Author Archive
Why Cheap is Good
It’s probably not fair to comment on a book I’ve never read, but here I go. I am basing most of my specific comments off of Richard Bernstein’s piece in the New York Times. In any case, Ellen Ruppel Shell, a correspondent for the Atlantic, has written a book called Cheap: The High Cost of [...]
July 30, 2009
Posted in: Economics 
2 Comments
Airline Pricing and Baggage Fees
With the news that American Airlines will increase its baggage fees starting August 14, 2009, I thought it might be nice to have a little note on airline pricing. It is well known that passengers on the same flight will often pay wildly different prices for the same trip. These prices differ by when you [...]
July 27, 2009
Posted in: Economics No Comments
Missing the Point on the Gates Arrest
Today, President Obama attended the White House press briefing to state that he “could have calibrated those words differently” when he stated that the Cambridge police officer who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. acted stupidly. To sum up what happened, Gates, a Harvard professor and leading authority on race, locked himself out of his house. [...]
July 24, 2009
Posted in: Policy 4 Comments
Venn Diagrams and Free Speech
Fred Kaplan has written an interesting history of the legal case that struck down many of America’s obscenity laws, particularly the ability of the US Postal Service to confiscate items from the mail it deemed obscene. The case revolved around a publisher, Grove Press, that sued the Postal Service for confiscating copies of the D. [...]
July 21, 2009
Posted in: Policy No Comments
How to Get Your Wallet Back
Richard Wiseman, the psychologist who brought us LaughLab, and their quest to find the world’s funniest joke, has come out with another piece of interesting research. Professor Wiseman tried to determine what factors increased the chances of getting a lost wallet returned. He found that wallets containing baby pictures were returned at a significantly higher [...]
July 20, 2009
Posted in: Programming, Data and Metrics No Comments
