Fun With WolframAlpha
The jury’s still out on whether WolframAlpha.com will turn into a tool that is useful to solve real world computational problems, but it certainly is fun to play with.
The jury’s still out on whether WolframAlpha.com will turn into a tool that is useful to solve real world computational problems, but it certainly is fun to play with.
There’s interesting research waiting to be done explaining just why some countries have been hit harder by the global financial crisis than others. For now, here’s an interesting observation from my former boss at the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glenn Stevens
Say the mounting rate of escalator injuries spooks you into taking an elevator instead. Even if a glitch doesn’t leave you trapped alone in that metal box for forty hours, you’re still captive, for a short while, in a unique laboratory for human psychology. Throw another passenger or two into the mix, and things get really interesting. …
I wish I had more details, and/or I wish I knew how true this story may be. But the point is that, like cheating schoolteachers or colluding sumo wrestlers, the people who steal money from banks sometimes leave telltale patterns — whether it’s a lack of vacation or a string of Thursdays — that point the finger right at them.
Washington, D.C., is underlaced by miles of fiber optic cables that carry information for the nation’s intelligence agencies. The exact locations of these cables are kept secret so that terrorists and other enemy agents can’t snip the lines. The secrecy has indeed kept the cables safe from terrorists. Instead, the danger comes from well-meaning construction crews, who occasionally sever these sensitive conduits during the course of an innocuous building project. That’s when the men in the black SUV’s show up.
YouTube may become the digital generation’s replacement for MTV, reports NPR’s All Things Considered, as musical artists use it as a cheaper way to be discovered, promote their albums, and post music videos that would never have made the cut at MTV. Getting a video noticed on YouTube, meanwhile, requires a different set of “tricks” than MTV, which may produce a new generation of videos that forgo bling and fancy production for dance crazes and badly shot paparazzi videos.
A while back I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Here is the latest installment of Craig Damrauer‘s “New Math.” Earlier posts can be found here, and his own site here.
For those who are still too scared to invest in the stock market, you can buy some imaginary stock at UpDown, a “practice investing” site that simulates the stock market and lists real-life companies without meting out real-life consequences.
I’ve been eating a lot of kiwis lately. At the corner deli near my home, I can buy three for $1. They are delicious. Unless the stickers are lying, they come from New Zealand. At 33 cents apiece, a New Zealand kiwi costs less than the price of mailing a letter to the East Side. (And believe me, I consider a first-class stamp one of the greatest bargains ever.) How on earth can it cost so little to grow, pick, pack, and ship a piece of fruit across the world?
Latvia has been particularly devastated by the economic crisis. The Latvian Blondes Association recently staged a “Blonde Weekend,” complete with a 500-woman parade, in the hopes of raising the nation’s spirits.
Levitt was floored by the documentary Smile Pinki, about two children in India who receive free surgery to repair their cleft lips. The documentary, which won an Oscar last year, gets its television premier tonight on HBO at 7 p.m. You can watch the trailer, here.
Good news: people who still have jobs are having a much easier time driving to work. Traffic congestion is down as much as 30 percent in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metro areas. In Washington, D.C., famous for gridlock of all kinds, traffic has fallen 24 percent during rush hour. San Francisco saw travel times fall 12 percent this . . .
Economists spend immense amounts of time ranking journals, partly to decide on monetary and non-monetary professional rewards, partly as pure gossip. There is some imperfect agreement on rankings.
Given that agreement, how should we credit coauthored publications (the overwhelming majority of papers)?
Surely by now you have some questions about Twitter, no?
Few other phenomena have entered the public consciousness so quickly and brashly, to be so rabidly embraced and so grievously disparaged at the same time….
Ulet Ifansasti’s stunning photographs depict working conditions at a primitive sulfur mining site in East Java, Indonesia. The miners use steel bars to hack off chunks of pure sulfur and carry loads of 100 to 200 pounds to the weighing station, making several trips a day. Daily pay is approximately $5.00.
In a reasonably interesting Guardian article Larry Elliott argues that the macroeconomists of yesteryear were superstars, but the current crop have lost sight of what macroeconomics is supposed to be about: describing the macroeconomy, not writing down fancy mathematical models.
Even in the days of Woodward and Bernstein, writes Mark Kemp in Paste magazine, print journalism “wasn’t ever entirely noble” — but today, it’s “crumbling faster than week-old bread.” With “fond memories” of what the newspaper industry once was, and hope that it has a future, Kemp put together a list of the top 10 songs about newspapers and journalism.
Vanity Fair and Bloomberg hosted an economic panel last week featuring Meredith Whitney, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Olivier Sarkozy, Austan Goolsbee, and Jack Welch. The heavyweight panelists debated unions, the Obama administration’s stimulus package, health care, and the banking system.
Daniel Markovits and I have a new piece in Slate arguing that sellers could use a fairly simple escrow agreement to provide buyers with price protection.
Last week, I offered up a quiz asking what Gary Becker thought the only purpose of economics was. His answer was so surprising to me, that just to make sure I had it right, I asked him again after I made the post.
He confirmed his answer, and said that it is the same answer he would have given 50 years ago when he started studying economics.
Scientists and engineers are racing to develop technologies that will improve fuel economy and perhaps replace gasoline altogether. This is certainly to be applauded. But there may be an easier and more effective way to help wean ourselves off foreign oil and fight global warming. Interestingly, it involves not 21st-century technology but 28th-century technology — as in 28th-century B.C.E.
What’s better, it will enable us to shed the pounds with comparatively little diet or exercise. We can improve fuel economy not through the onerous task of developing next-generation lithium-ion batteries but simply by getting people behind the wheels of S.U.V.’s. How?
You know that sensation when you’re reading an article in your morning newspaper and, about three grafs in, you start imagining the movie version and you can practically hear the Hollywood studios scrambling to get hold of the writer and the subject in order to lock up their life rights?
The problem of children used as soldiers has been gaining visibility since, among other things, former child soldier Ishmael Beah published his memoir. But the image of the child soldier as a young African boy with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder isn’t as descriptive of the problem as you might think.
New traffic signs have appeared on the drive to my son’s school that perplex me and have me thinking of John C. Calhoon.
The Cardsofchange website posts photos of revamped business cards sent in by the recently laid-off. The cards, most of which are marked up in pen or marker, reflect what each person has done since losing his or her job.
While no longer relevant today, one might think that raising the price of marriage licenses could have the beneficial effect of deterring spur-of-the-moment marriages. Of course, like so many restrictions, it might also have a negative unintended consequence: it might increase the number of out-of-wedlock births.
A few days back I wrote a post claiming that “for all the work that goes into the Human Development Index, it just doesn’t tell you much that you wouldn’t learn from simple comparisons of G.D.P. per capita.” Subsequently Francisco Rodriguez, who heads research at the UN Human Development Report Office touched base to tell me that he thought I hadn’t told the whole story. Francisco is a terrific macroeconomist (in fact, he was the TA when I took my graduate macro classes at Harvard), and so he kindly agreed to write a guest post filling in the missing pieces.
David Warsh reflects on the advances of auction technology and market design since the first high-tech auction was held by the Federal Communications Commission in 1994. Warsh points out that despite the recent growth of auctions in private markets and the well-established benefits of auctions, industry continues to vigorously oppose government auctions. Auctions of landing slots at New York airports, toxic bank assets, and carbon emission permits have all been opposed by industry groups precisely because of their price-discovering power. Warsh, however, is hopeful about the future. “As principles of market design become more thoroughly articulated and widely understood,” he writes, “the sphere of governmental discretion will shrink.”
Should we get rid of physical cash in favor of all-digital currency? David Wolman thinks so.