In case anyone is interested, you can read it here. Our motion to dismiss has been filed and the judge is currently considering the arguments.
There is a website — one that is so stupid I feel embarrassed to even give it free publicity — called www.whotohate.com. The idea behind the site is you pay them five bucks, write in the name of someone you hate, and the website writes to the person telling them that there is someone who hates them. I got one . . .
I went to the Wisconsin Dells as a kid. It was the hokiest sort of tourist trap you could ever imagine. All those same places I went to as a kid (Fairytale Garden, the Wonder Spot, etc.) are still there, almost unchanged. In the ensuing 30 years, what has changed are water parks. Now, everywhere you look there are enormous . . .
I was up with my family at the Wisconsin Dells last week. The water park we were staying at offered hair braiding for children on the following price schedule: 3 braids: $10. 6 braids: $22. Each additional braid: $4. This is a very unusual pricing schedule, to say the least. Rarely do you see a product priced so that each . . .
My friends over at Tradesports are catching some heat. Tradesports is an online prediction market that allows you to make bets on all sorts of unusual outcomes. A controversy is brewing, though, over the outcome of a contract on whether North Korea would have a missile launch before July 31. Reading the newspapers, you might think that North Korea did . . .
If you go to google images and type the word “children,” the first image that comes up is this picture of my kids. (I don’t routinely type the word “children” into google images…I only discovered this when a woman who works for Sesame Street e-mailed me asking if she could use the picture for a project she is doing.)
My son Nicholas is three and hopes to be a Power Ranger when he grows up. Thanks to Tivo, we are able to tape every single showing of Power Rangers (for all Dubner’s critiques of Wikipedia, it sure is a good place to learn about Power Rangers). In various incarnations, the show has been on for more than a decade. . . .
Not long ago we wrote about organ donation and how the current shortages could likely be solved if we let the market work. The most obvious way to accomplish this is by paying organ donors. Governments have been quite hostile to this idea around the globe. On Monday, Israel took some halting steps in this direction. As reported in a . . .
As reported by the BBC, Malaysia has banned “unsuitable” first names. An excerpt from the article: Parents will not be able to call their babies after animals, insects, fruit, vegetables or colours. Numbers are also not allowed, so little James Bonds cannot flaunt their 007 status on their ID cards. Other restrictions stop parents giving children royal or honorary titles . . .
I personally was far too pampered to deliver newspapers as a kid, but many other people I know (like my wife Jeannette) did deliver newspapers growing up. Anecdotally, at least, newspaper deliverers are now mostly adults with cars, rather than kids on bikes. Does anyone have any theories as to why? I can think of many possible explanations, but none . . .
If you can’t wait for the polished version on ESPN, here is the rough cut of the final showdown in the World Series of Poker Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. Thanks to Dean Strachan for filming and posting the video.
A few months ago, after someone claimed I was a celebrity, I offered to test that hypothesis by giving $100 to anyone who identified me spontaneously over the next 30 days. (In the deal I excluded the U of C campus area, because people know me there just because I am a professor.) It was an easy bet to make, . . .
Only in Vegas can you, on one day’s notice, get 64 people to put up $500 each to compete in a Rock, Paper, Scissors contest. Phil Gordon was responsible for the tournament. Phil is a great poker player, perhaps an even better poker author, and one of the most kind and generous people I have ever met. The tournament raised . . .
What group of people do you think is more likely to have heard of Freakonomics, top bridge players or top poker players? Far and away it is bridge players. We ran some experiments at a big bridge tournament last week and used the Freakonomics name to help recruit volunteers. Many of the bridge players had heard of or read the . . .
It seems that Stephen Dubner and Kevin Federline (Britney Spears’s husband) find themselves at odds over one of the great crises of the day. Not the Middle East or Social Security, but rather, whether the government should keep making new pennies. Dubner better be careful or Federline’s next rap will be dissin’ him.
I loathe going on TV for so many different reasons. First, doing a TV interview can take the better part of a day and in the end you are lucky if there is one minute of on-air time. Second, it is a terrible medium for expressing any idea with subtlety and complexity. It is all about sound bytes, whether or . . .
The answer, apparently, depends greatly on where you are in the hotel. In the lobby, a one-day pass to use their wireless internet connection costs $10.95. Not cheap, but standard for nice hotels. Down in the main ballroom, however, the story is very different. A one-day pass to the internet there costs $300! Economists have a name for this: price . . .
A headline on the DrudgeReport reads “13 Days, 14 Homicides in D.C.” and links to a Washington Post story on the subject. It shows just how far we have come in reducing crime when this sort of crime spree is headline news. Washington, DC averaged well more than one homicide a day in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It . . .
I might have thought the answer to that question was “nothing,” but it seems I would have been wrong. Tony Vallencourt has an interesting post on his econball blog. He tallies the astrological sign of members of the U.S. House of Representatives. This exercise is inspired by the work of Anders Ericsson and others; they find that month of birth . . .
I’m going to have a team of researchers in Las Vegas running some experiments on decision-making by poker players. We are looking for serious poker players who (a) will be in Las Vegas between July 21 and July 27, (b) want to make a little money and get a signed copy of Freakonomics, (c) read about themselves in the sequel . . .
After I graduated from college, I took a job in strategy consulting at a small firm called Corporate Decisions, Inc. The guy who had the desk next to mine could hardly have been more different than me. He was an athletic, good looking, Dartmouth frat boy. When he shook my hand that first time, he practically broke it in half. . . .
So I’m playing poker online tonight and one of the players at my table has the moniker “NolimitFreak.” On one of the first hands he plays, on the final round of betting I make a big bet, he raises me, I reraise him “all in,” and he folds. He then proceeds to call me a “turd” in the area where . . .
A few days back some dastardly Coca-Cola employees got nabbed trying to sell corporate secrets to Pepsi. Pepsi turned the bad guys in and cooperated in the sting operation. Did the executives at Pepsi give up the chance to make huge profits at Coke’s expense in order to “do the right thing?” I had lunch with my friend and colleague . . .
I have long been a fan of the folks at www.tradesports.com and www.intrade.com. They brought a whole new approach to sports gambling. Instead of acting as a bookie and charging a vig, tradesports and intrade are clearinghouses. They provide a platform for bettors to come together and make deals amongst themselves. Since tradesports and intrade aren’t taking any position on . . .
Both Dubner and the folks at Party Poker think so. Although supposedly illegal for Americans, online poker and sports betting is a huge business. At any given time, as many as 100,000 people are playing poker at Party Poker. More than half of these are Americans. Party Poker is successful for much the same reason that eBay is. Most internet . . .
Here is something that I don’t quite know how to interpret. In the Duke lacrosse sexual assault case, the police made the 46 players come down to the police station to have their pictures taken. Then these 46 pictures were shown to the woman who has accused the lacrosse players of sexually assaulting her. She was shown the pictures one-by-one. . . .
As a child, I first realized how dumb birds must be when I saw my first scarecrow. How could the birds’ behavior be so radically affected by something that is obviously fake? Now a new study suggests that humans (at least psychology professors) don’t behave much differently. From the writeup about the article: Melissa Bateson and colleagues at Newcastle University, . . .
The bookies seem to think so. From an AP article: “British media said up to $546,000 of wagers were placed on No. 89 Carlos Berlocq of Argentina to lose the match Tuesday. He lost 6-1, 6-2, 6-2 to Richard Bloomfield, who is ranked 170 places below him and got into the draw as a wild card.” “London media said the . . .
In my paper with Tim Groseclose and Pierre-Andre Chiappori, we test the predictions of game theory using penalty kicks in soccer. We find that the players’ actions conform very closely to the theoretical ideal. There is one big deviation that we see between what players actually do and what the theory predicts: kickers kick the ball right down the middle . . .
A number of reviewers criticized Freakonomics because it explored issues but stopped short of making broad policy pronouncements. A few months back Louis Uchitelle even wrote an article in the New York Times (available through TimesSelect or by purchase only) about how young economists like me were leaving the politics out of economics. Yesterday, though, I was accurately “accused” of . . .
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