Furious Seasons (Free subscription) | yesterday
There's a new study out in The Lancet which argues that obesity contributes to global warming. I've not been able to locate the study on the journal's website, but from what John Tierney reports in the New York Times, it...
Deltoid (Free subscription) | 05/13/2008
What Mark Kleiman says John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians...
From the Desert to the Sea... (Free subscription) | 05/12/2008
A brief interruption to the photoblog for this environmental brainstorm. First, from John Tierney's NY Times-affliated blog, a statement of the problem: The Daily Mail has gone after celebrities who preach against greenhouse emissions but travel by private jet, like Brad Pitt, Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Coldplay's Chris Martin. The British newspaper gives its full five-star “hippy-crite”...
Brad Pitt Celebrity News (Free subscription) | 05/09/2008
Brad Pitt's Carbon FootprintNew York Times Blogs, NY - 6 minutes agoBy John Tierney The Daily Mail has gone after celebrities who preach against greenhouse emissions but travel by private jet, like Brad Pitt, Madonna, …
Healthcare Economist (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
John Tierney writes in The New York Times (”Appeasing the Gods…“) that “”We buy insurance not just for peace of mind or to protect ourselves financially, but because…we think buying health insurance will keep us from getting sick.” A rational person would believe that buying insurance against an event will not alter the probability that it [...]
Marginal Revolution (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
Economists say that people buy insurance to cover themselves if something bad happens. Some experiments by psychologists suggest that people buy insurance because they think it will prevent the bad thing from happening. John Tierney has more.
William J. Polley (Free subscription) | 05/06/2008
Ok, we need a break from gas tax holidays. This column from John Tierney is nothing particularly earth-shattering in its pronouncements, but it addresses the moderately interesting (and moderately amusing) questions of why people would believe that buying insurance actually affects the future outcome. But I liked this somewhat tangential remark: The fear of tempting fate showed up in...
Blue Hampshire (Free subscription) | 04/25/2008
Yesterday, I called on Chairman John Tierney of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs to hold a hearing on the information contained in an article in the New York Times published on Sunday, April 20, alleging that the Pentagon used undue influence with former military officers serving as "independent" military analysts commenting on...
PR News Wire (Free subscription) | 04/21/2008
House and Senate Conferees Set to Take Up Bill That Includes Grants to Train Realtime Captioners Who Meet the Communication Access Needs of People with Hearing Loss VIENNA, Va., April 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The National Court Reporters Association urged U.S. Rep. John Tierney, D-Mass., a member of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education, Lifelong Learning and Competitiveness,...
Misleading Advertising Law (Free subscription) | 04/21/2008
Monty Hall Game Recently, the New York Times John Tierney reported on a serious instance of the Monty Hall fallacy. "The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real...
The Irish Times (Free subscription) | 04/21/2008
DUBLIN CITY manager John Tierney has defended his decisions to approve two major high-rise developments in Ballsbridge even though the area is not specifically identified as a suitable location for tall buildings.
crm (Free subscription) | 04/12/2008
This has only a glancing relation to marketing, but since I'm such a big fan of the book Influence and the psychology behind consumer actions I wanted to share a recent series of articles from John Tierney of the New...
The Hill's Pundit Blog (Free subscription) | 04/10/2008
John Tierney has a mind-contorting piece in today’s New York Times that explains the Monty Hall Paradox. In it he explains how to beat the “Let’s Make a Deal” system. In a typical show, the fabled host gives a contestant the choice of three doors where only one door has the sought-after prize, the other two [...]
Freakonomics (Free subscription) | 04/10/2008
John Tierney hits a home run with this fantastic column about a recent paper by Keith Chen (whose work on capuchin monkeys has previously caught our attention). The Monty Hall problem is as follows: You are chosen to compete on Let's Make a Deal. There are three curtains. Behind one of the curtains is something [...]
Gordon's Notes (Free subscription) | 04/10/2008
John Tierney has been playing with explanations of the "Monty Hall" ( Bayes theorem ) problem for 17 years. That might be why he's provided the most succinct explanation I've come across ... (note: Monty knows where the car is, he can't open the door you picked, and he won't open the door for the car . That's important -- his actions provide new information. He's not picking randomly.)...
