Essentially, both groups lost an average of 33 pounds in the first 16 weeks. The difference came in the second 16 weeks. By the end of the 32 weeks, those who skipped the dessert regained an average of 22 pounds. Those who were in the dessert-eating group continued weight loss and shed an average 15 pounds more. In the end, the dessert group lost an average of 40 more pounds more than the others.

The layman’s explanation is simple. The people who abstained from sweets experienced more cravings throughout the day and gave into the cravings more often. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but it is also when our appetite is smallest. So if you get your metabolism jump started early and eat that snack first, you have all day to burn it and you won’t be distracted by your cravings.

Keeping extra weight off long term is one of the biggest challenges. This finding could be a key component to helping people eat a steady balanced diet. If you combine this type of strategy with some moderate exercise, weight loss doesn’t have to be a mystery equation. Eat light at night and have sweets early in the day.

Let’s see what the reaction is on Twitter:

I’m here to serve … cake. MT @Cljohnst: Cake for breakfast? To lose weight? Thanks @gangrey for brightening my day. tampabay.com/news/health/re…

— Ben Montgomery (@gangrey) February 9, 2012

Yay! I have an essay in here! MT @avilandie: advanced reading copies of Wedding Cake for Breakfast arrived-gorgeous! twitter.com/avilandie/stat…

— Kristen Weber (@kristenwEditor) February 9, 2012

[new post] I made King Cake Cupcakes. And had one for breakfast today. j.mp/zKjRb1

— Shawnda (@foodiebride) February 9, 2012

It sounds like people are happy with the idea so far. Speaking of Twitter, I just read an article where a man had the idea to use Twitter to track his diet progress. The main gist is that, at first he was inspired by his idea, but he quickly became embarrassed by his late-night fatty food feasts and long periods of inactivity on Twitter do to his shameful diet.

As his tweets will reveal, he persisted and did lose weight. One thing that struck me about his story is how others began to tweet their diets to him. They would share tales of high calorie meals and compare weight loss secrets.

Here’s a brief chronology of his work with the Twitter diet:

Last nite: asparagus sted of fries, but too much alcohol. Today: fruit; then sushi, little bit of soy sauce, 1 cookie sted of usual 3.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter25) March 4, 2010

Until last month, I sometimes ordered 2 melts, 2 hash browns — 88% of day’s fat, 100% of saturated fat — for breakfast. Disturbing.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter25) April 28, 2010

In exactly two months, I have dropped 25 pounds. Now, my new goal: to lose 25 more pounds by my 25th birthday, 9/3.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter25) May 3, 2010

I started this Twitter feed at 270 pounds. I think I maxed out between 275 and 280. But now I’m at 220. I’d like to be under 200.

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter25) June 28, 2010

Keep in mind that this is the firm behind such viral hits as Evian Roller Babies and Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like (not to mention the campaign that got Chrome’s PageRank penalized):

“Notably, it was found that viewers are far more likely to recall a brand name and engage with an ad’s message if a branded video has been recommended to them by a peer,” an Unruly spokesperson tells WebProNews.

The firm points out the following highlights from the research:

• Brand recall and brand association rose 7 percent among viewers who had been recommended the videos versus viewers who found it by browsing;
• 73 percent of respondents who viewed a peer-recommended video recalled the brand when prompted versus 68 percent of viewers who had browsed to the video directly;
• There was a 14 percent increase in the number of people who enjoyed the video following a recommendation versus those who had discovered it by browsing;
• People who enjoyed a video were 97 percent more likely to purchase the product featured in the video

Here’s a closer look at the enjoyment comparison between recommended vs. non-recommended videos:

As Unruly notes in its report, the enjoyment level is important because it has a direct impact on key brand metrics:

The entire report is available in white paper format.

Need some pointers on what makes a video go viral? Here are some good points made by Robert Knorpp at the BlogWorld and New Media Expo in November.

The study compared two siblings. one was an addict and the other was not. Scientists found the same anomaly in both, suggesting it’s genetic. Next their brains were compared to participants with no history of addiction. There was no anomaly. Essentially the anomaly is an enlarged section of the fronto-striatal systems. This area is associated with controlling ones behavior.

Dr. Karen Ersche of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) at the University of Cambridge comments on the findings:

“Parts of their brains’ underlying self-control abilities work less efficiently. The use of addictive drugs, such as cocaine, further exacerbates this problem, paving the way for addiction to develop from occasional use.”

“While we still have more work to do to fully address the reasons why some family members show a greater resilience against addiction, our results will provide the scientific basis for the development of more effective preventative and therapeutic strategies for people at risk of addiction,”

Perhaps these findings can be used to prevent or treat addiction in the future.

That makes nine quarters in a row for positive year-over-year growth in U.S. e-commerce spending. In fact, that’s five in a row for double digit growth.

E-commerce spending in the U.S. reached a record $161.5 billion for all of 2011, according to the firm. That’s up 13% from 2010.

comScore’s highlights the following:

• The top-performing online product categories were: Digital Content & Subscriptions, Jewelry & Watches, Consumer Electronics, Toys & Hobbies, and Computer Software. Each category grew at least 18 percent vs. year ago.
• Ten individual days in Q4 surpassed $1 billion in online spending, led by Cyber Monday (Nov. 28) at $1.251 billion. Monday, Dec. 5 ranked second at $1.178 billion, followed by Green Monday (Dec. 12) at $1.133 billion.
• 52 percent of e-commerce transactions included free shipping, representing an all-time high. The previous high was Q4 2010 at 49 percent.
• Smartphones and tablets played a growing role in online shopping, with consumes increasingly using smartphones to check prices and product features while physically in a retail store.

“The fourth quarter of 2011 capped off what was yet another strong year for online retail, one in which every quarter achieved double-digit increases versus the prior year,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “In the face of continuing uncertainty regarding the U.S. economy, consumers increasingly went online for their shopping needs. Price and convenience continue to be the critical value drivers for e-commerce, and unless those conditions change we can expect to see more channel-shifting to online in 2012 and perhaps even an acceleration in the current growth trend.”

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and Georgia Tech have published a study today that looks to investigate how much of Twitter is worthless.

“If we understood what is worth reading and why, we might design better tools for presenting and filtering content, as well as help people understand the expectations of other users,” Paul André, a post-doctoral fellow in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and lead author of the study, said.

Even though there are 200 million tweets being sent per day, nobody really ever cared to tell users how useless their tweets are. That’s why the researchers created “Who Gives a Tweet?” which sought to collect reader evaluation of tweets.

Over a period of 19 days, over 1,000 visitors to the site rated over 43,000 tweets from the accounts of over 20,000 Twitter users they followed.

The readers liked 36 percent of the tweets and disliked 25 percent. Another 39 percent caused no strong reaction.

“A well-received tweet is not all that common,” Michael Bernstein, a researcher on the team, said. “A significant amount of content is considered not worth reading, for a variety of reasons.”

Tweets that were part of someone else’s conversation or updates about mood or activity were the most disliked.

Tweets that included questions, shared information or self-promoted creative works were the most liked.

The researchers put together a few tips for those who want to be a successful Twitter user:

Old news is no news: Twitter emphasizes real-time information. Followers quickly get bored of even relatively fresh links seen multiple times.

Contribute to the story: Add an opinion, a pertinent fact or add to the conversation before hitting “send” on a link or a retweet.

Keep it short: Followers appreciate conciseness. Using as few characters as possible also leaves room for longer, more satisfying comments on retweets.

Limit Twitter-specific syntax: Overuse of #hashtags, @mentions and abbreviations makes tweets hard to read. But some syntax is helpful; if posing a question, adding a hashtag helps everyone follow along.

Keep it to yourself: The cliched “sandwich” tweets about pedestrian, personal details were largely disliked. Reviewers reserved a special hatred for Foursquare location check-ins.

Provide context: Tweets that are too short leave readers unable to understand their meaning. Simply linking to a blog or photo, without giving a reason to click on it, was “lame.”

Don’t whine: Negative sentiments and complaints were disliked.

Be a tease: News or professional organizations that want readers to click on their links need to hook them, not give away all of the news in the tweet itself.

For public figures: People often follow you to read professional insights and can be put off by personal gossip or everyday details.

The researchers hope that their work leads to personalized applications that filter out unwanted tweets.

They go on to say, however, that some users may put up with bad tweets out of a personal obligation. It’s an online extension of having to attend extended family gatherings even though your cousins are social rejects that make you feel horribly awkward.

“Social media technologies such as Twitter pose questions regarding privacy, etiquette and tensions between sharing and self-presentation, as well as content,” André said.

What’s your definition of a worthless tweet? Let us know in the comments.

Here are the main takeaways:

- People are more likely to share information from their close friends on Facebook, but because of their abundance, distant contacts are primarily responsible for the majority of information spread on Facebook.

- This research is among the first to rigorously quantify influence at a mass scale, and demonstrates that social networks can act as a powerful medium for sharing new ideas, highlighting new products and discussing current events.

Bakshy discusses the findings at length here.

These findings actually bode well for Google+. One of the most common complaints we see, regarding Google’s social network is that it is missing the user’s real friends. It just hasn’t been adopted by the masses yet the way Facebook has. However, if similar trends occur on Google+ as to what Facebook has found, you shouldn’t have to have close friends using it to get significant benefit from it.

To make it easy lets take a look at the infographic from their site and see what they found:

We can see that consumers have an overall (87%) preference for shopping on web and mobile sites. 60% shop using either digital or print ads, or both, and only 4% are using mobile apps. these figures suggest that there is still a lot of opportunity to develop application based shopping.

Interestingly enough, the infographic also reveals purchasing preferences in the different consumer product categories. One item which stands out is for tablet users. They sure do seem to love their toys and electronics- two categories which I think go hand and hand for the young and young at heart. Perhaps this purchasing behavior is how they came to have their tablets before anyone else.

But of even more interest is, who is buying. The most prominent internet shopper (gatherer) is the 40-something female. Her household income is around 63,000/ year and she is an active Facebook user (over 80% connected). 43% of these shoppers own smart phones and 16% are using tablets.

This leaves me to wonder; are men too busy hunting for a good deal online to actually commit to buying something? Either way, this research suggests we still prefer browser-based shopping over apps and that means there’s a lot of room for growth in that market.

This study, which measures the CTR of different social network users, was conducted using a referrer based methodology.

To summarize, the CTR in question is calculated as (# of clicks generated from impression set) / (# of impressions received on a publisher webpage from a link posted on Google+/Facebook/Twitter). Hope this helps.

Original Article: Chitika Insights has a new report indicating that Facebook users click on ads more than twice as often as Google+ users or Twitter users.

“Given the announcements and roll out of new social media advertising programs on platforms including; Google+, Facebook and Twitter, we wanted to investigate where advertisers will have the highest potential to engage with users based on CTR (Click Through Rate),” a representative for Chitika tells WebProNews. “To quantify this study, we analyzed a sample of data from the extensive Chitika ad network, covering hundreds of millions of impressions, to compile a data set which yielded the CTR (Click Through Rate, or likelihood of a user clicking on an ad) of the average user on the three social networks.”

The firm isolated the referrer domain for Google+, Twitter and Facebook, to compile a data set which yielded clickthrough rate of the average user on each social network.

Google+ and Twitter users click on ads with about the same frequency, according to Chitika’s findings.

Facebook measured a .24% CTR, while Google+ and Twitter users ranked at .1 and .09% respectively.

“As always, a cost-benefit analysis is key to identifying which platform (if any) is worthwhile for your product or service,” Chitika says. “One of the biggest factors in deciding which form of social network advertising is the best choice is highly dependent on the type of campaign being run. For instance, in marketing a time sensitive campaign, utilizing an analytical approach with Twitter’s promoted trends could be more effective than pursuing standard Facebook ads. Moreover, it is possible as a marketer to optimize for all segments of traffic, and when making the final decision on an ad campaign, it is essential to keep your target market in mind.”

Of course, simply using Google+ to promote your products or services, may have new benefits to search visibility.

Medical Genomics looks to inform the masses, with a major step being the release of an iPad app which will inform users of their research. What are they researching? They’ve been sequencing entire cannabis genomes and mapping them for research. Their app will feature a wide array of functions, which you can read about below. If you decide to download the app, it will set you back $1.99.

MARBLEHEAD, Mass. – January 12, 2012 – Medicinal Genomics, a pioneer in the genomics of medicinal plants, today announced the availability of Jane-Ome, an application designed for Apple’s iPad tablet, which offers a science-based dissection of medical marijuana.

Jane-Ome provides a gateway to the Cannabis genome project led by Medicinal Genomics, which in August 2011 sequenced the entire genome of Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica, assembling the largest known gene collection of this therapeutic plant.

“Medicinal Genomics is excited to roll out Jane-Ome to help make sense of the extensive datasets created by the Cannabis genome project,” said Kevin McKernan, founder and head of scientific operations of Medicinal Genomics. “The company’s hope is that Jane-Ome will help make that data more relevant to the public and serve as a conduit for future Cannabis genomes.”

Jane-Ome provides users with continuously updated, exclusive genomic information on various Cannabis genomes. In addition, the app provides users with access to several scientific news feeds that explore the science of medicinal Cannabis, making Jane-Ome the nerve center to explore the plant’s therapeutic potential.

In addition to its encyclopedic information about the bleeding-edge science of Cannabis, Jane-Ome users can compete in Cannabis related trivia to earn the right to guide future sequencing efforts. Users can also explore never before released blueprints for the equipment used to crack the human genome project, as well as access videos which explain the impact DNA sequencing and genomics have had on the world. Furthermore, Jane-Ome provides users with access to never before seen videos documenting the history of the human genome project, as well as commentary from members of that scientific consortium explaining how research has led them to aim their sights on unlocking the genome of Cannabis.

One of the more interesting reads from their press release is the medical benefits they list from cannabis use – “Ongoing scientific research suggests that the Cannabis plant harbors beneficial compounds as it pertains to cancer apoptosis, antiemesis for HIV and chemotherapy patients, reduction of muscle spasms for multiple sclerosis patients, as well as the treatment of glaucoma, inflammatory diseases, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other health conditions.

Of the 85 identified Cannabinoids in the plant, only one is independently psychoactive. The other 84 appear to be non-psychoactive and are still powerful therapeutics. Many Cannabinoids have been bred to low expression levels over the years but are excellent small molecule therapeutic drug candidates for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The genome sequence can be utilized to design breeding strategies to resurrect these nearly extinct pathways. In addition, Cannabinoids have also been shown to have a very favorable therapeutic index making them a unique class of anti-cancer compounds because the lethal dose is much higher than the effective dose. Furthermore, Cannabinoids are less addictive analgesics than opiates, and target different pain pathways in the body.“

Conducted over the course of a 21-month period, the researchers found a “strong correlation between a rise in Internet searches for flu information, compiled by Google’s Flu Trends tool, and a subsequent rise in people coming into a busy urban hospital emergency room complaining of flu-like symptoms.” Primary investigator of the study, Dr. Richard Rothman, said that the results were promising for “eventually developing a standard regional or national early warning system for frontline health care workers.” More from the press release:

Rothman and his team found the correlation between Internet searches and patient volume was most pronounced when researchers reviewed data showing a rise in search traffic for flu information and the number of children coming into the Hopkins pediatric emergency room with what doctors call influenza-like illness or ILI.

Although the science and medical community has generally accepted that a rise in flu search queries on Google Flu Trends corresponds with a rise in people reporting flu-like symptoms, the Johns Hopkins team is believed to be the first to show that the Flu Trends data strongly correlates with an upswing in emergency room activity.

Currently, emergency departments, hospitals and other health care providers rely on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu case reports provided during flu season, October to May, as a key way to track flu outbreaks.

Those CDC reports currently dictating the preparation of hospitals for influenza outbreaks, the researchers say, are simply too slow to reach health care providers in order to be of any use. In the Google era of search technology, there’s a reason that news and cultural trends are described as “viral” when they become popular: they catch on and they spread among people quickly. If videos of politicians doing idiotic things at state fairs can race across an entire country within the period of a few hours in the afternoon, there’s no reason the CDC shouldn’t be able to quickly assess influenza outbreaks in a timely fashion. As a result, Rothman concludes, “[the CDC reports] don’t provide frontline health care workers with a strong tool to prepare day-to-day for a surge in flu cases, even as the flu is spreading in real time. Google Flu Trends, on the other hand, collects and provides data on search traffic for flu information on a daily basis by detecting and analyzing certain flu-related search terms.”

Mark one more in the win column for Team Google, who’s now officially doing better at helping your community stave off flu outbreaks than the United States government agency charged with that same task.