Farr sighted.

William Farr, The Lancet, and epidemic cholera.

In 1867 William Farr published his report into the cholera epidemic which, in 1866, had killed over five thousand people living in the Whitechapel area of East London. It was the last of the four epidemics which ravaged the capital in the mid-nineteenth century [1]. Farr, after an early career writing for The Lancet under its founding editor Thomas Wakley, had been appointed ‘compiler of abstra...

Braille in the Sighted: Teaching Tactile Reading to Sighted Adults

Blind people are known to have superior perceptual abilities in their remaining senses. Several studies suggest that these enhancements are dependent on the specific experience of blind individuals, who use those remaining senses more than sighted subjects. In line with this view, sighted subjects, when trained, are able to significantly progress in relatively simple tactile tasks. However, the...

In defense of Farr and Nightingale.

On a Correlation Inequality of Farr

Suppose that each vertex of a graph independently chooses a colour uniformly from the set {1, . . . , k}; and let Si be the random set of vertices coloured i. Farr shows that the probability that each set Si is stable (so that the colouring is proper) is at most the product of the k probabilities that the sets Si separately are stable. We give here a simple proof of an extension of this result.

Optimal Short-Sighted Rules

The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of methodological transfers from behavioral ecology to experimental economics with respect to the elicitation of intertemporal preferences. More precisely our discussion will stem from the analysis of Stephens and Anderson's (2001) seminal article. In their study with blue jays they document that foraging behavior typically implements short-sight...