While we all know how important it is to save our work and make back-ups of those important files, just in case...it is often in retrospect that we "wish" we had done things differently. Well, at least in Microsoft Word, you can create an automatic back-up of your files. These can get annoying, so you might want to turn them on and off if you use Word a lot. However, use it if it's something that makes sense for you. The backup file will have the .bak extension. Excel has something similar, but it's more of an autosave than a back-up file.
Here's how you turn this feature on in Word.
Go to the Tool menu bar and select "Options". Click on the "Save" tab. The first item should say, "Always create back-up copy". Check that, click OK and then you are set.
Don't forget to save your work on your H drive or the server as well so that in case of a hard drive failure you will have another copy!
P.S. There is a third-party solution available for PowerPoint that I found from a Microsoft poster on their site. I can't vouch for it but it might be something worthwhile for our IT group to look into.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Potent Social Forces Influence Smoking Behavior
From the desk of Julia....
Article is interesting in terms of the influence of others on changing health behaviors. We can make use of this type of data to emphasize the importance of modeling through patients and the ability to make use of community and online social networks for positive change.
Potent Social Forces Influence Smoking Behavior
Friends and family have a powerful influence on whether a person quits smoking, and the decision to stop smoking can "spread" from one person to another in a social network, new research suggests. The findings are from a detailed analysis of smoking behavior in more than 12,000 individuals who were followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003, as part of the Framingham Heart Study.
In 1971, the places smokers and nonsmokers held in the social network were indistinguishable. But three decades later, societal views of smoking have changed, and smokers are increasingly at the periphery of social networks and aligned largely with other smokers, according to results published in the May 22 New England Journal of Medicine.
The authors, Drs. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, reported last year that social networks may strongly influence obesity. In the current study, the authors demonstrate that decisions to quit smoking often reflect changes made by groups of people connected to each other, both directly and indirectly. For example, when a spouse quit smoking, the partner's chances of smoking decreased by 67 percent; friends who quit smoking decreased one another's chance of smoking by 36 percent.
"People are connected, and so their health is connected," the researchers write, adding that "cessation of smoking in one person appears to be highly relevant to the smoking behavior of others nearby in the social network." They also suggest that the person-to-person spread of smoking cessation has been a factor in the significant decline in smoking seen in recent decades.
The network phenomenon could potentially be exploited to spread positive health behavior, the study concludes. Along these lines, collective interventions may be more effective than individual interventions, and public health strategies to encourage smoking cessation may be more cost-effective than initially thought, since health improvements in one person may well spread to others.
Article is interesting in terms of the influence of others on changing health behaviors. We can make use of this type of data to emphasize the importance of modeling through patients and the ability to make use of community and online social networks for positive change.
Potent Social Forces Influence Smoking Behavior
Friends and family have a powerful influence on whether a person quits smoking, and the decision to stop smoking can "spread" from one person to another in a social network, new research suggests. The findings are from a detailed analysis of smoking behavior in more than 12,000 individuals who were followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003, as part of the Framingham Heart Study.
In 1971, the places smokers and nonsmokers held in the social network were indistinguishable. But three decades later, societal views of smoking have changed, and smokers are increasingly at the periphery of social networks and aligned largely with other smokers, according to results published in the May 22 New England Journal of Medicine.
The authors, Drs. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, reported last year that social networks may strongly influence obesity. In the current study, the authors demonstrate that decisions to quit smoking often reflect changes made by groups of people connected to each other, both directly and indirectly. For example, when a spouse quit smoking, the partner's chances of smoking decreased by 67 percent; friends who quit smoking decreased one another's chance of smoking by 36 percent.
"People are connected, and so their health is connected," the researchers write, adding that "cessation of smoking in one person appears to be highly relevant to the smoking behavior of others nearby in the social network." They also suggest that the person-to-person spread of smoking cessation has been a factor in the significant decline in smoking seen in recent decades.
The network phenomenon could potentially be exploited to spread positive health behavior, the study concludes. Along these lines, collective interventions may be more effective than individual interventions, and public health strategies to encourage smoking cessation may be more cost-effective than initially thought, since health improvements in one person may well spread to others.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Six Social Needs People Seek in Social Networks
Fast forward 64 years to a new cyber-psychology view: people are looking to fulfill six essential social needs online, and businesses that help facilitate those needs are more likely to create deeper emotional bonds than usually exist between companies and customers, according to a new research report released today by Communispace. These deeper relationships in turn result in greater consumer insights, advocacy and loyalty.
The Communispace researchers, building on the work of social scientists, have identified the specific social needs that are met through participating in social networks.
- 1. Expressing personal identity:online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.
- 2. Status and self-esteem: the need for autonomy, recognition and achievement are essential to our sense of self-worth and are fulfilled in online communities, blogs, and social networks that provide a way to develop and manage a virtual reputation.
- 3. Giving and getting help: people have a need to both seek and provide help to others. Mutual assistance between strangers is a phenomenon that has been uniquely enabled by the Internet.
- 4. Affiliation and belonging: online communities are becoming the way people find, create and connect with others "just like me" - people who share similar tastes, sensibilities, orientations or interests.
- 5. Sense of community: a sense of belonging or affiliation alone is not equivalent to a true sense of community. Achieving a real sense of community requires long-lasting reciprocal relationships and a mutual commitment to the needs of the community as a whole. Communispace tapped its other research on social networking behavior and found that when companies meet the full range of social needs, they gain trust and deep insights into their consumers and community members - marketing nirvana. And when companies go still further to actively embrace and act on people's ideas they fulfill a sixth social need:
- 6. Reassurance of value and self worth. People want to be reassured of their worth and value, and seek confirmation that what they say and do matters to others and has an impact on the world around them. Meeting all 5 + 1 of these social needs generally requires the level of intimacy and facilitation that are the hallmarks of smaller, invitation only online communities. online social networks provide people with the ultimate tool for defining and redefining themselves, as evidenced in profile pages on Facebook and MySpace.
Recent Browser statistics
86% of users have 1024x768 or higher resolution. Of the two major groups in “Higher” that I’ve seen are 1280x1024 and 1280x800.
| Date | Higher | 1024x768 | 800x600 | 640x480 | Unknown |
| January 2008 | 38% | 48% | 8% | 0% | 6% |
Majority of users are using IE, but Firefox has a significant following as well.
| Date | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Firefox | Mozilla | Safari | Opera |
| April 2008 | 24.9% | 28.9% | 1.0% | 39.1% | 1.0% | 2.2% | 1.4% |
Windows is by far the leader, with Mac having 4.6% of the market.
| Date | WinXP | W2000 | W98 | | W2003 | Linux | Mac |
| April 2008 | 73.3% | 3.3% | .5% | 8.8% | 1.9% | 3.7% | 4.6% |
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