Dubner weighs in on Google News’ new feature, which allows the subjects of news articles to comment on the pieces about them.
Watch Dubner’s “Good Morning America” appearance from Wednesday, Aug. 8, in case you missed it the first time.
We got an e-mail the other day from a certain Sara in Chicago. She had a question about the virtual world Second Life, but it could be asked of many pursuits, virtual and otherwise. (Even though I’ve never visited Second Life, I have been thinking about this issue lately since I have become a gold farmer for my own kids, . . .
I grew up just a few miles from the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. We were a family that was terrified of heights. At least once a month, my father would mention how he thought a bridge over the Mississippi was going to collapse. We would be calling him Nostradamus today, except that his doomsday prediction was about a different . . .
On August 3, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell succeeded in making the world’s first coherent telephone call. Little did he know that, less than 150 years later, more than a billion people worldwide would be surfing the Internet on phone lines and broadband.
July 27 is the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day, described on the SysAdminday Web site thusly: “[I]f you can read this, thank your sysadmin — and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, . . .
I was at O’Hare airport yesterday and saw something very unusual: a person actually using a pay phone. Airports have enormous numbers of pay phones which, if you observe them, go virtually untouched. At best you will see a senior citizen using one from time to time (as I did yesterday). The pay phone is one invention whose time has . . .
There was an interesting article in the New York Times sports section the other day about how the All England Club has kept the Wimbledon tournament free of pigeons since 1999 by employing a man named Wayne Davis to bring in his small flock of peregrine falcons. Until Davis came along, the pigeons were a real nuisance. “In the old, . . .
Mirroring Levitt’s thoughts on doctors plotting terrorist attacks, the Wall Street Journal takes an in-depth look at Alan Krueger‘s findings that terrorists tend to come from high-income, high-education families. David Pogue of the New York Times points out that, in the midst of last week’s iPhone mania, most of us missed T-Mobile’s announcement of a new plan under which all . . .
Prediction markets. Are there any other two words that couple as nicely as those, at least to readers of this blog? The promise of a prediction market is simple and profound: if you ask a lot of people a question about politics or sports or Hollywood movies, and those people are motivated to answer it correctly, their collective judgment turns . . .
New York Times writer Adam Liptak reports (TimesSelect membership required) that Avvo, a user-generated online rating system that allows clients to rate lawyers like Zagats rates restaurants, is being sued by none other than a group of lawyers with low ratings. More on the politics of online dating: Slate writer Seth Stevenson analyzes an ad campaign by Chemistry.com, a dating . . .
Newspapers have historically been vocal advocates for good environmental policy. So when millions of people start to consume them electronically, on computer screens, instead of on paper that comes from trees and must be thrown away, wouldn’t you think that newspapers would stand up and cheer? Well, not necessarily, since newspapers still make a lot more money selling ads on . . .
Tomorrow marks the iPhone’s official release to the public, in what will be one of the most hyped and anticipated product debuts in history. So far we’ve seen prediction markets making odds on everything from sales figures to the likelihood of spontaneous combustion. But what of the aftermath? Will economists, psychologists, sociologists and other researchers pick up where the tech . . .
Via Marginal Revolution: In his quest to explain the male-female wage gap in business, academia, and other fields, the economist M. Daniele Paserman studied the role that gender plays in competitive environments. Where’d he get his data? From professional tennis matches. Paserman argues that male athletes are generally more adept at handling high-pressure situations. With iPhone frenzy reaching a peak, . . .
Reporters have been abuzz recently over the release of a document revealing that, in 1994, the U.S. military asked for $7.5 million to develop a bomb filled with aphrodisiac chemicals intended to cause “homosexual behavior” that would “affect discipline and morale in enemy units.” Now, Jon Ronson of the U.K. Guardian writes of another leaked Air Force report containing additional . . .
I have been alerted that my recent post on PowerPoint and its failings would have been richer had it referenced the earlier work on the subject by Seth Godin. He’s been trying to help PowerPoint people help themselves for years. His e-book on the subject, reproduced here on his blog, is called Really Bad PowerPoint. As with many good ideas, . . .
Even though I try hard to avoid meetings in general, and business meetings in particular, I have sat through my share of PowerPoint presentations. In general, I hate them. There are at least two big problems with PowerPoint presentations. The first is that the speaker, because he’s got the visual crutch of the slide show, doesn’t work very hard to . . .
1. Tired of Google Street View yet? Here, via TechCrunch, is the next step on the horizon: Microsoft’s Photosynth Project is developing a network of 3-D virtual maps depicting actual places. Meanwhile, 3-D street views of ten cities will launch this fall on Everyscape. No word yet on whether the scenes will feature virtual peeing bystanders, dozing cats, or Dubner’s . . .
Looks like all that time spent on MySpace could start earning you college credits. Via Andrew Lavallee at the Wall Street Journal: More and more universities are incorporating curricula on social computing, allowing students to study subjects like online communities, social networking and user-contributed content as part of graduate and undergrad programs. This month in Scientific American, Cornell economics professor . . .
Readers of this blog fiercely debated the validity of the QWERTY keyboard story a few months back. As the legend goes, Christopher Sholes engineered the QWERTY layout that is still in use today in order to slow typists down and prevent key jams. One commenter (ludvig) pointed to this 1996 article from Reason magazine by Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. . . .
Repulsed by that six-inch centipede? Or are you simply being reminded of your own inevitable demise? A study led by Cathy Cox, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri-Columbia, determined that people find certain things disgusting because they make apparent our “vulnerability to death.” Food for thought next time you find yourself eating . . .
A reader named Andrew Gendreau recently wrote in on the topic of distributed computing, which refers to a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program run simultaneously on two or more computers while they communicate with each other over a network. According to Wikipedia (whose reliability is imperfect but often commendable), distributed computing differs from networking . . .
There was a very nice piece in the New York Times the other day about Mike Nolan, the manager of Metro-North Railroad’s lost-and-found department. Via the article: Since joining Metro-North in 1994, Mr. Nolan has applied the analytical skills he honed as a Wall Street analyst to a tracking system that once depended on pen and paper and that in . . .
In their May 6, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt wonder: Why do Americans spend so much time and money performing menial tasks when they don’t have to? What’s with all the knitting, gardening, and – as the Census Bureau dubs it – “cooking for fun”? Why do we fill our hours with leisure activities that look an awful lot like work? Click here to read the article and here to comment. This blog post supplies additional research material.
We have a new column in this week’s New York Times Magazine, which is a special issue on the boomer generation. Our piece is called “Laid-Back Labor,” and it actually germinated from a blog post here a few months ago. Here’s one paragraph from the column: Isn’t it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their . . .
A few years ago, I was working on a book about the psychology of money — a book I put aside when Freakonomics began to happen. The first chapter of the book was about a fellow named James Altucher, whom I’ve blogged about before. James’s relationship with money was fascinating and precarious. He grew up in a middle-class family that . . .
I blogged a few days ago about the sad fact that my beloved three-year-old child, a.k.a. 2687, a black IBM (Lenovo) laptop, had to be repaired. The LCD had gone dark. I tried to get it fixed locally, but none of the vendors recommended by IBM could move fast enough. Nor were any independent outfits like Geek Squad up to . . .
Maybe it was guest blogger Paul Kimmelman’s dissection of the Wii shortage, or your many-voiced response. Regardless: Nintendo is boosting its Wii production: Nintendo’s president acknowledged Friday that the shortage of the hit Wii game machine was “abnormal,” and promised production was being boosted to increase deliveries by next month.”We must do our best to fix this abnormal lack of . . .