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Explaining complicated subject matter simply since 1986

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Trinidad or Tobago?

Trinidad or Tobago?

Not many people know that Trinidad is closer to Venezuela (6 miles) than it is to Tobago (20 miles). Just 1,800 square miles, Trinidad is smaller than Rhode Island, but nearly twenty times the size of Tobago, a little squirt of an island. More than a million people...

Car 54, Where Are You?

Car 54, Where Are You?

“There's a holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn's broken out in fights. There's a traffic jam in Harlem that's backed up to Jackson Heights. There's a Scout troop short a child, Khrushchev's due at Idlewild; Car 54, Where Are You?”  The Car 54, Where Are You? television...

Warning!

Warning!

Red flags have long been used as warnings of immediate, imminent and potential danger. The warning is signaled by the combination of color and movement. These days, to red-flag something is to draw attention to a dangerous situation. In auto racing, a red flag means...

The Okay Corral?

The Okay Corral?

John Montgomery had a barn, stables and blacksmith shop in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881. He named his outdoor horse pen the O.K. Corral*, never knowing it would become the historical site where Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers shot it out with Ike and Billy Clanton...

National Bobblehead Day

National Bobblehead Day

January 7 is National Bobblehead Day. Early versions were called wobblers, bobblers, nodders, and head-shakers and had a head connected to a body by a spring so it would bounce around. The most popular were cats. In 1842 Russian author Nikolai Gogol described a main...

3 On a Match

3 On a Match

You’ve seen it in dozens of films, mostly in black and white. Somewhere outside in the dark of night, three guys take out cigarettes. One of them strikes a wooden match. The match flares up from the phosphorous in the tip and then settles down to a steady yellow...

How Can You Always Win?

How Can You Always Win?

The desperate young husband was at the roulette table gambling what little money he and his wife had left. It was his only chance to earn enough money to get them out of Vichy-controlled Morocco to Lisbon and from there to the United States. But the trip from...

How Did You Choose Your Dog?

How Did You Choose Your Dog?

In 1859 English naturalist Charles Darwin returned from a five-year voyage with his soon to be famous conclusion that humans and apes had common ancestors. His ship was named The Beagle. Genes had not been discovered yet, so Darwin knew nothing about them. But he...

The Frito Bandito

The Frito Bandito

Frank Woolworth opened a store in Utica, New York in February of 1879. It failed three months later. He tried again in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He used the same sign he brought with him from Utica: Woolworth’s Great Five Cent Store. That store was also a failure....

Sam Ryder’s Cup

Sam Ryder’s Cup

In May of 1921 a small group of American professional golfers travelled to Great Britain by steamship. Upon arrival a friendly competition was proposed and a 10 man team match was held at the Kings’ Course at Gleneagles, located in Auchterarder, Perthshire, Scotland,...

Who Can You Turn To?

Who Can You Turn To?

Vowing I wouldn't quit until I was done, I locked myself in the house and didn't come out for two weeks. If I wasn't sleeping, I was writing nonstop until I had finished what I was willing to call my best draft of a graduate thesis on job satisfaction for Indiana...

Rule of Thumb

Rule of Thumb

Back in the days of not so Merrie Olde England, the law allowed men to beat their wives, children, horses, and anyone unable to defend themselves. As the folk tale goes, the Rule of Thumb law stipulated men could use only sticks that were no larger around than their...

A Lousy Strategy

A Lousy Strategy

In 2015, McDonald’s was congratulating themselves on the success of their brand-new All-Day Breakfast because same-store sales had risen 5.7%. They deliberately avoided mentioning how the confluence of more than a dozen things contributed to that small increase. Only...

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

The Merry Mailman television program debuted on Secaucus, New Jersey’s WOR-TV in 1950. The host was Ray Heatherton, a former bandleader and singer. Ray and his sidekicks Chick and Milt entertained studio audiences with games, songs, stories, magic tricks, skits,...

Awesome!

Awesome!

When the clerk at my grocery store asked if I found everything I was looking for, I said yes and she said “Awesome!” In the time it took her to scan my dozen items and take my payment, she said awesome seven more times. I don’t know about you, but I believe awesome...

How Agile Are You?

How Agile Are You?

When people ask me if I've ever done agile research, they say "AGILE" as if it should be capitalized, underlined, and in italics. Their emphasis implies it is something quite new and mysterious. My response is to say I’ve been recommending agile research since long...

Veterans Day

Veterans Day

If you enjoy this article, please do me a solid and send it along to the veterans you know, and if you don't know any, to a couple of friends. When I joined the Air Force, I was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training. What was boot camp...

The Shell Game

The Shell Game

In a shell game, three walnut shells are moved about swiftly and onlookers bet on which one the pea is under when they come to rest. It’s not actually a game at all - it’s a swindle con artists control through sleight of hand and illusion to fleece the mark (the...

Do the Right Thing

Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing was a cautionary tale (one that warns of the consequences of actions and inactions). It did not provide “answers” to the issues it exposed. Instead, the film reflected back to its audience their own perspectives on prejudice and...

Alley Oop

Alley Oop

When I created a special course for MBAs, I began by giving my students a whirlwind tour of humans since Alley Oop*, following the arc of human history in Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. Then I introduced them to many strange people they...

How to Choose a Mentor

How to Choose a Mentor

Headed off to the Trojan war, Odysseus asked a trusted friend to stay behind in Ithaca and watch over the upbringing of his son, Telemachus. Odysseus chose the best person he knew to prepare his heir to handle family responsibilities while he was away. It was a good...

I Yam What I Yam

I Yam What I Yam

Are you tired of hackneyed phrases? Threadbare, moth-eaten sayings that have been used so tediously for so long that they've lost whatever meaning they ever had? Me, too. Recently I heard someone say “It is what it is" for the third time in a single day. If you look...

Service with a Smile

Service with a Smile

When I was a rookie bartender working my way through college, I found a grizzled veteran who agreed to teach me how a master craftsman does it. One day I asked him the name of the guy seated down at the end of the bar. “Amigo," he said. “No, no, what’s his name?” I...

Chain of Custody

Chain of Custody

Evidence is defined as the available body of information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or untrue. Chain of custody is a legal term for the rigorous procedure that is to be followed and documented when evidence is collected, held, transferred,...

Dreck the Halls

Dreck the Halls

Young Moderns have had it with the dreary old decorations of the past and think it’s time to move on. One great way to make your Christmas yard display stand out is by featuring an inflatable Hidden Valley Ranch bottle, a Taco Bell sauce packet, and a giant bag of...

Why Is It Called a Dunce Cap?

Why Is It Called a Dunce Cap?

For many generations, beating and humiliation were two of the tools schoolteachers used to keep order. Children who misbehaved would get whipped with sticks and switches. Those who gave the wrong answers would be made to put on dunce caps and stand in the corner, face...

Third Anniversary

Third Anniversary

This is the third anniversary of LetsTakeACloserLook.com. Here is where I've written and published more than 150 articles, usually on the topic of misinformation and often involving items in the news.  To those of you who have been loyal readers all along - thanks for...

How Information Is Like Gold

How Information Is Like Gold

The great California gold rush began when sawmill builders found gold in a streambed in 1848. Headlines in newspapers around the world told tall tales of gold lying on the ground just waiting to be picked up. Hundreds of thousands of gullible fortune seekers came by...

?#@*&%!

?#@*&%!

In The Guardian, Issy Sampson described rap music as society’s lurch toward infantilism. His? Her? (but certainly not Their) many examples included language that disgusts most people. The British daily published every bit of it unbowdlerized, as is their policy....

Calling Bullshit

Calling Bullshit

University of Washington professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom say the world is awash in bullshit and they’re tired of it. This is why they designed a class called Bullshit: Data Reasoning in a Digital World. Their aim is to teach people how to think critically...

March 32nd

March 32nd

No one knows how April Fools’ started. One story says it began during the First Century,  when court jesters and fools told Roman emperor Constantine they could do a better job of running the empire. Amused, the emperor allowed a jester to be king for one day. Another...

Just the Nose

Just the Nose

The statistics vary from study to study, but most agree that more than two out of three of us have stolen something from work. For most of us, it is small things. Pens, pencils, and paper clips are pilfered all year long. There are seasonal patterns, too. In August,...

Word Association

Word Association

Say the words cracker barrel and most Americans think of the chain restaurant and gift shop. Cracker Barrel Restaurants and Country Stores were designed to evoke the friendly, homespun character of general stores from the 1800s, when the U.S. was a rural agrarian...

What Are Your Chances?

What Are Your Chances?

We have to make an effort to get the full picture, especially when marketers don’t want us to have it. Most of us have seen the NordicTrack ads on TV where Jane lost 20 pounds and we can, too. Few of us have read the fine print in the footnotes. The information there...

Not Meant to Be Taken Literally

Not Meant to Be Taken Literally

TrueCar operates a consumer-facing website that promises to help car buyers find the best price. Their TV ads feature a glasses-wearing, bearded, regular-guy pitchman oozing authenticity. He tells us that by seeing TrueCar data on what other buyers paid, we can see...

Brainstorming

Brainstorming

Novelist William Styron wrote in Darkness Visible that “depression is a true wimp of a word.” True depression, he said, swallows its victims entirely and is so overwhelming that a better word for it is brainstorm, not as it is currently used to mean some burst of...

2 Million

Newspapers everywhere have picked up the Associated Press story on predictions of 2 million people in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Who is behind that forecast? In The Curious Science of Counting a Crowd, Rob Goodier says “when turnout implies clout, politicians and...

Sorry, Charlie

  Fox News Network’s Alexandra Deabler says the canned tuna industry is in decline because younger generations want their foods trendier and less-processed. Andy Mecs, VP of Marketing for Star-Kist, takes that explanation a step further, saying “A lot of millennials...

Second Anniversary

  Last week was the second anniversary of my weekly articles. I've written more than 100 of them in succession, usually on the topic of information and misinformation and often involving items in the news. To those of you who have been loyal readers all along -...

McCadillac

  Let me see if I have this straight: Cadillac struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave Detroit for New York, where they struggled to sell cars, so their solution was to leave New York for Detroit. Really?  Four years ago, Cadillac hired aging...

Cool

Thomas Dorgan was an American cartoonist who died in 1929. According to his obituary in the NY Times, he introduced many slang terms into the popular culture. Among them were some that are gone and some that lasted. When you said something was the cat’s pajamas or the...

Cookies & Milk

Cookies & Milk

"Our new and improved labels and boxes of "Cookies & Milk" will remind you of your favorite childhood cookie, dunked in sweet, creamy v'nilla milk!" Two quick questions: Q1. Which age group is the target? Q2. What type of products are these? A1. Most of us would...

Put On Your Thinking Caps

Six Thinking Hats is a system for conducting work sessions that claims to overcome the problems of factionalism, arguing, and groupthink. Different ways of thinking are represented by different colored hats. Participants are directed to "put on" these figurative hats...

McBummer

A story in Fortune said McDonald’s partnership with UberEats is bringing in younger customers. A Global Data report said McDonald’s has seen an increase in customers 50 and older. A CNBC article said McDonald’s is losing customers. Wait a minute - more younger...

Ford’s Aha! Moment

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s John Stoll, Ford’s president of global markets, says he is going to turn the advertising world on its head. Ford will laser-target us with very specific ads online, using algorithms that mine social media and online...

Can I Buy You a Drink?

The National Institutes of Health have shut down a controversial study of how moderate drinking promotes good health after a task force found severe ethical and scientific lapses in the study’s planning and execution. Credibility for sale. The NYTimes reported that...

TIDAL Wave

You already know music streaming is worth billions of dollars. Spotify, Apple and Pandora are big names, but did you know about TIDAL? Owned by Jay Z, TIDAL claims that Kanye West’s The Life Of Pablo was streamed by its customers 250 million times in just ten days and...

The Swiss Army and Their Knife

During the late 1880s, the Swiss Army decided to purchase a new folding pocket knife for their soldiers. It was to be suitable for use by the army for two things other knives couldn't do: opening canned field rations and disassembling the Swiss Army rifle, an...

Musical Chairs

Faced with large numbers of battlefield casualties arriving en masse, Army doctors needed to quickly determine which cases required immediate attention, which were urgent, and which could wait. This assigning of priorities and resources to one of three broad...

Which Is It?

Most businesses define customer problems as unwanted headaches, obstacles, messes, and predicaments. The exceptional ones don’t. Exceptional leaders understand problems are usually of our own making and they take the responsibility for them. They see problems as...

Order, Please

Most Western societies read from left to right and from top to bottom. As a result, we quite naturally assume that when it comes to lists of things, the most important ones come first. This has a profound but often ignored effect on how we go about building lists....

Your Shower Is Leaking

Your Shower Is Leaking

The co-op board told my friend her shower was leaking into the apartments below. She was instructed to under no circumstances use the shower until it was repaired. Faced with an undiagnosed amount of serious plumbing work, she began by going to the home improvement...

Shop ‘Til Somebody Drops

Shop ‘Til Somebody Drops

Thousands of years ago, we were all hunters of wild animals and gatherers of wild foods. Responsibilities were allocated by gender. Hunting was a male task, as men were bigger and stronger. Women's responsibilities included child-rearing, cooking, and gathering...

Tornadoes

In the United States 1,200 tornadoes a year kill 50 people. Texas has 149 tornadoes a year, Kansas has 93, and Oklahoma has 64. So Texas is the most dangerous place, right? That's the deduction most people make, but a few of us know the importance of taking more...

Nuts

Nuts

William Black opened a store in New York City in 1926 where he sold roasted nuts. As the story goes, he called it Chock Full o’ Nuts because the tiny (6 by 20 foot) store was crammed full of dozens of types of nuts. Within six years, he had more than 100 nut shops in...

Mixed Emotions

Mixed Emotions

U.S. President Ronald Reagan liked to define “mixed emotions” as the feelings a man has as he watches his mother-in-law drive over the cliff in his new Cadillac. Another example involves how driverless vehicles will be programmed to react in emergencies. One is to act...

Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers

Thousands of years ago, a gatekeeper was a roadway toll-taker or the person whose job was to prevent people from entering a restricted area without permission. In the modern workplace, gatekeepers control access to information. Information Gatekeepers are common in...

Dear Diary

Dear Diary

Sixty-seven years ago, Nielsen issued their first television audience ratings. They claimed their sample represented an accurate cross-section of U.S. geographies, markets, homes, families, people, incomes, educations, ages, ethnicities, and more. Two ways of...

Pay Only For What You Keep

Pay Only For What You Keep

In 1926, the Book-of-the-Month Club started with only a few thousand subscribers. By 1951, it had sold 100 million books. The business model worked then, and it works now. Clothing retailers have wholeheartedly embraced the subscription model, and why not? It allows...

It’s Time To Eat

It’s Time To Eat

Grossly overweight people are the subject of many studies. In one interesting experiment, scientists manipulated the clocks so when they said 12 noon, it was really 11am. All the subjects went to the dining room, because it was time to eat. The scientists fiddled in...

Jumping On The Bandwagon

Jumping On The Bandwagon

Long before television and radio, circuses traveled from town to town by way of horse-drawn wagons that paraded right down Main Street, USA. Elephants would be first - bizarre creatures never seen before by simple country folk. Next would be a fancy wagon with a...

Powdered Eggs

Powdered Eggs

Powdered eggs really came into their own during WWII, when the Armed Forces needed to feed millions of men in the European and Pacific theaters of operation. Powdered eggs were an excellent solution to the problem of shipping foodstuffs to far flung locales. But the...

Try This Experiment at Home

Try This Experiment at Home

The next time a prescription drug ad comes on, turn the sound off and watch the scenes of happy people enjoying active lives with families, friends, and pets. The next time that ad runs, leave the sound on, close your eyes and listen. You may discover how the list of...

Amazon Swallows Whole Foods

Amazon Swallows Whole Foods

We’ve seen the stories about Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods and the many speculations for the reasons behind this decision. The big ones are customer data, distribution, logistics, and more consumer touchpoints, but there are others. Physical Contact. There are...

Crazy Goats

Crazy Goats

In the 8th century BC, a Greek shepherd found his goats behaving strangely. Nearby was a chasm, with vapors coming out of the ground. When the shepherd got close, he inhaled the fumes and began to have strange visions of the future. Word got around, as you would...

Three Ways To Test Ads

Three Ways To Test Ads

For those companies that bother with advertising testing research (fewer than you think), there are three basic ways they go about it. The most common is the Disaster Check. Here companies do one or two quick focus groups after creating an ad. They only want to see if...

Why Did Our Plan Fail?

Why Did Our Plan Fail?

The senior executives decided the company needed a state-of-the-art customer service program. They appointed a Project Team and directed them to implement the vision. The team's first task was to write an action plan. They spent weeks putting together a detailed...

Breaking Up With QWERTY

Breaking Up With QWERTY

Folk wisdom says the QWERTY keyboard was invented in 1875 to slow typists who were overwhelming the machinery of primitive typewriters. The truth is that it was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators who needed to convert Morse Code's dots and dashes into...

Everything Old Is New Again

Everything Old Is New Again

Amazon’s cashierless grocery store is designed to allow shoppers to skip checkout lines and cash registers. The idea is that we scan our smartphones when we enter, pick up whatever we like, and walk out, with charges automatically posted to our accounts. Things worked...

Hurry, Hurry, Step Right Up!

Hurry, Hurry, Step Right Up!

Circuses. Most of us have been to circuses where tamed animals are trained to perform for the amusement of spectators. In general, the less the performing animals act as they normally would, the more we are entertained. Dancing bears in tutus. Seals balancing balls on...

Doing The Laundry

Doing The Laundry

We were asked to survey users of stacked washer-dryer units to learn about their likes and dislikes. We agreed, but only if we began with some site visits so we could observe how people used them in their homes. Stacked washer/dryer combos are designed to save space....

What Do You See at the Airport?

What Do You See at the Airport?

Every day, nearly four million people fly on airplanes. Think of the complexity of what’s involved. Websites are searched, travel agencies are contacted, calendars checked, phone calls made, messages sent, relatives consulted, and so on. A massive worldwide system of...

Who Wants Dessert?

Who Wants Dessert?

In an earlier century, the would-be entrepreneurs had an idea for a new business: home delivery of desserts. No one in their area was doing it, and they would have the market all to themselves. A shoestring operation, they had budgeted for only two focus groups. We...

Big Data

Big Data

Only recently popularized, Big Data has been around for a long time. It has been nearly 50 years since some exceptional Stanford students developed a sophisticated statistical package to analyze huge data sets on mainframes. Their idea was to use this very powerful...

Leading Edge Rejectors

Leading Edge Rejectors

They were the first to get on the technology bus, and now they're the first to get off. Seventy million Baby Boomers were born in the years immediately after World War II. They were well into managerial and professional careers when desktop computers and cellphones...

H2CUS. CU@4.

H2CUS. CU@4.

One effect of too-small and hard-to-use keyboards is the shortening of words and messages. This spins itself off into a linguistic subculture where understanding and using code words are evidence of being well-informed and up-to-date — technological sophisticates with...

A 534-Word History of Tech

A 534-Word History of Tech

Thirty years ago, the first Motorola Brick cellphones weighed two pounds, were as big as your shoe, and cost $4,000. The first ones were owned by four different groups of Leading Edge Adopters: status seekers, business people who spent a lot of time out of the office,...

Status Seekers

Status Seekers

A hundred years ago, a new comic strip was published in the New York Globe. Called Keep Up With The Joneses, it featured the adventures of a family vainly trying to keep up with their well-to-do neighbors. Mr and Mrs McGinis and their daughter were social climbers,...

Herd Behavior

Herd Behavior

As much as we humans like to think of ourselves as sophisticated, there are many things we do at animal level. One of these is herd behavior, our tendency to blindly follow the lead of others and go with the group. And while this is often a choice, as when we follow...