Markdownpad is a freeware text editor that generates markdown code and shows the html result during typing.

 Advantages

Markdownpad as an editor for Leanpub files?

• most useful markdown codes are covered
• preview shows what you probably will get after conversion to an ebook
• no need to know the more complex markdown codes (images and hyperlinks)
• very simple user interface
• It actually works: the file generated leads to a well-formatted Leanpub manuscript, at least in my little test.

Limitations

• does not cover everything: for example, bulleted lists are supported but not numbered lists
• image insertion: not possible to select a file (only relative or absolute hyperlink)
• not “intelligent”: when you twice press H2, the markdown code for H2 (##) is also generated twice
• not possible to link to places in the same document
• not possible to relatively link to places in another document
• no support for tables

De site zelf oogt rustig en eenvoudig, maar toch schuilt er al heel wat leuke functionaliteit onder de motorkap. Zo kun je op een eenvoudige manier boeken zoeken, aangeven welke je reeds gelezen hebt en wat je ervan vond, en suggesties krijgen voor gelijkaardige boeken.

Ook zijn er enkele huisrecensenten aan het werk die je tips aan de hand doen, en vind je gelijkgestemde zielen door iemand te volgen. Omgekeerd kunnen andere gebruikers jou volgen. Er is zelfs een discussieforum waarmee je commentaar kan leveren op de aanwezige boeken. En dat zijn er ondertussen al vele duizenden.

Heb je zelf een aantal dubbels in de collectie? Niets belet je om een eigen winkeltje te openen op Bookido en zo je dubbels aan de man te brengen. Tot tien boeken is dat volledig gratis.

Professionele handelaars kunnen een grotere boekenshop openen en betalen dan een kleine bijdrage.

Uiteraard kunnen boekenwurmen via dit platform boeken kopen bij de handelaars die op Bookido actief zijn. De wijze van betaling hangt af van de handelaar, maar verscheidene betaalmogelijkheden worden ondersteund: van Paypal tot Visakaart, van bankoverschrijving tot Ogone-betaling.

Ook goed gevonden: je kunt via hetzelfde platform events aankondigen die boekgerelateerd zijn. Ik denk aan de release van een nieuw boek, een signeersessie, of een tweedehandsbeurs.

Inloggen kan door een eigen account aan te maken, maar als je reeds een twitteraar of facebookadept bent, dan kun je ook van je twitter- of facebook-account gebruik maken.

Onnodig te zeggen dat ik dadelijk verkocht was en m’n eigen boeken, Quiztig met Wijn en Fifty Enterprise Architect Tricks, onmiddellijk op Bookido heb gezet.

In de pers:

• Nieuwsblad

De proevers lieten hun indrukken na op de fles. Zo kan ik nu die proefnotities met u delen. Voor wat het waard is, want vele van deze flessen zul je nergens meer vinden.

De kelderlijken

Niet te verwonderen dat er af en toe kelderlijken tussen zaten:

• Witte châteauneuf-du-pape uit het gezegende jaar onzes heren 1966: inderdaad, niet meer te drinken. Oxideerde van zodra hij in het glas was. Op zich wel spectaculair: van appelsapgeel naar roestbruin in minder dan vijf minuten. Fles zat in een lot dat ik ooit op de veiling kocht, met de bedoeling de àndere flessen van dat lot te verkrijgen uiteraard.
• Côte rôtie van Bernard Burgaud uit 1983: op zich geen kelderlijk, maar helaas kurksmaak. Zou nog goed hebben kunnen zijn.
• Saint-joseph  “Le Berceau” van Bernard Gripa uit 1986: in zijn jeugd kan Saint-Joseph misschien zonder problemen mee met de absoluut grote terroirs uit de noordelijke Rhône, maar op latere leeftijd manifesteert de échte kwaliteit zich. Deze was helaas schielijk overleden, wellicht ergens eind jaren 1990. (noot: de wijnen werden blind geproefd, om vooroordelen uit te sluiten of tenminste tegen te gaan).

De buitenbeentjes

Naast de wijnen waar ik van verwachtte dat ze ofwel totaal ondrinkbaar geworden zouden zijn, ofwel net verrassend goed zouden zijn, laste ik ook een paar buitenbeentjes in:

• Pic st loup – Château Lavabre 1998: nochtans een topjaar en (toen) een goed domein, maar de enkele keren dat ik deze wijn nog proefde na tien jaar flesrijping viel hij telkens tegen. Ook nu weer. Over zijn top, jammer genoeg.
• Hex Vom Dasenstein spätburgunder Spätlese 1999: veel goedkoper dan de andere, en met een sterk afwijkend smaakpatroon (zoet ipv droog). Geen allemansvriend. Maar je moet al eens uit de band durven springen, vind ik.
• Aneto 2004: dat komt ervan als je je vrienden zoals Kaat een wild card geeft om een willekeurige fles uit de kelder te halen. Maar niet getreurd, deze Portugees is na zeven jaar op fles nog altijd in topvorm.

De recentere ontdekkingen uit Ventoux en Languedoc

• Nog een wild card: Wim toverde een magnifieke ventouxwijn uit de kelder, met name cuvee E.V. van Paul Vendran, een eenmalige botteling ter gelegenheid van de geboorte van zijn kindje in 1998. De kleine is nog jeugdig, de wijn ook. Dit bewijst wat de Ventoux in zijn mars heeft, teminste op topterroirs en in handen van een kundig en gepassioneerd wijnmaker.
• Domaine d’Aupilhac Montpeyroux 1999 van Sylvain Fadat: ik heb de man zich ooit weten boos maken op een collega omdat die beweerde dat zijn wijnen niet kunnen ouderen. Bij deze het bewijst: deze montpeyroux is sappig, lang en diep fruitig, mooi ondersteund door zuurtjes. En dat in een jaar dat toch zeker niet tot de grootste van de Languedoc mag gerekend worden.
• André Iché mag dan al overleden zijn, enkele van zijn mooiste kunstwerken zijn nog steeds bij ons. Deze Nobilis uit 1999 is een mooie herinnering aan een bedreven wijnbouwer. De speciale tekening op het etiket is van “Eisbär” Stéphane Eichmann.
• Een simpele Vin de Pays Duché D’Uzès van Vignoble Chabrier uit 2001, cuvee La Garrigue d’Aureilhac, verbaasde menige proever met zijn fijne neus waarin zelfs wat citrus dooschemert, maar ook met zijn elegante mondgevoel en lengte. Je moet het niet altijd in de dure flessen gaan zoeken.

De verrassingen

De echte verrassingen, of soms dan toch ook weer niet, zaten verweven in de hele proeverij.

• Pointoise Cabarrus 1982: op de Nalys na de oudste fles, een eenvoudige cru bourgeois uit de Haut-Médoc, had ik er in feite tussen gezet om te kunnen vergelijken met flessen die wél zulke lange rijpingstijd kunnen overleven. Maar wat bleek? Dit eenvoudige wijntje, weliswaar uit het onvolprezen oogstjaar 1982, was nog steeds fruitig, kruidig en sappig. Nooit verwacht, want ik heb al talloze bordeauxwijnen gedronken van veel hogere komaf en veel jonger die al totaal passé waren.
• Mag ik dit dé verrassing van de dag noemen? Een witte rhônewijn, een condrieu 1983 van Georges Vernay, door de meeste proevers blind betiteld als “toch al wat ouder, uit 2002 misschien”? Maar wàt een lengte, wat een vuursteenspectakel, wat een fruitigheid na een luttele 28 op de fles…
• Paul Jaboulet-Ainé heeft één van de beroemdste wijngaarden van de hele Hermitageheuvel. Deze 1983 La Chapelle werd gewonnen van de druivenstokken vlakbij dit bekende kapelletje toen ik amper tien was. Prachtige lengte, een aangename geur met kruiden en zwarte olijf, diep fruitig ook. Grote terroirs, grote wijnmakers: het kan soms heel goed zijn.
• De eerste wijn die ontkurkt werd: een côte rôtie van Guigal, weliswaar niet één van de heilige drievuldigheid La Turque – La Mouline en La Landonne, maar de “gewone” Côte Brune et Blonde, dus de mengeling uit twee verschillende terroirs van de Côte Rôtie. Oogstjaar : 1985. Het hartje dat een proever op de fles achterliet, verklaart alles. Hoewel een andere ‘m tien jaar te oud vond, herkenden we nog vele geuren waaronder klei, truffel, en animale toetsen in deze langlever. Lees ook de post van wijnvriend Bart over deze wijn.
• 

De twijfelgevallen

• Hermitage 1992 van Laurent Charles Brotte: aanvankelijk enkel tertiair, maar na een tijdje ontplooit de wijn zich en krijgen we een weliswaar moeilijk te omschrijven geur (het “ventje” dat een proever op de voorzijde tekende, getuigt daarvan), dan peperige en gerookte geuren, en een kanjer van een afdronk. Niet voor iedereen weggelegd, zulke rariteiten.
• Bernard Faurie Hermitage 1987: slechts enkele proevers kunnen deze wijn waarderen, maar komen niet verder dan “sniffy sniff” als omschrijving. Toch geef ik hen gelijk: voor wie oudere wijnen kan waarderen, is dit een uniek smaakpatroon en is de wijn verre van versleten.
• Hospices de Nuits – Nuits St Georges 1er Cru uit 1996 (botteling voor Eddy De Kok): gesloten, misschien al passé? Neen, we moeten ‘m gewoon de tijd geven zich los te wrikken uit het harnas van zijn oogstjaar. We worden beloond met een yummie wijn die naar rood fruit geurt en absoluut pinot noir is. Niet te snel oordelen! laat iemand als advies op de fles achter…
• Château l’Enclos 1993 uit Pomerol: gekocht toen ik pas met wijn begon. Geen geweldig jaar, een middelmatig kasteel in zijn regio, maar toch goed gerijpt. Al komt de enkeling die hier echt van houdt, niet verder dan “paprika” als omschrijving. Weliswaar blind herkenbaar als bordeaux.

1. General media coverage

Metro (Flemish Edition, Friday April 15th) states “Cheap wine is as tasty as expensive one”. “From 587 people from the public”, the newspaper continues, only 50% identified the wine correctly”. And further: “Only red wines like merlot and chardonnay (!) were tasted”.
The Guardian (online edition) states “apparently, some 578 lucky visitors [...] were given two glasses of wine, told that one of them was cheap and the other expensive, and asked which was which”.

BBCNews (online edition) says, “The blind test at the Edinburgh Science Festival saw 578 members of the public correctly identify the “cheap” or “expensive” wines only 50% of the time.”

The Daily Mail (Derbyshire, D, online edition) opens with “Cheap or nasty? Most Britons can’t tell the difference between plonk and fine wine”.
And continued: “The researchers approached 578 people in Edinburgh and asked them to sample a glass of either a cheap or an expensive wine. The tasters were shown two prices and asked to say which wine they were drinking. They correctly classified the white wines as cheap or expensive 53 per cent of the time, and the reds on 47 per cent of occasions. Overall they were right just 50 per cent of the time.”

The Daily Mail also reveals details about the price level of the wines and the percentage correct per wine type. The story in the Daily Mail offers most details and is closest to what I think really happened. I tried to get confirmation of the experimental results by contacting prof. Wiseman several times, but he refuses to answer. So I’m forced to guess.

2. The experimental setup and open questions

Aside from the many factual errors (like different number of participants, the “red chardonnay” or the specification “French” champagne), there are two big misunderstandings that matter a lot.

The first misunderstanding is about the experimental setup itself. Depending on which source you consult, you are left with the idea that people were given two wines, a cheap one and an expensive one, and had to figure out which was which.

That was probably not the case. As the Daily Mail states, “We didn’t ask people to compare two wines because we wanted to mimic real-life conditions, said Professor Wiseman, of Hertfordshire University.

A second misunderstanding has to do with the results. If you read the newspaper superficially, you would be left with the impression that half of the people cannot distinguish good from bad wine. So that would imply that half of the people *can*.

That also was not the case. If the Wiseman study proves anything, it is certainly not that there are two types of people: connaisseurs and ignorants. Several newspapers rightfully compare a 50% score on a discrimination task to “flipping a coin”, i.e. none of the participants scored better than luck. But
we cannot conclude that from the data we have. All we know is that on average, people scored 50% at this discrimination task.

We don’t know whether there were people able to identify correctly 8 cheap wines from 8 more expensive wines. This is perfectly possible: all you need then, is enough people who think the cheap wine is expensive or vice versa to compensate. We are even not sure that people had to taste 8 wines or just 1. Also, we don’t know how many times a cheap wine was held for an expensive one or the reverse. The results were aggregated per wine type, so all we have is a report from Daily Mail with 8 wine types (four white and four red) with their percentage correct and sixteen prices ranging from £4.29 to £29.99.

3. Supporting evidence

Despite the confusion and the lack of quality data about the Wiseman study, the wine world reacted sharply. Jancis Robinson: “It is true that wines currently on sale for around £30 a bottle in British stores would typically be very young – too young – examples of wines that are meant to be aged for many years. A 2008 bordeaux classed growth, for example, would still be chock full of off-puttingly chewy tannins and youthful acidity. Only a professional would be likely to prefer this, for current drinking, to a soft, fruity £4.99 Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon.”

While I support this argument, I must say that Wiseman tried to choose comparable wines to avoid comparing a 2008 bordeaux classed growth to a soft and fruity chilean cab. For “claret”, the Daily Mail mentions a bottle of £3.49 and one of £15.99. That is probably a cheap, generic AOC bordeaux next to a saint emilion grand cru or a mediocre médoc. You can’t have high-quality bordeaux classed growth for sixteen pounds a bottle in a British supermarket.

Still, there is some evidence that people might prefer a cheap bordeaux over a more expensive one:

There has been a study published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008 “Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”

I carried out a blind tasting with a group of about 30 wine amateurs in which I chose 3 cheap (sub 5 euro) wines and asked four wine amateurs to find an expensive (about 25 euro) wine of the same type as my wine. If for each of the wines two-thirds of the tasters would prefer the expensive wine over the cheap one, I would lose. I won. My €3,55 Salice Salentino Cantine Due Palme 2001, notably a supermarket wine, was preferred over an expensive (€26,10) Salice Salentino Riserva 2001. Average scores were 13,1/20 for the cheap wine and 11,7/20 for the expensive one. While not set up in a scientific way, this study has one advantage over the Wiseman study: the selection process of the wines was much clearer. Indeed, both the “cheapo” (me) and the “luxury boys” (the four wine amateurs) had a good reason to pick the best wine they could for that price. There was no possible experimentor bias, as there probably was with the Wiseman study.

There are numerous accounts of wine fraud by putting cheap wine into an expensive bottle. A case that springs to mind is the 2001 Schoonhoven fraud. Utterly cheap sauvignon from Chile ended up in a bottle of Château Schoonhoven, and was sold for about €100 in three-star restaurant Comme-chez-Soi. Even the knowledgeable sommelier William Wouters didn’t spot it.

Non-wine experts generally like an other type of wine than experts. For them, it must be “not too sharp” and “good and soft” (I hear these words often in tastings with non-experts). Generally, this means cheaper, fruit-driven wines without too much tannin, or without the marked acidity a young quality wine can have. Exactly the point made by Jancis Robinson.

You can fool a wine expert by showing an expensive bottle but pouring a cheap wine from it, or vice versa (pour Pétrus into a cheap bottle and ask the expert what he thinks – he might miss the subtlety of the wine completely). But in blind tastings, it’s impossible to fool all experts all of the time. Quality will shine through. I remember a blind panel tasting in 2006 where 38 experienced tasters judged 111 wines from two regions and two price categories (from about €3.5 to €39). The tasting was set up in four flights such that one flight consisted of wines from the same region and price category. The best wine, with a score of 93%, was also the most expensive and there was a positive correlation between price and perceived quality, even if the wines were young. Correlations between price and quality ranged from 0.29 to 0.58 depending on the origin and the price category of the wine.

The lack of correlation between price and quality is partly due to demand/supply effects. For example, the demand for fine burgundy is ten times as high as the supply. Price goes up, quality goes down. The production cost of even the finest wines on earth rarely exceed €50. So anything you pay above that price (€2000 or more for a bottle of Pétrus 2009) is because demand is high, not necessarily because it is worth the price (Haut Brion 2009, another top bordeaux, gets comparable marks by wine experts but costs “only” €600 or so). This does not only hold within a region, but even more so between regions. I did a blind tasting with about 50 unexperienced wine lovers. They tasted 8 red wines from various European regions. I asked beforehand which of the regions they would like most. The general answer was, not surprisingly, “Bordeaux”. After the tasting, I asked which wine they actually liked the most. General feeling was that bottle number 4 was the best. Then I asked what region they thought it came from. Most thought it would have been bordeaux. When I revealed the label, it turned out we had tasted a €12 Languedoc wine. The bordeaux, also a €12 wine, came in last…

Open questions

A first cluster of open questions is about the experimental setup. How were people selected? How many wines did they taste? Were the bottles hidden with a brown bag, or were they decanted in a neutral caraffe? In what circumstances did this tasting take place? What glasses were used? Geoffrey Kelly said, according to Lucy Shaw of The Drinks Business “I found out that the wines were served in thimble-sized glasses – no wonder people were unable to pick out the fine wines from the cheap ones.”
What was the temperature of the wines? Who carried out the experiment and was this indeed carried out as a double-blind study, i.e. the participants don’t know it is an experiment, and the observer is unaware of the research hypothesis and the experimental conditions? The fact that prof. Wiseman is unwilling to share details about the experiment contributes to the opinion in the wine world that this is a very weak study, to say the least.

A second cluster of open questions is about the data. How were the data collected? Apparently, Wiseman spent no effort to note down individual scores (assuming that each person had to taste 8 and not only two wines). As stated by Gary Ernest Davis: “Imagine that half the people tested were experts and got it right every time, while the other half were dunces who got it wrong every time. On average, people would be right half the time”. Furthermore, how were “wine-loving” tasters determinations kept apart from the others to justify the claim that “even self-professed wine lovers failed to identify the wines correctly”? How was determined if a person was more experienced than others? There has been a study showing that non-expert are unaware of their incompetence but that more experienced people are aware of their lack of competence. This could mean that self-reporting on experience shows a negative correlation with actual performance. This is nicely illustrated by a certain mr. Jon from Staffs who reacts to the Daily Mail article online: “these so called experts dont even drink the wine.they slush it around there mouths and spit it out. im no expert, but even i know you have to swollow *sic+ it!”. Where do you think Jon places himself with respect to wine knowledge, above or below the wine amateur whom he sees spitting out a wine?

Also with regard to this second cluster of open questions, the fact that prof. Wiseman is unwilling to share his experimental data weakens his study.

A third cluster of open questions handles the selection of the wines. As Jamie Goode points out, “Wines purchased from the producer for the same cost can end up at very different prices. A supermarket may pay a grower 1 Euro per bottle and then list the wine at £4.99 (a standard mark-up, given tax and logistical costs). They may then buy another wine for 1 Euro and list it at £7.99 or even £9.99, with a view to discounting it later.” Exactly! So having a precise mechanism to select “cheap” versus “expensive” wine is necessary. It is not sufficient to just run into a supermarket and buy eight pairs of bottles. At the very least, one should try to buy wines with a known production cost to rule out any pricing strategies supermarkets are known for. On top of that, there should be some protection from experimentor bias. If you know what the hypothesis is, it is not difficult to find wines that match this hypothesis. For example, I can go to the supermarket around the corner and pick out a very nice sauvignon for €4 and a bad sauvignon for €10. Furthermore, for non-experts, even £5 for a bottle of wine is fairly expensive, as illustrated by John W from Manchester, who says “I view a cheap bottle of wine will cost me £2.99, and an expensive will one cost £4.99″ as a reaction to the Daily Mail article. So why then compare “cheap” wines (on average £6.18) with “expensive” (on average £14.65). Why not compare £2.5 with £10? Why indeed not choose a larger difference (price tension = expensive divided by cheap, in this case on average 2.7 and ranging from 1.7 to 4.6)? And why not include expensive and cheap older wines into the sample, such that quality can express itself when the wine is ripe for consumption?

A fourth open question is inspired by an observation I made when interpreting the scarce data from the Wiseman study. I discovered that the correlation between the price tension and the percentage correct is highly negative (-0.83). That means: for every pair of wines (cheap and expensive), if the difference in price is large, chances are that people actually think the cheap wine is the expensive one. When the price difference is small, people seem to have less trouble putting the right price label on the bottle. For example, the bordeaux pair has a price span of 4: the expensive partner of the pair costs 4 times as much (16 pounds) as the cheap one (4 pounds). With the pinot grigio pair, the price span is only 2.2 (cheap: £4.29; expensive £9.49) but here, 59% of tasters identified the wine correctly. This is strange and in fact contradicts the conclusion of prof. Wiseman, only not in a way that the wine world would like. It means that people can actually distinguish between cheap and expensive, be it that they label them wrongly. If price tension goes up, people have a higher probability than chance to declare the expensive wine cheap and vice versa. How does this come? It is difficult to interpret this result since we don’t have the raw data, but this finding is in line with the Goldstein 2008 results, i.e. that there is a negative correlation between price and perceived quality if laymen are quality judges. As Goldstein states, “Suppose we have two wines, A and B, and Wine A costs ten times more then Wine B in dollar terms.In terms of a 100-point scale (such as that used by Wine Spectator), [our model] predicts that non-experts will assign an overall rating that is four points lower for wine A, whereas experts will assign an overall rating that is seven points higher.

4. Bad science, after all

To conclude that “people cannot distinguish good wine from plonk” from the Wiseman study is totally unacceptable. On the one hand, there are serious methodological troubles with the experimental setup and with the experimental data, which should be available for closer inspection to the scientific community. The fact that professor Wiseman refuses to give them, is unprofessional and unscientific. On the other hand, there is strong experimental evidence for the far more interesting conclusion that laymen and experts judge a wine very differently. If the data as described by the Daily Mail are accurate reflections of the actual experimental data, these even support that conclusion. In that case, it can be assumed that the 578 person sample of professor Wiseman consisted of both laymen and wine experts, or at least amateurs.

Or is it?

How can it be possible that someone with a reputation as a skeptic like professor Wiseman sets up such a bad experiment, behaves unprofessionally with the data, and draws a totally invalid conclusion? I see two possible reasons. It was first stated by Jamie Goode: “Wiseman, a psychologist from the Hertfordshire University, is one of the seven-strong advisory group for the Edinburgh International Science Festival (www.sciencefestival.co.uk), and it seems that this ‘study’ was in essence a clever publicity stunt to boost the profile of the festival by generating column inches—one that worked very well. It was not designed as a proper scientific study, although this is how it has been reported”.

This would explain why Wiseman performed the experiment this way and reported about it with its invalid conclusion. But it would still be very unprofessional, both to the world of experimental psychology and to the wine world. To quote Goode again: “And it would be a shame if, through a publicity stunt dressed up as a piece of scientific research, people were put off exploring wine because they were led to believe that differences in wine quality are actually illusory”. Very true.

So I suspect that there is another reason for the publication of this bad experiment with its invalid conclusion. I guess the whole media storm is one of professor Wiseman’s experiments, a meta-experiment you could call it, to see how people react when under attack. I hope I am right, otherwise the skeptic world has just lost an important proponent to me.

(references available at

http://www.aboriginemundi.com/index.php/2011/05/wiseman-on-wine-maybe-the-right-conclusion-but-invalid-nonetheless)

In this article, I come to the conclusion that it might be true that people generally cannot distinguish between cheap and expensive wine, but that the Wiseman study is too weak to support that conclusion.

First, I give an overview of what the popular media reported about the study. Second, I describe how the experiment was actually set up and I describe some questions that we are left with after the study. Third, I present some evidence that people indeed cannot make the difference between cheap and expensive wine. And last but not least, I conclude that the Wiseman study does not advance science unless… but I’ll keep my hypothesis for the end.

1. General media coverage

Metro (Flemish Edition, Friday April 15th) states “Cheap wine is as tasty as expensive one”. “From 587 people from the public”, the newspaper continues, only 50% identified the wine correctly”. And further: “Only red wines like merlot and chardonnay (!) were tasted”.

The Guardian (online edition) states “apparently, some 578 lucky visitors [...] were given two glasses of wine, told that one of them was cheap and the other expensive, and asked which was which”.

BBCNews (online edition) says, “The blind test at the Edinburgh Science Festival saw 578 members of the public correctly identify the “cheap” or “expensive” wines only 50% of the time.”

The Daily Mail (Derbyshire, D, online edition) opens with “Cheap or nasty? Most Britons can’t tell the difference between plonk and fine wine”.

And continued: “The researchers approached 578 people in Edinburgh and asked them to sample a glass of either a cheap or an expensive wine. The tasters were shown two prices and asked to say which wine they were drinking. They correctly classified the white wines as cheap or expensive 53 per cent of the time, and the reds on 47 per cent of occasions. Overall they were right just 50 per cent of the time.”

The Daily mail also reveals details about the price level of the wines and the percentage correct per wine type. The story in the Daily Mail offers most details and is closest to what I think really happened. I tried to get confirmation of the experimental results by contacting prof. Wiseman several times, but he refuses to answer. So I’m forced to guess.

2. The experimental setup and open questions

Aside from the many factual errors (like different number of participants, the “red chardonnay” or the specification “French” champagne), there are two big misunderstandings that matter a lot.

The first misunderstanding is about the experimental setup itself. Depending on which source you consult, you are left with the idea that people were given two wines, a cheap one and an expensive one, and had to figure out which was which.

That was probably not the case. As the Daily Mail states, “We didn’t ask people to compare two wines because we wanted to mimic real-life conditions, said Professor Wiseman, of Hertfordshire University. When you have a meal you don’t decide whether a wine is good or not by comparing it with other wines – you drink it”.

A second misunderstanding has to do with the results. If you read the newspaper superficially, you would be left with the impression that half of the people cannot distinguish good from bad wine. So that would imply that half of the people *can*.

That also was not the case. If the Wiseman study proves anything, it is certainly not that there are two types of people: connaisseurs and ignorants. Several newspapers rightfully compare a 50% score on a discrimination task to “flipping a coin”, i.e. none of the participants scored better than luck. But we cannot conclude that from the data we have. All we know is that on average, people scored 50% at this discrimination task.

We don’t know whether there were people able to identify correctly 8 cheap wines from 8 more expensive wines. This is perfectly possible: all you need then, is enough people who think the cheap wine is expensive or vice versa to compensate. We are even not sure that people had to taste 8 wines or just 1. Also, we don’t know how many times a cheap wine was held for an expensive one or the reverse. The results were aggregated per wine type, so all we have is a report from Daily Mail with 8 wine types (four white and four red) with their percentage correct and sixteen prices ranging from £4.29 to £29.99.

3. Supporting evidence

Despite the confusion and the lack of quality data about the Wiseman study, the wine world reacted sharply. Jancis Robinson: “It is true that wines currently on sale for around £30 a bottle in British stores would typically be very young – too young – examples of wines that are meant to be aged for many years. A 2008 bordeaux classed growth, for example, would still be chock full of off-puttingly chewy tannins and youthful acidity. Only a professional would be likely to prefer this, for current drinking, to a soft, fruity £4.99 Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon.”

While I support this argument, I must say that Wiseman tried to choose comparable wines to avoid comparing a 2008 bordeaux classed growth to a soft and fruity chilean cab. For “claret”, the Daily Mail mentions a bottle of £3.49 and one of £15.99. That is probably a cheap, generic AOC bordeaux next to a saint emilion grand cru or a mediocre médoc. You can’t have high-quality bordeaux classed growth for sixteen pounds a bottle in a British supermarket. At the time of writing, there is one bottle of exactly that price available at Marks and Spencer and that is a cru bourgeois Château Devise d’Ardilley 2005 (Haut-Médoc). A wine that gets 3 stars in Decanter with the following tasting note: “rich, classy emphasis on cassis. Bold, bright and vivid. Crunchy fruit, firm tannins. Astonishingly undeveloped – promising. Drink 2016-23. (16.4 points)”.

Still, there is some evidence that people might prefer a cheap bordeaux over a more expensive one:

• There has been a study published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008 “Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that indiv iduals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”
• I carried out a blind tasting with a group of about 30 wine amateurs in which I chose 3 cheap (sub 5 euro) wines and asked four wine amateurs to find an expensive (about 25 euro) wine of the same type as my wine. If for each of the wines two-thirds of the tasters would prefer the expensive wine over the cheap one, I would lose. I won. My €3,55 Salice Salentino Cantine Due Palme 2001, notably a supermarket wine, was preferred over an expensive (€26,10) Salice Salentino Riserva 2001. Average scores were 13,1/20 for the cheap wine and 11,7/20 for the expensive one. While not set up in a scientific way, this study has one advantage over the Wiseman study: the selection process of the wines was much clearer. Indeed, both the “cheapo” (me) and the “luxury boys” (the four wine amateurs) had a good reason to pick the best wine they could for that price. There was no possible experimentor bias, as there probably was with the Wiseman study.
• There are numerous accounts of wine fraud by putting cheap wine into an expensive bottle. A case that springs to mind is the 2001 Schoonhoven fraud. Utterly cheap sauvignon from Chile ended up in a bottle of Château Schoonhoven, and was sold for about €100 in three-star restaurant Comme-chez-Soi. Even the knowledgeable sommelier William Wouters didn’t spot it. The fraud was dismantled after Justice found out that the number of bottles was far too large for the weight of the grapes bought to make the wine.

Here is what I believe:

• Non-wine experts generally like an other type of wine than experts. For them, it must be “not too sharp” and “good and soft” (I hear these words often in tastings with non-experts). Generally, this means cheaper, fruit-driven wines without too much tannin, or without the marked acidity a young quality wine can have. Exactly the point made by Jancis Robinson.
• You can fool a wine expert by showing an expensive bottle but pouring a cheap wine from it, or vice versa (pour Pétrus into a cheap bottle and ask the expert what he thinks – he might miss the subtlety of the wine completely). But in blind tastings, it’s impossible to fool all experts all of the time. Quality will shine through. I remember a blind panel tasting in 2006 where 38 experienced tasters judged 111 wines from two regions and two price categories (from about €3.5 to €39). The tasting was set up in four flights such that one flight consisted of wines from the same region and price category. The best wine, with a score of 93%, was also the most expensive and there was a positive correlation between price and perceived quality, even if the wines were young. Correlations between price and quality ranged from 0.29 to 0.58 depending on the origin and the price category of the wine. Strangely enough, the average correlation was the same for cheap versus expensive wines (0.43 and 0.44) but it was higher for wines from Southern France (0.53) than for Southern Italy (0.34). So in Southern France, you are more likely to get what you pay for than in the South of Italy. Wine-wise, that is.
• The lack of correlation between price and quality is partly due to demand/supply effects. For example, the demand for fine burgundy is ten times as high as the supply. Price goes up, quality goes down. The production cost of even the finest wines on earth rarely exceed €50. So anything you pay above that price (€2000 or more for a bottle of Pétrus 2009) is because demand is high, not necessarily because it is worth the price (Haut Brion 2009, another top bordeaux, gets comparable marks by wine experts but costs “only” €600 or so). This does not only hold within a region, but even more so between regions. I did a blind tasting with about 50 unexperienced wine lovers. They tasted 8 red wines from various European regions. I asked beforehand which of the regions they would like most. The general answer was, not surprisingly, “Bordeaux”. After the tasting, I asked which wine they actually liked the most. General feeling was that bottle number 4 was the best. Then I asked to say what region they thought it came from. Most thought it would have been bordeaux. When I revealed the label, it turned out we had tasted a €12 Languedoc wine. The bordeaux, also a €12 wine, came in last…

So in my opinion, it is quite possible to get the results prof. Wiseman achieved. What I do not support, is the claim that “cheap wine is as good as expensive wine”. There are far too many loose ends in his study to warrant such a far-fetching conclusion. Let’s discuss some open questions.

Open questions

The experimental setup

A first cluster of open questions is about the experimental setup. How were people selected? How many wines did they taste? Were the bottles hidden with a brown bag, or were they decanted in a neutral caraffe? In what circumstances did this tasting take place? What glasses were used? Geoffrey Kelly said, according to Lucy Shaw of The Drinks Business “I found out that the wines were served in thimble-sized glasses – no wonder people were unable to pick out the fine wines from the cheap ones.”
What was the temperature of the wines? Who carried out the experiment and was this indeed carried out as a double-blind study, i.e. the participants don’t know it is an experiment, and the observer is unaware of the research hypothesis and the experimental conditions? The fact that prof. Wiseman is unwilling to share details about the experiment contributes to the opinion in the wine world that this is a very weak study, to say the least.

The experimental data

A second cluster of open questions is about the data. How were the data collected? Apparently, Wiseman spent no effort to note down individual scores (assuming that each person had to taste 8 and not only two wines). As stated by Gary Ernest Davis: “Imagine that half the people tested were experts and got it right every time, while the other half were dunces who got it wrong every time. On average, people would be right half the time”. Furthermore, how were “wine-loving” tasters determinations kept apart from the others to justify the claim that “even self-professed wine lovers failed to identify the wines correctly”? How was determined if a person was more experienced than others? There has been a study showing that non-expert are unaware of their incompetence but that more experienced people are aware of their lack of competence. This could mean that self-reporting on experience shows a negative correlation with actual performance. This is nicely illustrated by a certain mr. Jon from Staffs who reacts to the Daily Mail article online: “these so called experts dont even drink the wine.they slush it around there mouths and spit it out. im no expert, but even i know you have to swollow [sic] it!”. Where do you think Jon places himself with respect to wine knowledge, above or below the wine amateur whom he sees spitting out a wine?
Also with regard to this second cluster of open questions, the fact that prof. Wiseman is unwilling to share his experimental data weakens his study.

The selection of the wines

A third cluster of open questions handles the selection of the wines. As Jamie Goode points out, “Wines purchased from the producer for the same cost can end up at very different prices. A supermarket may pay a grower 1 Euro per bottle and then list the wine at £4.99 (a standard mark-up, given tax and logistical costs). They may then buy another wine for 1 Euro and list it at £7.99 or even £9.99, with a view to discounting it later.” Exactly! So having a precise mechanism to select “cheap” versus “expensive” wine is necessary. It is not sufficient to just run into a supermarket and buy eight pairs of bottles. At the very least, one should try to buy wines with a known production cost to rule out any pricing strategies supermarkets are known for. On top of that, there should be some protection from experimentor bias. If you know what the hypothesis is, it is not difficult to find wines that match this hypothesis. For example, I can go to the supermarket around the corner and pick out a very nice sauvignon for €4 and a bad sauvignon for €10. Furthermore, for non-experts, even £5 for a bottle of wine is fairly expensive, as illustrated by John W from Manchester, who says “I view a cheap bottle of wine will cost me £2.99, and an expensive will one cost £4.99″ as a reaction to the Daily Mail article. So why then compare “cheap” wines (on average £6.18) with “expensive” (on average £14.65). Why not compare £2.5 with £10? Why indeed not choose a larger difference (price tension = expensive divided by cheap, in this case on average 2.7 and ranging from 1.7 to 4.6)? And why not include expensive and cheap older wines into the sample, such that quality can express itself when the wine is ripe for consumption?

A strange correlation

A fourth open question is inspired by an observation I made when interpreting the scarce data from the Wiseman study. I discovered that the correlation between the price tension and the percentage correct is highly negative (-0.83). That means: for every pair of wines (cheap and expensive), if the difference in price is large, chances are that people actually think the cheap wine is the expensive one. When the price difference is small, people seem to have less trouble putting the right price label on the bottle. For example, the bordeaux pair has a price span of 4: the expensive partner of the pair costs 4 times as much (16 pounds) as the cheap one (4 pounds). With the pinot grigio pair, the price span is only 2.2 (cheap: £4.29; expensive £9.49) but here, 59% of tasters identified the wine correctly. This is strange and in fact contradicts the conclusion of prof. Wiseman, only not in a way that the wine world would like. It means that people can actually distinguish between cheap and expensive, be it that they label them wrongly. If price tension goes up, people have a higher probability than chance to declare the expensive wine cheap and vice versa. How does this come? It is difficult to interpret this result since we don’t have the raw data, but this finding is in line with the Goldstein 2008 results, i.e. that there is a negative correlation between price and perceived quality if laymen are quality judges. As Goldstein states, “Suppose we have two wines, A and B, and Wine A costs ten times more then Wine B in dollar terms.In terms of a 100-point scale (such as that used by Wine Spectator), [our model] predicts that non-experts will assign an overall rating that is four points lower for wine A, whereas experts will assign an overall rating that is seven points higher.

4. Bad science, after all

To conclude that “people cannot distinguish good wine from plonk” from the Wiseman study is totally unacceptable. On the one hand, there are serious methodological troubles with the experimental setup and with the experimental data, which should be available for closer inspection to the scientific community. The fact that professor Wiseman refuses to give them, is unprofessional and unscientific. On the other hand, there is strong experimental evidence for the far more interesting conclusion that laymen and experts judge a wine very differently. If the data as described by the Daily Mail are accurate reflections of the actual experimental data, these even support that conclusion. In that case, it can be assumed that the 578 person sample of professor Wiseman consisted of both laymen and wine experts, or at least amateurs.

Or is it?

How can it be possible that someone with a reputation as a skeptic like professor Wiseman sets up such a bad experiment, behaves unprofessionally with the data, and draws a totally invalid conclusion? I see two possible reasons. It was first stated by Jamie Goode: “Wiseman, a psychologist from the Hertfordshire University, is one of the seven-strong advisory group for the Edinburgh International Science Festival (www.sciencefestival.co.uk), and it seems that this ‘study’ was in essence a clever publicity stunt to boost the profile of the festival by generating column inches—one that worked very well. It was not designed as a proper scientific study, although this is how it has been reported”.

This would explain why Wiseman performed the experiment this way and reported about it with its invalid conclusion. But it would still be very unprofessional, both to the world of experimental psychology and to the wine world. To quote Goode again: “And it would be a shame if, through a publicity stunt dressed up as a piece of scientific research, people were put off exploring wine because they were led to believe that differences in wine quality are actually illusory”. Very true.

So I suspect that there is another reason for the publication of this bad experiment with its invalid conclusion. I guess the whole media storm is one of professor Wiseman’s experiments, a meta-experiment you could call it, to see how people react when under attack. I hope I am right, otherwise the skeptic world has just lost an important proponent to me.

References

BBCNews. Cheap wine ‘good as pricier bottles’ – blind taste test. Online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13072745.

Caldwell, E., Vintage Wine or Cheap Plonk? Science Festival reveals experiment results. Online at http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/news/everyday/vintage-wine-or-cheap-plonk-science-festival-reveals-experiment-results.

Davis, G. (2011). Tasting Wine: a Coin Toss? Online at http://www.blog.republicofmath.com/archives/4720

Derbyshire, D. (2011). Britons can’t tell the difference between a fine wine and plonk. Online at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1376686/Britons-tell-difference-fine-wine-plonk.html

Devriendt, E., Doomen, P., and Van Campenhout, S. (2006). Very Interesting Bottles uit Zuid-Frankrijk en Zuid-Italië. Ken Wijn-magazine nr 6, juni 2006.

Doomen, P. (2005). Proefverslag proeverij 4: Top of Flop. Available with the author.

Goldstein, R, Almenberg, J et al. (2008). Do more expensive wines taste better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings, Journal of Wine Economics, vol. 3, n. 1, p 1-9.

Goode, J. The Wiseman Study: cheap versus expensive wine. Online at http://www.wineanorak.com/wineblog/wine-science/the-wiseman-%E2%80%98study%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-cheap-versus-expensive-wine

Guardian: Cheap wine, don’t be a plonker. Online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/apr/15/cheap-wine-dont-be-plonker

Robinson, J. (2011). What is wine value? Online at http://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/a201104262.html

Shaw, L. (2011). Industry attacks psychologist for flawed taste test. The Drinks Business. Online at http://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12634&Itemid=0

Supermarketwine (2011). If you can’t tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, why pay more? Online at http://www.supermarketwine.com/blog/if-you-can-t-tell-the-difference-between-cheap-and-expensive-wine-why-pay-more

Thomas, L. (2011). Are wine buffs for real. TropicPost. Online at http://www.tropicpost.com/are-wine-buffs-for-real/

Even the paying options don’t offer enough space for photographers or movie collectors or music lovers or video fanatics or… you get the point: when you really need terabytes instead of just gigabites, Dropbox doesn’t cut it.

Therefore, I looked out for other services that offer more space. Unlimited space. I found some who claimed to do that, but it turned out they put other limitations in place that render the service unusable. For example: one such cloud service limits the upload speed once you go above 100 gigabyte. That’s not what I call “unlimited”.

My other alternative was to buy a NAS (Network Attached Storage). But then I considered the disadvantages:

• price: although prices are dropping, a good NAS costs several hundreds of euros.
• RAID: without RAID higher than 0, your data are not protected. One single disk issue can cause your data to become corrupted. So if you buy a NAS of 4TB, you can use only 2TB effectively.
• operating cost: with rising electricity prices, NAS drives are not cheap in operation. Depending on your use of it and current prices, add 10 to even 100 euro a year.
• protection: what if disaster strikes and my house burns down? Next to the financial loss, I’d also lose all of my photos, which are memories
• space limitation: even a big NAS of 6TB has its limitations. One day or another, the disks will be full.
• access: I can access my files only at home, unless I buy a pogoplug or something.
• knowledge: if there’s a problem, I’ll have to fix it. Or find someone to do so.

So I left this option quickly and searched for more online storage plans. I found only one that didn’t lie about limitations and that is LiveDrive. I decided to give it a try. So far, it works for me (I have uploaded almost one terabyte so far) and I thought I’d share it with you. You can test LiveDrive here: http://www.livedrive.com.

I met Alex Otterlei from the Dreamhouse Studio more than 20 years ago. Around that time, I was involved in role playing games. At the RPG shop, I bought a music cassette with fascinating music. Little did I know that the composer was in that same shop that very moment…

Unfortunately, I lost the music (I still have the box though). Three years ago, when chiro Lips organized a summer holiday camp themed “Arthur”, I knew I had to find that music again… It was not very difficult to find Alex on the web. He told me that he would re-release his old work soon. The moment has come: Arthur is available again, either as an MP3 download either at the iTunes store. All info at the Alex Otterlei website.

Contents of the CD

1 - Lady of the Lake

2 - The Coming of Arthur

3 - Hail to the King

4 - Camelot

5 - Merlin

6 - Lancelot’s Arrival

7 - Forbidden Romance

8 - Arthur’s Grief

9 - Riding out for the Holy Grail

10 - The Quest Begins

11 - Dragon’s Breath

12 - Mordred’s Madness

13 - Morgana

14 - The Downfall of Merlin

15 - To the Grailcastle

16 - The Holy Grail

17 - Return to Camelot

18 - Doommarch

19 - Last Battle

20 - Arthur’s Death

21 - Avalon

History of the CD

“Arthur”, composed between 1989 and 1990,  marked the start of Alex Otterlei’s career. Although initially the music was released on cassette (!), the album was received so enthusiastically both by press and audience that a record-deal and a CD-release soon ensued.

Many people throughout the world have been enthralled by “Arthur”, and the album became an instant-classic in the worldwide RPG-community who found the music very fitting during their fantasy-based game sessions.

Composer’s notes on “Arthur”

“From when I was a child, I had always been deeply moved by the legend of Arthur. In fact, anything about knights fascinated me, and the keen observer would find me wandering in the bushes outside our house, wearing full (plastic) armor, trying to spot my imaginary Dragon through correctional glasses. Guess I wasn’t missed in the football team…

At the end of the eighties, my circle of friends mainly consisted out of people who saw themselves as  Knights of the Round Table. Some of them took this so seriously they even came to our weekly gatherings in full (real) armor…”

“Yes, those were the days. After a while however, I detached myself again, feeling the need to do something more constructive than just sit and talk all night about Arthur. And so I set myself a huge task: translate this saga into music. Make your own Arthur.

And although upon looking back now after all these years, I can’t help but noticing the limitations of my musical and technical skills at that early stage, I am still struck by the genuine passion, the raw power and yes, even the magic that composing” Arthur” evoked in me.”

A.O.

Leatherman multitools, like the famous swiss knife, are several tools combined in one. But unlike the swiss knife, the Leatherman can be unfolded to pliers. When closed, most multitools are no larger than 10cm. When unfolded, pliers of normal size (15 to 20cm) show up. Invaluable for camping, do-it-yourself, gardening and hundreds of other activities.

This website allows you to find the perfect Leatherman multitool for your needs: http://www.myleatherman.tk.

Op verschillende websites vond ik commentaar, vooral dan op het eerste toestel. Het bleek goed te functioneren, maar er zijn toch enkele nadelen aan volgens de gebruikers:

• De iRobot gaat niet echt systematisch te werk: hij rijdt random rond en er is dus de kans dat het ene stuk van de kamer driemaal gestofzuigd is en het andere niet.
• De iRobot is moeilijk proper te maken. Af en toe moet je namelijk het stofbakje leegmaken en de onderdelen onderhouden, en dat blijkt bij de Roomba niet zo eenvoudig.
• De iRobot heeft een beperkte zuigkracht in vergelijking met klassieke stofzuigers. Vooral bij tapijten merk je dat die niet echt goed gestofzuigd zijn. Deze opmerking werd bevestigd door Test-Aankoop, dat in het recentste nummer (juli) de Roomba nogmaals had uitgetest.

Over de Samsung Navibot vond ik nog niet veel reviews (het is nog een zeer nieuw toestel) maar de enkelen die ‘m geprobeerd hadden, waren wel vol lof. Ik kan me daar bij aansluiten, al zijn er ook enkele nadelen.

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Samsung navibot robotstofzuiger in actie

Voordelen

• Snel gestart: amper vijf minuten nadat ik de doos op de tafel zette, reed de Navibot al vrolijk stofzuigend door de kamer.
• Intelligent: de Navibot slaagt er effectief in een model van de kamer op te bouwen, waardoor hij een efficiënt zuigplan ontwikkelt en uitvoert. Bovendien vermijdt dit dat hij telkens tegen dezelfde hindernissen botst.
• Werkt goed in de hoeken: door de zijborsteltjes poetst hij ook waar je zelfs met een gewone stofzuiger moeilijk geraakt.
• Kwaliteit van het werk: de kamer wordt werkelijk grondig onder handen genomen. Ook het tapijt is na de zuigbeurt proper.
• Vlot navigeren: dorpels, hoge tapijten, “afgronden”, obstakels: geen probleem, hij kan er allemaal mee overweg.
• Verschillende programma’s: je kan hem een gewenste starttijd geven, een stuk kamer grondig laten doen, maximaal stofzuigen, de randen een extra beurt geven… indien gewenst kan je hem zelfs met de afstandsbediening manueel bedienen. Al zie ik niet goed in wie zich daarmee zou bezighouden.
• Eenvoudig te reinigen: het stofbakje en het filter zijn zeer eenvoudig te verwijderen en te reinigen.
• Twee fences/guards meegeleverd: die kan je gebruiken ofwel om een stuk kamer af te schermen (fence), ofwel om de kamer in te delen in zones die achtereenvolgens proper gemaakt worden (guard).
• Afstandsbediening: batterijen inbegrepen.
• Keert automatisch terug naar zijn laadstation wanneer hij herladen dient te worden.
• Extra borstel en zijborstels inbegrepen.

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Nadelen

Tapijt na reiniging door de navibot

• Geen batterijen meegeleverd met de guards.
• Maakt lawaai (hoewel minder dan een klassieke stofzuiger) – je zet ‘m dus beter niet aan het werk als je in dezelfde kamer bent.
• Opgepast met kabels, draden, kleine obstakels… op de grond. Je ruimt dus best eerst op vooraleer je ‘m in werking zet.
• In complexe, grote kamers vindt hij soms de weg naar z’n laadstation niet terug.
• Het programmeren van uur en starttijd is niet al te intuïtief. Je moet hier de handleiding nauwgezet volgen.
• Door z’n afmeting geraakt de robot niet door smalle openingen. Wil je hem dus bv onder de tafel laten stofzuigen, dan kan je best een paar stoelen omhoog zetten.
• Prijs: zo’n 500 euro is inderdaad niet goedkoop.

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De nagel op de kop

Je vervangt er niet de regelmatige poetsbeurt mee, en je bekijkt ‘m beter ook als aanvullend ten opzichte van een klassieke stofzuiger. Maar het is wél handig dat je ‘s avonds thuis komt en de vloer is tenminste proper. De enkele nadelen die ik ondervonden heb, wegen niet op tegen de voordelen. Of je dit duur vindt, hangt van je eigen portemonnee en noden af.

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je krijgt meer dan 2 GB gratis webruimte die zich in de achtergrond synchroniseert met de computers waarop je werkt.

De voordelen zijn niet moeilijk te raden maar wel vérstrekkend:

• Je hoeft geen mails meer naar jezelf te sturen om een bestand op meerdere computers te hebben. Bovendien werk je altijd met de juiste versie
• Je kan heel gemakkelijk folders delen met anderen. Handig als je in groep aan iets werkt.
• Je kan ook individuele bestanden delen.
• Er is een foto-modus: gewoon wat foto’s naar de map kopiëren en de link doorsturen.
• Je hebt als het ware een gratis backup, want alle bestanden worden gesynchroniseerd op meerdere computers.
• Zolang je netwerktoegang hebt, heb je geen USB-sticks meer nodig.
• Stel: je bent op reis. Dan kan je bv in een internetcafé foto’s opladen en je geheugenkaart vrijmaken. Of bestanden raadplegen die je in je dropbox hebt gestopt.
• Best van al: dropbox gedraagt zich als een gewone map op je computer. Je moet dus niet inloggen en dergelijke om van de service gebruik te maken, dat gebeurt allemaal in de achtergrond.
• Je kan ook kiezen om Dropbox niet op je computer te zetten, maar om enkel van de webdienst gebruik te maken.
• Je moet geen persoonlijke informatie prijsgeven. Gewoon een username en paswoord volstaan.

Dropbox is snel, functioneel, gratis en rechttoe-rechtaan. Zoals ik het graag heb.

→ Intekenen kan op https://www.dropbox.com