Superfreakonomics (VIDEO)

SUPERFREAKONOMICS

It's the only thing that could top Freakonomics

Meet the PROFESSORS, PROSTITUTES, DOCTORS, INVENTORS, PSYCOLOGISTS, and OTHER REAL-LIFE CHARACTERS of SUPERFREAKONOMICS

CRAIG FEIED, a onetime Berkeley skateboarder, has revolutionized emergency medicine by building a system that has little to do with actual doctor skill.

IAN HORSLEY is a "completely average and unforgettable" Englishman who found his calling as a bank officer stopping fraud - and who has now turned his attention to using bank data to hunt down terrorists.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD is a physics geek with a realistic, budget-friendly plan to prevent the next Hurricane Katrina - and to stop global warming too. He and his colleagues have another few thousand inventions up their collective sleeve as well.

ALLIE is a highly paid prostitute and unlikely entrepreneur who got rich by maintaining quality control and understanding the market forces of supply and demand.

JOHN LIST is an accidental economist, the son of a truck driver, who proves that most altruism isn't as altruistic as we might think.

SUDHIR VENKATESH, an inventive sociologist who collected real-time, on-the-spot data from Chicago street prostitutes, shows how the feminist revolution has lowered prostitutes' wages (and cheapened the price of oral sex).

KEN CALDEIRA runs an ecology lab at Stanford and is one of the most respected climate scientists in the world -- but his research shows that carbon dioxide is the wrong villain, and that even trees can exacerbate global warming.

BEN BARRES, a Stanford neurobiologist who was born Barbara Barres and had a sex-change operation, is part of a statistical look at why men make more money than women.

JOSEPH DE MAY, Jr. is a lawyer and Kew Gardens, Queens, resident, who tears apart the legend of the Kitty Genovese murder, which shocked the world in 1964 because 38 people apparently witnessed the crime and did nothing to help.

K. ANDERS ERICSSON, a professor of psychology at Florida State University, studies talented performers in all fields and finds that the thing we call "raw talent" is vastly overrated.

KEITH CHEN, a thirty-three-year-old, spiky-haired associate economics professor at Yale and the son of Chinese immigrants, taught a bunch of monkeys to use money, disproving Adam Smith's contention that humankind alone had a knack for monetary exchange.

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