Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

The price is right

It seems that we're a nation that cannot keep secrets. Well, that is if you are a woman.

The results of a survey by Infosecurity Europe show that women are four times more likely than men to give away passwords to total strangers pretending to be market researchers with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for completing the survey. The research highlights how easily people give important information - like names, date-of-birth and phone numbers - to complete strangers. This is precisely the kind of information that scammers use to defraud people and their employers.

I feel for the respondent who had 32 passwords to remember - although many people use only one or two and rarely change them.

Now, before all you men become all smug and mail this post to wives, partners and female friends - you had better know that we're just as predictable. We can't but help ourselves from being putty in the hands of advertisers when looking at adverts with scantily-clad women. My colleague reported on an article in the journal NeuroReport which suggests that sexual images make us buy things because it makes our brains say, "What the hell," when making risky financial decisions. I suspect it wasn’t the rather dazzling fuel performance on the urban cycle which influenced your last car purchase.

Now, we are tempted to offer readers of this blog a free chocolate for every comment - or pepper the site with some erotic images to encourage you to 'invest' your time on these pages. However, we know that you are all far too sophisticated to fall for that trick.

In a galaxy far, far away

What do aliens eat? And even if they do a) exist and b) have a compatible digestive system would they choose to cram themselves with crisps? Such musings don't much matter because a brand manager has come up with a clever marketing ploy to get me to write about Doritos. The manufacturer, PepsiCo, is asking imaginative UK punters to come up with an advert that it promises to beam into space from a radio telescope in Norway for 24 hours. The ad should find its way to the "habitable zone" around one of the stars in the constellation Ursa Major only 42 light years away, New Scientist (March 15) reports. Should aliens get the munchies, they'll be so grateful.

Meanwhile back on earth, some Danes are apparently less than grateful to Ikea which stands accused of cultural imperialism, or so BusinessWeek (March 24) reports.

Signs of the times

  Is this the worst sell-line ever? I saw this poster on a bus shelter in the east-end of London. The Polish city of Gdansk is famous for being the birthplace of Solidarity the trade union movement which helped overturn Communist rule in the 1980s. I'll be the first to admit  that rebranding the city as a tourist destination is more than a little tricky. But this?

Maybe nothing special will happen, maybe you'll leave as planned, maybe for some reason you'll decide to stay on, maybe . . .

Er, no, maybe not.

12 e-cards for Christmas

Environmentally-aware folks have ditched quill and ink in favour of e-cards this year. Here at Snakes and Ladders we have collected together our 12 favourites for you to enjoy: