Three days: … The amount of time auto-rickshaws are striking. … How long it took to crack the iPhone root password. … The length of the papal visit to New York. … How long a man played online games before dying. … How long a cow-human cross embryo lived.
In 2006, a Rhode Island jury found three major paint makers liable for the toxic effects of lead paint on children. One of those effects may have been a rise in the crime rate — and the removal of lead from house paint has been linked to the crime drop of the 1990’s (as Levitt blogged about here). Now the . . .
In some cases, both rely on the honor system to collect their revenue. During tax season, New York State asks its citizens to voluntarily pay sales tax on any untaxed internet purchases they have made over last year. The plea has been pretty effective — New Yorkers handed over $45 million in internet sales tax last year alone. Still, that’s . . .
Can you measure success by the opportunities you’ve blown? America’s oldest venture capital firm thinks so. Bessemer Venture Partners, which has been betting on startups since 1911, has posted this anti-portfolio of once-fledgling companies they sent packing, including Apple, Google, eBay, Intel, and FedEx. Maybe Dubner and Levitt can interest them in this new baby-name-consulting firm …
Taiwan’s major newspapers charge a higher advertising rate on days when Yankees right-hander and Taiwan native Chien-Ming Wang pitches, Sports Illustrated reports. Computer maker Acer claims Wang’s name increased its product sales by 10 percent, and the Taiwanese business journal Money Weekly attributed a 25 percent rise in the Taiwan Stock Exchange to Wang’s strong performance last June and July. . . .
Dubner recently questioned whether there’s much (or anything) to be learned from stock market news. A paper by University of Michigan political science professor Arthur Lupia and his students points to a major reason stock stories lack substance: “Point blindness,” or what happens when news reports and citizens don’t realize that the value of a stock index point changes frequently. . . .
Dubner and Levitt have written a column for the Times Magazine‘s inaugural “green” issue of Sun., April 20. The subject: how auto travel produces a variety of negative externalities — pollution, carbon emissions, congestion, accidents — and how one new strategy may be able to help: pay-as-you-drive (P.A.Y.D.) auto insurance. The strange truth is that most auto insurance in the . . .
Congestion pricing for Disney World?(HT: Todd Eades)(Earlier) For when you don’t even have time to surf the Web. (HT: Clint Parson) How to trademark a dance fad. Don’t take your vitamins.
One in five: … Spanish hotels allows pets. … respondents to a Nature survey has used brain-enhancing drugs. … children in Britain has never visited the countryside. … Americans says he is just able to meet living expenses. … viewings of The Office premier was on a computer screen instead of a T.V.
We’ve looked at how the rising cost of metals has changed the value of the coins in your pocket, the pipes in your walls, and the parts under your car. It turns out that gun lovers and local police have been looking at it, too. Consider the bullet. Basically, it’s made of lead wrapped in a jacket of copper or . . .
As discussed earlier, Dubner went on Good Morning America today to talk about the motto contest that ran on this blog. Here’s the proof.
The economy appears to be in recession, and while most industries are shedding jobs, consumer debt councilors, conservation consultants and green energy suppliers have ramped up hiring, the Christian Science Monitor reports. The Monitor also points out that the leading edge of the recession overlaps with the start of the baby boomer retirement wave. This has sparked a government hiring . . .
Sixty-nine-year-old Bob Fanning may have hit upon a new senior citizen benefit that makes your home a more attractive sell the closer you are to dying, the Chicago Tribune reports. To stand out from other Wisconsin homes in the real estate glut, Fanning offers this incentive: The buyer of his home will be named the beneficiary to a 10-year, $500,000 . . .
Meterologists at Colorado State University expect the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season to be an unusually active one. If that sounds familiar, it should. The team made a similar forecast for the 2007 season, just as they had in 2006. But both of those dire predictions turned out to be high of the mark — 2006 and 2007 turned out to . . .
On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side. The site’s creator, Bertrand, uses Yahoo Pipes to retrieve comments from the most recent posts on both sites and displays them on one page, which is updated every hour or . . .
Germany had good intentions when it began hoarding solar panels.(HT: Saad Abdali) Hemingway’s haunt offers charity to American subprime victims.(Earlier) Student of law and economics gives it up for a career in fast food and amazing videos.(HT: David Black) Are male geishas the new handbag?
Levitt doesn’t get why Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” video generated thousands of YouTube comments when there’s the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics. They do mostly poetry, but also have a music video: “I.Q.R. [interquartile range: a measure of statistical dispersion] In a Box” — a spoof on S.N.L.‘s slightly racier version. Zero comments so far, but video director Allison Lind, . . .
Lists are great. They can be revealing, cause anxiety, or serve no discernible purpose. But throw in some links and a statistic and you have … LIST-onomics, this blog’s newest diversion. Here is today’s list: 33 percent: … of parents say they set no rules for their children’s use of social networks. … the amount Indian steel prices shot up . . .
Last October, we gathered a group of experts together to find out what U.S. air travel will look like ten years from now. If you want to remember what air travel looked like twenty years ago, try booking a flight to Russia on American Airlines’s website, which appears to give you the option of flying to the Union of Soviet . . .
Burglaries are on the decline across the United States, with at least one notable exception: increasingly, thieves are breaking into foreclosed homes — stripping out the copper pipes, wiring, and appliances — and selling their pilfered goods as scrap. From there, Treehugger reports, the scrap metal is most often shipped to China. Coincidentally, that’s the country Tyler Cowen credits for . . .
At its heart, Inspectd is a simple game: it shows you a chart of historical data on a random stock, asks you to bet on whether the stock’s price will rise or fall, and then immediately tells you if you won or lost — with another performance chart showing you why. And maybe that instant gratification is what makes this . . .
Most of us who eat meat regularly would still rather not kill an animal with our own hands. So we have, for generations, delegated that work to others. Jennifer Dillard, at Georgetown Law, authored a new paper looking at what that delegation costs the workers of industrial slaughterhouses. She argues that prolonged work on a kill floor exposes workers to . . .
In Argentina, buying a pack of gum can throw you into a standoff with the cashier, who, due to the country’s coin shortage, often lacks the correct change. Facing similar problems, nearby Paraguay has adopted a socially acceptable solution for vendors: when you don’t have change or need to round up, candy is acceptable currency. If Americans place as much . . .
We know that Levitt loves the Harry Potter series. The Golden Compass trilogy — not so much. But the bigger question is: why do any of us love fantasy, and what good does it do us? Some good ideas have tumbled out of a lively discussion on the subject at Oxford’s Overcoming Bias blog, where Robin Hanson points out that . . .
If an e-mail message from a campaign or non-profit group were to pop up in your inbox on election day asking you to please go down to your polling place and cast your vote, would you do it? Probably not, if the results of a study by Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson are any indication. Nickerson conducted 13 field . . .
Real estate is back. April Fools’!(Earlier) “Ask a Mexican” calls it quits. Feeling insecure? Play a video game. Did preparation for Earth Hour defeat its purpose?(HT: Andrew)(Earlier)
Producing a penny costs about 1.7 cents, and the Treasury’s annual penny deficit is about $50 million, according to a New Yorker article by David Owen. Yet folks — and some companies — still want the penny around, in part because they fear merchants rounding up prices and increased reliance on the even more expensive nickel (which costs almost ten . . .
London has successfully instituted congestion pricing for private vehicles, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying very hard to do the same, but ran into stiff opposition from the public as well as political players. New York magazine reports, however, that Bloomberg has just gained an important ally: New York’s new governor, David Paterson. According to New York: . . .
When elementary and high schools ban the sale of candy and sodas, students create flourishing underground economies to satisfy demand for the sweet stuff. In the ensuing crackdown, even high-profile figures are laid low. For example, in Connecticut last week, an eighth-grade student body vice president was forced to resign after he was caught buying an illicit packet of Skittles . . .
Sex is a notorious depression balm — a recent study of Australian women provides evidence for this. But does pregnancy fill the same role? A research team from the University of Newcastle found that one in 10 Australian moms suffers from post-natal depression (and it’s likely that she had pre-pregnancy depression as well).
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