They were both widely reported this week, although not at ABC News. Gary Langer, who runs polling at ABC and also acts as its data cop, kept both stories off the air after kicking their tires and determining that they weren’t worth reporting. Langer was obviously not sufficiently consulted in the Paris–Hilton– gets-out-of-jail story.
July 5 is National Workaholics Day. If you are reading this at a work computer, you know who you are. For those who feel they have a problem, Workaholics Anonymous has been growing throughout the country — though some chapters are foundering, given that so few people will leave work to make it to meetings.
Mike Bloomberg regularly calls himself a “short, Jewish billionaire from New York” … but how Jewish is he? Here’s an interesting article from the Forward on Bloomberg’s brand of Jewishness in which an acquaintance calls Bloomberg something I’d never heard, but which is a pretty useful acronym: W.A.S.H., or a White Anglo-Saxon Hebrew. If widely adopted, this would give headline . . .
So much for the Hippocratic Oath. The latest terror attacks in the United Kingdom were apparently carried out by doctors. The specifics of the case are admittedly bizarre, but the general principle that acts of terror are often committed by individuals with high levels of education is not at all unusual, a fact I learned from economist Alan Krueger‘s excellent . . .
July 4, in addition to being a bona fide national holiday, is also Tom Sawyer Day in Monroe City, Missouri. The festivities include a 10K run – whether the race is considered work or leisure is for Mark Twain to decide.
Via Wired: In addition to providing potential career-building skills, online gaming may be good for teens, according to a three-year study of adolescent gamers by researchers at Brunel University. The findings showed that teens who gamed could “establish their presence, identity and meaning in ways that might not be accessible or permissible in their everyday lives.” Though there’s also the . . .
I have a new book on sale today, although it’s not really a new book. HarperPerennial has just republished my second book, Confessions of a Hero- Worshiper, which originally came out in 2003. Here’s the Amazon link. It is currently ranked #3,984,523, so there’s nowhere to go but up. The book is a memoir of hero-worship, as the title implies, . . .
A young woman in England wants to sell something unusual to fund her college education. We wrote in Freakonomics about how the increased access to information provided by the Internet has helped consumers overcome the historical information advantage that real estate agents and life insurance salespeople have had. This is one case, however, in which information asymmetry is alive and . . .
A reader named John Grund wrote in to lament the relative unpopularity of Paul McCartney — relative, that is, to John Lennon. Grund bases his assumption on a Google Trends search of the two men’s names. Indeed, aside from the occasional spike, McCartney lags behind his long-deceased mate (Lennon is in red): “You might think that if McCartney ever had . . .
July 3 is Stay Out of the Sun Day, which is being heartily celebrated by all fourteen Americans who aren’t spending the week at the beach. Given that the FDA has yet to offer consumer guidelines concerning sunscreen use and SPF numbers have been found to be misleading, staying indoors is looking more and more promising. You can also send . . .
Every thug in Nigeria needed a machete to help ensure that the general elections in the country were conducted “properly.” Take a guess what happened to the price of machetes after the election, according to Reuters. To be honest, though, I have a hard time believing this is true for the same reason that gun control laws don’t work. Machetes, . . .
A landmark study has been published by Northwestern statistics professor Bruce Spencer offering statistical and empirical data on the accuracy of U.S. jury verdicts. His method involved comparing the decision of a jury with the decision of the judge hearing the case, accomplished by having the judge fill out a questionnaire during jury deliberations. The data pool consisted of 290 . . .
New York Times writer Adam Liptak reports (TimesSelect membership required) that Avvo, a user-generated online rating system that allows clients to rate lawyers like Zagats rates restaurants, is being sued by none other than a group of lawyers with low ratings. More on the politics of online dating: Slate writer Seth Stevenson analyzes an ad campaign by Chemistry.com, a dating . . .
Newspapers have historically been vocal advocates for good environmental policy. So when millions of people start to consume them electronically, on computer screens, instead of on paper that comes from trees and must be thrown away, wouldn’t you think that newspapers would stand up and cheer? Well, not necessarily, since newspapers still make a lot more money selling ads on . . .
Today marks the start of National Fishing Week, conveniently scheduled right after PETA’s “Fish Are Friends Not Food” week.
South African reader David Drew pointed me to this report, stating that one of South Africa’s political parties has called for an investigation of the “extremely suspect” March 3rd South African National Lottery after it yielded a record nine jackpot winners (as opposed to the typical 0-3 winners). The evidence given to support claims that the drawing was rigged is . . .
Here’s a twist in our discussion of specialized online dating: a 26-year-old Australian ad salesman has created a tongue-in-cheek site meant to “weed out” the “ugly, unattractive, desperate fatsos.” Called Darwin Dating, it has since gained popularity and led to several happy matches. Craigslist posters are selling their time this week by offering to stand in line to buy iPhones . . .
I have no idea what effect pornography has on you, but veterinarian Kannikar Nimtragul hopes that a daily dose of X-rated videos will do the trick on his client. (For an economist’s take on the effects of porn, see this earlier blog post.)
I am currently in the process of hiring a new assistant. (Yes, Nicole has been here for more than a year, and I vow at the outset to hold no assistant captive for much longer than that.) I posted an ad on Craig’s List and received roughly 200 resumes. Many of them are impressive. From an anthropological standpoint, nearly every . . .
June 29 is National Ducks and Wetlands Day, offering yet another chance to celebrate the existence of water creatures headed for likely destruction.
Our British publisher, Penguin U.K., continues to delight and astound us with their marketing cojones. How would you like to come across this new poster in the Tube? It is perhaps not surprising that Penguin won a big marketing award this year for their work on Freakonomics. It should be noted that the “3 million copies sold” refers to worldwide . . .
We’ve written about the power of “lucky 8s” to influence stock decisions. Now, with 7/7/07 approaching, LiveScience takes a look at the many people planning major life events for that signal day. In a dose of bad luck, the Japanese man who holds the world record for hot dog eating has severely injured his jaw during a training session for . . .
Our recent New York Times Magazine article on the use of cash-back transactions in home sales produced a mountain of e-mail responses. Among the most interesting was this one from New York attorney Nishani Naidoo, a former real estate lawyer and member of the New York State Bar Association’s Real Property group. He has been distressed by the growth of . . .
Tomorrow marks the iPhone’s official release to the public, in what will be one of the most hyped and anticipated product debuts in history. So far we’ve seen prediction markets making odds on everything from sales figures to the likelihood of spontaneous combustion. But what of the aftermath? Will economists, psychologists, sociologists and other researchers pick up where the tech . . .
An article from the Cox News Service that was published in the State, the daily newspaper of Columbia, S.C., tells the story of a family camping trip gone wrong. You should read the article here. For those who don’t feel like clicking through, I’ll summarize: 1. A suburban Atlanta man named Chris Everhart, a former Marine who now works as . . .
June 28 is Insurance Awareness Day, which works well with tomorrow’s opening of SiCKO.
There’s been plenty of buzz this week over a paper by U.C. Berkeley PhD. student Danah Boyd, who argues that Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantaged than those on MySpace. According to Boyd, the Facebook crowd “tend[s] to come from families who emphasize education and going to college … They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors . . .
Companies like Gallup do surveys all the time on a wide range of issues: Who do you intend to vote for in the next election? What issue are you most worried about? Do you approve of the job George Bush is doing as president? Are you in favor of higher taxes? While we’ve expressed skepticism about the answers people might . . .
There has been a lot of talk, on this blog and everywhere, about the price of gas. Levitt wrote recently in favor of higher gas taxes. I went on Good Morning America last week to talk about factors that do and do not affect gas prices. (Among the events that matter: the International Olympic Committee’s 2001 meeting in Moscow that . . .
Via Marginal Revolution: In his quest to explain the male-female wage gap in business, academia, and other fields, the economist M. Daniele Paserman studied the role that gender plays in competitive environments. Where’d he get his data? From professional tennis matches. Paserman argues that male athletes are generally more adept at handling high-pressure situations. With iPhone frenzy reaching a peak, . . .