Camp Fires and Skepticism
Camp Quest is like a regular summer camp — campers canoe and swim — except that one of the main activities is trying to prove unicorns do not exist in order to win a ?10 note signed by Richard Dawkins. Read More »
The World Wide Web Keeps it Local
Rather than create a “global village,” the Internet may have actually “shrunk people’s horizons,” reports an Economist article about a new study by Hebrew University researchers Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy. They used a common Freakonomics topic — baby names — to study how far ideas have spread since the advent of the Internet. Read More »
FREAK Shots: Big Macs on Fancy Plates
On his website Fancy Fast Food, designer and writer Erik Trinidad revamps fast-food meals to look like plates you’d see at a five-star restaurant.
His tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look.” Read More »
Fertilizer Nudges
We’ve blogged before about the efforts of the international aid community to increase fertilizer use among small farmers in Africa. Many economists, however, believe that the subsidies often used to deliver the input are “distortionary, regressive, environmentally unsound, and … result in politicized, inefficient distribution of fertilizer supply.” A new working paper by Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Jonathan Robinson examines the fertilizer-buying patterns of farmers in Western Kenya. Read More »
and 
. You can also watch it on 