So today is a two-fer: both Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer will not be joining the Obama administration, as planned, as Health and Human Services secretary and chief performance officer, respectively. They were both undone by failure to pay taxes.
If you had asked me that question a week ago, I would have said with great certainty that the post office would not mail a letter without a stamp. A few days ago, however, my daughter got a letter delivered in the mail. Where the stamp should have been, the sender had instead written, “Exempt from postage: Guinness Book of . . .
Ben Mezrich Ben Mezrich‘s book Bringing Down the House — a nonfiction account of six M.I.T. card-counters who made millions in Las Vegas — has sold more than a million copies and was translated into 18 languages. But the changes made in the recent movie adaptation, 21, have (besides helping to bring in $23.7 million in the movie’s debut weekend) . . .
Why are there so many fake memoirs in the world? The latest is Margaret Seltzer‘s Love and Consequences. (I would link to its Amazon page but, alas, it no longer has an Amazon page.) If you had written a memoir that was, say, 60 percent true, would you try to present it as a memoir or as a novel? If . . .
In January, Hasbro, the North American distributor of Scrabble, announced plans to sue Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Facebook‘s most popular application: Scrabulous. With 700,000 daily users, Scrabulous makes the Agarwalla brothers $25,000 a month in advertising revenue, the Times reported Sunday. Scrambling for a piece of the market share, Hasbro has reportedly signed deals with gaming companies . . .
That was the question I found myself asking while reading through the Times sports section in recent days. I understand that we are sort of between seasons here. The Super Bowl is over, baseball has yet to begin, the N.B.A. is slogging through its long wintry slog, and the N.H.L. — well, I’m afraid I just don’t pay attention, as . . .
We’ve written quite a bit about online identity theft here at Freakonomics. But there’s another form of crime that’s been spreading through the Internet over the past few years: click fraud. As its name suggests, the crime involves clicking on a Web site’s ads repeatedly (or, in some cases, employing a software program to do it) in order to pad . . .
It’s identity theft meets Internet dating: the Wall Street Journal reports that would-be online suitors are lifting other people’s profiles and posting them as their own. For example, Thierry Khalfa, a 44-year-old Frenchman, found himself dumped by Marjorie Coon, 48, after she discovered that he had copied exactly the profile of Mike Matteo, a 47-year-old screenwriter in Tampa, Fla. After . . .
N.I.H. and the E.P.A. to collaborate on testing chemicals for toxic effects. (Earlier) The 10 most fuel-efficient luxury cars. (Earlier) A guide to optimizing caffeine consumption. “Plagiarius Award” developed for the best product knockoffs of the year.
Last week, Justin Wolfers offered an insightful analysis of Roger Clemens‘s career statistics and what those statistics imply about the likelihood that Clemens used steroids. The latest contribution to this debate is by sabermetric legend Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. Using only data through 1997, Nate generates a projection of what Clemens‘s stats should have looked like from 1998-2001, the . . .
If you thought the cheating in sumo was bad enough, now they are talking about murder charges.
Yesterday, I posted about the conclusions that Eric Bradlow, Shane Jensen, Adi Wyner, and I drew from analyzing Roger Clemens‘s career statistics. I thought that it might be useful to show how we got from the findings in the Clemens Report (exonerating him), to our somewhat opposite conclusions. So for budding forensic economists, here is a step-by-step guide, with pictures. . . .
Economist Austan Goolsbee has a $44 billion idea called the “Simple Return”: Around two-thirds of taxpayers take only the standard deduction and do not itemize. Frequently, all of their income is solely from wages from one employer and interest income from one bank. For almost all of these people, the IRS already receives information about each of their sources of . . .
Sports fans will probably be aware that Roger Clemens is currently before Congress, arguing that the Mitchell Report wrongly tagged him as having used performance-enhancing drugs. And last week, his agents released the “Clemens Report,” arguing that his career statistics somehow exonerate him. The full marketing spin is available here. I was interested in understanding how they could “prove” his . . .
Levitt blogged the other day about Yale Law student Aaron Zelinsky‘s proposal for ending steroid use in Major League Baseball. Now here’s an anti-doping counter-proposal from Joe Lindsey, a sports writer and blogger/contributor at Bicycling magazine. You may remember Joe from another guest post, in which he also countered an earlier Freakonomics doping post. So this is getting to be . . .
Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball: 1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available. 2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval. 3) . . .
We’ve covered the history of dirty politics in the U.S. here at Freakonomics. But what about the modern state of affairs? Allen Raymond knows a thing or two about bending the rules in the electoral process. A former G.O.P. political operative who served as chief of staff to a co-chairman of the Republican National Committee and supervised numerous election victories, . . .
What should be done about the quality and quantity of standardized testing in U.S. schools? We touched on the subject in Freakonomics, but only insofar as the introduction of high-stakes testing altered the incentives at play — including the incentives for some teachers, who were found to cheat in order to cover up the poor performance of their students (which, . . .
Which M.L.B. players performed better after using steroids? (Earlier) Confusion over euro conversion good for Spanish waiters. Rare $90 video game sells for more than $9,000 online. Apple beefs up program security to thwart hackers. (Earlier)
Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell today released his long-anticipated report on steroid use in baseball. It charges many star players with having used steroids, including Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, and Mark McGwire. Here’s one thing about the report that really jumped out at me, as portrayed by Michael Schmidt and Duff Wilson in the Times‘s lead story: [Mitchell] did say . . .
I am wondering if perhaps we should try to enlist John McEnroe to write with us in the future, although I’m sure we couldn’t afford his fee. In this interesting (London) Telegraph article on the reported rise in fixed tennis matches, McEnroe nicely parses the incentives at play for top-ranked players versus lower-ranked players. While lower-ranked players may be willing . . .
Ian Ayres is an economist and lawyer at Yale and the author of Super Crunchers, which we excerpted here. He has agreed to write occasional guest posts on our blog, which delights us, since he has a lot of compelling interests and insights. Ian is not the only notable guest blogger who will turn up on this site in the . . .
The Long Tail author comes down on press release emails. New breed of mega-pumpkin creates market for carvers. Just how big is the American League advantage? Halloween fun facts: 90 percent of parents steal their kids’ candy. (HT: SugarShockBlog)
Video It is fairly well known by now that Levitt has more than a passing interest in poker, and he’s occasionally shown some promise. (His blackjack skills, meanwhile, are subject to debate.) It is also well-established that, as a parent, he’s less interested in reading a standard bedtime story than in teaching his kids to think creatively and strategically — . . .
[Addendum appended.] A few weeks back I blogged about allegations of cheating at an online poker site called Absolute Poker. While things looked awfully suspicious, there wasn’t quite a smoking gun, and it was unclear exactly how the cheater might have cheated. A combination of some incredible detective work by some poker players and an accidental (?) data leak by . . .
Students fight for the right to file-share. (Earlier) Headhunters see spike in lies on resumes. Is Craigslist inadvertently prolonging the Iraq war? (Earlier) Why are so many good kidneys going to waste? (Earlier)
Back in August, we blogged about allegations of match rigging at Wimbledon. According to a new report by SI.com, that may have been only the tip of the iceberg; now, 150 matches are being investigated by tennis officials. My hunch, having seen no data and only read this article, is that the number of rigged tennis matches will ultimately turn . . .
Public school or private school: does it matter? Test security firm Caveon sees business thrive at U.S. schools. (Earlier) Employers impose “no e-mail” days; workers rebel. Are antidepressants safe for children?
Tamara Audi and Adam Thompson write in the Wall Street Journal about how the Las Vegas casinos helped authorities catch point-shaving football players at the University of Toledo. It is no surprise that the sportsbooks take an active role in this endeavor: when cheating happens, the sportsbook is the party from which money gets stolen. (If the bookies balanced the . . .
Does the Internet need replacing? Airport security to focus on remote-control toys. (Earlier) Can cheating in online games be stopped? (Earlier) Woman sues for $1 million over iPhone price cut. (Earlier)