H(APP)Y Nurses

Mobile applications move to the hands of healthcare professionals

Communication network developer, Avaya has recently unveiled a iOS tool designed for health care professionals. Mobile Activity Assistant (MAA) provides a system of secure communication throughout the hospital using a text message format effectively allowing nurses to send and receive call alerts on patient conditions. The application eliminated the liability of nurses having to leave a patient and run back and forth to the nursing station, responding to alerts.

"Nurses did not have enough time to spend on direct patient care because they [were] spending a lot of time on other things like documentation and walking around," said Sanjeev Gupta, general manager of Avaya Healthcare Solutions. "They want to be able to get all communications while they're on the move, so they can spend more time with the patients rather than rushing back to the nursing station."

The APP can be downloaded and used on a personal device as long as its running on the hospitals secured Wi-Fi network. Many hospital professionals including doctors, nurses and therapisits can now all be networked on a shared patient’s status.

The application, initially designed for use on Apple products like the iPad, will eventually be compatible on other devices, like Android.

Next Wave of HDTV coming in 2020

The Internet just got faster.

Mark this day, folks, because the brainiacs have finally made a breakthrough in quantum teleportation: a team of scientists from Australia and Japan have successfully transferred a complex set of quantum data in light form. You see, previously researchers had struggled with slow performance or loss of information, but with full transmission integrity achieved -- as in blocks of qubits being destroyed in one place but instantaneously resurrected in another, without affecting their superpositions -- we're now one huge step closer to secure, high-speed quantum communication. Needless to say, this will also be a big boost for the development of powerful quantum computing, and combine that with a more bedroom friendly version of the above teleporter, we'll eventually have ourselves the best LAN party ever.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/18/first-light-wave-quantum-teleportation-achieved-opens-door-to-u/

Quantum teleportation, or entanglement-assisted teleportation, is a process by which a qubit (the basic unit of quantum information) can be transmitted exactly (in principle) from one location to another, without the qubit being transmitted through the intervening space. It is useful for quantum information processing, however it does not immediately transmit classical information, and therefore cannot be used for communication at superluminal (faster than light) speed. It also does not transport the system itself, and does not concern rearranging particles to copy the form of an object.

The seminal paper first expounding the idea was published by Charles Bennett and coauthors in 1993.^[1] It was first confirmed experimentally in 1997 by a group in Innsbruck ^[2] and has subsequently been shown to work over distances of up to 16 kilometers.^[3]

Wiki

Tumblr, Microblogging and Business

By Joshua Smith

Tumblr has been described as “the space in between Twitter and Facebook.” – Mark Coatney

According to the sites “About Tumblr” section, Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme's HTML. Mediaite.com posted a column by Anthony De Rosa who calls the combination of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr “The Holy Trinity of Social Media.”

“There is a corner of the internet where actors, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, bloggers,directors, people from all walks of life are creating over 2 million posts per day, and are often meeting each other in person in over 50 different places around the world, from New York to London to Berlin to Tokyo. The place is Tumblr and it is quickly becoming the third member of the holy trinity of social media, along with Twitter and Facebook.”

Industries such as Rolling Stone, BlackBook Media Corporation, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Life Magazine and The New York Times have established a presence on Tumblr.
But what’s the hype? How can Tumblr help you connect with the audience “in between?”
Always, always, always do your research. Know who your target market is and where they participate online. Mr. Coatney has stated that U.S. Tumblr users tend to be younger – 56% of the services 25.2 million monthly visitors are under 34, and users skew slightly more male (52%). Knowing this and considering the growth of Tumblr, determine if it’s worth your time.
Social Media management is time consuming, especially if you target different groups on different sites. Some organizations have only a Facebook Fan Page. Some are just learning what a #hashtag means on Twitter. Others may struggle with Social Media overload as they desperately try to brand every corner of the internet.
Set measureable goals using Tumblr statistics. If you are not confident in your use of Tumblr you can always check the figures to see the impact your account has on the public. Adding the Tumblr Stat application to your site lets you analyze your blog posts for reposts, traffic and user information.
(applications instructions @ http://tumblring.net/track-tumblr-traffic-visitors/)
Other applications and site information to help you create your Tumblr account:
Automatic Twitter integration
Publish posts to Facebook
Community powered blogs
Own your work
Video posting
FeedBurner RSS support
No Ads or banners
+ dozens of third party apps

http://www.mediaite.com/online/tumblr-completes-the-holy-trinity-of-social-media/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/technology/02tumblr.html

Quick Read Codes and Marketing

Twitter Considers Face(book)-Lift

Twitter might introduce pages for brands similar to those on Facebook, according to reports.

The initiative, which Marketing Magazine reports is being lead by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and President of Revenue Adam Bain, is to give brands their own space on Twitter — a page they could point to and use to deliver content, while encouraging Twitter users to follow them.

In a similar move, Foursquare launched Pages Gallery
Monday, a showcase of different company pages on Foursquare.

The question is: Does Twitter really need branded pages? On Facebook, the entire brand experience revolves around the company’s page. That part of the experience is currently lacking on Twitter, where brands can only promote themselves through sponsored hashtags, lists and tweets.

However, one could argue that this constant flow of information, without many single static elements for users to grab onto, is part of Twitter’s appeal. What do you think? Could pages improve the Twitter experience for users and brands?

by Stan Schroeder

http://mashable.com/2011/04/05/twitter-pages-brands/

Internet kills the PR star

Originially Posted on the Daily Maverick

The press release, along with the idea that newspapers are a great vehicle for unconscious manipulation of the masses, was developed and perfected by Sigmund Freud’s nephew in the 1920s. This month, finally, the Internet makes available a free machine for distinguishing churnalism from journalism. By KEVIN BLOOM.

The Museum of Public Relations, founded in 1997 and situated on Broadway in Manhattan, takes itself pretty seriously. There’s nothing ironic in its self-plug that it’s *the* place to go for people who want to learn about “how ideas are developed for industry, education, and government”. The humourless focal point of the museum is Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L. Bernays. As the profession’s founding father, Bernays has a biography with a lot more adjectives than the other early pioneers. And no campaign is written about in tones of greater reverence than Bernays’s work for the world’s largest manufacturer of household staples, Procter and Gamble.

In 1923, goes the legend, four years after opening his own public relations firm, Bernays was contracted by P&G to provide back-up to its advertising on Ivory soap. A huge fan of surveys (he is credited as the man who brought the survey to PR), the 32-year-old kicked off with a set of numbers that demonstrated a nationwide preference for white, unperfumed soap. Ivory, as it happened, was the only such soap on the market, a fact the press published next to the survey results, and Bernays’s objective was met.

But soap is one thing, making smoking fashionable amongst women something else entirely – and this was what really won Bernays his fame. In 1928, when he was hired by the makers of Lucky Strike to boost cigarette sales, women seemed the obvious growth market. Bernays consulted a psychoanalyst, who figured out that cigarettes symbolised “freedom” for women. So during the 1929 Easter Parade, he arranged for a cast of models and actresses to parade down Fifth Avenue in New York, sucking on their “Torches of Freedom”. The event made the front page in all the national papers and all but smashed the taboo on female smoking.

1928 was also the year that Bernays published “Propaganda,” a book that soon became – and remains – the de facto manual for the PR industry. The first chapter opens with the following words: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

The vehicle for Bernays’s manipulation of the masses, of course, was the press. He couldn’t have made Ivory the most popular soap in America or pried open the female market for tobacco companies had he not had the national newspapers right where he wanted them. His genius was that there was no bribery or corruption involved, all he did was give the press what they craved – stories that would entice readers and fill the pages, sometimes with visuals to match, and often with the sorts of stats and surveys that lent the pieces their all-important air of authority.

Now, eight decades or so later, we have churnalism.com. A non-commercial site funded by the Media Standards Trust, it allows users to paste in press releases and compare them with all the news in the UK’s national papers, as well as with stories on the BBC site and Sky News online. The word “churnalism” comes from Nick Davies’s book “Flat Earth News,” and means exactly what it appears to mean – an item in a newspaper published as journalism that is, in fact, a barely reworked press release.

According to an in-depth feature on churnalism.com in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, more than half the stories in the UK national press can be “at least partially sourced” to PR. The feature also notes: “In the US and UK there are now more PR people than journalists. The PR industries in these two countries are numbers one and two in the world in terms of size. In the UK, PR accounts for over £6.5 billion in revenues. PR is, in the words of Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, ‘faster growing, better paid and better resourced’ than journalism. ‘Like it or loathe it, PR has become a key ingredient in many of our lives.’”

Why’s this a bad thing? If you have to ask, maybe The Daily Maverick isn’t a place for you – but just in case you’re curious, here’s how Davies sums up the problem: “[This] material, whether or not it is truthful, is designed specifically to promote or suppress stories in order to serve the interests of political, commercial and other groups.” In other words, these stories are sales pitches masquerading as objective journalism, and there’s a double-deceit at play; it serves neither the PR companies nor the newspaper editors to let you, the reader, know that what you’re really confronting is a conscious effort to manipulate you.

Still, the CJR does concede that not all churnalism is unhealthy, and of course they’re right – where would we be without government announcements, news of (worthwhile) corporate social responsibility initiatives, and releases on medical breakthroughs? The issue, rather, lies in the lack of transparency. While the space constraints in print are an (almost) understandable excuse for the institutional and historical failure of newspaper editors to acknowledge the source of their PR-based stories, in the online environment that excuse falls away. Hence churnalism.com – a site where you can check for yourself.

At the time of writing, the second most shared item on churnalism.com is a press release entitled “Waitrose to open first ever Glasgow store”. The release was issued by the UK retailer itself, and underneath the item as it appears on the site is a line that notes “three articles may be churnalism”. These three articles include one from The Herald (which, the site helpfully tells us, has 1046 characters overlapping with the original release), one from BBC News (1027 characters overlapping), and one from The Daily Express (a more modest 475). Are the BBC embarrassed that they’ve apparently copied more sentences word-for-word direct from a press release than one of the country’s most notorious tabloids? Doesn’t say, but somebody might have some explaining to do… DM

Daily Maverick: http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-03-10-internet-kills-the-pr-star-the-all-new-diy-churnalism-detector