Overcoming taboos concerning organ donation: a BBC broadcast

 Here's a BBC broadcast on generational change that talks about how young people are helping to overcome taboos regarding organ donation. (They chat with me about organ exchange, including a liver lobe for a kidney, and about having hairdressers talk to customers about deceased donation.)

Listen now

"Generation change: Part two, The Documentary

"BBC presenter Babita Sharma and correspondent Megha Mohan meet the young people from India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Arab Emirates fighting to change taboos around organ donation and for greater diversity in the critical fields of science, technology, engineering and maths. We also speak to Nobel Prize awarded contributors including kidney transfer campaigner and economist Alvin Roth as well as astronomer and Physics Laureate Andrea Ghez."

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Earlier: 

Monday, May 6, 2019

A (first) liver-kidney exchange

The 1918 influenza pandemic

Communications failures played a role in the 1918 pandemic:

A flu that brought nations to a standstill  Jennifer A. Summers

"The year was 1918 and after four grisly years of the First World War, the longed-for peace was within the grasp of the Allied powers. But little did they know, that a threat far greater than any war experienced by humans loomed over their existence.

"An influenza virus, minute in size, was slowly making its presence felt. Fuelled by the unprecedented movement of troops worldwide, it spread to almost every corner of the globe.

"The symptoms of this influenza were particularly gruesome. ...

"Wartime censorship held a firm grip on influenza reports at the time, as military authorities speculated that the gas-soaked trenches and horrific conditions of the Western Front were somehow responsible. Civilians were therefore left in the dark about the approaching pandemic. Indeed, its common name ‘Spanish Flu’ is a reference to neutral Spain being the first country in the world to report its existence officially to its citizens."

Presenting results anecdatally (and other stories about presenting data to policy makers)

I've recently been involved in several efforts to present data to policy makers who, rightly or wrongly, react more strongly to well-told stories than to comparisons of data distributions.

The reason that scientists of all sorts are distrustful of stories--i.e. anecdotes--is that anecdotes can be outliers, unrepresentative of the underlying data. (Think of political ads that feature particularly memorable crimes committed by paroled prisoners, or immigrants, etc.)

But while comparing data distributions may be more persuasive to scientists, anecdotes, responsibly presented, remain useful for communicating with non-scientists.  And so I've found myself arguing to colleagues that we should present data "anectdataly,"  by illustrating our statistical results with anecdotes that represent well the underlying statistical data.

So...we're in neologism territory here, inventing appropriate new words.

andecdatum. (plural: anecdata)

1. noun.  an anecdatum is a single story that represents the underlying data distribution, e.g. by illustrating its mean or mode. (Compare to "anecdote".)

anecdata

1. plural of anecdatum
2. a collection of stories that together illustrate key features of a statistical distribution (or comparisons of distributions) that may not be well illustrated by a single anecdatum.

anecdatal   

1. adjective: stories illustrating statistical evidence collected as part of systematic scientific evaluation: (as in "the statistical presentation was supplemented with anecdatal evidence.")

anecdataly (also anecdatally)

1. adverb. (as in "the executive summary was presented anecdataly and with summary statistics, with the details of the data presented in the body of the report.")

School choice design in New Orleans Recovery School District

When it comes to design, not only do algorithms and procedures have to be designed (in this case with the assistance of  IIPSC), but also advertisements and logos. New Orleans Recovery School District has billboards going up that emphasize that the new centralized school choice procedure lets parents apply to multiple schools with just one application--{one App}--with, for emphasis, one cute kid playing all three roles in the billboard.

RSD hopes to primarily use a top trading cycle system (which is the second of two algorithms described in this short paper about the design of Boston's school choice system), which makes it safe for families to rank schools in the true order of their preferences. (Schools in RSD aren't strategic players; they don't rank students, who have priorities assigned by the district).

Here's my earlier post on New Orleans school choice, including an interview with John White, who was at that time the new RSD Superintendent, but is now the superintendent of schools for the State of Louisiana.

HT: Gabriela Fighetti

School choice in Denver: communication, communication, and communication

Shannon Fitzgerald, director of choice and enrollment services for Denver Public Schools, explains what parents need to know about a strategy proof system:

“All you have to put on the form is what you really want for your kid. There is no strategy that you can really employ … All parents needs to do is tell us is what they really want.”