After 30 years of drinking cheap wine and not noticing any problems with it...

... it turns out I was more or less right and could have proven so with some simple experiments. The ancedote is from the Freakonomics blog and the research is here.

And just when I was about to stop adding balsamic vinegar to my beer the Freakanomics follow-up post shows that all I really needed to do was to have someone add it for me and not tell me.

The positive correlation between price and perceived quality is familiar to most of us. When I was growing up on a farm in Australia in the 1960s my great-uncle Fred who owned an audio equipment store in Melbourne told me that if he had items that were not selling he would raise the price to entice buyers.

Why does Freakonomics focus exclusively on the taste of wine? Why not the pleasure derived from the altered state of conciousness or the severity of the after-effects? My remembered perception of wine drinking is that the best wines are the ones that taste best when drunk in large volumes.

In a future post we will subject water to the above analysis.

You Think Google Has Hard Interview Questions? Try EFI.

 
The job interview - "Oops!",
by Big Fat Rat.

Google is famous for its hard interview questions . When I lived in the USA I used to listen to Car Talk on NPR, a radio show that had its own hard weekly questions in its "puzzler" segment.. When I was browsing the Car Talk web site I saw their hardest "puzzler" .

A hundred prisoners are each locked in a room with three pirates, one of whom will walk the plank in the morning. Each prisoner has 10 bottles of wine, one of which has been poisoned; and each pirate has 12 coins, one of which is counterfeit and weighs either more or less than a genuine coin. In the room is a single switch, which the prisoner may either leave as it is, or flip. Before being led into the rooms, the prisoners are all made to wear either a red hat or a blue hat; they can see all the other prisoners' hats, but not their own. Meanwhile, a six-digit prime number of monkeys multiply until their digits reverse, then all have to get across a river using a canoe that can hold at most two monkeys at a time. But half the monkeys always lie and the other half always tell the truth. Given that the Nth prisoner knows that one of the monkeys doesn't know that a pirate doesn't know the product of two numbers between 1 and 100 without knowing that the N+1th prisoner has flipped the switch in his room or not after having determined which bottle of wine was poisoned and what colour his hat is, what is the solution to this puzzle?

EFI at Night, Foster City,
by cool_blue_dog.

The problem sounded difficult but familiar, and sure enough ....

it was written by a man named Alan B. at EFI, Inc

I had worked at EFI when I was in the USA and when I interviewed software engineering candidates I asked challenging interview questions, as was common practice there . We interviewers had had to answer difficult questions to get employed there in the first place so we had  seen it from both sides.

Googleplex,
by Laughing Squid.

Alan B's question brings back some memories. I am glad I didn't get it at my interview.

A web search found my favorite EFI interview question on an interview questions web site .
How hard can Google interview questions be?

MUJI. No-Brand Quality Goods. Nature Cannot be Fooled.

This DDI Magazine article says The name MUJI was derived from "Mujirushi Ryohin," which translates as "no-brand quality goods." The retailer has promoted an image of recognizable quality without a brand or designer's name on the products it carries. Rather, the corporate mission insists upon avoiding trends for its products so that they are universally relevant—"depending on simplicity and flexibility"—to fit customers' lifestyles.

That sounds like a great idea as did shopper marketing. As audience measurement becomes grounded in hard measurement and reasonable analysis, brand premiums may disappear. Here is an example of how this might occur with wine.

In the end, nature cannot be fooled.