Selling used to be so simple: pack up the wagon, harness the horse, and head to the nearest settlement. Today, retailers have to allocate their marketing dollars across a multitude of channels, from stores, catalogs, and traditional media to websites and apps. Recent research about consumer adoption of new sales channels indicates that marketing campaigns focused on social media and socioeconomic groupings are likely to give the greatest boost to disruptive new channels - but help propel new brick-and-mortar venues as well.
Culture
Archaeologists from the University of York have played a key role in Anglo-Danish research which has suggested the dawn of the Viking Age may have been much earlier - and less violent - than previously believed.
The study by Dr Steve Ashby, of the Department of Archaeology at York, working with colleagues from York and Aarhus University, identified the first signs of the Viking Age around 70 years before the first raid on England.
The existence of gender-based wage gaps in many occupations continues to be a hot-button topic in social and political debates. While much attention has been focused on medium- and lower-wage positions, some studies have shown that wage disparities extend to high-wage, high-prestige positions. According to a new study published in The American Journal of Medicine, women who serve as directors of internal medicine residency programs are paid less than their male counterparts.
Women's magazines influence whether women decide to have a more natural childbirth or not, with most of the messages biased towards promoting the benefits of medicalised birth.
Researchers from Monash University and Queensland University of Technology have studied how popular media influences women's choices for childbirth
The study, published in Women & Health, specifically aimed to assess the effect of communicating the benefits of more natural birth (e.g. no medical intervention such as epidurals or caesarean section).
New developments in personalized and precision medicine (PPM) could offer enormous gains in healthy life expectancy for Americans, but the incentives to develop them are weak, according to Dr Victor Dzau, President of the US Institute of Medicine, and colleagues, writing in a Personal View in The Lancet.
"It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces", comments SISSA neuroscientist Alessandro Treves, "but it's very likely that our brains could get there long before. In fact, it's likely that the brain of rodents gets there very naturally every day".
A large new study in the New England Journal of Medicine examines the impact of growth in Medicare's hospice benefit among nursing home residents between 2004 and 2009. The researchers documented improvement in indicators of care quality, such as less reliance on intensive care and feeding tubes, but also found increased costs to Medicare of $6,761 per patient on average.
Psychologists are to improve online health information on lung cancer after research showed that family members are more likely to search online to encourage loved ones to seek help.
This is one of the outcomes from research by PhD student Julia Mueller based in the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work at The University of Manchester (part of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre) who will present her study today, Thursday 7 May 2015, at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool.
Insurance coverage has increased across all types of insurance since the major provisions of the federal Affordable Care Act took effect, with a total of 16.9 million people becoming newly enrolled through February 2015, according to an estimate based on a survey sample analyzed by RAND Corporation. That is even though coverage through individual non-marketplace policies declined by 1.9 million and coverage from other sources (Medicare, military insurance and state programs) declined by 10 million over the study period.
Male job applicants who are perceived to have high levels of leadership potential are rated as a better employment prospect than a female applicant with proven leadership track record., according to a study by undergraduate student Fatima Tresh, Dr. Georgina Randsley de Moura and Abigail Player from the University of Kent that presented today at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference in Liverpool.
Health interventions to increase exercise in older people could be more successful if they differentiated between people aged 65 to 79 years old and those over 80 years old.
This is the finding presented by Dr. Mark Moss and colleagues from Northumbria University at the Annual Conference of the British Psychology Society being held in Liverpool. Moss is Head of the Psychology Department and the study was undertaken by a PhD student.
A new study examined the relationship between mandatory nap times in childcare and children's night-time sleep duration concurrently and then 12 months later.
"For the first time this study shows a relationship between observed naptime practices in childcare and children's night-time sleep," says Dr. Sally Staton of Queensland University of Technology. The study found children who were exposed to more than 60 minutes mandatory sleep at childcare slept worse at night which continued when they started school.
A majority of American adults say they've tried dieting to lose weight at some point in their lives, and at any given time, about one-third of the adult population say they're currently dieting.
Yet 60 percent of American adults are clinically overweight or obese and more than 16 percent of deaths nationwide are related to diet and physical activity.
They may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but dolphins do, in fact, form highly complex and dynamic networks of friends, according to a recent study by scientists at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University. Dolphins are known for being highly social animals, and a team of researchers at HBOI took a closer look at the interactions between bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) and discovered how they mingle and with whom they spend their time.
Adults who experienced multiple incidents of childhood maltreatment were more than two times as likely to have trouble sleeping than their counterparts who were not maltreated during childhood, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto, University of Ottawa, and Western University. The study appears online in the journal Sleep Medicine.