Filed under: Products and services, Launches, Ideal Purchase (BBY)

Best Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) just keeps on ingraining itself into every customer niche it can. It’s already entering the Chinese market. It may be coming to an airport near you. Now, possibly anticipate Best Purchase to be seen in a shopping mall in your area soon.

In the Washington D.C. area, the largest consumer electronics retailer will open a new 3,000-square-foot stand-alone location inside the Fair Oaks Mall this day that’ll sell wireless phones, laptop Personal computers and all types of accessories for both product categories.

There will be two more mall openings by Best Purchase this month in yet-to-be disclosed locations. It will be double the size of the Ideal Buy Mobile kiosks already in place within some malls and will have locations next to your favorite Hollister or Yankee Candle stores.

According to the retailer, these new mall concept stores will cater to teens and women — many of whom don’t like shopping at its big-box locations. Best Purchase has already turned its focus to women shoppers, and these new openings are just another leg in the stool from where I sit. Well done.

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Ponca City, We love you writes “Legendary bluegrass musician Eddie Adcock has undergone brain surgery to treat a hand tremor, playing his banjo throughout to test the success of the procedure. Adcock suffers from essential tremor, a condition where there is a continuing deterioration in areas of the brain that control movement, causing a tremor that usually appears when the person tries to act or move. Deep brain stimulation can be used to treat the movement difficulties of both Parkinson’s and essential tremor by sinking an electrode into the thalamus, a deep brain area that’s part of the motor loop — a circuit that helps coordinate movement. Surgeons put electrodes in Adcock’s brain and fitted a pacemaker in his chest, which delivers a small current that shuts down the region of his brain causing the tremors. The most sensible thing to do was to tweak the system while Adcock was playing the banjo to optimize the effect for the thing that’s most important to him.”

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According to a study to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, you can tell someone’s political affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Conservatives tend to be neat and liberals love a mess. Researchers found that the bedrooms and offices of liberals tend to be colorful and full of books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, motion picture tickets and travel memorabilia. Their conservative contemporaries, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials. Their bedrooms and offices are well lit and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags — especially American ones. Sam Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, states these room cues are “behavioral residue.” The findings are just the latest in a series of current attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. I, for one, support a woman’s right to clean.

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Filed under: Economic data, Housing, Recession

The proposition that housing drives the economy is a pretty old and well-articulated theory. Housing values underlie the value of many of the mortgage-related paper held by financial firms. Falling home values have undermined consumer access to credit and people have been pushed out on the streets due to foreclosures.

Some economists say that there are hopeful signs housing will begin to recover. The extra liquidity that the Treasury is putting into banks will improve mortgage lending. That theory is actually deeply flawed. Paulson can give the banks money, but he can’t force them to lend it. Big financial firms are just as likely, if not more likely, to keep the cash to use against future losses. Those losses may come due to mortgage problems. It is a perverse circle which might not be broken soon.

Continue reading Nothing moves without housing and housing isn’t moving

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mcgrew writes “The question of how we loveless nerds managed to not be bred out of the species genome might have been answered. According to New Scientist, we’ve better sperm. According to the article, men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests boasted high counts of healthy sperm, while low scorers tended to have fewer and more sickly little guys. … Though the connections between brains and sperm were ‘not awesome, they’re there and highly significant.’ All things held equal, good sperm and good brains go together.” Don’t begin gloating yet. Another current study found that the gene that makes you good at Halo also makes you a premature ejaculator. A study of 200 Dutch men found that those with a premature ejaculation problem all had a version of a gene that controls the release of serotonin. These men seem to “have very swift reflexes. They may be excellent at playing tennis or computer games.” Remember, if you smoke after sex you’re doing it too fast.

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