Freakonomics Poll: When It Comes to Predictions, Whom Do You Trust?
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “The Folly of Prediction,” is built around the premise that humans love to predict the future, but are generally terrible at it. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the media player above, or read the transcript here.)
There are a host of professions built around predicting some future outcome: from predicting the score of a sports match, to forecasting the weather for the weekend, to being able to tell what the stock market is going to do tomorrow. But is anyone actually good at it? Read More »
Physical Activity During the Recession: More Voluntary Exercise, Less Exertion
Last month, we wrote about data pulled from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), examining how Americans spend their lost work hours during the recession. While 32% of foregone work hours were spent watching TV and sleeping (not great, though sleeping is helpful), 15% of that time went to “other leisure,” among which, there is “listening to music” and “being on the computer,” as well as “exercise and recreation.”
Two new studies (both coauthored by Dhaval M. Dave of Bentley University) drill further into that ATUS data to paint a more complete picture of our exercise and physical activity habits, and ultimately, what impact they have on our health. The first finds that during the recession, we engage in more voluntary exercise, but have less exertion. Part of this has to do with the difference between exercise and physical activity — the latter is seen as the healthier of the two. (Better to walk to work everyday than do sit-ups twice a week.) With the loss of work, comes a loss of physical activity — particularly with the types of jobs we’ve lost. Read More »
FREAK-est Links
This week, why SpongeBob hurts kids’ willpower, a restaurant in Saudi Arabia fines you for unfinished plates, robots inventing their own language, Indonesia’s floating trash problem, jet packs are finally for real, and lie detectors that actually work. Read More »
Good News: We’re Getting Better at Not Killing Sea Turtles
Human-caused sea turtle deaths are down 94% since 1990 because of “fisheries-specific bycatch mitigation measures.” Basically, it means we’re getting better at not catching sea turtles in giant fishing and shrimping nets. A paper to be published in the November issue of the journal Biological Conservation compiles the first cumulative estimates of the number of sea turtles unintentionally caught across U.S. fisheries between 1990 and 2007 — before and after implementation of mitigation measures. The researchers are careful to point out, however, that they cannot account for off-the-books fisheries. They write in their abstract:
Our estimates represent minimum annual interactions and mortality because our methods were conservative and we could not analyze unobserved fisheries potentially interacting with sea turtles.
Before measures were put in place 20 years ago, 300,000 sea turtles were victims of bycatch, and 70,000 were killed every year. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 