The Chronicle of Higher Education raises an interesting question: should professors be tweeting with their students? Or is it a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction?
The confusing spectacle of Judge Posner blogging about macro continues. His latest missive appears particularly misguided.
A new study by Angus Deaton uses an expansive dataset to analyze the determinants and benefits of religiosity around the world.
Just in case you weren’t sitting inside on this beautiful late-summer morning watching television over your breakfast bagel, you can see today’s Good Morning America segment on the Freakonomics paperback, here.
Jonathan Mann, the resident Freakonomics songwriter, is currently a finalist in mobile query service ChaCha’s music video contest.
Dallas’s police department changed the way it lines up its suspects for identification. Instead of the common “six pack” method where the victim looks at six photos at once, detectives (blind to who the suspect is) started showing the photos one at a time.
A reader named Christopher Rumney writes in with an interesting idea for how to discourage illicit performance-enhancing drugs in pro sports. Perhaps something like this has already been proposed, but I’ve not heard of it, and it’s certainly an interesting idea — although any players’ union in its right mind would likely rather blow itself up than submit.
We wanted to let you know that Dubner is scheduled to appear on Good Morning America this Thursday, Aug. 27.
Brian Wansink and Collin Payne recently examined the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and eating behaviors at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.
The average horsepower of a new American car has more than doubled since 1980. You probably haven’t noticed, and most of this additional horsepower goes to waste.
A strange story has broken out in Sweden and Israel, with an article in Aftonbladet, a Swedish newspaper, by a journalist named Donald Bostrom.
According to The Times, Bostrom’s article “accuses the Israeli Army of harvesting organs from Palestinians wounded or killed by soldiers.”
Italian banks may soon accept fine wines and dry-cured hams as collateral on loans.
Megwalu emphasizes the importance of resolution on the ground, saying, “people may appreciate the arrest of persons like Thomas Lubunga of the DRC (currently held by the ICC), but if his arrest does nothing to rebuild trust in affected communities, and/or does nothing for the lady who lost a son to his brutal tactics but never gets to hear/see him account for his crimes, then little has been gained on the ground.”
Brazil, a longtime leader in developing alternative energy for its transportation sector and its electricity, has recently discovered a truly gigantic supply of oil under its ocean waters.
This is in spite of the fact that there have surely been technological advances in tracks and shoes, as well as expanding knowledge of weight training and fitness. The world’s population has increased substantially, as have nutrition levels, especially in developing countries.
The biggest puzzle to me is not how remarkable Usain Bolt is, but rather why it’s been so hard to get people to sprint faster.
According to the FBI’s recently released second quarter Bank Crime statistics, bank robbers are most likely to rob a bank between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Friday; more robbers stated their demands verbally than by passing a note, and only 4 percent of incidents involved violence. The FBI also noted that, despite the recession, there were fewer bank robberies than last year.
Over at The Atlantic, Richard Posner writes:
I am concerned with the fact that academic economists, when they become either public officials or public intellectuals (like Krugman), leave behind their academic scruples.
In a later paragraph, he expands on his theme, turning to:
Fight spam by donating to your favorite charity. That’s how researchers at Yahoo are hoping to convince people to put a virtual one-cent stamp on their outgoing e-mails. Sending a penny-stamped e-mail through Yahoo’s (not yet released) CentMail program would automatically mark it as “real mail” and get it past any spam filters.
Foreign Policy come up with a list of “The World’s Worst Healthcare Reforms.” Keeping company with Russia, China, and Turkmenistan is the good old U.S. of A.
While a zombie attack is one of the least likely ways the world could end, four Canadian mathematicians did a mathematical analysis of a hypothetical zombie outbreak to determine the likelihood of human eradication, should such an attack ever occur.
If you live in Brooklyn and you’re sick of looking at George Washington’s face every time you buy coffee, things may be looking up.
Slums are larger and more dense than two centuries ago — and they’re creating “causal chains that weren’t there before,” says urban historian Mike Davis.
Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty offers some hypotheses as to why Chinese restaurants have “secret menus” that only Chinese people seem to know about.
We’ve discussed before what suburbia might look like in the future. Dwell and Inhabitat.com asked designers, planners, and engineers to submit their ideas for a suburban re-do (ReBurbia), and invited readers to vote on the top 20 finalists.
We posted earlier about how a blogger named Dave Prager tried to figure out why the buses in Delhi kill so many people. Now he’s back to explain how Delhi’s upscale alcohol ads create demand for his empty liquor bottles, and give his maid a nice side income.
Slate’s interactive End of America site presents 144 possible ways the U.S. could meet its demise and lets you choose your favorites. We’ve covered quite a few of them on this blog
Crematoriums in Denmark want to recycle their “waste heat” by distributing it into local heating systems. The Danish Council of Ethics didn’t have a problem with the idea, as the Economist reports, but it did advise that “burning granny especially to warm radiators would be indecent and illegal.”
Inspired by Bernie Madoff’s 150-year prison sentence, New York state assemblyman Jim Tedesco introduced a bill that, as the Economist reports, would establish a “pay-if-you-go” model for prisons, whereby wealthy inmates pay for their own incarceration costs, thereby easing the burden on taxpayers.
… would probably be dotted with parking lots the size of Greenwich Village in order to accommodate all the daily commuters driving into the city on the equivalent of 84 Queens Midtown Tunnels, predicts Michael Frumin at the Frumination blog.
So does this make you want to go locavore, since so much fuel was likely used in transporting them around the globe, and maybe they’re not the freshest almonds?
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
