Zimbabwe’s currency has been essentially worthless in-country for months. Now the Zimbabwe dollar is officially worth more on eBay, where collectors can snap up a few trillion-dollar notes for less than $25. Technically, a currency exchange would give you 37 million Zimbabwe dollars for every U.S. dollar, but since Zimbabwe’s government recently suspended its currency altogether, you probably shouldn’t bother. . . .
Levitt‘s cheap wine advocacy may have met its match. To protest the falling price of wine, a French group calling itself the Regional Union for Viticultural Action has attacked French supermarkets in the past. Now it has adopted a more supply-side approach: the wine militants recently broke into a cooperative in the south of France, emptying vats of wine containing . . .
We’ve written before about musicians giving away their work for free online. Now you can add Mike Skinner (a.k.a. The Streets) to the list. He’s giving away new songs using Twitter because, he writes, “all this trying to sell you music … wastes valuable time.” A new study out of Norway suggests Mike‘s business model may be a good one, . . .
Beware moral self-regulation. Doing good works, it turns out, may make people feel justified in doing ill. A new study from psychologists at Northwestern University suggests that “affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally.” In other words, as Ryan Sager points out, acting green one day might leave you more willing to indulge your planet-destroying . . .
With the magazine industry in bad shape, newsweeklies are trying to imitate the one freakishly successful exception: The Economist. In a Vanity Fair article, Matt Pressman outlines four reasons why they can’t, using analogies like this one to explain: “The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an . . .
If you copy this post and pass it off as your own, that’s called plagiarism. If you illegally download a Freakonomics e-book for yourself, that’s downlifting (or, more traditionally, bootlegging). If you want to be a pirate, downloading a bootleg of Hook isn’t going to get you there — you’re going to have to actually go out onto the high . . .
Archaeologists worry a lot about looting. Artifacts stolen from historical sites fetch high prices on the black market, which gives looters strong incentives to steal these items. The emergence of eBay, therefore, was a nightmare for those who hated looting. Reducing transaction costs and making the market more liquid would certainly lead to more looting. EBay almost certainly had that . . .
Most people don’t consider geography a controversial field, but that perception may change in the wake of the Iraq war and the ensuing shift toward pragmatism and realism in international affairs. Robert Kaplan argues that, “of all the unsavory truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography.” Kaplan’s article outlines the . . .
When Japanese unemployment edged up to a three-year high of 4.4 percent in February, the government started looking for creative ways to lower it. One solution: get the unemployed out of the country by offering citizenship buyouts. The program applies only to unemployed people of Japanese descent who were born abroad but now live in Japan (they’re known as nikkei). . . .
All of Clara‘s recipes have the same ingredients: potatoes and onions. That’s because she was raised during the Great Depression, and her family was so poor, she says, she was forced to drop out of high school because she couldn’t afford socks. Now a great-grandmother, she wants to teach you to make delicious, nourishing depression cuisine, to help you through . . .
If surfing the web increases workplace productivity, what does spending time on Facebook do to college students? According to a study by Aryn Karpinski and Adam Duberstein, college students who use Facebook have lower GPA’s and devote less time to studying than other students. While the study didn’t prove causality — do low-GPA, anti-study students self-select into Facebook? — could . . .
In the Times Magazine, Jon Gertner takes a look at the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED), which is dedicated to analyzing how people make environmental decisions. CRED has discovered, for instance, that if a carbon tax is framed as an “offset” instead of a “tax,” it makes a substantial difference in how people, particularly Republicans, feel about it. . . .
According to a study by scientists at DePauw University in Indiana, people who frowned a lot in photos when they were kids and teenagers are five times more likely to get divorced later in life than those who smiled in their photos. Unlike an earlier study that claimed happiness is “contagious,” the authors in this case don’t argue that smiling . . .
David Simon, creator of The Wire and Homicide, announced plans to shoot an HBO pilot of Treme, about the New Orleans neighborhood of that name. New Orleans is unfortunately rife with material for a crime drama. As Simon tells the Times-Picayune, the show would explore “political corruption, the public housing controversy, the crippled criminal-justice system, clashes between police and Mardi . . .
Hoping to harness new parents’ love of photographing their babies, researchers at the University of Washington have put together a computer program that tracks a child’s development in photos. With a photographic record of each milestone (first steps, first word spoken, and so on), pediatricians and parents can better detect early signs of developmental problems. [%comments]
The conventional wisdom holds that electronic correspondence is unequivocally better for the environment than snail mail, but a new study finds a surprising result concerning the 62 trillion spam emails sent last year. The energy used to transmit, process, and filter spam could have powered 2.4 million homes, or all the foreclosed homes in the U.S., for a year. (HT: . . .
If you give your mother a gift card this Mother’s Day, make sure it expires soon; otherwise she might not enjoy it. That’s the suggestion of this Atlantic article (with a rather familiar headline), citing research by the economists Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy. They found that if you put a tight deadline on a fun activity, people are . . .
Here are 20 tips for a safe weekend: Amanda Ripley busts 10 myths that could save your life in a disaster while Nassim Nicholas Taleb outlines 10 points to save the world from financial cataclysm. [%comments]
Some people invest in stocks, others invest in lobbyists. Still others, The Wall Street Journal reports, are investing in assault rifles. Just as Slate laments spring as the start of gun season, Freakonomics readers might find more to worry about with the start of swimming pool season. [%comments]
We’ve written earlier about Anders Ericsson‘s research on talent, and we’ve blogged on the subject repeatedly. Ericsson’s thesis is that raw talent is overrated, and that experts in a given field (be it hockey or music) accomplish excellence primarily through “deliberate practice.” Nicholas Kristof wrote yesterday about a new book about I.Q., also reviewed here, by Richard Nisbett. He argues . . .
According to NPR, recession-themed marketing is a way to “rais[e] money from lower expectations” and “turn bad times into glad times” by selling thrift, good value — and, as Gawker claims, more sex and alcohol. This photo, taken in a New York City subway station, then, is the perfect recession-ad sampler: Photo: Ryan Hagen
Our telecom bill is huge; for cable (no premium channels), cable modem, landline, and my iPhone, it’s about $250. I’ve tried to get AT&T to give me a deal on the landline and iPhone, but to no avail. The cable company, however, will take over my landline at a total price for everything but the iPhone at $5 more than . . .
Readers of this blog may recall Dubner’s crusade against the penny due to opportunity cost as well as the high actual cost of producing pennies. Now Slate takes a look at another currency question: is cash or credit more environmentally friendly? The article doesn’t manage to answer the question, but it does point out the heavy environmental toll of producing . . .
The potential benefits from Chicago’s bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics extend even beyond the Washington Park beautification project. A new paper by Andrew Rose and Mark Spiegel finds that hosting mega-events like the Olympics has a significant positive impact on a country’s exports. Interestingly, the authors also find that even unsuccessful Olympic bids have a positive effect on . . .
Hoping to grab a place alongside the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and the euro, India is looking to design a symbol to represent its currency, the rupee. Any suggestions? [%comments]
As procrastinators across the country furtively shuffle W-2’s under their desks while on conference calls and google “post office hours,” Natalie Angier points out that humans aren’t the only ones expected to contribute to their society. In fact, dominant male fairy wrens may punish delinquent citizens for up to 26 hours and vampire bats actually regurgitate meals to feed hungry . . .
Recently, we highlighted a British journalist’s story about the underside of Dubai’s startling ascent. Some in Dubai called foul, including one writer who wants to remind Britons that their own country has a dark side. After all, what to think of a country in which one fifth of the population lives in poverty? [%comments]
Looking for a 22,000 percent return on your investment? Hire a lobbyist, send her to Washington on your behalf, and watch the money roll in. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that every $1 spent by firms lobbying Congress for a single tax break in 2004 brought in $220 in tax savings. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
This may sound like a chorus of goblins, but it’s really the sound of the internet — of two thousand people, each paid to make just one tone, synthesized into a rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” Why this song? When scientists used a computer to synthesize music for the first time, in 1962, they used “Daisy.” A few years . . .
Over the past half-century, ballet dancers who perform Sleeping Beauty at London’s Royal Opera House have been raising their legs higher and higher. (More here.) So why, over the same time period, have professional basketball players not improved their free-throw shooting?
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