After reading a Guardian story is headined “A $95,000 question: why are whites five times richer than blacks in the US?” I still don’t know. A typical white family is now five times richer than its African-American counterpart of the same class, according to a report released today by Brandeis University in Massachusetts. White families [...]

Company policies requiring you to constantly change your password? Almost certainly more harmful than useful. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended. “Most security advice simply offers a [...]

Economist Arnold Kling points to some federal earning statistics of people who graduated college ten years ago and  concludes that we’re graduating far too many people with essentially worthless degrees: Major average income 25th percentile not in grad school 25th percentile Humanities 23791 11900 15600 Social Science 23361 9840 18000 Life Science 20120 0 17500 [...]

Yet another academic study finds correlation between IQ and political and religious beliefs. This one throws in sexual practice, too. Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ [...]

It seems that Olympic third place finishers who win a bronze medal are happier than second place finishers who win a silver. When Shannon Bahrke won bronze in women’s moguls Saturday, she hugged first-place winner Hannah Kearney so tightly that she almost knocked her U.S. teammate over. Under the cloud cover of Cypress Mountain, Ms. [...]

Glenn Reynolds, Stacy McCain, Jim Hoft, Lonely Conservative and others continue to point to rather thin evidence that UAH mass murderer Amy Bishop was a “socialist.”  She went to Harvard after all.  And one kid on a prof rating website called her one.   QED! As I’ve previously noted, her politics seem rather irrelevant.  Certainly, [...]

A new CDC study suggests that Americans may have reached the limits of human obesity. Americans, at least as a group, may have reached their peak of obesity, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released Wednesday. The numbers indicate that obesity rates have remained constant for at least five years among [...]

Glenn Reynolds passes along a Wired summary of a new report in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research which finds that whiskey produces worse hangovers than vodka. One reason for the different effects of vodka and bourbon, Rohsenow says, could be that bourbon contains 37 times more toxic compounds than vodka does, including nasty [...]

From the Telegraph, not the Onion:  “All men watch porn, scientists find.” Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users. But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been [...]

A new study finds that living to 100  will soon be commonplace: If current life expectancy trends continue, more than half of babies born in rich nations since 2000 will live to 100 years of age, and they’ll have less disability than elderly people in previous generations.  That’s the conclusion of researchers who found that [...]

In a classic Seinfeld episode, a phenomenon known as “shrinkage” was attributed to cold water. Now, a study finds that European fish have been shrinking owing to warm water. Go figure.

Tim Harwood looks at a recent National Center of Education Statistics report [PDF] titled “Achievement Gaps: How Black and White Students in Public Schools Perform in Mathematics and Reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”  In particular, he highlights the fact that “Black students at the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) have consistently [...]

The Defense Department is being urged to ban tobacco use by its personnel, Gregg Zoroya reports for USA Today. Pentagon health experts are urging Defense Secretary Robert Gates to ban the use of tobacco by troops and end its sale on military property, a change that could dramatically alter a culture intertwined with smoking. Jack [...]

Perhaps apropos yesterday’s post musing over whether “dating” is the appropriate way to describe an adulterous relationship, Michael Munger points us to a forthcoming article in the Journal of Sex Research entitled “The ‘”Booty Call’: A Compromise Between Men’s and Women’s Ideal Mating Strategies.” I render no judgment on the value of the research of [...]

Glenn Reynolds passes along news of a Japanese study that finds “People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.” Sweet!  I’ve apparently gotten out of shape [...]

Steven Taylor passes along a (somewhat old) scientific report that may spur a health movement: Researchers at Granada University in Spain have come across a discovery that will undoubtedly please athletes and sports enthusiasts – a pint of beer post-workout or match is better at rehydrating the human body than water. Professor Manuel Garzon, a [...]

Firms spend millions and go through a lot to keep their workers from goofing off on the Internet.  That may not be such a good idea: Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It’ll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases [...]

Tom Vanderbilt passes on and summarizes a new study by researchers at the Delft University of Technology that estimates the effects of “rubbernecking” in adding to traffic congestion after an accident at about 50 percent of free-flow capacity. As pictured above, a light truck overturned near the city of Apeldoorn. One lane (in the ‘bottom [...]

A new study (“Scientific Evidence Underlying the ACC/AHA Clinical Practice Guidelines” by Pierluigi Tricoci; Joseph M. Allen; Judith M. Kramer; Robert M. Califf; Sidney C. Smith Jr) in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, in Stuart Buck‘s words, “analyzes more than two decades of heart care guidelines (that is, the guidelines that your [...]

A recent study seems to confirm a point that Dave Schuler has been making repeatedly for months:  the housing bubble is a narrowly targeted geographic phenomenon: Via  Andrew Sullivan [Yes, him again. -ed.], who summarizes, “66 percent of potential housing value losses in 2008 and subsequent years may be in California, with another 21 percent [...]

Gina Trapani transcribes a corporate whiteboard offering solutions for “Workday Quality Over Quantity.” Check email ONLY: 10AM 1PM 4PM Send any time Set email to check every 3 hours. NO email on evenings. NO email on weekends. EMERGENCY? = Use phone. FOCUS 1-3 Activities max/day LOG 1-3 Succinct status bullets every day on team wiki [...]

College students increasingly expect to be rewarded for trying hard, Max Roosevelt claims in NYT: “Many students come in with the conviction that they’ve worked hard and deserve a higher mark,” Professor Grossman said. “Some assert that they have never gotten a grade as low as this before.” He attributes those complaints to his students’ [...]

Now, here’s a study I hope wasn’t funded by our tax dollars: Researchers at Indiana University showed video clips from 24 different speed dates and asked male and female participants two simple questions: “Do you think the man was interested in this woman?” and “Do you think the woman was interested in this man?” Their [...]

Boys with uncommon names are more likely to commit crimes, a new study concludes. Boys in the United States with common names like Michael and David are less likely to commit crimes than those named Ernest or Ivan. David E. Kalist and Daniel Y. Lee of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania compared the first names of [...]

Will Wilkinson passes on Bart Wilson‘s observation that, “fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language.” Jim Henley, blogging into the Google Reader comment share ether, retorts: I remember the days we were assured there was no word for ‘freedom’ in Russian. That was bullshit. ‘There’s no one-to-one translation of *fair* into other languages’ sounds [...]

MSNBC is touting the results of a new government funded survey under the headline: “Study: Teenage ‘virginity pledges’ are ineffective” and the subhead, “Youths who promise abstinence are also less likely to use protection.” The new analysis of data from a large federal survey found that more than half of youths became sexually active before [...]

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting post Wednesday arguing that extending life through medical intervention is expensive and that tradeoffs and rationing have to be made.  The only question, then, is how much value is placed on that extra unit of health care and who’s making the valuation. The inverse of the American health care system [...]

U.S. News, Washington Monthly, and others have ranked America’s colleges on academic and social measures. Princeton Review has put out its annual list of top drinking schools, ranking schools on per capita alcohol consumption. Surprisingly, there is little overlap. Survey Ranks Wisconsin School Tops in Drinking (AP) The University of Wisconsin-Madison topped a list of [...]