data, like Web pages and sensor signals.
In 2009, I wrote a long piece that looked at SAS and the challenges it faced. The headline read, ?At a Software Powerhouse, the Good Life Is Under Siege.?
On Wednesday, SAS executives came to New York for an event at the Pierre Hotel to show off its retooled technology to customers. The code has been rewritten to run on modern hardware ? so-called massively parallel computers. A new version, coming in June, will be able to run entirely in remote ?cloud? data centers. ?It?s a complete cloud distribution, totally cloud-ready,? James Goodnight, co-founder and chief executive of SAS, said in an interview.
Those clouds can be private ones operated by companies or government agencies. But SAS has its own hosted data centers, and its software now also runs on Amazon?s Web Services cloud.
SAS has developed new visual tools ? so users can do data analysis with a point-and-click on a laptop, or swipe-and-tap on an iPad tablet, as SAS demonstrated this week. The goal is to broaden the base of SAS users well beyond its traditional core of SAS-trained data experts. ?Democratizing data is exactly what this is about,? said James Davis, an SAS senior vice president and chief marketing officer.
SAS, to be sure, faces a long list of rivals from giants like I.B.M. and Oracle, to data analysis software specialists like Tableau Software, TIBCO Spotfire and MicroStategy, and a host of ambitious start-ups. The market for Big Data technology will be a competitive hotbed for years, and how things will play out is uncertain.
But industry analysts say SAS has made considerable progress and shown real agility, especially for an established company.
?SAS is a real canary in the coal mine for how legacy software companies respond to massively parallel computing and Big Data,? said Merv Adrian, an analyst at Gartner. ?And the company has done a pretty impressive job.?
As a private company, SAS does not report its financial results. But Mr. Goodnight said its revenue grew 5.5 percent last year, held down by weakness in Europe and a strong dollar against the euro, which reduced reported sales. Europe is about the size of the United States as a market for SAS.
This year, Mr. Goodnight said, SAS hopes to achieve a 12 percent growth in revenue. The revamped product line with visual tools and cloud offerings are fueling that optimism.
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South Africa did not import any crude oil from Iran for a ninth consecutive month in February, data showed on Thursday, as Pretoria steers clear of the shipments because of sanctions.
South Africa used to import a quarter of its crude from Iran but has come under Western pressure to reduce the purchases as part of sanctions aimed at halting Tehran's suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In May last year, imports from Iran stood at 285,524 tonnes but since June, Africa's biggest economy has replaced the shipments with crude from other suppliers.
Saudi Arabia was again the major supplier in February with shipments of 719,330 tonnes, data from the South African Revenue Service showed. Other crude imports were from Angola, Nigeria, Russia, Yemen, Ghana and Equatorial Guinea, with shipments totalling 1.75 million tonnes.
While the United States extended South Africa's exemption from financial sanctions in December due to the Iranian cuts, Pretoria is still hampered by European Union sanctions that prevent insurance companies from underwriting Iranian shipments.
The EU has not granted any waivers, even though South Africa has been lobbying Brussels because it has to pay more to source crude from countries other than Iran.
Also, some of the South African refineries are designed to treat Iranian-type crude only and require modifications to accept other products.
Refiners in South Africa include Shell, BP, Total, Chevron, petrochemicals group Sasol, and Engen, which is majority-owned by Malaysian state oil group Petronas .
Stanford survey: Americans back preparation for extreme weather and sea-level risePublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Terry Nagel, Stanford tnagel@stanford.edu 650-498-0607 Stanford University
Images told the story: lower Manhattan in darkness, coastal communities washed away, cars floating in muck. Superstorm Sandy, a harbinger of future extreme weather intensified by climate change, caught the country off guard in October.
Unprepared for the flooding and high winds that ensued, the East Coast suffered more than $70 billion in property damage and more than 100 deaths.
Will Americans prepare and invest now to minimize the impact of disasters such as Sandy, or deal with storms and rising sea levels after they occur?
A new survey commissioned by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to prepare in order to minimize the damage likely to be caused by global warming-induced sea-level rise and storms.
A majority also wants people whose properties and businesses are located in hazard areas to foot the bill for this preparation, not the government. Eighty-two percent of the Americans surveyed said that people and organizations should prepare for the damage likely to be caused by sea-level rise and storms, rather than simply deal with the damage after it happens.
Among the most popular policy solutions identified in the survey are stronger building codes for new structures along the coast to minimize damage (favored by 62 percent) and preventing new buildings from being built near the coast (supported by 51 percent).
"People support preventive action," said survey director Jon Krosnick, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and professor of communication, "and few people believe these preparations will harm the economy or eliminate jobs. In fact, more people believe that preparation efforts will help the economy and create jobs around the U.S., in their state and in their town than think these efforts will harm the economy and result in fewer jobs in those areas. But people want coastal homeowners and businesses that locate in high-risk areas to pay for these measures."
The challenges posed by rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms will only intensify as more Americans build along the coasts. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released March 25 predicts that already crowded U.S. coastlines will become home to an additional 11 million people by 2020.
Survey questions were formulated to assess participants' beliefs about climate change and gather opinions about the impact of climate change, sea-level rise and storms on communities, the economy and jobs.
The survey also gauged public support for specific coastal adaptation strategies and how to pay for them. "People are least supportive of policies that try to hold back Mother Nature," Krosnick said. "They think it makes more sense to recognize risk and reduce exposure."
Among the survey's respondents, 48 percent favor sand dune restoration and 33 percent favor efforts to maintain beaches with sand replenishment, while 37 percent support relocating structures away from the coast and 33 percent support constructing sea walls.
Eighty-two percent of the survey's respondents believe that Earth's temperature has been rising over the last 100 years. However, even a majority of those who doubt the existence of climate change favor adaptation measures (60 percent).
"The question is, how does public support for preparation translate to action?" asked Meg Caldwell, executive director of the Center for Ocean Solutions. "Our impulse is to try to move quickly to put communities back together the way they were after devastation. But that impulse often leads to doubling down on high-risk investments, such as rebuilding in areas likely to experience severe impacts. To move toward long-term resiliency for coastal communities, we need to seize opportunities to apply new thinking, new standards and long-term solutions."
Krosnick presented the survey results this morning at a policy briefing hosted by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The briefing was followed by a discussion about the implications of changing public attitudes with four panelists: Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations in New York City; Laurie McGilvray, chief of the Estuarine Reserves Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Margaret Peloso, an attorney with the international law firm of Vinson & Elkins; and Carol Werner, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Videos of the presentation and the panel discussion will be available by 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific time on the Stanford Woods Institute website.
The survey was conducted via the Internet with a nationally representative probability sample of 1,174 American adults, 18 and older, conducted by GfK Custom Research March 3-18, 2013. The survey was administrated in both English and Spanish. The survey has a margin of error of +/-4.9 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
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Bo MacInnis, a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Department of Communication, was co-director of the study. Lauren Howe, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford; Adina Abeles, director of education and training at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions; Ezra Markowitz, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University; and Robert Socolow, director of the Princeton University Environmental Institute's Climate and Energy Challenge, contributed to the survey design and analysis process.
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Stanford survey: Americans back preparation for extreme weather and sea-level risePublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Terry Nagel, Stanford tnagel@stanford.edu 650-498-0607 Stanford University
Images told the story: lower Manhattan in darkness, coastal communities washed away, cars floating in muck. Superstorm Sandy, a harbinger of future extreme weather intensified by climate change, caught the country off guard in October.
Unprepared for the flooding and high winds that ensued, the East Coast suffered more than $70 billion in property damage and more than 100 deaths.
Will Americans prepare and invest now to minimize the impact of disasters such as Sandy, or deal with storms and rising sea levels after they occur?
A new survey commissioned by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Center for Ocean Solutions finds that an overwhelming majority of Americans want to prepare in order to minimize the damage likely to be caused by global warming-induced sea-level rise and storms.
A majority also wants people whose properties and businesses are located in hazard areas to foot the bill for this preparation, not the government. Eighty-two percent of the Americans surveyed said that people and organizations should prepare for the damage likely to be caused by sea-level rise and storms, rather than simply deal with the damage after it happens.
Among the most popular policy solutions identified in the survey are stronger building codes for new structures along the coast to minimize damage (favored by 62 percent) and preventing new buildings from being built near the coast (supported by 51 percent).
"People support preventive action," said survey director Jon Krosnick, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and professor of communication, "and few people believe these preparations will harm the economy or eliminate jobs. In fact, more people believe that preparation efforts will help the economy and create jobs around the U.S., in their state and in their town than think these efforts will harm the economy and result in fewer jobs in those areas. But people want coastal homeowners and businesses that locate in high-risk areas to pay for these measures."
The challenges posed by rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms will only intensify as more Americans build along the coasts. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report released March 25 predicts that already crowded U.S. coastlines will become home to an additional 11 million people by 2020.
Survey questions were formulated to assess participants' beliefs about climate change and gather opinions about the impact of climate change, sea-level rise and storms on communities, the economy and jobs.
The survey also gauged public support for specific coastal adaptation strategies and how to pay for them. "People are least supportive of policies that try to hold back Mother Nature," Krosnick said. "They think it makes more sense to recognize risk and reduce exposure."
Among the survey's respondents, 48 percent favor sand dune restoration and 33 percent favor efforts to maintain beaches with sand replenishment, while 37 percent support relocating structures away from the coast and 33 percent support constructing sea walls.
Eighty-two percent of the survey's respondents believe that Earth's temperature has been rising over the last 100 years. However, even a majority of those who doubt the existence of climate change favor adaptation measures (60 percent).
"The question is, how does public support for preparation translate to action?" asked Meg Caldwell, executive director of the Center for Ocean Solutions. "Our impulse is to try to move quickly to put communities back together the way they were after devastation. But that impulse often leads to doubling down on high-risk investments, such as rebuilding in areas likely to experience severe impacts. To move toward long-term resiliency for coastal communities, we need to seize opportunities to apply new thinking, new standards and long-term solutions."
Krosnick presented the survey results this morning at a policy briefing hosted by the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The briefing was followed by a discussion about the implications of changing public attitudes with four panelists: Cas Holloway, deputy mayor for operations in New York City; Laurie McGilvray, chief of the Estuarine Reserves Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Margaret Peloso, an attorney with the international law firm of Vinson & Elkins; and Carol Werner, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Videos of the presentation and the panel discussion will be available by 4 p.m. Eastern/1 p.m. Pacific time on the Stanford Woods Institute website.
The survey was conducted via the Internet with a nationally representative probability sample of 1,174 American adults, 18 and older, conducted by GfK Custom Research March 3-18, 2013. The survey was administrated in both English and Spanish. The survey has a margin of error of +/-4.9 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
###
Bo MacInnis, a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Department of Communication, was co-director of the study. Lauren Howe, a graduate student in psychology at Stanford; Adina Abeles, director of education and training at the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions; Ezra Markowitz, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University; and Robert Socolow, director of the Princeton University Environmental Institute's Climate and Energy Challenge, contributed to the survey design and analysis process.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 28-Mar-2013
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