Devra Davis knows a few things about cancer. The director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and the former director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the National Academy of Sciences, she has spent her career researching, documenting, and advising about the disease. In the preface of her new book, . . .
(Photo: Scott Adams) Last week, we solicited your questions for Dilbert creator and author Scott Adams. Here are his answers. They are great, and so were your questions; thanks to Scott and thanks to you. Here’s what I found most interesting: 1. From his answers, Scott Adams would appear to be a poster boy (poster man?) for the Anders Ericsson . . .
I have a favorite thought exercise: look at an issue that’s important, complex, and interesting — something like healthcare, education, or electoral politics — and pretend that you could rebuild the system from scratch, without the convoluted histories and incentives that currently exist. What would the new system look like? How differently would you think about key issues if there . . .
Some Red Sox fans are doubly happy this week: not only did their team win a World Series, but they also get a rebate on the furniture they bought during a special Red Sox incentive deal last spring. Hopefully none of them got a brown couch whose color is described, on its tag, with the use of the n-word. That’s . . .
Video It is fairly well known by now that Levitt has more than a passing interest in poker, and he’s occasionally shown some promise. (His blackjack skills, meanwhile, are subject to debate.) It is also well-established that, as a parent, he’s less interested in reading a standard bedtime story than in teaching his kids to think creatively and strategically — . . .
That’s the question asked by the Wharton economists Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko. But they are not talking about national political parties. In that realm, party affiliation has indeed been shown to have a strong effect on legislation and policy. No, Ferreira and Gyourko are interested in whether party affiliation matters on the local level — and their answer, essentially, . . .
(Photo: Scott Adams) Although I’ve never been a regular reader of Dilbert — the silly newspapers I read most regularly, the Times and the Wall Street Journal, don’t have the good sense to run comics — I am a huge fan of Dilbert creator Scott Adams, thanks to his extraordinarily good blog. After studying economics at Hartwick College, Adams took . . .
In almost all countries, women are more likely to be obese than men. The economists Anne Case and Alicia Menendez set out to learn why, using data collected from a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa. Here’s what they determined: 1. “Women who were nutritionally deprived as children are significantly more likely to be obese as adults, while men . . .
For those of you who love prediction markets (a variety of which we’ve written about in the past), there’s a new site that looks to be as vast, inclusive, and user-friendly as anything I’ve seen: Predictify. You can wager on standing bets (who will be the Yankees’ next manager, e.g.) or “tap collective wisdom” (I hope they’re paying Jim Surowiecki . . .
Jamie Hyneman (left) and Adam Savage; photo: Discovery Channel. Last week, we solicited your questions for MythBusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. You came up with more questions for them than for any previous Q&A — which connotes, among other things, how interesting their TV show is. Here are their answers. I think you will agree that their answers, even . . .
Video For the past couple of months, we’ve been regularly posting short FREAK-TV videos, made by resident young genius Nick Graham, in a box on the right-hand column of our home page. The problem was that the video itself couldn’t be housed within a blog post, so you had to scramble over to the right-hand column to watch the video . . .
Whenever I see a poker tournament on TV or wander through a casino, I am always struck by a particular absence: there seem to be very few Indian-Americans playing poker. Considering that there are so many Indians of poker age in this country who thrive in finance, computer science, engineering, and other fields that incorporate math, probability, risk, etc. — . . .
We’ve blogged in the past about the Undercover Black Man blog and its regular feature called Misidentified Black Person of the Week. Last week, I had the singular good (bad?) fortune to come across two instances of misidentification, in two different newspapers, within about 5 minutes of each other. The first was in a USA Today article about New York . . .
You may remember Paul Feldman as the Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics. You may also remember that he was an economist before he got into bagels, with an interest in agricultural, medical, and military issues. He recently wrote to us about an environmental issue he’s been looking into: the abundance of underground coal fires in abandoned mines and . . .
Last week, I requested your suggestions for things to do with 24 spare hours in Las Vegas. This is what’s known as a bleg — i.e., using your blog to beg for something. You were so smart and generous with your suggestions that we’ve decided to try out the bleg as a regular feature, though probably not quite in the . . .
(Photo: Courtesy of The Discovery Channel) It’s time for another Freakonomics Q&A, in which you guys ask the questions. If you haven’t seen it, MythBusters is a really good TV show. Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage make science happen in front of your eyes as they systematically test all sorts of conventional wisdoms to see if they are at all . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret. Here are his answers. Q: What gave you the idea to start this project? A: There are two kinds of secrets. The ones we keep from others and the ones we keep from ourselves. I think I began collecting secrets from strangers as a way to explore . . .
By now we’ve run quite a few Indexed posts by Jessica Hagy, whose online home can be found here. With today’s installment, “Golden Oldies and Glass Ceilings,” I believe she has outdone herself:
My son’s first-grade teacher recently held an open house to tell the parents what their kids will be learning this year, and how they’ll be going about it. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. My favorite part had to do with turning the kids into first-grade (if not first-rate) empiricists. The teacher, a wonderful veteran from Texas named . . .
Have you all played around with Zipskinny? It’s a site that takes data from the 2000 census and lets you search by ZIP code to see demographic information in your area, and compare it to others: income levels, racial breakdown, unemployment, education level, marital status, etc. It’s pretty basic information, little more than a snapshot, but it’s a good snapshot . . .
We have posted in the past about Amazon.com reviewers — their motives, their celebrity, and even some reviewers who seem to game Amazon’s commenting system. Much more recently, I blogged about a strange shakeup in the Amazon best-seller rankings. From the comments that followed, it appears that the Amazon algorithm wasn’t re-jiggered, and that the change had nothing to do . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about airline travel over the past couple of years, covering everything from the future of pilotless airplanes to security snafus to the likelihood of an all-business-class U.S. airline. I don’t think this reflects our overwhelming curiosity about the subject as much as the fact that we both happen to be on planes a lot. That . . .
My travel schedule has me plunking down in Las Vegas this week with 24 hours to kill. I’m looking for advice: what should I do? I’ve been to Vegas probably 8 or 10 times in the last 5 years, but it’s always been for one kind of work or another, and I’ve never had much free time. I often don’t . . .
Online education is seriously on the rise, garnering praise from congressmen and even gaining share among elementary school students. In the realm of higher education, more and more schools are offering online degree programs as an alternative to in-class courses, with some schools creating online-only engineering and law degrees as well as bachelors’. But have you ever wondered who’s on . . .
When someone writes a comment on this blog, it goes into a moderation queue — where, if everything is working right, it gets promptly approved and shows up on the blog. (The moderation process is the Times‘s measure against spam and outrageousness.) Usually it is our site editor, Melissa Lafsky, who moderates the comments, but occasionally I do it too. . . .
That’s really all I have to say. The rest is commentary — i.e., yours.
Courtesy of HarperCollins In 2004, Frank Warren, the owner of a medical information company in Germantown, Md., had an idea for a project. He bought 3,000 blank postcards and wrote two things on the back: his home address and an invitation to anonymously share a secret. He passed the cards out on the street, stuck them in library books, left . . .
Decades of research has convinced just about everyone that a child with a single parent is, on average, more likely to have worse outcomes in life than a child with two parents. These outcomes are seen in a variety of channels: education, income, health, and crime. But what are the mechanisms that actually produce a worse outcome? Exactly how, in . . .
Portal? Or how about: A Confuser… the Screen … the Box … God … HAL … or how about Abra, short for “artificial brain.” These were among the many suggestions you wrote in response to our contest asking readers to rename the computer. Let me say it once again: our readership is awesomely creative, smart, and funny. Thanks for all . . .
Despite Fred Thompson‘s so-so performance in his first presidential debate, and despite his serious lag on InTrade (Giuliani, 39; Romney, 24; Thompson, 19.5), the blogger Noele Kensut is calling for Thompson to win the White House. Why? Because he has blue eyes. Eye color is one trait, Kensut writes at Mijka Samora‘s Reality Journal, that every president since Richard Nixon . . .
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