A website called African Signals, the brainchild of Eric Hersman, launched this week. Its goal is to aggregate information about mobile phone and internet connections across Africa. Hersman is also affiliated with Ushahidi, “a website developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.” You can see Hersman’s TED talk on Ushahidi . . .
Quotes Uncovered Here are more quote authors and origins Shapiro’s tracked down recently. Who Said Data Kills? Who Worried About Events? Spelling, Logic, and Frenchmen Fifteen weeks ago, 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 . . .
One of Huan Hsu‘s Chinese coworkers called him “Steve” for months, wondering why Hsu, unlike most other young professionals in mainland China, had yet to pick an English name for himself. Another of Hsu’s friends, who goes by dozens of names depending on the situation, tells him “a name is just a dai hao.” In other words, a code name, . . .
It’s safe to say that macroeconomists haven’t been very popular lately. In fact, many people blame the profession for such sins as failing to predict the housing bubble and encouraging the deregulation of the financial industry. In their new book Animal Spirits, the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller propose a new macroeconomic framework — one that incorporates real human . . .
Barkevious Mingo! The L.S.U. linebacker fended off a late challenge from Iris Macadangdang to be crowned winner of the 2009 Name of the Year competition. Hopefully in 2010 they’ll finally find LemonJello and OrangeJello. [%comments]
Feeling a little guilty about that flight to London last month? No problem — you can offset that trip with credits from a reforestation project in Nicaragua, available at carbonfund.org. The thriving carbon-offset market in the U.S. allows individuals and companies to voluntarily offset their carbon footprints relatively painlessly — just point, click, and pay. If the United States implements . . .
Since we first asked you to send us your Freakonomics-related photos, you’ve responded from all over the world, and with an impressive variety of images, ranging from innovative ways to stop overzealous newspaper deliveries … To signs of hyperinflation: So keep sending your photos here, and, as usual, tell us why they’re Freak-worthy.
A new study analyzes reciprocal attention in blogging. The authors conclude that “the activity of bloggers is found to be related to the size and level of reciprocity within a blogger’s network.” The study also finds that bloggers who don’t participate in reciprocity are punished with a lower number of readers. In other words, the Internet hasn’t remotely damaged the . . .
Well, probably not. But at least one person has lost her job — albeit not an actual full-time, paying job — in a fracas over Freakonomics and other books. A few years back, a school-board member in suburban Chicago named Leslie Pinney wanted to pull nine books from the high school’s approved reading list. Among them were Freakonomics, The Things . . .
Tent cities have been cropping up across the country and around the world. The Times‘ Jim Wilson recently put together this series of photos of tent city life outside Fresno, California. (NOTE: This post originally linked to a different set of photos which the photographer has since requested be removed.) [%comments]
Remarkable facts from a new paper by James Habyarimana and William Jack of the Center for Global Development: The World Health Organization (2004) reported that 1.2 million people died from road traffic injuries in 2002, 90 percent in low- and middle-income countries, about the same number as die of malaria. In addition, between 20 and 50 million people are estimated . . .
Dan Hamermesh wrote recently that he doesn’t feel sorry for would-be retirees who lost their savings by bad asset allocation. Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff thinks people aren’t capable of predicting how much they’ll need to save in the first place. So he has developed a “consumption smoothing” program that helps users maintain stable spending patterns up to and . . .
No less an authority than my brother called my last post on the transportation stimulus package “spectacularly uninformative.” Fortunately (or unfortunately), this shows I got my message across; I feel pretty uninformed about the transportation program and perhaps you do too. Photo: Artem Finland One problem is that, paradoxically, a major strength of the way we make transportation policy can . . .
We’ve been watching the wandering meaning of the word “piracy” over the last few weeks, as it stretches and shrinks to accommodate the modern world. The re-emergence of honest-to-goodness sea piracy shares headline space with the high-profile trial of Swedish internet pirates and the debate over just what to call “digital piracy.” The Wall Street Journal reports that another group . . .
Once again, Catherine Rampell has an interesting Economix post (“Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage”) describing a new empirical analysis arguing that “jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women.” Why? [M]en had much to lose by enfranchising women. … The relative scarcity of women in the West may have “reduced the political . . .
If going to the library is a hassle and you don’t want to pay $20 for a children’s book, plop your kids in front of this website, which offers children’s stories for free. The stories are all original and written by the site’s proprietors, so you won’t find certain books there — but they may be the perfect therapy for . . .
It is always interesting to watch what happens when the media latches onto a given issue and then, as the reality on the ground evolves — sometimes radically — the media fails to catch up to, or even monitor, the changes. This means the public is stuck with an outdated version of conventional wisdom which, even if it were true . . .
Photo: DeusXFlorida Coke has a new ad that declares that only two people know Coke’s secret formula, and if something happened to one of them, the formula would be lost forever. It then goes on to talk, facetiously, about all the terrible things that would happen to the world if something bad happened to one of the two men and . . .
We’ve told you about recession music, recession comfort, and depression cooking. Now: recession gadgetry? Last Year’s Model is a site encouraging users to reject disposable culture by hanging on to their good old gadgets as long as possible. It’s good for the pocketbook and good for the environment. We’ve got a 2004 model-year iPod whirring around the Freakonomics office. Is . . .
I’ve never twittered and never sold or bought on eBay. To me the technology and the hassle of the latter are daunting. I came across a franchise chain, iSold It, which solves the fact that I’m eBay-challenged. Drop off your item at an iSold It store and they handle auctioning it on eBay and sending it to the lucky buyer. . . .
Not long ago, we linked to a site called New Math, whose proprietor is named Craig Damrauer. We liked Craig’s work so much that we asked if he felt like contributing new pieces to this blog occasionally. We are happy to say that he agreed. Craig is, in his own words, “a writer and artist living in Brooklyn with my . . .
Some on Wall Street think of themselves as the fighter jocks of American capitalism. Justin Fox thinks they’re more like bumper car drivers, “spending more time tangling with each other than doing anything useful.” Either way, now that the market has tanked and the public has turned on bankers, many on the Street find themselves switching to Plan B. [%comments]
The Emanuel Brothers — Rahm, Zeke, and Ari — are famously high achievers, one in politics, one in entertainment, and one in medicine (although the doctor has recently crossed over into politics as well). But there’s another family of high achievers, also from Chicago, that is giving them some competition: the Serenos. Of the six grown children, five are prominent . . .
If deliberately practicing your way to success seems like a lot of work, there’s always the prescription drug route. In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the increasing use of cognitive-enhancement drugs. Tests have indicated that the drugs improve concentration but their effect on abstract thought and creativity is unclear. As one scientist put it, “I’m a little concerned that . . .
Congratulations to Emmanuel Saez, winner of this year’s John Bates Clark medal given to the most influential economist under the age of 40 by the American Economic Association. Emmanuel’s work focuses on issues of inequality and taxation. He has made both theoretical and empirical contributions. I remember vividly the first time I met Emmanuel. I think it was 1998. I . . .
The paparazzi are like 18th-century pirates in that it’s hard to understand and control them until you realize that they’re rational, economic actors. The Obama administration seems to understand this. The White House has been strategically releasing photos of the Obamas in an attempt to drive down the value of paparazzi shots. The avalanche of Obama photos recently released to . . .
You’ve probably already forgotten about Conficker, the computer worm, since it declined to wreak havoc as feared on April 1. Rest assured, Conficker has not forgotten about you. It’s currently operating on millions of computers around the world, and it’s still spreading and changing. Nobody knows what it will do next. As Bruce Schneier points out, the worm isn’t any . . .
In a recent post, I extolled the virtues of Robert Cialdini‘s Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. The book is wonderfully designed in 50 short chapters to describe the results of 50 different randomized field experiments. The format of, say, 1,800 words per chapter is a bit unusual. But I found it a great way to catch up . . .
Zimbabwe’s currency has been essentially worthless in-country for months. Now the Zimbabwe dollar is officially worth more on eBay, where collectors can snap up a few trillion-dollar notes for less than $25. Technically, a currency exchange would give you 37 million Zimbabwe dollars for every U.S. dollar, but since Zimbabwe’s government recently suspended its currency altogether, you probably shouldn’t bother. . . .
Levitt‘s cheap wine advocacy may have met its match. To protest the falling price of wine, a French group calling itself the Regional Union for Viticultural Action has attacked French supermarkets in the past. Now it has adopted a more supply-side approach: the wine militants recently broke into a cooperative in the south of France, emptying vats of wine containing . . .