Researchers at M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab have asked volunteers in New York and Seattle to affix electronic tracking tags to their trash this summer so that they can track, in real-time, where each piece travels.
You can learn a lot about the world just by asking questions of people that normally don’t get asked. That’s why we do a Q&A series here, and why you may like David Lynch‘s Interview Project; Alex Chadwick‘s Interviews: 50 Cents; and Our Time, a revealing documentary on American youth directed by Matt Heineman and Matt Wiggins, and co-screenwritten by Freakonomics research assistant Ryan Hagen.
Camp Quest is like a regular summer camp — campers canoe and swim — except that one of the main activities is trying to prove unicorns do not exist in order to win a ?10 note signed by Richard Dawkins.
Rather than create a “global village,” the Internet may have actually “shrunk people’s horizons,” reports an Economist article about a new study by Hebrew University researchers Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy. They used a common Freakonomics topic — baby names — to study how far ideas have spread since the advent of the Internet.
On his website Fancy Fast Food, designer and writer Erik Trinidad revamps fast-food meals to look like plates you’d see at a five-star restaurant.
His tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look.”
We’ve blogged before about the efforts of the international aid community to increase fertilizer use among small farmers in Africa. Many economists, however, believe that the subsidies often used to deliver the input are “distortionary, regressive, environmentally unsound, and … result in politicized, inefficient distribution of fertilizer supply.” A new working paper by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson examines the fertilizer-buying patterns of farmers in Western Kenya.
A family in Saudi Arabia is suing a genie for theft and harassment. The family accuses the genie of “leaving them threatening voicemails, stealing their cell phones, and hurling rocks at them when they leave the house.”
Virginia Postrel examines the kidney donation system in the United States, where 11 people die every day waiting for a kidney transplant. Exchanging organs for payment is illegal in the U.S. although recent developments in organ exchanges, including donation chains, have been successful. These innovations alone, however, won’t solve the problem, and Postrel advocates a new system that includes both financial incentives and measures to protect donors.
An unidentified computer glitch has led Visa to overcharge several of its cardholders for routine purchases at drug stores, gas stations, and restaurants, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 each. These charges, as far as we can tell, exceed the sum total of wealth accumulated in human history.
The city of Vancouver has turned one lane of traffic on the busy Burrard Bridge into a bicycle route. Critics predicted chaos, but the first day of the experiment found traffic moving smoothly. This seems to be in line with recent studies suggesting that road closures actually lead to fewer traffic jams. [%comments]
After bad weather foiled several launch attempts, the Space Shuttle Endeavor finally took off last night from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida’s Cape Canaveral. With stormy weather so typical there, why does NASA continue to use it as a launch site?
Just because a technology has been superseded doesn’t make it completely irrelevant.
North Korea has come out with its first beer commercial for Taedong River Beer, “the pride of Pyongyang,” which shows both Western businessmen and a sweaty worker in uniform enjoying a cold one.
Should Parents Who Offend Receive Sentencing Discounts?
A Guest Post
By Jennifer Collins, Ethan J. Leib, and Dan Markel
Many states expressly tell judges to calibrate a sentence based, in part, on one’s family ties and responsibilities in sentencing offenders.
Raise your hand if you have a drawer filled with old cell phones just waiting to be responsibly recycled. Keep your hand up if most of those phones have been in the drawer for over a year. Of the 160 million cell phones discarded annually, 75 percent of them end up in drawers or trash cans. A new company, Cycled Cells, takes in old cell phones, sometimes paying for them, and either recycles the phones or, if they can be rehabilitated, distributes them to phone-needy people around the world. They even pay for postage.
Mason d’Envie, a brothel in Berlin, offers discounts to customers who arrive by bike or public transportation.
I love to collect examples of bizarre pairs of goods that sellers or buyers apparently believe are complements or substitutes.
Coal and nuclear power provide the vast majority of our electricity. Coal brings environmental and health hazards with it every step of the way, from mine to smoke stack. Nuclear energy, with all of its benefits, comes with its own risks (as ill-perceived as they may be). So which is the least bad solution? Seed magazine asked a panel of experts and came up with this interesting quorum.
What’s the best way to pay teachers based on performance? One Planet Money listener suggests tying teacher pay to their students’ future earnings, turning the students into “investments.” The scheme is reminiscent of Monetizing Emma, a play that recently ran in New York, about a future when Wall Street traders invest in smart schoolkids in return for a substantial share of their future earnings.
Following up on our earlier introductory post about our book on criminal justice and the family, we thought we’d start here with an examination of the same topic that initially sparked our interest in the intersection of criminal justice and the family — namely, how the law treats persons who refuse to cooperate (or actively interfere) with law enforcement on account of trying to protect a family member.
The 21st century could represent the end of war as we know it, writes political scientist John Mueller in a new paper for Political Science Quarterly. He notes that there have been no wars between developed nations since 1945, and that other international wars that fit the classic definition — the violent resolution of a dispute between two or more . . .
I’ve been struck recently that as I talk to most economists, they think that the case for a further fiscal stimulus is pretty solid. At least that’s what I hear in the hallways and seminar rooms. But that’s not what I hear in the media; for some reason the most outspoken economists are the anti-stimulus folks. And so I did a short piece for Public Radio’s Marketplace yesterday on the need for more fiscal stimulus.
I thought it worth taking a closer look at the main arguments against the stimulus:
Naked self-promotion: the third edition of my book, Economics Is Everywhere (Worth Publishers), has just appeared. It contains little articles like those I have included on this blog (and, no doubt, some of the posts from this blog will be included in the fourth edition). I love many of the stories, but my all-time favorite from among the 700 that have been in the book’s various editions combines several basic economic ideas:
Conor Clarke suggests removing polls from the American political process. Not only are poll results frequently wrong, he argues, but polling “uncomfortably expands the domain of democracy.”
In an article headlined “The Man Who Crashed the World” Michael Lewis profiles Joe Cassano, the former head of A.I.G.’s Financial Products unit. Lewis interviewed employees at the beleaguered F.P. unit and writes that most believed that “if it hadn’t been for A.I.G. F.P. the subprime-mortgage machine might never have been built, and the financial crisis might never have happened.”
We previously featured some compelling guest posts by the legal scholar Ethan Leib on the subject of friendship and the law. Now he is back, along with his two co-authors on a new book called Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties. This is their first of three posts.
… for a Sanka ashtray if Luc Sante made up a story about it? Apparently at least a few people would, as Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker found when they launched a project called Significant Objects, where they paired up creative writers with objects bought at garage sales and asked them to make up a story about the objects. Each object is for sale on eBay, where anyone can bid for it.
How can Swoopo, the online auction site, rake in $2,151 selling a laptop for $35.86? Easy: set an opening price of $0.01 (almost free!), then let each new bidder top the last by only a penny, and extend the auction each time someone places a bid in the final seconds. Oh, and collect $0.60 from each player for each bid they place. The winner of the auction might walk away with a good deal, but the losers will have racked up big fees chasing their sunk costs.
Concerned citizens can now track government spending at USASpending.gov. Users can view current and historical spending on contracts, grants, and loans, broken down by characteristics like congressional district and contractor. The website, mandated by the Federal Funding and Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, is a revamped version of fedspending.org. Warning: if you’re a pacifist, steer clear, or at least keep your blood-pressure pills at hand.
Slate columnist Daniel Gross thinks he’s found the female embodiment of Paul Krugman in Japanese economist Noriko Hama.
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