EconTech

An accidental plague that wiped out cities in World of Warcraft has drawn the attention of epidemiology researchers, who are negotiating with Blizzard about future studies. The next virtual horror might be intentional.
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Savulescu proposes that instead of trying to detect whether an athlete has taken drugs, we should focus on measurable indications of whether an athlete is risking his or her health. So, if an athlete has a dangerously high level of red blood cells as a result of taking erythropoietin (EPO), he or she should not [...]

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From an article in the New York Times today:
More recently, executives have blamed very unusual events — known to experts as 25-standard deviation moves, things expected only every 100,000 years — for the disruptions that computers could not predict.
Um, according to my calculation, a 25 standard deviation move on a normal distribution has a [...]
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FsG writes “Over the past few weeks, more and more Comcast users have reported that their BitTorrent traffic is severely throttled and they are totally unable to seed. Comcast doesn’t seem to discriminate between legitimate and infringing torrent traffic, and most of the BitTorrent encryption techniques in use today aren’t helping. If more ISPs adopt [...]

Antibacterial soaps show no health benefits over plain soaps and, in fact, may render some common antibiotics less effective, says a University of Michigan public health professor.
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Al Harberger is the father ofthe Chicago boys, who took Latin American economic policyby storm during the 1970s and 1980s. He recentlygave an interesting talk at the Center for Global Development, the transcript of which can be found here. The…
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