You can TRIS me here
Information Technology
This blog’s section is used for my entries in IT (CS, AIT, ICT, etc)
How Ads Affect Our Memory!
Feb 18th
I partly read this article but I’m now stuck with homework and don’t have time to read them all. Bookmark is a stupid way to remind me to read things that I found (actually I never check my bookmarks). Thus, I share this interested piece of cake here for everyone to read it, as I will also do later.
——————————
A new study suggests that marketers shouldn’t fixate on the number of people who click on ads. According to the research, just seeing an ad on a Web page can impact memory. The findings could have a significant impact on the way online advertising is made and metered.
|
|
| Credit: Technology Review |
Typically, to be considered effective, an online advertisement has to elicit a response–usually a click of the mouse–from a potential customer. But Chan Yun Yoo, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Telecommunications, found that when people view Web advertisements, they store information in two different types of memory: explicit and implicit.
Explicit memory involves facts learned through conscious interaction, while implicit memory involves unconscious retention. Explicitly remembered information includes ad slogans, product benefits, and website addresses. In contrast, implicit memory might only come into play when external stimuli trigger concepts. For instance, a consumer might only recall a brand of toothpaste from a television ad when he or she discovers it while browsing in a store. Or the consumer might develop an unconscious affinity for a certain brand despite not knowing specific facts about it.
Subjects who paid attention to a banner advertisement were more likely than those who didn’t to recall whole words and facts from the ad–facts stored in explicit memory. All ads had the same level of impact in the unconscious explicit memory, however, whether or not they’d been clicked. Yoo’s findings are relevant because they challenge the assumption that online advertising is only effective when it gets a direct response from the viewer. His study was published in the spring 2007 edition of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.
Donna Hoffman, codirector of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside, says that Yoo’s research applies traditional ideas about media impact to the Internet. In other mediums, such as television, advertisers do not typically assume that audience members will interact with the ad. Hoffman says the notion that banner ads may have some impact on perception begs the question, “What are the most effective ways to advertise in the new medium?”
Yoo says that the implications of his work are twofold: advertisers “need to reconsider the objectives of Web advertising” and use “impression-based metrics more than performance-based metrics when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of Web advertising.” Click-through rates, which represent the percentage of people who clicked on an ad after viewing it, might be useful to determine whether an ad elicited an immediate response. But ad impressions–that is, the number of times an ad is displayed–might be a better measure of the impact required to build a brand image.
Many advertisers offer companies and individuals both impression- and performance-based measurements. Google’s Adsense allows revenue to be collected in number of impressions or per click. Popular video-sharing website Revver relies mainly on click throughs, but it recently introduced impression-based advertising.
Heather Luttrell is president of online marketer IndieClick, based in Los Angeles, which charges according to impressions. The company’s goal is to connect retailers with viewers who are highly relevant to the advertiser, ensuring an attentive audience.
“Clicks are not the most important thing,” Luttrell says. How people find the site is not as important as tracking what they do once they go to the site. IndieClick found that click throughs accounted for only a fraction of the increased site activity created by an ad campaign. On a consistent basis, Luttrell says, site statistics “showed seven times more traffic at that destination site than we would have shown through click through alone.”
Yoo recommends focusing on targeting neither explicit nor implicit memory but, rather, both. A larger campaign might not be based exclusively on click-through behavior, he says, and many of the implicit effects of online advertising are not yet fully understood.
Tris won triple first prizes in IT Challenge – Monash University
Oct 8th
Hi everyone,
That was amazing that I’ve won triple first prizes in IT Challenge held by Monash University. Wow wow wow =D! My project was about an online system that helps students practice before tests which is modified with some new features and solutions. A month working alone, day by day, and I’ve reached my goal in which I’ve never thought about how successful it will be, yes never mind about that.
I used the same package as usual: PHP/MySQL/Javascript (AJAX). Hopefully, I will share my source code for everyone soon, just for intellectual purposes only.
I’m trying to get a visa as soon as possible to fly to Melbourne by late Oct. Hope it will be ok and I will be attending the awards ceremony with a special digital festival there ^^
This is a screenshot of my position ranking in Monash University website. You guys can check it here: http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/promotion/competitions/it-challenge/results-2009.html

10/2009
Tris.
PayPal has updated its policy – Vietnam is included wow!
Sep 23rd
I’ve just read them from an IT forums. I was going wow wow wow!
PayPal has updated its policy in which includes Vietnam in bank account withdrawal countries list. It will effect from October 14, 2009. Great news eva!
Notice date: September 10, 2009 Effective date: October 14, 2009 Beginning Effective date: October 14, 2009, the PayPal User Agreement, Payments policy and buyer protection policy will be modified to include several new currencies as holding currencies and add additional withdrawal countries and the related fees and charges have been modified to include these new currencies. New currencies include: Filipino Peso, Taiwanese Dollar, Thai Baht, Malaysian Ringgit, Argentinean Peso, and Brazilian Reais. Bank account withdrawal countries being added include Vietnam, Malaysia, Argentina, and Brasil. Several of these currencies are restricted currencies and not all PayPal features will be available with regards to a restricted currency and not all customers will have access to restricted currencies.
I love PayPal =D
Coding techniques for securing PHP app in a shared hosting environment.
Sep 19th
I’ve just read ‘em on PHPTalk, I don’t visit there every often, but still looking for some interesting articles. And the topic now is using some coding techniques to secure your PHP app in a shared hosting environment.
I’ve trimmed the post for some parts we don’t need to read (such as server’s configurations). We focus on the coding techniques only. Although these issues have been talking for bunches of times over the Internet but there are still some basic things that programmers got missed.
(Reference: http://www.phptalk.com/forums/index.php/topic,6455.0.html)
Since its inception in 1994 as a set of basic development components, PHP has grown into one of the web’s most powerful development engines, having since been installed on literally millions of servers worldwide. And although PHP offers both the versatility and the built-in functionality to run in a reasonably secure fashion, most of those servers are configured in such a way that PHP scripts are at high risk for compromise.
[...]
General practices for PHP application security
At this point, I’d like to briefly go over just a few coding techniques you can use to increase the security of your application. Please understand that this is by no means a comprehensive list, and simply adhering to the suggestions below does not ensure that your application is secure. However, you should make it a point to be security conscious when writing code, rather than trusting your environment to eliminate or mitigate any potential attacks on your application.
1. Sanity-check your data
- This is probably the simplest and most effective way of preventing exploits in your application. Sanity checking just means that if you’re expecting the user to enter a number, make sure you actually received a number. If you’re expecting a string with alphanumeric characters only, verify that that’s what you got. Also, never trust this kind of validation to javascript only, as javascript can easily be disabled on the client side. Finally, never pass user data directly to an SQL query without validating it first. While PHP’s magic_quotes mechanism is great for helping to prevent SQL injection attacks (an attack where a user can enter data in such a way as to run their own arbitrary queries), again you should not rely exclusively on the environment for your application security.
2. Check the type and extension of uploaded files.
- Allowing file uploads is inherently risky, but very often it’s a necessary part of an application. PHP allows you to gain a lot of information about uploaded files before they’re ever written to their final destination, so make use of the information contained in the $_FILES array to ensure that you’re getting the type of file you’re expecting. A basic way of validating the file type is simply to ensure that the extension of the file indicates that it is (or is purported to be) the type of file you’re expecting. A common exploit for upload scripts is for an attacker to upload a malicious PHP script to your site, then browse to the uploaded script to gain control of your files. Even a basic check to make sure that, for instance, only files with a .jpg extension are allowed to be uploaded would prevent this type of exploit. However, I also recommend verifying the MIME type of the file, which is contained in the $_FILES array under the key ‘type’, and will look like: “image/jpeg” or “application/pdf”. Be as restrictive as possible – rather than validating against a list of extensions that are NOT allowed (php, exe, etc), check to make sure that the extension and/or MIME type matches a small group of file types that ARE allowed.
3. Use a .php extension for ALL files with PHP code contained in them.
Often I come across files in PHP projects that have a .inc extension, because they are meant to be included, not browsed to directly from the web. This is a common condition, but there’s a potential security issue here if those files contain any sensitive data (e.g. database passwords). Because .inc files are not parsed by the PHP interpreter, they can be passed directly to the client side if they’re available via a web request, which would allow anyone to read the php code directly. Hopefully the directory these files reside in is denied read access by webserver rules (see below), but even so, there’s no sense in risking an accident where the user ends up being able to browse directly to the file. Use .inc.php.
4. Make use of your webserver’s access control rules (e.g. .htaccess)
- Even if all the php files in your application have a .php extension as discussed in #3, you should still make use of your HTTP server’s access control to prohibit any files in sensitive directories from being served via the web. For instance, if you keep your database passwords in “include/db.inc.php”, this file, and all files in the include/ directory should be prevented from being served via the web. Even though the .php extension will ensure that client-side users can’t read the code if the PHP interpreter is functioning, there is the potential condition that the HTTP server has loaded without the PHP interpreter. Botched upgrades or configuration errors can sometimes cause this condition, and in the event that someone browses to a PHP file without the PHP interpreter ever having been loaded, they will again see the code just as you do when editing the files. In Apache, disabling directory access is usually as simple as creating a file called .htaccess (note the leading period) in the directory, then adding the line: “Deny from All” (no quotes) to that file and saving it.



