Category: Web/Tech

1. Tim Harford explaining Thomas Schelling.

2. Richard Posner on the financial crisis; a good overview of his new book.

3. Profile of Andrew Sullivan.

4. Lane Kenworthy critique of Goldin and Katz on inequality and education.

5. Robert Merton lecture.

1. Tweenbots

2. Literary conventions and the human body.

3. Shirt to assist you in your time traveling.

4. Mark Thoma vs. Houman Shadab, on financial regulation.

5. Why recovery won't be easy.

Via the always-excellent www.geekpress.com, I find this report:

At North America's largest cell phone trade show, running this week in
Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the U.S. market that had a
numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard…

Old-fashioned numeric keypads
still will have a prominent place – but largely overseas. In a twist of
market dynamics, the demand for QWERTY phones is mainly a North
American phenomenon, said Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD.

It's true QWERTY had a head start from the fact that we all learned it at a young age.  Still, there is a starting over of sorts and if some alternative system were better for cell phone texting we might expect it to be evolving now.  It isn't.

I love being reminded of the history of economic thought:

It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow,
with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs
for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and
since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies
of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a
linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than
professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that
while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing
geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube
really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of
YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of
delivering that library will continue to grow.

The article is interesting through and the hat tip goes to Andrew Sullivan.

1. Fred Astaire

2. Is terrorism good for you?

3. Critical vs. Amazon rankings of composers; which are under- and over-valued?  Take Brahms and Tchaikovsky out of the over-hyped category and the resulting lists are pretty good ones.

4. New neuroscience blog.

5. Summer movies to look forward to (or dread).

Eric Crampton informs me of this article:

So, in lots of the developing world, we're seeing lots of searches on
Marx and very little on Rand. Rand only registers in the Philippines.
In the US, Rand beats Marx by a small margin; same in India. In Canada,
Marx beats Rand; same in Norway and New Zealand and … pretty much
every country that makes the top ten in searches on Ayn Rand. The green
bars show searches for "Atlas Shrugged". Only in the US and India do
searches on Rand beat searches on Marx.

In other words, we are not currently at a "Rand moment," at least not globally.  There is much more information at the link.

1. Michael Spence defends the Geithner plan.

2. Chimpanzee markets in everything; research is here.

3. Via Michelle Dawson, more on the fMRI voodoo correlations debate; relevant papers can be found here.

4. A tauntaun sleeping bag: do you get the reference?

1. The economy: have we seen the worst?

2. Financial regulation as chess game.

3. Markets in everything yes progress is real.

4. Urban renewal in Medellin.

5. Don't trample the geisha.

Of me, at the Kaufmann Foundation, talking about blogging (and I believe some other things).  Like Scott Sumner, I don't usually watch myself on video so I haven't viewed it.  I don't remember what I said, but I am sure I meant it at the time.  The Kaufmann people seemed to like it.

I thank Tim Kane for the pointer.  From Tim's blog, here is an interesting profile of Carl Schramm, president of Kaufmann.  I did have a chance to meet Carl and he is a fascinating man.

1. Transcript of Bob Lucas talk, with eminent questioners and, at one point, Bob Lucas falling down the stairs.

2. Bloggingheads.TV between Mark Thoma and Scott Sumner.

3. What Larry Summers learned at a hedge fund.

4. Lesswrong, a rationality blog, with guest posts by Robin Hanson.

5. Markets in everything: a pro al Qaeda magazine, from North Carolina, in English.

1. Markets in everything: Anatomie-Bettwäsche.

2. Zach Wamp.

3. Vitamin sales seem to be countercyclical.

4. I Love You, Man is a deeply conceptual movie, full of (implicit) social science.  It raises (and does not resolve in the usual corny way) the possibility that our choices of romantic partners are more interchangeable than our choices of same-sex friends.

1. Posner reviews Akerlof and Shiller.

2. Review essay on macroeconometrics.

3. La Sirene: I can't wait to go see it.

4. The economics of URL shortening.

5. After Gaza, by Michael Walzer.  He understands nested games, at least implicitly.

1. The mark-to-market myth?

2. Pulp nonfiction.

3. Fear of TALF.

4. Via Greg Mankiw, ranking of all blogs, MR is now at #36 ("widely referenced" seems to be the standard).

5. Via Brad DeLong, one rating of the top Hayekian public intellectuals (shouldn't Bill Easterly be in the top few?).

Via Finoculous, here is a very interesting post on why you hate Facebook, yet why it will make the company billions.  It is not written for an easy excerpt but the main argument is that finally the company can produce a commercially viable interface between businesses and people.  Here is one part:

When Zuckerberg announced these changes a couple of weeks ago I told
him he was brilliant and that his moves this month would be remembered
for decades. Decades.

Here’s why:

Let’s say you’re walking down University Ave. in Palo Alto,
California in a couple of years (or, really, any street in the world)
and you’re hungry.

You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or
Windows Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then
you type “sushi near me.”

It answers back “within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more than 20 of your friends have liked.”

In his view the new Facebook is basically copying Friendfeed, albeit in a more potent way.  If you announce you are having a baby, you will be contacted by product suppliers and you will learn which baby-related services your friends have liked.

I still don't like it. 

1. Overview of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.  

2. Does money mess with your mind?

3. Is voice mail obsolete?

4. Giant baby robot spits fire.

5. Ryan Avent on libertarianism.