November 14th, 2008
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Achievement situations in which athletes have an opportunity to display physical competence (i.e., in training or competition) activate their task or ego involved goals. They might be either highly task involved or ego involved in that situation, or they might even switch between the two, because their perception of what they need to feel could change from moment to moment.
For example, imagine yourself as a young football player in a grudge match. You’ve felt great during the match because you’ve worked hard, made some great tackles and accurate passes, and your work on your concentration skills has paid off by allowing you to refocus quickly. You’ve spent most of the game in a highly task-involved state of mind and have received praise from your teammates.
The game is tied and goes to a penalty shoot out. You are the last player of five selected, and the score is 3-3. As you make that long walk to the penalty spot, how does the situation and its potential consequences affect your view of success and skill? Will your feelings of competence depend entirely on scoring or missing? And, if you do become ego involved, how might it affect your chances of scoring?
All athletes have an innate preference for task or ego involved goals in sport. These predispositions, referred to as task and ego goal orientations, are believed to develop throughout childhood largely due to the types of people the athletes come in contact with and the situations they are placed in.
If children consistently receive parental praise that’s reliant on their degree of input and recognition for personal improvement from their coaches, and are encouraged to learn from their mistakes, then they are likely to foster a task orientation. It becomes natural for them to believe that success is associated with mastery, effort, understanding, and personal responsibility.
The behavior of their role models in sport also affects this development. Such an environment is far different from one where children are shaped by rewards for winning (alone), praise for the best school grades, criticism or non-selection despite making their best effort, or coaches whose style is to hand out unequal recognition. This kind of environment helps an ego orientation to flourish, along with the belief that ability and talent, not effort and personal endeavor, earn rewards.
Goal orientations are believed to be reasonably stable and enduring characteristics that are largely formed by mid to late teen-age. Therefore, coaches and parents should attempt to shape a child’s development as early as possible during the 6- to 14-year-old phase.
In this developmental period, children’s cognitive abilities start working overtime as they begin to understand that effort isn’t the sole reason for success at a skill. At about 11 or 12 years of age, they begin to realise that regardless of effort, some kids simply have more skills than others. That’s when the fantasy of being the next super-star comes under obvious pressure for some children.
The strength of a goal orientation influences whether a sportsperson will adopt a task or ego involved goal in a specific sport scenario. It is also perfectly feasible for growing athletes to develop both high task and ego orientations if they have been exposed to an assortment of task and ego oriented situations and people. However, never underestimate the power of a particular situation.
The evolving athlete might be quite high in task orientation, but in a competition with a high degree of public evaluation, judgment, criticism, or comparison based on who’s best, with rewards and benefits for winners and negative consequences for losers, he or she might become ego involved. Competitions accompanied by high perceived expectations and consequences arguably form the natural spine of competitive sport.
Factors such as the stage of the event (e.g., final or qualifying match), whether selection is at stake, previous head-to-heads, financial rewards, age of the opponent (e.g., playing a talented younger player), representing the team or country for the first time, and the support of the audience can make a match a natural ego-involving laboratory.
Nevertheless, not all sport is like that; in fact, some sport situations offset the natural importance of superiority by emphasising participation and publicly reinforcing or rewarding personal effort, improvement, and problem solving rather than focusing on comparisons.
An example is a swimming club that encourages all standards of swimmer, with a coach who gives recognition solely based on individual improvements in time or technique. These situations increase the importance and number of task-involving cues. The key message here is that the availability of task-involving cues in sports that are naturally ego involving allows the athlete to develop a more task-involved approach to competition.
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November 8th, 2008
Windows has dominated the personal computer operating system market for the last 14 years. And with every new version of Windows Microsoft releases, it seems there’s a higher price tag to go with it —just look at the retail prices for Windows Vista and you’ll see what I mean. New versions of Windows often means an expensive hardware upgrade just to run the operating system, especially a memory upgrade.
But if you thought your options ended with back-grading to XP, think again. There’s another operating system that’s growing in popularity around the world and it’s not Apple’s Mac OS X.
It’s called Linux and while it has had the reputation in the past of being the geek’s alternative, Linux is quickly becoming a viable alternative to Windows for everyday users.
It is already appearing in PCs and notebooks from Dell as well as the little Eee PC from ASUS, but best of all, Linux is absolutely free. Yes my friends, it’s fast, reliable and free.
There’s an investment in time required, but the actual operating system is free and there’s heaps of free support available via the Internet with Linux support forums offering world-class support and information springing up like weeds.
Welcome to Xubuntu Linux
There are dozens of different versions of Linux available and that’s because Linux is a bit like a Lego set set — you can pick and choose the bits you want and leave out those you don’t.
But if you’ve never tried Linux before, there are one or two versions, or distributions (that’s short for distribution), that are perfect for beginners — they mimic things that Windows does and in many cases, can actually do them better.
The one we’re going to look at is called Xubuntu. It’s a spin-off of Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution to date, but I think Xubuntu is ideal for beginners, because it’s almost the ‘Windows 98′ of the Linux world — it has a neat, user-friendly interface, but can happily run on older computers. So, if you have an older computer lying around, now’s the time to flash it up and give it a coat of paint.
Try before you install
Unlike Windows, many of the Linux distributions, including Xubuntu, allow you to use them on an almost try before you install basis, meaning you can actually use the operating system direct from the installation CD without having to install anything on your computer’s hard drive.
This special type of installation CD is known as a live CD, because the operating system is ready to go live on the CD — all you need to do is setup your PC to boot from the CD drive, load in the live CD, boot up and Xubuntu will start up.
It can take 2-3 minutes to finish booting. Not much longer than Windows Vista !
Your Windows hard drive remains intact. All you have to do to get back into Windows is to remove the CD, reboot and Windows will load as usual.
Some people always carry a Linux live CD with them so that if their Windows system breaks, they can at least boot into Linux and recover important files. In many cases they will be able to continue editing these files using applications like Open Office which comes bundled free with many Linux Live CD distributions.
However, Xubuntu is ideal if you have an old computer lying around and you’d like to learn and play around with Linux. It just needs a PC with a lO Gig hard drive and 256M of memory. If it has a 400MHz or faster processor, you’re good to go.
Download your new operating system
The first thing you need to do is download the operating system, which you can do directly from the Xubuntu Web site. Just go to Google and do a search on Xubuntu 8.04 download. Alternatively search on Xubuntu Live CD.
This software is a completely free operating system that you download as what’s called an ISO image, which just means the data of a CD stored as a single file. It’s about 590M of download, but that’s smaller than most similar versions. Your best bet is to set this up to download overnight if you’re on dialup or low-speed broadband.
Once you have your ISO you will need to burn it to a bootable CD. Programs like Nero or Burn4free can help you there.
Setting up your PC
The last thing you need to do before giving Linux a go is to make sure your PC or notebook is ready to boot up from your CD-ROM drive. For the vast majority of PCs this will be the default setting, so the best bet is to try and boot the Xubuntu disk.
If the disk doesn’t boot automatically when you restart, you’ll need to check either the notebook or desktop motherboard manual to locate how to make the CD drive the first priority boot device. This involves getting into the CMOS or BIOS setup of the computer. If you’re not sure about doing this, rope in a knowledgeable mate who can help you. At worst, your local computer shop should be able to set it up for you in about three minutes.
Linux is one of the best value downloads on the Internet. It can make an old PC useful again, help recover a Windows PC and comes with a bunch of powerful applications. You will find that for most Windows applications, there is a free Linux equivalent.
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November 8th, 2008
A good marketing advertisement pays attention to both copy and design. But always, always, write the copy first. The design must reemphasize the strongest points in the copy, and never be created independently of it.
Otherwise, your stuff might look great but have too little substance, or have a visual message that conflicts with the text, or force your most important points into some hard-to-read corner.
Copywriters often have a sense of good design, and prepare a rough layout for the designer to work from (or, if the design is simple, actually create both elements together). But trying to fit text to suit artwork and design is a definite mistake.
The only exception is in a very small piece. In some instances, like a business card with a strong graphic, you may have a very clear idea of the look before you write the words. If the whole idea is to dominate the page with a graphic, such as your company logo, and fit in contact information around it, obviously the words come second.
But always ask yourself if this card is doing the strongest selling job it can. Maybe you need a sales sentence and should shrink the logo down somewhat unless your product, too, is graphically oriented. Make sure the artwork is appropriate to your message and if it is not, get rid of the concept.
Effective Copywriting and Wonderful copywriting:
1. Grabs the reader’s attention with something relevant;
2. Addresses the reader’s fears, anxieties, or aspirations;
3. Stresses benefits to the end user, not the features that lead to those benefits;
4. Offers to solve the reader’s problem, in the most specific terms possible;
5. Provides the reader with a chance to acquire something of clear value, but only for a limited time;
6. Draws the reader toward an immediate action step;
7. Shows the consequences of a failure to act;
8. Backs up claims with comparisons to the competition;
9. Includes solid, substantial proof of your claim by someone else (a customer, an expert); and
10. This should be obvious, make sure you provide the necessary order form, address, telephone number and e-mail to allow the reader to purchase.
You may not get all ten in every marketing creation, but aim to include as many as you can. These group together into several bunches.
Writing promotional material is both a science and an art. Doing your own press release or flier copy is pretty straightforward. But if you’re going to spend a chunk of money doing a brochure or newsletter, make sure the copy is outstanding.
Certainly you can try to do your own, following the principles outlined above. But before you print the final, try out the ad on people who will give you accurate and detailed feedback. Writers who sell are writers who revise, so be prepared to do several drafts. Then leave it for a few days and come back to it with a fresh mind.
Or call in outside help. Either outline the project to a writer and wait for a draft, or write the first draft yourself and then let an editor put the magic in it. Whether you or the outside consultant prepare the first draft, expect to play with it. Make sure each section uses strong sales language. Examine the different sections together, to see if they fit well and are in the right order.
Where do you find writers and editors? Get recommendations from other business owners whose marketing materials you respect. Look in the Yellow Pages under Editorial Services, Marketing Consultants, Public Relations, or Publicity. Or, of course, have a look on web sites like elance.com or getacoder.com
If you’re looking for a Brisbane web site designer, visit johnhacking.com For Brisbane Google Company, visit Search Tempo Pty Ltd. If you want SEO Training, then contact Search Tempo.
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November 5th, 2008
A great marketing piece pays attention to both copy and artwork. But always, always, always, compose the copy first. The design must reemphasize the strongest points in the copy, and never be created independently of it.
Otherwise, your ad look great but have too little substance, or have a visual message at odds with the copy, or force your most important points into some hard-to-read corner.
Copywriters often have a sense of good design, and prepare a rough layout for the graphic artist to work from (or, if the design is simple, actually create both elements together). But trying to fit words to suit artwork and design is a definite no-no.
The only exception is in a very small piece. In some instances, like a business card with a strong graphic, you may have a very clear idea of the look before you write the words. If the whole idea is to dominate the page with a graphic, such as your company logo, and fit in contact information around it, obviously the words come second place.
But always ask yourself if this card is doing the strongest selling job it can. Maybe you need a sales sentence and should shrink the logo down a bit unless your product, too, is graphically oriented. Make sure the graphic is appropriate to your message and if it is not, junk the concept.
Effective Copywriting and Great copywriting:
1. Catches the reader’s attention with something relevant;
2. Addresses the reader’s fears, anxieties, or aspirations;
3. Stresses benefits to the user, not the features that lead to those benefits;
4. Offers to solve the reader’s problem, in the most concrete terms possible;
5. Gives the reader with a chance to acquire something of clear benefit, but only for a limited time;
6. Pulls the reader toward an immediate action step;
7. Shows the consequences of a failure to act;
8. Backs up claims with comparisons to the competition;
9. Includes solid, substantial validation of your claim by someone else (a customer, an expert); and
10. This should be obvious, make sure you provide the necessary order form, address, telephone number and e-mail to allow the reader to move forward.
You may not get all ten in every marketing piece, but aim to include as many as you can. These group together into several bunches.
Writing promotional material is both a science and an art. Doing your own press release or flier copy is pretty straightforward. But if you’re going to spend a lot of money doing a brochure or newsletter, make sure the copy is worth the investment.
Certainly you can try to do your own, following the principles outlined above. But before you send it off, try out the advertisement on people who will give you accurate and detailed feedback. Writers who sell are writers who revise, so be prepared to do several drafts. Then leave it for a few days and come back to it with a fresh mind.
Or call in outside help. Either outline the project to a writer and wait for a draft, or write the first draft yourself and then let an editor put the magic in it. Whether you or the outside editor prepare the first draft, expect to play with it. Make sure each section uses strong sales language. Examine the different sections together, to see if they fit well and are in the right order.
Where do you find writers and editors? Get recommendations from other business owners whose marketing materials you respect. Look in the Yellow Pages under Editorial Services, Marketing Consultants, Public Relations, or Publicity. Or, of course, have a look on web sites like elance.com or getacoder.com
==
If you’re looking for a Mambo web designer in Brisbane, visit johnhacking.com For SEO Training in Brisbane, visit Search Tempo Pty Ltd. If you want SEO Training, then contact Search Tempo.
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October 31st, 2008
A short drive south of Brisbane is the Gold Coast, stretching for about 35 kilometres along the subtropical coast to the New South Wales border. With its many theme parks, entertainment venues, and surf-washed sandy beaches edged with high-rise holiday apartments it is the gateway to instant leisure.
Just north of Brisbane Iies the Sunshine Coast: Caloundra, Maroochydore, and Noosa Heads beckon with kilometres of golden sands and surf.
North of the Sunshine Coast is Hervey Bay, which has long been a popular holiday spot with locals, but in recent times has become the base for a fleet of boats carrying large numbers of visitors to watch whales off nearby Fraser Island.
The largest sand island on Earth and World Heritage Listed, Fraser Island attracts thousands of visitors annually who come to experience the beauty of its sub-tropical rainforests, freshwater lakes, and dunes that rise to heights of around 230 metres; others come for the great beach fishing. At the northern end of the island lies the Great Sandy National Park.
In the hills behind the Sunshine Coast the town of Nambour is surrounded by pineapple farms and is home to `The Big Pineapple’, a tourist attraction set on a pineapple farm. Some of the best scenery in this area is around Maleny, where there are wonderful views over the Glasshouse Mountains - a series of old volcanic plugs that rear over forests and farmlands. Named by Captain Cook in 1770, their strange shapes standing on the horizon were a reminder of the glass furnaces of industrial Yorkshire.
For nature-lovers and bush walkers, it is often a relief to leave the clamour of the coastal resorts and escape to the quiet wilderness of the hinterland’s national parks. Mount Tamborine, close to Brisbane, has some small but delightful parks. One of them, Witches Falls, was Queensland’s first national park in 1908; at that time, forestry officials declared it to be ‘unfit for any other purpose’.
The most popular park in Queensland is Lamington National Park, situated close to the New South Wales border. Edged with escarpments rising to 900 metres, the park protects an outstanding area of undisturbed rainforest on the Lamington Plateau, on the south side of the Scenic Rim - the crescent of mountains lying behind Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The park has the oldest stands of Antarctic Beech trees in the southern Hemisphere.
Another notable park on the border is Springbrook National Park. The Natural Bridge and waterfall, one of the park’s main features, lies close to the Numinbah Valley road; higher up in the park, near the village of Springbrook, the Best Of All Lookout offers aerial-like views over the ranges.
The capital of Queensland, Brisbane is built around the busiest commercial river in Australia, the Brisbane River. One of the best views of the river with a backdrop of the central business district is from a small park at Kangaroo Point. Further upstream there are more good views of the city from the South Bank Parklands, situated on the southern banks of the river. A ‘must’ for visitors to Brisbane, the 16 hectares of parks and tropical gardens feature restaurants and cafes, weekend markets and entertainers and an artificial beach.
Nearby, on the same side of the river, is the Queensland Cultural Centre, which incorporates the performing arts complex, the State Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Queensland Art Gallery.
If you’re looking for Dayboro Accommodation, or a Dayboro B and B, contact Dayboro’s Best Bed and Breakfast at hillhouse.net.au
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October 31st, 2008
The southern approach to Brisbane presents a striking picture: rounding a bend on the Pacific Motorway you see weatherboard stilt houses with red tin rooves on leafy hills, with the thrusting towers of the Central Business District (CBD) beyond.
Crossing Captain Cook Bridge, you catch glimpses of the serpentine Brisbane River, bordered by skyscrapers on one side and lush parkland on the other. It’s hard to believe that, only a few decades ago, this impressive waterway was polluted and neglected. Today’s sparkling river is at the hub of city life and is the pride of Brisbane inhabitants.
It serves as an aquatic highway for ferries connecting riverside suburbs and is the focal point for festivals and celebrations. The motorway follows the river’s edge, swooping above the bank and through luxuriant mangroves — an unexpected sight deep in the heart of Australia’s third-largest city.
Nearly half of Queensland’s population of four million lives within Brisbane’s statistical boundaries — a sprawling 4,700 sq. km (1,800 sq. miles) — one of the reasons why the city’s reputation as the “world’s biggest country town” lingered for so long. Brisbane is the third largest city in the world after Tokyo and Los Angeles and has a budget larger than the state of Tasmania.
The catalysts for change were the 1982 Commonwealth Games and the Expo ‘88 which put Brisbane on the cultural map. These games were a catlyst for the introduction of fast and clean electric trains, late night trading and city malls. Inevitably, something of the city’s laid-back character has been lost in transition from sleepy backwater to cosmopolitan hub.
The new Queenslander may wear board shorts but, in business, he or she is as hard-nosed as anyone from Sydney or Melbourne. More than likely, the new Queenslander is from Sydney or Melbourne. Yet there remains some truth to the old saying: “In Melbourne they ask what school you went to, in Sydney, they ask how much you earn, in Brisbane they ask if you’d like a beer.”
Rough edges remain, but there’s a new sophistication, as evidenced by a healthy restaurant culture and the number of people able to spout knowledgeably about wine. Add Brisbane’s hip young generation to the mix and you have a sassy, confident city.
Young people no longer feel the imperative to leave. This, plus a surge of interstate migration, has caused Brisbane’s population growth to outpace that of every other Australian capital. This fast growth has caused it’s own problems including water shortages, traffic jams and rocketing property prices.
The climate —subtropical summers and mild, sunny winters has undoubtedly played a part but the reasons for Brisbane’s rise are many and complex.
Brisbane’s recognition of the value of its architectural heritage came too late to save many iconic buildings destroyed during the development frenzy of the 1980s. Still, enough historic architecture remains to show what used to be. Many of the city’s distinguished colonial-style residences were wrenched from their stumps in leafy Ascot or Hamilton and relocated, iron-lace and all, to exclusive outer suburbs like Brookfield and Pullenvale.
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