PicoBusiness

Small, but nice collection of high quality photos. I like using these as backgrounds and screensavers. Very soothing.

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(Cross-posted from Indefinite Articles)

I’m kicking myself for not realizing this earlier.   I’m starting to build an architecture around a new business domain – Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials.  I’ve learned quite a bit about the domain over the last few weeks, but I just realized that if I had read the Wikipedia pages on Clinical Trials, I would have had a great head start.

If you’re working in consulting or in any way trying to master a new domain, the Wikipedia probably has some great starting points for understanding the new business.

Dan Boudreaux, chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University, has some thoughts about the minimum wage, and whether he is an idealogue for believing that the Law of Demand is rarely (if ever) suspended.

Generally, I agree with him.  However, based on “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, I think he errs in one place (and it’s this deviation that’s the point of this blog post, not the discussion of the minimum wage).

Dr. Boudreaux says:

I’ve never heard of a supermarket that seeks to clear out excessively large inventories of canned peas or laundry detergent by raising the prices it charges for these items.

However, Dr. Cialdini writes in chapter 1 of his book about a woman who was able to clear out her inventory of turquoise jewelry by doing exactly that.  She (accidentally) doubled the price of jewelry that wasn’t selling, and the doubled price provoked people to buy it, because they believed that, based on the price, it must be of a high quality.

Now, this does not refute Dr. Boudreaux’s point in the least – if the minimum wage was increased, no one would say “ah, everyone’s labor is of higher quality today than it was yesterday, therefore I will buy more”.  But it does make an interesting case study of how the Law of Demand can be bent, if not broken

And this is what I get when I try to book at LasVegas.com

Regardless of the number of travellers I pick…

Sorry I’ve been away so long, but I haven’t had anything really interesting to say until now.

I wanted to book a vacation to Las Vegas. For the last several weeks, I’ve been hearing fairly amusing commercials on the radio for Hotels.com, and “Hotels.com euphoria” so I thought I would give them a try.

Alas, they lost me on the first page. I tried to pick a start date, and behold the calendar that comes up:

It isn’t resizable, so there’s no way for me to move forward in time. Lame. I’ll have to find another option, one that tests on Firefox.