Is Voting Rational? Yes, Scientists Say.
Voting as a rational decision, by Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, Vox EU: About fifteen years ago, I attended a lecture by venerable pollster Mervyn Field, who told us that when he started in the business in the 1950s, there was a lot of concern about nonvoters. What was going on with these people who were too alienated to participate in society in this most basic way? But, recently, Field continued, the question has become, Who are these “voters”? What makes them tick?
Globalizing Soccer
How does globalization reshape wealth and opportunity around the world? Is it mainly a force for good, enabling poor nations to lift themselves up from poverty by taking part in global markets? Or does it create vast opportunities only for a small minority?
To answer these questions, look no farther than soccer. Ever since European clubs loosened restrictions on the number of foreign players, the game has become truly global.
Roommates.com can be sued for violating fair housing laws, court rules
The law may temper the freewheeling nature of the Internet after all.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that a website may be found liable for violating fair housing laws by matching roommates according to gender, sexual orientation and parenthood.
Federal law protecting websites "was not meant to create a lawless, no-man's land on the Internet," the court in San Francisco said in an 8-3 ruling.
Researchers crack Aztec symbol code
It has long been a mystery of Aztec arithmetic: What is three arms plus five bones?
Now researchers know: Five hearts.
The odd symbols had been noted for centuries - thousands of them appear in Aztec property registries that were created around 1540. But no one knew value of the symbols or how they were used to represent the size of land plots for tax assessment and other purposes.
5th-grader finds mistake at Smithsonian
ALLEGAN, Mich. - Is fifth-grader Kenton Stufflebeam smarter than the Smithsonian? The 11-year-old boy, who lives in Allegan but attends Alamo Elementary School near Kalamazoo, went with his family during winter break to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Regular use of text messages and e-mails can lower the IQ more than twice as much as smoking marijuana.
That is the claim of psychologists who have found that tapping away on a mobile phone or computer keypad or checking them for electronic messages temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user’s IQ.
This rate of decline in intelligence compares unfavourably with the four-point drop in IQ associated with smoking marijuana, according to British researchers, who have labelled the fleeting phenomenon of enhanced stupidity as “infomania”.
Research on sleep deprivation suggests that the IQ drop caused by electronic obsession is also equivalent to a wakeful night.
Market Rises Sharply On April Fool's Joke
Traders woke up to a pleasant surprise on Tuesday morning, with equity Futures strongly higher. CNBC anchors were exuberant as previous earnings and credit fears melted away.
The cause? An internet April Fool's hoax that backfired.
Private Equity: "Nothing More than a Clumsy Trick"?
Students Plagarize Honor Code
SAN ANTONIO - Their goal was an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.
However, the wording in a draft by students at the University of Texas at San Antonio appears to match another school's code - without proper attribution.
The student currently in charge of the honor code project said it was an oversight, but cheating experts say it illustrates a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don't know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.
Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior?
In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.
