Scott Adams’s investing advice.
The art of story telling.
How should volatility affect an investment strategy?
A high school teacher creates a fun study aid.
Ian Ayres’s new book discusses diversifying risk across time.
Is there an IP violation in Date Night?
In this interesting article from the American Prospect, Bruce Ackerman reveals how in 1957 Lyndon Johnson opposed an effort of Vice-President (and President of Senate) to reform the filibuster rule.
Last words on death row.
A fascinating but depressing analysis of messaging at OkCupid.com suggests that discriminatory male preferences are a wider phenomenon.
I’ve written before about the hidden power of prosody – which concerns “the syllable length, loudness, pitch, and the formant frequencies of speech sounds.”
Here is part two of the WSHU “Better Biz” series, in which Barry Nalebuff and I react to the challenges of specific businesses. In this segment, we talk about the super-cool travel site Kayak.
WSHU, a public radio station in Connecticut, is running a six-part “Better Biz” series, where Barry Nalebuff and I react to the challenges of specific businesses.
Now that the Supreme Court has freed corporations to expressly advocate for the election or defeat of federal candidates, many pundits feel that is simply beyond the power of Congress to constitutionally curtail the corrosive potential of corporate speech.
One of the great unresolved questions of predictive analytics is trying to figure out when prediction markets will produce better predictions than good old-fashion mining of historic data. I think that there is fairly good evidence that either approach tends to beat the statistically unaided predictions of traditional experts.
Contributor Ian Ayres sees two subtle shifts in methodology between Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics.
Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents “to raise undergraduate fees – the equivalent of tuition – 32 percent next fall.” But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity. As Aaron Edlin and I wrote back in 2003:
We are trapped in a world with far too few IRS audits. Law abiding tax payers hate being audited and their representatives in Congress have heard the message loud and clear – strangling the ability of the IRS to conduct field examinations. The problem with the current state of affairs is that non-law-abiding tax payers find it far too easy to avoid paying their fair share.
One of the heroes of SuperFreakonomics is Ignatz Semmelweis — who crunched numbers in the 1840’s to champion the benefits of doctors washing their hands.
I’ve written a fair amount about organ transplantation in the past (for example, here and here). But it was only in reading SuperFreakonomics that I learned that “the Iranian government [pays] people to give up a kidney, roughly $1,200, with an additional sum paid by the kidney recipient.” The book also tells the story of our own country’s brief flirtation with donor compensation:
Implicitly, Alex was arguing, “If you are an independent, then you have a mind of your own.”
From which she concludes, “Conversely, if you are not an independent,” then you do not have a mind of your own.
Alex, I think, is making both a mistake in English usage and a mistake in logic.
Her mistake in usage is that she should have said “inversely” instead of “conversely.” The converse of “If p, then q” is “If q, then p.” But the last frame concerns an inverse: “If not p, then not q.” An interesting empirical study would look to see how often newspapers or academics misuse these adverbs (I’m sure I have).
Here a pretty simple puzzler. Find a mistake in Alex’s logic?
I sang this past weekend at the Whiffenpoof Centennial Reunion Concert (you can hear examples of recent groups singing, here). And I had a chance to sing with probably the best selling Whiff, Joseph Finder. Joe is the author of 9 corporate thrillers. (My favorite is “Company Man”). It will not surprise you that, like Levitt and Dubner, his webpage offers free book plates. But you might be surprise when you see his “Bad Apple” bookplate:
From my office window, I have a glorious view of the Grove Street Cemetery, where Yale students often go to read. By far, my favorite spot in this vast city of monuments is near the end of Cedar Avenue, past the graves of Eli Whitney and Noah Webster. There, just beyond the intersection with Myrtle Path, you can find the extraordinary headstones of two Yale chemists.
Students, if your professor has asked you to buy his or her book, ask for a rebate.
Corporations like Amazon and Sirius won’t help owners recover their lost gadgets, like cell phones or Kindles or the Sirius receiver. The article points out that “iPhone owners have a number of options to search for their handsets, including features that use GPS technology to send out virtual semaphores.”
It was during a trip to the Boston Science Museum that I had an idea about calculating statistical slumps.
Lisa Sanders, the diagnosis columnist for New York Times Magazine (and, I should disclose, my close friend), has just published a truly interesting book, Every Patient Tells A Story, on how good doctors go about making difficult diagnoses.
Last week’s excellent article on the just one sign of the market value of number crunching. As I wrote in the afterword to the paperback version of Super Crunchers:
I am writing this at 4:25 a.m. on Friday and I’m a bit woozy. On Wednesday afternoon, my body seriously crashed. On very short notice, my beloved spouse got me in to see to see a physician, who told me I definitely had a bad flu and the only one going around was the swine flu.
The good news is that I’ve been recovering just as quickly as I crashed. By Thursday morning, my 101.3 fever had broken, and while I still have a cough, the aches and chills are now largely gone. My body just feels extraordinarily tired. I tried going to sleep Thursday night without any cold medications.
I’m troubled by news reports that Antoine Walker was arrested for writing $1,000,000 in bad checks. The ex N.B.A. star — Employee Number 8 — was forced to do a perp walk as he apparently was led out of Harrah’s Tahoe in handcuffs. The criminal complaint alleges that from July 27 to January 19, he wrote 10 separate $100,000 checks with insufficient funds to Caesars Palace, Planet Hollywood, and Red Rock Resort.
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