By Francis Moran
As is often the case at this time of year, I am reminded of the tiny mission church pictured here. It is located in Roma, a rural village in Lesotho, a tiny country in southern Africa. Besides being the gateway to Lesotho’s majestic mountainous highlands, Roma is also home to both a long-standing Roman Catholic mission and the country’s national university.
And it’s where my family and I celebrated Christmas in 1968.
By Linda Forrest
In honour of Halloween, this post is a round-up of the frightful ways that PR can scare away prospects and editors and how bad PR haunts those who neglect to adhere to best practices. Boo!
Frightfully bad PR practices
Last month, I wrote a whole post about bad publicity, but it’s worth scaring you silly again with the key points. At this very moment, there are PR practitioners who can’t write, can’t pitch, who are selling short your opportunity to tell your story, offering all strategy with no implementation or implementing a spray-and-pray program without any strategy to back it up. Frightening, isn’t it?
This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
In my last post we looked at research that suggests there may be a darker side to our growing reliance on technology. The brain development of our “digital natives” may even be negatively affected by continued exposure and use of video and computer applications. But is this truly the case?
Barbara Arrowsmith Young struggled with dyslexia while growing up and had difficulties with problem solving and visual and auditory memory. Finding connections between things, such as the relationship between the big hand and the little hand on a clock, was impossible. However, she also had areas of brilliance. Tests done later in life proved that her auditory and visual memory was in the 99th percentile and her frontal lobes were exceptionally developed, giving her a driven, dogged quality. She learned enough tricks to compensate for her difficulties and went on to study psychology in university.
This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
Do you ever wonder, as I often do, if there is a dark side to modern video and digital technology? If we are indeed creatures of our animal evolution, then is our technology becoming harmful to our bodies, or, more particularly, our brains? If you work for a technology-driven company, are there unintended psychological consequences arising from what you do?
UCLA-based neuroscientist Gary Small and his author wife Gigi Vorgan think so. They say exposure to technology is actually changing the human brain, and these changes are especially pronounced in young people who have grown up with computers – what they refer to as “Digital Natives.” And their research has some far reaching implications for parents, educators and young people themselves as new media technologies become more and more pervasive.
Using functional MRI scanning to monitor brain activity of subjects, two groups of subjects – those with lots of experience using the Internet, and those who had little to no experience with computers – were asked to perform a simple Google search.
By Alexandra Reid
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
This powerful idea comes from Alvin Toffler, an American writer and futurist best known for his works discussing digital, corporate and communication revolutions and technological singularity. It’s a thoughtful quote that sums up the core theme of the TEDx Ottawa event nicely. Its theme, “creative actions,” explored the creative effort that goes into reversing, reworking and reinventing previously held ideas and the profound results that come from taking this kind of action.
What is TED?
