The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington
Chemistry mid term.

The answer by one student was so ‘profound’ that the professor shared it with
colleagues, via the Internet,
which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well :

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs
heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas
cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So
we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at
which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul
gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how
many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that
exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their
religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these
religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can
project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rate s as they are,
we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we
look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states
that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the
volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls
enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until

all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls
in Hell,
then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman
year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take
into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must
be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen
over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it
follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore,
extinct……leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine
being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+

The winter newsletter from Calm is here, find about all about what we’ve been involved in over the last 3 months. Highlights include:

Never a dull day in the North East

With the launch of the revamped events-led website for visitTeesvalley and the bid website for Durham City of Culture, residents from in and around the region have absolutely no excuse to sit at home and twiddle their thumbs… more

Glue: A multi sensory art & design event to inspire, influence and involve
Sunday 8th November | 5pm ’til 1am Uncle Alberts (opposite the Railway Station), Middlesbrough… more

Introducing the new Face of Tees Valley
Over the past two months, visitTeesvalley has searched for two energetic Challengers ready to indulge in all Tees Valley has to offer, become ambassadors for the area and stand a chance of winning £1000 and the accolade of becoming the Face of Tees Valley….more

Advent Calendar Online
Another Calm Christmas is fast approaching, which means exciting times for Calm as Santa’s little helpers prepare to personalise an Advent Calendar Online for a number of clients not just in the UK but as far away as Australia and Dubai…. more

Daniel and Danielle
Although it isn’t mandatory for your name to be a derivative of Daniel to work at Calm, it must certainly help… more

Calm’s quest for SEO perfection
The majority of people think of (SEO) Search Engine Optimisation as an art to improve their search engine rankings, being a time studied profession that without putting a great deal of time and effort into it should be left to the techies. Wrong! more

Final Thoughts
We’d like to say a big thank you for reading our quarterly newsletter - we hope it you’ll be able to make use of some of the information. As always feel free to contact us: www.calmasylum.com - www.calmdigital.com - @calm_asylum - @adventonline

Something interesting happened today at Calm. We were able to  practice what we preach about how brands should use social networks to engage with not only their friends, but their critics as well. Social networking via Twitter etc,  is all about engaging in conversations, both positive and negative, that the wider network is having about you and your work. This can’t be a bad thing and it can only improve performance all round.

We posted a link to a 3 year old website of an e-commerce client in the interest of goodwill to help drive traffic to the site. Unbeknown to me, the site owner had recently uploaded some images of new stock, but put a £0.00 amount against them.

The comments that this invited ranged from constructive advice to very harsh criticism of the developer. (One kindly Twitizen mentioned that this was a tad “ungentlemanly” of said critic). Some said it made the site look broken, and others said that we should have validated amount field so it doesn’t allow a £0 against a product. I have put solutions to these issues to the client and will see whether we can take this forward. The comments, although hard to hear,  will (we hope) serve to make the user experience a lot smoother and ultimately increase sales through the site.

If brands are given a chance to explain their position and are humble enough to acknowledge where they can improve, clients will benefit from a better result. Who wants a brand that thinks it already knows everything and there is nothing left to be learned?

Calm recently recieved a surprising email from a company who are in our network showcasing their latest product - a seat shaped like a set of teeth! The company responsible is Sculpture Studios.

I watched last night’s BBC Panorama about the fine line between the privacy law and free speech – the freedom our media has to report [almost] anything.  I wondered if, in the week of the Iran election and an impending review of privacy vs free speech, social media represents a shining hope in keeping this gift alive.

If the many tweets from the likes of @persiankiwi and thousands of other Iranians desperate to let the world know what the government doesn’t, it would seem at first glance that social media has the ability to give us an instant, much clearer, more accurate insight into what is really going on in the world. The people are reporting what they see, instantly. Photos from mobile phones, tweets, uniting others through groups, and updates what they see show  us so that we can see it through their eyes. The BBC is getting its breaking news from these services today – CNN was yesterday criticised for missing the boat. The downside is, as China did with Twitter  in the aftermath of last year’s Earthquake, regimes have the option to simply shut down networks that allow people to propagate information. It’s up to individuals to find innovative ways of plugging into their networks – and they do.

So our privacy report may mean that the BBC and media groups may have to be more mindful of what they broadcast, but if it’s in our interests, I feel very confident that word will get out and find its way into the mass consciousness. As long as we don’t build our own “great firewall of China” that is.

Not quite! But as in most industries, terminology exists to differentiate between types of services-here’s an overview of some of the terms that you might of heard whilst talking to people within the industry…

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Placement (SEP) are terms used to describe the practice of modifying or tuning invisible website content according to the key search terms it is required to be found for. Some parts of this process are on-site: the modifying of the actual website - some work involves establishing external links (link building) from other websites to yours. Careful work with site content that is efficient (and useful for the site visitor), organic and well structured is usually the first step of a long, but well worthwhile journey to becoming a website of authority status.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a natural evolution for SEO, but is more far reaching in terms of using other methods to achieve high numbers of visitors and general exposure. This is a form of on-line marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results through the use of paid inclusion, paid placement or contextual advertising i.e. Google Adwords (PPC).

Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is related to SEO, but the main focus of this is on driving traffic from other sources, rather than search engines. i.e. RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, social media sites and other media exposure can contribute extensively to a website popularity.

Conversion Rate Marketing (CRM) is the science of detailed analysis of a website to goal settings and funnelling strategies of all on-line traffic. This procedure often involves highly detailed visitor data for the website (metrics). An in-depth refinement process can be be conducted through multivariate testing, heat maps and other other methods that constantly refine and improve the sites structure, layout and also navigation. All text content, ‘calls to action’, persuasion paths and other elements of design are changed to convert more visitors and massively reduce bounce rates. Raising visitor retention considerably (often in excess of 50 percent) makes interesting reading from the point of view of a Return of Interest on moneys invested.

I hope this helps! If you have any questions or require any further information regarding these or any other terms, please give us a call or check out Calm Digital.

The majority of people think of (SEO) Search Engine Optimisation as an art to improve their search engine rankings, being a time studied profession that, without putting a great deal of time and effort into it,should be left to the techies. Wrong! Yes, improving search engine rankings in competitive areas does require a huge amount of knowledge and expertise and search engine optimisation techies are needed, but most websites aren’t in hugely competitive areas. Many of them can achieve effective rankings by applying some of these search engine optimisation basics.

SEO is the art of achieving high search engine results, increasing website traffic. It’s when the content is set out so the search engines can read it easy and effectively, and most importantly, it is about creating real value for the searcher. SEO is about attracting visitors specifically focused around predetermined key search terms. A valuable user experience will be rewarded by the search engines by increasing your Google Pagerank. SEO is all about making sure your website delivers what it says it will!

SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimising a website involves writing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords. Sometimes a site’s structure must be adjusted too. Because of this, SEO needs to be considered at the design phase of any project and a strategy created specifically. It is critical that all the elements work together including the content and how the website is designed:

• Keyword analysis
Using our SEO expertise we will research and refine keywords into a definitive list. Using our specialised software Calm Asylum will run searches on keywords to understand how many people are searching for them and how competitive they are. The aim being to find popular search terms which are specific to your offering allowing you to rank as high as possible.

• Title tag
The keywords or phrases must be present in this tag. The priority of the keywords run from left to right in the title tag, so more important keywords are placed first. The title tag is indexed by the search engines in its own right and its influence is multiplied if the keywords within it are also used inside other elements.

• Meta keywords
Meta keywords allow you to provide additional text for search engines to index along with the body copy. Although this tag is indexed by search engines, text appearing within it only has limited relevancy as it is text and cannot be seen by the user. Like title tags priority runs from left to right, separated by commas. Keywords should never occur in meta keyword tags unless they also appear in the page text and generally should not be any longer than 255 characters including whitespace.

• Meta description

The meta descriptions allow you to influence the description of your page with search engines. The meta description has to contain your keywords and also relate to the copy on the page and be ideally no longer than 128 characters in length.

• Keyword distribution
It is essential that the predefined keywords are evenly distributed throughout the web page without simply keyword stuffing or spamming. To prevent this, keywords should not be used to often, but used in every paragraph, heading, subheading and also links. This simply allows the search engines to know that is what the content is about.

• Page URLS

Search engines love static URLs as they are sure that the pages content is less likely to have changed since last being indexed and not have duplicate information. An affective URL should be short and contain your most important selected keywords making your pages more trustworthy to search engines.

So as a round up if you have a spanky website and are fed up paying for Adwords why not contact Calm Digital for a chat and discuss in further detail how Calm can help.

Twitter seems to be all over the media like a rash at the moment. So much so that I’ve been forced to revisit my twitter after it had lain dormant for months. And guess what - it’s so addictive that I’ve had to limit my time on it. So what’s happened?

It’s hit the Tipping Point!

In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell explores three personality types that are essential for reaching out to people: Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople.

Connectors: These are folks who naturally build links, networks and connections between individuals and groups - think twitter fiend Jonathan Ross.

Mavens: In the best sense of the term these are people who love to gather practical information and share it with others, think  Stephen Fry, Arch Twitterer.

Salespeople: Folks who love to sell because they are passionate about people and twitter. - Phil Schofield fits this archetype.

Of course there are also those who by their very status can ifluence simply by adopting, like Barack Obama.

These personality types are enjoy people and effectively build community. Prominent personlaties fitting these archetypes can influence individuals and organizations who may adopt Twitter, becoming contributors, followers and ultimately twitters best advocates.

Add to the mix a global networking frenzy in the form Twestival, a live networking and fundraising event in 202 cities in the world, and yo, twitter hits the mainstream in a big media glitz type way.

As generously shared with the masses by @seotimeline on twitter and re-shared by Calm Asylum yo.

It really is an essential roadmap for all your social media / networking needs, detailing both community and B2B social networking sites, search engines, video sites, micro-blogging and texting, tools and platforms, blogs, wikis, photo sharing sites, social bookmarking and podcasting. The full palava really. Check it out here.

Calm Asylum has found the blog of a true genius. The periodic table of social media elements is so cool and it even gives you links to social media movers and shakers like Guy Kawasaki and The Real Shaq.

Calm Asylum has made friends with super Saltburn-based photographer, Cathal Carey. His shots range from glossy home-ware brochure sets, to Audi advertising and shiny happy people - oh yes, even Prince Andrew was a most willing subject for our Cathal. View Cathal’s recent work click here.

Event ‘Keeping a Calm head in business 2009.’ 4th February 2009.

We have received fantastic feedback from the event and we want to share it with you.

If you would like a copy of the presentation please contact Anna Smith at anna.smith@calmasylum.com

If you attended, please feel free to comment about the event below. Simply click the “comment” link below, log in and leave your comment. For all those new to blogging, and in need of a helping hand, please contact Anna Smith anna.smith@calmasylum.com 0845 058 0511.

If you were unable to attend, please contact Anna Smith for a copy of the day’s fantastic presentation’s.

We hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did, and look forward to seeing you at any future events.

The Calm Team.

www.calmasylum.com

www.harlands.co.uk

www.nicolacook.com

For those who attended, please check your emails  ‘for your eyes only’ special offers.