Offbeat

Image courtesy of Saturday Morning Central If you were to name a ‘comfort food’ – something that you will reach for when you’re feeling down – chances are that chocolate would be in your top 3, if not the first thing out of your mouth. Now a study out of University of California, Davis, and University of California, San Diego published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that there is a link between chocolate consumption and actual depression. They note that “of 931 men and women in the San Diego area showed that people who ate an average of…

Back in August of 2009 the Consumerist featured a New York Times article about a growing Japanese trend of single men carrying ‘2-D Girlfriends’ around everywhere with them. The rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of unmarried men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan said they were not “going out with anybody”. Now Sears.com is getting in on this new trend, featuring the…

Apparently this happened last month, but since there is 137 YEARS of content … I don’t think it will get old for a while! For my first search I looked up an area of interest in my current work: Multivariate. Here is what I found: I really hadn’t expected much, as multivariate statistical analysis isn’t exactly in PopSci’s wheelhouse … but the reference to the Journal of Irreproducible Results was priceless – and a complete time-sink! In fact, there was something linked off the front page that I just have to share:   Anyway … Check out the Popular Science…

If you have spent any time on a project team in a corporation of any size, you have likely used tools such as decision analysis (or DA in Kepner-Tregoe speak), fault-tree, DMAIC, and so on … now you can apply some of those tools to figuring out whether to eat that cupcake that just fell on the floor. Of course, those of you with kids, pets or both know that there are multiple dynamics involved – more than are captured on this diagram, so that perhaps using a PPA (Potential Problem Analysis) or doing a ‘5 Whys’ exercise or filling…

Image courtesy of Consumerist The Consumerist website regularly tracks misdeeds by various companies and also our rights as consumers … oh, and some crazy stuff going on in the retail world! Starting back in 2008, they started awarding the ‘Golden Poo Award’, for the crappiest company in the nation! The first year it went to Bank of America, last year to AIG, and now they are getting underway with the bracket voting for the finalists! First up – Walmart vs. Sears/KMart. Who do you think is worst? I’m not sure what else to say but … get to Consumerist and…