SuperFeakonomics

p.15 shark attacks
"between 1995 and 2005, there were on average 60.3 world wide shak attacks each year... on average 5.9 fatalities per year. ... Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So wqhy aren't we petrified of them? Porbably because most of their victims live in places far from the world's media centers. It may also have something to do with the perceptions we glean from the movies. Friendly, entertaining elephants are a staple of children's films; sharks, meanwhile, are inevitably typecast as villains. "

p.17 "Most of the stories fall into one of two categories: things you always thought you knew but didn't; and things you never knew you wanted to know but do."

p.20" however, being female remain a serious handicap even in the 2a centurt. Young women in Cameroon have their breasts "ironed"--beaten or massaged by a wooden pestle or a heated coconut shell--to make them less sexually tempting.

p.21 A consideable body of research has shown that overweight women suffer a greater wage penalth than overweight men. The same is tru for women with bad teeth.

p.35Prostitutes do not charge all customers the same price....
Economists have aname for the practice of charging different prices for the same product: price discrimination.

p.42 July 4th family reunions.
And the prostitues do what any good entrepreneur would do: the raise prices by about 30% and work as much overtime as they can handle.
Most interestingly, this surge in demand attracts a special kind of worker--a woman who steer clear of prostitution all year long but, during this busy season, drops her other work and starts turning tricks. Most of thee part-time prostitutes have children and take care of their households; they aren't drug addicts. But like prospectors at a gold rush or Realtors during a housing boom, they see the chance to cash in and jump at it.
so How is a street prostitute like a deprtment-store Santa? -- the answer should be obvious: they both take advantage of short-term job opportunities brought about by holiday spiokes in demand.

p.61 Deliberate practice has three key components: setting specific goals; obtaining immediate feedback; and concerntrating as much on technique as on outcome.
The people who become excellent at a given thing aren't necessarily the same ones who seemed to be "gifted" at a young age. This suggests that when it comes to choosing a life path, people should do what they love--yes, your nana told you this too--because if you don't love what you're doing, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good at it.

p.63 "terrorists tend to be drawn from well-educated, middle-class or high-income families."
It may be that when you're hungry, you've got better things to worry about than blowing yourself up. It may be that terrorist leaders place a high value on competence, since a terrorist attack requires more orchestration than a typical crime.

p.99 Today, more than 40 years later, the Kitty Genovese saga appears in all 10 of top-selling undergraduate textbooks for social psychology.

p.125 People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.

p.148The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work.

p.193 That's why Archimedes said, "if you give me a fulcrum, I can move the world."

p.199Certain new ideas, no matter how useful, are invariably seen as repugnant. As we mentioned earlier, a market for human organs--even thoug it might save tens of thousands of lives each year--is one such example.

-----------Notes--------------
p.222 The unlikely savior of Indian women: This section draws substantially from Robert Jensen and Emily Oster, "The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women's Status in India," Quarterly Journal of Economics, forthcoming.

p.223 Son worship in China: see Therese Hesketh and Zhu Wei Xing, "Abnormal sex Ratios in Human Populations: Causes and Consequences," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 5, 2006; and Sharon LaFraniere, "Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million," The New York Times, April 10, 2009.

p.224 Shark-attack Hysteria: The Time magazine cover package appeared on July 30, 200a, and ioncluded Timothy Roch, "Saving Jessie Arbogast."
The definitive source for shark attack statistics is the International Shark Attack File, compiled by the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida.
Elephant deaths: see People and Wildlife, Conflict or Co-existence, ed. Rosie Woodroffe, Simon Thirgood, and Alan Rabinowitz (Cambridge UP, 2005). For more on elephants attacking humans, see Charles Soebert, "An Elephant Crackup?" The New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2006.

p.225 Brest ironing: see Randy Joe Sa'ah, "Cameron Girls Battle 'Breast Ironing,'" BBC News, Jun 23, 2006; as many as 25 percent of Cameroonian girls undergo the procedure, often by their mothers, upon reaching puberty.

p.229 Why aren't there more women like Allie?
See also Stephen J. Dubner, "A Call Girl's View of the Spitzer Affair," Freakonomics blog, The New York Times, March 12, 2008.

p.230 The birthdate bulge and the relative-age effect
The Cambridge Hndbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge UP, 2006)
"The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993)

p.248 Eat more kangaroo: see "Eco-friendly Kangaroo Farts Could Help Global Warming: Scientists, Agence France-Press, December 5, 2007.