Phantom Traffic To Funemployment

By: Josh Landis and Mitch Butler
Topics: Fast Draw Five

(Mitch Butler)

Confidence Game - A secret of the punditocracy and various opinionated blowhards has been revealed: outsized confidence. We're 100 percent sure of this! Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have demonstrated that people prefer to take advice from a confident source even if that source has a poor track record.
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(Mitch Butler)

Sleepily Ever After - New research presented at a sleep conference today concludes women who are married or in stable relationships get better sleep than their single sisters. (No word on whether their significant others are boring them to sleep.)
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(Mitch Butler)

Phantom Traffic Jams - Ever get through a long delay and wonder for the life of you what the holdup was? It might have been a "phantom traffic jam." They occur when someone drives too fast and then hit the brakes and researchers at MIT are figuring out how to prevent them.
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Funemployment - The recession has spawned a subculture of the formerly employed who are living it up now that they don't have professional responsibilities. Supported by severance packages, savings, unemployment checks or parents, the "funemployed" don't sweat their status. They enjoy it. Are they incurable optimists or people living in denial?
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Air Show - Bird researchers, armed with high-speed cameras, have discovered male hummingbirds reach speeds "faster than fighter jets" relative to their body size. Why do they fly so fast? To impress females, of course. The researchers used stuffed decoys of female birds to provoke the feathered need for speed. http://bit.ly/fxrzNClick here for the story.

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by mja721 June 11, 2009 11:14 AM EDT: New Jersey must account for a majorty of phantom traffic. mit should take aim there first; Reply to this comment