I sometimes do wear a wig and too much eye makeup, but that’s not what I had in mind. The answer to the question is that people are scalping tickets to both of our performances. There was uproar recently about the steep prices resellers were getting for her concert tickets — sometimes upwards of $2,000. My venue is a little . . .
Album sales hit new lows in 2007. (Earlier) New InTrade markets predict the effects candidates may have on economic matters. Is this pollster luckier than everyone, or just better? Study shows monkeys may “pay” for sex. (Earlier)
The Education Life supplement in yesterday’s Times included an intriguing article simply called “Data” and subtitled “Law and Order.” It listed crime statistics for roughly 120 urban college campuses across the country. A brief introduction warned that the statistics could easily be — well, junk: With so many ways to consider and report crime, statistics are inconclusive. But by federal . . .
Dr. Gretchen Berland, an assistant professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and former documentary filmmaker, writes in the New England Journal of Medicine of an extraordinary experiment she has conducted over the past 10 years. It involved giving videocameras to people in wheelchairs, and asking them to document their daily lives (samples of the videos can be seen . . .
We’ve been running lots of Q&As of late, with you, the readers, asking the questions. A fellow named Thomas Whitaker recently wrote us to suggest that we submit to a Q&A ourselves. This seemed like a sensible suggestion. We did a bunch of Q&As back when the book came out (see here and here and here, and these FAQs), but . . .
45 percent of Chicago doctors recommend placebos, survey says. What’s the secret to China’s economic success? “Five Myths About How Americans Vote.” Which science topics are the presidential candidates dodging?
There’s been some strange activity lately on this blog. It concerns a post that was written more than a year ago, on Dec. 8, 2006. In the three days after the post was published, it received 32 reader comments, which is pretty typical. Then the comments ceased. This, too, is typical: people generally no longer comment on a post that’s . . .
California’s environmental policy has made headlines recently, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announcing that he plans to sue the federal government over its refusal to let the state enact its own plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and instead adopt a more lax federal plan. While the E.P.A.’s regulation promises to increase fuel efficiency standards by 40 percent come 2020, the . . .
Just how liberal are college professors? Becker and Posner discuss. Study shows hospital staffs lag in responding to cardiac arrests. Most free drug samples go to the wealthy and insured. Indian prime minister pledges a “quantum jump” in science education.
Here’s the second installment from our newest guest poster, Justin Wolfers. His first post can be found here. This weekend is the annual gabfest of the American Economic Association, running in New Orleans from Thursday through Sunday. It’s an econ-stravaganza, with dozens of parallel sessions running on just about every topic (the full program is here). For the past few . . .
My daughter Olivia, who is seven, proudly calls herself a scientist. Mostly what that means is that she likes to break things open and see what’s inside. Seeing a fantastic series of scientific experiments done as part of a holiday lecture put on by the University of Chicago Physics Department more or less confirmed her definition of science. In “Physics . . .
Is the “cropland bubble” bursting? New search engine uses ranking algorithm to reduce spam. (Earlier) Cardiac arrest fatalities may provide a new kidney source. (Earlier) Students gather data by sniffing livestock manure. (Earlier)
… just one of the choice quotes delivered by my father in this informative article about his life’s work.
Most people, given the opportunity, would like to have a say in what other people earn. If someone is nice to me, throw a little extra Christmas bonus their way. If they are rude and surly, how about a 3 percent pay cut? So I find it interesting that the Baseball Writers of America (BBWAA) recently approved a rule which . . .
The top 10 science and technology stories of 2007. Can scientists replace sleep with a drug? The key to raising gifted kids: don’t tell them they’re gifted. (Earlier) Libraries see record attendance, computer use from “Generation Y.” (Earlier)
The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that more and more non-Jews are calling in the mohel, or ritual circumciser, to have their sons circumcised. The reasons for this include a desire for cleanliness (mohels operate outside of hospitals) and adding a bit of spiritual pizazz, even if the pizazz comes from outside a family’s own religious tradition. An excerpt: Nearly . . .
According to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of housing prices, home prices have fallen by about 6 percent in the United States on average over the last twelve months. By my rough calculations, that means that home owners have lost about $720 billion in wealth as a consequence. That is about $2,400 for every person in America, and $18,000 for the average . . .
In recent days, we’ve introduced a pair of regular guest bloggers, Ian Ayres and Sudhir Venkatesh. We are happy and proud to now introduce a third, a terrific addition and no stranger to readers of this blog: Justin Wolfers, an economist at Wharton and a great explorer of everything from racial bias in N.B.A. refereeing to the decline in women’s . . .
We use our eyes to see, so it seems logical to conjecture that if you didn’t have eyes, you couldn’t see. What I love about science is that these sorts of limiting beliefs routinely get blasted out of the water. A fascinating series of experiments points out that we see with our brains, not our eyes. Consequently, you can substitute . . .
I have blogged repeatedly about the propensity of the media to distort official crime reports to make it appear as if things are getting inexorably worse. (You can see past examples here, here, and here.) Crime has more or less been treading water in the United States over the last few years, although you would never know it from the . . .
A financial markets outlook for 2008. The newest trend in Romanian business: eBay scams. (Earlier) What would Earth look like to aliens? Want to keep your Web surfing, e-mail and IMs private? Here’s how.
That’s the assertion made by James Heckman and Paul LaFontaine in a new working paper called “The American High School Graduation Rate: Trends and Levels.” Here is their abstract: This paper uses multiple data sources and a unified methodology to estimate the trends and levels of the U.S. high school graduation rate. Correcting for important biases that plague previous calculations, . . .
Please say hello to a new guest blogger, Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia. You may remember him as the grad student who embedded himself with a Chicago crack gang, which we wrote about in “Freakonomics,” and you may also remember this blog Q&A. On Jan. 10, Venkatesh will publish a memoir about his research, . . .
A friend of mine went through Naval Officer Candidate School a while back, and I recently stumbled upon an old e-mail he’d sent me that included the following: It has been eight weeks, and my training class is about to become the “senior class on deck,” which means that we are responsible for running the junior classes. It also means . . .
The art and practice of political data mining. (Hat tip: Chris Masse) CalTech scientist works to develop more efficient, less costly fuel cell. (Earlier) Spam made up 90% of e-mails delivered to big companies in November. (Earlier) LeverageCard.com offers increased options for gift card recipients. (Earlier)
The Harvard economist (and blogger) Greg Mankiw has written an excellent primer on the Federal Reserve’s power to influence the economy, making much of the the fact that the Fed is politically independent and can therefore afford to ignore public sentiment more than politicians can. His piece got me thinking about what a lot of people have been thinking for . . .
Here’s the latest guest post from Yale economist and law professor Ian Ayres. Here are Ayres’s past posts and here is a recent discussion of standardized tests. A recent article in the Times trumpeted the results of a report that had just been released by the Educational Testing Service (E.T.S.). The E.T.S. researchers used four variables that are beyond the . . .
This is the time of year when a lot of people give to charity, in part because of the holidays and in part because of year-end tax considerations. Below you will find a few loosely connected observations about charity and then, at the end, some questions for all of you. It is probably not fair that I am not answering . . .
For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in other words, businesses don’t run . . .
E.P.A. denies states’ requests to set their own emissions standards. (Earlier) Study indicates that insured cancer patients have better chance of survival. The one place where the Patriots lose: the point spread. Sellers offered extra incentives to buy in stagnating home market.