The Freakonomics Guide to Hitchhiking: A Contest
Our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?” has a pretty obvious premise. You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed or read the transcript here.
What may not be super obvious to everyone out there is the meaning of the graphic above. So let’s play name that reference and throw in some swag for good measure!
We haven’t forgotten that your preferred method of giveaway is “random,” and we’ve had a contest before on this blog where the prize is contingent on your comment number. So here’s how it’s going to work this time: the 42nd comment will win if it bears the correct answer. If comment 42 has the wrong answer, the winning number doubles and the 84th comment will win — but again, only if the answer is correct. The winning number will triple, quadruple, etc. until we get a winner.
So tell us, what does 42 signify and where is it from? Hint: the title of this post.
How the Internet Is Restoring the Market for Hitchhiking
In our latest Freakonomics Radio podcast, “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone,” we looked at how hitchhiking is essentially a market. Specifically, as Levitt puts it, it’s a “matching market” where supply (a person who’s willing to give a ride) matches up with demand (a person who needs a ride) in natural equilibrium. Over time, that equilibrium, as facilitated by people thumbing on the sides of roads, eventually vanished.
But the supply remained; actually it increased — as the average number of passengers in a car during the work commute went from 1.3 in 1977, to 1.1 today. (Click here for more data.) And as gas prices have steadily risen, and the economy flat-lined, the demand has seemingly come back. Enter the Internet as the new facilitator.
As many of you have pointed out in emails and comments, an entire online ecosystem of ride-sharing ventures has cropped up in the last few years. So here are the highlights: Read More »
Political Football
I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
John machlachlan asked:
When did surgery start being called a ‘procedure’?
The Oxford English Dictionary quotes usage of the term “surgical procedure” from the medical journal Lancet in 1853, and “Osteoclasis is a simple procedure” from E. H. Bradford and R. W. Lovett, Treatise on Orthopedic Surgery (1890).
John also asked:
Was the secretary of defense ever called anything else such as the secretary of offense?
The answer is: Secretary of War. Read More »
Research Retractions Rising
There’s a new trend emerging in academic research: more retractions. According to a recent article in Nature by Richard Van Noorden, “[i]n the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the Web of Science is on track to index more than 400 (see ‘Rise of the retractions’) — even though the total number of papers published has risen by only 44% over the past decade.”
The article suggests that the increase is a result of ‘an increased awareness of research misconduct” and “the emergence of software for easily detecting plagiarism and image manipulation, combined with the greater number of readers that the Internet brings to research papers.”
While scientists and editors support the change, they point to various problems with the system: policy inconsistencies across journals, “opaque” explanations for retractions, ongoing citation of retraction papers and the stigma surrounding retraction. “[B]ecause almost all of the retractions that hit the headlines are dramatic examples of misconduct, many researchers assume that any retraction indicates that something shady has occurred,” writes Van Noorden. 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 