Alston Grove

There is a section of the population that responds to surveys. I am not in that section. A piece of mail from J. D. Power and associates arrived by post, and I opened it for some reason. “Another survey,” I muttered to myself after I saw the questionnarie. But before I tossed it away, I noticed they had enclosed a crisp one-dollar bill. I instantly had two thoughts. First, why bother insulting someone with such a paltry incentive? Second, I wondered if the postman would figure it out and collect all the letters. (I quickly realized that the surveys are randomly dispersed, so a single local postman wouldn’t have much of a shot at collecting the money.) But the first thought still puzzled me.

Back to that section of the population that responds to surveys. It turns out that it’s typically 2 percent. That statistic alone isn’t the worst problem for a marketer. The bigger problem is that the people who do fill out the survey are the kind of people who fill out surveys. In other words, it’s not a good sampling. So, marketers experimented with different incentives, like sending a cash incentive in the initial mailing, or entering respondents in a prize drawing. Of course, this affects the cost of running the survey. Experiments with cash incentives (for example, $1 and $2 vs $5 and $5 vs $10 vs $20) have been done and compared to a lottery of $250. The incentives drew more reponses, and the higher cash incentives drew more responses. But the biggest pop was from, you guessed it: a one-dollar bill.

If you use the “snooze” button too much like I do, maybe you should consider Clocky. It’s an alarm clock on wheels that hops off the night stand and rolls around aimlessly, forcing you to get up and chase it. People have posted video of Clocky to YouTube, and there’s even a Clocky Commercial. It’s like having R2D2 wake you up!

Here’s a fun little puzzle called the Leap Frog IQ Test. Supposedly, this test is given to second grade children in China, and should be solvable in 3 minutes by someone with an IQ above 50. I’m not sure about that, but I did have fun solving it.

It’s an interactive Flash-based puzzle, but I’ll explain how it works just for edification. You start with green frogs on the left and brown frogs on the right. The goal is to perform a switcheroo of green and brown frogs. The rules are:

• Green frogs can only move to the right and brown frogs to the left.
• Only one frog is allowed on a rock at a time.
• A frog can move to the open rock or jump over one other frog to reach it.

It reminds me a little bit of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. I’m not sure if the Frog puzzle is also recursive, but my solution is algorithmic with two steps.

Here’s a meme that you’ll notice after I tell you about it. It started with a student at Ball State Univerisity named Brian Collins who filled in for a sports spot on a student news show. As the sports clips flashed by, he choked and tried to cover with ad-libbing. As a final attempt at saving his performance, he threw out a catch phrase as a basketball shot was made: “Boom goes the dynamite!”

The clip was posted on the Internet and the phrase was quickly picked up in broadcast and news. Brian found himself telling his story to The Early Show and Late Nite with David Letterman. On Late Nite they played the original news broadcast and followed it with clips from other broadcasters using his catch phrase, which was hilarious. The best copycat was a weatherman describing a stormy forecast with, “As they say, ‘boom goes the dynamite!’”

You can watch the original video at ebaumsworld.

The Tao Te Ching is an old book probably written in the sixth century by Lao Tsu. It is about ancient Chinese philosophy that says to accept what is in front of you without wanting it to be something else. Or simply put, just be.

There are many translations of the Tao Te Ching (only the Bible has been more frequently translated), but I chose the one by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. Along with the English translation, the book has typography of the original Chinese text set on beautiful black and white photographs.

On the right, I scanned in a verse that has particular salient meaning. If you are having trouble understanding it, try tilting your head sideways to the right.

Okay, maybe it didn’t really come from the book!

What is it about humans that makes us exaggerate and overcompensate? If I apply force to something and it doesn’t budge, I will next apply too much force and bust the thing to smithereens. I did that with a bag of chips once. As I grow older and wiser, I learn to make smaller movements, but many people don’t learn or they forget to apply that philosphy in new contexts.

I am tired of listening about gas prices on the news and people complaining about it. They drive around in their $50K SUVs, pick up $4 lattes at Starbucks, and complain that gasoline costs $2/gallon. Puhleez!

Let me explain it this way: If you adjust for inflation, gas prices are at a historic low. Believe it. In 2004, gas was about $1.88 per gallon, and in 1980 it was $2.87 after adjusting for inflation. After the low in 2004, the price per barrel rose from $20 to about $50, and people freaked out. If we had spread out the increase over 25 years, nobody would have noticed. But the market overcompensated, and so has our perception of what happened.

Besides the recent jump in price, another reason people think gas is expensive is because other things cost about the same now. This article has a chart of prices after inflation that shows how things like bannanas and eggs are cheaper in price while the price of other things rose faster than inflation.

Maybe I shouldn’t complain that people are complaining, because some good has come from it. The hybrid gas-electric vehicles are having some success. Especially, Toyota’s Prius. While Honda’s Insight is technically superior in gas mileage, it went too far with redesign. Prius is practical and cool, and it significantly outsold Insight. Small movements.

So while gas prices aren’t really as high as we think, let’s continue overcompensating by buying more fuel-efficient vehicles that will lead to alternate fuels. We’ll be better off for overreacting. Now, I wonder if I can convince my boss to overcompensate on my salary. Hm…

Time for this week’s safety briefing. Remember, kids, always blow out the flame on your shot before drinking it. If you don’t… well, you could end up like this poor sap.
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Indie band Longfellow out of Athens, Ohio just released a new album, “Jangling Tea Trolley”, which is their best effort yet. To complement the CD release, I designed a new website for them at www.longfellowfan.com. It’s definitely still a work in progress, but it has essentials like show listings, message forums, and online orders through PayPal. Props to PayPal for their developer-friendly integration. I literally threw the ordering together in one night. I plan to write my own shopping cart for better integration soon.

These guys are music geeks, and enjoy the technical aspects of music. There’s a nice writeup on them at The Post Online. Their sound is hard to describe, but it’s something like atypical acoustic pop with similarities to Jack Johnson, Ben Folds, and Dave Mathews. (Of course, there are sample tracks of their CD on the website if you want to check them out.) Full disclosure: the band’s primary vocalist, Nick Long, is a cousin of mine!

This is one of the most creative résumés I’ve seen. Alexandre Guéniot presents his Curriculum Vitae using Flash. Never has such bad singing made such a good impression on me.

This article quotes Steve Ballmer as saying:

There are two people who probably are the number one spam recipients in the world. Bill Gates [is number one] because he is Bill Gates. Bill literally receives four million pieces of email per day, most of it spam. Literally, there’s a whole department, almost, that takes care of it.

Four million e-mail messages per day? For once, the spammers have done some good for the world. But that’s 46 emails per second! Can MS Exchange even handle that kind of load? Or maybe they are running Postfix.

A whole department to handle spam? Does that mean they pay interns to filter through it, or do they have software do it? Why not release this wonderful spam filtering software to the world? Oh… a whole department, “almost”. By that, maybe he means they are running Spam Assassin. If not, he could save some money by getting a Gmail account.

According to Flamesplash on Slashdot, internal Microsoft employees can e-mail Bill directly without going through filtering. Flamespash was an intern at Microsoft, and his journal has some interesting stories where he’s come across Bill at work.

By the way, you can e-mail Bill at billg@microsoft.com.