Music video depicts drug dealer counting cash in euros. (Hat Tip: Foreign Policy) Study finds gender discrimination in coffee shops. Devra Davis to speak at NYU. (Earlier) An alternative theory to the conventional wisdom on dinosaur extinction.
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 . . .
In almost all countries, women are more likely to be obese than men. The economists Anne Case and Alicia Menendez set out to learn why, using data collected from a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa. Here’s what they determined: 1. “Women who were nutritionally deprived as children are significantly more likely to be obese as adults, while men . . .
Last week I linked to an intriguing visual of a spinning dancer. It is intriguing because some people see her spinning clockwise, whereas others see her spinning counter-clockwise. Moreover, some people are able to make the direction of her spin switch. The article asserts that the direction she spins is an indicator of whether your thinking is dominated by the . . .
“Womenomics” on the rise. Want crime stats, school rankings, and home listings in L.A.? Look no further. Government to increase use of pilotless planes. (Earlier) Are there factual errors in An Inconvenient Truth? (Earlier)
Despite Fred Thompson‘s so-so performance in his first presidential debate, and despite his serious lag on InTrade (Giuliani, 39; Romney, 24; Thompson, 19.5), the blogger Noele Kensut is calling for Thompson to win the White House. Why? Because he has blue eyes. Eye color is one trait, Kensut writes at Mijka Samora‘s Reality Journal, that every president since Richard Nixon . . .
The following story is currently making the rounds on the Internet. The events probably didn’t happen exactly as described, but for my purposes it doesn’t really matter. Supposedly, a woman posted the following personal ad on Craigslist: What am I doing wrong? Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25-year-old girl. I’m articulate and . . .
I blogged a few days back about the interesting new paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers analyzing trends in happiness by gender, and finding statistically significant reductions in how happy women are relative to men. Elsewhere on the Internet, the paper has drawn the ire of a number of bloggers. Stevenson and Wolfers have fired back on Marginal Revolution, . . .
I saw Justin Wolfers a few weeks back, and I joked with him that it had been months since I’d seen his research in the headlines. It didn’t take him long to fix that — he and his partner in life and economics, Betsey Stevenson, made the news twice last week. The first time was in the form of an . . .
While VH1 debuts a reality show on picking up women, researchers gather data on the psychology of retaining your partner once she’s safely hooked.
New research has demonstrated a link between the ratio of the length of the index finger to the ring finger to relative scores on the math and reading SAT. The relative length of these two fingers is apparently related to testosterone and estrogen levels in utero. While this research focuses on comparisons between the sexes, a logical extrapolation would be . . .
A study by University of Toronto assistant professor of organizational behavior Jennifer Berdahl found that, contrary to the conventional belief that a woman’s acting “feminine” in the workplace leads to sexual harassment, just the opposite may be true. Berdahl’s paper concluded that women who “act like men” are more likely to experience harassment, possibly because of the conduct’s use as . . .
Our own Gary Langer analyzes polls on recently departed conservative icon Jerry Falwell taken over his lifetime. The results can be summarized as follows: “Popularity with most Americans was not among the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s achievements.” In a development on the link between motherhood and happiness, Science Daily profiles a study done by the U. Michigan Institute for Social Research . . .
Remember this discussion about the likelihood of a three-way tie on Jeopardy? Everyone agreed that the estimate of 1-in-25 million was absurdly high. So too does Carl Bialik, the Wall Street Journal‘s “Numbers Guy.” Men outnumber women on the Internet, by a long shot … right? Wrong. Stockpickr.com takes a brief look at the stocks of companies working on treatment . . .
Emily Oster told me just yesterday that she didn’t start thinking about missing women until she was in graduate school. Now it is revealed in the Everit St. Weekly (see page 3) that she actually began the research at age 9. Knowing she spent more than 15 years working on the project, it is easier for me to understand how . . .