How Will Sean Payton’s Injury Affect the Saints’ Offense?
On Sunday, in a game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, New Orleans Saints head coach Sean Payton tore his MCL and fractured his knee when one of his own players was tackled out of bounds and crashed into him on the sideline. You can watch the replay here if you have a thing for gruesome knee injuries.
Payton is the rare NFL head coach who still calls the offensive plays, so the injury presented a pretty big problem for the Saints, especially since it happened early in the first quarter. Rather than going to the training room, Payton gutted it out on the sideline and kept calling plays while trainers tended to his knee. By halftime though, with the Saints trailing 20-10, Payton had had enough and passed play-calling duties over to his offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael.
It’s tough to say what effect the injury had on the Saints’ offense Sunday; they lost 26-20. By the numbers, the Saints’ output was fairly even through the first to second half. Read More »
International Aid and Mobile Cash Transfers
We’ve blogged before about the many applications of mobile phone technology in developing countries, especially when it comes to mobile banking. In much of the developing world, particularly in Africa, mobile phones are thriving in remote villages, while access to electricity, clean water, schools and government services is weak at best; yet cellular service is strong.
A new research paper by Jenny C. Aker, Rachid Boumnijel, Amanda McClelland and Niall Tierney analyzes the effectiveness of yet another mobile application gaining strength in the developing world: cash transfer programs. After a drought in Niger in 2009 and 2010, Concern Worldwide, an international NGO, provided “unconditional cash transfers to approximately 10,000 households during the ‘hungry season,’ the five-month period before the harvest and typically the time of increased malnutrition.”
Instead of distributing cash in the usual way, the NGO conducted a randomized experiment: one-third of targeted villages received a monthly cash transfer through a mobile system called zap; another third received manual cash transfers, and the remaining third received manual cash transfers plus a mobile phone. Read More »
Did Blackberry Outages Cut Abu Dhabi Traffic Accidents by 40 Percent?
A three-day Blackberry service outage last week in parts of the United Arab Emirates once again demonstrates the value of “distracted driving” laws. According to an article in The National, an English-language paper in Abu Dhabi, traffic accidents in Dubai last week fell 20 percent from average rates on the days when BlackBerry users were unable to use its messaging service. In Abu Dhabi, the number of accidents last week fell 40 percent, and there were no fatal accidents. According to the article, on average there is a traffic accident every three minutes in Dubai, and a fatal accident every two days in Abu Dhabi.
Abu Dhabi recently launched a campaign against cell phone use while driving and plans to use electronic evidence in traffic cases. Read More »
Marriage: More Money, More Problems
We included this in last week’s FREAK-est Links, but thought it was worth a full blog post. A recent study of 1,734 married couples in the U.S. finds that money, indeed, can’t buy you love. According to an article about the study, couples who don’t value money very highly score “10 to 15 percent better on marriage stability and other measures of relationship quality than couples where one or both are materialistic.”
“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” said Jason Carroll, a professor at BYU, and the lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.” Interestingly, materialistic couples’ perception of their finances seems to matter more than their actual financial status: “Though these couples were better off financially, money was often a bigger source of conflict for them.”
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 