Postage Stamp Research Articles

Investigating pricing solutions to combat spam: Postage stamp and bonded senders

E-mail is a powerful communication tool for marketers. Unfortunately, the efficacy of this tool is rapidly being eroded by spam. In response, one option now in play for legitimate marketers is to subscribe to services that charge postage for delivery of e-mail. This solution is consistent with economic theory and essentially amounts to a tax to reduce the supply of unwanted communications. However, it fails to harness the unique nature of the e-mail communication medium— namely, its “interactivity.” A solution that utilizes the interactivity of the e-mail medium, but less commonly known, is bonded senders. It involves the posting of a bond with an intermediary that is forfeited if the recipient identifies the e-mail as an unwanted communication. Given the emergence of these two distinct pricing solutions, we ask: (1) What are the essential characteristics of each pricing solution? (2) Which pricing solution is superior? and (3) Is it sustainable without regulation? Our analytical findings reveal that the bonded senders solution dominates the postage stamp solution. Specifically, it allows marketers in more categories to participate and yields greater profit to each marketer. Surprisingly, despite offering these benefits to marketers, it also results in a lower amount of unwanted communications. Finally, incorporating the notion of rational expectations, we also find that only bonded senders emerge as a solution that is self-enforcing. Our analytical findings thus give pause to pure postage-type mechanisms but encourage investments in the bonded senders mechanism.

Malaria eradication in Mexico: Some historico-parasitological views oncold war, deadly fevers by Marcos Cueto, Ph.D

This review of Professor Marcos Cueto's Cold War Deadly Fevers: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955–1975 discusses some of the historical, sociological, political and parasitological topics included in Dr. Cueto's superbly well-informed volume. The reviewer, a parasitologist, follows the trail illuminated by Dr. Cueto through the foundations of the malaria eradication campaign; the release in Mexico of the first postage stamp in the world dedicated to malaria control; epidemiological facts on malarial morbidity and mortality in Mexico when the campaign began; the emergence of problem areas that impeded eradication; considerations on mosquitoes and malaria transmission in Mexico; the role of business and society in malaria eradication; the results of the campaign; the relationship between malaria and poverty; and the parasitological lessons to be learned from the history of malaria eradication campaigns. Dr. Cueto's excellent and well-informed exploration of malaria – not merely as a disease but as a social, economic and human problem – makes this book required reading.

Anniversary Postage Stamp Marking the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Mohorovičić

Anniversary Postage Stamp Marking the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Mohorovičić

Bhambatha and The Zulu Rebellion 1906

In 1906 there occurred a rebellion among a part of the indigenous people against the settler government of the British colony of Natal, ostensibly against the collection of a poll (capitation) tax on adult males. It is very often called the Zulu Rebellion, but it has many names, and it is commonly called “Bhambatha’s rebellion” or “the Bhambatha rebellion”, after the most famous of its leaders. The centenary of the rebellion was marked by public celebrations of a political character which however shed very little light on the actual historic events. These celebrations were sponsored by the provincial government, usually in collaboration with ad hoc local bodies. They commenced when the provincial premier announced that Bhambatha would be posthumously reinstalled as a chief. There followed the laying of wreaths at memorials at Mpanza, near Greytown on 8 April 2006, followed by a cleansing ceremony and the dedication of a memorial wall to the “Richmond Twelve” on 22 April. They culminated in the laying of more wreaths and the reinstatement of Bhambatha to his chieftaincy at Mpanza on 11 June. The latter affair also engaged the national government, and the crowded programme included speeches by the president and deputy president, as well as provincial premier, the chairperson of the House of Traditional Leaders and the king of the Zulu nation. A special postage stamp was issued to mark the occasion. Almost a week later, on 16 June or Youth Day, a Bhambatha Memorial Concert took place at Lake Merthley, also near Greytown. On 27 September Bhambatha was awarded the national Order of Mendi in Gold for Bravery. Outside the government sphere there was very little to mark the centenary. Two plays, which did not enjoy government support, hardly got off the ground. A third, which did, was the musical 1906 Bhambada–The Freedom Fighter, which ran for a fortnight in Pietermaritzburg, and was touted to go on to Pretoria, but did not, probably for political as well as aesthetic reasons. A government-funded Indigenous Knowledge Systems project by local university academics produced a book entitled Freedom Sown in Blood: Memories of the Impi Yamakhanda, which contained practically nothing about the rebellion itself. Another book, Remembering the Rebellion: The Zulu Uprising of 1906, comprised a series of twelve commemorative supplements previously published in the The Witness and related newspapers in partnership with the provincial department of education. Beautifully illustrated and pitched at schools, it necessarily simplified scholarship on the rebellion for its readers.

A Postage Stamp About the Periodic Table

Presents a postage stamp issued in Spain in honor of Mendeleev and the modern periodic table that could serve as an opportunity to link chemistry and art.

Min-Max Fairness Criteria for Transmission Fixed Cost Allocation

Conventionally, transmission fixed cost allocation is carried out on postage stamp basis. Amongst various other ways of solving the problem, the cost allocation under the "usage-based" domain has also been suggested, namely, based on proportionate tracing and recently, by optimization based real power tracing. Changing the cost allocation regime from postage stamp basis to usage-based methods, though technically sound, can pose fairness issue. The fairness criteria in its simplest form would allocate cost in equitable manner on per unit basis while meeting the constraints. The optimization-based tracing provides room for defining an objective, leading to tracing compliant postage stamp method, that strikes a balance in allocation between conventional postage stamp and proportionate tracing-based methods. In this paper, we address this complex cost sharing problem by suggesting a min-max fairness algorithm, using optimization-based real power tracing. The min-max algorithm achieves fairness by equalizing allocations within constrained space and reaching an equilibrium where further balancing cannot be achieved. We show that computing min-max fair solution simply corresponds to solving a sequence of sparse LP problems for real power tracing. The algorithm satisfies the property of aggregate invariancy. Results on actual data of central transmission utility of Western Regional Grid of India, as well as IEEE 30-bus system, validate the claims. The results are compared with the tracing compliant postage stamp method.

O. N. Pruitt's Possum Town: The 'Modest Aspiration and Small Renown' of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915-1960

O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town:The ‘Modest Aspiration and Small Renown’ of a Mississippi Photographer, 1915–1960 Berkley Hudson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. O. N. Pruitt (right) with his son Lambuth ( far left) and probably Pruitt's brother Jim (center). Both Lambuth and Jim worked as photographers—Jim in nearby Starkville, and Lambuth in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1925. All photographs from the O. N. Pruitt Collection in Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. [End Page 52] Sometime in the 1930s, jack-of-all-trades photographer O. N. Pruitt focused his bulky, large format view camera beside a northeast Mississippi lake surrounded with swamp cypress. Draping the camera's black cloth over his head the better to see the upside down and backwards image that appeared on the ground glass, he clicked the shutter. Black-and-white, nitrate negative film would soon reveal two African American men standing in a wooden boat filled with huge spoonbill catfish. Close by, a white man stands in the water next to another boat laden with spoonbills. He holds the trophy fish by the gill, dangling it vertically to display its size—almost as long as he is tall. The two black men in the boat, one smiling, seem deferential. But their looks and body posture, and the gaze of another black man leaning against the tree, suggest that the white man may have caught that fish, but he did not catch them all. Shadows of the four men appear as murky reflections in the lake water. About the same time that he made this photograph Pruitt was called to take a very different picture. On Monday, July 15, 1935, the telephone rang in Pruitt's home in Columbus, Mississippi. Come quickly, he was told; there had been a lynching, a double lynching. With that, Pruitt, who always kept his camera equipment at the ready in his car trunk, sped south of town on paved and then gravel roads. There, in a backwoods churchyard, he found two men—described as young "Negro farmers" in Associated Press accounts published around the nation—lynched from a big oak tree. One Pruitt photograph depicts the bodies of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton, hanging side-by-side from ropes tied to the tree. A white man, wearing a straw boater and kneeling with his back to the camera, grasps their pants' legs, apparently to steady the bodies for the picture.1 Moore and Morton—two among at least four thousand African Americans lynched between 1889 and 1946—had been accused of harassing a white woman. The day after the lynching, a Tuesday, the local newspaper reported this salient detail: hundreds of spectators came to look at the bodies of the lynched men before they were cut down, more than twelve hours after the lynching occurred. Although the images did not appear in the local newspaper, Pruitt, a commercial and studio photographer, was nonetheless contacted to document this horrific event. The subject of this image tells us everything about Pruitt's time and place, while his role in photographing it speaks volumes about the relationship of the small-town southern photographer and the community in the early twentieth-century South.2 From 1915 to 1960 Pruitt was the de-facto documentarian of his postage stamp of soil, Lowndes County, Mississippi, where race, class, and gender mattered greatly. Pruitt took pictures throughout northeast Mississippi, but he focused on the crossroads town of Columbus, the county seat situated along the Alabama border. Specializing in "portrait and commercial work," Pruitt's photography studio, [End Page 53] in the words of his advertising brochure, "pictured many phases of the life of Columbus and Columbians." Ranging from the mundane to the horrific, the photographs offer a record of family picnics, river baptisms, carnivals, parades, fires, tornadoes, funerals, and even two of the last public and legal executions by hanging in Mississippi, as well as the illegal lynching of the two African American farmers. By photographing the familial and the communal, the sacred and the profane, Pruitt shows us a broad range of community life filtered through his own perspective...

“Shift to right flypaper technique” a refined method for postage stamp autografting preparation

“Lack of donor skin” is a challenge condition for autografting in the treatment of extensive burns. The modified Meek technique seems to be a practical solution for this problem. However, the equipment and consumed materials for the modified Meek technique are expensive which limits routine use. Designing a less expensive, efficient and easy to apply expansion method may improve burn care quality and shorten hospital stay period. Our previous study reported the “flypaper technique” for preparation of postage stamp autografting. The time for confluence of the burned wound depends on the size of the skin islands and expansion ratio. In clinical practice, 5 mm skin squares is the preferred size of the skin islands; however, the positioning procedure can be modified to improve the wound healing process. According to the chessboard diagram, the “shift to right” positioning technique shortens the 10% biggest distance in six times expansion diagrams and 20% biggest distance in nine times expansion diagrams. By using a quick cutting plate, chessboard tray and petrolatum gauze, the skin islands can be uniformly located and correctly oriented on the gauze. This method allows a true expansion ratio up to nine times. In comparison with the modified Meek technique, this method also offers rapid wound reepithilization but with lower cost. However, the burn scar needs further rehabilitation and compression therapy to improve the functional and cosmetic result. This “shift to right flypaper technique” is worthy of consideration in dealing with extensive burns.

Integrated color, texture and shape information for content-based image retrieval

Feature extraction and the use of the features as query terms are crucial problems in content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. The main focus in this paper is on integrated color, texture and shape extraction methods for CBIR. We have developed original CBIR methodology that uses Gabor filtration for determining the number of regions of interest (ROIs), in which fast and effective feature extraction is performed. In the ROIs extracted, texture features based on thresholded Gabor features, color features based on histograms, color moments in YUV space, and shape features based on Zernike moments are then calculated. The features presented proved to be efficient in determining similarity between images. Our system was tested on postage stamp images and Corel photo libraries and can be used in CBIR applications such as postal services.

Apply directly to the forehead: Holmes, Nana, and hennapecia

Apply directly to the forehead: Holmes, Nana, and hennapecia

Clustered Stomates in Begonia: An Exercise in Data Collection & Statistical Analysis of Biological Space

An important aspect of biology is spatial distribution and patterns of distribution can be either ordered, random, or clustered. For examples, deployment of mature trees in a forest is ordered, occurrence of zebras on a savannah is clustered, and location of clams on the ocean floor is random. Deployment can be examined in two directions; first is down the scale of order to study arrangement of organisms (trees, zebras, trout) in a population, leaves on a branch, stomates on a leaf, chloroplasts in a cell, etc. The second approach to the study of deployment is to provide a quantitative measure of a pattern. One means of quantifying space is by tile dispersion index, DI, which is tile variance over the mean, ([[sigma].sup.2]/m; a value greater than 1.0 indicates an ordered arrangement, a value of about 1.0 denotes a random pattern, and a D1 noticeably' less than 1.0 comes from clustering. An interesting example of all three patterns is the occurrence of clustered stomates on leaves in some Begonia cultivars (Figure 1). In this figure stomates are found in clusters and the arrangement of these clusters is indicated by the DI which is 0.64/3.25, or 0.19, much less than 1.0. Also notice that clusters are usually separated by one cell, again, a relation that gives an ordered pattern. For the arrangement of stomates the DI is 74/13, or 5.7, much greater than 1.0 and so the pattern is one of order. Finally, the number of stomates per cluster has a D1 of 3.1/3.6 (Table 1), or 0.87 close to 1.0 for a random number of stomates per cluster. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Data collection and statistical analysis of the data is the hallmark of modern science but few teaching exercises are designed lot students to experience this approach. The difficulty with handling data is that it requires either too many organisms or the technological requirements are unrealistic. For a class to study the spatial distribution of trees, animals in a herd, or clams on the sea floor is unrealistic both with respect to travel and to have sufficient numbers to make sound conclusions. One example where many data points can be collected with minimal equipment is that of stomates (Greek for openings) on the leaves of plants. In some cultivars of Begonia, stomates occur in clusters ranging from one to as many as ten (Payne, 1970) and these can be seen by a permanent preparation of a microscope slide as a fingernail polish imprint (Sampson, 1961) as shown in Figure 1. Seen under the microscope, 100 clusters can be counted for the number of stomates per cluster in only 15 minutes and, if desired, 500 within an hour. This data set can then be analyzed statistically by, calculating the average as well as variance and then tested to see if they fit a particular expected distribution, in this case the Poisson distribution. The exercise can be done in middle school classes by students making their own slides and seeing imprints of ceils, or at the high school level through collecting data of number of stomates per cluster and graphing the results, or in a college laboratory by comparing collected data to an expected Poisson distribution and doing a [chi square] test for goodness of fit. Procedures Begonia (B. X semprflorens) plants can be purchased in the spring at a local nursery or are grown indoors year round. Some cultivars have stomatal clusters, such as Vodka, Whiskey, or Lady Carol, while others, B. X tuberhybrid, have the more typical solitary stomates, so plants have to be checked well before class. A piece of leaf about the size of a postage stamp is cut off the plant and the imprinting method of Sampson (1961) is run as follows. The lower epidermis is swabbed with clear fingernail polish, left to dry for about 15 minutes, and then peeled off with a pair of forceps. This imprint is then placed on a dean microscope slide, a coverslip is placed over it, and a small dab of the fingernail polish is placed at two diagonal corners and allowed to dry in order to hold down the coverslip. …

A switch in time

By 2020 the semiconductor industry wants a memory device that can store a trillion bits of information in an area the size of a postage stamp. As companies race towards this goal, chemists are coming up with an unusual approach. Philip Ball reports.

Minutes of the ESA Governing Board

Minutes of the ESA Governing Board

Why Elvis?

January/February 2007 Historically Speaking 17 Why Elvis? Michael T. Bertrand Elvis. A surname almost seems redundant. No one ever asks "Elvis who? or "Who's Elvis?" Many, however, have persistently asked or wondered, "Why Elvis?" Or, intoned widi a different emphasis, "Why Elvis?' On the surface, no matter what the intonation, it is a rather straightforward two-part question. The first component involves the social conditions responsible for Presley's emergence, and the second concerns the performer's historical relevance. Yet embedded within the inquiry are several issues tied to race, region, class, taste, gender, and generation that make die question a politically charged or loaded one. Responses to it reflect similar tensions. "Why Elvis?" at die top of this essay, for instance, may have elicited as much exasperation as it did delight. Several readers indeed may have turned back to the front page to make sure they had not mistakenly grabbed their NationalEnquirer , while others may have irritably shouted above the Beethoven booming from their office jam box, "Why not Chuck Berry?" Whatever the response, it is doubtful that the question provoked nothing. For, beginning widi his arrival on the national scene in the mid-1950s, Presley has maintained a constant, controversial presence in American life, a perseverance that even his dying could not defy. In 1 958, for instance, two writers who surely did not anticipate die longevity of their counsel , fittingly proclaimed that "as a subject for polemic, Elvis Presley has few peers." Their assessment was not terribly immoderate; an earlier recommendation had advocated angrily that "Elvis the Pelvis belongs in the jungle." Many definitely agreed that he simply did not belong. Widely syndicated Chicago columnist Mike Royko's disapproving epitaph upon Presley's untimely death at 42 ultimately registered a widespread contempt and loathing for the soudiern white working-class culture the singer personified: "Elvis pulled off a marvelous con. There he was, a Depression -born, unread hillbilly, a marginally-talented pop singer" who "promoted a limited talent into a vast fortune .... I think what Presley's success really proves is that the majority of Americans, while fine, decent people, have lousy taste in music."1 To many, Royko's inference that Elvis reigned as the "king of white-trash culture" merely stated the obvious. Two years following his death, one scholar noted diat to appreciate or like Presley "was suspect, a lapse of taste. It put one in beehives and leisure suits, in company with 'necrophiliacs' and odier weird sorts." By the middle of the next decade, one of the biggest selling biographies in the history of publishing (Elvisby Albert Goldman) portrayed the ex-truck driver as a "redneck with savage appetites and [a] perverted mentality and of no musical significance to American culture." And as the 1 980s gave way to the 1990s, the media transformed the former poster child Elvis Presley performing with Bill Black, January 1, 1955.© Sunset Boulevard/Corbis. for adolescent rebellion into a national joke, a cultureless icon whose cultural consequence had been reduced to an ironically flawed (not to mention tacky) exhibition pitting a "skinny Elvis" (likeness from the 1950s weighing approximately 175 pounds) against a "fat Elvis" (an image from a 1973 Hawaii satellite program in which a slimmed-down Presley tipped the scales at about 1 65—Elvis had apparendy just gone on a "crash" diet) for the honor of gracing a decidedly non-iconoclastic commemorative postage stamp. Once likened to a "jug of corn liquor at a champagne party," the hip-swiveling "Hillbilly Cat"-turned-Bmovie star-turned-Las Vegas spectacle clearly never obtained the credentials necessary to attain legitimacy and rise above caricature. As Jon Wiener has noted: "To die mainstream, the culture Elvis came out of was dumb and degraded, and Elvis was a stupid hillbilly , a redneck who came from white trash." Indeed, according to Simon Frith, Presley "was not just working class but, worse, southern working class, [the object of] a class contempt which, among other things, assumed that someone like Elvis was incapable of artistry."2 Historians have frequently assumed that "someone like Elvis" also proved incapable of achieving historical significance. After all, he was, as William Leuchtenburg once pronounced...

Microarrays

Microarrays are revolutionizing genetics by making it possible to genotype hundreds of thousands of DNA markers and to assess the expression (RNA transcripts) of all of the genes in the genome. Microarrays are slides the size of a postage stamp that contain millions of DNA sequences to which single-stranded DNA or RNA can hybridize. This miniaturization requires little DNA or RNA and makes the method fast and inexpensive; multiple assays of each target make the method highly accurate. DNA microarrays with hundreds of thousands of DNA markers have made it possible to conduct systematic scans of the entire genome to identify genetic associations with complex disorders or dimensions likely to be influenced by many genes of small effect size. RNA microarrays can provide snapshots of gene expression across all of the genes in the genome at any time in any tissue, which has far-reaching applications such as structural and functional ‘genetic neuroimaging’ and providing a biological basis for understanding environmental influence.

An incentive mechanism for electricity transmission expansion in Mexico

This study proposes an incentive regulatory framework for expanding electricity transmission in Mexico. A two-part pricing model is implemented within a combined merchant-regulatory structure. Three cases are considered. In the first, a monopolist with “postage stamp tariffs” serves the whole country using uniform prices. In the second case, one firm holds a regional monopoly in each of the five electricity areas. In the third, a monopolist operates in all areas of the national electricity system and discriminates in the prices it charges in each of the regions. This approach is described and then applied to the Mexican electricity transmission network. Using real data, the study compares all three cases in terms of profits, capacity increases, and network expansion. The results are found to depend on two effects: the “economies-of-scale effect”, in which the maximum level is reached with a single network; and the “discriminatory effect” that results when a firm can discriminate among types of consumers. The economies-of-scale effect produces greater capacity and network expansion, whereas the discriminatory effect increases profits.

Multi-layer in-situ for evaluation of dynamic mechanical properties of pressure sensitive adhesives

A multi-layer, lap-shear geometry has been developed as a reliable testing method for evaluation of the dynamic mechanical properties of polyacrylic pressure-sensitive adhesives (PSA) for postage stamp applications. In-situ tests of four different PSA samples constructed by laminating, water-based polyacrylic PSAs to the face paper used for stamps were carried out with a dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA) over a temperature range from −50 to 60 °C at frequencies of 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 Hz. This geometry utilizes the tension mode on the DMA, but the results were converted to shear properties of the PSA layers in the laminate. The effect of the specimen thickness (2–10 layers) on the dynamic mechanical properties was studied and the results suggest that a multi-layer geometry with 5–10 layers can be an appropriate structure to produce enhanced responses. Therefore, a geometry with 8-layer laminates was used for frequency sweep/isothermal temperature and for frequency sweep/temperature step tests. The results showed three relaxation responses: glassy, transition, and flow regions with respect to the frequency and temperature. The tensile properties of the face papers were also tested under the same conditions as those of the multi-layer geometry. Significant differences were found between the shear behaviors of the multi-layer geometry and the tensile behaviors of the face paper alone. This suggests that the tensile deformation of the face paper in the multi-layer geometry can be ignored as it did not contribute to the shear behaviors of the PSA layers. Master curves were produced by time–temperature superposition with a reference temperature of 23 °C. They can be used to predict the long- and short-term performance of these samples.

A new transmission pricing approach for the electricity cross‐border trade in the ASEAN Power Grid

AbstractThe electricity cross‐border trade is presently introduced among the member countries of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). The ASEAN Power Grid (APG) is a plan to interconnect transmission networks among the ASEAN countries to optimize the use of energy resources; to operate the power network in an efficient, economical, and reliable manner; and to provide a close relation among the member countries by electric power interconnection. Transmission pricing is one of the controversial tasks to achieve the APG objectives. In this paper, a transmission pricing method for the electricity cross‐border trade based on a combination of postage stamp method and sensitivity indices is proposed. The postage stamp pricing is a uniform tariff expected to recover the project investments, and the operation and maintenance costs. With the combination of the postage stamp method and sensitivity indices, the proposed pricing method sends proper incentive signals to power traders, which are based on system usage and congestion management. To demonstrate its effectiveness, the proposed method is applied to a 12‐bus test system. The nodal tariffs at the particular injecting points, payments of the users, and revenues of transmission owners are computed. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method ensures a recovery of the investment costs and the concurrent costs of operation and maintenance in an efficient, fair, and simple manner. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Optimization Approach to Real Power Tracing: An Application to Transmission Fixed Cost Allocation

Megawatt (MW) power flow tracing can assess the extent of network usage by the participants that can be effectively used for multiple objectives like transmission pricing, loss allocation, etc. MW power tracing, a post-facto analysis of power flow solution, is amenable to multiple solutions. This implies multiplicity of solution space of transmission cost and loss allocation problems. The conventional tracing methods enforce a "proportionate sharing rule" to calculate the shares. These shares are sensitive to quantity and distance as against the postage stamp method, which is immune to distance. Any of these methods will result in penalizing a set of constituents, which raises a fairness issue. This is evident from the experiences of developing countries like India. In this paper, a new paradigm is suggested that attempts to capture the best of the two methodologies by exploring multiplicity of the solution space of the tracing problem, within the given constraints. We show that the tracing problem can be formulated as a linear constrained optimization problem. We propose a tracing compliant modified postage stamp allocation method that computes a traceable solution that minimizes overall deviation from the postage stamp allocation. Results on actual data of central transmission utility of Western Regional Grid of India demonstrate the claims

Enclosing a pen with a postal questionnaire can significantly increase the response rate

Background and Objectives It is important to maximize response rates to postal questionnaires. We compared the impact of three low-cost interventions on response rates. Methods A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial trial was conducted, nested within TOMBOLA (Trial Of Management of Borderline and Other Low-grade Abnormal smears). Three interventions were evaluated: (1) enclosing a TOMBOLA-branded pen with the questionnaire (as opposed to no pen); (2) sending the questionnaires by first class post (as opposed to second class); and (3) enclosing a preaddressed return envelope on which there was a second class postage stamp (rather than a freepost business-reply envelope). Nine hundred thirty women, aged 20–59 years, due to receive a TOMBOLA psychosocial questionnaire by post during June–August 2003 were randomized. Results Enclosing a pen resulted in a statistically significant 7.0% increase in the cumulative proportion of questionnaires returned (from 61.5 to 68.5%; P = .002). The adjusted odds of response was significantly raised (odds ratio [OR] = 1.38, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.04–1.82). Neither first class post nor providing a stamped envelope had a significant impact on response. There were no interactions between the interventions. Conclusions Enclosing a pen with a questionnaire can significantly increase response. This low-cost strategy was effective against a background of “good practice” with regard to the administration of postal questionnaires.