A Day on Pluto, a Day on Charon 11-21

A Day on Pluto, a Day on Charon

On approach in July 2015, the cameras on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured Pluto rotating over the course of a full “Pluto day.” The best available images of each side of Pluto taken during approach have been combined to create this view of a full rotation.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Pluto’s day is 6.4 Earth days long. The images were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera as the distance between New Horizons and Pluto decreased from 5 million miles (8 million kilometers) on July 7 to 400,000 miles (about 645,000 kilometers) on July 13. 

The more distant images contribute to the view at the 3 o’clock position, with the top of the heart-shaped, informally named Tombaugh Regio slipping out of view, giving way to the side of Pluto that was facing away from New Horizons during closest approach on July 14.  The side New Horizons saw in most detail – what the mission team calls the “encounter hemisphere” – is at the 6 o’clock position.

These images and others like them reveal many details about Pluto, including the differences between the encounter hemisphere and the so-called “far side” hemisphere seen only at lower resolution. Dimples in the bottom (south) edge of Pluto’s disk are artifacts of the way the images were combined to create these composites.


On approach to the Pluto system in July 2015, the cameras on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured images of the largest of Pluto’s five moons, Charon, rotating over the course of a full day. The best currently available images of each side of Charon taken during approach have been combined to create this view of a full rotation of the moon.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Charon – like Pluto – rotates once every 6.4 Earth days. The photos were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera from July 7-13, as New Horizons closed in over a range of 6.4 million miles (10.2 million kilometers). The more distant images contribute to the view at the 9 o’clock position, with few of the signature surface features visible, such as the cratered uplands, canyons, or rolling plains of the informally named Vulcan Planum. The side New Horizons saw in most detail, during closest approach on July 14, 2015, is at the 12 o’clock position.

These images and others like them reveal many details about Charon, including how similar looking the encounter hemisphere is to the so-called “far side” hemisphere seen only at low resolution – which is the opposite of the situation at Pluto. Dimples in the bottom (south) edge of Charon’s disk are artifacts of the way the New Horizons images were combined to create these composites.

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What Taking a Global View of Youth Unemployment Reveals 11-01

Looking at trends in youth unemployment in high- and low-income countries makes the need for supporting youth entrepreneurship clear Youth unemployment is a critical issue for any country. From the lifelong effect graduating in a recession can have on students’ earnings to the upheaval of the Arab spring, the headlines of the last few years have shown that the ramifications of youth unemployment are deep and far-reaching. Taking a global view of trends in youth employment reveals what’s at the heart of the challenge—and points to the change that needs to be made to address it.

While youth unemployment rates across geographies vary, they diverge in a fashion that one may not expect. The world youth unemployment rate (ages 15–24) sits at 13.9 per cent, according to the World Bank, increasing by .2 percentage points since 2006. High-income countries—including the United States, Argentina and Kuwait—average an unemployment rate of 18.2 per cent. Middle-income countries—including China, Malaysia and Mexico—average a rate of 13.8 per cent. Low-income countries—including Afghanistan, Nepal and Liberia—a rate of 9 per cent. The key to making sense of what may be a surprising disparity is to ask: What kind of employment do these numbers reflect? That in turn underscores the transformative role youth entrepreneurship can play in both developing and developed economies.

“What often goes unrecorded in the data on youth unemployment is underemployment, and the negative impact that has on income and quality of life,” says Dr. Ben Oppenheim, Visiting Scholar and Senior Fellow at New York University, whose research focuses on economic development and governance in emerging markets. “Unemployment estimates can also be unreliable, since in many emerging markets, a significant share of labor activity takes place in the informal economy.”

A dearth of legal, high-paying economic opportunities means populations, including youth, in developing countries are forced to take jobs that expose them to occupational hazards and decrease their overall well-being. A 2012 study, for example, found that people in developing countries are exposed to more than 80 per cent of global occupational hazards.

In a similar vein, workers in the developed world are witnessing an increased informalization and fragmentation of their work, putting greater strains on youth employment. “What we see today is increasingly informalized labor in wealthy countries,” says Oppenheim. “The rise of the on-demand economy creates both pressures and opportunities for workers in the developed world to piece together income streams, as many people in developing countries do.”

This global, cross-regional perspective helps to clarify where the focus of combating youth unemployment should be—not just on hitting a number of “employed,” but also on creating quality employment opportunities with a positive impact on the individual and community alike. Fostering youth entrepreneurship may provide one avenue for accomplishing this. “Small and micro enterprises can absorb a lot of labor, and we know how to stimulate those kinds of businesses—for example, through microloans when credit bottlenecks are a critical constraint,” says Oppenheim. While no prescription for fostering youth entrepreneurial activity will be the same across borders, there may be similar through-lines that transect geographies. A key challenge, however, says Oppenheim, is that not everyone is ready to be an entrepreneur, and training and relieving constraints to entrepreneurship can only go so far.

This highlights that a combination of measures is needed to support a culture of youth entrepreneurship by choice, as opposed to labor-force participation out of hand-to-mouth necessity. While programs like social safety nets can free young would-be-entrepreneurs from subsistence work, getting to the “liftoff” point, where ideas become thriving business realities, takes more than that. That’s why training and mentoring are key. Investing in these resources for youth can have an impact on a country’s social and economic health that goes far beyond today’s topline numbers.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore how this central insight is being turned into solutions that are unique to the challenges and opportunities of countries around the world.

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Enormous, ‘catastrophic’ landslide in northern Canada almost went undetected by humans 10-31

It was enough rock and ice to equal the weight of 33 million pickup trucks. And for an earth-shattering two minutes, it barrelled down a mountain at nearly 200 km/h, pulverizing everything in its path.

And the Yukon didn’t even know it was there.

“Most likely it would have been missed,” said Colin Stark, one of two Columbia University geologists who spotted the “catastrophic” event from more than 5,000 kilometres away.

Expected to rank among the world’s 10 largest landslides for 2015, the slide saw a massive chuck of rock and ice slough off Mount Steele, Canada’s fifth highest peak.

If the Oct. 11 slide had struck in a populated region of India or China, hundreds would be dead. Even in Canada’s sparsely populated Rocky Mountains, it would have at least blocked a highway or buried a wilderness lodge.

But it occurred in a remote corner of Kluane National Park, Canada’s Wales-sized contribution to a swath of protected land stretching all the way to Anchorage, Alaska.

Jennoit/Jenn/Wikipedia

“That particular area, as the crow flies, is about 70 kilometres to the Alaska Highway; people aren’t back there very often,” said Jeff Bond with the Yukon Geological Survey.

Quite often, said Bond, the only way remote Yukon landslides are recorded is if some bystander happens to phone it in.

“We hear about them from helicopter pilots who say, ‘hey, did you guys know about this big slide?’ ”
In the summer of 2014, for instance, a landslide plowed into a creek within Kluane National Park, violently creating Canada’s newest lake. But it wasn’t until six months later that the change happened to be spotted by an off-duty parks employee who was out for a hike.

Credit for discovering the Oct. 11 avalanche falls to Stark and his research partner, Göran Ekström.
Operating out of Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, they have pioneered a way of discovering landslides by sifting through data typically used to detect earthquakes.

In the case of Mount Steele, one of the few witnesses to more than 45 megatons of falling rock and ice was “YUK8,” an unmanned Canadian seismic monitoring station located only 25 kilometres away.

Confirmation then came in via Landsat 8, a NASA Earth-monitoring satellite that focused in on the remote mountain and noted that vast areas of the surrounding peaks and glaciers had been blackened by debris.

Jsayre64/Wikipedia Commons

“The fact that the debris fell on ice contributed to the long debris field,” NASA wrote in a subsequent post.

Named for Sam Steele, the Yukon’s indomitable top Mountie during the Klondike Gold Rush, Mount Steele has proved to be surprisingly delicate of late.

In 2007, the mountain first found its way into geology textbooks with a slide that buried an area larger than Vancouver’s Stanley Park, and shook the ground with the force of a 5.2 earthquake.
That time, the only witnesses were a research team led by glaciologist Garry Clarke, who just happened to be nearby when they heard the distinctive roar of a mountain falling over.
“They got dusted by the ice avalanche, actually,” Bond said.

Mount Steele is part of the Saint Elias Mountains, which includes Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan. Amid regular earthquakes and landslides, it’s also a good candidate for Canada’s most geologically interesting corners.

Just last year, in fact, a mountain face broke off nearby Mount La Perouse, in Alaska, creating one of North America’s largest known natural landslides.

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Do today’s philanthropists hurt more than they help? 10-11

Do today’s philanthropists hurt more than they help?

As philanthropy enters a second golden age, real social change is getting lost in the hype of market-based giving.

In one of his short stories, “Counterfeit Money,” Charles Baudelaire describes a fictional encounter between two friends who come across a beggar in the street.

In this short piece, the narrator and friend offer the beggar spare change, but the friend offers a much larger coin. The narrator commends him for his generosity. The friend accepts the compliment and then adds, once they’re out of earshot of the beggar, “It was a counterfeit coin.”

The narrator is astounded. Not only has his friend duped the beggar on purpose, what’s worse, he feels self-congratulatory for his gift. His satisfaction lies in the fact that the beggar doesn’t realize that he has been duped. The narrator sees that his friend’s “aim had been to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal; to earn forty cents and the heart of God; to win paradise economically; in short to pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man.”

Baudelaire’s story was written in the latter half of the 19th century, a time when industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Sr. began channelling their vast fortunes into some of the greatest acts of philanthropy ever known. From Carnegie’s spending on public libraries to Rockefeller’s investment in biomedical advances, their giving helped to shift charity from the dispensing of alms in a largely unsystematic manner to a business in itself, overseen by paid philanthropic advisors.

Many did not feel grateful for the robber barons’ generosity, however. In his essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde berated the tendency of benefactors to use their charity as a bulwark against redistributive demands.

“The best among the poor,” Wilde wrote, “are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so … Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”

As philanthropy enters a second golden period, with the gifts from benefactors such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett rivaling those offered toward the end of the gilded age, sceptics are starting to ask: Are Wilde’s and Baudelaire’s concerns still relevant? Are today’s philanthropists knowingly dispensing “false coins?” Are they trying to “pick up gratis the certificate of a charitable man?”

In most cases, the answer is a firm no. Charity is dispensed in good faith, with empathy toward close and distant strangers. And yet, at the same time, a new trend is growing: philanthrocapitalism, a more muscular philanthropy that seeks to combine profits with poverty alleviation. The effort to do a good deed while at the same time making a good deal is the driving impetus behind the new philanthropy. Another question Baudelaire raised still lingers: Who benefits more from charitable acts, the giver or the receiver?

At the forefront of the new philanthropy is the effective altruism movement, something upheld as radically different from earlier philanthropic approaches through a purportedly novel emphasis on measuring the results of giving. A pioneer in the movement is Peter Singer, the controversial bioethicist who has praised Buffett and Gates for being “the most effective altruists in history.”

His praise rests on the magnitude of their giving rather than evidence of their effectiveness. It’s true that in dollar terms, their generosity is jaw-dropping. Joel Fleishman points out in The Foundation that Buffett’s 2006 announcement of a gift of $31 billion to the Gates Foundation represented, in 2006 dollars, more than Rockefeller Sr. and Carnegie gave away combined.

But as a proportion of the overall U.S. Gross Domestic Product, the size of today’s foundations pales next to their predecessors. The Ford Foundation’s endowment in the early 1960s represented more than double the share of U.S. GDP in comparison to the Gates Foundation 50 years later. Ever since the 1970s, overall charitable giving in the U.S. “as a share of GDP has rarely strayed far from 2 percent,”Suzanne Perry points out in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, “despite the huge growth in the number of charities and fundraisers and periodic crusades to encourage greater giving.”

Corporations have become far stingier. Mark Kramer and Michael Porter pointed out in the early 2000s that corporate philanthropy as a proportion of corporate profits dropped since the 1980s. Since then it’s sunk even further, from 2.1% of pretax profits in the mid-1980s to 0.8% in 2013.

Singer’s presumption that Buffett and Gates are any more effective than earlier philanthropists isn’t backed by data. Some of the Gates Foundation’s work has led to measurable gains. Vaccination rates are rising; global child mortality has fallen—the foundation’s work in global health has contributed to these gains. But in comparison to government donors, Gates Foundation grants are a small drop in the global health landscape: The U.S. government has committed over $65 billion to global HIV/AIDs programs alone. That’s double the amount of overall giving by the Gates Foundation toward U.S. education, global health, and global agriculture since its inception.

To date, there has been far more hype than hard evidence about effective altruism’s achievements; its progress often seems to be measured and underpinned by self-sustaining feedback loops. Donors privilege what critics see as low-hanging fruit: aid projects where measuring the effect is relatively easy to do.

We hear a lot about the positive effects of different programs, such as the benefits of deworming efforts worldwide that were once thought to have contributed dramatically to education attainment in developing nations, until a recent review from independent health research group Cochrane cast doubt on that link. Far less attention is paid to counterfactuals, such as the cost to welfare programs when tax revenue is lost as a result of philanthropists receiving lucrative tax exemptions for pet projects.

Today’s philanthropy enthusiasts are never short on hyperbole. An organizer of a recent effective altruism conference at Google’s Quad campus in Mountain View reportedly averred that “effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.” But it’s clear that rises in global giving over the past 10 years have not made a dent in reducing economic inequality in rich nations such as the United States or Britain.

Individual philanthropic foundations have grown at a fast clip in the U.S. over the past 15 years: In that span, the number of individual foundations has doubled from about 40,000 to over 85,000. But this surge hasn’t helped alleviate extreme poverty. A 2012 report from the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan points out that within the U.S., “the prevalence of extreme poverty rose sharply between 1996 and 2011.”

One of the biggest ironies facing 19th-century philanthropy was the question of whether growing charity simply exacerbated economic inequality by thwarting demands for better wages and the right to unionize.

Carnegie published his first “Wealth” essay, in which he urged the rich to share their spoils, just a few years before the Homestead battle of 1892, one of the bloodiest labor standoffs in U.S. history, where he brutally stamped out burgeoning union efforts even while liberally dispensing charity to his workers. “Paradoxically,” David Nasaw, Carnegie’s biographer, has pointed out, “Carnegie … became, if anything, more ruthless in pursuit of profits once he had determined that those profits would be distributed during his lifetime.”

“In remonstrating that only the millionaire could be trusted to dispense his millions, and that whatever that millionaire thought ‘best’ was best,” Nasaw adds, “Carnegie was promulgating a profoundly antidemocratic gospel, almost feudal in its paternalism.”

Effective altruists insist that private charity is the best means for improving livelihoods. ‘Today’s philanthrocapitalists see a world full of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put right,’ Matthew Bishop and Michael Green write inPhilanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World, a book that’s become something of a bible for the new philanthropists.

In contrast to claims of novelty, the results-oriented approach of today’s donors is little different than Carnegie or Rockefeller, who were both outspoken about the need to give away their money in an efficient and effective manner.

And just as in Carnegie’s day, philanthropy is often upheld as justification for gross profiteering.

“I donated a total of $5,000,000 to various causes recently. Looking forward to telling you all about it,” Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who was vilified for raising the price of Daraprim by 5,000%, tweeted in mid-September.

This is a prime example of philanthrocapitalism in action: the use of philanthropy to thwart attention to business practices that hamper access to life-saving medicines. And much like in Carnegie’s time, many aren’t buying it.

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3D Computer Chips Could Be 1,000 Times Faster Than Existing Ones 10-02

3D Computer Chips Could Be 1,000 Times Faster Than Existing Ones

© Max Shulaker A new method of creating computer chips could provide much faster performance than was previously possible. The new design uses a special material called carbon nanotubes, which allows memory and processor layers to be stacked in three…

A new method of designing and building computer chips could lead to blisteringly quick processing at least 1,000 times faster than the best existing chips are capable of, researchers say.

The new method, which relies on materials called carbon nanotubes, allows scientists to build the chip in three dimensions.

The 3D design enables scientists to interweave memory, which stores data, and the number-crunching processors in the same tiny space, said Max Shulaker, one of the designers of the chip, and a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at Stanford University in California.

Reducing the distance between the two elements can dramatically reduce the time computers take to do their work, Shulaker said Sept. 10 here at the "Wait, What?" technology forum hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research wing of the U.S. military.

Progress slowing

The inexorable advance in computing power over the past 50 years is largely thanks to the ability to make increasingly smaller silicon transistors, the three-pronged electrical switches that do the logical operations for computers.

According to Moore's law, a rough rule first articulated by semiconductor researcher Gordon E. Moore in 1965, the number of transistors on a given silicon chip would roughly double every two years. True to his predictions, transistors have gotten ever tinier, with the teensiest portions measuring just 5 nanometers, and the smallest functional ones having features just 7 nanometers in size. (For comparison, an average strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.)
The decrease in size, however, means that the quantum effects of particles at that scale could disrupt their functioning. Therefore, it's likely that Moore's law will be coming to an end within the next 10 years, experts say. Beyond that, shrinking transistors to the bitter end may not do much to make computers faster.

Long commute time

The main roadblock to faster computers is not flagging processor speed, but a memory problem, Shulaker said.

Big-data analysis requires the computer to draw some tiny piece of data from some previously unknown spot in truly staggering troves of data. Then, the computer must shuttle that information via an electrical signal back and forth across the (relatively) vast inches of wire between the computer's memory (typically a hard drive) and the processors, facing the speed bump of electrical resistance along the entire path.

"If you try to run that in your computer, you would spend over 96 percent of the time just being idle, doing absolutely nothing," Shulaker said. "You're wasting an enormous amount of power." While the Central Processing Unit (CPU) waits for a piece of data to make the return trip from the memory, for instance, the computer is still hogging power, even though it's not calculating a thing.
Solving the memory-CPU "commute time," however, is tricky. The two components can't be put in the same wafer because silicon-based wafers must be heated to about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), while many of the metal elements in hard drives (or solid state drives) melt at those temperatures, Shulaker said.

Carbon nanotubes

To get around this issue, Shulaker and his advisers at Stanford University, Subhasish Mitra and H.-S. Philip Wong,  looked to a completely different material: carbon nanotubes, or miniscule mesh rods made of carbon atoms, which can be processed at low temperatures. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have electrical properties similar to those of conventional silicon transistors.

In a head-to-head competition between a silicon transistor and a CNT transistor, "hands down, the CNT would win," Shulaker told Live Science. "It would be a better transistor; it can go faster; it uses less energy."

However, carbon nanotubes grow in a disorderly manner, "resembling a bowl of spaghetti," which is no good for making circuits, Shulaker said. As such, the researchers developed a method to grow nanotubes in narrow grooves, guiding the nanotubes into alignment.
But there was another hurdle. While 99.5 percent of the nanotubes become aligned, a few stragglers will still be out of position. To solve this problem, the researchers figured out that drilling holes at certain spots within the chip can ensure that even a chip with wayward tubes would work as expected. 

Another problem is that while most CNTs have the properties of a semiconductor (like silicon), a few act just like an ordinary conducting metal, with no way to predict which tubes will misbehave. Those few conducting tubes can ruin an entire chip, and having to toss even a fraction of the chips wouldn't make financial sense, Shulaker added. As a remedy, Shulaker and his colleagues essentially "turn off" all the semiconducting CNTs, leaving huge jolts of current to circulate through the remaining conducting nanotubes. The high current heats up and breaks down only the conducting nanotubes, which blow like nano-scale fuses, Shulaker said.

In 2013, the team built a CNT computer, which they described in the journal Nature. That computer, however, was slow and bulky, with relatively few transistors.

Now, they have created a system for stacking memory and transistor layers, with tiny wires connecting the two. The new 3D design has slashed the transit time between transistor and memory, and the resulting architecture can produce lightning-fast computing speeds up to 1,000 times faster than would otherwise be possible, Shulaker said. Using the new architecture, the team has built a variety of sensor wafers that can detect everything from infrared light to particular chemicals in the environment.

The next step is to scale the system further, to make even bigger, more complicated chips.

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IoT, cloud and Big Data analytics reshape vertical markets 09-07

IoT, cloud and Big Data analytics reshape vertical markets

 

 

The advent of the Internet of Industrial Things (IoIT) has triggered an influx of services such as cyber security and advanced maintenance, and this has dramatically widened business opportunities in the manufacturing services sector, according to a new study from Frost & Sullivan.

As integration with information and communication technologies (ICT) such as big data analytics and cloud-based platforms form the crux of next-generation manufacturing services, solution providers are developing new services that address security and operational improvement as well as maintenance and support, the firm says.

The study, Services 2.0: The New Business Frontier for Profitability, notes that big data analytics is poised to change the maintenance services models across the manufacturing sector.

“In line with the emerging trend of IoIT, manufacturing services are also evolving into a connected ecosystem supported by a single control center,” Srikanth Shivaswamy, Frost & Sullivan industrial automation and process control senior research analyst, said in a statement. “The demand for interoperability and maximum transparency across multiple products and processes is lending credence to the concept of connected operations.”

Such extensive integration will mean high costs for manufacturers, the report says. The convergence of ICT with conventional services will require sophisticated platforms. But the deployment of advanced process controls and smart communication systems will increase efficiency and compensate for the large investments.

Strengthening information security infrastructure, a recent addition to the framework of industrial services, will be vital for the uptake of IoIT-based modules, Frost & Sullivan says. Innovations in investigation, threat detection and self-aware platforms will be critical.

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The Difference Between Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing (and Why It Matters) 09-06

The Difference Between Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing (and Why It Matters)

 

 

During a 1967 post-fight interview with Muhammad Ali, legendary sports broadcaster Howard Cosell said to the fiery champ, “You’re being extremely truculent.” Without pausing to catch his breath, Ali replied, “Whatever ‘truculent’ means, if that’s good, I’m that.”

I’ve always thought Ali’s response was the coolest quip in sports history. Yet somehow I’d forgotten all about it until a couple years ago, when someone asked me to explain the difference between “content marketing” and “inbound marketing.”  I suggested she let others fret about terminology and instead focus on creating awesome stuff that doesn’t even feel like marketing in the first place. In other words, if it’s good, be that.

Perhaps it's because I have a “content marketing” title at the company that coined the term “inbound marketing," but lately I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the distinction. So as part of our annual State of Inbound survey, we put the question to more than 3,500 marketing and sales professionals.

Specifically, we asked, “Which of the following best describes the relationship between ‘content marketing’ and ‘inbound marketing’?” and provided five options:

1. They are synonyms.
2. Content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing.
3. Inbound marketing is a subset of content marketing.
4. The two are fundamentally different.
5. Don’t know.

Before we dive into what the audience said, I’ll share my perspective. I believe content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing, but like the Arc Reactor to Iron Man, there is no inbound without content. Content is inbound’s lifeblood. What I think, of course, doesn’t matter at all. Ultimately, it comes down to what marketers think. And it turns out, we all think a lot alike.

Front-office (marketing, sales, services) professionals generally agree that content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing. Marketers are particularly united in this definition.

When we first saw the above data, we felt validated, but skeptical. We wondered if sample bias was skewing the results. After all, HubSpot sells inbound marketing software, and nearly half of our survey respondents are our partners or customers -- so perhaps we were sampling an audience that had been preconditioned to favor inbound?

We tested this possibility by comparing responses from HubSpot customers to non-customers. As you can see in the below chart, there’s little variance between the two groups. In fact, nearly half of marketers who don’t use HubSpot believe content is a subset of inbound marketing – that’s five times as many as those who feel inbound is a subset of content marketing.

Just as HubSpot has positioned itself around the inbound marketing concept, other marketing automation vendors have introduced their own terminology. Does one’s choice in marketing platform influence her perception of inbound and content marketing terminology? We sliced the data by marketing automation usage to find out.

Here's what we found: Marketers generally share a common understanding of inbound/content marketing, regardless of what marketing software they run.

Finally, we wanted to ask the same question of a completely different audience. So we promoted a one-question survey on Facebook, targeting North American adults with an interest in either digital marketing, inbound marketing, or content marketing. Though the data is a bit more variable than the responses to the HubSpot State of Inbound survey,respondents were three times as likely to consider content a part of inbound than vice versa. See below.

So what does all this mean, and does it really matter? It does.

Marketers should think in terms of “and” not “or” when it comes to the content/inbound relationship. Success relies on both. Content may help fuel your inbound engine, but there are similarly valuable inbound projects -- like technical SEO, freemium trials, interactive tools -- that may exist outside of the content marketer’s scope. If you aren’t availing yourself of the full spectrum of inbound practices, you are limiting the potential impact you can have as a marketer or marketing leader. In other words, your inbound initiative should be a superset -- inclusive of your content assets, but not limited to them. There are implications for organizational structure, roles and responsibilities, as well as skills procurement. 

Or you can worry about creating the kind of marketing people love, and let the pundits attach terms to your output. That works too. After all, as truculent as Ali was, he’ll always be remembered simply as the greatest.