Number of comments: 8 For the 20-year period ending in 2007, the Los Angeles Lakers' NBA championship record did a surprisingly good job of reflecting the stock market.' [...]
If you're in Times Square on Saturday, Dec. 19, keep an eye out for SuperFreakonomics on the Dow Jones news zipper. A piece of Freakonomics schwag will go to the first person who sends us a photo of the book's name up in lights. [...]
As the L.A. Times reports,
two new studies, from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco and the National Cancer Institute, suggest that hospitals may want to cut down on the volume of CT scans. [...]
The always-enlightening Atul Gawande evaluates the new health-care bill's efforts (or lack thereof) to control runaway health-care costs. The bill, which has been widely criticized for its lack of significant cost reductions, proposes a few small pilot programs aimed at cost containment.' [...]
University of Scranton psychology professor Carole Slotterback analyzed about five years' worth of children's letters to Santa that were sent to her city's central post office.' [...]
It's one Los Angeles boutique owner's answer to the pay-what-you-wish pricing scheme: only open your store to customers you want to let in -- and set prices on the spot by sizing customers up. The strategy, she says, has helped her store stay open when other shops around [...]
Finally, a scientific approach to the eternal cats vs. dogs debate. NewScientist evaluated dogs and cats in 11 different categories: brains, shared history, bonding, popularity, understanding, problem solving, vocalization, tractability, supersenses, eco-friendliness, and utility. It was a close contest but Fido ultimately won six to five. [...]
Does giving a man a job stop him from becoming a political insurgent? The generally accepted wisdom is that it does. In fact, the U.S. and other western powers have distributed millions of dollars of foreign aid in the hopes of reducing political violence and instability.
Tim Donaghy's 2007 arrest for betting on N.B.A. games, including games that he refereed, shocked basketball fans. Despite his astounding betting success rate (70 to 80 percent), Donaghy claimed that he never fixed N.B.A. games but rather used insider information, a claim that the N.B.A., the F.B.I., and the U.S.' [...]
More than 4,000 teams of people recently raced to determine the location of ten red balloons released across the U.S., as part of an experiment designed to "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope," [...]
Number of comments: 9 Planet Money recently interviewed Elinor Ostrom, this year's Nobel prize winner and an expert in the tragedy of the commons about global warming. Ostrom believes the solution to climate change will come not from government initiatives but from people in communities around the world. "I think we are stupid to'" [...]
A group of civic activists in Los Angeles plans to start giving "Gang Tours" -- taking busloads of tourists through some of the most dangerous parts of the city -- in hopes of "sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what's on the ground."
As the SuperFreakonomics chapter on global warming suggests, solutions that are initially viewed as repugnant sometimes gain acceptance over time. Consider, for example, that environmental groups have supported a "last-ditch effort" by Illinois environmental officials to dump a toxic chemical into a canal. The purpose?
Scientists in the U.K. and Slovenia have developed a new, new technique for dating old books that's far less damaging than the typical methods which require destroying part of the book.
Number of comments: 4 A site called Oobject features juxtaposed shots of cities before and after major events like war, natural disasters, and "property speculation."
After jump-starting the economies of Somali fishing towns, local pirates are taking their local business further by setting up "stock exchanges" that host 72 pirate gangs or "maritime companies," a Reuters article reports. [...]
Jason Kottke explains how the H1N1 vaccine is made - including the step where part of the virus is injected into eggs, where it incubates for two to three days before being removed.
National borders may sometimes seem like arbitrary lines drawn on a map, but a new study from the University of Haifa reveals that those borders mean something to the resident animal populations.
Number of comments: 4 A Boston Globe article explains how "positive deviance" - a way to change behavior by using "nudges" that already exist in a community, rather than imposing them from the outside - substantially decreased malnutrition in a Vienamese village: researchers observed children who looked more nourished than others, found that their [...]
It seems to make all the sense in the world. You are WPMI-TV, the NBC affiliate that covers southern Alabama and some of the Florida Panhandle, and you rent a big electronic billboard to promote your nightly news and weather team.
Number of comments: 13 Foreign Policy released its list of 2009's Top 100 Global Thinkers. The No. 1 spot goes to Ben Bernanke for "staving off a new Great Depression," while Obama takes No. 2 for "reimagining America's role in the world." A few of our old favorites also made the list.
Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home last year, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn't include bagels eaten at work, where a not-completely-insignificant number are delivered by bagel economist Paul Feldman). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, 1,979 people cut their' [...]
At Big Think, Dan Ariely discusses ways to think about money so you splurge less - like equating expensive wine with gallons of milk and making paying hurt a little more. [...]
The island of Kiribati began to subsidize coconut harvesting in the hopes of encouraging fishermen to switch to the coconut trade and thereby help preserve Kiribati's reefs from the ravages of overfishing.' [...]
Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics, called "Unbelievable Stories About Apathy and Altruism," takes a look at the research of John List (the Univ. of Chicago economist, not the notorious murderer of the same same - although the same chapter does cast a new light on a famous murder as well). List's' [...]
If you'd like to turn your garden-variety copy of SuperFreakonomics (or Freakonomics) into a nifty autographed copy that suddenly seems much more gift-appropriate, you can sign up here for a free bookplate that is hand-signed by Levitt and Dubner. If all goes well, the Freakonomics elves will dispatch your bookplate' [...]
Daron Acemoglu describes what makes a nation rich in a new article for Esquire. According to Acemoglu, experts who believe geography or the weather or technology are to blame for persistent poverty are missing a much simpler economic explanation: people respond to incentives.
"What makes hate tick? How can we stop it?" These are the questions that Jim Mohr, director of Gonzaga University's Institute for Action Against Hate, asks himself every day as he develops a new field of study around hate. Mohr believes that despite all the devastating examples of hate in' [...]
It's well-established that domestic violence is bad for the children directly exposed to it (and possibly their classmates as well) but experts still debate the drivers of family violence. Economists have traditionally characterized violence as a signal to outside parties or as part of an incentive contract between family members.
If you missed Levitt and Dubner on their U.K. SuperFreakonomics tour, a podcast of their lecture at the London School of Economics is now online. So are their interviews with Reuters TV, Channel 4, and Telegraph TV, as is the BBC's piece on how SuperFreakonomics fits into the David Cameron' [...]
We've blogged extensively about the serious organ-doner shortage in the U.S. and the debate over establishing a market for organs. Now it seems the recession has uncovered some unexpected potential participants in the organ market: unemployed white collar Americans.
Worker productivity is up dramatically, despite the release of photographer Andrew Zuckerman's mind-blowing book - and totally engrossing website - Bird.
Number of comments: 15 In recent years, replacing your car with a Schwinn has become a popular idea for reducing your carbon footprint. However, not everyone has rushed to their local bike store: fewer than 2 percent of the population relies on bikes for transportation. [...]
Number of comments: 4 The folks at Appfrica have put together some interesting infographs on infrastructure investment and Internet connectivity in Africa. The graphs provide information on internet penetration and network readiness by country, and the various infrastructure development projects that are rapidly transforming Internet connectivity in Africa. [...]
Number of comments: 15 SuperFreakonomics briefly considers the possibility of a rogue leader like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deciding to unilaterally try geoengineering the planet. Who'd have thought Chavez would actually try some geoengineering with his own hands? According to this Reuters report, Chavez recently asked a team of Cuban scientists to seed clouds' [...]
Dubner will be appearing on the public-radio show The Takeaway every morning this week to talk about SuperFreakonomics. His past appearances can be found here, including this one about kidney donation and this one about climate change.
Over the last decade, the number of syphilis cases in China increased tenfold, according to this Associated Press report, because more migrant workers have been able to afford to hire prostitutes.
Malcolm Gladwell explains Christmas, as imagined by Craig Brown for Vanity Fair: "In a hugely influential 2004 experiment at the University of Colorado at Bollocks Falls, Professor Sanjiv Sanjive and his team asked 323 volunteers to wrap themselves in swaddling clothes and spend the night in a stable, lying" [...]
Unhappy with the clutter in your life? You don't need to get organizized; you just need to ditch your extraneous stuff. The Happiness Project's Gretchen Rubin punctures eleven myths of would-be clutter slayers. [...]
Number of comments: 2 If you've never really gotten a good look at Mars, here's your chance: The Big Picture has collected 35 striking photographs from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting and photographing the planet since 2006. [...]
Number of comments: 2 Levitt and Dubner are scheduled to appear on the Charlie Rose show tonight, talking about the importance of applying economics to "trivial" subjects; how Levitt learned to stop fearing death; and about SuperFreakonomics in general. The show airs on PBS at 11 p.m. in most cities, but check your [...]
Number of comments: 15 There's at least one unexpected benefit of rising unemployment. More people are staying home during working hours, and going out less often at night. That means there's less chance they'll be burglarized.
Number of comments: 8 We've blogged several times about Roland Fryer's research on education and the black-white achievement gap. Now Fryer thinks he has identified one system that successfully closes the gap. His new working paper, with co-author Will Dobbie, analyzes both the high-quality charter schools and the comprehensive community programs of the Harlem [...]
Number of comments: 3 Photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen spent six weeks living in and photographing the slums of Nairobi, Caracas, Mumbai, and Jakarta. Bendiksen's photos of family homes portray a reality that clashes with popular perception.
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to [...]
People worry that disasters have become more frequent and more damaging since the close of the 20th century. But the 19th century's natural disasters were plenty devastating; but there weren't nearly as many of us around to suffer the consequences (nor as much media to record it). [...]
Who gets bumped to the front of UCLA medical center's liver-transplant line? The godfather of the Japanese mafia, according to this 60 Minutes video...
Just announced: Levitt and Dubner's sold-out lecture at London's Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) will be webcast live on Tuesday, November 10, 2009, at 13:00 GMT (that's 8 a.m. Eastern -- or use this handy calculator to find the time where you' [...]
Number of comments: 14 We've blogged about proposals to save ailing print newspapers. Despite shrinking circulation and falling ad revenue, Daniel Gross doesn't think print news is doing so badly. [...]
Number of comments: 8 We know polling results are sensitive to the wording of questions. The delivery of those questions could be a factor, too. We'll know for sure when we see the first health care push-poll featuring sniffling, sneezing pollsters.' [...]
The random coin toss must be one of society's most frequently used decision-making mechanisms. We use the coin toss to choose which movie to see, to determine team positions in major sporting events, to divvy up household chores.
Number of comments: 15 Paul Saffo, an American futurologist, recently told the Telegraph that the ultra-rich may slowly evolve into a separate species thanks to medical advances. Saffo imagines a world of replacement organs, sophisticated robots, self-driving cars, and artificial limbs that are superior to the real thing - all available to only the [...]
Number of comments: 15 Every newly purchased mobile phone comes with a new charger. Even if you've already got a working charger from your last phone, chances are it won't work with the new one. It's redundant.' [...]
The Freakonomics book website has been redesigned and updated to include SuperFreakonomics. We love the new look. (Thanks, Being Wicked, and you too, Sean!) It's the best place to stay up-to-date on appearances, reviews, and so on. It's also a great place to sign up for the Freakonomics email list [...]
He wondered if he was in for a Jim Cramer-type beatdown. But it turns out that Jon Stewart doesn't appreciate the global-warming fanatics either, and gave SuperFreakonomics a thumping endorsement.
GOOD produced this sharp info-graphic on murder rates worldwide. One interesting trend it doesn't show: countries with lower murder rates tend to have higher rates of suicide. Take Japan, which has one of the lowest murder rates in the world - just 0.5 per 100,000 people. It also has a' [...]
Gizmodo lists eight "Regrettable Tech Inventions" and their inventors' apologies for them, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee's apology for the double-slash in web addresses - "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //"
Here's a sampling of the latest coverage:
Reviews
* Wall Street Journal: "Not only a book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research, and quality investigative journalism, it's also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down."
Organ donation is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. And yet, Chapter 3 of SuperFreakonomics spells out, relying on altruism for organ donations has proved to be largely unsuccessful. There are a lot of reasons people give for not signing up as organ donors.
Faced with a plague of rabbits, some wild and some abandoned pets, the city of Stockholm is pursuing a unique pest-control strategy. The city is hunting, deep-freezing, and shipping the rabbits to a heating plant in central Sweden where they're processed for fuel. Three thousand rabbits have been culled this' [...]
You know yourself pretty well. But what if a lot of your conventional wisdom about what makes you tick--what makes you happy, healthy and whole--turned out to be wrong? How would you find out? You'd probably start by...
The makers of World of Goo, a "physics-based puzzle game," let customers pay what they wanted for the game - which normally sells at $20 - and a week after the offer, 57,000 people bought the game, bringing in over $100,000 in sales.
Ten percent of Arkansans have been married three or more times, double the national average. That's according to new data from the Pew Center. Arkansas also has one of the lowest median ages for first marriage: 26. If you're looking for marital stability, look no further than New York State, [...]
We've written extensively about the consequences of baby naming. The name you choose for your children can affect his "Google-ability" or even get you in trouble with the law. A new survey of 2,000 elementary school teachers in Germany finds that your children's names may also affect how teachers perceive [...]
We've blogged before about sites like Swivel and ManyEyes, data-mashup sites which allow users to upload datasets, create tables, share them with other users, and compare them to other datasets on the sites. This week a new open data project, Factual, was launched by Google alum Gil Elbaz.
Paul Offit is one of America's most-hated scientists. He's been called a "biostitute" for the pharmaceutical industry and been threatened with death for his advocacy of one of medicine's greatest innovations: vaccines. In recent years, anti-vaccine sentiment has spread like, well, an epidemic, with frightening results.
Number of comments: 14 SuperFreakonomics officially debuts today, already near the top of the Amazon bestseller lists here in the U.S., in Canada, and in the U. K.. The Financial Times calls SuperFreakonomics "a page-turner a book with plenty of style; underneath the dazzle, there is substance too." The New York Post advises: "Don't'" [...]
Obama expressed his disappointment recently when rapper Kanye West stormed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to protest singer Taylor Swift's win of the "Best Female Video" trophy. Soon after, Obama himself was Swifted by critics who felt he was undeserving of his Nobel Prize win. This process' [...]
International children's rights advocates focus significant resources on eliminating child labor in developing countries, often advocating consumer boycotts and international regulation. Despite all these efforts, however, child labor is still prevalent throughout the developing world. Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti think all that international pressure may actually be worsening the' [...]
What do Ignatz Semmelweis and Robert S. McNamara have in common? Your answer should include a cost component.
The answer, and the winner, will be revealed early next week. Good luck.
Number of comments: 15 Just as flu season gathers force here in the northern hemisphere, it's petering out in the southern half of the globe. No matter where you are, you're more susceptible to the flu in the winter months. Even if, let's say, some research physicians expose you to live flu virus in' [...]
Number of comments: 15 There's a price war going on among booksellers - WalMart is offering a handful of big new books for just $10, which forced Amazon to counter - but unfortunately, SuperFreakonomics is not one of them. On Amazon, it costs $16.19. Is it worth it?
To help you decide, here's a roundup [...]
Number of comments: 5 Scientists have long been aware of the "uncanny valley" phenomenon, which describes "that disquieting feeling that occurs when viewers look at representations designed to be as human-like as possible - whether computer animations or androids - but somehow fall short." This might explain why people loved The Incredibles but were [...]
Yesterday, HuffingtonPost ran this cast of characters you can expect to hear about in SuperFreakonomics. It was accompanied by a video preview in which Dubner's juggling practice pays off and Levitt wonders why college students, if they're so altruistic in the lab, never give him money in the subway: [...]
One morning in 1992, a Chicago radio reporter looked into the river and, stunned, told listeners he saw "swirling water that looks like a giant drain ... I think someone should wake up the mayor!" [...]
The announcement that Barack Obama will receive this year's Nobel Peace Prize only 10 months into his presidency surprised many, including us. Even more surprising, Obama was nominated for the award only 12 days after he took office. Now F.P. Passport has taken a look at what Obama did in' [...]
In both sports, it's expected that someone or something "almost always get[s] hurt," writes Malcolm Gladwell in this New Yorker article, where he goes over the sports' similarities - including the reason why, despite their brutality, both will likely stick around for a long time.
In celebration of its 150th issue, The British Psychological Society's Research Digest has asked some of the world's foremost psychologists to share one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their responses are varied and fascinating.' [...]
Architect Carolyn Steel's TED talk, posted this week, discusses how ancient food routes shaped the cities we live in today and the future of food in our world. Steel believes we can "use food as a really powerful tool, a conceptual tool, a design tool to shape the world differently."' [...]
We've posted several times about interesting odd pairs and strange promotional gimmicks. Now hotels, facing persistently low occupancy rates, are getting in on the act. The Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach now offers a package with a new tattoo and a bottle of tequila (to numb the pain).
The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner's book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show "how skiing changed the Alps" during the last few decades.
Women are lighter and thus cost less than men to transport to space, they're less prone to heart attacks, and they do better in isolation tests, reasoned Randy Lovelace when he founded the Women In Space Earliest program in 1959 to test women for their "qualifications as astronauts," as this' [...]
Researchers at the University of Tokyo say they've created a paint that blocks out wireless signals, reports the BBC. You can use it, for example, to make sure your neighbor doesn't steal your wi-fi, and movie theaters can use it to stop cell-phones from interrupting films.
Number of comments: 5 Hedgeable.com is holding a contest to find the American investor who lost the most during the recession, reports The Economist; they want the "financial world's equivalent of Paris Hilton" (named worst actress at this year's Golden Raspberries).
Number of comments: 9 Nairobi's City Council recently made life a little more difficult for the city's residents by outlawing a wide variety of mundane activities. Things like blowing your noise without a tissue, spitting in the street, crossing the road while talking on the phone, and making loud noises will now result in [...]
Muammar el-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, recently attracted attention for his colorful speech to the United Nations General Assembly. He was hardly the first world leader to go off the reservation while addressing the U.N.
When athletes are exposed as dopers, we heap scorn and doubt on their accomplishments. What about college students? An estimated 25 percent of them now illegally use concentration- and memory-boosting drugs to help them make the grade. One researcher wonders if academics are willing to subject themselves to the same [...]
Number of comments: 15 The winner of food writer Michael Ruhlman's "BLT from Scratch Challenge," Jared Dunnohew, harvested his own salt from sea water (25 liters for one kilo of salt), smoked his own bacon (with wood gathered from local parks), and made his own mustard and vinegar for homemade mayonnaise.
Number of comments: 15 It's a well-documented truth that long commutes are bad for both the environment and emotional well-being of the commuter. So policy interventions aimed at reducing traffic and, by extension, commuting time have the potential to significantly improve welfare.' [...]
The poorer you are, the fatter you're likely to be, and the fatter you get, the poorer you're likely to become. Slate's Dan Engber has more on what this means for health reform.
