The FREAK-est Links
What does the first letter of your name say about you? The new wave of thought-operated technology. Is “iTV” the future of television? (Earlier) Marc Chandler lectures on patterns in global currency.
What does the first letter of your name say about you? The new wave of thought-operated technology. Is “iTV” the future of television? (Earlier) Marc Chandler lectures on patterns in global currency.
Video It is important to never underestimate the power of free — of free anything, it seems. I have been to conferences where the typical attendee makes at least low six figures and yet is willing to stand in line to get his schwag bag. What’s in it? Some suntan lotion, a paperweight, boutique vinegar — it doesn’t really matter. . . .
In the last few years, magazine covers and newspaper front pages have often been dominated by disaster coverage: wildfires in California, hurricanes in the Gulf and elsewhere, and of course the Sept. 11 attacks and their myriad repercussions. (Whether the incidence of such events is higher or coverage is just noisier is a separate question, which is addressed below.) So . . .
The boiler went out in my house last week. We have an archaic steam-driven radiator system, and we knew we were living on borrowed time. It is a good time of year to lose heat. It hasn’t been terribly cold in Chicago, so we’ve managed to keep the temperature in the house around 60 degrees through space heaters and sunlight . . .
17 people indicted for identity theft in New York. (Earlier) Economists and psychologists tackle speed dating. Everything you ever wanted to know about U.S. cities. A foolproof strategy for winning at Monopoly. (Hat tip: BoingBoing)
Jessica Hagy has been sending us “Indexed” posts for a few months now, and has been posting them for much longer on her own blog. Am I the only one who thinks she is inching dangerously close to real economics? Behold her latest, “Movin’ on Up” and “Getting Stuck There”:
Of all places, San Francisco must be one of the worst in which to try a “following the falafel” strategy for catching terrorists. Still, I like the creativity. (Hat tip: Alon Nir.)
Last week, we ran a few excerpts from the new book The Secret History of the War on Cancer and and solicited your questions for its author, Devra Davis. I found her answers to be extraordinarily informative, and hope you do too. According to Davis, the economics of cancer prevention (not treatment) seem to be improving hard and fast, which . . .
Google directions soon to be available at gas pumps. Pet rental business thrives in New York. The economics of newspaper Web sites: do subscription models beat advertising models? What’s the all-time record high for oil prices?
The current conventional wisdom is that the rise of Internet video may mean the end of television as we know it — a view that extends to the music industry as well, as we’ve seen before. Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against the Google-owned YouTube continues to lumber on, and the TV writers’ strike has led to speculation that . . .
Pretend you work at a mid-size advertising agency. Would you rather … 1. Be arrested for minor embezzlement and get fired? 2. Be arrested for prostitution (or, more likely, solicitation thereof) and get fired? Keep in mind that solicitation and embezzlement of under $1,000 are both class A misdemeanors in New York, with prison time of up to a year . . .
Economist Alan Krueger‘s excellent work on terrorism — which we’ve discussed before — comes to the conclusion that suicide bombers tend to be surprisingly well-educated. They are not generally the poorest of the poor; in fact, they are more likely to be middle class members of society. Now it turns out that further support for Krueger’s assertions is coming from . . .
As much as I liked Penn & Teller, there was no levitation involved when I recently saw their show. This guy, however, more than makes up for it. His name is Wouter Bijdendijk and yes, that is the White House in the background. I guess he wasn’t able to get inside, unlike someone we know. Can anyone explain how he . . .
How well has the Radiohead experiment fared? (Earlier) Employers adopting personality tests to avoid “hiring jerks”. A “How To” for corporate prediction markets. Are we more likely to vote for candidates we perceive as being “like us”?
Today, you’ll recall, is Election Day. Which means that one year from now, we will be electing a new president (as if it really matters). The race is starting to heat up, as candidates shed their friendly veneers and start getting nasty with their rivals. (For what it’s worth, on the Republican side, Ron Paul — whom we’ve discussed before . . .
I spent the morning in the White House, attending the ceremony recognizing this year’s winners of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gary Becker was one of the honorees, and he was kind enough to let me tag along as a member of his entourage. Becker became only the second person to win both the Nobel Prize in economics and the . . .
Video Today is Election Day, albeit a quiet one. There isn’t much at stake in New York. There’s more action in New Jersey, though voter turnout is expected to be low, as it is in California. The irony is that the typical voter is more likely to have an impact in a smaller election than in a larger one, but . . .
PCs on the downswing in Japan. Can brain atrophies among the elderly lead to unintended racist views? The economics of death in the U.S. The Top 10 “wackiest” science experiments.
An e-mail just turned up in my in-box. It was clearly selling something, and the text ended with the following thoughtful note: Please consider the environment — do you really need to print this e-mail? And what, you ask, was the e-mail selling? Private jet travel. Like the man said: please consider the environment.
In 1994, Anu Garg, a computer science graduate student in Ohio, decided to pick a daily word, study its origins, and share his findings with his fellow students. The result was Wordsmith.org, which today has more than 650,000 readers in 200 countries. Over the past 13 years, Garg has shared thousands of words with fellow linguaphiles, including illeist (someone who . . .
Economist Roland Fryer has done research on “acting white,” i.e. the phenomenon by which black children who excel academically are stigmatized by their peers. Recently, he was in a New York City school and asked some of the seventh graders he was talking to whether they had ever heard the phrase “acting white.” The kids laughed at him and said, . . .
Will a TV writers’ strike send more viewers to the Web? Do conservatives eat sushi? A culinary breakdown An analysis of “pay what you want” music donations (Earlier) AFL team offers fans a deal: they make the playoffs, or season tickets are free (Earlier)
Video This is a subject we wrote about in Freakonomics, based on a really interesting paper called “What Makes You Click?” by Günter J. Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu, and Dan Ariely. The story we told in the book was an aggregate one, based on thousands of online daters’ data. But we thought it would make sense to go out on the . . .
Not long ago, Levitt wrote about a Craigslist posting in which a woman solicited advice in marrying a man who made more than $500,000 a year. That posting eventually made the international media rounds, from the Times to the BBC News to Scientific American. But journalists have yet to jump on the wealth of posts like the following, posted in . . .
Evidence that any publicity can be good publicity: Reading this story about an E. coli outbreak in the pepperoni on Totino’s pizzas reminded me of my 20-year love affair with Totino’s. Why haven’t I been eating them lately? I will have to get some immediately. Maybe I’ll start with the sausage pizza, though.
A couple of years ago, we wrote a column about crack cocaine, which ended with a discussion of the federal sentencing guidelines for crack vs. powder cocaine: This disparity has often been called racist since it disproportionately imprisons blacks. In fact, the law probably made sense at the time, when a gram of crack did have far more devastating social . . .
Can a future of Internet gridlock be avoided? Corporate prediction markets conference kicks off in Kansas City, Mo. A breakdown of Halloween spending. Expert debunks myths about current U.S. wages and productivity.
With the current installment of Indexed, Jessica Hagy wanders firmly into Freakonomics territory — the economics and politics of oil and of fear. She calls this pairing “Slippery and Magnetic.” (Here are her past posts.) Is breast cancer a fatal disease that should be vigorously prevented and treated? Of course. But it is a good example of a “cause” disease . . .
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, . . .
I hadn’t worn a Halloween costume in many years until last night, when my kids — Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and a man-eating shark, respectively — encouraged me to do so. I tried to think of something that would take almost no time, effort, or money. The idea came to me in a flash. With my kids, I . . .