Dutch hospital director becomes anonymous kidney donor

Joris van de Klundert points me to the following story:
Voorzitter AMC geeft het goede voorbeeld als anonieme donor--
Ziekenhuisbestuurder schenkt een nier aan een onbekende
(Google translate: "Chairman AMC sets a good example as anonymous donor--
Hospital Director donates a kidney to a stranger")

"Levi (52) was operated on in his own hospital. When that happened, he would not say, because the recipient could then figure out his identity. This is undesirable, for an anonymous donation in order to protect the privacy.

"He tells his story because he wants to encourage others to think about undertaking organ donation.
...
"Thanks to a donor kidney dialysis patients do not have more weekly. Dialysis takes time, has serious side effects and worsens the health of patients.

"Levi is one of the seven people who have donated a kidney in the hospital this year an unknown. The Dutch Transplant Foundation (NTS) is no national records of the numbers of so-called altruistic donations, but thinks that it is a few dozen per year."

Amsterdam school choice: next year will be single tie-breaking deferred acceptance (instead of multiple tie-breaking)

In Amsterdam, the school choice debates have been resolved for now. Next year, there will be a deferred acceptance algorithm with single tie-breaking, which replaces deferred acceptance with multiple tie breaking. The reason is to avoid inefficiencies that could leave students wanting to trade places.
 Hessel Oosterbeek forwards the following press release:

Nu toch matching voor toewijzing van scholen aan nieuwe brugklassers
Osvo herziet besluit plaatsingsprocedure en volgt Amsterdamse gemeenteraad in wens tot matching
Datum: 27 november 2015


Google translate renders it into English like this:

Now surely matching for allocation of new schools graders
Osvo revises decision placement procedure and following Amsterdam city council in desire to matching
Date: November 27, 2015

The Amsterdam secondary schools united in Osvo match yet again to bring out high school students in a school of choice. In matching children fill a preferred list of several schools, and the computer most favorable and fairest possible distribution calculates. Last year was also matched, but according to a different algorithm. With the currently chosen variant will be more students in the school of their first choice, but there will be more children who are considerably lower on their preferred list. In any case, there is not the problem afterwards between students can be exchanged for a better result.

Osvo still goes first consult with the alderman of education Simone Kukenheim the practical assistance that will get the schools of the municipality for the implementation of the matching. Concrete will be requested from the municipality together with Osvo a central project, the information to parents and children and to take complaints to themselves.

A broad majority in the city council gave to know the alderman of education for this variant of matching. The alderman asked Osvo thereafter published the decision on October 29 to return to draw, to reconsider. With the amended decision in favor of the matching variant Osvo hopes for this year to be able to count on political and social support in the implementation, but also for the results of the placement.

The selected system is also preferred by a large group of parents who made ​​their wish to keep matching known through a petition, in a variant they call matching 2.0. This variant is referred to as DA STB or RSD. DA STB earlier this year in a scientific analysis for the evaluation Osvo compared with DA MTB, which was used in the 2015 matching. DA STB recently came second in the bus in the quest of Osvo to a procurement procedure for 2016. For the pros and cons refer to 
http://www.verenigingosvo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Evaluatie_Matching_simulaties.pdf

Osvo has always its decision to match last year defended by pointing to the starting point of an optimal and fair distribution of the few places in schools where more children enroll than there are places. After a storm of protest about the system, its implementation and information about Osvo selected after extensive review and in consultation with the municipality for a combination of items and match. It would be students in a first-round no preferred list can draw for their school of choice, followed by a relatively small group of about 500 children would be placed on matching the schools still places available. The second round would be conducted according to the system which now is put the whole group of students.


See previous posts:

Friday, June 26, 2015

School choice in Amsterdam goes to court over tie-breaking

Thursday, July 2, 2015

The Amsterdam court rules on school choice

Who Gets What and Why in Dutch

Here is a book review in Dutch of the English version of Who Gets What and Why, by Burak Can. And here is his translation of his review in English: Book Review: “Who gets what and why?” by Al Roth

The Amsterdam court rules on school choice

Hessel Oosterbeek sends the following update on the school choice court case seeking to allow the exchange of school places that were allocated by a deferred acceptance algorithm with multiple tie breaking.  He writes: 

"Attached is a link to the decision of the judge in Amsterdam. Important considerations for the judge are that: i) trading would harm students who have a higher position on the waiting lists, and ii) allowing trade this year makes the system unusable in the future. The judge also writes that the rules were clear.

Overall it reads that the judge is well informed."

Google Translate allows you to make reasonable sense of the judge's decision in English...
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Here is a blog post, also in Dutch, but Google Translate does a good enough job so that you can see that this is a pretty detailed discussion of various algorithms, strategy-proofness, the judge's decision, etc. It seems that the public discussion is going on at a pretty high level: 
Schoolstrijd in Amsterdam
Waarom ruilen niet mag, ook niet als beide partijen er beter van worden
(School Fight in Amsterdam

Why should not change, even if both parties are better off)

School choice in Amsterdam goes to court over tie-breaking

Hessel Oosterbeek sends me this article in Dutch about the very current controversy playing out in Amsterdam over this year's school choice results:

Het beest in de Amsterdamse ouder is los,
which Google Translate renders as
The beast in Amsterdam's parent is loose

Some background to the current controversy can be found in a paper by Oosterbeek and his coauthors which was influential in the Amsterdam school choice design (which used student-proposing deferred acceptance with multiple tie-breaking):

"The performance of school assignment mechanisms in practice," by Monique de Haan, Pieter A. Gautier, Hessel Oosterbeek, and Bas van der Klaauw.

Abstract: "Theory points to a potential trade-off between two main school assignment mechanisms; Boston and Deferred Acceptance (DA). While DA is strategyproof and gives a stable matching, Boston might outperform DA in terms of ex-ante efficiency. We quantify the (dis)advantages of the mechanisms by using information about actual choices under Boston complemented with survey data eliciting students’ school preferences. We find that under Boston around 8% of the students apply to another school than their most-preferred school. We compare allocations resulting from Boston with DA with single tie-breaking (one central lottery; DA-STB) and multiple tie-breaking (separate lottery per school; DA-MTB). DA-STB places more students in their top-n schools, for any n, than Boston and results in higher average welfare. We find a trade-off between DA-STB and DA-MTB. DA-STB places more students in their single most-preferred school than DA-MTB, but fewer in their top-n, for n ≥ 2. Finally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit most from a switch from Boston to any of the DA mechanisms"

The city of Amsterdam adopted multiple tie-breaking, with the consequence that some post-assignment trades now seem possible between students.  And this is where the beast in Amsterdam's parents (some of whom are lawyers) has been loosed. Here's Google Translate again, on the news story:

"Moreover, there is a side effect that parents can not stomach: a class can sit next to each other two children who are both disappointed in the school they were assigned, whereas if they would swap, both overjoyed to be made ​​with a spot on their favorite school. A child who is placed in a school where he really did not want it (tenth place on his preference list), through an exchange would nevertheless may still end up at No. 1. And yet you can not. There is, every year it again what in Amsterdam that the beast in the parent disconnect when it comes to the choice of school of the child.
...
"A father of a girl who wants to be very happy in music and dance, with a spot on the Geert Groot School, turned to Sprenkeling for an exchange. To facilitate this exchange, harnessed the lawyer with 32 other parents a lawsuit against the dome of high schools Osvo. The aim is to consider the new placement system this year as a test. Only next year should really not be exchanged. "

I understand from Hessel that a judge is expected to rule soon on whether families may exchange school places...

Kosher and Halal slaughtering repugnant in the Netherlands

Dutch slaughter ban sparks Jewish and Muslim outrage

"Just one week after the acquittal of fiery far-right politician Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliament struck another blow against multiculturalism in the Netherlands yesterday with the passage of a bill banning ritual animal slaughter. The bill requires that all animals be stunned before being slaughtered, a requirement that conflicts with halal and kosher stipulations that animals be fully conscious.

The bill was initially proposed by the Party of the Animals, which holds two seats in the 146-seat Dutch parliament and maintains that ritual methods of slaughter are inhumane. It gained support from centrists on similar grounds, but Wilders's Freedom Party has also been a longtime proponent. In fact, it was Wilders who first raised the issue in 2007 when he objected to halal meat being served at a public school in Amsterdam.

The ban has provoked a furious reaction from Jewish and Muslim leaders in the Netherlands and Europe. From Reuters:

"The very fact that there is a discussion about this is very painful for the Jewish community," Netherlands Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs told Reuters. "Those who survived the (second world) war remember the very first law made by the Germans in Holland was the banning of schechita or the Jewish way of slaughtering animals."

It should be noted that a last-minute amendment attached to the bill states that halal and kosher slaughterhouses will be able to apply for special permits if they can show that their methods do not cause more pain than non-ritual methods. But some are skeptical of the permit process's efficacy, and the European Jewish Congress is already considering challenging the law in court."

Misc. repugnant transactions: marijuana, camel meat, and concealed carry on campus

The Maastricht ban on selling marijuana to foreign tourists is spreading to the rest of Holland:
Dutch govt to ban tourists from cannabis shops (HT Bettina Klaus)
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A little-noticed move by American Express to ban the purchase of medical marijuana with its credit cards has reignited a longstanding debate: How much can a credit card company control what you buy?
        To the surprise of consumers, major credit card companies are making decisions about what they can and can't buy with their credit cards. What's off-limits? Legal purchases like gambling chips and donations to at least one controversial non-profit organization; in some cases, buying pornography is also restricted, and so, increasingly, is medical marijuana. Last month, shortly before Delaware became the 16th state to legalize medical marijuana, American Express told merchants that its cards could not be used to buy it.
*********

Good news for camel meat lovers: The Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee annulled various outdated regulations Monday, including a longtime ban on the sale of camel meat. (HT Assaf Romm)
********

And those of you looking forward to concealed carry on campus will have to wait a bit longer, even in the Lone Star State:
State legislators in Texas could not meet Monday's end-of-session deadline to pass a bill that would have allowed people to carry concealed weapons on campus -- meaning a win for higher education leaders, who almost uniformly opposed the legislation.

Repugnance by residence: only Dutch can buy marijuana in Maastricht now

It's official:

The prohibition on the admission of non-residents to Netherlands ‘coffee-shops’ complies with European Union law "Around 2.7 million tourists a year who visited Maastricht’s 14 coffee shops will have to look elsewhere for their cannabis, as the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld a ruling that prohibits non-Dutch residents from entering those venues.

“The rules are intended to put an end to the public nuisance caused by the large number of tourists wanting to purchase or consume cannabis in the coffee-shops in the municipality of Maastricht,” the court ruled, according to a press release published on its website."

HT: Bettina Klaus

Some transactions become repugnant again in Holland

Holland scrapping liberal policies on drugs and brothels to clean up image
"The Dutch are rethinking their famously liberal polices on legalised brothels, prostitution and soft drugs, such as magic mushrooms and cannabis, amid fears of growing crime and social decline.
New restrictions on marijuana selling cafés, a ban on the sale of magic mushrooms and plans to clean up Amsterdam's red light district have been announced across Holland."

But it looks like they are contemplating gradual change:

"Last week, Amsterdam announced that it planned to halve the number of its shop window brothels and cannabis cafés in an attempt to drive pimps, money launderers and criminals out of the city.
Now the Dutch government has announced new plans to strictly regulate the sex industry, massage parlours and brothels more by imposing a tough licensing system to drive out organised crime. "