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Monday, December 6, 2010
I love my front-loading washing machine. But I hate measuring out detergent. The measuring cap that comes with my favourite detergent has lines that are almost impossible to see, especially when peering down into the cap in a moderately-lit laundry room. But measuring carefully is vital, because the recommended amount is half a cap... More
Monday, November 29, 2010
Its the parade of the body parts - the time of year when requests for donations arrive from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Lung Association, the Canadian Liver Foundation, and other worthy causes. But with over 85,000 registered charities in Canada, how can one decide where to give? Every donor has his or... More
Monday, November 22, 2010
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers argued that extraordinary success requires hard work, talent, ambition - and being born at the right time. His favourite example is hockey. In minor hockey, children are grouped by birth year. This year, any player born in 1995 is a "minor midget." But January-born minor midgets are, on average, bigger and... More
Thursday, November 11, 2010
In a paper recently published in the Canadian Journal of Economics, Professors Jane Friesen and Brian Krauth of Simon Fraser University try to understand why Aboriginal students in British Columbia score significantly lower than non-Aboriginal students in standard, province-wide tests. Are Aboriginal students at worse schools? Do they suffer from... More
Thursday, October 28, 2010
On ratemyprofessors.com, students rank their professors for clarity, helpfulness, easiness and "appearance (just for fun): __Hot __Not." If a professor receives more hots than nots, a chili pepper appears beside his or her name. In a recent working paper, Marcel Voia, Anindya Sen, and I use this information to estimate the effect of hotness... More
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The credit card bill came through the mail. New balance: $1,676. Minimum payment: $10. I had always thought minimum payments protected consumers from accumulating debts they could not pay. Yet research by Professor Neil Stewart of University of Warwick suggests that minimum payments can hurt consumers. Suppose that I don't have enough money on... More
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The United Nations estimates that, based on standard demographics, there should be about 40 million more girls and women living in China than can be found in official counts. Some of these "missing women" were never born. Ultrasound technology makes it possible to detect a child's sex before birth and abort a child of... More
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