Why both A-Rod and the Yankees will benefit from his contract. (Earlier)

L.A. finds that “honor system” is futile on the subway.

Survey finds college admissions still a blood sport. (Earlier)

Brain studies show teenagers more prone to committing crimes.

Among many ingenious ideas/scenarios/scams proposed by blog readers in response to my horse betting quiz, the answer I was looking for finally appeared. Jim Vanasek is the reader who nailed it. Here is what he wrote:

The scenario: You are alive in going in to the final leg of the pick six. There is going to be a payout of $100,000 to the winning tickets. There is a very strong favorite in the race with 97 percent of the money bet on him. Your horse has 2 percent of the money bet on him. The last horse has 1 percent of the money bet on him. You KNOW Horse A cannot win. These numbers are consistent in the pick six pool as well as the win pool.

Assume there are 100 live tickets. 97 on the favorite, 2 on Horse B (we have one of the tickets), and 1 on Horse A. Read more …

Don Imus is back on the radio, brimming with apology and announcing a new cast that includes two African-American comedians. He was run off the air a few months ago for calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.”

I understand why he was canned. I understand why he is back. I understand that our culture loves the whole hero-sins/is-sent-into exile/then-is-redeemed cycle. It seems to perfectly embody the Christian ideals on which much of our culture operates.

What I don’t understand is why Imus got fired for his sins, albeit temporarily, while Family Guy rolls merrily along. I am not saying that Family Guy should be canned, or that Imus shouldn’t have been, but it’s a pretty curious situation.

I haven’t seen Family Guy all that much, but whenever I do I am pretty surprised that it’s allowed on the airwaves right there during prime time on broadcast TV (not cable). It’s a cartoon comedy that packs more gags per minute about race, sex, incest, bestiality, etc. than any other show I can think of. (It may have been beaten by South Park and a dozen others for all I know, but I can’t think of anything that comes close on broadcast TV.) Read more …

Are men inherently better at math & science than women? (HT: Odd Numbers)

Strange food tattoo fails to save owner’s restaurant.

Working the night shift linked to cancer. (Earlier)

New prediction market focuses on software products. (Earlier)

Here’s the latest from Jessica Hagy, the creator of Indexed and our regular guest blogger:

Read more …

It’s tough to imagine a world without cars. They serve as a base for our social and economic structure in a way that wasn’t thought possible a century ago. But the rapid growth of an automobile-based culture has produced economic and environmental consequences that, if left unchecked, could cripple society. As such, we’re facing a major dilemma: we can’t tell people not to drive, but we can’t survive if they keep doing so. What’s the solution?

Vijay Vaitheeswaran, a correspondent for the Economist, has set out to answer that question. His new book, Zoom: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, co-authored with Iain Carson, offers an in-depth history of the auto industry’s reliance on fossil fuels, and outlines the steps that should be taken to forestall a global crisis. Vaitheeswaran agreed to answer our questions about his book.

Q: What are the global trends in automotive ownership? How are they affecting the need for alternative fuels?

A: We are rapidly heading towards a world of a billion cars. The first mover was America, where there are now more cars than people with driver’s licenses Read more …

Do the book blurbs that one author gives to another author affect your decision to read the book?

The publishing industry certainly believes that blurbs matter a great deal. There is a lot of effort put into sending a manuscript out to authors for blurbs — more effort, I sometimes think, than the editing that goes into books. So do those endorsements matter?

Long ago, I used to think they mattered a lot. Then I changed my mind, thinking that blurbs don’t signal much about the quality of the book, but at least they signal something about the quality of the author’s friends or acquaintances who were willing to blurb the book.

Lately, I’ve come to believe that they really don’t matter at all, since most readers see blurbs as having about the same level of integrity as a used-car salesman’s personal promise that the car you’re about to buy is A-OK. But that might be an insult to used-car salesmen. Read more …

Rarely do I get to the end of a book and wish that it had still more chapters. On the rare occasion when this does happen, the feeling usually passes quickly. When my longing for a book persists, I know I really liked the book.

By this measure (as well as any other), I loved the book Sin in the Second City. For weeks after I’d finished it, I found myself wishing I had a stack of books just like it waiting to be read. Congratulations to Karen Abbott on writing a fantastic first book.

I first discovered the book, believe it or not, on the Freakonomics blog! Unbeknownst to me, either Melissa or Dubner convinced Karen Abbott to do a Q&A with us. I read that Q&A and promptly bought the book on my next trip to the bookstore. My primary reason for reading it was “business,” since Sudhir Venkatesh and I are working on a project concerning modern-day street prostitutes in Chicago. As such, I thought it would be important to learn something about the city’s prostitution in an earlier age. Read more …

James Flynn discusses the phenomenon of IQs rising through generations.

Prostitute auctions off services for Chilean charity. (Earlier)

Genetics and intelligence not necessarily linked.

Man attempts to open bank account with $1 million bill.

Apparently, it is dangerous even to be the wife of a semi-famous economist-author. In this blog post about the difference between corked wine and screw-top wine, Levitt’s wife, Jeannette, is revealed to be not only a drinker but a cork snob:

We recently had a friend over (her husband, Steve Levitt, co-wrote Freakonomics) and I noticed the strange look she gave me when I turned the screw cap of a very good South African Sauvignon Blanc.

To the blogger’s credit, he notes that a screw cap really does diminish the drama of opening a bottle of wine. But it’s good that Jeannette got busted by a friend. Can you imagine what an enemy, or even a stranger would have made of her “strange look”?

A few weeks back we linked to a blog post describing the optimal strategy in the game Monopoly.

This fascinating article by Brian McMahon describes how the game of Monopoly was used during World War II to aid in the escape of Allied POWs.

(Is it just me, or does it seem from reading the story that this was an incredibly risky strategy — the Monopoly boxes contained maps that showed where Allied safe-houses were located within Nazi controlled areas. Wouldn’t it be a disaster if some of these maps were confiscated by the Nazis? Allied soldiers who were going off to fight were being told to look out for the specially-marked Monopoly boxes. All you needed was one traitor or P.O.W. to confess under torture, and the Nazis would know to intercept the Monopoly games.)

Bruce Schneier could probably find out just about everything about you without breaking a sweat. He has built a career out of discovering weaknesses in computer systems and has analyzed security flaws in everything from biometrics to post-9/11 airline security. The designer of the popular Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms (the latter was a finalist for the Federal Advanced Encryption Standard), he has even earned a namecheck in The Da Vinci Code. Schneier is also the founder and C.T.O. of BT Counterpane, which calls itself “the world’s leading protector of networked information.”

In addition to writing a popular security newsletter and a blog, Schneier has also written a slew of books on the subject, including the seminal Applied Cryptography, Secrets and Lies, and his latest, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World.

He has kindly agreed to field your questions. Just keep in mind that even if you ask anonymously, he can probably figure out who you are.

Yesterday morning, I posed a challenging question for horse bettors:

Is there ever a situation in a parimutuel betting system in which you would want to bet on a horse to win, even though you knew for sure that the horse would lose the race?

Some clever folks came up with an answer involving “breakage.” That was not what I was looking for, but it is correct, meaning blog reader “dd” –the first one to mention it — will win a prize.

But I am still looking for the answer I have in mind, so keep on thinking. I knew this was a hard one.

Hint #1: It does not involve arbitrage between the parimutuel pool and any other odds.

Hint #2: It does not involve influencing other people’s perceptions of what the true odds should be.

Wildlife refuges bring in impressive revenues.

Researchers analyze goalkeeper jumps in stopping penalty kicks. (Earlier)

Have your genomic profile read for just $1,000.

New ranking scale helps experts predict winter storms. (Earlier)

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal about online lending reports that Zopa, a British person-to-person lending market, is starting operations in the U.S. It will join, among others, Prosper.com, which the WSJ reports will issue $100 million in person-to-person loans this year, with future loan originations projected to be $1 billion in 2010 and $9 billion in 2017. Can you imagine: $9 billion in person-to-person, unsecured loans? That should certainly shake up the credit markets.

I love cruising the loan offers at Prosper.com. There is a lot of information attached to each offer, and I’d imagine you could learn quite a bit about human behavior, decision making, and biases by playing with their data. I wonder if any economists are already working with the Prosper data (think “What Makes You Click,” the online-dating paper); I am looking forward to learning more about Prosper first-hand in a couple of months.

Even a quick glance at Prosper loans seems to show that lenders leap to loan money to people with a “good” cause Read more …

It’s a widely held perception that the professional athletes who constitute Major League Baseball and the National Football League have different levels of power — i.e., players have more juice in M.L.B., while it’s a team’s ownership that has more power in the N.F.L., often at the expense of individual players. Is this true?

We put this question to a handful of insiders: Vince Gennaro, Darren Rovell, Stan Kasten, and Andrew Zimbalist. Here are their responses:

Vince Gennaro, sports consultant and author of Diamond Dollars: The Economics of Winning in Baseball:

The radically different business models of the “egalitarian” N.F.L. and the “Darwinian” M.L.B. favor different constituents. With less variability in its revenue streams and a salary cap limiting player compensation, the N.F.L. structure tends to favor the owners. Meanwhile, the M.L.B. model leads to more revenue risk, and allows greater leverage and thus greater compensation for players. Pro football teams engage in a “national” business, with national broadcast rights making up the largest portion of their revenue stream. Read more …

Here is a tough little Freakonomics quiz for people who like to bet the ponies:

Is there ever a situation in a parimutuel betting system in which you would want to bet on a horse to win, even though you knew for sure that the horse would lose the race?

This is a hard one. Had it simply been posed to me as a question, I don’t think I could have figured it out. I know of only one case in which someone actually followed this strategy, and it worked out great for them.

We’ll give some Freakonomics schwag to the first person who gets the right answer (unless that person’s name is Bill Hessert, because he is the one who first told me the story).

A proposed history of the efficient markets hypothesis. (Hat tip: MidasOracle)

U.N. climate change conference to discuss global warming post-2012. (Earlier)

Senator proposes national registry for convicted arsonists. (Earlier)

The misery of economy air travel continues. (Earlier)

Today’s installment of FREAK-TV traces the history of male abs in culture and media, from the unveiling of Michelangelo’s “David” to James Dean’s shirtless pose in Rebel Without a Cause to the Calvin Klein abs bonanza of the 1990s that made “six-packs” the norm (and turned an often-unattainable level of fitness into an anti-fat craze that continues today). Now the only question left is, what’s next?