For UK readers

From BBC news, a snapshot of life in statistics.

Friday Special - week 1

For those of us in the 'office sector', Friday is a special day. This is the first in a series of Friday posts listing some of the interesting stuff I came across during the previous week.

What to do if you have a big appartment, loads of coins and time to spare (video)

The gender genie - enter any text to predict the gender of the author. Seems to work too!

Via Greg Mankiw, a hillarious anthropological account of Life Among the Econ

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, on The Joy of Righteous Indignation

The New York Times: For $82 a Day, Booking a Cell in a 5-Star Jail

Cheating Scandal at Duke

BBC News: Woman put excrement in man's curry

The New Zealand Herald: Colonisation and Christianity blamed for smacking

Kopi Luwak, the most expensive coffee in the world

Levitt and Dubner discuss economic research on monkeys

Levitt again, on why drugdealers live with their mums. (video)

Reuters: Muslim women in France regain virginity in clinics

Mapped up: News and blog feeds from around the world - with country of origin marked on funky map. Available as screensaver and online.

Sentencing according to probability of guilt

Two murder trials take place within weeks of each other. The first one is almost purely a procedural matter: there is overwhelming evidence that the accused is guilty and no reasonable man could argue otherwise. Not so in the second case, where while the evidence point towards a reasonably high probability of guilt, some jurors and members of the public still have their doubts (reasonable or otherwise).

Both men are convicted - and sentenced to the same number of years in prison.

Repeat this same scenario a few thousand times, and the defendants that fall in the second category will have served a lot more 'undeserved' years in prison than those in the first. In fact, given that 'society' determines its optimal sentencing policy by taking into account the probability a miscarriage of justice takes place, those that are indeed guilty will enjoy a more lenient sentence than they would have been awarded in a world with perfect information.

This is a classic example of the inefficiency arising by awarding an average (rather than probability weighed) performance payout to all agents under conditions of uncertainty. I take it as given that society prefers someone who is undeservedly in jail to at least be freed sooner rather than later. In so far as the balance of opinion within a jury is correlated with probability of guilt (and it better be, because otherwise we should discard the notion of a 'fair trial' all together) our approach to sentencing is grossly inefficient and unfair.

Postscript: I am ignoring potential issues arising from strategic interactions amongst jury members here, however these should not affect the basic thrust of the argument.

Murdoch makes an offer you can't refuse

Here's the story:

DOW Jones could face a flood of shareholder lawsuits if it rejects a buyout bid from News Corporation and its shares tumble, legal and governance experts said overnight.

Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, has said it is evaluating the $US5 billion ($6 billion) takeover bid from Murdoch's News Corp (nws.ASX:Quote,News), a proposal that triggered a nearly 55 percent jump in its stock price on Tuesday.

But a representative of the publisher's controlling shareholders, the Bancroft family, said they would oppose it.

If the board ultimately rejects the offer, and no comparable bids emerge, lawsuits almost surely will be filed accusing the directors for failing to look after investors' interests, said Thomas Dewey, a partner at law firm Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky.

55% jump in the share price upon publication of the offer? If I was a shareholder, I'd sue too.

Who said that the rise of litigation culture is a bad thing?

Advice to the Chinese press

This is from 'Minutes of the News Briefing, Bureau of Propaganda and Management, State Administration of Radio Film and Television':

Abide by the propaganda discipline, stand in the same line with the central government and the people.

They also have a problem with watching cartoons and talking about pigs.

Something for your ipod

The London School of Economics holds a number of public lectures and events of interest to economists and social scientists in general.

You can find some of them in mp3 format here.

The trouble with women - part 2

For background, read part 1.

Now, picture two companies competing with each other. They are identical in every respect, other than the gender of their staff. The first one (Girl Co.) employs only women, while the other prefers men (predictably, the founders went for Guy Co.)

When joining their respective companies' graduate schemes, guys and girls have equivalent levels of IQ, education and charisma. Guy Co. and Girl Co. are reputable, law abiding companies, so they pay the same salary for the same job. Being identical in every respect, they have the same costs of production. Competition is stiff.

A few years pass. The guys get married to the girls and they decide to have children. Guy Co. barely notices: its employees go away for a few weeks after each child is born, and perhaps have the odd day off every once in a while thereafter to cater for measles, chickenpox and the like.

At Girl Co., however, things look decisively bleak. One by one, its employees give birth and go away for months on end, while Girl Co. still has an obligation to pay them a large fraction of their salary. Temporary replacements are hired, causing the company's payroll and training costs to go up dramatically.

But that's the least of Girl Co.'s worries. Many of its star employees never come back, choosing instead to stay at home or look for a less onerous job. Those that do return tend to leave earlier than they used to, and showing up for that crucial meeting depends on whether the antibiotics they gave to their baby the night before proved to be as effective as it said on the package.

To cut a long story short, Girl Co. goes bust while Guy Co. ends up dominating the market. From the point of view of the employer, hiring a girl is that much riskier than getting a guy with similar qualifications, training her or promoting her to a business-critical position that will allow her to eventually reach the top even more so.

The real trouble with women is that they have a visible characteristic (their gender) that is negatively correlated with life-time productivity. It's not that there aren't many women that are as career oriented as the most driven of men. On average, however, women tend to not be as good an investment for an employer as men are - and it's impossible to tell who the 'committed' ones will turn out to be. By the time it all becomes clear, most female high-flyers will have lost valuable time in second-rate jobs, without the experience and contacts that will secure them a job running the world and a fat pay package to go with it. Add to that the calculus of household welfare maximisation, and there you have it.

Unfortunately, the saying that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to succeed is all too true. Blame culture, history and the tax system - but keep in mind that these would account to nothing were it not for your less eager sisters.