Integrated townships function as distinct and cohesive neighbourhoods

Effects of repo rate cut on real estate and home loans

Your property-related legal queries answered by S.C. RAGHURAM, Partner, RANK Associates, a Chennai-based law firm

The company said the vaccine gives a 95.5% protection against severe dengue and an 80.3% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation.

In some cases, even colistin has failed to kill it.

Network of genes enables these creatures to develop and regenerate teeth throughout their lifetime.

Researcher says the 'super fruit ' can have a real benefit in improving memory and cognitive function in some older adults

A disruptive technology, says researcher

Substances from the plant found to enhance absorption of calcium in the body and promote the formation of new bones

Young adults, who grew up in stable families with quality parental relationships, more likely to have healthy diet, activity and sleep behaviours, and less likely to be obese.

India lagging behind in implementing cervical cancer vaccines in its national immunisation programmes, says Dr. R. Sankaranarayanan, Special Advisor on cancer control

400 Novartis employees to lose jobs due to resulting role redundancies 

Delhi Disaster Management Authority will impose no penalty for ‘COVID offences’ with immediate effect till further orders

They say they wrote their exams in May and have been living with uncertainty for the last two months

Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee takes readers on an inward journey to discover the building blocks and their place in the human body

Her blood-testing startup claimed to revolutionise testing by detecting hundreds of medical conditions from just a few drops of blood 

Psychedelic substances have reinvigorated clinical and research interests, and have added to psychiatry’s ever-expanding therapeutic armamentarium.

India aims to eliminate healthcare disparities across the globe via Medical Value Travel (MVT) under its G20 presidency this year. Here’s a look at India’s plan to become a medical tourism hub

Bipolar disorder, earlier known as manic-depressive disorder, is prevalent in about 1% of the population and tends to be a lifelong illness

None of us will ever be able to read all the articles and blog posts we had like to, and RSS feeds can be an incredible source of information overload. WebWorkerDaily highlights tools and tricks that can help make RSS more relevant.

We have waxed lyrical about Yahoo! Pipes before and how Pipes can create a master feed, fetching all your news feeds and filtering them, but the topic is well worth a revisit.

With a particular emphasis on making the flow of information more manageable and more relevant to you, GigaOms collaboration blog WebWorkerDaily singles out Yahoo! Pipes for its robust filtering by various criteria and PostRank, a service that gets the top posts (by engagement score) from a particular feed. You can use PostRank and Yahoo! Pipes together to find only the most popular posts from your favorite blogs and then filter them by your keywords.

Marketers are complicit in the toxicity of social media, they misunderstand its function and how brands should participate in it, and yet they appear to be held hostage by it. Those are some of the main paradoxes confronting brand marketers, according to a damning new report from the social media analyst at Forrester Research.

Social media and online platforms have been a saving grace in these isolating times. During the challenges of COVID-19, social media usage has surged with a 61% increase worldwide, according to a study of 25,000 consumers across 30 markets. Live video usage has doubled on Facebook and Instagram. WhatsApp has seen a 40% increase in usage. Twitter has 23% more daily users than last year. TikTok reported a 27% increase during the month of March alone.

Our technology has given us an imperfect but vital substitute for human connection.

Verizon Business today released findings from a recent survey, Small Business Response to COVID-19 to better understand the impact small business owners and decision makers feel COVID-19 has had on their businesses. The survey, conducted by Morning Consult, focused on 500 small and medium businesses that are currently open or plan to reopen. One of the survey’s key results is that small businesses have renewed confidence, with 68% believing they can recoup COVID-19 related losses.

Key Survey Findings:

As businesses grapple with the economic impact of COVID-19, these responses highlight the assistance small businesses feel they need, the communities they feel most supported by, and the changes they have made to adjust to the new normal.

1. A Renewed Confidence
The small businesses that have weathered this pandemic to date express an overall optimism and the financial wherewithal to eventually reopen.

68% of small businesses believe they can recoup COVID-19 related losses
46% (nearly half) of small businesses that remain open say their businesses will be able to stay open for more than six months if the pandemic continues in the same way
48% of small businesses say it’s unlikely they will need to resume operations with a smaller staff
While 78% of small businesses indicate declining sales, less than a quarter (24%) say that they have missed or withheld any payments of bills (rent, utilities, etc.).

A new study led by researchers at McGill University finds that people who get their news from social media are more likely to have misperceptions about COVID-19. Those that consume more traditional news media have fewer misperceptions and are more likely to follow public health recommendations like social distancing.

In a study published in Misinformation Review, researchers looked at the behavioral effects of exposure to misinformation by combining social media analysis, news analysis, and survey research. They combed through millions of tweets, thousands of news articles, and the results of a nationally representative survey of Canadians to answer three questions: How prevalent is COVID-19 misinformation on social media and in traditional news media? Does it contribute to misperceptions about COVID-19? And does it affect behavior?

By setting boundaries around what you post, when you're online, and who you surround yourself with in real life, you can strike a better balance between Instagram and reality

When US consumers started spending more time at home in March and April, they also started using social media more, providing an unexpected boost to the platforms.

Depending on the research source, up to 51% of US adults are using social media at higher rates during the pandemic. But even though elevated social usage continued at least into May, causing us to upgrade our forecast for time spent on social networks by US social network users, we believe that when consumers eventually get back to their normal routines of school, work and social activities, the trends will moderate. We think this will start to happen later in 2020, with a more visible downward trend evident in 2021 and beyond.

Today, almost everyone is a critic, complete with an unfiltered opinion. Be it the clout chasers or active advocates, many take to social media to air these opinions and grievances where the views are met with either support or scorn; and the line between the two is often blurred.

To be present online, one must plan well and be equipped with a solid risk register to deal with any potential reputational damage that could occur. While a tweet may lead to brand tragedy, it could also lead to business popularity.

It's all dependent on metrics; a well-planned social marketing and content plan that considers all options should be viewed as your lifeline. Here are three ways to implement such a plan:

1. Make your metrics matter
2. Improve stakes and stakeholder management
3. Take online and offline conversations seriously

Have you ever heard of conversion conversations? This sales technique involves getting to know your prospect through an online messaging platform, creating a conversation, then shifting to a sale once they are qualified. The best part? It is entirely free if you do the legwork.

When choosing which social media platform to use for your messaging, keep in mind that Facebook is still the largest social media platform, used by 2.6 billion users, according to Statista. Pew Research found that 75 percent of high earners use Facebook. Instagram is more visual, so if you are selling products or services that look good in photos, or if you are targeting younger generations, go for Instagram. According to Statista, 32 percent of users are between 18 and 24, and 33 percent are between 25 and 34.

Rather than using aggregated statistics and sentiment analysis, the research team used a qualitative approach to drill down into all the tweets posted around the two case studies, and divided them into key topics, positions, purpose and arguments, in order to determine how users engaged in the debate around sustainability and ethics in fashion.

They found that the two main ethics and sustainability issues raised by social media users were environmental concerns, in the first case study; and labor conditions in the supply chain, in the second. Analysis revealed that only a small proportion of tweets were explicitly critical and that those that were, were actually prompting a relatively sophisticated debate that fashion brands may benefit from engaging meaningfully with.