A new study by a research team from Tokyo’s Keio University found that pigeons can distinguish between paintings the researchers consider good and bad.
Americans responded to the economic crisis and rising oil prices in 2008 by driving less and purchasing fuel-efficient cars. Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle have looked at the effect of these trends on carbon dioxide emissions between October 2007 and April 2009.
After viewing this data candy from baekdal.com, the BBC’s Michael Blastland wonders: is there a point at which sexy design overwhelms the usefulness of the data?
As the recession lingers and swine flu spreads, it appears that the antiviral drug Tamiflu has now surpassed Viagra as the most commonly spammed drug on the internet.
The Unthinkable author Amanda Ripley points to an interesting story about child safety in air travel. In the 1990’s, a call went out for the F.A.A. to stop letting air-traveling parents carry young children in their laps, making them buy a ticket for their children instead, so that every person could wear a seatbelt. The F.A.A. refused, saying that the cost of an extra ticket could force parents to travel by car instead.
The Obamas have a Flickr account. Its photos are labeled “United States Government Work” — definitely not Creative Commons material — and most of them look like standard PR material.
In the face of a difficult credit squeeze, more and more borrowers are turning to peer-to-peer lending networks, which directly connect lenders and borrowers. These networks have recently financed nearly half a billion dollars in lending. Ray Fisman examines these new networks and discusses the conflicting economic research on them. While economists have found some evidence of “human frailty and bias” in lending decisions, one recent study of a specific network concluded that the, “…credit market operates quite efficiently and without a bank pocketing a slice of the proceeds.”
Nepal’s prime minister was upset that officials at the country’s main airport had gained a reputation for bribe-taking. So the government is trying to put an end to corruption by putting an end to pockets, issuing pocket-less trousers to all its airport staff.
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
this year, Darwin’s 200th anniversary, Americans favor intelligent design over Darwinian theory. According to the poll, 33 percent of respondents said they agreed with Darwinism, but 52 percent agreed that “the development of life was guided by intelligent design.” On the other hand, the poll was commissioned by The Discovery Institute, which advocates intelligent design.
Not long ago, cycling enthusiasts took fixed-gear racing bikes out of velodromes and onto the streets, where they were a hit among bike messengers and hardcore urban cyclists. The appeal had to do with the stripped-down simplicity of the bikes.
Gary Stix looks at recent developments in the science of human decision-making and economic bubbles. Stix examines the growing influence of behavioral economists, the neuroscience behind various economic phenomena, and the research of George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (), and Andrew Lo.
It takes a lot of people to manufacture even the simplest products, so making a household appliance on your own shouldn’t be expected to be easy. It may even be impossible. That’s what the artist Thomas Thwaites is finding as he tries to make a toaster from scratch, traveling around the world to collect raw materials and refining his own petroleum for plastic moldings.
The Tri-State Transportation Campaign makes a case for improving the Hudson River bus crossings connecting New Jersey and Manhattan using a combination of animation and statistics, such as
You can read Malcolm Gladwell’s review Chris Anderson’s Free: the Future of a Radical Price online for free–except of course for the price you paid for your computer, mobile device, electricity and internet connection. This hitch is just one problem Gladwell has with Anderson’s idea…
Readers of this blog know that we like baseball and explanatory graphics, so we were excited to hear about Craig Robinson‘s site, Flip Flop Fly Ball. Robinson presents a series of informational baseball graphics.
Some say that a major cause of the U.S. housing bubble was a surge in savings overseas, particularly in China, where the personal savings rate soared to 30 percent of disposable income. (In the U.S., meanwhile, we were saving next to nothing). Just why the Chinese were saving so much has been a puzzle to many economists. Now Shang-Jin Wei and Xiaobo Zhang think they’ve come up with an explanation.
USA Today had a poll asking people, “Would you fly on airlines that charge for access to the restroom?” Most respondents said no, but I bet that people wouldn’t let this bother them, they wouldn’t alter their flight plans, and they would pay for use of the toilet.
Pricing the bathroom would reduce the quantity demanded; some people would wait and race off the plane to the airport bathrooms (unless airports started charging also). But I would think that the demand for using a plane’s bathrooms is fairly inelastic, so that — except on short flights — behavior wouldn’t change very much.
I took the family to last night’s Yankees-Mets game at the new Citi Field. We had a great time despite the very late hour. (More on that later.) This was the final game of the season between the crosstown rivals. Interleague play means that lots of away-team fans are present in home-team stadiums, and that was very much the case last night — a scenario that produced at least one interesting result that would disappoint anyone who thinks that game theory always prevails.
Incentives, or nudges, to get people to do things — like donate organs, lose weight, and pick up dog feces — are everywhere; some work better than others. Here are a few that various Flickr users have come across:
In a new Foreign Policy article, Christian Caryl describes how the events of 1979 defined the world we live in today. In 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran, Margaret Thatcher led the conservative movement to power in Britain, Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to Poland, and Deng Xiaoping began laying the groundwork for China’s market economy.
Worried that peak oil is about to put a sudden end to cheap kiwis and civilization as we know it? Kathy McMahon is a clinical psychiatrist who wants to help. She runs a website for people with peak-oil panic, which pledges to help you separate “what’s ‘mental preparation’ from what’s just ‘acting mental.'”
A new blog, News from 1930, summarizes the news that appeared in The Wall Street Journal each day in 1930. For example, on Wednesday, June 25, 1930 a broker said, “When this economic and market readjustment has been completed, it will merely be represented by a small curve downward in our steadily mounting curve of prosperity, consumption, production, and efficiency … ”
The latest Economist has an article about an Italian firm whose workers negotiated a deal during the recession for time off with no pay cut in exchange for promises to work overtime without extra pay when the firm’s demand recovers.
Jake Whitney of Guernica interviews Michela Wrong, whose new book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower, tells the story of John Githongo‘s anti-corruption crusade in Kenya.
A while back we wrote about Adeona, a free tracking program that could help police locate and recover a stolen laptop. As a bonus, we figured, thieves might be less inclined to steal any laptop, since every laptop they stole could potentially lead police to their doors. Enter Find My iPhone, a new service by Apple that does the same thing for your iPhone. After losing his phone in Chicago, one man recently tracked his phone down personally and confronted the thief, who, shocked at having been found, handed it back with a handshake.
When Google opened a major routing center in Lenoir, N.C., some community members complained that the town gave Google to much in the way of incentives — such as sales-tax-free electrical power. Now Google seems to be giving back: the company is hooking up downtown Lenoir with free wireless Internet for the next three years.
… and five minutes later, is sent home. You get the sense that maybe his feelings are a little hurt: the only thing the lawyers knew about him was his being a Harvard economics professor. What’s wrong with that?
Freakonomics readers know that a baby’s name reveals more about its parents than about the baby. That’s also true of naval ships. The Christian Science Monitor reports that China’s online community has taken a strong interest in naming that country’s first aircraft carrier — if it ever gets built. The most favored name? Mao Zedong. China’s state newspaper approved, with one caveat: if an aircraft carrier named after Mao is damaged in battle, “it might hurt ordinary people’s feelings.”
When we last talked about abolishing paper currency, we joked about it happening in 2012. In Japan, where the future comes early, they’re considering banning cash now, as a way to stave off deflation.
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