I have been participating in a fantasy football league for the last few years with many former college econ majors as well as two econ Ph.D. students. We are all still very plugged in to economic policy debate too. Anyway, we all pride ourselves on having amusing or clever team names. This year, with the current economic crisis, I thought a team name related to economics (in the academic or popular sense) would be appropriate.
One of the people you’ll meet in SuperFreakonomics is a remarkable physician at Washington Hospital Center (WHC) named Craig Feied. He has had a hand in many technological innovations that are pushing medicine, hard, into the future (or at least the present).
In a trenchant Times Op-Ed, Michael Lynch explains, point-by-point, why the “peak oil” concept is so wrong.
The paperback edition of Freakonomics goes on sale today. As with the Revised and Expanded hardcover (which, we are told, will stay in print), it includes several of our New York Times Magazine columns; it doesn’t, however, include a chapter of blog excerpts.
Aldrin has agreed to take your questions — about NASA, walking on the moon, the value to society of space exploration, or anything else you can conjure — so ask away in the comments section below. As with all Q&A’s, we will post his answers here in a few days.
I blogged last week about how progress in lowering the world record in the 100-meter dash has been extremely slow, even with the improvements in track surfaces, training techniques, steroids, etc. The world record has been lowered at an average of 0.1 percent per year over the last 40 years.
Of the (very) many large topics on the Obama administration’s to-do list, one that has slipped off the radar of late is education reform. I assume Arne Duncan et al. are working hard and will retake the spotlight eventually, maybe even in a few weeks when a new school year begins. It will be interesting to see how much attention is paid to one of the most important, albeit touchiest, topics of school reform: teacher skill.
I am the first to say this and surely I will not be the last, but: isn’t it strange that with all the technological improvements in our lives in the past few decades, the audio fidelity of so many of our phone calls is so abysmal?
Iran’s citizens take to the streets en masse after a disputed election. Gay men in Salt Lake City hold a kissing protest. Members of the Westboro Baptist Church voice their anti-just-about-everything views to military funerals and elsewhere.
Beyond the media attention they inevitably garner, what do protests actually accomplish?
Next week, after more than four years in, Freakonomics is being published in the U.S. in paperback. We’ve been asked to go on TV to talk about the effects (if any) the book has had, whether in the realm of crime-fighting or baby-naming or book-writing. We need your help in gathering good examples to talk about. Nothing is too large or too small, in your life or the lives of others. Thanks in advance.
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline. He answered his first two batches of questions here, and is back with another round. Please leave new questions for him in the comments section below.
Last week we solicited your questions for Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the “personal genetics” company 23andMe. Among your interesting questions: are 23andMe’s genetic results taken seriously by doctors? Should children have the procedure done? Will insurance companies engage in genetic profiling?
Thanks for the good questions and to Wojcicki for the compelling answers.
You probably heard about the terrible air crash in New York on Saturday between a small plane and a tourist helicopter. Nine people were killed.
Andrew W. Lo, who teaches at M.I.T. and is director of its Laboratory for Financial Engineering, has contributed to this blog before. Here he is joined by co-author Jeremiah H. Chafkin, president of AlphaSimplex Group (where Lo also serves as chairman and chief scientific officer) for a guest post about the best (and worst) ways to manage risk.
In today’s Washington Post, there’s an incredibly affecting long article about a down-and-out family in Indiana. It’s called “Nowhere to Go But Down.” Husband and wife have both lost their jobs; there’s a teenage son and a very young daughter, and it looks like they’re all going to have to move back to Michigan to live in the basement of the wife’s mother. I urge you all to read it, and to look at the photo gallery too.
Memes are made to be heisted. So here’s one I heisted from the (U.K.) Times‘s Comment Central blog by Daniel Finkelstein, who of course heisted it from someone else.
It’s as simple as this:
One of my classmates wound up _____________________.
From a Wall Street Journal article by Betsy McKay come these tantalizing facts (emphasis added):
The medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases may have soared as high as $147 billion in 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, as its new director set a fresh tone in favor of more aggressively attacking obesity.
This is the best explanation I have ever read of why I hate meetings so much, and why other people love them. If you are like me, you should save this link and simply forward it to anybody who asks if you’d like to “grab coffee” or “have a quick phone call to pick each other’s brains” or, God forbid, actually go somewhere and sit around a table with a lot of other people and have a proper meeting.
In his very good baseball Q&A the other day, Buster Olney didn’t address the questions some of you asked about how sportswriters vote for the Hall of Fame.
For what it’s worth, however, Zev Chafets, author of the recent book Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Baseball Hall of Fame, recently wrote an interesting piece for the Wall Street Journal about how much players benefit financially once they are elected to the Hall, especially if they are only marginally famous.
You probably know already that 44 people were arrested yesterday, mostly in New Jersey, for corruption and money-laundering. They included mayors, rabbis, and assemblymen (oh my!).
The story is simultaneously vast and banal, seeming to illustrate every cliché of politicians and the people who seek to grease their palms. There are many, many angles to be discussed. A few thoughts that sprung to mind include:
Last week we solicited your questions for ESPN baseball reporter and analyst Buster Olney. There were a lot of really interesting questions, and I think Buster chose well; moreover, his answers are excellent — especially, in my view, his last one. Along the way, he addresses the Steroid Era, budgetary and expansion issues, and how he came to be called Buster. Thanks to all for participating.
This morning, my paper copy of The Times included a replica of the paper’s special section on the moon landing from July 21, 1969. You’ve probably seen the iconic main headline: “MEN WALK ON MOON.” The lead article is by John Noble Wilford (who’s still going strong, btw), and includes one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article:
A while back, we began soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a captain with a major U.S. airline. He made his debut here, with his rather spirited take on the state of the modern pilot, and now is back with his first round of answers to reader questions. Thanks to him, and to you — and please leave new questions for Captain Steve in the comments section below.
I never set out to be anti-penny, but somehow it happened, and I have gone on the record more than a few times arguing that the penny should be eliminated.
While I stand by my belief that the penny is lousy as currency, someone has finally come up with a use for pennies that has made me reconsider my extinction argument: make a floor out of them!
In two previous posts, we examined laws exempting family members from prosecution for harboring fugitives and laws either granting or permitting sentencing discounts on account of one’s family status, ties, or responsibilities. These are two of the benefits defendants receive on account of their family status in the criminal justice system.
If you care about baseball, you should care about Buster Olney. He is the ESPN baseball reporter who seems to know everything about everything, on the field and in the general managers’ offices, and presents it with a calm authority.
A long-standing pet peeve of mine is that so much academic research is funded by public tax dollars and yet the public is rarely given access to the findings of that research.
In a short Times piece today, I found a hero: Michael Tuts, a particle physicist at Columbia who, among other things, is doing work at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research:
The mother of all deadlines fast approaches: our new book, SuperFreakonomics, is due to be published on October 20. In the meantime, how about a little contest?
Think of it as a guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest except in this case the jar is infinitely expandable, and the jelly beans don’t yet exist.
Two weeks ago, we solicited your questions for White House economist Austan Goolsbee. You will find his answers below. Among the highlights: no, the Obama administration is not socialist; and no, Goolsbee will not be trapped into telling you whether he’d buy an American car. Thanks for the good questions and thanks especially to Goolsbee for the interesting answers.
We recently introduced you to Captain Steve, an airline pilot for a major U.S. carrier, who will be regularly fielding your questions about any and all aspects of air travel. But before we get to that, Captain Steve had something he wanted to say about the overall state of the industry, and particularly how pilots fit in — or don’t.
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