Prediction Models, Strömberg and Norpoth

At Freakonomics, Justin Wolfers blogs about predicting the winner in the upcoming election. In the post (here), he presents a great model by David Strömberg who makes his forecast based on states and their electoral college votes, giving the Dem's a 63 percent chance of winning. The paper can be found here.
To bear the department’s standard here: While I like Strömberg’s model for getting closer at the data-generating process, Helmut Norpoth’s very parsimonious model so far did a good job at predicting the popular vote in every election since 1952 with the exception of JFK’s narrow victory over Nixon. All this based mainly on the New Hampshire primary, and therefore allowing for a prediction months before election day. A nice description can be found in Helmut's own guest post at pollster.com and this Washington Post article.
The only problem this time around being that the prediction is virtually a tie, giving only a 50.1 percent lead to Senator Obama.

Mankiw's 10 principles of economics - Revisited

The best-selling introductory economics textbook is Greg Mankiw's "Principles of economics". Everybody who - like me - worked with it, will remember the 10 principles he proposes. Here comes the fastest and funniest summary of these ten principles I have ever heard...