As Levitt once noted, getting a paper published in an academic journal is an often comically belabored process, and of course it’s even worse when the paper is rejected.
The cover for our new book, SuperFreakonomics has just been revealed. Come take a look!
For years, as its stores spread like kudzu across the country, Starbucks was accused of driving neighborhood coffee shops out of business. In most cases, it seems to have done exactly the opposite. In recent times, the Seattle-based company is in retreat, having closed hundreds of stores and laying off thousands of employees. But now it’s making a crafty move on its community competitors.
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve
According to the Brazilian environmental organization SOS Mata Atlantica, a household that flushes its toilet one less time per day saves more than 1,100 gallons of water per year. So the organization has launched a TV ad campaign encouraging Brazilians to avoid a flush by peeing in the shower.
The Economist reports that pork prices have plunged 24 percent in the past year, partly because the demand for U.S. pork exports has dropped sharply. I don’t eat pork, so how does this help me?
Two physicists and a computer scientist used Google maps to study traffic in Boston, London, and New York, and found that when people use real-time driving maps to try to pick the fastest routes, traffic slows down.
Barry Bonds, Todd Helton, and Mickey Mantle are the top three batters in baseball history … well, according to a new study that used network science to rank players by analyzing the outcome of every at-bat from 1954 to 2008.
Detroit is practically a giant food desert, with no produce-carrying grocery chains left and its citizens resorting to local raccoon and pheasant meat. According to Mark Dowie in Guernica, that makes Detroit a prime candidate for the world’s first “100 percent food-self-sufficient city.”
Two French firefighters admitted to starting brush fires on the island of Corsica on July 8 and July 14. Their motivation: overtime bonus pay of 19 euros for nighttime work (July 8) and 38 euros on July 14, for Bastille Day.
Anne Wojcicki, a biotech analyst and biologist, is co-founder of the “personal genetics” company 23andMe — which, for $1,000, will take a bit of your spit and map out your DNA to learn genealogical details as well as your risk factors for certain diseases. Clients can also join the company’s gene-themed social networks and share their genetic info with others. Sort of like Facebook for your innards.
Five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell pronounced ketchup ripe for the kind of diversity revolution that had already shattered the staid monotony of the spaghetti sauce and mustard markets. Now The Smart Set wonders why we’re still waiting for ketchup to storm the barricades.
Ubiquitous in classrooms, PowerPoint makes lecturing easy, boring, and forgettable, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. That’s exactly why lazy students like it: if their teacher isn’t truly engaging with the material, they don’t have to either. The PowerPoint crutch isn’t just an academic problem: it’s wrecking the Pentagon’s decision-making, too.
For the past year, all government employees in Utah have had a four-day workweek. The results of the trial run are in, and they look good: the state says it saved $1.8 million in electrical bills, eliminating 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, while 82 percent of workers say they like the new scheme.
Most lotteries are a sucker’s game. But a group of credit unions in Michigan has come up with a lottery that everyone wins. The idea is that each time a customer makes a savings deposit of $25 or more, he or she is entered into a raffle to win $400, plus a chance to win the $100,000 annual jackpot.
During a visit last year to the London School of Economics, the Queen of England asked why economists failed to predict the credit crunch.
The product recalls of 2007 covered 276 toys and focused primarily on toys manufactured in China, including Thomas the Tank Engine. A working paper by Seth Freedman, Melissa Kearney, and Mara Lederman examines the effects of those recalls.
Japan’s Keihin Express Railway Co. has set up “smile scanners” at 15 of its stations, where railway employees have their smiles assessed by software in the hopes of perfecting a customer-friendly look.
On his blog about living in Delhi, Dave Prager tries to figure out why 100-plus citizens are killed by that city’s blue buses each year:
While we’ve been hard at work answering your flying questions, Slate has taken a look at the history of airport design
You responded with vigor when we asked for your favorite weird promotional pairings. Our favorites are the edible/inedible pairings.
If you couldn’t see the eclipse firsthand, you can see a collection of photos from Flickr users in India and China, posted on Flickr’s Group Pool. Here are some of our favorites:
Tokyo’s police force has developed a new method of fighting crime in the city’s Kitashikahama Park, popular with teenagers late at night. A machine emits a high-pitched frequency, which most adults can’t hear, from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night.
Do you have trouble making sense of U.S./Iranian relations? Clearly, you haven’t been following the byzantine freestyle campaign between the rap world’s hegemon, Jay-Z, and rising power The Game. Word-slinging MC’s are a great model for nations locked in high-stakes diplomacy, as explained by George Washington University professor Mark Lynch.
The State Department revised the transcripts of the Nixon White House tape recordings when it found that parts of the transcriptions didn’t match the original recordings. One example, according to a Secrecy News article:
If it’s not caffeine or alcohol, it’s Xanax or marijuana or morphine or cocaine or crack. There’s a apparently universal human drive to alter our consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree, whether it’s legal or not. How we go about doing that is the subject of Ryan Grim‘s new book This Is Your Country on Drugs, reviewed here.
A new N.B.E.R. working paper finds a link between health insurance and obesity, and suggests that the better insured you are, the fatter you’re likely to be. We already knew that people with health insurance consume more healthcare resources than the uninsured; it appears they’re consuming more calories, too.
Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver challenged bloggers to stand behind their beliefs on climate change by wagering money and risk shaming by Silver if they back out. No takers.
A new study finds that monkeys can distinguish between “right” and “wrong” grammatical patterns.
When the crime statistics for 2006 were released, the news media had no trouble declaring that the next big crime wave had hit (even though violent crime had just ticked up 2 percent; property crime fell by the same amount). So what’s happened since?
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