Wednesday's flowers

shrinking paper directory advertising

The local paper directory business is shrinking rapidly.  Consider Yell Group, which publishes Yellowbook and describes itself as “a leading international directories business operating in the classified advertising market through print, online and phone-based media in the United Kingdom, United States, Spain and Latin America.”  The Yell Group’s presentation of financial results for the first [...]


Tagged:

traditional news: an academic style

The rise of interactive media has directed attention to differences in communicative style.  “News is a conversation” and “conversational marketing” have become rallying slogans for new-media news reporting and advertising initiatives.   Conversation uses words and grammatical constructs in characteristically different ways and frequencies than does traditional news reporting and public relations releases. Experts in corpus [...]


Tagged:

the masses

Right leg, left arm, left leg, right arm pump forward numbered torsos with identifying peculiarities. The House of Lords mounts an enquiry: name, age, years worked, state of health six thousand workers manufacturing in a distant factory. A crescendo of foot falls and the onslaught arrives threads drawing and twisting bobbing breasts and bulging muscles [...]

Wednesday's flowers

to the teacher in Nairobi

Thanks for your prayers.

boys are less communicative than girls

Parents, teachers, and others who frequently interact with children commonly think that boys are less communicative than girls. Consistent with this common sense, a scholarly article on sex differences in volubility observed: Females are typically more voluble than males when speaking with a same-sex conversational partner of their own choosing.  Exceptions to this, when they [...]


Tagged:

both sexes talk longer with women

The best, published, empirical work on sex differences in the use of communication devices is from researchers working for France Telecom.  Smoreda and Licoppe (2000) studied telephone calling behavior across four months in 317 households randomly selected from telephone-owning households in three regions of France.   They collected both call-billing records (which are more accurate [...]


Tagged:

musical stimulus package

With many economies heading into a depression, government-organized economic stimulus packages are attracting widespread attention.  Stimulation is imperative for encouraging gross national output.  But governments alone cannot provide sufficient stimulation.  And life is more than just economics.   Perceptive observers and highly experienced persons report that stimulus packages come in many shapes, forms, and sizes.   Uninformed [...]


Tagged:

old war

In the middle of an Iowa cornfield, a girl sits cross-legged amidst the stalks and songs caressing the nose of a nuclear missile. Further below, in Siberia, shame rides out to die alone in the woods while wrestlers and con-artists take over the town. Do you believe that codes multiply in dueling clones? Do you [...]

Next Page »