Yup, you read that right. If those fuzzy bastards get put on the Endangered Species List, it's bye-bye freedom, hello socialist police state.
...at least, that's what we learned a couple weeks ago at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change.
In an attempt to measure how social media affects the music biz (a different take than the constant attempts to just shut down the Interwebs), NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar looked at how the number of blog items about an album posted before its release could predict its sales. Looking at 108 albums released in early 2007, he found that it worked out pretty well.
With more than 40 "legitimate" blog posts prior to the album's drop, the artist could expect three times as many sales as the average. If that album was associated with a major label, the artist could expect five times as many sales. So, you know, there go the hopes of tastemakers everywhere looking for the next indie band out of Omaha.
Football games do funny things to people. Everyone knows that to some degree--I remember a distinct urge to roll an SUV and light things on fire when my Texas Longhorns won the Rose Bowl in 2006--but apparently no one has studied it. Until now.
Assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college game, vandalism spikes by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%, reports a new working paper by Daniel I. Rees, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver, and Kevin T. Schnepel, a graduate student in the economics program. It's even worse when there's an upset. An upset at home brings 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism.
Too bad the 'Horns sucked it up this year and gave in to a few upsets. Anyone game for some petty vandalism? Continue reading 'Want to reduce crime? Stop hosting football games.' >
Those Freakonomists are at it again: Steven Levitt teamed up with Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh to measure the economics of prostitutes in Chicago. After surveying various pimps, whores, and Chicago Police Department incident data, they discovered that street prostitution yields an average of $27 an hour. That's a lot better than Mickey D's, but then again, you don't have to worry about getting beaten to death when you're washing heads of lettuce.
But what's most shocking is that 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who fly solo without a pimp are "freebies" given to cops to keep from getting arrested. This bargaining tactic leads to prostitutes only getting arrested once every 450 tricks or so, which convinced the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one."
Ouch, Chicago's finest.
Continue reading 'More Freakonomics: Chicago cops sleep with more prostitutes than they arrest' >
Teenage me thought it was smooth as hell to turn to the girl next to me in choir--yes, choir--and offer to rub her shoulders before asking her out. Turns out it wasn't just a hormonal innovation. Now Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, suggests that male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming their female counterparts.
"In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all," Gumert told the Associated Press "It's a sign of friendship and family, and it's also something that can be exchanged for sexual services."
Continue reading 'Monkey sex now for sale cheap - only three picked nits and a French braid!' >
Like medical care, gasoline, and the price of a latte in Paris, the cost of lower-calorie foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and basically everything that isn't a snack cake with an indefinite shelf life or a bucket of high fructose corn syrup, has been going up faster than the increase in our wages or even the contents of our savings accounts
Continue reading 'Cost of healthy food rising five times as fast as inflation' >
