Posted by Elena del Valle on November 18, 2013
U.S motorization study by Michael Sivak
In 2011, based on the most recent data available, the average driver in the United States consumed 585 gallons of fuel or 1,033 gallons per household. Recent studies indicate that Americans, in general, own fewer light-duty vehicles, drive each of them less, and consume less fuel than in past years.
According to the results of a study (one of three on the subject conducted) released this month, researchers believe fuel consumption rates per person, per licensed driver, per household, and per registered vehicle and distance-driven rates peaked in 2003 or 2004, before the ongoing economic downturn.
By 2011, they had decreased by 13 percent to 17 percent. The researchers believe the long term peak was reached around 2003 or 2004.
They concluded Americans drive fewer light-duty vehicles, defined as cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans; they drive each of them less, and consume less fuel. They also estimate that current fuel consumption rates are lower than they were in 1984 when they began to track the information.
The 17-page report, titled Has Motorization in the U.S. Peaked? Part 3: Fuel consumed by light-duty vehicles was authored by Michael Sivak, director, Sustainable Worldwide Transportation, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. Earlier this year, he published two reports in which he looked at recent trends in the numbers of registered light-duty vehicles in the United States and the corresponding distances driven.
Posted by Elena del Valle on November 15, 2013
QR Codes Kill Kittens
Photos: Wiley
A quick response code or QR code for short is a type of bar code that requires a smart phone and an app to read it. According to Wikipedia, it is a kind of two-dimensional barcode that can be read optically by a machine. It is used to read information. If the app is able to read the QR code it was made correctly. Once the app reads the code it should lead the user to a mobile device friendly link or website.
QR codes have become common marketing tools, appearing on products, billboards, bus stops and so forth. The problem, according to Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, is that most QR codes don’t work. He believes it is because many people are too focused on using codes without paying enough attention to functionality. He proposes that if it mattered people would make sure they worked when they launch them.
Scott Stratten, author, QR Codes Kill Kittens
“If you knew that your terrible business decisions could cost a kitten its life, would you still do it? Of course not. No one wants to hurt a kitten, and no one wants to damage their own business through easily avoidable mistakes. The trick is, knowing which things are the wrong things to do,” Stratten said.
To make his point he wrote QR Codes Kill Kittens: How to Alienate Customers, Dishearten Employees, and Drive Your Business into the Ground (Wiley, $18), a 196-page hardcover small book focused on what goes wrong when QR codes don’t work.
The four color book is easy to read and often humorous. It includes photos on almost every page. It is divided into four sections designed to showcase why QR codes represent what’s wrong with business today including; They Don’t Work, Nobody Likes Them, They are Selfish and They Take Up Valuable Time Better Spent Elsewhere. Stratten, ranked among the top online influencers by Forbes.com, is also author of Unmarketing.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 8, 2013
Lost Luggage
Photos: Atria Books / Marble Arch Press
Jordi Punti, a writer and translator, and a contributor to the Spanish and Catalan press, was rewarded with recognition when he released his first novel. Lost Luggage (Atria Books / Marble Arch Press, $16), published in English in paperback and e-book editions in October 2013, was translated into 15 languages, and won the Spanish National Critics’ and the Catalan Booksellers prizes. Prior to this title Punti published three books of shorts stories.
In the 440-page book, Cristofol, a young Barcelona resident, is informed by the police that his father’s flat has been abandoned and its owner is missing. The man who vanished, a truck driver, left Cristofol and his mother 20 years earlier. At the apartment he had never heard about Cristofol finds a list of names belonging to his half brothers Christof, Christophe, and Christopher. He contacts them. None of them was aware that he had half siblings from a common father. None of them had seen his father in many years.
Jordi Punti, author, Lost Luggage
Although they live in different European cities they decide to meet for the first time. They wonder why he abandoned them and why they have similar names. In their journey to find the answers they discover a man who during 30 years of driving was able to escape the darkness of Spain under its former president Francisco Franco and to explore Europe.
Since he received a degree in Romance Philology in 1991, Punti has worked in Barcelona publishing houses, and co-directed La Flor Inversa (The Inverse Flower), a collection of medieval poetry along with Jordi Cerdà and Eduard Vilella, according to lletra.net.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 4, 2013
Lara Pizzorno, MDiv, author, Your Bones
Photos: Praktikos Books
A podcast interview with Lara Pizzorno, MDiv, author, Your Bones (see Former osteopenia sufferer, doctor share natural path to healthy bones), is available in the Podcast Section of Hispanic Marketing & Public Relations, HispanicMPR.com. During the podcast, she discusses her book and bone health with Elena del Valle, host of the HispanicMPR.com podcast.
A member of the American Medical Writers Association with 29 years of experience writing for physicians and the public, Lara is editor of Longevity Medicine Review as well as senior medical editor for SaluGenecists, Inc., and Integrative Medicine Advisors, LLC. Your Bones was recently translated into German and Polish.
She is contributing author to the Textbook of Functional Medicine, articles for Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal, and Textbook of Natural Medicine; lead author of Natural Medicine Instructions for Patients; co-author of The Encyclopedia of Healing Foods; and editor, The World’s Healthiest Foods Essential Guide for the healthiest way of eating.
To listen to the interview, scroll down until you see “Podcast” on the right hand side, then select “HMPR Lara Pizzorno, MDiv” click on the play button below or download the MP3 file to your iPod or MP3 player to listen on the go, in your car or at home. To download it, click on the arrow of the recording you wish to copy and save it to disk. The podcast will remain listed in the November 2013 section of the podcast archive.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on November 1, 2013
The Year Without Pants
Photos: Jossey-Bas
Scott Berkun, a Microsoft veteran with a corporate background who had authored four books, wondered whether he would follow his own advice if he were back in the workforce trenches. An opportunity to test his theory arrived when he was invited to lead a team of programmers at WordPress.com from 2010 to 2012. He agreed on condition that as a participatory journalism exercise he would write about his experience and the lessons he learned.
In The Year Without Pants and the Future of Work (Jossey-Bass, $26.95), he outlines the highlights of the experience as he saw them. He includes a behind the scenes look at Automattic, the firm he thinks drives WordPress.com’s success. The 258-page hardcover book published in 2013 is divided into 24 chapters.
His biggest challenge the author said by email was that “As an expert I had to put my expertise to the test, and find out: what of my own advice do I practice? And how will I adjust to a workplace with no email and no offices?”
Scott Berkun, author, The Year Without Pants
Every month 396 million people view more than 14 billion pages in 120 languages at WordPress.com. As of this writing, there are 72 million blogs around the world; users produce 36 million new posts and 62 million comments per month, according to the company website. He believes other businesses can take advantage of the insights he gleaned first hand from working there.
“I learned the future of work can be wonderful if managers are willing to reevaluate what’s possible, based on the examples WordPress.com has provided,” he said when asked what was the biggest reward he received from the project.
In the book, he explores workplace issues at WordPress.com such as how he thinks the company’s decentralized workplace, relying on 170 employees in 70 different cities, is creative and productive. He draws attention to the company’s “culture of self-sufficiency and experimentation.”
And he considers how the use of blogs, chat and Skype in lieu of email to communicate make it efficient. It’s possible, he says in the final chapter, that technology companies like Automattic are returning work to its roots and away from the absurdity of work that exists in many white collar environments; and that they might return some of the meaning of work the business world has lost.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 25, 2013
Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results
Photos: Drew Boyd, Jacob Goldenberg
Innovation is likely when working in a familiar world with tools that foster our creativity, say Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg. They’re convinced inventive methods follow common patterns or Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) in use, according to them, by hundreds of companies. They also believe creativity is a skill anyone can learn and perfect.
In Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, $28.50), a 257-page hardcover book published this year, they outline their approach and the characteristics of SIT.
“Research has shown that just telling people to ‘think outside the box’ does not improve their creative output. It does not give people the cognitive instructions how to generate an idea,” said Goldenberg by email in response to the question of thinking outside versus inside the box. “Instead, it prompts people to stray far away from the problem in unconstrained ways. This is both inefficient and highly unlikely to generate a creative solution. On the other hand, research shows conclusively that constraining one’s thinking, inside the box, with fewer options and tight boundaries prompts far more creative output than unconstrained thinking. Limiting the brain’s options makes it work harder to find a creative solution.”
The book project took two years to complete while development of the SIT lasted four years, and the work in the field took more than 12 years, he explained. In the book, the authors discuss five problem solving techniques: Division, Subtraction, Multiplication, Task Unification and Attribute Dependency. By removing something that had previously been thought essential a product or service may be adapted for a new use, according to the Subtraction technique. By dividing a component out of an existing product or service that initially seemed not to function it may be possible to transform it into something productive, according to the Division tecnique.
In Multiplication, a part of a product is copied after being modified. Bringing tasks together into one component of a service or product is Task Unification. Usually the component had been previously thought to be unrelated to the task. When two or more attributes initially thought unrelated are brought together successfully there is Attribute Dependency, the authors say.
Rather than start with a problem and seek solutions they suggest the opposite. “Let me tell you a secret: consumers don’t care if the problem was defined first and then a solution was found, or the opposite way. All they care about is if they have a new solution to a meaningful problem,” said Goldenberg.
Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg
“However, the latter direction is much more effective for creative (only creative) ideation. Psychology researcher Ronald Finke and his colleagues discovered that people hold inside their head an ambiguous, pre-inventive form the instant before generating an idea. People essentially start with a configuration in their head and then seek ways to make that configuration useful. They called it Function Follows Form. They also concluded that people are better at this direction of thinking. They are better at searching for benefits for a given configuration (starting with a solution) than they are finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem). The method, SIT, structures your creative thought processes to first create these configurations in your head, and then it leads you to find a benefit for that configuration. Done properly, you end up with a creative idea.”
Boyd is executive director, Master of Science in Marketing Program, and assistant professor, marketing and innovation, University of Cincinnati. Prior to that he worked for Johnson & Johnson, United Airlines and was an officer in the United States Air Force. He dedicates his time to the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media.
Goldenberg is professor, marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and visiting professor, Columbia Business School and the Interdisciplinary Center-Herzliya (IDC). His research focuses on creativity, new product development, diffusion of innovation, complexity in market dynamics, and social network effects. The company he established with his partners, which created the SIT system, works with more than one hundred companies worldwide, from the United States to Argentina to Kazakhstan.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 18, 2013
Latino Americans audio book
Photos: HighBridge Audio
In an effort to showcase the role of Hispanics in the history of the United States Ray Suarez, a broadcast journalist, recorded Latino Americans (HighBridge, $34.95) an audio book, as a companion to Latino Americans, a book and documentary television series designed to “chronicle the rich and varied history and experiences of Latinos” by the same name.
The television programs, featuring interviews with several dozen Latinos, aired on public television earlier this year. The unabridged audio recording is based on the book and read by Suarez. The label released it September 2013. It includes nine and a half hours of recording time on eight CDs.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, a television documentary demands to be watched. You must sit in one place and watch as the images accompany the narration. The audio book can, and must, go deeper, as the book does,” said Suarez by email when asked why he opted to record an audiobook and not just the documentary.
“Stories that are briefly shown on the television program are explored in great depth in the audio book, and you can consume the audio book while driving, cooking, or taking your daily walk. The audio book goes where you go, and tells you a story whatever you’re doing. Already with friends and family members I’m reminded of how many people use audio books, and for a wide range of reasons…from helping to break the tedium of a long commute, to getting around the difficulty of reading small type with less acute eyesight, to just wanting company during daily exercise.”
Ray Suarez during the recording of Latino Americans audiobook
In the audio recording, Suarez explores the Latino Americans in early European settlements, Manifest Destiny, Wild West, Cold War, Great Depression, Globalization, Spanish-American War and Civil Rights movement.
Regarding his personal connection with the audiobook Suarez said, “Latino Americans is my third book, but the first of them to become an audiobook. It was an interesting, and sometimes taxing process saying that many words out loud! It made me realize why actors are called upon so often to be the voice of audio books. After all, I had to ‘become’ everyone I quote in my story, men and women, across 500 years of history. A challenge, a joy, and a reminder of why simple sentences work as good storytelling!”
Suarez is a senior correspondent for PBS NewsHour, and host of the public radio show America Abroad. He has also been host of Talk of the Nation on NPR and a correspondent for CNN.
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Posted by Elena del Valle on October 14, 2013
Three researchers examined TIGER indexes for 23 countries
Is the world economy improving? Yes, sort of. After examining key economic indicators of a group of advanced and emerging markets three researchers concluded the economic turn around remains slow and uncertain. Eswar Prasad, Karim Foda and Arnav Sahu, authored the October 2013 Update to TIGER: Tracking Indexes for the Global Economic Recovery published this month by The Brookings Institution and the Financial Times.
Growing confidence in advanced economies and stable growth in emerging markets are driving the economic climate. The analysts are convinced that the economy “remains just a shock or two away from turning into another slump.”
They shared TIGER indexes for 23 countries and charts for the indicators indexes, each including real activity, financial and confidence indicators. The countries are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States.
The Overall Growth Index, the Real Activity Index and other charts for the United States, for example, show a deep slump in 2009 with varying degrees of recovery since. The confidence index was the most worrisome.
It appears the worst is over for advanced economies including Europe, Japan, United States, and United Kingdom. The latter “is experiencing surprisingly good growth.” Overall in advanced economies although jobs creation is weak and financial conditions are mixed confidence in the private sector has increased and inflation is modest. We’re not out of danger, seems to be the cautionary message which points to the need for growth.
At the same time, emerging market economies, such as China, India and Brazil, which had stopped growing are looking stronger. Private sector confidence in these countries had been poor recently and has improved somewhat.
Eswar Prasad is senior fellow, Global Economy and Development
new century chair in International Trade and Economics. Karim Foda is research associate, Global Economy and Development,
and Arnav Sahu is a student at Cornell University.
Posted by Elena del Valle on October 11, 2013
Capture the Mindshare and the Market Share Will Follow
Some people are brand loyal because they believe that those brands provide them with extraordinary value that cannot be acquired any other way. That is how Libby Gill, a Los Angeles management consultant, sees the relationship between consumers and brands. She says that the most successful brands are carefully built by people who are meticulous about getting certain things right.
In Capture the Mindshare and the Market Share Will Follow: The Art and Science of Building Brands (Palgrave MacMillan, $26), a 240-page hardcover book published this year, she explains her thinking. When she writes about mindshare she’s referring to the heads, trust, loyalty and hearts of a company’s customers.
In the book, she promises readers a blueprint for deep and lasting connections for executives, entrepreneurs, leaders and those who seek to influence, sell, persuade or attract customers. She defines branding as the ability to maintain an on going connection through awareness of value that drives others to act and create loyalty born of hope, trust and respect.
She describes seven elements she sees as necessary for the creation of the powerful company client relationships that generates customer loyalty and promotes economic success among successful brands. The elements are: Clarify Customer Benefits, Commit to Your Customer, Collaborate with Your Customer, Connect with Your Customer, Compete with Your Competition, Communicate with Confidence and Certainty, and Contribute to the Community.
An executive coach and branding expert with over 20 years of industry experience, Gill is the former head of communications and public relations for Sony, Universal, and Turner Broadcasting. Her clients include ABC-Disney, Nike, PayPal, Warner Brothers, and Wells Fargo. Her previous books are Traveling Hopefully: How to Lose Your Family Baggage and Jumpstart Your Life, and You Unstuck: Mastering the New Rules of Risk-taking in Work and Life.
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