We’re working on a Freakonomics Radio episode about pain. One component is the very interesting research by Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier about how colonoscopy patients remember the pain of the procedure, and how that memory can be manipulated (to dim the memory of the pain) so that patients aren’t reluctant to return for their next colonoscopy.
Robert Shiller points to an interesting conflict in economics today: “We are in the midst of a boom in popular economics: books, articles, blogs, public lectures, all followed closely by the general public. Yet this boom in popular economics comes at a time when the general public seems to have lost faith in professional economists – because almost all of us failed to predict, or even warn of, the current economic crisis, the biggest since the Great Depression.”
Here’s an interesting method of combating the hand-hygiene problem discussed at length in SuperFreakonomics: “A doctor enters a hospital room to examine a patient, but neglects to wash her hands. A special badge on her lab coat turns a deep shade of red as wireless computer components in the door, the soap dispenser and near the bed immediately relay information about the unwashed hands. The doctor is busted.”
When my wife saw the cover of the new book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, which was sitting on my bedside table, all she could do was shake her head.
As did its recent acquisition, Northwest Airlines, Delta is doing on-line auctions of seats that must be vacated if the plane is overbooked.
A new Foreign Policy photoessay takes a look at the secretive, Bangkok-based Dhammakaya movement.
Last time, I showed you evidence (courtesy of Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution and Adam Millard-Ball and Lee Schipper of Stanford University) that driving per person seems to have peaked in the 2000s and now may even be dropping. This bucks every travel trend we’ve seen since Henry Ford got to work. What might be slowing down the acceleration in driving?
A new research paper shows that North American economists have lost a lot of market share in research publication to the rest of the world — but mainly to European economists.
In the SuperFreakonomics section about various “birth effects,” we cited some research about the downside of having a surname that begins with a letter late in the alphabet: It is common practice, especially among economists, to co-write academic papers and list the authors alphabetically by last name. What does this mean for an economist who happened to be born Albert Zyzmor instead of, say, Albert Aab? Two (real) economists addressed this question and found that, all else being equal, Dr. Aab would be more likely to gain tenure at a top university, become a fellow in the Econometric Society (hooray!), and even win the Nobel Prize.
When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.
A collaboration between Kraft and Intel has produced a machine that scans your face to predict what you might want to eat (or, more precisely, what it can sell you to eat).
A while back, we did a podcast about whether the NFL might someday sell corporate sponsorship on its jerseys, the way soccer clubs around the world do, and even Major League Soccer clubs in the U.S.
Marginal decisions to increase the net of revenue minus costs arise in non-profit organizations as much as in companies. The designers of a recent book, Peter Leeson’s The Invisible Hook (Princeton University Press, 2009), recognized this in picking a cover.
New research from OkCupid, the research-focused dating site, finds that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. OkTrends assessed male perceptions of female attractiveness and found that “when some men think you’re ugly, other men are more likely to message you. And when some men think you’re cute, other men become less interested.”
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent research.
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, offers some reading suggestions for fans of statistics (no, they are not as numerous as fans of, say, Harry Potter, but still …).
Are NFL coaches starting to listen to economists?
My gut feeling is that the answer to that question is almost certainly a resounding “no.” There are at least three pieces of data that hint at the possibility that economists might be making some headway.
In stressful meetings, does coffee help or harm the situation? Lindsay St. Claire, Robert C. Hayward and Peter J. Rogers attempted to answer that question in a new study, which is summarized here by the BPS Research Digest: “For two men collaborating or negotiating under stressful circumstances, caffeine consumption was bad news, undermining their performance and confidence. By contrast, for pairs of women, drinking caffeine often had a beneficial effect on these same factors. The researchers can’t be sure, but they think the differential effect of caffeine on men and women may have to do with the fact that women tend to respond to stress in a collaborative, mutually protective style (known as ‘tend and befriend’) whereas men usually exhibit a fight or flight response.”
This year alone has seen teacher-cheating scandals in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere; in this week’s Times, Sharon Otterman reports how New York State is trying to curtail cheating and offers some specific instances of past cheating:
A charter school teacher warned her third graders that a standardized test question was “tricky,” and they all changed their answers. A high school coach in Brooklyn called a student into the hallway and slipped her a completed answer sheet in a newspaper. In the Bronx, a principal convened Finish Your Lab Days, where biology students ended up copying answers for work they never did.
This comes as little surprise to Steve Levitt, who several years ago recognized what most legislators and school administrators were unable (or unwilling?) to foresee: that the introduction of high-stakes testing would create incentives that might encourage some teachers (especially bad ones) to cheat on behalf of their students. So he developed an algorithm to catch cheaters, which was so successful that then-Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan brought Levitt in to help identify and fire cheating Chicago teachers.
We’re taking a bike tour through the Everglades, and the guide mentioned one of the airboat “captains,” who did something seemingly irrational.
A new study out of England finds that, for heart-failure patients, being admitted to the general ward instead of the cardiology ward can mean death: “Half the patients were admitted to cardiology wards. Compared with those managed on general wards, they tended to be younger and were more likely to be men. Those admitted to general medical wards were twice as likely to die as those admitted to cardiology wards, even after taking account of other risk factors.”
As reported in Forbes on Friday, the Freakonomics blog will be leaving NYTimes.com on or around March 1 and returning to its indie roots.
Technology is supposed to improve outcomes and efficiency especially when it comes to “health-information technology” (HIT). But it’s not always that simple.
To my mind, WeightWatchers is the industry leader in performing rigorous testing of their services. Under the leadership of Karen Miller-Kovach, its chief scientific officer, it has sponsored several randomized control trials comparing the effectiveness of the WeightWatchers point system to other diet approaches. For example, Miller-Kovach is a co-author of this 2003 JAMA study (which showed that after 2-years WeightWatchers helped overweight dieters lose about 3 percent of their body mass – reducing their average weight from 207 to 201 pounds).
But I’m troubled by the current advertising campaign that accompanies the rollout of the New PointsPlus system.
Might want to carry your Purell to the ATM from now on. A new study finds that the numeric keypads on London ATMs are as bacteria-contaminated as the seats of public restrooms.
In our latest Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace podcast, Stephen Dubner and Kai Ryssdal talk about the unexpected reasons why American food got so bad. (Download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript.)
In his forthcoming book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, economist Tyler Cowen pinpoints specific moments in history that affected American food for decades to come. From Prohibition to stringent immigration quotas to World War II, Cowen argues that large societal forces threw us into a food rut that lasted for roughly 70 years:
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
In the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, there’s a “Crime and Punishment” section featuring Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig’s “Economist’s Guide to Crime-Busting” (gated), which considers the most “cost-effective way to control crime.” And Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution writes on one of his favorite topics: bounty hunting.
It really annoys me! I review papers for scholarly journals and, if I agree to undertake the task, have never taken more than six weeks to get the job done. But sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers.