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The Reputation Shock

A 60 years old English entrepreneur who spent his entire working life building up his reputation as a serious, noticeable business man has woken up one morning to find himself staring at his computer screen with disbelief. A life-long customer referred him to the search results against his store chain as they appeared on the first page of the Google search engine. Page after page, result after result – website visitors were being discouraged from shopping at any of his stores. The chain’s customer services was described as appalling and the business practices as dishonest. 35 years of solid rock reputation have been tarnished literally over night. Lie after lie, allegation after allegation. 3,4,5 different websites all of which seemed to have been devoted to ruining him company and his reputation.

Scores of internet surfers appeared to have left their comments on each of the tarnishing websites. The stories were very damaging and were likely to catch the attention of the off line media with possibilities of articles appearing in national newspapers. This was the point where the veteran business man suddenly had woken up to the fact that the world has changed and that negative comments by whoever it might be could destroy life-time work almost overnight.

This very successful, somewhat old fashion business man used to be in control during his entire business life. Now it appears he wasn’t any longer. So he called his trusted lawyer for the past 25 years who admitted, this was a new territory for him too. “The normal legal tools” the solicitor said “might not work in this case”. “In fact the normal legal tools might actually exacerbate the situation further”, he lawyer added. “This is the unknown land” he told his client, “We need to tread carefully”.

Watch Your Back!

A small international book publishing company had woken up one morning to discover that she had no reputation or business left. A competitor in what is already a tough market had been conducting a negative campaign about her company for a few months now with the aim of getting her out of business.

This case ended up in the High Court where despite what the Judge said, my client was left with a tarnished reputation which had in effect blocked any subsequent attempt by her to get back into the same line of business.

So What Does This Mean To You?

On average they say, 1 in 5 happy customers will put a good word about you to one friend or one relative, perhaps earning you business this way. 1 unhappy customer on the other hand will tell between 5-10 people about his bad experience which means that bad news travel much faster than good news. No matter how much effort you put into good PR with your clients and employees, one bad experience can ruin the whole lot. Can you do anything about this? Sure! This is what you need to do: As a starting point, follow these 3 steps. They will reduce the risk of online damage to your reputation.

They are general good business practices too so don’t delay and start implementing now. The 3 steps that you need to take are:

Preventing
Listening
Influencing

Preventing:

Learn to treasure complaints. You don’t need an internet lawyer to tell you how important it is for you to respond to complaints quickly and to avoid procrastination. Follow each complaint through with a view of satisfying your customer’s anger and frustrations. It is a fact of life that complaints stay in the family for a very short time and if not resolved promptly, there is a risk that any griavance could end up being exposed to the entire world. Don’t ever be defensive. If you are in the wrong, simply admit to it and make amends.

Initially, all that your unsatisfied customer desires, is for you to put things right. Later on your customer’s goals might change, and revenge could become their new desire. By this time, you might have lost control over the whole situation which leaves you valuable to online attacks on your reputation.

Listening:

Read and hear what your customers are saying about you. Search the internet for your company’s name and brand using the normal Google search engine as well as Google Blog Search or any other free search tools that are available online. This will reveal to you many of the blogs and discussion groups where your company’s name has been mentioned. This is what your customers will see when they search for your company. Hopefully you will not find anything alarming and in such case you should continue monitoring these websites and discussion groups.

But if you do find unpleasant comments, this is still not the end of the world and there is plenty that you can do to repair the damage.

Influencing:

You can actually influence what your customers see when they search for your company online. Try to get involved in online discussions and post articles and comments online using various methods such as blogs, discussion groups websites and more. Whenever you find negative comments about your company, join the discussion by introducing yourself and try to put things right. Don’t simply stay away and hope that this will just disappear because it won’t. If you feel that the situation is getting slightly out of control, get expert advice on internet law. Internet lawyers provide constant monitoring of your reputation and offer can give you good practical advice on how to form a strategy to combat online attacks on your reputation and how to protect your online reputation through the courts of law.

Radiation is a naturally occurring form of energy that occurs in sunlight and sound waves. However, mankind has harnessed this power through nuclear materials, such as uranium, plutonium, and thorium. These materials can be utilized for weapons, electricity production, and medical devices. While radioactive materials have helped further things like clean energy and medical diagnostics, exposure to the radiation can cause serious damage to your health.

First, everyone experiences small doses of radiation throughout their lives. This is called background radiation. It comes from small amounts of radioactive materials in rocks and dirt, and it can also come from cosmic radiation. Additionally, most people at some point receive medical treatment that involves radiation, such as taking an x-ray. Over time, this low-intensity exposure is mostly harmless although it can increase your chance of developing cancer.

The frightening type of radiation exposure comes from a short-term, intense dose that causes radiation poisoning or sickness. This typically occurs due to radiation accidents. There are several different types of jobs that involve radiation and are therefore at risk for radiation poisoning, including:

* Mining or handling nuclear materials
* Working in a nuclear power plant
* Testing or working with nuclear weapons
* Nuclear pharmacists
* X-ray technicians
* Doctors who perform radiation cancer treatment, vascular embolization, etc.

If something goes wrong, like if the radioactive materials spill in a nuclear pharmacy, the pharmacists can be exposed to a high dose of radiation. This can cause radiation poisoning. Although there are several symptoms of this condition, they may only appear much later after the accident. Immediate signs of exposure include:

* Red, painful skin burns
* Welts or ulcers where the skin touched the radioactive material
* Nausea
* Diarrhea
* Hair loss
* Organ failure

Radiation sickness treatment depends on the extent of your exposure. Doctors must try to remove external contamination, such as radioactive particles on your clothing, as well as nuclear materials inside of your body. Sadly, there is no cure for radiation poisoning, and doctors attempt, instead, to fight the complications arising from the sickness, such as loss of bone marrow, increased risk of infection, etc.

Few people know this, but our age is an amazing time for people who love philosophy.

When I was in college 30 years ago, philosophy was strictly an academic exercise and there were few resources available for people, like me, who view philosophy more as a way of life or avocation than as a job.

Today, however, all that has changed.

There are three or four excellent “magazines” about philosophy – such as Philosophy Now and The Philosopher’s Magazine – that are filled with funny, off-beat, irreverent articles about philosophical topics. A number of top-rate publishing houses, mostly in the UK, such as Routledge and Blackwell Publishing, produce books aimed at a general philosophical readership.

There are philosophy radio programs such as Philosophy Talk, coffee houses, salons, adult education classes and literally hundreds of websites for the interested reader. There are even philosophy comic books, such as LogiComix about the life of British logician Bertrand Russell. It’s simply amazing. It’s a golden age of philosophy, I think.

The irony, however, is that there is still no solid consensus on what, precisely, philosophy actually is. In its historical and etymological sense, philosophy is literally “love (philia) of wisdom (Sophia),” and that is always how I have looked upon it. Philosophy, for me, is the attempt to reflect upon experience in order to understand more about life and how we are to live. My aims, like those of Socrates, are primarily practical: I want to understand the world and myself to live better.

Today, there are three, perhaps four major “schools” or approaches to philosophy, each with their own journals, intellectual heroes and methodologies. It is one of the scandals of contemporary philosophy that these schools are somewhat incommensurable, meaning they are so different in their approaches and ideals they are almost incapable of speaking to one another. It’s as though organic chemistry and 17th century French literature are forced to share the same offices and pretend they are the same discipline (I exaggerate but you get the point).

The first approach may be called, for lack of a better word, Traditional Philosophy: this is the approach now largely taught only in Catholic universities. It is primarily historical in orientation, a “history of philosophy” style in which students study the thought of, say, the ancient Greeks, and Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel and so on. There is very little attempt to think through how the thought of these philosophical greats can be reconciled. The idea appears to be that by working through all of these great thinkers, eventually the student will come to his or her own philosophical conclusions — although there is really no fixed “method” or approach given for doing so. I always think of this as the University of Chicago or Great Books approach. A variation of this approach is Catholic philosophy, including various schools of Thomism (such as the Transcendental Thomism of Merechal, Karl Rahner and, my guru, Bernard J.F. Lonergan)

The second major approach to philosophy today is what is known as Continental Philosophy. This is the philosophy that is most commonly taught in Europe and, again, in some Catholic universities in the U.S. In practice, it means primarily the philosophical systems of phenomenology, existentialism, so-called “critical theory” and their postmodern descendants. When I was in college, this is what I studied (in addition to traditional philosophy). We read the classic texts of phenomenology as well as such trendy philosophers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Edith Stein and others. Today, those names have largely been replaced by those of postmodern French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard. While classical Husserlian phenomenology does attempt to “solve” major philosophical problems and actually be a descriptive science, in practice students of Continental Philosophy, like their Traditional Philosophy counterparts, spend much of their time studying the works of individual thinkers and writing papers on aspects of their thought. (There is a greater interest in Continental Philosophy in social and political questions, however.)

The third and allegedly dominant approach to philosophy today is Analytic Philosophy. This is the philosophy most commonly taught in the UK and in major U.S. universities. Built upon the infrastructure of British empiricists such as David Hume, Analytic Philosophy appeared in the early 20th century through the work of such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. When I was in college, I found Analytic Philosophy to be mostly unintelligible gibberish. The emphasis on symbolic logic and the solving of trivial intellectual “puzzles” was, to me, an absurd waste of time.

In the past few years, however, I’ve been reading more about Analytic Philosophy and I am now much more impressed. Analytic Philosophy has matured over the past few decades and is now more of a philosophical “style” than it is a collection of doctrines. The style is more like that of my hero, Bernard J.F. Lonergan, in that Analytic Philosophy is much more interested in actually solving philosophical problems than it is in clarifying the thought of past philosophers. Thus, Analytic Philosophy is characterized by a thematic, rather than a “history of philosophy,” approach. It uses or creates a specialized technical vocabulary to elucidate the various “options” available in any given philosophical issue — marshals the evidence in favor or against those options — and then attempts to actually “settle” the issue. It’s actually quite refreshing.

The only problem with Analytic Philosophy from the perspective of a traditional philosopher or “lover of wisdom” is that it’s still focused primarily on trivial problems or mere puzzles (perhaps because those are the easiest ones to “solve”). Academic analytic philosophy is often little more than “chloroform in print,” boring to the point of dispatching its readers into a catatonic stupor. The cure for this tedium has been, over the past several years, the appearance of those popular philosophy journals and publishing houses I mentioned earlier. Precisely because they are aiming at a wider audience, the popular philosophy authors have to turn their attention to the Big Issues that interest real people – and thus are forced by the market to abandon the tedium beloved by academics and use their philosophical skills to address topics people actually care about. An example of how wonderful this can be is a book I am reading right now, Michael Sandel’s magisterial Justice. It’s clear, concise, lays open the various options available on contentious issues, concerns serious subjects (what is justice?) and doesn’t resort to pretentious displays of symbolic logic to make its points.

These days, I mostly read good Catholic philosophy (such as can be found in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly or Method: A Journal of Lonergan Studies ) and “popular” analytic books such as Justice or those produced by Routledge. I still can’t read academic analytic philosophy journals. I tried subscribing to Faith and Philosophy, the (mostly analytic) journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, but found it deadly dull and exhibiting the worst aspects of analytic pretentiousness. Here’s a sample, taken from John Turri’s essay, “Practical and Epistemic Justification in Alston’s Perceiving God” (July 2008, p. 290):

“Alston’s thesis is that putative perceptions of God often justify beliefs about God. A subject S has a putative perception of God when S has an experience e in which it seems to S that God appears to S as P. If, based on e, S forms the “M-belief” that God is P, then S has a justified belief that God is P. An M-belief is a belief that God is P, which is based on a putative perception of God. (I will often substitute ‘q’ for the proposition that God is P.) I dunno. My reaction to writing like that is the same as George Will’s: Just because life is absurd that doesn’t mean philosophy should be as well.

I don’t mean to pick on John Turri, whom I am sure is a great guy and a lot smarter than I am. But this sort of stuff is meant solely for professional philosophers in universities — and is largely what turns people off to philosophy as an academic discipline. If Socrates had spoken like that, they probably would have forced him to drink hemlock much earlier and philosophy would never have gotten off the ground.

Plants for home interior design can transform any room in the house. They bring life, color, and fresh air into an indoor space. Plans come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, so no matter your décor, it is possible to find some for every room. It is important to keep in mind the location and growth rate of the plant, as well as the containers they require and whether they will be displayed in a group or on their own.

All plants require some sunlight in order to survive and thrive – how much or how little depends on the species of plant. Determine the areas in the home where the plants will live. How much sun does that spot receive? Do not put a plant in an area that gets more or less sunlight than it requires.

Some plants’ growth rates are quicker than others. Be sure to research the speed at which plants for interior design mature. Before you know it, you could have a plant that does not fit in the place where you intended. This will ultimately defeat the interior design of the home. It will also waste money because now a new plant with a slower growth rate must be purchased in its place.

Plants also have different watering instructions. Some need to be watered more often or in greater quantities. Overwatering can be harmful to the plant and can even kill it. Use planters or containers with a hole in the bottom for drainage. These protect the plant from drowning because excess water can escape so the plant’s roots can take in oxygen.

A group of plants can make a stunning visual display. Taking this interior design route requires some planning. Plants come in different textures and shapes. Mixing plush plants with those with sharp edges creates a contrast that is pleasing to the eye. Use plants of different shades of green or with flowers that match the rest of the décor in the room. A group of plants that is monotone does not have the same impact.

The options for using plants for home interior design are endless. Use your imagination to transform your room into a living, breathing oasis by bringing the outdoors into your home. Caring for plants can be a rewarding and satisfying experience. Make sure to treat them with love and care by following their proper instructions and they will bring great pleasure for years to come.

The main cause for Xbox 360 failure is heat. Yes, heat. It is that simple. It is heat in various forms but heat none the less. The first suspected cause related to heat deals with the soldering process of the chips to the motherboard. The mass of the processor chips absorbs heat and possibly creates a cold soldering defect between the pins of the processor chips and the motherboard.

The second problem associated with heat is the solder. Some have suggested that an inferior solder was used which prevents the proper flow of the solder, which creates a cold solder joint at the processor pin connection to the motherboard.

Another problem associated with heat is the design of the Xbox 360 itself. It is rumored that in order to fit the DVD drive in the Xbox the GPU heatsink was reduced in size. Some theorize that this is one of the issues that contributes to the overheating of the console and GPU.

Also related to the design is the size of the Xbox 360 console. It is very small and relies on two small fans and vents for cooling. Overall it does not dissipate heat very well. While the console is on it generates quite a bit of heat and the metal components expand ever so slightly. When the unit cools down they contract. If there is any weakness at the solder joints between the processor pins and motherboard they may possibly weaken further and eventually contact may be lost between the pins and motherboard leading to RROD.

Once this happens you really only have three choices. If it is under warranty, send it back to Microsoft and have them fix it. If it is not under warranty either fix it yourself or have someone else fix it. The cheapest, fastest and easiest choice is to fix it yourself.