1. The property also included an elaborate doghouse that was a stunning example of pampered pooch barkitecture.
2. Doctors fear the problem will lead to a bed-blocking crisis in Birmingham as elderly flu victims take up hospital spaces.
3. An Indian swami sat in a corner, near an enigmatic Haitian “breatharian” who is admired by all because he lives, supposedly, on air alone.
4. He scoops up business donations by the bucketload.
5. In this restaurant one can select from enchiladas, chalupas, quesadillas, burritosas well as exotic tropical seafoods.
6. Because on-line drug stores bypass doctors to deliver drugs, medical professionals are beginning to take alarm at cyberchondriac behaviour.
7. A typical example would be shopping in a cybermall, where a user might move from store to store and acquire various merchandise along the way.
8. Physicians are being threatened, impoverished, delicensed, and imprisoned for prescribing this drug in good faith with the intention of relieving pain.
9. Statistics show that the community disappears about 200 pounds of cabbage a year.
10. These capsules were labelled as an “extremely effective fat burner, working especially well for conditions of obesity and reducing problematic areas of fat (cellulite)”.
11. Their readers are generation D, the digital generation, which adapts very easily to new technology.
12. He spent the afternoon googling aimlessly.
13. Don’t drink that milk – it went south a few days ago.
14. In a modest way, hoteling has been around for a while, but it’s specific to each company.
15. Michael is a “hyperflier”, a relatively new species whose members spend more time aloft than aground.
16. Your headaches may be related to job spill, so try to reduce your workload.
17. The recent news is that in Japan karoshi – death from overwork – is now the second leading cause of death after cancer.
18. The industrial sector is largely organized into great families of companies – keiretsu – each of which consists of 20 to 40 big corporations.
19.Linguistic profiling revealed that the bomber was probably an uneducated southerner.
20. We’ve added features that make our site much easier to navigate.
21. A century before scientists researched the nocebo effect – the phenomenon of negative, fearful thoughts causing harm.
22. It’s basically a huge database where users identify themselves by name and school graduation date. To see classmates’ E-mail addresses, nostalgics pay $36 a year.
23. Companies find their absenteeism rates dwindle to virtually nothing for homeworkers. Working at home is presented as expanding, progressive and even fashionable.
24. From 2008, eco-driving is set to become a standard feature of the UK driving test.
25. Calcuholism has increased in recent years and will continue to increase due to advances in technology. To avoid dependency, we must do mathematics with our minds from time to time rather than with a machine.
26. Information and communications technologies have made possible the emergence of the teleworker seen by many pundits as the figure of the future. With a lap-top and a mobile phone the teleworker can, in principle, work almost anywhere.
27. It is fairly bold to spend $40 million filming an approximately 2 700-year old classic that many channel-surfers will associate with the drudgery of compulsory education.
28. As they try to sell higher-end electronics and add-ons, including customer warranty plans, such companies will also want to control staffing costs.
29. One of the renewable energy technologies that has received the most hype in the past few years has been fuel cells.
30. Headhunters say at least 300 high-tech companies are looking for seasoned chief executive officers who can take them to the next level.
Òåêñò 1
Slang gets seal of approval
Language purists may fume but any “dipstick” can tell them to “chill out” with the approval of Penguin, the publisher, when its new dictionary is published on Thursday.
Hundreds of words, classified as slang when the last edition was published 14 years ago, are now classified as “informal English”. They include “freebie” and “dosh” and phrases such as “on the take” and “brewer's droop”.
Nigel Wilcockson, editor of TheNew Penguin English Dictionary,said: “When Penguin last published a dictionary, all these words were listed as slang. This warned people not to use them when they wanted to be taken seriously in mainstream society. These words are now classified as informal, which shows a major shift in our attitudes.
You might still be unwise to use these words in a business report or a lawyer’s brief, but essentially they're now part of general English.”
Television, cinema, newspapers and magazines have helped popularise slang vocabulary, especially among the young. The frequency with which each word appeared in print or on screen determined its status, compilers said. Other promotions to the dictionary’s hallowed pages include “blubber” to describe a fat person and “crumpet” in its CarryOn sense.
John Lister, of the Plain English Campaign, said: “A lot of the time you do find that dictionaries can be a little hasty in adding new words, especially when you consider language changes so quickly now that words risk becoming passebefore the end of the print run.”
Perhaps Penguin would say that was “fad-surfing”, meaning “the persistent and often meaningless following of the latest trends”.
Òåêñò 2
The rebirth of web analytics
The largest online seller of bags is betting Web analytics will help it keep up with the latest consumer buying trends and help it choose the right advertising schemes over the holiday season. Using Web analytics, eBags has identified the colours that consumers are looking for, as well as determined other baggage-related trends.
For example, Chris Seahorn, director of business development for eBags told the E-Commerce Times that Web analytics clued the vendor that iPod cases would be a hot item this shopping season. Based on that information, eBags quickly built out a “digital lifestyle” page that features cases for all types of electronics. That’s not the only way analytics have helped.
“The search terms help us scale,” Seahorn said. “By knowing what the trends are ahead of time and by adding new key categories, we’ve literally generated thousands of new dollars per week. I think those would have been lost sales otherwise. I think going into the holiday season, it will be tens of thousands of dollars.”
John Mellor, vice president of marketing for Omniture, the software vendor that provides Web analytics tools to these and other top Internet brands, told the E-Commerce Times that Web analytics is becoming mainstream in the online retailing community.
“Some of our sophisticated customers are using Web analytics to optimize their sites all the way through the final days of the buying cycle,” Mellor said. “Web analytics is becoming more of a have-to-have technology because you can’t improve what you can't measure.”
Òåêñò 3
Online shopping sites fight customer bailouts
During the latest year-end holiday season, both TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com tested a checkout system in which customers used a single page for all shipping and billing information. Fifty per cent more customers completed the checkout process than had finished the multipage process.
For many e-commerce sites, the shopping cart is where transactions go to die. More than half of all prospective customers bail out of their purchases sometime after selecting products and before hitting the “buy” button, according to Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm.
That predicament has prompted sites like Macys.com, TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com to seek new ways to shepherd customers diligently through the checkout process. As traditional retailers sharpen their online operations, those kinds of improvements could be critical in winning business.
Take TJX, which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, among other retail chains. Last autumn, the company opened online stores for T.J. Maxx and HomeGoods, using a traditional checkout method in which users clicked through multiple screens while typing in shipping information, credit card numbers and the like.
Ease of Access
During the latest year-end holiday season, both TJMaxx.com and HomeGoods.com tested a checkout system in which customers used a single page for all shipping and billing information. Fifty percent more customers completed the checkout process than had finished the multipage process.
“We make it as easy as possible to get in and out of our stores easily, so when we went to the Web, this seemed like a natural progression,” Sherry Lang, a TJX spokeswoman, said.
The technology is known as a “rich Internet application” in industry circles.
Such applications work by loading a small, temporary software application onto the user’s computer when he or she clicks on a particular Web page. The Web site feeds information instantly to that software program in the background so that when someone, say, types in an invalid postal code while checking out, the computer flags it and requests a correction.
The technology itself is not new. Tech-savvy companies like Kayak.com, a travel search site, have deemed such applications important enough in recent months to build onto their own technology. As Kayak’s site presents search results, it also loads into the computer’s temporary memory the details of hundreds of fares. Then, when visitors use the control panel to select different target prices or flight dates, the relevant fares instantly replace the previous set.