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Those ubiquitous asterisks used to point to standard disclaimers about war, riots, or force majeure, but the small print at four point font now occupies tomes. There is a fine line between disclaimers, limitations, conditions, restrictions, and outright fraud. The following examples are nowhere near that line.
"Accident" [...]
Among the many issues with ranking schools, one of the most glaring is incorporating the input of those who are impacted by the result. Students reporting on MBA programs or University presidents ranking schools all put people influenced by the result in a position to influence the results. This [...]
Ranking journals is a popular pastime among academics. Each of us has a favorite ranking, largely chosen by the results fitting with our favorite publication outlets. There are more debates over the methodology of journal rankings than of ranking business schools. There may be no universal agreement on the [...]
Preparing for my upcoming Canada trip, I initiated an online chat with a Sprint rep to find out the roaming voice and data rates. Sending an average-length email would, according to the agent, cost somewhere between a few cents and a few hundred dollars. Transcript below the jump.
This Thursday, Nashville votes whether to prohibit public business from being conducted in any language other than English.
In an impassioned speech, Councilman Eric Crafton contends that newcomers to foreign lands must learn the local language. Strangely, this sentiment was not expressed in Cherokee, Iroquois, or Choctaw! Exhibiting his penchant for [...]
At an online forum for aspiring MBA students, participants are discussing an application essay (400 word limit) for a top ten program:
Applicant 1: Quick question guys! How stringent is the word limit? I am at 423 words.
Applicant 2: I wouldn't worry about it. I've been following the +10% [...]
Last weekend, Nashville ran out of gas. This was not because of significant shortages, but because of a belief that there were significant shortages. So, people rushed to get gas. And we ran out.
This is a demonstration of sunspot equilibria, one of the items on my still- incomplete list of [...]
Nashville Councilwoman Erica Gilmore has resurrected a bill banning single-bottle sales of beer in a misguided attempt to curb drinking and littering. To understand the unintended consequences of hair-trigger paternalism, we turn to the Soviets.
To curb alcohol and vagrancy, the Soviet Union tried [...]
Compare:
New York Times on single-father Biden being sworn in as Senator days after losing his wife:
"After taking office, he refused to move to Washington and commuted daily from Wilmington to help bring up his sons ... The Washington-to-Wilmington train run has since become a leitmotif of Mr. Biden's devotion'" [...]
A local recording studio is being confiscated by the city of Nashville to put it to a "higher valued use." Apparently, the music emanating from Music Row in Music City sounds sweeter from a high-tax-rate high-rise than from an historic, independent label. Joy Ford was unwilling to sell her business [...]
A parent of a toddler spends approximately half of his time teaching a child the distinction between food (not for playing) and toys (not for eating, especially when they are the choke-hazard kind). Now, a most diabolical joint venture contributes a new traverse to the gauntlet of parenting.
In a recent blog post, I took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the contentious topic of ranking business schools. The genesis of the post was a very different question: how to rank hospitals' success rates with a specific operation when some hospitals only accept less risky cases while others take' [...]
Rankings of business schools generally fail to evaluate the inherent quality of an institution, instead ranking the people who choose to attend it.
UPDATE: If you came here from a source that did not make clear the wry, tongue-in-cheek nature of my rankings, also read the clarification.
An MBA student [...]
In a week, my street will again be closed to roll out the red carpet for the fan-voted CMT Music Awards, a night where the Average Joe decides who best expresses in musical form the malaise of a life of run-down trucks and sickly stray dogs.
While some will inevitably [...]
Harvard University has decided to require faculty members to deposit all published articles in an open-access online repository. The announcement comes with the standard (and well deserved) attacks on journal publishers, but an even greater dose of hypocrisy wrapped in lip service about dissemination of knowledge.
The [...]
Apparently fed up with misinterpretations of more subtle interactions with humans (such as the nun bun, pictured, at a coffee shop behind my house), your deity-of-choice has decided to be a bit more literal.
The setup: The Associated Press reported today that Minnesota is experiencing temperatures of forty degrees below zero!
The punchline: Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius?
If you laughed, you are (like me) a geek.
Whatever the scale, Minnesotans may be asking for a bit of that Global Warming to come their way.
[...] A two-person political race should be as close to a zero-sum game as we can imagine in practice. Apparently, this is not the case for the Democratic side of Super Tuesday.
Depending on whether you count the national popular vote, number of states won, yesterday's pledged delegates, cumulative pledged delegates, or' [...]
Jake starts school next year. Public school. In Nashville. And I'm scared.
The Chief Administrator of the Nashville public school system (i) can't write, and (ii) has not come to terms with his disability, or he would have hired an editor. From Benjamin Wright's page:
Mission Statement: To provide' [...]
In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in order to make choices, he must define a code of values ... He cannot escape from this need; his only alternative is whether the philosophy guiding him is to be chosen by his mind [...]
Despite Nick Carr's insistence that Greg Mankiw stop blogging to concentrate on his comparative advantage as an economic thinker, I'm glad Mankiw continues with his inefficient pursuit. From a recent entry:
If, however, beauty is correlated with income, which it is, then like height, it should be taxed, even [...]
Happy Chanukah
From Balducci's in New York!!
This may even top the cafeteria worker at UVA who told me on Passover: "We even gave you people bagels. What else do you want?"
Hat tip NancyKay Shapiro
' [...]
We all have days where a small thing makes us unaccountably happy. One of those days, for me, was when we acquired a commercial-grade blender. It had but one speed: "on." After all, when I put something in the blender I just want it to come out, [...]
Some time ago, I emailed my state representatives asking for their positions on interstate wine sales. I received a letter from State Senator Douglas Henry in response. I wasn't expecting much, since the Senator receives substantial contributions from the liquor wholesalers cabal. As anticipated, with his donations, the Senator' [...]
If William of Occam was alive today, I'm pretty sure he'd use something like this:
and not any of these:
And before you go telling me that he would abandon all "shaving systems" (the industry has banned the term [...]
Unfermented grape juice:
Fermented grape juice:
And with a name like Cordier (historical negociant and marketer of some of the best names in Bordeaux), it's got to be good.
(With apologies to Smuckers).
UPDATE: Apparently, the straw is not a simple hollow cylinder, but a' [...]
Randall Munroe has a solution to Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and to self-referential puzzlement in general.
First, John von Neumann's profound take on Gödel's result:
It was a very serious conceptual crisis, dealing with rigor and the proper way to carry out a correct mathematical proof. In view of' [...]
The guilt I carry with me for not immediately sending back my child's collection of Thomas the Tank Engine toys to replace them with unleaded versions is slightly assuaged. Had I separated my son from his most prized possessions for six to eight weeks, I would' [...]
Over 20 years ago, economist and FTC director Bruce Yandle wrote an influential column on the origins of social regulation. The theory of "Bootleggers and Baptists" contends that legislative regulation of "sin" (e.g., alcohol, tobacco) requires both a vocal "moral" voice (the Baptists) and a quiet though [...]
Following up on the table of wine price markups at restaurants, here are a few current examples:
We all know that a bottle of wine at a restaurant is substantially more expensive than at a retail store. I use the example of a restaurant wine list in my pricing class to motivate varied concepts, from extremeness aversion to product-line pricing to price discrimination. But just how expensive [...]
Yesterday, we saw several examples of an intriguing discount plan at Wal-Mart. Not to be outdone, Target follows suit:
A behaviorist might argue that if you're getting thirty cents of happiness thinking that you found a sale, then Target is actually making you better off. But [...]
I'm no marketing whiz, but this does not seem to be a sensible discount policy.
Why buy one when you can have two at trice the price?
Read on for more Wal-Mart "discounts"
These next two suggest that "saving" need not be financial. You'll pay just as much, [...]
The Beer Hunter, notable author, connoisseur, and advocate of fine malt, passed away August 30.
Michael Jackson's writings on the beers of Belgium, a country he termed "The Disneyland of beer," set me on a mission to try them all. I'm about 400 in, and there [...]
