Andrew Webber

This study analyses time-dependent rhythms in happiness in three aspects. We show that the Sunday neurosis exists exclusively for men with a medium level of education and both men and women with high levels of education. Men with high levels of education may even experience a weekend neurosis. This study is the first to test for intra-monthly rhythms and to demonstrate that men with a lower educational background may suffer from negative effects on happiness towards the end of the month, potentially due to liquidity problems. The study is also the first to demonstrate that – even when controlling for health and income effects – happiness exhibits seasonal effects over the annual period, depending on gender and education.

The question about economics that I get asked the most is “where is the exchange rate going?” I have been pretty constant in my answer on that one – it is close enough to a random walk (interpret as how the hell would I know if you like). Of course that means that I get it wrong just like everyone else, but the point is, assuming that the exchange rate is a random walk, I don’t get it AS WRONG as the many “currency experts” out there, and I also know that forecasting the exchange rate is a mugs game i.e. I know that I’m going to get it wrong. I’ve copied below a blog post of mine from last year, about a hedge fund manager who predicted that the AUD would have hit $1.70 by now. Not quite as crazy, but still poor in terms of forecasts are the many commentators predicting an AUD at 85c in the next month/few months/year. Quite possibly true, but still a poor forecast relative to the random walk forecast of 97c (or whatever today’s rate is). It is certainly the case that an unexpected early end to QE (currency manipulation) in the US will see the AUD fall – but the point is it is impossible to expect the unexpected.

One clarification that I would make is the point about the exchange rate being close enough to a random walk. The academic debate on this comes down to whether there are long swings in currencies, or whether they are pure random walks. Long swings might mean reversion to a long run mean, which is how I see the exchange rate. The AUD probably has a fundamental of around 80c to 85c. But by long run a good guess is that the half life of shocks is probably somewhere between 3 to 10 years. So if you take the current 97c exchange rate, and assume that the currency takes 7 years to revert half way to the long run fundamental you have a one year ahead exchange rate forecast of {97 – (97-82.5)x0.5 x1/7} = 95.75c…in other words at a year or two you may as well take the random walk forecast and be done with it – the volatility will likely kill you anyway. And the real lessons for business should be don’t try to predict the exchange rate, and expect volatility.

My earlier post follows.

Last July [2011] an attention seeking hedge fund manager predicted that the AUD would be at US1.70 eighteen months from now. Of course anything is possible, but that prediction is now looking even more stupid than it did a year ago. Here is my post about the AUD from one year ago, which I would suggest is holding up pretty well. I still haven’t found Savvas Savouri, I’m guessing he’s gone underground. But I did find this great quote from Reuters about him.

Trusting in hard numbers rather than the forecasts of company managements is key for Toscafund chief economist Savvas Savouri, as he helps one of the UK’s best-known hedge fund firms recover from a tough credit crisis. A self-confessed “data junkie” who claims a number-crunching computer programme he built in the mid-1990s is now the world’s biggest single user of government data, Savouri feeds his colleagues, and his own fund, with his calculations of how much money companies can really make.

I have a pretty good idea what exactly he is feeding his colleagues, and his own fund, but I’ll leave that for you to judge.

Experienced birders can often make reliable identifications in the field at a glance by utilising jizz. Often jizz is useful for identifying to the family or genus level, rather than the species level. For example, “It definitely had the jizz of a thrush, but I couldn’t see what kind.”

Link

Many reality TV shows, like Project Runway, Hell’s Kitchen, or Survivor, focus on punishing the worst, instead of rewarding the best. Not only do viewers seem to find that more interesting, it actually works better to incentivize performance (many quotes below). Punishment works better to encourage lone behavior, to encourage behavior in a group, and as a tool for letting some group members encourage others.

The puzzle is that in most of our social worlds we instead focus on rewarding the best, not punishing the worst. If you search for “punish reward” you will mostly find the issue raised about how to treat kids; we are mainly willing to use punishment flexibly on them. And this when young kids are the main exception – for them punishment works worse. For adults, we tend to limit punishment’s use to extreme behavior that we all strongly agree is bad, like crime. And when you ask adults, they much prefer to be part of a group that uses rewards, not punishment.

As a college teacher, I expect that I’d get more effort from most students by regularly pointing out the worst student in the class than the best. But I also expect students to hate it and give me low evaluations. Similarly, I expect that if I wrote the occasional post criticizing a bad blog commenter here, instead of praising a good one, I’d get more change in commenting behavior. But I also expect that person to complain long and loud about how I was biased and unfair, and others to come to their defense. I expect a lot less complaining about bias in picking the best.

In both the class and comment cases, I expect people to see me as mean and cruel for punishing the worst, but kind and generous for rewarding the best. This even though all of these effects are relative – punishment would raise the rest of the class, or the rest of the commenters, up above the worse.

Note that rewarding the best is in practice more elitist than punishing the worse; punishing creates an underclass, not an overclass. And in fact our hyper-egalitarian forager ancestors were quite reluctant to overtly reward or praise; they focused their social coordination on having the group punish norm violators. Our hyper sensitivity to being punished, and our elaborate instinctual strategies to give excuses and to coordinate to retaliate against any who might suggest we should be punished, are probably human adaptations to that forager history. And they make us especially unwilling to accept punishment by an authority, instead of by the informal consensus of the group.

This seems an interesting example of our seeking to avoid aspects of the forager way of life. Our forager evolved aversion to being singled out for social shame is so strong that we’d rather create elites instead. At least this applies when we are relatively rich and comfortable. If we really feared being destroyed for lack of sufficient efforts, as farmers often did, we’d probably be a lot more eager to raise overall efforts by punishing the worse. I suspect that foragers themselves didn’t punish much in good times; punishment was invoked more, and mattered more, in hard times. In good times foragers probably more tolerated praising some as better, and weak forms of bragging.

In a more competitive future, with organizations and individuals that compete harder to survive, I’d expect more use of punishment, in addition to reward.

Today if you have a group that really needs to succeed, and to induce strong efforts all around, consider paying the social disruptions costs of punishing the worst, instead of rewarding the best. You will probably get more effort that way, even if people end up hating you and calling you evil for it. And if your group doesn’t punish and fails, know that your reluctance to punish was probably a contributing factor.

Those promised quotes:

A study of 150 public-school teachers … split the teachers into two groups and told both that their bonuses would be linked to student test scores. Teachers in the first would receive a bonus at the end of the year if student test scores improved. Members of the second group received a check for $4,000 in September and agreed to return the money if test scores failed to rise by June. Loss aversion worked: Teachers who faced the threat of having to refund their bonuses produced student test scores that were about 7 percentage points higher. (more)

Performance improved substantially more when the feedback was positive in the case of the younger children, telling them they did well when they did, rather than negative, telling them that they did poorly when they did. Just the opposite proved true in the case of older children, who functioned just like young adults aged 18-25 who were also tested. That is, negative feedback improved performance more for these individuals than did positive feedback. (more)

In a laboratory experiment, we have implemented three main incentive mechanisms: reward-only, punishment-only, and reward and punishment. We have also varied the size of the tournament. Although the baseline model predicts that employee effort should be the same in all treatments, our empirical results have indicated that this is not the case. In general, no mechanism generates higher effort levels from the agents than the one which combines reward and punishment. We have also found that punishment produces similar results to the combined mechanism in tournaments of a relatively small size (three participants), while the reward-only and punishment-only mechanisms are equivalent in terms of effort in tournaments of a relatively large size (six participants). … Social dilemma … experiments have [also] found that punishment is generally more effective than rewards in terms of promoting cooperation between subjects in voluntary contribution games. (more)

It’s much easier to change an established behavior by offering rewards, rather than threatening with punishments. … But once you have established a norm, sustaining it by the threat of punishment is cheap. Only a few people will violate the norm, so you will rarely have to follow through with your threat. (more)

[We] extend the standard public goods game in a variety of ways, in particular by allowing for endogenous preference over institution, … [We] elicit preferences in an incentive-compatible manner over voluntary contribution mechanisms with and without reward and punishment options. Finally, [we] randomly assign subjects to one of the four institutions and observe repeated play. They [we] that payoffs are significantly greater when punishment is allowed but that only a small minority of participants prefers such an environment. (more)

This is so absolutely brilliant and important:

“One thing that experts know, and that non-experts do not, is that they know less than non-experts think they do.”

It comes from Kaushik Basu, currently chief economist at the World Bank and one of the world’s most thoughtful expert-economists.

Economists would be so much more honest (with themselves and the world) if they acted accordingly – letting their audience know that their results and prescriptions come with a large margin of uncertainty.  Public intellectuals would do so much less damage if they did likewise.  And if experts are not aware of the limits of their knowledge – well, they do not deserve to be called experts or intellectuals.

The real point, though, is that the other side – journalists, politicians, the general public -- always has a tendency to attribute greater authority and precision to what the experts say than the experts should really feel comfortable with.  That is what calls for compensating action on the part of the experts.  

So if you are an expert hang this gem from Basu prominently on your wall.  And next time you talk to a journalist, advise a politician, or take to the stage in a public event, repeat it to yourself beforehand a few times.

 

 

there’s room for a lot of experiences in there, i would think

At some point during the 2000s, America reached an unexpected milestone: There are now more poor people living in the suburbs than in the inner cities.

That stat comes from a big new Brookings Institution book by Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America . They find that between 2000 and 2011, the number of suburban poor in the United States grew by 64 percent — more than double the rate in the cities:

In 2012, there were an estimated 16.4 million poor people living in the suburbs, compared with 13.4 million in the cities. Granted, it's worth putting this in context. There are three times as many total people living in America's suburbs, so the overall rate of suburban poverty is still much, much lower. But the recent rapid uptick is striking.

So why is this geographic shift happening? The website for the Brookings book lists a couple of big reasons:

1) The biggest driver is that suburbs simply grew faster than urban areas during the 2000s, particularly in the South. At the same time, jobs have been migrating to the suburbs for many years — and that includes low-paying jobs in retail and hospitality. As a result, many of the working poor have been moving to the suburbs, too.

2) There's increasingly more affordable housing in suburban areas, attracting poorer Americans away from the city. ("By the end of 2010," the report notes, "roughly half of residents in voucher households lived in suburbs.")

3) The recession hit manufacturing and construction particularly hard, and both of those industries were concentrated in the suburbs. And the housing crash devastated many suburban communities.

4) Immigration played a role, albeit a minor one: "Although foreign-born residents accounted for 30 percent of the overall population growth in suburban areas, they contributed just 17 percent to the increase in overall suburban poor during the 2000s."

There also are wide disparities from city to city. El Paso, Tex., has a suburban poverty rate of 36.4 percent. Meanwhile, Hartford, Conn., and Omaha, Neb., have suburban poverty rates of just 7.8 percent. But suburban poverty was rising just about everywhere, from booming cities like Phoenix to stagnant metros like Cleveland.

So why does any of this matter? For one, as Emily Badger reports over at Atlantic Cities, many suburban areas aren't quite as prepared to handle an influx of poverty:

Many suburbs, for instance, don't have the kinds of public transit networks that can connect impoverished neighborhoods to job opportunities. And it's significantly harder to address poverty through transportation when low-income households in need of it live dispersed over larger areas. Suburbs also simply lack the built-in networks of service providers that have grown up over decades in inner-city communities.

The Brookings authors also suggest that the suburbanization of poverty could put a strain on safety-net programs: "The federal government spends $82 billion dollars a year across more than 80 programs to address poverty in place," the authors note. "But the spread-out nature of suburban poverty, and the lack of expert public and non-profit service providers in suburbs, mean that most of those dollars remain focused on urban communities."

They do add that it's a mixed picture overall: "While some poor people living in the suburbs enjoy better housing, safer neighborhoods and higher achieving schools than those in cities, others face lengthy, costly commutes to work; a lack of reliable transportation; and an absence of basic health and social services that are often more fully available and established in cities."

Further reading: There's a lot more on the book's Web site, including in-depth profiles of a handful of suburbs that have seen poverty rates rise (including Montgomery County, Md.). There's also some commentary on this topic from Emily Badger (and here), Josh Harkinson, Joel Kotkin and Reihan Salam.

Name: Thallid
Cost: G
Type: Creature — Fungus
Pow/Tgh: 1/1
Rules Text: At the beginning of your upkeep, put a spore counter on Thallid.
Remove three spore counters from Thallid: Put a 1/1 green Saproling creature token onto the battlefield.
Illus. Trevor Claxton
Rarity: Common

He and Michelle seem inattentive to their own finances:

When we adults are confronted by a bridge, we're concerned not just by its width and sturdiness, but also by the height of the drop beneath. If there's a deep canyon, we'd usually rather the bridge was mighty strong and wide. If there's but a short drop, we'll happily jaunt along the narrowest, flimsiest of crossings - after all, it won't matter much if we fall.

Infants - those aged 11 to 14 months - are different. They don't want to fall, so they're wary of narrow bridges. But the height of the drop makes no difference to them at all. "We found clear evidence that infants are averse to falling from a height," said the researchers Kari Kretch and Karen Adolph, "but no evidence of adult-like anxiety that increases with drop-off height."

Kretch and Adolph challenged 37 14-month-olds to walk across a bridge of varying widths spanning a 76cm gap between two surfaces. The drop beneath the bridge was either large (71cm - nearly the infants' standing height) or short (17cm - roughly knee-high to the infants). An experimenter was on-hand to prevent any falls.

When faced with a more narrow crossing, the toddlers were more cautious as you'd expect - they hesitated, felt their way, and proceeded more slowly. Too narrow and they'd even refuse to go ahead. Crucially, however, their crossing behaviour didn't vary according to the height of the drop. A similar result was found when the study was repeated with 11-month-olds who were still crawling.

It's not that the walkers and crawlers couldn't perceive the difference in the height of the drops. When they refused to cross a very narrow bridge, they'd climb down into the small drop, but not the big drop.

At first, these new results might appear to contradict Gibson and Walk's classic "visual cliff" experiments conducted in the 1960s, in which babies refused to crawl onto a glass surface that had the appearance of  a cliff edge. However, the visual cliff studies, and other research since, didn't disentangle risk of falling from the issue of fall height and the likelihood of injury. The researchers point out their new results aren't as surprising as they might seem. Toddlers are effectively averse to all dangers of falling, whether down a short or big drop. Unlike adults, they don't calibrate according to the relative risk.

"How would infants know that the longer an object (or baby) falls, the harder it hits the ground?" asked Kretch and Adolph. "Certainly by adulthood, we understand this intuitively. An open question is how and when this understanding develops." They acknowledged it would be useful for future research to explore a broader range of heights, to see if there's any level at which toddlers do register a greater danger.

_________________________________

Kretch, K., and Adolph, K. (2013). No bridge too high: Infants decide whether to cross based on the probability of falling not the severity of the potential fall. Developmental Science, 16 (3), 336-351 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12045

--Further reading--
Toddlers don't take the risk of entrapment seriously.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Rufus made sure he planned ahead for his Cinco De Mayo celebration.

cybergata:

“Get in quickly.  There is no time to explain.”

Chako Paul City is a women-only city in the north of Sweden, established in 1820 by a wealthy widow. It is "a place that is respectful of women's love, but with a rule that men cannot enter"; the few who have tried have found themselves beaten half to death by the formidable Amazonian sentries at its gates. It has a castle, and its main industry is forestry, with a sideline in lesbian tourism. Of the 25,000 women, from all over Europe, living in Chako Paul City, those wishing to seek male company are allowed to leave, but may only reenter after having bathed and undertaken several other measures to avoid negatively affecting the mental state of the other residents.

Chako Paul City (also known as Shakebao City) doesn't actually exist; it originated in a fictitious story in a Chinese provincial newspaper. The story spread in 2009, and soon Swedish tourism agencies were beset by inquiries from China. Since then, the story of the fabled Swedish lesbian utopia in the forests has reportedly spread to Japan and South Korea.

Ed Luce in the FT reports on increased interest in the German model of apprenticeships:

Germany channels roughly half of all high-school students into the vocational education stream from the age of 16….More than 40 per cent of Germans become apprentices. Only 0.3 per cent of the US labour force does so.

Luce, however, thinks that “In the US that would be seen as too divisive, even un-American.” In the United States we obsess about getting a college degree so much that anything else looks like second best. But what is so special about college? As I said in Tuning in to the Dropping Out:

The U.S. has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Most of them, however, crash before they reach the end of the road–some drop out of high school and then more drop out of college. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to knowledge.

German apprenticeship students are well-educated, highly skilled and employable and they are in no way second-class relative to college graduates. Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well educated. Moreover, as Luce goes on to note, even for those who do complete a college degree, all is well no longer.

Fifteen per cent of taxi drivers in the US have a degree, up from 1 per cent in 1970. Likewise, 25 per cent of sales clerks are graduates, against 5 per cent in 1970. An astonishing 5 per cent of janitors now have a bachelor’s degree.

Bryan Caplan has studied the literature and he quotes the summary of Philipp Bewerunge and Harvey Rosen:

The literature on wage differentials between public and private sector employees spans roughly four decades, originating with Smith’s [1976a, 1976b, 1977] seminal series of papers. The core of her analysis is the estimation of conventional human capital earnings functions. For example, in Smith [1976b] she uses 1973 Current Population Survey (CPS) data to estimate for each gender a regression of the logarithm of the wage on various worker characteristics such as years of schooling and race, including a series of dichotomous variables indicating whether each individual worked in the federal, state, or local government sectors (the private sector is the omitted category). For males, she finds wage differentials relative to the private sector of 19 percent in federal government and -4.9 percent in local government. The coefficient on the state government variable is statistically insignificant. The differentials for female workers are 31 percent in federal government, 12 percent in state government, and 3.6 percent in local government…

Papers subsequent to Smith’s have modified her approach by trying to correct for self-selection of workers into various sectors, by using panel data to estimate fixed effects models, and by estimating models on a state-by-state basis to allow for the possibility that labor market institutions, and hence public sector wage differentials, vary across states. A fair way to summarize the findings in this literature is as follows: a robust result, found in almost all the research from Smith’s early papers on, is that there is a substantial positive wage differential for federal employees, even after controlling for worker characteristics in the standard way.

I recall this characterization not receiving wide circulation during the recent disputes over Wisconsin and the like, so I thought I would pass it along.

Miha Tamura takes photos of nicely designed or otherwise unusual escalators in Japan. Here, for instance, is a spiral escalator:

Pingmag recently interviewed Tamura about her photos.

The most amazing is the spiral escalator made by Mitsubishi Electric. Curving escalators were conceived from early on when escalators were invented, but they are very difficult and even today Mitsubishi Electric is the only one in the world who can make them. If I hadn't come across this spiral escalator in Yokohama I don't think I would have committed myself to escalators as much as I have.

Some people are really into escalators. (via coudal)

Tags: architecture   Miha Tamura   photography

Why are most people in the world religious? Some say it is because we're naturally predisposed to believe in a god or gods and that religion brought evolutionary advantages to our ancestors. But if that's the case, how come there are over half a billion atheists in the world? One theory is that atheists consciously suppress their instincts for religion, with only varying degrees of success. A new study provides tentative support for this idea. Marjaana Lindeman and her colleagues report that atheists get just as stressed as religious people when they ask God to do nasty things, as in "I dare God to make someone murder my parents cruelly."

The researchers tested 16 atheists and 13 religious people (Finns aged 17 to 45 recruited via a skeptics group and bible group, respectively). The participants were wired up to a skin conductance machine that records the sweatiness of the fingers - a basic marker of stress. Next the participants read aloud 36 sentences - some were requests for God to do something awful; others were offensive statements not involving God (e.g. it's okay to kick a puppy in the face); and the remainder were neutral (e.g. I hope it's not raining today).

The participants' views about this experience differed as you'd expect. The religious folk found the God-related statements more unpleasant than the atheists. However, they were no more likely than the atheists to refuse to utter the God statements, or to retract them later when given the chance. Most importantly, skin conductance was higher for both participant groups when reading the God statements compared with the neutral statements. Moreover, across both groups, skin conductance when reading the God statements did not vary according to a person's level of religious belief. The atheists seemed to get just as stressed as believers when daring God to do awful things.

An obvious flaw in this evidence is that the mention of God was confounded with horrible outcomes. Perhaps the atheists were stressed reading the God statements simply because of the ideas involved, not because of God's role per se. A second study examined this with nineteen more Finnish atheists (aged 20 to 30). The participants were wired up to the skin conductance machine while they uttered unpleasant sentences involving God (e.g. "I dare God to make me die of cancer") or not involving God (e.g. "I wish I would die of cancer"). Signs of stress were higher for the God statements, suggesting the involvement of God brings some extra stress to atheists beyond the unpleasant outcomes involved.

"The results imply that while atheists' and religious individuals' beliefs about God and explicit attitudes towards God statements are different, they become equally emotionally aroused when daring God to do unpleasant things," the researchers said.

The study has its limitations - the participant samples were very small for a start - and the findings are difficult to interpret. Certainly it would be inappropriate to conclude that the results prove atheists believe in God at a subconscious level. Other plausible explanations for the findings include atheists finding the God statements stressful because they know friends or family who do believe in God; or perhaps atheists experience stress reading the God statements because the wording implies God is real, which runs counter to their own beliefs.

_________________________________

Lindeman, M., Heywood, B., Riekki, T., and Makkonen, T. (2013). Atheists become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion DOI: 10.1080/10508619.2013.771991

--Further reading--
The unscientific thinking that forever lingers in the minds of physics professors
Religion causes a chronic biasing of visual attention
The children of securely attached mothers think that God is close
Can God make people more aggressive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

A pair of scientists looked at the rate at which the complexity of life increases and then extrapolated back to a point of zero complexity, aka the origin of life. The answer they came up with is 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago. Which is much older than the Earth. This idea has some provocative implications:

Sharov and Gordon say their interpretation also explains the Fermi paradox, which raises the question that if the universe is filled with intelligent life, why can't we see evidence of it.

However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.

Tags: Earth   science

thefrogman:

Otis vs the New Bone [video]

In Iceland, with a population of around a third of a million, the danger exists of that heady one-night stand ending up as an intimate encounter between near-relatives, as nearly happened to the friend of Elin Edda. No longer, due to the launch of an android app ("Bump the app before you bump in bed") which easily tells a budding couple how related they are.

More on the app from the university where three students in Software Engineering at the School of Engineering and Natual Sciences created it, and in the google app store.

The Íslendingabók database, containing genealogical information about the inhabitants of Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back (limited to citizens and legal residents of Iceland). Iceland is one of the least densely populated countries or dependent territories, ranking 235th out of 243 for crowding. This population does not extend to elves.

This is a great deal. I seriously walked out with 16 pizzas at half price this evening. When I got home I could only fit 12 into the freezer so had a huge pizza dinner and food will last until tomorrow.

Select Range Pizza half price only $2.49 for a 400 gramm each and the Pizza actually tastes good. Was $5.36

Woolworths Select Pizza Mushroom & Mozzarella
Woolworths Select Pizza Quattro Formaggi
Woolworths Select Pizza Mozzarella & Tomato
Woolworths Select Pizza Roasted Vegetable

All half price in store and online http://www2.woolworthsonline.com.au/#url=/Shop/SearchProduct...

A sort of mania for gambling overtook White’s, a gentlemen’s club in London, in the 18th century. Excerpts from its betting book:

• “January the 14th, 1747/8. Mr. Fanshawe wagers Lord Dalkeith one guinea, that his peruke is better than his Lordship’s, to be judged of by the majority of members the next time they both shall meet.”
• “Lord Ravensworth betts Ld. Leicester & Ld. Coke ten guineas each, that the General Post Office is not three miles distant from Lord Gower’s house in Upper Brooke Street.”
• “Feb. 10th, 1748-9. Mr. Fanshawe betts Dr. Wm. Stanhope twenty guineas, that there was not a play acted at Covent Garden Play house twenty years ago.”
• “Ap. 2nd, 1761. Mr. Fanshawe wagers Mr. Gauquier one Guinea that if Mr. Harley comes to the House of Commons the first day of sitting, he comes in a red gown.”
• “Mr. Talbot bets Lord Frederick Bentinck five guineas, that destroying a horse by poison is not a capital offence by Act of Parliament.”
• “Mr. Talbot bets Mr. Blackford one guinea, that the play of Julius Cæsar is acted within six weeks from this day. Feby. 15th, 1812.”
• “Sir G. Talbot bets Sir Watkin W. Wynn five guineas, that he Sir W. does not drink a bottle of claret on French ground before the expiration of this month of March. March 6th, 1814.”
• “Col. Cooke bets Ld. Clanwilliam thirty-five guineas, that if a person understood between them ever fights a duel, he kills his man.”

In 1816 Lord Alvanley and a friend bet £3,000 as to which of two raindrops would be the first to reach the bottom of a windowpane. In a 1750 letter, Horace Walpole wrote, “They have put in the papers a good story made on White’s; a man dropped down dead at the door, was carried in; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not, and when they were going to bleed him, the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet.”