No, this trick won’t work in the NFL, but Driscoll Middle School in Corpus Christi, Tex., pulled it off brilliantly.
The piracy problem off the Horn of Africa has received less media attention in recent months, but the pirates are still going strong, and international efforts to combat the threat have increased. FP’s new photoessay, “Pirate Hunting in the Gulf of Aden,” depicts the battle.
Have you ever wondered just who writes those papers handed in by cheating students? An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, written by a writer for a “custom-essay company,” has some answers for you.
Celebrity endorsements are all well and good … until the celebrity starts misbehaving. That’s where the insurance companies come in.
It’s been widely reported that London cab drivers have “enlarged hippocampi” thanks to their years spent memorizing London’s streets (a.k.a., acquiring “the Knowledge.” But do their skills generalize?
Britain will soon begin “measuring people’s psychological and environmental well-being” — i.e., their happiness.
Shankar Vedantam of Slate hypothesizes that people continue to procreate, despite overwhelming evidence that parenting isn’t very fun, for much the same reason that cocaine users can’t quit: they’re addicts.
If you’re looking for a hot stock tip, consider Twitter. A new paper by Timm O. Sprenger and Isabell M. Welpe looks at the effects of microblogging on stock prices.
Delhi’s Blueline buses are notoriously deadly, perhaps due to a perverse incentive system that rewarded drivers for speedy progress and discouraged investments in the vehicles.
Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Last time, they wrote about the roles of “tweakers” and “pioneers” in the innovation world; today, they expand on the topic.
The Big Think profiles Paul Zak, a neuroeconomist and Freakonomics guest blogger whose research has focused primarily on oxytocin, a chemical that’s “critical to creating and sustaining trust among people.” Zak has even explored the relationship between trust and national prosperity.
Are McDonald’s* hamburgers immune to natural processes like rotting? There’s some evidence that they are, but a truly scientific inquiry into the matter has been lacking – until now.
In the wake of any financial crisis, a few people are always trotted forth (sometimes they do the trotting themselves) as having seen the particulars of the crisis in advance — but who, despite all their hand-waving and teeth-gnashing, were roundly ignored. In the Wall Street Journal, Jason Zweig profiles Melchior Palyi, an economist who seemingly predicted many of today’s big economic problems. But here’s the twist: he did it some 70 years ago.
The world is full of efforts and estimates toward reducing carbon emissions. A new paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer argues that the best bang for the climate change buck may lie in family planning and girls’ education: $1 million spent could save 250,000 tons of CO2.
The Center for Global Development has just released its 2010 Commitment to Development Index: “Rich and poor nations are linked in many ways-by foreign aid, commerce, the environment, and more. Each year, the CDI rates rich-country governments on how much they are helping poor countries via seven key linkages: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.”
A few years back, a Freakonomics reader named Stephanie Downs wrote in with an idea: bribing people (with cash, gift certificates etc.) to spay or neuter their pets. “I found your story about the [Israeli] daycares very interesting,” she wrote. “I want to do the research upfront on what will motivate people instead of spending years finding the right formula.”
Previous research indicates that the more years of education a person has, the more he thinks like an economist. A new paper (summarized by the BPS Research Digest) by Bryan Caplan and Stephen C. Miller, however, attempts to separate the role of intelligence and education in “thinking like an economist.”
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has “passed an ordinance that will require meals to meet certain nutritional guidelines if restaurants wish to include a toy with the food purchase.”
Kal Raustiala, a professor at UCLA Law School and the UCLA International Institute, and Chris Sprigman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School, are experts in counterfeiting and intellectual property. They have been guest-blogging for us about copyright issues. Today, they write about the roles of “tweakers” and “pioneers” in the innovation world.
Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor have already argued that a bad economy equals deadlier terrorists. Now, the three economists have turned their attention to the effects of house demolitions on terrorism.
If you think your multitasking skills are improving your productivity, think again. Consistent with other multitasking research, a new working paper (ungated version) by Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico analyzes a sample of Italian judges with different caseloads and finds that “task juggling, i.e., the spreading of effort across too many active projects, decreases the performance of workers, raising the chances of low throughput, long duration of projects and exploding backlogs.”
One Dunkin’ Donuts store is taking a stand against the penny.
Among its many perks, there’s now evidence that E-ZPass may help save babies.
Humans are social creatures, or so the psychologists tell us. But when does that social behavior start? Is it biological or cultural?
Economists Mark J. Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller propose a new tool for government financing: “trills” — i.e., shares in U.S. GDP.
A funny thing happened in Israel last week. The winning state lottery numbers were the same as the numbers drawn three weeks earlier.
Barack Obama may be under fire for failing to jump-start the economy, but a feature in the Harvard Business Review points out that Michelle Obama is doing her part to rejuvenate the fashion industry – at least the part of the fashion industry she likes.
In Washington State, high-income residents and corporations are coming together to battle I-1098, a ballot initiative that would levy a 5 percent tax on “income above $400,000 per couple and a 9% levy on income above $1 million per couple.”
Dan Froomkin of the Nieman Watchdog Project interviews William K. Black about the media’s underreporting of fraud cases.
This just in from the Vatican’s daily broadsheet: “Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J. Simpson is a Catholic.”
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