M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary, argues in a new working paper that the epic 19th-century slaughter of American bison — with 10 to 15 million buffalo killed on the Great Plains in barely a decade — was driven by a technological advance and a profit motive that both came from Europe. (Incidentally, this makes me . . .
Devin Brewer, a folkish singer-songwriter from Seattle, has co-founded a music-downloading site called SongSlide that lets musicians post their music for sale and lets buyers pay what they wish for the songs, with a $.59 minimum. The higher the amount, the larger a percentage goes to the musician. Brewer wrote to say that his site was inspired in part by . . .
We ran a little contest here the other day, asking you to guess the next selection of Oprah Winfrey’s book club. The selection, announced yesterday, was a big surprise: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. How surprising was this pick? Here’s how Tirdad Derakhshani summed it up in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: Remarkable by any standards sacred or profane, haute culture or . . .
Imagine that you are an editorial writer at a newspaper. In honor of the annual celebration of government transparency known as Sunshine Week, you decide to write a column that includes a link to a public-records database that lists names and addresses of all members of a certain population. Now, try to imagine which of the following databases might provoke . . .
When faced with the opportunity to read a book by someone who isn’t by profession a writer, I always go for the doctor. It is the rare book by the businessman or entertainer or politician that I thoroughly enjoy; and lawyer-writers may be the worst of the lot. But doctors! Often, I love them. Arthur Conan Doyle was a marvel. . . .
It is hard to tune out all the talk about obesity in this country. In the past, such talk has led me to ponder how serious the problem really is, how obesity is measured, etc. It has even led to the suggestion that higher oil prices may help curtail U.S. obesity. Now here is a new working paper called “Why . . .
Are there more people living on Earth today than at all other times combined? Nope. The British Medical Journal is very critical of the international publishing company Reed Elsevier: “While promoting world health through its publications, including the Lancet, Reed Elsevier also organises international trade fairs for the arms industry. By facilitating the sale of armaments, Reed Elsevier is directly . . .
According to this squib in the New York Times (fourth item down), the newest selection in Oprah Winfrey’s book club will be announced on Wednesday, March 28. Here is the book’s page on Amazon.com, which says that the book is published by Vintage Books (one of Random House’s paperback imprints) and is 304 pages long (although the page counts listed . . .
A blogger named Ganesh Kulkarni discovered that the commuter trains of Mumbai serve six million passengers daily but the system isn’t equipped to check everyone’s ticket. Instead, Kulkarni writes, ticket agents conduct random ticket checks. This has given rise to a form of cheating that is elegantly called “ticketless travel.” Although it’s probably not very common to get busted for . . .
Here’s an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Carl Bialik (“The Numbers Guy”) on how authors (and their public-relations firms) try to push a book to No. 1 on Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com: For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author. New York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown titles to the top of rankings . . .
Freakonomics is apparently something of a black cat. It’s gotten students thrown out of class. It’s gotten a tech consultant thrown off his job. But now the news is even worse: Freakonomics has thwarted love. Here’s the story, in an e-mail we received recently from a guy named Phil: Fellas, I was recently dating a girl. Nothing serious, but I . . .
Quite by accident, I’ve blogged three times on this site about Happy Feet: 1. Whether Savion Glover, the human tap dancer behind Mumble’s moves, got sufficient credit; 2 When Glover himself took in a showing of the film, with his own child in tow; and 3. Whether the success of films like Happy Feet have raised awareness of global warming. . . .
The business woes of the U.S. newspaper industry, and of most other traditional media, have been exhaustively chronicled, most vigorously in newspapers themselves. (I sometimes think that the entire journalism/ music/film/TV industry just needs a 5-year bridge loan to help it safely migrate to the digital future, when online distribution and advertising are robust enough to support them.) So it . . .
An article in today’s Wall Street Journal asserts that, while various life skills seem to deteriorate as people get older, our skill at making personal-finance decisions doesn’t peak until the ripe age of 53. “Baseball players are said to peak in their late 20’s,” writes David Wessel. “Chess players in their mid-30’s. Theoretical economists in their mid-40’s. But in ordinary . . .
Pennsylvania State University has set up a prediction market for the weather, letting two groups of students bet against professional forecasting services like AccuWeather in trying to predict the temperature in different locations. “To date, the weather markets have been as accurate as the major public forecasting services,” says the Penn State press release, which is printed below in its . . .
A few days a week, I bring my daughter to nursery school on the East Side of Manhattan. (On the other days, I bring my son to kindergarten; next year, they will blessedly attend the same school.) We live on the West Side, and usually take the bus across town. It is a busy time of day. At the bus . . .
America’s universities are producing an awful lot of economists these days. Too many? Well, if Levitt is successful in getting rid of tenure (don’t bet on it), there will certainly be some teaching openings. Otherwise, newly minted economists may wish to consider the career path of David Teece. Teece is a 58-year-old Berkeley professor who, noting that the legal system . . .
After misinterpreting the data on the side-impact crash tests it ran on child car seats, Consumer Reports is changing its methodology on such tests, enlisting the help of experts in the field instead of acting with total independence. (Here is our earlier take on child car seats.)
Here’s a very interesting review of a very interesting-sounding new book on Mark Twain, by Peter Krass. The review, published in the Wall Street Journal, was written by one of my favorite business journalists, Roger Lowenstein, who has written good books on Warren Buffett and Long-Term Capital Management and good recent articles on immigration and on the history of the . . .
Is illegal downloading responsible for the music industry’s woes? Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf say nope. The I.R.S. will give you a pile of money if you help them catch a big tax cheat. Too bad they weren’t this generous with John Szilagyi, who was one of their own. These three guys look pretty thrilled to have produced the first . . .
Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch, now attends Yale Law School, where she has learned to hate AutoAdmit, the online university blab shack. As with many online slanders, the ones on AutoAdmit tend to molder for a long time, which means that a newly minted lawyer may have to deal with an unseemly Google fingerprint (which, unlike . . .
If you are going to murder someone, be sure to not leave your fingerprints behind all over Google, as this woman apparently did. Her searches included “how to commit murder,” “undetectable poisons,” and “fatal digoxin doses,” as well as searches on local gun laws. And while I don’t mean to heap even more dishonor on Walgreens, guess where she bought . . .
I assume that I was not the only person who was astounded when some details of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s confession were made public the other day. Although there are many reasons to doubt the veracity of his claims, if he is responsible for even half of what he says, how much does it change the American perception of the ongoing . . .
In a post yesterday, I asked why people comment on blogs. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of comments on the post. To summarize: 1. A great many of you don’t want to comment unless you have something original and worthwhile to say. Also, it’s time-consuming to comment at all, much less wade through the previous comments to make sure . . .
We wrote recently about identity thieves. One of them is probably already working on this guy — a lottery winner who had the misfortune of having his picture published in the local newspaper, a picture in which all his personal information was visible, including his Social Security Number. (Hat tip: Jim Romenesko)
On most websites or blogs, the ratio of readers to commenters is gigantic. On this blog, a post that garners 40 or 50 comments is considered quite a bit, even though there are many thousands of readers. The stream of comments can take many shapes, depending on the nature of the post. And, once again depending on the nature of . . .
Several weeks ago, I was talking to a physician in Houston, the sort of older gentleman family doctor you don’t see much of anymore. His name is Cyril Wolf. He’s originally from South Africa, but other than that, he struck me as the quintessential American general practitioner of decades past. I’d asked him a variety of questions — what’s changed . . .
In the U.K., it’s been discovered that five percent of medical-school applicants cheat on their application forms by plagiarizing material in their personal essays. It is hardly news, of course, that students will cheat (or, for that matter, teachers). Consider the following snapshot from Google Trends, which compares search queries for “term paper” (in blue) and “animal rights” (in red). . . .
A while back, I posted here about the San Francisco Chronicle‘s new audio feature called “Correct Me If I’m Wrong,” which turns irate readers’ voicemail messages into brief podcasts. The first podcast featured a caller who was deeply disturbed by the Chronicle‘s use of the seemingly redundant phrase “pilotless drone.” This first message was so over-the-top that I wondered if . . .
That is the proposal being considered in the South Carolina Senate. Prisoners would receive up to 180 days of time served for donating an organ or bone marrow. The following exchange of quotes from an A.P. article pretty much sums up the positions of nearly every debate over how organ donation should be incentivized: Mary Jo Cagle, chief medical officer . . .
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