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 . . .
The Times has just announced that college students (or, for that matter, anyone with an .edu e-mail suffix) can have free access to the entire contents of the newspaper’s website, including the previously gated TimesSelect material. This strikes me as a huge move, and one that will reverberate throughout every discussion of the new business model/s for journalism. [Addendum: As . . .
The other day, I wrote to say that I’d be warming up for Bill Clinton, again, and solicited your questions for him — many of which, as you can see here, were pretty good. I was particularly fond of this one, from “BennyM”: Does the American public get such lackluster politicians because we’re so cynical and disengaged? … or… drumroll . . .
Is this a safer version of Purell? At least people probably won’t drink it. Following on this discussion of remotely piloted aircraft, here is news of a tamper-proof autopilot system designed to thwart terrorists. More advice from a burglar on where not to hide your money, guns, or drugs. Following on this discussion of household urinals, here is one economist’s . . .
Our Chinese publisher has sent along word that Freakonomics has won an award in China. Here is the certificate. According to Jesse Coffino-Greenberg, a Chinese translator friend, it says: Certificate of Honor Guangdong Economics Publishing House The publishers of “Freakonomics” are hereby awarded the 2006 “New Path Prize” for finance publications. Jesse explained that he came up with “New Path . . .
That is the question we ask in our most recent column in the New York Times Magazine. Along the way, we try to clear up some misconceptions about the subject, and get a guided tour of a hacker chat room where credit-card numbers, passwords, and PIN’s are bought and sold. Below is some of the research cited in the Times . . .
I am giving a lecture later today (though not at TED) and the speaker immediately after me is President Clinton. I’ve warmed up for him before. I realize this is short notice, but: if I have the chance to chat with him for a few minutes before his talk, what do you think I should ask him? Or, I guess . . .
I believe that my daughter Anya, who just turned five, may turn out to be a philosopher. (I know, there isn’t much money in philosophy, but the thought does warm my heart.) I base this suspicion on something she said the other night while she, I, and her six-year-old brother Solomon were setting up for a massive Playmobil battle. She . . .
A reader named Kevin Cornwell, who has his own blog here, wrote us the other day about the forthcoming book The Baseball Economist. It’s by J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University who writes the baseball blog Sabernomics. (I love that a baseball economist teaches at a university named for the same Georgia mountain for whom the first baseball . . .
I used to have a problem, but a friend of mine helped me with it. He didn’t know he was helping me; in fact, he wasn’t even my friend when this problem first cropped up. So, to clarify: he’s a new friend who helped me solve an old problem. My problem was this: I often record interviews on an Olympus . . .
In the U.K., there are plans afoot to charge a higher fee to park a larger car, even in your own driveway. Remember Swivel, the data mashup site we blogged about? Here’s another new data visualization site, called ManyEyes, run by IBM’s Visual Communications Lab. And here’s a thoughtful review of ManyEyes vs. Swivel. Standardized test scores in Illinois are . . .
A reader named Pete Dignan has noted that we tend to write pretty often about how people are afraid of things. In fact, that was the very theme of a recent 20/20 special to which I contributed. So he sent a link to this song, “Afraid,” by the band Waking Rothko. “The song says pretty much what you do,” Dignan . . .
A study just published in JAMA put four groups of overweight, premenopausal women on four different diets: Atkins, Ornish, Zone, and LEARN. The winner? Atkins, by a mile — in terms of weight loss as well as risk factors.
We are very fortunate to get some incredibly interesting and perceptive mail from readers. Occasionally, we share these queries (like here and here). We also get some hardcore snark, and we sometimes share those too (like this recent one). An e-mail that showed up the other day was so interesting that I wrote back to ask if I could simply . . .
I blogged recently about a Def Poetry Jam piece by Tommy Bottoms called “Basic Economics.” Below, thanks to the transcription diligence of Nicole (remember her? she wrote this very good blog post about predictive-text errors), are the lyrics of “Basic Economics.” There were a few phrases she couldn’t make out, each of which are marked with a “TK.” That’s journalism . . .
New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s new book, Positively American, isn’t selling very well. As of this writing, it is ranked #3,869 on Amazon.com, which probably translates into 2 or 3 books sold a day. It must be a little disappointing for someone as ambitious as Schumer to see his fellow Democratic senator Barack Obama selling that many books every second. . . .
Last weekend, I went to New York Comic Con with my 14-year-old nephew. As someone who’s never been heavily into superheroes, manga, anime, or gaming, I found it utterly fascinating. Gary Coleman was there, signing autographs (huh?), and I ran into a guy I knew from grad school, Roland Kelts, who has just published a book called Japanamerica: How Japanese . . .
This is an obviously important question on many fronts, especially since SSRI’s are among the most heavily prescribed drugs in the world, and because their safety and efficacy have lately been seriously questioned. So it would be helpful to know if, at the very least, anti-depressants decrease the probability of suicide. In this new working paper, Jens Ludwig, Dave E. . . .
They would both like to see the new Federal ban on Internet gambling overturned. At least D’Amato is getting paid to do something about it. Am I the only one surprised at how easily Congress enacted the ban? One day it seemed as though Internet gambling was a quasi-legal, hugely profitable, generally accepted practice. Then, all of a sudden, Congress . . .
In his New York Times column the other day (gated), David Brooks wonders aloud, and compellingly, if perhaps New Mexico governor Bill Richardson might somehow rise above the glamorously noisy H. Clinton/B. Obama fray and become the Democratic candidate for President. Here’s what Brooks likes about Richardson: He’s down to earth, accessible, funny, and smart. He is “the most experienced . . .
In the recent dustup over a Wikipedia administrator dubbed Essjay who lied about his academic credentials in a New Yorker profile, here’s how Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales responded when The New Yorker recently ran a correction: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really . . .
This one is pretty top-notch. It’s a lecture/performance by Yoram Bauman, who bills himself as the world’s first-and-only stand-up economist. (Hat tip: Roberto Ruiz)
Here’s an interesting new working paper by T. Clifton Green, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, and Yue Tang, all of Emory University, who looked at nearly 8,000 sell-side Wall Street equity analysts in order to assess gender and job performance. In terms of sheer representation, they found that women actually lost ground from 1995 to 2005, from 16% to 13% of analyst positions; . . .
Yesterday I blogged about Al Gore blaming the media for inaction on global warming. Some of you asserted, albeit quite politely, that I am an idiot for disagreeing with Gore. I may well be an idiot, but let me clarify a bit. I acknowledge that I should have put a finer point on my objection to what Gore said. And . . .
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