…the research: Mathematics is a fundamental tool of research. Although potentially applicable in every discipline, the amount of training in mathematics that students typically receive varies greatly between different disciplines….
…result, he adds, “it’s more complicated to manage five Israelis than 50 Americans because [the Israelis] will challenge you all the time — starting with ‘Why are you my manager;…
…never thought at all about how Smile Train managed to make this happen. A night with Smile Train convinced me that this is one of the most amazing organizations around.…
…have become harder to achieve. The Australian Institute of Sport is leading the charge; its success is best-demonstrated by an example from the skeleton, a sledding event that was recently…
…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…
…the result of luck, then you could argue that many predictions go astray because the predictors couldn’t foresee the bad luck coming — but that their picks are otherwise sound.…
…since the beginning of commercial airliner service in 1958, according to AirSafe.com. Of 442 passengers and crew involved in those intentional ditchings, by my own math, 66 percent survived. In…
Once upon a time, Bapu Jena was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His most interesting teacher? The economist Steve Levitt. This week on Freakonomics, M.D., a replay…
…please … let it hereby be known that today, June 1, marks the beginning of not only Potty Training Awareness Month but also National Soul Food Month. (Surely there are…
Sure, we all want to make good personal decisions, but it doesn’t always work out. That’s where “temptation bundling” comes in.
…some training, and the courage to get close to the thing we’re smelling, but we can become super sniffers. One study found that humans are able to follow the scent…
…and members of the community (typically older). It made me realize how seldom these different age cohorts assemble naturally. Too bad: the folks at Fresno were a great audience, and…
…Nonfiction Amazon.com: Bestsellers of 2005 Editors’ Picks Amazon.ca (Canada): Bestsellers of 2005 Editors’ Picks USA Today: Tops for literate gift-givers (not to mention quirky) Publishers Weekly: Best Titles Listen Up…
A kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?
…$1,500 lower than the current best offer from the dealership where I was sitting.? He came back and said the best he could do would be to go $200 lower.?…
A kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?
Promising drugs keep failing in trials. Allegations of fraud have cast a shadow over the field. An expert explains why Alzheimer’s treatments have been so hard to find — and…
…pale in comparison to those in Mumbai. I figured that since competition in Mumbai is so high, if all rickshaw drivers compete with each other to quote low prices, they…
The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang argues that different forms of government create different styles of corruption. The U.S. and China have more in common than we’d like to admit…
Big poker tournaments are a zero-sum game. The competitors pay to enter and those entry fees are returned as prize money. It is common practice for a player to be…
Newspapers trumpeted a landmark event last week: a computer program beating professional poker players head-to-head at Limit Hold-Em. Parallels have been drawn to Big Blue‘s victory over Gary Kasparov roughly…
Pennsylvania State University has set up a prediction market for the weather, letting two groups of students bet against professional forecasting services like AccuWeather in trying to predict the temperature…
Our new study poses a conundrum: in a professional market (for economists), having more scholars pay attention to your research raises your reputation and your salary. Conditional on that attention,…
…team. and a cap on the pay to all players. Furthermore, this latter cap has been reduced from around 57 percent to about 51 percent of Basketball Related Income (or…
Last spring, I jokingly (okay, maybe half-jokingly) wrote about my quest to make the Champions Tour, the professional golf tour for people over the age of 50. In that post,…
…has an important impact on later success in a variety of activities such as professional soccer and hockey. We recently wrote about this work in a New York Times column….
We are setting up a new series of interviews for Freakonomics Radio in which we’ll identify interesting/accomplished/prominent people and ask them a series of Freakonomics-ish questions, ranging from their professional…
…when I suggested the loser pay for dinner. He somehow found a 10-pound ball that fit his fingers and in his first practice frame he rolled it as if it…
…Do you have any examples of some… unique … “Oh, now it makes sense..” moments given your particular professional background? – Bobby G A. Sure, here are some examples: Dinner…
