Amazon's word play

Amazon.com now has a way to take a word, for example: halloweenand blend it into a cool list.

Cool New Amazon MP3 Widget

Shopping Teams - comic

Courtesy of xkcd.com

Bunny saved from science lab. Brain sometimes pops out of head.

It's been a while since I posted a bunny image, and I couldn't resist this find via boingboing.net. And the source is another great site, flickr.com. And most awesome of all is the artist, Andricongirl.

When You're Down 'n Out, Don't Shop!

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh showed volunteers either a video clip that showed grief following a tragic death or a neutral clip from a nature show. Afterward, participants had the chance to purchase an ordinary item -- a sporty water bottle. They found that people who'd watched the sad video clip offered an average of 300 percent more money for the item than those who had viewed the neutral clip.

"The key contribution our paper adds to the literature is that a high degree of self-focus can carry over to spending," says lead study author Cynthia Cryder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University.


Courtesy of ABC News

Our new Widget - on Facebook, MySpace, Ning, etc

(This is 7/10 of the actual size) - Enjoy!

Gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" narrows

The NYTimes takes a look at the difference between income brackets and consumer spending. The top fifth of all income is 15 times higher than the bottom fifth, but the gap in consumption is only 4-to-1, or four times the bottom fifth of the population. How can that be?



At the "average" wage, the price of:
- a VCR fell from 365 hours in 1972 to a mere two hours today
- a cellphone dropped from 456 hours in 1984 to four hours
- a personal computer, with thousands of times the computing power of the 1984 I.B.M., declined from 435 hours to 25 hours
- a mid-size Ford sedan declined by 6 percent in the last ten years

The bottom line is increased international trade - globalization - is bringing costs down and narrowing the gap between what the rich can have, and what everyone else is getting closer to having too.