The Beige Book, February 29, 2012
Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggest that overall economic activity continued to increase at a modest to moderate pace in January and early February. Read the rest at: http://www.federalreserve.gov/fomc/beigebook/2012/20120229/FullReport.htm

Vitamin D is a nutrient found in some foods that is needed for health and to maintain strong bones. It does so by helping the body absorb calcium (one of bone's main building blocks) from food and supplements. People who get too little vitamin D may develop soft, thin, and brittle bones, a condition known as rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. Vitamin D is important to the body in many other ways as well. Muscles need it to move, for example, nerves need it to carry messages between the brain and every body part, and the immune system needs vitamin D to fight off invading bacteria and viruses. Together with calcium, vitamin D also helps protect older adults from osteoporosis. Vitamin D is found in cells throughout the body. Read much more at: http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-QuickFacts/

UPSELL Suggesting your customer buys the more expensive model of the same product or service; or that they add a feature that would make it more expensive. With upsell you’re suggesting they pay more in exchange for a better product or service.
For example: buying a 42” TV instead of a 40”, upgrading from economy to business class for a flight, adding an extended warranty
CROSS SELL Also called an add on, cross sell is when you suggest your customer buys additional products or services from a category that is different to the product or service they are viewing / purchasing.
For example: purchasing a DVD player to go with your TV, purchasing paper to go with a printer, buying a hands free car kit to go with a mobile phone, adding a vase to your purchase of a bunch of flowers
DOWN SELL Some examples of down sell include: presenting customers with 3 levels of membership but showing the most expensive option first, making the middle but cheaper option more appealing than if you showed then the cheapest level of membership first (which might otherwise make the middle plan seem more expensive), walking onto a car yard hoping to buy a BMW, finding you can’t afford it, and having the salesman show you lower cost cars. http://www.marketinggum.com/cross-sell-and-upsell-%E2%80%93-conversion-techniques-to-boost-your-online-sales/

Sales gimmicks include extremely early renewal offers (I've had them up to 18 months before a long-term subscription expired), repackaging of material into a different format (such as speeches, articles or editorials made into books or reports), appeals for a renewal of something you never ordered, offer for a publication with a slightly different title than you now have disguised as an official renewal.

Phone sales depicted in Blondie comic strip Feb. 29, 2012
I'm calling about the mandolin lessons you requested .... there's no way I requested mandolin lessons . . . Oh, really? I suppose you consider yourself an expert on mandolin . . . Dagwood signs up for lessons.

Reader feedback to story mentioning E85, a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline: I am on my second E85 car and love using ethanol fuel. While it is true you get fewer miles per gallon, the real figure to look for is cost per mile. Typically there is at least a $0.30 difference in the cost per gallon between E85 and regular, with regular being more expensive. When the difference comes to around $0.60/gallon, then there is little, if any, difference in the cost per mile between the two fuels. And of course the bigger the difference after that, then the better the cost per mile is using E85. In other words, if E85 is $3.00 a gallon and regular $3.30 and your car gets 25 mpg on E85 and 30 on regular, then the cost per mile is $0.12 and $0.11 respectively. At $3.00 for E85 and $3.60 for regular, cost per mile changes to $0.12 for regular. If Newt is right and we have $5.00 gas, then cost per mile is $0.17 for regular. Plus there are other benefits like supporting the US economy rather than the Middle East’s. It is easier to grow corn than create oil. E85 burns cleaner than gas. We are not dependent on foreign companies. As you can tell, I am a fan of E85.

Welcome to the brave new world of Massive Open Online Courses — known as MOOCs. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free). Consider Stanford’s experience: Last fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in an Artificial Intelligence course taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, a Google colleague. An additional 200 registered for the course on campus, but a few weeks into the semester, attendance at Stanford dwindled to about 30, as those who had the option of seeing their professors in person decided they preferred the online videos, with their simple views of a hand holding a pen, working through the problems. Mr. Thrun was enraptured by the scale of the course, and how it spawned its own culture, including a Facebook group, online discussions and an army of volunteer translators who made it available in 44 languages. Besides the Artificial Intelligence course, Stanford offered two other MOOCs last semester — Machine Learning (104,000 registered, and 13,000 completed the course), and Introduction to Databases (92,000 registered, 7,000 completed). And this spring, the university will have 13 courses open to the world, including Anatomy, Cryptography, Game Theory and Natural Language Processing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/education/moocs-large-courses-open-to-all-topple-campus-walls.html

Mar. 6 events
1521 – Ferdinand Magellan arrives at Guam.
1820 – The Missouri Compromise is signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allows Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state, but makes the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase territory slavery-free.
1834 – York, Upper Canada is incorporated as Toronto.
1836 – Texas Revolution: Battle of the Alamo – After a thirteen day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured.
1840 – The Baltimore College of Dental Surgery opens, the first dental school.
1857 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case.
1869 – Dmitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
Mar. 6 birthdays
1475 – Michelangelo, Italian artist and sculptor (d. 1564)
1619 – Cyrano de Bergerac, French soldier, poet (d. 1655)
1806 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, British poet (d. 1861)
1885 – Ring Lardner, American writer (d. 1933)
1893 – Furry Lewis, American blues guitarist (d. 1981)
1900 – Lefty Grove, American baseball player (d. 1975) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_6