I guess it's a common problem

My last name (Monnier) is rarely pronounced correctly (it's French, so it's pronounced "Moan-e-yay"). So I wasn't too surprised to see the name butchered by Brent Weisberg (the journalist covering the case) from KPTV in Oregon when discussing how a local man (Charles Monnier) saved someone who had been attacked by pitbulls by beating them off with a shovel. Instead of the elegant French pronunciation, Weisberg identified the hero as "Mont-e-air". Last time I checked there was no "t" in "Monnier."

Oh well.

Taste...influenced by more than just smell

This is relatively old news (August of 2008), but is nevertheless interesting. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that:

Participants who ate the vegetarian alternative did not rate the taste and aroma less favorably than those who ate the beef product. Instead, what influenced taste evaluation was what they thought they had eaten and whether that food symbolized values that they personally supported ... strategies that might persuade heavy meat eaters to change their diet include changing the cultural associations of fruits and vegetables to encompass values that meat eaters endorse (e.g., power and strength), or challenging heavy meat eaters' assumptions about what tastes good by using in-store (blind) taste tests or showing them results of studies such as this one."

This reinforces the idea that the product is not just the physical product (or its taste), but the entire experience of purchasing and consuming the product (the price, the product's story, its ingredients, its smell, etc.). And I think the authors of this study are on to something by suggesting a change in the marketing strategy of vegan alternatives to meat. While I think that rebranding tofu and seitan as manly products (buy a new Ford F150, bet a freezer full of Hungry-Man Tofu dinners!) is an uphill battle, I could imagine a line of frozen vegan dinners targeted toward health/fitness-conscious individuals that uses a brand strategy similar to those whey/protein supplement powders...maybe something like Kung pao tofu fortified with Omega-3 fatty acids and 1000mg of the latest nutrient du jour.

John has sent you an invitation to join his risk pool...

As Jay Parkinson mentions here, the social network E-Factor (for entrepreneurs and investors) is now offering health insurance to its premium members:

Fascinating concept…social networks becoming pools for health insurance. It sure is a whole new world of stickin’ it to the man...What if Facebook offered a whole slew of low cost insurance premiums to their members? Of course, premiums would be much lower because the average Facebook user is young and fairly healthy.

We (in the US) have employer-provided health insurance for a number of reasons, one being the fact that income from corporations in the form of subsidized health insurance isn't taxed (so it's cheaper for a corporation to buy health insurance for an individual than an individual for herself), and another being that a company's set of employees provides a rather convenient group of people from which to create a risk pool.

A change in the tax code to allow all expenditures on health insurance (whether by a corporation or an individual) to be tax-free would take care of the advantage of employer-provided insurance described in the first reason, and allowing risk pools to be created from online social networks would take care of the advantage described in the second reason.

Granted, a group of Facebook friends (or an extended network of friends' friends) may not provide a sufficient diversity of healthiness to allow for a practicable risk pool, but perhaps a network of LinkedIn connections would work. In any case, I'm sure there's some way that social networks (or meta networks) could be harnessed to generate risk pools. It's an intriguing idea, to be sure.

Image from here.

Unintended Consequences?

I think that the "iBreath" iPod breathalyzer attachment is a good idea...anything that gives people more information (which can in turn lead to more informed decisions) seems like a good thing, especially when it gives people more control over their own bodies.

I wonder, though, if having such information may lead to a perverse competition among revelers to see who can achieve the greatest Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) the fastest. The selling point of the product seems to be that it can help you know when it's safe (from a legal standpoint, at least) to drive. But I wonder if it also contains warnings for when ones BAC is nearing that of alcohol poisoning. And then I also wonder whether such warnings would be effective or might they merely be a sign of accomplishment ("Last night I was so wasted I got the alcohol poisoning warning!").

In any case, the potential for intentional misuse is probably pretty small, and is most likely outweighed by the benefits of the product, so it's obviously a net good thing.

I've lived a sheltered life...

I knew Wisconsin was a nice place to live, but I hadn't realized that I'd grown up in a metropolitan area with one of the lowest crime rates in the nation (Wausau, WI). In fact, six of the top ten metropolitan areas with the lowest crime rates in the nations are mid-size Wisconsin cities very similar to Wausau. Wow.

1. Fon du Lac, WI
2. State College, PA
3. Bangor, ME
4. Eau Claire, WI
5. Appleton, WI
6. Sheboygan, WI
7. Bismarck, ND
8. La Crosse, WI
9. Logan, UT-ID
10. Wausau, WI

Via Marginal Revolution.

2009 looks bleak, 2010 a bit better

As the following embedded map of the OECD Economic Outlook shows, 2009 looks like a pretty stagnant year for the western world. Flipping the year to 2010 shows a happier scenario, with a lot less blue and a lot more orange.

One comment about the map's usability: it would be nice to be able to toggle the year without having to move the mouse all the way down to the dropdown box for the year. One potential solution would be to add all the years (2008, 2009, and 2010) to the little bubble that pops up when you hover over a country so that you could click a different year without losing focus ona country. As the map is currently designed, the user has to break their focus on a country (and any other countries their comparing the country of focus to) to change the year, which seems a bit clunky.

Via OECD Factblog.

Meta-analysis of Free Market Critiques

After reading this post by Tim Lee:

It sounds to me like what Ezra is saying here, in an extremely back-handed fashion, is that libertarians aren’t corporate stooges at all. When the interests of corporations happen to align with what we regard as good public policy, then corporate interests tend to be our allies. Otherwise, they tend not to be. Which, as far as I can tell, is exactly how it should be.

...

But it is a little bit frustrating that when libertarians take a firm stance against the interests of large corporations, we don’t get praised for our independence so much as getting attacked for our ideological rigidity. These charges can’t both be right: we can’t both be solicitous corporate shills and inflexible ideologues. If people are going to question our motives, I wish they’d at least get their story straight on exactly which kind of intellectual dishonesty they think we’re engaging in.

I was reminded of this video (via Will Wilkinson) on how ones morals can affect what should be an objective, rational judgment.



What Ezra seems to be guilty of is allowing his moral values (opposition to oil drilling, support for a progressive tax system, support for government-managed Social Security) to cloud his characterization of the motives of libertarians.

True For Many Things

Via Andrew Sullivan, this ridiculously simple chart shows how gay marriage would affect society:


A similar chart could be made for many libertarian positions, the most obvious of which (to me, at least) is drug legalization.

Wikipedia Curiosity of the Day

Can you believe that the guillotine was used by the French government as recently as 1977?!? From Wikipedia:

The last public guillotining [in France] was of Eugène Weidmann, who was convicted of six murders. He was beheaded on June 17, 1939, outside the prison Saint-Pierre rue Georges Clémenceau 5 at Versailles, which is now the Palais de Justice...The guillotine remained the official method of execution in France until France abolished the death penalty in 1981. The last guillotining in France was that of torture-murderer Hamida Djandoubi on September 10, 1977.

Via curiosity about the guillotine courtesy of this Boing Boing post.

Pro-Choice

This Daily Show clip reminds the viewer of the benefits of choice:



Why doesn't the same liberal appreciation of reproductive choice also apply to parents being able to choose where their kids go to school? As Nick Gillespie and Neal McCluskey have pointed out, when it comes to school choice, rich people (like Barack Obama) effectively have a choice; poor people effectively don't.

I've never understood how some people can so passionately defend a woman's right to choose her reproductive outcomes but then not defend that same woman's right to choose where her child (once born) will go to school.