Return on Investment Measurement. One of the most important aspects about advertising is understanding what amount of return on investment is realized. The ROI for every advertising campaign should be determined. Digital sign advertising through use of video walls allows the business owner to easily compute the financial investment comparing it to either television or print advertising

Targeting Your Advertising Audience. Traditional types of advertising methods typically are general when broadcasting and do not contain specific messages. Use of video walls for digital signage allow advertisers the opportunity to create specific messages toward narrower audiences and rotate these messages as needed

Advertising Costs. Any business owner already understands that the traditional mediums offering advertising are going to be at a considerable cost. However, the purchase of video walls used as digital signage advertising allows business owners the opportunity for a somewhat inexpensive, yet more effective alternative to television, radio or print advertising. Furthermore, you can leverage that ownership of video walls, selling advertising space when you are not using it. There are companies that can be recruited that will sell ad space on your digital signs, thus becoming a smart and prudent method for recouping any investment you’ve made in purchasing the equipment

Converting Lookers. Video walls that are being used to reemphasize your selling message can reach your targeted customers putting them in a purchasing mindset. This helps make them ready to spend money with you since they are already at your establishment or have been exposed to your digital sign repeatedly reminding them you have the solution to their needs. A digital sign, through use of a video wall, allows advertisers to create point of sale campaigns that help to increase conversion rates

An Effective Out Of Home Medium
Video walls used as digital signage produced the most effective out of home advertising medium and one that is easily controlled, easily changed and easily executed. And, you may not even have to be in the situation to purchase the electronic equipment involved since there are actually companies that specialize in providing digital sign advertising solutions. This may be a specifically good choice for the uninitiated who, after renting a digital sign advertising campaign, can make a better determination as to it’s worth and presence in that businesses’ operating future.

Comparison Shop on the Net

Whether deciding to rent video walls for a digital sign advertising campaign, or jump headfirst into purchasing the necessary equipment to conduct message making on ongoing basis, it’s a good idea to do a little self-education and comparison shopping. The best place to conduct this investigation would be online. Here you would find the information you need about the equipment and availability as well as typical pricing.

Often, due to the low operating costs experienced by people conducting business online, you may find exceptional bargains when looking for video walls for digital signage.

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LONDON — Until recently, if you wanted to take Professor Rebecca Henderson’s course in advanced strategy to understand the long-term roots of why some companies are unusually successful, you needed to be a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ms. Henderson taught at the Sloan School of Management. Admission to the Sloan School is extremely selective, and tuition fees are over $50,000 a year.

For Exposure, Universities Put Courses on the Web

The London School of Economics has denied reports that the university is considering “going private” in response to the coalition government’s announced plans to cut its contribution to university teaching budgets by as much as 40 percent.

Briefly: L.S.E. Denies It Is Privatizing After U.K. Budget Cuts

As their state financing dwindled, four-year public universities increased their published tuition and fees almost 8 percent this year, to an average of $7,605, according to the College Board’s annual reports. When room and board are included, the average in-state student at a public university now pays $16,140 a year.

As College Fees Climb, Aid Does Too

The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday will release finalized regulations targeting for-profit colleges that give the government a stronger hand overseeing the fast-growing sector — including new rules reining in how recruiters are paid and a controversial attempt to define credit hours.

Still to come early next year is the most fought-over proposal: a rule that would cut off federal aid to college vocational programs with high student-debt levels and poor loan repayment rates.

The department put off finalizing those “gainful employment” regulations until early next year, although Thursday’s package of rules includes one scaled-down gainful employment provision that has eased industry worries.

A full review will not be possible until the final regulations are published online Thursday and in print Friday in the Federal Register. But department officials are portraying themselves as good listeners, saying they made 82 changes in response to comments and criticisms of 13 new “program integrity” rules that will go into effect in July 2011.

“These new rules will help ensure that students are getting from schools what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement.

On recruiter pay, admissions officers at for-profit colleges have been barred since 1982 from receiving incentive pay based on securing enrollments. But since then, a dozen loopholes have been put in place allowing the practice, with limits.

The regulations to be released Thursday will eliminate such “safe harbors.”

“It closes the loopholes that led to boiler room-style sales tactics at some colleges, with recruiters doing and saying whatever it took,” said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success, an advocacy group for tighter regulations.

Other new regulations strengthen the department’s authority to take action against schools engaging in deceptive advertising, marketing and sales practice. Those are common complaints against for-profit colleges, which are facing intense scrutiny this year for their huge reliance on federal aid and high student-loan default rates, among other things.

Industry officials are eager to see specifics on the department’s attempts to define a credit hour, the metric used to determine a student’s eligibility to receive federal aid. The education department said a standard definition is necessary because some schools are gaming the system, inflating student credits to get more federal money.

The regulations define a credit hour and establish procedures for accrediting agencies to determine whether an institution’s assignment of credit is acceptable, the department said.

Although the department said it is not intruding into academics, others say they are not so sure.

“It’s quite likely they’ve federalized the definition of credit hour,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government and public affairs for the American Council on Education, an umbrella group that represents higher education. “Our position is that no successful and diverse industry is improved by federalizing important aspects of it.”

The education department significantly scaled back one part of the gainful employment rule, doing away with a proposal that would have required schools wanting to start aid-eligible occupational programs to provide five years of enrollment projections and get documentation from employers showing the curriculum aligns with job needs.

Under the final regulations, schools instead will be required to notify the department 90 days in advance of starting a new program. If the department has concerns, schools will be asked to apply for new program approval, a scenario department officials said would be rare.

The department said it was important to get that on the books by next summer, because the full gainful employment regulations are not scheduled to go into effect until summer 2012.

Otherwise, institutions could quickly start new programs or restructure existing ones, eliminating a data trail and skirting the new rules, the department said.

Harris Miller, CEO of the for-profit college industry’s main lobbyist, Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, called the change “a much more reasonable and pragmatic approach.”

Lanny Davis, a lobbyist for a group for several large privately held for-profit colleges, called it a step in the right direction.

Earlier Wednesday, Davis held a conference call criticized the original proposal, saying it would block career college students from learning about new technologies and getting training for green jobs.

New federal regulations target for-profit colleges (AP)

New federal regulations target for-profit colleges (AP)

It is 8:30 a.m. at De La Salle Academy, a private school in Manhattan for academically talented poor children, and classical music is humming through a boom box that harks back to the 1980s.

Children are streaming up four flights of stairs and surrounding the school’s founder and principal, Brother Brian Carty, like moths fluttering around a light. They want to tell him something. They want one of his bearhugs. They want to be in his orbit for a few minutes.

If the students’ attraction to Brother Carty suggests that he is a teddy bear of an administrator, consider a few of his rules. Gossip is an expellable offense. Makeup — even lip gloss — is prohibited. Dating is outlawed.

Parents are instructed on rules regarding parties and cellphone and Internet use. Teaching fads are generally dismissed, memorization is encouraged and smart boards are nowhere to be seen. “I’m not going to spoon-feed them,” he said. “Taking notes is a skill.”

At a time when everything about education seems to be in flux — the role of testing, the expectations for teachers, the impact of technology — Brother Carty is something of a throwback. For more than a quarter-century, he has been the guiding force and gatekeeper of one of the city’s most selective, if not most heralded, private schools. More than half of its students come from families with incomes of less than $35,000, and most move on to the city’s top private high schools or elite boarding schools in New England.

De La Salle, a middle school on West 97th Street, is nonsectarian, but there is a faith component, including prayers at the beginning of the day and the start of each class. “I ask the parents to raise them in their faith and to practice it,” Brother Carty said. And though he holds an administrative role, he clearly views his position pastorally.

“I was not so sure you had the soul to make it here,” Brother Carty wrote in the autograph book of a student who graduated from De La Salle in May, Cassandra Raimundi. She said she was into boys and into gossip when she arrived at the school.

“Brother Brian had me sit in his office, and we had a long conversation and it was very emotional,” she said. “But that was the minute I decided to grow up.”

His tough-as-nails attitude toward behavior that falls short of expectations — at a funeral for a student who drowned over the summer, he told some of the student’s friends that they risked a spiritual death — does not easily fit the image of a man who has more than 1,300 friends on Facebook, and whom children flock to hug.

A towering figure, at 6-foot-4, with a deep belly laugh, he considers it his mission to be deeply involved in their lives. He chooses all of the students who are accepted, helps guide eighth graders through the high school admissions process and even consults with them four years later when they are applying to college. He seems to know everything about every one, about 150 each year, of his students, like whose father lost his job or whose mother is ill, and he still keeps up with students he had as early as the 1970s.

He has set up volunteer counseling with social workers and psychologists to help students work through problems at home. “It’s O.K. to struggle, but they have to learn to cope,” he said. “Pity parties are not allowed here.”

His graduates win scholarships to some of the city’s most prestigious schools that are eager to increase minority enrollment, including Dalton, Trinity and Fieldston, as well as boarding schools like Hotchkiss and Taft. (Brother Carty takes parents on a field trip to visit boarding schools since many of the parents, he said, have no idea what the schools are.)

“He remembers every kid, details about their families and the areas where they need to grow,” said Stephen M. Clement, headmaster of the Browning School, which has taken many of Brother Carty’s students.

Dorothy A. Hutcheson, head of the Nightingale-Bamford School, an all-girls school in Manhattan, said De La Salle alumnae come academically prepared and with a thirst for learning that stands out. “It’s a great way to get diversity without having to work for it because they come so prepared,” she said.

Brother Carty, 66, grew up on the Upper West Side, the son of Irish immigrants. His father, a steamfitter, died when Brother Carty, the middle child of three, was 9, and he took on more family responsibilities.

He attended parochial schools, taught by the De La Salle Christian Brothers in the Lasallian tradition, named after a French Roman Catholic saint who founded a system of Christian schooling for the poor in the 17th century. “I had fabulous teachers,” Brother Carty said. “They were good men.”

He started teaching in 1965 at the Monsignor Kelly School, a private school whose enrollment was made up of academically talented children from public schools that could not focus on them.

“I was suddenly in a group — they seemed like old guys; they were probably in their mid- to late-20s — of adult males who took you under their wing and nurtured you spiritually, academically and athletically,” said Michael Franc, vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, and a 1971 graduate of Monsignor Kelly. “It was an across-the-board adoption in a positive way.”

Tough as Nails, but Always Ready for a Bearhug

No science fiction here: “These are real,” say commercials for Planet Green’s new show, Dean of Invention, which premieres Friday at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

Dean Kamen, the show’s host and inventor of various medical technologies as well as the two-wheeled self-balancing personal transporter, the Segway, says he wants the show to get kids excited about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), although the series is not aimed just at children.

Demolishing stereotypes

Inspiring and engaging kids in STEM has long been one of Kamen’s goals, which he largely pursues through his FIRST robotics competition, a series of hands-on robotics contests culminating in a large international championship, something of a robot Olympics.

“I think the biggest stereotype of all that hurts the world of science and technology is that kids think of scientists as a ‘they.’ Kids think, ‘It’s those scientists who will cure cancer. It’s those weird geniuses. It’s them, those scientists, not me,’ ” says Kamen.

Kamen says that he hopes his show will wipe out the image of the crazy or boring scientist by showing kids fascinating technology and fun, exciting scientists of all races, genders and ages.

In each show, Kamen takes his audience on “field trips” to labs and other research sites to investigate breakthrough inventions, including a trip to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to study robotic prosthetic limbs, a feature on the first episode.

“We want the opportunity to present this information in a way that is broadly interesting and accessible from kids to adults. We want kids to say, ‘I wanna get involved,’ or ‘I wanna build that reality.’ We want to build the army of kids who are going to be the next generation of saviors,” he says.

There are educational TV shows that are effective, such as Cyberchase, a science cartoon on PBS Kids that must prove it is reaching kids because the National Science Foundation funds it, says Joe Blatt, Harvard University Graduate School of Education senior lecturer and director of the Technology, Innovation and Education program.

Blatt adds, however, that educational shows succeed best when geared toward the appropriate age group.

He has not seen Dean of Invention yet, but Blatt says it is not unreasonable to assume that older kids might watch because “teens and tweens” often turn to shows designed for adults as they grow out of kids’ shows.

“A lot of the show, from what I can see, is very technically oriented,” says Tony Murphy of St. Catherine University’s National Center for STEM Elementary Education in St. Paul. Murphy watched preview clips of the show on Planet Green’s website.

“But it is also done in a way that’s interesting and easy to understand, with graphics and great visuals, that help people to gain an understanding of what’s being done in science and technology,” Murphy says. “It’s very, very exciting, and could be great for parents and kids to watch together.”

The show is designed to be accessible to the average adult viewer but stimulating for kids, and informative for professionals in STEM, says Kamen.

Although entire episodes may not appeal to some younger kids, Murphy says teachers from elementary to high school could use clips from the show as part of a lesson to get kids thinking about technology, which is vital because by middle school, some children already have negative feelings about those subjects.

Outside the typical lab

Murphy adds that bringing this show into the classroom could “start kids off with an understanding that we live in a technological world,” and expose kids to scientists and engineers of all cultures and outside of the typical laboratory setting.

Kamen says future episodes will feature a range of innovations such as computer programs that can transfer information from the human brain, and the development of human waste as an energy source to be burned like coal.

Planet Green show aims to inspire kids with science

Planet Green show aims to inspire kids with science

LONDON — What is a university education worth? Who derives the benefits? And who should pay for it?

Britain Looks to Graduates to Pick Up the Tuition Tab

CARLSBAD, Calif. – An electronics technician suspected of wounding two girls after opening fire at a California elementary school fell into a deep depression after he was fired from an insurance company, an acquaintance said.

Bonnie Ramirez said suspected gunman Brendan O’Rourke was rooming with her son in Springfield, Ill., in 2002, when he tried to get O’Rourke help at a hospital, but nothing was done for him.

Her son asked him to move out and O’Rourke became angry.

Ramirez said O’Rourke began calling them 20 to 30 times a day. At one point, he telephoned 228 times over five days, she said.

“He was very, very disturbed,” Ramirez, 68, told the San Diego Union-Tribune from her Springfield home in a story published Wednesday.

O’Rourke later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor telephone harassment and was sentenced to one year probation and fined $300, the newspaper said.

O’Rourke, 41, is expected to be arraigned Wednesday in Vista Superior Court in connection with the Friday shooting at Kelly Elementary School. He was being held for investigation of attempted murder, possessing a firearm on school grounds, using explosives on school grounds and making explosives without a permit.

Police believe O’Rourke armed himself with a .357-magnum revolver, jumped a fence and opened fire toward the crowded playground. The two girls, ages 6 and 7, were each shot in an arm. Both were recovering.

Construction workers building a school cafeteria chased the gunman and held him until police arrived.

Carlsbad police said the walls of O’Rourke’s apartment in Oceanside had been painted with the words “destroy” and “Christian,” and other writing indicated he was angry with the insurance companies AIG and State Farm.

O’Rourke worked as a phone or computer technician at NTN Communications Inc., a video entertainment firm in Carlsbad that installs games and video equipment in bars and restaurants, police Lt. Kelly Cain said.

The business is about two miles from Kelly Elementary, which serves one of the wealthiest communities in the U.S., a generally crime-free area about a 30-minute drive north of San Diego known for its scenic beaches and luxury resorts.

Michele Hincks, vice president of marketing, confirmed O’Rourke’s employment but declined to say what he did.

“We are cooperating fully with police, and our thoughts and prayers go out to the two little girls and all those at Kelly Elementary,” she said.

Oceanside police records show officers were dispatched to O’Rourke’s apartment three times this year over noise complaints. Each time he refused to answer the door and the noise stopped.

___

Information from: The San Diego Union-Tribune, http://www.signonsandiego.com

Report: Shooting suspect depressed about lost job (AP)

Report: Shooting suspect depressed about lost job (AP)