Google is the world's most valuable brand.

The FT reported this week that Google is now worth $66.4 billion, ahead of GE, Microsoft and Coca-Cola.

The speed of the company's ascent has been astounding: the domain name google.com was only registered in 1997. Google's ranking jumped to the top spot from No. 7 a year ago, based on a 77 percent increase in the value of its brand. By contrast, Microsoft, which led the survey in 2006, tumbled because of an 11 percent drop in the perceived value of its brand.

The other top brands were as follows:

1. Google ... $66.4 billion
2. GE ... $61.9 billion
3. Microsoft ... $55 billion
4. Coca-Cola ... $44.1 billion
5. China Mobile $41.2 billion

Wag the Dog

It's good to know that out there, somewhere, someone is investigating how and why dogs wag their tails. The New York Times is reporting that when dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.

“This is an intriguing observation,” said Richard J. Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. It fits with a large body of research showing emotional asymmetry in the brain, he said.

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

Dog tails are interesting, Dr. Davidson said, because they are in the midline of the dog’s body, neither left nor right. So do they show emotional asymmetry, or not?

To find out, Dr. Vallortigara and his colleagues recruited 30 family pets of mixed breed that were enrolled in an agility training program. The dogs were placed in a cage equipped with cameras that precisely tracked the angles of their tail wags. Then they were shown four stimuli through a slat in the front of the cage: their owner; an unfamiliar human; a cat; and an unfamiliar, dominant dog.

In each instance the test dog saw a person or animal for one minute, rested for 90 seconds and saw another view. Testing lasted 25 days with 10 sessions per day.

When the dogs looked at an aggressive, unfamiliar dog — a large Belgian shepherd Malinois — their tails all wagged with a bias to the left side of their bodies.

Thus when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left, Dr. Vallortigara said. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.

Expect this research to be among the front-runners for this year's Ignobel Awards.

Sight Beyond Seeing

A book of photographs by blind teenagers. The project is the brain child of visual artist and social entrepreneur Tony Deifell, who says:

"Photography wasn't the obvious subject to teach at Governor Morehead School for the Blind.

Even Jackie, one of the first three students to take the class, was incredulous: "What are you thinking, teaching photography to blind people?"

As a photographer, I feared losing my eyesight and began to wonder, "If I were blind, could I still make photographs?""

Pictured is Melody's self portrait. See also, Ways of Seeing.

Well Golly

• Five hundred Britons are leaving the UK every day to live in the sun or find work abroad, according to the Office of National Statistics. A record 380,000 people left the country in 2005.

• Comics account for 25% all book sales in South Korea.

• Traffic injuries are the leading cause of death in people ages 10 to 24 around the world, according to the World Health Organisation.

• Nearly 182,000 new items were launched globally during 2006, according to market analysts Mintel. Food and drink products made up nearly 105,000 of the releases - around 290 new goods for every day of the year.

• More than a third of American adult internet users (36%) consult the citizen-generated online encyclopedia Wikipedia, according to a new nationwide survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And on a typical day in the winter of 2007, 8% of online Americans consulted Wikipedia.

Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods

Nicked from Cool Tools who say, "If you've ever wondered how to model something, or were looking for new ideas for segmenting and presenting complex concepts, this is an incredible online resource. A neat graphical explanation and example of each "element" (ex; a cycle diagram) appears as soon as your cursor scrolls over them. What I like most is that the categorisers have thoroughly sliced the categorising! For instance, they've color-coded their categories: data, metaphor, concept, strategy, information, and compound visualisation techniques. As if that were not enough to spark your brain, the creators also provide clues as to whether the model works best for convergent or divergent thinking, and whether it is more for an overview vs. detailed perspective. So far, I have used it mostly for inspiration, especially the metaphor models, but this resource has given me ideas and structure and the appropriate language for my work as a process designer and facilitator. I also passed this onto a 7th grade teacher friend of mine who is using it with his entire class!"

The table itself is here.

Created by Dr. Martin J. Eppler & Ralph Lengler, University of Lugano, Switzerland of Visual Literacy.org.

Innocentive

InnoCentive serves as a crowd-sourcing R&D broker. Companies can post R&D challenges to their site and 90,000 independent researchers in 175 countries have an opportunity to tackle them. Interestingly, many of the solutions come from "left field": physicists who easily solve what are nominally difficult chemistry problems, for example. Rewards range from $25,000 to $1 million, which works out pretty cheap given that American firms spend around $200 billion on R&D annually.

See also: The Rise and Fall of Corporate R&D, The Economist.

The Business of Innovation

"The Business of Innovation is a series of 5 one-hour programmes produced by CNBC, the worldwide leader in business news, which explores in-depth the most important topic in the business world today - Innovation. Each program will explore a different aspect of Innovation using CNBC's global newsgathering capabilities, well-known current and former CEO's and innovation experts to dissect the topic and provide guidance for viewers seeking to innovate in their own organizations. The series is hosted by award-winning journalist Maria Bartiromo, who calls the programmes "...ground breaking in scope"."

And it's all watchable in your own time, online.

Another Dog

This time - Freeway - met at pub yesterday.