Will we be able to predict natural disasters soonly?

In June 2013, scientists from the NASA’s IFloodS program were on hand to study the powerful storm. The researchers gathered data radar dishes, ground moisture sensors and rain gauges, which they then compared to data and images gathered by orbital satellites passing overhead. Their goal: Double-checking estimates of rainfall based upon satellite data. If they’re able to fine-tune those calculations, they eventually hope to use their weather satellites to spot and provide an early warning of when midwestern rivers may overflow their banks and cause flooding.

The IFloodS program is just one part of NASA’s other, less-publicized but extremely critical mission of trying to find ways to protect humans from various natural disasters on our own planet.

To that end, NASA spends more than $1.8 billion annually on earth sciences — more than it spends upon studying other planets. The agency’s research programs include efforts to predict earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, forest fires and powerful storms, and to give us more warning to prepare for them, largely by using data gathered by satellites from the vantage point of orbital space. In addition, NASA’s Near Earth Object Program uses both Earth-based and orbital observatories to identify and track asteroids and comets whose paths bring them close to Earth –including some that might possibly smash into our planet’s surface and cause massive devastation and loss of life, or possibly even trigger a wave of extinctions.

Predicting Hurricane Intensity

If you live in a coastal region in which you’re vulnerable to hurricanes, there are two crucial pieces of information that you want from weather forecasters. The first is what the hurricane’s path will be, so that you know whether or not it’s going to hit the place where you live. The second is how powerful the storm is going to be.

In 2014, NASA is planning to launch a new array of satellites that may give weather forecasters even more help in predicting hurricane intensity. The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), developed by engineers at the University of Michigan, will put a constellation of eight small satellites into a low-Earth orbit. The satellites’ sensors will measure various properties in the ocean and the atmosphere, with the aim of coming up with a more precise model for how tropical cyclones form and how they strengthen.

Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis

Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have one important tell-tale sign in common. As the pressure in them builds up before they unleash their fury, they cause small deformations in Earth’s crust. If scientists could spot those subtle changes, they might be able to predict more precisely when catastrophic eruptions and quakes will occur.

In 2011, Song and Ohio State University professor C.K. Shum used Japanese GPS data to analyze the particularly destructive tsunami generated by a March 2011 earthquake off northern Japan, and discovered that the wave actually was composed of two different wave fronts that merged and doubled in intensity as they passed over rugged ridges on the seafloor. That knowledge may help forecasters in the future to predict similarly super-powerful waves, and hopefully speed evacuations of coastal areas.

Killer Asteroids

In February 2013, a 60-foot-across (18-meter), 11,000-metric ton (12,125-ton) meteor exploded in the sky over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,200 people. Coincidentally, that same day, an even bigger object–an asteroid half the size of a football field–passed about 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) from Earth. Had it struck, it would have exploded with a force of about 2.4 million tons (2.2 million metric tons) of dynamite, the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshima-sized A-bombs.

To hunt for them, NASA has repurposed an existing satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, originally launched in 2009 to search for distant stars and galaxies. NASA envisions that WISE will discover about 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects and gather information about the size and other properties of about 2,000 more.

WISE and the NEO program hopefully will give NASA advance warning of an object on a collision course—and time to implement a defensive strategy, whether that means diverting the asteroid with gravity tractors, solar sails or other future technologies, or simply destroying it with a nuclear blast. That might help us to avoid the worst natural disaster ever.

Related articles

• 6 oct nasa asteroid 2013 (educationbulletinboard.com)
• Nasa Shuts Down ‘Asteroid Watch’ In Wake Of US Government Crisis (huffingtonpost.co.uk)
• NASA will not warn us about asteroids over Twitter during the shutdown (washingtonpost.com)
• How is the Government Shutdown affecting NASA? (io9.com)
• Risk of bigger tsunamis (radionz.co.nz)
• Scientists find evidence of supervolcanoes on Mars (forobserve.wordpress.com)
• Photos: Natural Disasters From Space (abcnews.go.com)

Leaders: surf on social networks to not get carried away by the wave!

Equity risk, marketing, legal or image… Rather than see his heckled by sounding social networking reputation, the manager can choose to engage proactively on social networks.

The leader is a media

The question is no longer whether lightning may fall, but where and how it will hit! Power reaction online for about a DG can affect, temporarily or long term, the market price of his company or brand perception .

Capitalizing on the transformational power of social media while mitigating its risks calls for a new type of leader. The dynamics of social media amplify the need for qualities that have long been a staple of effective leadership, such as strategic creativity, authentic communication, and the ability to deal with a corporation’s social and political dynamics and to design an agile and responsive organization.

Social media also adds new dimensions to these traits. For example, it requires the ability to create compelling, engaging multimedia content. Leaders need to excel at co-creation and collaboration—the currencies of the social-media world. Executives must understand the nature of different social-media tools and the unruly forces they can unleash.

Equally important, there’s an organizational dimension: leaders must cultivate a new, technologically linked social infrastructure that by design promotes constant interaction across physical and geographical boundaries, as well as self-organized discourse and exchange.

This interplay of leadership skills and related organizational-design principles organizational media literacy, which is defined along six dimensions that are interdependent:

1. The leader as producer

With video cameras achieving near ubiquity and film clips uploading in the blink of an eye to YouTube or other platforms, the tools for producing and sharing rich media are in everyone’s hands. More than a few executives have started to incorporate video streams into their blogs.

2. The leader as distributor

Business leaders have traditionally disseminated information along a controlled, linear chain that begins after the development of a formal meaning-creation process—think of how your company creates and distributes memos explaining new initiatives. While traditional distribution pathways won’t disappear, social media revolutionizes the standard information process by reversing it. Social communication makes distribution the starting point and then invites company audiences to cocreate and contextualize content to create new meaning. Messages are rebroadcast and repurposed at will by recipients who repost videos, retweet and comment on blogs, and use fragments of other people’s content to create their own mash-ups.

3. The leader as recipient

Social media has created an ocean of information. We are drowning in a never-ending flood of e-mails, tweets, Facebook updates, RSS feeds, and more that’s often hard to navigate.

As a first step, leaders must become proficient at using the software tools and settings that help users filter the important stuff from the unimportant. But playing in today’s turbulent environment requires more than just filtering skills.

In traditional corporate communications, consumption is a mostly passive act: you are pretty much left alone to make sense of messages and to assess their authenticity and credibility. In the social-media realm, information gets shared and commented on within seconds, and executives must decide when (and when not) to reply, what messages should be linked to their blogs, when to copy material and mash it up with their own, and what to share with their various communities. The creation of meaning becomes a collaborative process in which leaders have to play a thoughtful part, as this is the very place where acceptance of or resistance to messages will be built.

4. The leader as adviser and orchestrator

In most companies, social-media literacy is in its infancy. Excitement often runs high for the technology’s potential to span functional and divisional silos. But without guidance and coordination, and without the capabilities we discuss here, social-media enthusiasm can backfire and cause severe damage.

To harvest the potential of social media, leaders must play a proactive role in raising the media literacy of their immediate reports and stakeholders. Within this 360-degree span, executives should become trusted advisers, enabling and supporting their environment in the use of social tools, while ensuring that a culture of learning and reflection takes hold. As a new and media-savvy generation enters the workplace, smart leaders can accelerate organizational change by harnessing these digital natives’ expertise through “reverse mentoring” systems.

5. The leader as architect

Leaders who have steeped themselves in new media will testify that it requires them to navigate between potentially conflicting goals: they must strive to establish an organizational and technical infrastructure that encourages free exchange but also enforce controls that mitigate the risks of irresponsible use. This is a tough organizational-design challenge.

Most companies have a defined formal organization, with explicit vertical systems of accountability. But below the surface of org charts and process manuals we find an implicit, less manageable “informal organization,” which has always been important and now gets amplified through social media. The leader’s task is to marry vertical accountability with networked horizontal collaboration in a way that is not mutually destructive.

6. The leader as analyst

As companies start to digest the consequences of the Web 2.0 revolution, the next paradigm shift is already knocking on the door. The next generation of connectivity—the Internet of Things—will link together appliances, cars, and all kinds of objects. As a result, there will be about 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.3 This transformation will open new opportunities, spawn new business models, and herald yet another major inflection point that leaders must manage.

It’s imperative to keep abreast of such emerging trends and innovations—not just their competitive and marketplace implications, but also what they mean for communications technologies, which are fundamental for creating an agile, responsive organization. Executives who monitor weak signals and experiment with new technologies and devices will be able to act more quickly and capture the advantages of early adoption.

Related articles

• 6 Dimensions: Understanding Social Media Literacy for Business Leaders (staples.com)
• Lessons From Fast-Growth Company CEOs Go Beyond Social Media (domo.com)
• The Next Frontiers in Social Media (grasshopper.com)
• Social media and your small business: Perfect together (hiscoxusa.com)
• Time For Social Media Users To Grow #Press #Media #LightReading (greyhoundtechnocrat.com)

June 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net

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• April 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net (worldofinnovations.net)
•  May 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net (worldofinnovations.net)

The Rise Of Social Commerce: How Tweets, Pins & Likes Can Turn Into Sales

1 article showing how in the future the social media will be the entry gate for e-commerce web sites that will generate more and more revenue. We will for sure use more and more social media to access the right web site we would like to watch, more than web search tools (as Google, Bing or Yahoo).

This is why search tools companies buy currently social media web sites as YouTube for Google or Tumblr for Yahoo. These aggregation will continue in the next years.

Related articles

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• Silicon Alley Insider: The Rise Of Social Commerce: How Tweets, Pins And Likes Can Turn Into Sales (businessinsider.com)
• E-commerce Retailer BellyBling Utilizing Social Media Marketing for Modeling Contest (prweb.com)
• The Marketer’s Guide to Proper Social Media Etiquette (hubspot.com)
• The Eight Biggest Social Media Customer Service Fails of 2012 (staples.com)

TECH in AMERICA (TiA)

by Josh Luger (courtesy BusinessInsider)

BI Intelligence

Overall usage on social media platforms is exploding. Millions and millions of consumers are expressing likes on Facebook, tweeting about products on Twitter, and pinning on Pinterest every single day.

Retailers and brands are therefore increasingly focusing their attention on social commerce.

But, many struggle with the question: how do you convert a “like,” a “tweet,” or “pin” into a sale?

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at successful examples of businesses and business models for generating commerce via social media-based strategies, analyze Pinterest’s success as a social commerce platform, look at Facebook’s potential as a social commerce contender, and examine the e-commerce conversion and order value gap.

Here’s an overview of the converging trends that promise to transform social media into a viable commerce platform:

The rise of mobile: The rise of mobile, which means shoppers can price-compare and solicit advice…

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May 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net

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• April 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net (worldofinnovations.net)

Pros and Cons of Social Networking for Insurance Agents

Nowadays we can almost say that virtual life became as important as the real life, at least when it comes to business. It certainly helped us to broaden the number of acquaintances.The computerization of socializing has become an inevitable part of the present and the future.General internet statistics shows that it took the radio 38 years, the television 13 years, and the internet 4 years to reach 50 million users. These statistics speak for themselves.

Social media has become an increasingly important tool to engage clients and understand their needs and preferences. More and more agents are starting to use such websites as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in order to interact with their customers on a daily basis.

Recent statistics

• one out of every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook

• 61% of LinkedIn members use it as their primary professional networking site

• 34% of medium and 27% of small businesses use social media for business

• 340 million tweets are sent every day

• 62% of marketers say that social media has become more important to their marketing campaigns in the last 6 months

But as much as this type of communication can help you, it isn’t perfect. Here are the general pros and cons of this situation.

The pros

• Price- most social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are free to use

• Speed -sending personal messages takes seconds

• Ease- easy promotional method for your career

• Opportunity- engage with people that you wouldn’t meet in real life

• Promptness- present the up-to-date information or publicize events in real time

• Comfort – with a business social network, you can take your entire network with you

• Availability- you can be active on social media anywhere

• Growth- broaden your clients data base

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? The advantages have caught your attention. On the other hand, you should be well aware of the possible pitfalls.

The cons

• Sharing- personal information is easily available and can put you at risk

• Fraud – fake advertisements can invite unwanted viruses and spywares to your computer

• Tracking- employers can always track you

• Hacking- you can get hacked

However, there is no need to panic about it, as there is always the solution for every situation. Just follow this simple and effective advice that will keep you out of trouble.

How to Use Social Media Safely and Effectively

• Use privacy settings wisely

• Change your password often

• Make sure everything is right before sending an update or a tweet or anything else

• Carefully map out and consider the negative and positive side of the information you

• Would like to post and how it is going to influence on your personal and professional life

• Humanize yourself and you will see more people will come to you

• Maximize your business’s potential by participating in social networking sites
  also remember not to be too pushy about your achievements

• It takes time to establish the fruitful relationships, so don’t rush

• Be sure to maintain security settings so you could avoid cyber-stalking and identity theft or any other form of harassment

The concerns about social networking should not overwhelm you. Just find the right platforms for your business and develop a following. Eventually you will see results. Do you know other effective methods that you would recommend in order to boost up the career perspectives?

Related articles

• Pros and Cons of Social Networking for Insurance Agents (insurancefiles.com)
• Social Media Strategy for Small Business 2013: A Totally Honest Look at Social Networks (amsterdamprinting.com)
• Do You REALLY Need All Those Social Media Networks? (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• Social Media in the Corporate World (hispanicbusiness.com)
• Ask an Expert: How to Pick the Right Social Network For Your Business (blogs.constantcontact.com)
• 10 Hot Social Networks to Watch (mashable.com)
• 10 Must Have Social Media Tools For Small Businesses (business2community.com)

Facebook Pressured to Take Action on Violence Against Women

Inaction from the leader of social networks against Women is not anymore acceptable. This is true also for all the words that do not respect others. It is important to understand that it is part of the keys successes of future of social networks. The anonymity may encourage some of us to express what they have worse in them. Innovative Technologies should prevent public to may authorize to express this violence: how to make it?

Related articles

• Facebook bows to ‘hate’ campaigners (bbc.co.uk)
• Facebook hit by protest over offensive posts (thetimes.co.uk)
• Facebook agrees to block sexual assault ‘humor’ (redalertpolitics.com)
• Facebook bows to pressure, vows to rid itself of sexist hate speech (go.theregister.com)

Australia: Social Network addiction

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The 2013 Yellow Social Media Report has analyzed that a growing number of Australians are using social network at an addictive rate wherever they can, even in toilet cubicles. According to the study, three out of every five internet users are accessing these sites more than five times a day, making it a total of seven hours a day.

In a report by News.com, the study found that the time spent by Australians for social media usage has gone up this year, as smartphones have become the most popular way of accessing social media. Sensis digital partnerships and innovation executive general manager Kelly Brough said the study indicated the large growth of social media in Australia.

It was also the first time smartphones took over laptop computers for social media usage. The survey presented figures about various locations of social media access. Of the people surveyed, 34 percent logged on at work, 13 percent at school 18 percent in car, presumably from the passenger’s seat, 44 percent in bed, 7 percent in bathroom and 6 percent in the toilet.

Brough indicated that social media is important to people as part of their daily routine Australian social media users had an average of 258 friends, followers or fans, and women were more likely to use social media and share frequently Lack of interest and privacy concerns was the reason why Australians avoided joining the social media networks.

A total of 65 percent online Australians use social networks, added the report.

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• Athletes and social networks (fieldoo.com)
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Social Media Etiquette

About the importance to understand that all thinks written by anybody on social media can be seen by everybody. It can impact their life… and their company depending on what they are writting!

Related articles

• The Marketer’s Guide to Proper Social Media Etiquette (hubspot.com)
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• The Dos and Don’ts of Social Media Etiquette (geeksugar.com)

April 2013: Stats of WorldOfInnovations.net

Global overview

For the first month, 623 pages have been viewed and 385 unique visitors have seen WorldOfInnovations.net website. The visitors come from 53 different countries.

Top views by country

% calculated in comparison of pages viewed.

1. France: 193 (31%)
2. United States: 149 (24%)
3. UK: 33 (5%)
4. Japan: 27 (4.5%)
5. Canada: 13 (2%)
6. India: 13 (2%)
7. Germany: 13 (2%)
8. Colombia: 13 (2%)
9. Netherlands: 11 (2%)
10. Pakistan: 11 (2%)

Top pages viewed

% calculated in comparison of pages viewed.

1. Home page & archives: 250 (40%)
2. Q1 2013 Tablets stats: 33 (5%)
3. Babolat: 33 (5%)
4. Top Internet Browsers: 30 (5%)
5. How to innovate with social media: 26 (4%)

Top sites which referrer

% calculated in comparison of unique visitors.

1. Google: 87 (23%)
2. Bing: 29 (7.5%)
3. Yahoo: 24 (6.2%)
4. Twitter: 21 (5.5%)
5. LinkedIn: 19 (5%)
6. WebCrawler: 17 (4.4%)
7. WordPress: 14 (3.6%)
8. Blogger.com: 6 (1.5%)
9. Facebook: 3 (0.75%)