Question of the Day: What Boomerangs in Value?
Our latest podcast, “Weird Recycling,” is about the unlikely reuse of cast-off items. A reader named Gavin Castleton just happened to write in with an appealing riddle in the same vein:
Read More »Has there ever been a good/product whose value was reduced to zero, but somehow rose again? If so, could you shed any light on the market dynamics or social catalysts that revived it?
To put my question in context: I’m researching the music industry’s rocky transition from goods to services (download/physical goods to streaming music subscription services). Journalists, industry folk, and consumers are all quite fond of declaring “Music will be free. It’s obvious and inevitable.” But I started to wonder if it really was all that inevitable. So I started looking for other examples of a product that lost its monetary value completely, but somehow returned from the dead.
FREAK-est Links
1. Who are the 1%? A Gallup poll.
2. Creative types are more likely to cheat.
3. Boost your test scores by chewing gum.
4. Facebook changes numbers on an old adage of separation.
5. Ten things everyone should know about time.
6. Like hopping the subway turnstile? You’d better buy insurance.
7. New study says rats are nice.
How to Guess Better on an SAT
A nice analytic giblet from a Times profile of new Nobel economists Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims:
Because of his father’s College Board connections, Mr. Sims got hold of an old SAT exam, which he and Mr. Willoughby used to conduct a statistical analysis. They found that on multiple-choice questions in English and social studies, the “longer answers tended to be correct.” In math, they determined that the number that was “closest to all of the other numerical choices” was probably the right one.
I do wonder if those patterns still hold true in standardized tests. Of course, you can always pay someone else to take the test for you. Read More »
Is Climate Change Affecting When People Visit National Parks?
Last year, 281.3 million people visited America’s national parks, down 4.2 million from a year earlier. With parks such as Glacier likely to be glacier-less sometime around 2030, or sooner, authors Lauren B. Buckley and Madison S. Foushee (PDF here) track differences in attendance habits since 1979 to ask if climate change is affecting relatively mundane human activities such as park visitation:
Read More »Climate change has driven many organisms to shift their seasonal timing. Are humans also shifting their weather-related behaviors such as outdoor recreation? Here we show that peak attendance in U.S. national parks experiencing climate change has shifted 4 days earlier since 1979. Of the nine parks experiencing significant increases in mean spring temperatures, seven also exhibit shifts in the timing of peak attendance. Of the 18 parks without significant temperature changes, only 3 exhibit attendance shifts. Our analysis suggests that humans are among the organisms shifting behavior in response to climate change.
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