Last October, we gathered a group of experts together to find out what U.S. air travel will look like ten years from now. If you want to remember what air travel looked like twenty years ago, try booking a flight to Russia on American Airlines’s website, which appears to give you the option of flying to the Union of Soviet . . .
Online education increases in popularity. (Earlier) Is jealousy linked to height? Microsoft turns down Blu-ray for Xbox 360. (Earlier) Want to stop junk mail? Sign this petition. (Earlier)
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 . . .
Limiting child access to TV and Internet can lower their weight. (Earlier) Is online therapy the future of mental health treatment? Is Google recession-proof? (Earlier) 140-year-old math problem solved. (Earlier)
Treasury Secretary in favor of axing the penny. (Earlier) Free books online: the debate continues. (Earlier) Are lawsuits the next phase in the fight against global warming? (Earlier) Reducing class sizes isn’t enough to fight achievement gap.
Last week, we cited a study finding that 16.6 percent of all pay-per-clicks on the Internet were fraudulent in the fourth quarter of 2007, up from 14.2 percent for the same quarter in 2006. The statistic, as reported by MediaPost, was compiled by Click Forensics, an independent auditor that has created the Click Fraud Index. Given what must be billions . . .
Is the Internet really filled with pedophilic sexual predators lurking in a social network or chat room near your child? Not necessarily, according to 3 nationwide surveys done by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. The first two surveys consisted of responses from 3,000 teens who use the Internet in 2000, and . . .
Is Wikipedia more accurate than we think? (Earlier) Parentonomics to be published in Australia. Olympic athletes permitted to blog at the 2008 games. Does working in solitude lead to greater productivity?
Is use v. non-use of social networking sites leading to “digital inequality”? (Earlier) Study finds crowds can be influenced by 5% minority. Incarceration rates for crack-cocaine users on the rise. (Earlier) Biofuels expert named among the “fastest growing” jobs of 2008. (Earlier)
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 . . .
Given our fondness for all things publishing here at Freakonomics, we’ve been following the development of e-books with particular interest. In the past few weeks, it appears that the free e-book movement has officially begun. Last week, publishing monolith HarperCollins (the publisher of Freakonomics) announced that it would offer free electronic editions of a group of its books on the . . .
MySpace is to Facebook as Yahoo! is to ___________. The answer, according to Hitwise, is: Google. Just as Facebook users are higher on the socioeconomic ladder than MySpace users, people who use Google as their search engine are better off than those who use Yahoo!. Google is most popular among users defined as “Affluent Suburbia,” “Upscale America,” and “Small Town . . .
Two little words — “social networking” — have become a giant buzzphrase over the past couple of years, what with the worldwide march of Facebook and headline-ready stories about Web-assisted suicides. So what’s the net effect of social networking? We gathered a group of wise people who spend their days thinking about this issue — Martin Baily, Danah Boyd, Steve . . .
How do tax rebates affect household spending? (Earlier) (HT: Patrick Maguire) Does the internet make suicide more contagious? (Earlier) What’s the Tiger Woods effect? A look inside the executive brain
Apparently, all information on the Web does not want to be free: the Wall Street Journal will not, as has been widely speculated, tear down its paywall entirely. Here’s what new WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch told his paper at Davos: “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will . . .
Is PTSD the only result for Iraq veterans? Just how dangerous is personal data on the Internet? (Earlier) How do people describe themselves with one word? An experiment. Is Jan. 21 truly the “most depressing day of the year”?
For the last few years I’ve been trying to convince businesses to run experiments in order to learn how to do things better. Why is it that experimentation is the gold standard in science, but rarely exploited in corporations? My own hunch is that the main reason is what economists call “path dependence” — in other words, businesses don’t run . . .
We posted an item the other day from a reader who kept landing on General Motors’ Web site when he went to use his Gmail account; he wondered if many Gmail users did the same, and subsequently wound up buying cars. We don’t have an answer to that question, but the whole scenario is starting to look a bit less . . .
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)
Remember our contest on the Coase Theorem? It asked for good examples of the Coase Theorem failing in regard to URLs — i.e., instances in which a company that is most motivated to own a URL for some reason doesn’t. The winner of the contest proposed Nissan.com, which belongs not to the car company, but to a far lesser-known computer . . .
A new healthcare Web site called iMedix has just been launched, and it could revolutionize the way people take care of themselves. Or it might gum up the works further; at this point, it’s hard to tell. But you have to applaud the effort. A privately funded startup launched by Amir Leitersdorf and Iri Amirav, it allows users to search . . .
Methane-free kangaroo gas could slow global warming. (Earlier) Weather prediction traditionalists face off against modernists. Honda introduces hydrogen-fueled car. (Earlier) Read newspapers on the Web? That could make you an “influencer”.
Apparently, it is dangerous even to be the wife of a semi-famous economist-author. In this blog post about the difference between corked wine and screw-top wine, Levitt’s wife, Jeannette, is revealed to be not only a drinker but a cork snob: We recently had a friend over (her husband, Steve Levitt, co-wrote Freakonomics) and I noticed the strange look she . . .
I recently blogged about how well the Coase Theorem does online. It predicts that, regardless of who is assigned property rights, the interested parties will strike a bargain to put the asset in the hands of the party that values it the most. Thus, despite the fact that more or less anyone can purchase a URL for a small amount . . .
Tech experts cast their judgments on the Kindle. (Earlier) The science of collective attention tested on Digg.com. Could the Internet run out of space by 2010? The long road ahead for the mobile Web.
A couple of weeks ago, Wired editor and The Long Tail author Chris Anderson got so fed up with receiving pitches from clueless (or lazy) publicists that he screeched out in protest, permanently banning said publicists from his in-box and, to the delight of some onlookers, publishing their e-mail addresses on his blog in a spammer-friendly format. Reaction to Anderson’s . . .
Freakonomics schwag is up for offer at the end of this post. As such, it may actually be worth slogging through the brief economics lesson that follows. The Coase Theorem is a somewhat rare species of beast: an economic theory that is both completely counterintuitive and yet often right in practice. The idea is named after Ronald Coase, one of . . .
Can a future of Internet gridlock be avoided? Corporate prediction markets conference kicks off in Kansas City, Mo. A breakdown of Halloween spending. Expert debunks myths about current U.S. wages and productivity.
Courtesy of HarperCollins In 2004, Frank Warren, the owner of a medical information company in Germantown, Md., had an idea for a project. He bought 3,000 blank postcards and wrote two things on the back: his home address and an invitation to anonymously share a secret. He passed the cards out on the street, stuck them in library books, left . . .
Portal? Or how about: A Confuser… the Screen … the Box … God … HAL … or how about Abra, short for “artificial brain.” These were among the many suggestions you wrote in response to our contest asking readers to rename the computer. Let me say it once again: our readership is awesomely creative, smart, and funny. Thanks for all . . .