From the Economist: “To avoide the dynasties that have misruled many Latin American countries, Guatemala’s constitution forbids relatives of the incumbent president and vice-president from running for high office. This clause had seemed to scotch the chances of Sandra Torres, the country’s ambitious first lady, becoming its first presidenta. But on March 21st she and her husband, Álvaro Colom, announced a novel way to sidestep the rules: they filed for divorce.”
We talk to a U.S. Geological Survey physicist about the science — and folly — of predicting earthquakes. There are lots of known knowns; and, fortunately, not too many unknown unknowns. But it’s the known unknowns — the timing of the next Big One — that are the most dangerous.
Maybe Dyson should be making smartphones too, eh? They are so much fun to use that I wonder if people will be more likely to wash their hands in airport restrooms …
You know the bromide: winners never quit and quitters never win. To which we say: are you sure?
We’re working on an hour-long Freakonomics Radio show about the upside of quitting. Sometimes quitting is strategic, and it might even be the best possible thing you can do. (I may be a bit biased, as I’ve done some major-league quitting in my life and am generally happier for it.) It’s all about opportunity cost: the time and resources you spend doing one thing can’t be spent doing another. So when do you quit the one and start the other?
As food companies see inflation creeping higher this summer, many are downsizing, reducing the amount of food in their packages but keeping prices–and often–the size of the box, unchanged.
Last week, I asked for your advice. I was taking my family (kids are 10 and 9) on their first trip to D.C., and wanted some tips. Your suggestions were fantastic, and it was too bad I could only follow up on a fraction of them. We had a great time (in only 2.5 days). The highlight was a White . . .
A reader named Florian Kern writes from Germany: “I was listening the other day to your very interesting podcast on memory and pain. Yesterday, then, I watched the incredibly boring soccer game between Germany and Kazakhstan.”
One of the hour-long Freakonomics Radio shows we’re currently producing is about prediction — the science behind it, the human need for it, the folly it often produces.
One person you’ll likely hear from in the program is Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at Penn and author of the deservedly well-regarded book Expert Political Judgment. It is a rigorous romp through the minefield of expert prediction, and essentially argues that the words “expert” and “prediction” should almost never occupy the same sentence.
In the Times, Sam Grobar has written a great article — a great screed, really — about how much people love to complain about their smartphones even though they accomplish so much for so little cost.
New research by an FDA economist shows that overweight adolescents who are surrounded by overweight family and friends, don’t consider themselves to be overweight.
Back in 2006, Virginia Commonwealth University launched a program to help acclimate new students, including requiring all incoming freshman to read the same book. Guess which book VCU chose as its inaugural “summer read”?
Fire deaths in the U.S. have fallen 90 percent over the past 100 years, a great and greatly underappreciated gain. How did it happen — and could we ever get to zero?
E-books are growing like crazy. Most of the complaining you may have read is from publishers– that it will be ever harder to stay solvent in an e-book world. But it’s actually authors, not publishers, who take the biggest hit.
We’ll be spending a couple of days this week in Washington, D.C. It’ll be my kids’ first trip. Am looking for non-obvious things to do and good things to eat as well. Best suggestion wins a piece of Freakonomics swag!
A Forbes.com article by Jeff Bercovici discusses the New York Times‘s plan to shut down a rogue Twitter feed called FreeNYTimes, which is meant to circumvent the Times‘s upcoming metered model (some people call it a paywall). As Bercovici writes: It’s clever, but it’s not kosher. “We have asked Twitter to disable this feed as it is in violation of . . .
I like Family Guy and I like watching TV with my kids, but I do not like watching Family Guy with my kids. What are your bad combinations?
The Three Mile Island nuclear-power accident in 1979 coincided almost perfectly with the release of The China Syndrome, a Hollywood film about a nuclear meltdown. As we once wrote, this pairing helped gel American sentiment against nuclear power. Several other nations, meanwhile, kept on building nuclear-power plants, Japan among the leaders. Now, how will the earthquake/tsunami-damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima . . .
There are a growing number of churches in the U.S. that can no longer afford their upkeep, as costs are outpacing collections. In Europe, some churches have turned into techno-dance clubs. Would that work here?
For decades, G.D.P. has been the yardstick for measuring living standards around the world. Martha Nussbaum would rather use something that actually works.
If you’re the kind of sports stat-head who loves that the Bill James movement has become mainstream in baseball, and you wonder why basketball doesn’t pay more attention to analytics, you may be pleased to read this article and this one about the annual Sports Analytics Conference at MIT Sloan.
That’s the question posed in a new working paper by Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. What would the mechanism/s be? “Schools facing increased pressures to produce academic outcomes may reallocate their efforts in ways that have unintended consequences for children’s health. For example, schools may cut back on recess and physical education in favor of increasing time on tested subjects.”
As we’ve written here before, family firms in which a founder hands the business off to the next of kin tend to perform worse than equivalent non-family firms. This isn’t very surprising: what are the chances that the best person to succeed the founder just happens to be his/her son or daughter?
For some time now, Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline (and one of the nicest humans you’ll ever meet), has been answering your questions about flying. He has commented on everything from cabin air to maintenance problems and ticket prices. It’s been a while since we had him here, however, and since there’s no shortage of airline headlines — including an eventful winter for weather interruptions — we thought it was time to bring him back for another round of questions.
To get a lot of followers on Twitter, do you need to follow a lot of other Tweeps? And if not, why not?
Thanks to Time.com for naming this blog one of the top “financial” blogs — and the nice writeup from the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Frank — but we didn’t know that we’re a financial blog!
… a New York Times article by Randall Stross about how fast and cheap broadband access is in Hong Kong compared to the U.S.: “Hong Kong residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second – known as a “gig” – for less than $26 a month.”
… the jacket of a new book from Princeton University Press called Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories, by Federico Varese.
Roland Fryer continues to work with incentives in education — for students, parents, and teachers. His newest working paper (gated) describes an experiment in New York City that was unsuccessful in moving the needle.
A reader named Ed Woodcock writes to tell us of …: “[A] conversation I had with a WHO (World Health Org.) official I bumped into while touring the Taj Mahal for the first time about 5 or 6 years ago. We introduced ourselves and she told me that she was a “polio advocate,” which obviously led to the question, “What the heck does that mean?” She basically spent her time lobbying organizations for donations to help eradicate polio. Obviously a very worthy cause!”
Since the beginning of civilization, we’ve thought that human waste was worthless at best, and often dangerous. What if we were wrong?
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