I was just looking through my team members' blogs one last time before I left for spring break (Ft. Lauderdale here I come!!) and just as she states the article of her article post caught her eye, so did her post catch mine. I cannot remember who, but someone else in my group also wrote about this same article, obviously Internet Curfews for College Students is a popular topic amongst us college students.
This slashdot posting talks about how students at a particular college in India will cut off from internet access during the night hours. It is stated that the internet has a negative impact on students' "academic performance, personality development, and extra curricular activities." Just as Kathleen's reaction to this curfew is that it is ridiculous, I must say that I cannot come up with a better word to describe my feelings about this as well. Not only is the internet an entertaining medium, it is also a great academic resource to have right at your fingertips that college students should have access to. I have absolutly no idea what the work load is like for the students at ITT Bombay is like, but I can only assume that they are kept busy with heavy work loads throughout the year. This being said, being a college student myself, I know that the evening hours are when I do most of my work, and the internet is a big part of that. Like this class for example, right now. It is almost 10 at night and I am on the internet doing work for class, not being distracted. If we were to have a curfew also, what I am doing right now would not be possible.
Also, just as Kathleen mentioned, having internet access shut off by a particiular time each night would be like putting a time limit on all assignments, even if they were not due until the next day. And how about online courses? Personally I love them and I love having the ability to do the assignments on my own time, and yes, sometimes that just happens to be late at night, but I'm ok with that.
Bottom line, I think this curfew idea is just crazy talk. Yes, being at school we are required to complete a lot of work to get good grades, but we are also here to socialize, hang out and party. The fact that we are on the internet late at night really shows no indication that we are bad students! I completely agree with all the points that Kathleen brought up, but her reasons are certainly not an exhaustive list, and I'm pretty sure that those students at ITT Bombay are going to come up with a long list of their own reasons as to why this idea is ridiculous as well.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Vanity Search
In class Professor Brown has metioned a few times that one of the most common searches done on google.com is a vanity search. This is when you type in your name in the search field and see what comes up... possibly actually you. I decided to do this. I tried a few combinations. First I put in "Andrea Lynn Boyer"and all that came up was someone else's blog wishing someone a happy 1st birthday.. not me :( so I revised my search to just "Andrea Boyer" and there were a lot of matches (747 to be exact). What I found is that apparenly I'm an artist from France! Obviously this is not about me, but it is not surprising since my most of my family is of French decent. I looked in the images that came up under my name and saw all of the artwork that this other Andrea Boyer did. Shes actually really good. All of her work is in black and white, but they're all of extremely odd things, such as legs crossed, shoes, and various naked people. Not really my style. Some of the pictures are so vague/weird that you cannot even make out what they are actually of. Pretty cool though.
Another common Andrea Boyer result were news feeds about a woman in Clay County Florida that was murdered in mid-Janurary 2007. Apparently there have been no leads as to who killed her but there are videos of her entering a Vet Clinic that same night and never leaving. There have been a few suspects brought to court but all of them have pleaded non guilty. So far this murder case is still a mystery. There is even the Andrea Boyer Foundation to help raise money for Andrea's family to pay for the funeral and burial arrangements.
Other than these two results the rest of them are just random links here and there. Most of them are in French or some other language I cannot make out. Once again, I am not surprised that my name is associated with a lot of French webpages since both my first and last name are extremely common in France. This was an interesting project to do and I have honestly never done it before. I never would have thought that there would be so many Andrea Boyer's in this world!
Another common Andrea Boyer result were news feeds about a woman in Clay County Florida that was murdered in mid-Janurary 2007. Apparently there have been no leads as to who killed her but there are videos of her entering a Vet Clinic that same night and never leaving. There have been a few suspects brought to court but all of them have pleaded non guilty. So far this murder case is still a mystery. There is even the Andrea Boyer Foundation to help raise money for Andrea's family to pay for the funeral and burial arrangements.
Other than these two results the rest of them are just random links here and there. Most of them are in French or some other language I cannot make out. Once again, I am not surprised that my name is associated with a lot of French webpages since both my first and last name are extremely common in France. This was an interesting project to do and I have honestly never done it before. I never would have thought that there would be so many Andrea Boyer's in this world!
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Another Medfield Edit...
Soooo I messed up. According to the syllabus we can only edit a wikipedia article once every week, and I of course went and did my biggest edit after only 5 days of my previous edit so this will not count as the third edit to this article. Regardless, here is what I edited:
- In the Geography section there was only statistics about the size of the town, so I decided to add the names of all the towns that border Medfield. This is a pretty important bit of information and is definitely relevant to the geography of the town.
- The History section was pretty weak and offered very little information about the history of Medfield. I realize that this section is supposed to be a brief explaination of history for someone to read quickly, but it was definitely lacking. Therefore, I did not change what was being discussed, I simply embellished a little and gave more specific details. For example, I added the year of the King Phillip's War and added specifics about what in the town was burned, and also added that Medfield was the 43rd town in Massachusetts to be established.
- Finally, in the Trivia section I decided to add the sentence "The Medfield State Hospital, located at 45 Hospital Road, opened in 1896 but at at its peak housed 1,500 patients. The hospital was closed on April 3, 2003." I added this because I feel that this is an important fact to mention about the town... not just any town has a state hospital!
As you can see this was my biggest post yet, and a pretty good one too! Now I have to come up with more Medfield facts to add to complete my last wiki edit. Then I will move on to my other three articles to edit! Woo!
Friday, March 16, 2007
VALS Survey
Today I took the VALS survey, which is a marketing and consulting tool that helps businesses worldwide develop and execute more effective strategies. What the survey does is break consumers into segments to which companies can choose to target market to based on specific personality traits. The basic theory behind VALS is that people express their personalities through their behaviors, which is why the survey asks mostly questions about what you like to do in your spare time and what type of activities you are interested in.
After taking the survey, my results stated that I am mostly an experiencer and secondly an innovator. While these sound nice, reading the experiencer description actually makes me sound like a slave to fashion, which I am definitely not. Contrary to what the description states, I do not spend too much on fashion related products, nor do I enjoy participating in sports and outdoor recreational activities. Perhaps these qualities were given to me because I agreed with most of the statements regarding fashion. However, if there had been a neutral option to choose, I would have gone with that, but since there was not, I had no choice but to choose "slightly agree". This response probably skewed my results into categorizing myself as highly fashionable individula.
As for the innovator quality, I wish I could say this was true but unfortunately I feel like this is an overstatement. Although I do consider myself to be successful and motivated, I do not feel that I am successful enough (at least not yet) to be considered an innovator. I cannot afford to be an innovator who apparently has upscale tastes for niche products and services. I wish.
After taking the survey and receiving my results I quickly skimmed through the other possible outcomes. Overall, I would say that none of these really relate to the way I live my life. All of them either have an extremely negative connotation or positive one, I think I'm somewhere in between. If I were to choose from these options I would say that I am a combination of an Achiever and maybe a Striver for various reasons. I think that the questions on this survey are too specific to make accurate assumptions about individuals and they were completely wrong about me!
After taking the survey, my results stated that I am mostly an experiencer and secondly an innovator. While these sound nice, reading the experiencer description actually makes me sound like a slave to fashion, which I am definitely not. Contrary to what the description states, I do not spend too much on fashion related products, nor do I enjoy participating in sports and outdoor recreational activities. Perhaps these qualities were given to me because I agreed with most of the statements regarding fashion. However, if there had been a neutral option to choose, I would have gone with that, but since there was not, I had no choice but to choose "slightly agree". This response probably skewed my results into categorizing myself as highly fashionable individula.
As for the innovator quality, I wish I could say this was true but unfortunately I feel like this is an overstatement. Although I do consider myself to be successful and motivated, I do not feel that I am successful enough (at least not yet) to be considered an innovator. I cannot afford to be an innovator who apparently has upscale tastes for niche products and services. I wish.
After taking the survey and receiving my results I quickly skimmed through the other possible outcomes. Overall, I would say that none of these really relate to the way I live my life. All of them either have an extremely negative connotation or positive one, I think I'm somewhere in between. If I were to choose from these options I would say that I am a combination of an Achiever and maybe a Striver for various reasons. I think that the questions on this survey are too specific to make accurate assumptions about individuals and they were completely wrong about me!
Sunday, March 11, 2007
Subliminal Advertising
While going through the required blog readings I found an small article that caught my eye. It was titled "Subliminal Messages Might Actually Work". The reason that I stopped to read this article is that we had been talking about this exact topic in one of my other marketing classes.
According to this blog post and the article linked to it there is a substantial amount of evidence that when we are exposed to subliminal messages our brain can and will register the information and store it without us even knowing. However, whether or not this information can impact our purchase dicisions is still being tested. Dr Bahador Bahrami of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience states that he "believes that it's likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions -- but that is just speculation at this point." Studies are currently being done world wide to test this theory.
Although this may seem really cool (or maybe not) there are a lot of implications of sending subliminal messages to the public. Currently this strategy is illegal in many technologically advanced countries, such as England, but is still legal in the United States. By sending a stimulus that is below the level of conscious awareness many people will feel violated. We like to be in control of our lives and what we do. To think that advertisers are impacting the decisions we make as to what we buy will upset a lot of people. One heated response to this blog post states that "just plain old advertising can make people buy things against their will", which is true. When we see ads, pay attention to them and then register the information they can drastically impact the purchase decisions we make. So why the need for subliminal marketing?
Overall, I feel that this is a really new and interesting technique for marketing to use, in theory. However, I also feel like it will not go over well with the general public. As stated before, people do not like to think that they do not control their lives. Sending messages that are stored in our brain without us knowing seems like an unfair advantage for marketing companies to have. I say that while it is interesting and should be tested, if it is to be used marketing companies need to be prepared to deal with the public's reaction. For now, just stick to plain old advertising.
According to this blog post and the article linked to it there is a substantial amount of evidence that when we are exposed to subliminal messages our brain can and will register the information and store it without us even knowing. However, whether or not this information can impact our purchase dicisions is still being tested. Dr Bahador Bahrami of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience states that he "believes that it's likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions -- but that is just speculation at this point." Studies are currently being done world wide to test this theory.
Although this may seem really cool (or maybe not) there are a lot of implications of sending subliminal messages to the public. Currently this strategy is illegal in many technologically advanced countries, such as England, but is still legal in the United States. By sending a stimulus that is below the level of conscious awareness many people will feel violated. We like to be in control of our lives and what we do. To think that advertisers are impacting the decisions we make as to what we buy will upset a lot of people. One heated response to this blog post states that "just plain old advertising can make people buy things against their will", which is true. When we see ads, pay attention to them and then register the information they can drastically impact the purchase decisions we make. So why the need for subliminal marketing?
Overall, I feel that this is a really new and interesting technique for marketing to use, in theory. However, I also feel like it will not go over well with the general public. As stated before, people do not like to think that they do not control their lives. Sending messages that are stored in our brain without us knowing seems like an unfair advantage for marketing companies to have. I say that while it is interesting and should be tested, if it is to be used marketing companies need to be prepared to deal with the public's reaction. For now, just stick to plain old advertising.
Second Wiki edit to Medfield
Continuing with the same article, I noticed there were a few more changes that needed to be made to the Medfield Wikipedia article. First of all, In the edit I made last time someone went and changed the link to the website. Instead of having the address written out it now has a little arrow to click on that will connect you to the outside web page. At first I was bummed that someone changed what I did, but overall I think it looks better the way it is now. At least they didn't change any of the content I added!!
For my second edit I was originally going to add a link to the website for the Town of Medfield but found that it was already on there. Instead, I decided that there were two edits that people had done that were completely unnecessary. The first one was in the section titled "Notable Residents" This is where all of the famous who live in Medfield are listed. At the bottom of the list someone added "Uber Jason: basically the mann!". I thought this was ridiculous. It was clearly some kid adding either himself or his friend to be funny. I can guarentee that there is no one in Mefield named Uber Jason that everyone is talking about, which is why I decided to delete this entry.
My second change was in the "History" section where the wiki article talks about Richard Desorgher and how he wrote a few books on the history of Medfield. While I feel that this is an important fact to mention, there were many links in this section that were unnecessary. For the word "books" someone made a link to a wikipedia article describing what books are. I think that it is safe to assume that everyone reading this Mefield article knows what books are. Once again, I decided to delete this link.
For my second edit I was originally going to add a link to the website for the Town of Medfield but found that it was already on there. Instead, I decided that there were two edits that people had done that were completely unnecessary. The first one was in the section titled "Notable Residents" This is where all of the famous who live in Medfield are listed. At the bottom of the list someone added "Uber Jason: basically the mann!". I thought this was ridiculous. It was clearly some kid adding either himself or his friend to be funny. I can guarentee that there is no one in Mefield named Uber Jason that everyone is talking about, which is why I decided to delete this entry.
My second change was in the "History" section where the wiki article talks about Richard Desorgher and how he wrote a few books on the history of Medfield. While I feel that this is an important fact to mention, there were many links in this section that were unnecessary. For the word "books" someone made a link to a wikipedia article describing what books are. I think that it is safe to assume that everyone reading this Mefield article knows what books are. Once again, I decided to delete this link.
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