Flu analysis, Freakonomics style

Freakonomics discusses why the flu outbreak hasn't been nearly as serious as was first predicted:

What made swine flu so worrisome was the high death toll it wrought in Mexico. Most of us assumed that the virus would be at least as lethal wherever it spread. It wasn’t. With the virus temporarily in retreat, current estimates show all but one of the swine flu deaths were confined to Mexico, and all but a few of those were in Mexico City. Why? Rampant poverty, for one, which kept many in Mexico who contracted swine flu from going to the doctor until it was too late. Swine flu isn’t much more dangerous than seasonal flu, it just struck a particularly vulnerable population. That didn’t prevent a public panic, of course: the Mexican economy could lose as much as $5 billion before tourism and economic activity recovers.

Productivity booster

This was posted on Freakonomics last week but I haven't gotten to it until today. I guess I'm a little slow...maybe that means I should spend more time browsing the Internet at work:

(If you're reading this at work)...you’re probably 9 percent more productive than your co-workers... That’s according to new research out of the University of Melbourne, which found that Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing (WILB) improves productivity by giving internet-centric workers a chance to refocus their minds between tasks. The increase is startling; workers who spend as much as 20 percent of their office time leisure browsing actually get more work done than workers who don’t.

I wonder if that applies to students at school as well...?