Tech Today w/ Ken May

From research done the Inon Inon Pricing Research Centre, and Leigh Caldwell:

Everyone knows – or thinks they know – that prices such as £1.99, £5.99 or £9.99 are optimal price points for retail goods. Customers read the first digit first, and the last two are ignored – or at least, they have much less cognitive impact. In general, consumers were thought to put a subjective value estimate of about ten per cent less on an item priced at £3.99, than one at £4.00.

This has been a fairly robust result in the past, and is intuitive for a number of reasons, “but WAIT!” say Leigh:

[And] the results were a surprise. At first we thought that the effect we have discovered was just a previously unnoticed artefact, hidden by the fact that no proper experiment has been published before. But after further exploration, we think it is also an effect of changing consumer preferences. As customers become more aware of marketing tactics and more cynical about any communication from companies, their psychology and behaviour inevitably changes.

So, to the results. The summary points are:

1. Prices ending in .99 no longer have any advantage in consumer value perception, and do not lead to higher sales.
2. The optimal penny value varies by country. In the United States, it is .01. So, instead of $3.99, companies should charge $4.01. In European countries, the optimal price point is different for different product categories, but there is a peak at .04 for many products. So, British or European retailers currently charging, say, £0.99 should increase the price to £1.04.
3. By switching in this way to a “dollar-plus” price instead of “dollar-minus”, retailers can increase sales volume by an average of 8% and increase profit margins by 1-3% (depending on the exact price point).
4. Consumers, when presented with the new price point, report an increased level of trust and affinity with the brands of the retailer and manufacturer. We believe this arises from the “honesty signal” that comes from abandoning a discredited and manipulative sales practice.

This is indeed very interesting, and I eagerly await reading the full study (which Leigh is offering as a pre-print!). Head over to Leigh’s blog for more rather counter-intuitive findings from his new research!

Filed under: Economics, Society

Continue Reading:
I Got .99 Problems, But Pricing Ain’t One.

Mosquito bay

The world’s most bioluminescent bay

At night, Mosquito Bay flashes green with an eerie ethereal light. Bright blue tracer lines suddenly appear in the water as small fish dart through the blackness. But this illumination has nothing to do with spirits or aliens: Mosquito Bay happens to be one of the most bioluminescent bodies of water in the world.
Bioluminescence is a form of natural light created by living organisms converting internal chemical energy into light. The light in Mosquito Bay is created by tiny organisms called dinoflagellates (specifically Pyrodimium bahamense or “swirling fire”), and Mosquito Bay contains an astonishing number – roughly 700,000 per single gallon of water. Although they’re microscopic, the effective size of the light they give off is a hundred times larger than their own bodies, and in great numbers they light up like an underwater aurora borealis.
Trapped by a curve in the Bay’s opening and fed by the surrounding mangroves, the dinoflagellates find Mosquito Bay a perfect home. Thought to bioluminesce as a defense mechanism – to attract predators that can ward off the small fish who eat them – dinoflagellates make light upon sensing any movement in the water, swirling out bright blue-green plumes that eventually diffuse back into the dark stillness of the Bay. This makes swimming in the Bay a truly astonishing – not to mention surreal – experience.
There are a number of outfits that will take people out to the bio-bay, but be sure to select one that uses kayaks, and don’t wear bug spray, as gas and DEET kill dinoflagellates. In addition, be sure to visit on a night with no or little moonlight, as seeing the bioluminescence in near-total darkness is truly amazing.

Read more about Mosquito bay on Atlas Obscura…

Category: Watery Wonders, Fascinating Fauna, Bioluminescent Spots
Location:
Edited by: Dylan, wythe, Gergle

See the article here:
Mosquito bay

I always thought that if someone wanted to counter the agenda of the forces in our country peddling fear and make America more progressive and open to the world, they would simply give people determined to build walls passports and plane tickets. I’ve also thought that about the best investment the rest of the world could make in the interest of everyone’s well-being would be to establish a fund to give each American a trip to a foreign land of their choice (not Canada) upon graduation. This map shows a hard-to-refute correlation to percent of population with passports and political persuasion. It also shows a economic correlation between those who travel and those who don’t. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this, but it is thought-provoking. Does travel make someone more savvy about politics or more mixed up? Or is this just a quirky coincidence with no real meaning?

More:
The Passport Map: Who Travels Among Americans

This was brought to my attention today: Christopher Soghoian, on slight paranoia from December 2009: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight:

Executive Summary

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

Originally posted here:
In 2009, Sprint provided law enforcement customer GPS location information 8 million times in 13 months

If you’ve been waiting for a nice, easy jailbreak solution for iOS 4.3.1, then today’s your lucky day: Dev-Team’s just released redsn0w 0.9.6rc9 for both Windows and OS X, allowing us mere mortals to free our supported devices — iPhone 3GS, 4 (GSM); iPod touch 3G, 4G; iPad 1; and Apple TV 2G — with a few simple clicks. Alas, there are a couple of caveats: the iPad 2 isn’t supported here, as Cupertino has somehow managed to tighten up its security to fend off hackers (for now); and ultrasn0w users have also been told to hang tight until there’s a compatibility fix — Dev-Team will announce on Twitter when this becomes available. As for those who are eligible for this new jailbreak, head over to Dev-Team’s website for the download links, and make sure you have the corresponding IPSW files handy as well — you can find them over at iClarified or on your favorite search engine.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

redsn0w untethered jailbreak for iOS 4.3.1 released for Windows and OS X, lacks iPad 2 support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week’s most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us — it’s the Week in Green.

This week Inhabitat saw renewable energy projects blast off around the world as Kenya announced the construction of the largest wind farm in Africa and a team of Georgia Tech researchers developed a heart-powered nanobattery that can charge your gadgets on the go. We also learned that the mixture of saltwater and fresh water in estuaries could provide for 13% of the world’s power needs, and we took an in-depth look at a cryogenic energy system that produces electricity from liquified air. Finally, we showcased photographer Mitch Epstein’s haunting photos of “American Power” which recently won the Prix Pictet prize.

It was also an epic week for architecture as the Pritzker Prize – the world’s highest architecture honor – was awarded to Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. We also saw a high-tech solar skyscraper with a mind-bending wavy facade rise in Seoul, and we shared 15 visions for skyscrapers of the future — from vertical farms to shipping container towers and oil rig cities.

Finally, this week we saw a bright future dawn for green transportation as a team of students unveiled a hyper-modified electric Audi TT that is powered by solar energy. We also learned that the European Union is considering banning gas cars by 2050, and we took a look at Microsoft’s new database that tells you the cheapest place to charge your EV. Last but not least, we brought you a 10-seater pedal-powered party bike, and we showcased a stylish LED-lit jacket designed to keep cyclists safe at night.

Inhabitat’s Week in Green: Renewable art touches the sky, an electric Audi TT, and cryogenic energy originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 21:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

You know that pseudo-tactile feeling you get when you fondle your mouse’s clicky scroll wheel, the one that satisfies your obsessive need to touch everything? Logitech wants to give you more clicks, and smoother scrolling to boot. This M325 wireless mouse’s new “micro-precise” scroll wheel features 72 tiny ratchets, making our self-counted 22-ratchet mouse wheel seem downright barbaric by comparison — not that we ever really considered the number of teeth our mice had before now. The rodent’s 18-month battery life won’t quite live up to your 2-year Couch Mouse, but at least they can share a Logitech Unifying Receiver. Your scroll wheel of tomorrow can be had for $40 later this month, or £30 right now for lucky folks in the UK.

Logitech ratchets up the competition with M325 wireless mouse originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 15:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

If you’ve never seen the rise and fall of humanity as told by a series of pulleys, levers, and CO2 rockets, now’s your chance — a team of Purdue engineers have built a contraption that not only tells the history of the world through the end of days, but is also a contender for the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine. The Purdue team’s “Time Machine” catalogs a history of dinosaurs, war, and rock ‘n roll before finally culminating in a cataclysmic inferno and efflorescent renewal in 232 steps — narrowly beating out the previous record of 230 set by Ferris State University in 2010. Impressive, but not officially the “world’s largest” just yet– the team is submitting a video of a flawless run to Guinness World Records to certify the historic thingamajig, hopefully eking out a victory with its two step lead.

Rube Goldberg Machine to set new world record, bring forth apocalypse originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink

Windows only: Only a month after its last update, one of our favorite Windows utilities, CCleaner, has released a new update that now adds full support for Firefox 4 and IE 9 (both released last month) as well as several other improvements. More

We usually think of fossil fuels as an energy source, but petroleum is also the raw materials used in all the world’s plastics. Now leftover chicken feathers could allow us to keep using plastics in a world after oil. More