Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item—in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.”

I originally found this over at Boing Boing. It's an insightful look at the information architecture of a restaurant menu. Given the rise of grid-based CSS layouts, I wonder if there are some insights here that might be able to be adapted to the web, and how well they might translate. I'm particularly curious if there's a way to reorganize the menus on Seamless Web that would substantially change consumer behavior. It would be an incredible exercise to actually test different a few menu structures for a site like Seamless Web. Instead of hiring a firm or team to come up with "the design" it would be intriguing to develop several designs at once, based on different strategies, and test them live on random samples in order to determine which one has the most effective impact on purchasing behavior. While this kind of testing might seem intuitive to some, it happens far less often than you might imagine.

BERLIN — A German computer engineer said Monday that he had deciphered and published the secret code used to encrypt most of the world’s digital mobile phone calls, saying it was his attempt to expose weaknesses in the security of global wireless systems.

And with that, the encryption key for all GSM handsets will find its way into open source repositories around the world. It's funny, reading the New York Times article, because it's almost as if the GSM Association is taunting hackers.

“This is theoretically possible but practically unlikely,” said Claire Cranton, an association spokeswoman. She said no one else had broken the code since its adoption.

As with every other major security crack ever (CSS, Fairplay, AACS, etc.), whenever you start taunting the audience that is trying to teach you something, they respond with tools that put exploiting security cracks in the hands of even more people. Streisand effect, anyone?

It's just a matter of time now before a Kismet-style application is developed that lets you listen in other people's conversations. And a few months after that someone else will release a version with a user-friendly GUI.