Dolan Media Flyover
Jan 17th, 2008 by John Stodder
Here’s a roundup of some of our recent stories…
Wisconsin Law Journal blogger Anne Reed supplements her blogging fortune working as a jury consultant. She came across a consumer-research study, cited in an article about losing weight, to come up with a tactic to keep jurors engaged in a complex case without repeating the same information. She calls it “The Jelly Bean Theory.”
The researchers gave subjects jelly beans. Twenty-two jelly beans each, in five flavors: cherry, orange, strawberry, peach, and tangerine. (Why twenty-two and not, say, twenty-seven? The press release doesn’t say, and I don’t have the whole article.) The research subjects had the grueling job of eating the jelly beans and rating how much they enjoyed this jelly-bean-eating thing. When it was over, they had to answer more questions: “how well they could distinguish the flavors, how much they noticed the different flavors, how repetitive the eating task felt, how similar the jelly beans seemed to each other, and how much variety they perceived.”
The subjects were in two groups, and the two groups heard different words about what they were eating. One group was asked only to eat the “jelly beans.” The other group was asked to eat “cherry jelly beans,” “tangerine jelly beans,” and so on. And that difference — an extra word articulating the obvious fact that the beans were not exactly the same — changed the subjects’ experience. The folks who were offered another “peach jelly bean,” then “strawberry,” had a great time, enjoying every bean and ready for more when the 22-bean ration was gone. But the poor subjects who were offered “jelly bean” after “jelly bean” got bored and didn’t want more.
The basic discovery: “Subcategorization…reduces satiation.” Reed thinks this phenomenon applies to any learning process, including teaching a jury about your clients’ version of the facts.
In presenting repetitive material, there is almost always a way to group it into segments that are different from each other, and to describe the differences briefly to the jury. Any good teacher can tell you how to do it — or, if the teacher is your expert witness, do it for you. Jurors think in segments anyway, so the simple act of dividing the material up will help them absorb it. If you label the segments too, they might even start looking forward to the parts of the trial where you’re the one standing up.
So, if lawyers start naming their evidence after Jelly Belly flavors, you heard it here first….
In New Orleans, an extreme feel-good story. Before Hurricane Katrina, Joshua Lee Nidenberg sold life insurance. After returning to the city last year, he realized he would never be able to get his business running again, so he decided to become a full-time fine arts photographer. He is thriving, selling his art at shows, to corporate clients and via this website. Overall, reports New Orleans City Business‘ Ariella Cohen, the fine art market is booming in this struggling city….
Still on the pleasure beat… The brewery business is going through some rough times, thanks to higher prices for hops and barley, according to this story by Long Island Business News‘ Ambrose Clancy. Craft brewers, the makers of those tasty microbrews, will be hit especially hard because they use more hops to deliver more flavor.
What happened to cause this intoxicating rise in prices?
Mother Nature playing wicked tricks, startling currency exchange rates, government policy and weak supplies pursued by huge demand are just a few of the variables which drove up costs for hops and barley malt, the key ingredients to brewing. According to Julia Herz, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Brewers Association, severe weather conditions in the primary barley-growing areas of the world, especially Australia and Europe, resulted in near disastrous harvests.
Drought in Australia and biblical weather in Europe are the real culprits plaguing agricultural products, with 60 percent of hops in Slovenia wiped out by hail this summer and the United Kingdom fields drowned by heavy flooding during the same time. Australia is producing less than half its normal barley output, Herz added.
But what’s in the brewers’ pockets is taking an awful toll as well. With a weak dollar – “Our peso currency,” mocked Burford – compared to a robust euro and yen, European and Asian brewers turned to Canadian and Pacific Northwest fields to buy hops, and are cornering an already tight market. “They’re buying hops for half price,” Burford said.
“We’re also fighting a government policy,” Cotter put in, pointing to government subsidizing farmers who plant corn for ethanol rather than hops or barley.
The culprits for these price hikes might sound familiar if you read this post about wheat thievery, and this one about biofuels displacing agricultural food growth.
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