New interactive TV ad format captivates consumers beyond the 30-second spot.
REDMOND, Wash. — Jan. 7, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the double-digit engagement results of the first NUads experience, interactive polling, which it rolled out earlier in the fall of 2012 on Xbox LIVE in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The first wave of NUads was provided by a lineup of top advertisers, including SUBWAY® Restaurants and Toyota, which on average saw the following results with their ads on Xbox LIVE: (more…)
A person’s style of speech — not just the pitch of his or her voice — may help determine whether the listener perceives the speaker to be male or female, according to a University of Colorado Boulder researcher who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male.
The way people pronounce their “s” sounds and the amount of resonance they use when speaking contributes to the perception of gender, according to Lal Zimman, whose findings are based on research he completed while earning his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s linguistics department. (more…)
Like the impact of an elephant herd grazing on grassland, multinational banks shape the financial environment to an extent that far outweighs their small number. And like a contagious person on a transnational flight, when these giant, interconnected banks succumb to financial ills, they are uniquely positioned to infect wide swaths of the financial system.
Researchers from Princeton University, the Bank of England and the University of Oxford applied methods inspired by ecosystem stability and contagion models to banking meltdowns and found that large national and international banks wield an influence and potentially destructive power that far exceeds their actual size. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. – After imaging during the holidays, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity resumed driving Jan. 3 and pulled within arm’s reach of a sinuous rock feature called “Snake River.”
Snake River is a thin curving line of darker rock cutting through flatter rocks and jutting above sand. Curiosity’s science team plans to get a closer look at it before proceeding to other nearby rocks.(more…)
Berkeley Lab research could lead to a better understanding of the Arctic ecosystem’s impact on the planet’s climate
What does pulling a radar-equipped sled across the Arctic tundra have to do with improving our understanding of climate change? It’s part of a new way to explore the little-known world of permafrost soils, which store almost as much carbon as the rest of the world’s soils and about twice as much as is in the atmosphere.
The new approach combines several remote-sensing tools to study the Arctic landscape—above and below ground—in high resolution and over large spatial scales.It was developed by a group of researchers that includesscientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). (more…)
UA physicist Andrei Lebed has stirred the physics community with an intriguing idea yet to be tested experimentally: The world’s most iconic equation, Albert Einstein’s E=mc2, may be correct or not depending on where you are in space.
With the first explosions of atomic bombs, the world became witness to one of the most important and consequential principles in physics: Energy and mass, fundamentally speaking, are the same thing and can, in fact, be converted into each other.
This was first demonstrated by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and famously expressed in his iconic equation, E=mc2, where E stands for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light (squared). (more…)
Biodiversity can be considered as an imperative factor that plays a crucial role in poverty reduction owing to its basic goods and the ecosystem services it provides. Over three billion people rely on coastal and marine biodiversity and about 1.7 billion people depend upon non-timber forest products and forests for biodiversity.
Common issues relating to biodiversity can be classified as:
Biodiversity as a source of income and food
World’s poor population, especially living in rural areas are dependent on biological resources for meeting most of their needs. At least, 90 percent of their needs relating to fuel, shelter, medicines and food come from biological resources. (more…)