Market for poets

The market for poets is of course not the same as the market for poetry, and a recent NY Times article looks at how poets fit into academia, as professors of poetry: Poets, Academia: A Couplet in Conflict.
The article discusses the notion that poets might be expected to be more drunken and seductive than, say, critics. But in other respects, the intersection of poetry and academia is a lot like in many other fields, in which scholars not only do scholarship, but teach.

That being said, the balance between scholarship and teaching, like the balance between discovery and stewardship, and between the ivory tower and the open marketplace, is quite different in different disciplines. But, in each discipline, the various roles that universities play in our society involve finding such balances.

I can't tell how much the non-academic market for poets and poetry has been changed since the endowment in 2003 of the Poetry Foundation (what rhymes with a hundred million dollars?). But here's a 2006 article in the Globe: Poets, Inc., which notes about Poetry magazine that "The magazine's efforts to engage a broader audience seem to be working. When Wiman took over Poetry in October 2003, the magazine's circulation was 11,000. Today it stands at roughly 29,000."

One thing to admire about the poetry biz is that there's a technical term for a bad poet: poetaster (rhymes with "do it faster").

(Contest: what should be the equivalent word for a bad economist? Econo... misser? ...messer?)

Chicago parking: private metering, public/private enforcement

The City of Chicago recently sold the right to manage its parking meters for the next 75 years to a private company, for a payment of $1.15 billion. The city retains the right to make parking laws and enforce them, although some aspects of enforcement are now shared. Not surprisingly, there's some trouble in the Windy City: Long a Driver’s Curse, Chicago Parking Gets Worse .

Not only have meter rates gone up, enforcement seems to have become more aggressive. Aside from the fact that Chicago looks to parking fines for revenue in tough economic times, there appear to be market design reasons for this.

Here is the agreement between the city and the contractor. Section 3.2e on page 40 reveals that the contractor as well as the city may issue tickets to illegally parked cars at meters.

So now there are two motivations for issuing tickets; the city issues them to raise revenue from parking fines and to enforce the parking laws, and the contractor issues them to increase meter revenue by discouraging people from parking without paying or parking after the payment has expired.

The city can raise revenues from fines by aggressively enforcing laws, e.g. about how many inches you may park from the curb. The contractor can raise revenues by ticketing cars promptly after meters expire. (Both the city and the contractor have an interest in enforcing the laws that say you must park between the lines.)

Some problems with getting new meters (which accept credit cards) to work properly have compounded the angst.

What to do? Carry lots of quarters when you drive in Chicago, at least until things settle down.

Harvard's "Z-list," waitlist admission with a difference

Even Harvard gives favorable attention to legacies (children of alums), you are no doubt shocked to learn. But, right around this time of year, as offers are made off the waiting list, some of those alumni children, and others with certain special late-season Harvard offers, are being given a potentially hard choice: The Back Door to the Yard Z-list: A legacy-heavy special admissions program .

The Z list students are admitted after a year delay, on the unusual condition that they don't attend college anywhere else in the intervening year. The Crimson story (from several years ago) described the program, and found that it included a substantial proportion of legacy students. (emphasis added):

"This group of students, known within Byerly Hall as the “Z-list,” are plucked off the waitlist any time from May to August—after they have accepted offers of admission at other universities—and informed that if they are willing to take a year off, they can enroll at Harvard the following September.Harvard admissions officers say they choose to “Z” students—it’s a verb—when there is a consensus that the College cannot bear to reject them but there is simply no bed available for them immediately after they graduate high school.“There’s no formula to this and there’s not much in common [between Z-list students],” says Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73. “It makes us feel we made some effort to get them here.”But if you talk to enough of these students whom the admissions office makes a special effort to bring to Cambridge, you’ll find they do have something in common: Their parents went to Harvard."
...
"Other top colleges have special admissions programs in which applicants are asked to take time off or enroll elsewhere and then transfer, but no other Ivy requires students to take a year off and gets them to come in such high proportions—a testament to the College’s perennial superiority in admissions.And if a year off makes students more mature and better able to contribute to the College, then the Z-list allows Harvard to placate powerful parents without diluting the quality of its class."
...
"“A very high percentage are alumni cases,” agrees Susan G. Case, a college counselor at Milton Academy, which in some years has sent Harvard a quarter of the Z-list all by itself. “There isn’t necessarily an academic pattern, but it’s usually institutional needs. That’s a phrase they use internally.”"

Legacy admissions in public schools

California leads the way again: here's some school choice news from LA. 'Legacy' admissions OK'd in public grade schools, Calif. weighs pros, cons of alumni preference policy.

"Emulating a controversial practice at many colleges, two high-achieving public school districts in California are giving preference to the children of alumni.

"The Beverly Hills Unified School District and the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have adopted legacy admissions policies for children of former students who live outside their enrollment boundaries.
The policies appear to be the first in the nation at public schools, education observers say.
The programs vary slightly, but leaders of both districts say they hope to raise money by forging closer ties with alumni who may be priced out of their hometowns as well as with grandparents who still live there.
In each district, nonresident legacy students will make up a tiny percentage of the student population, officials said.
...
Many universities and colleges have long offered preferences to the children, grandchildren, and siblings of alumni, accepting them at greater rates than applicants overall, sometimes with lower grades and SAT scores.
Universities' arguments for legacy admissions - to nurture connections with alumni and their checkbooks - have been upheld as constitutional.
But the policies can cause campus controversy, leading some schools, including the University of California in 1998, to vote to abolish them.
...
Beverly Hills adopted its legacy policy on a 3-2 vote last spring, allowing the children of anyone who attended city schools at least four years and whose grandparents have lived in the city for at least a decade to apply for permits. Eleven students, among 5,100 enrolled in district schools, attend school under the program.
Fenton said he proposed the idea to reconnect the district with grandparents who live within its borders and no longer have a direct stake in the city's schools yet are asked to vote on school measures, such as a $334-million facilities bond passed in November."
...
"To round out classes and maximize state funding, the 12,000-student Santa Monica-Malibu district has long offered permits to the children of district, city, and community college employees, siblings of current students, and others who moved away.
After those, it also has given permits to some nonresident students without connections to the district.
But the board voted unanimously in April to give alumni children priority over this last category of students, starting next school year.
...
"Critics are skeptical.
"It would be more efficient from a fund-raising standpoint to auction off education slots on eBay than to create a legacy preference," said Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation."

Opposite of repugnance: Protected transactions

I've been thinking lately about transactions that are the opposite of repugnant, i.e. transactions that, as a society, we often seek to promote, for reasons other than efficiency or pure political expediency.

In yesterday's post I mentioned monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, which in many countries and U.S. states is promoted over other forms of marriage (such as polygamy or same sex marriage).

Home ownership in the US is an obvious one, in this post-housing-bubble financial crisis, in which there have been Federal bailouts of the various Government Sponsored Entities like Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, set up to promote home ownership.

Food production by small farmers, not only in the US, but also in Europe and Japan: we protect this by subsidies, price supports, government supported crop insurance programs, etc.

Fishing by small fishing boats: if we were only interested in protecting fish to keep fisheries sustainable, we might regulate fisheries by imposing seasonal limits on how much could be caught. But in many cases we also set daily limits (e.g. some fishermen on Cape Cod are limited to catch no more than 400lbs of scallops a day). This makes large, factory fishing uneconomical, and protects small local fishermen.

The right to purchase guns probably falls into this category in the U.S.

Of course, as with repugnant transactions, protected transactions may involve a lot of complications, like providing public goods and protecting rights. But it may be that to better understand which kinds of transactions may come to be regarded as repugnant, it will help to understand which kinds of transactions are sometimes protected.

Update: looking at the comments, commuting alone in a car seems worth including on the list of protected transactions in the U.S. (And thank you to Dubner at Freakonomics for his generous plug of this blog...)

Airport slot auctions in the Washington Post

Today's Washington Post has an editorial regretting the obstacles thrown up to auctioning airport slots, and in favor of good market design: Airport Slot Auctions--A good idea to relieve air traffic congestion is snuffed out.

HT: Scott Kominers

Miscellaneous repugnant transactions

Germany to ban paintball
"The German government is planning to ban paintball and laser shooting games in reaction to the recent school massacre in which 15 people died.
Under legislation agreed by the ruling coalition of the chancellor, Angela ­Merkel, using air rifles to shoot paint-filled pellets at opponents is likely to be made illegal, and would be punishable with fines of up to €5,000 " (HT Muriel Niederle)

Over at Knowledge Problem: Price gouging: Is it wrong? Should it be against the law?

At MR, Tyler Cowen reports:"Love Land, a sex theme park set to open this October in China won't have the chance to lose it's virginity. Chinese bureaucrats ordered the park destroyed after details of the park's featured attractions were leaked.
The story is here. The rest of the article relates:
The park was to have giant-sized reproductions of male and female anatomy, and offered lessons in safe sex and the proper use of condoms. There was also an exhibition about the history of sex, as well as workshops offering sex techniques.
The entrance to park featured a giant pair of women's legs clad only in a red thong. Those legs are now closed forever. Officials would only say that the concept of the park was vulgar, and deemed unnecessary. Bulldozers and wrecking ball were seen destroying the exhibits as onlookers tried to get a peak.
China considers the topic of sex taboo, even though illegal prostitution is at an all-time high in the country. "

Fertility treatments in Britain: a post actually headlined Repugnant Transactions follows a story in the Guardian, Thousands of women leaving UK for fertility treatment, • Women losing patience with NHS waiting lists • Eggs and donated sperm in short supply, study says.
"Couples here are able to exploit the fact that, in some countries, women who choose to donate eggs can be paid, said Culley, with some donors in America receiving up to $10,000. In Britain, by contrast, tight regulation of fertility means egg donors receive only expenses.
"All the evidence is that cross-border reproductive care is growing. Women here do this for all sorts of reasons," she said. "There is a serious shortage of eggs, donated sperm is in shorter supply than before, the cost can be cheaper abroad and some people want IVF which they can't get on the NHS."
...
"Isobel O'Neill, a fertility counsellor in Glasgow, said couples seeking a donated egg who visit the Glasgow Royal Infirmary are told there is a six- or seven-year wait for one on the NHS. Even those willing to pay at the private Glasgow Centre for Reproductive Medicine, where she also works, face a delay of up to a year."

California High Court Upholds Gay Marriage Ban
"The California Supreme Court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage Tuesday, ratifying a decision made by voters last year. The ruling comes at a time when several state governments have moved in the opposite direction.
"The court’s decision does, however, preserve the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed between the justices’ ruling last May that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected and voters’ passage in November of Proposition 8, which banned it.
The court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice Ronald M. George for a 6-to-1 majority, noted that same-sex couples still had a right to civil unions. Such unions, the opinion said, gives those couples the ability to “choose one’s life partner and enter with that person into a committed, officially recognized and protected family relationship that enjoys all of the constitutionally based incidents of marriage.”
Justice George wrote that Proposition 8 did not “entirely repeal or abrogate” the right to such a protected relationship. Instead, he said, it “carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term ‘marriage’ for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law.”
The 18,000 existing marriages can stand, he wrote, because Proposition 8 did not include language specifically saying it was retroactive."

Update, hugging: Jorge Ortiz directs my attention to a story in today's NY Times that I had overlooked, some high schools are banning hugs:
"And schools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule. "

An innovative early paper on repugnance: Ravi Kanbur, "On Obnoxious Markets", July 2001. Revised version published in Stephen Cullenberg and Prasanta Pattanaik (editors), Globalization, Culture and the Limits of the Market: Essays in Economics and Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Professor Kanbur argues that extreme outcomes, and asymmetric and inadequate information, and inequality are big components in making markets obnoxious, and I agree.

I'm personally reluctant to set out a theory of what makes markets repugnant since I always find markets that don't fit into any simple framework. Same-sex marriage, for example, is a transaction that many people find repugnant (and is now once again illegal in California, see above), but it is no more extreme, or subject to asymmetric information, or unequal than heterosexual marriage, which is just about the opposite of a repugnant transaction, what we might call a "protected" transaction.

Signaling for attention: email version

Seriosity.com thinks it has a solution to email overload. They offer firms a signaling service based on an artificial currency ("serios"). Potential message senders are endowed with a fixed supply of serios per week, and they can spend them to indicate their estimate of the value of the message. The company demo suggests that managers may not read underfunded messages, and will read highly endowed messages first. (It isn't clear what the equilibrium would look like in a dynamic environment.)

But creating scarce signals is not a bad idea, see e.g. the mechanism for Signaling on the Economics Job Market , which allows each candidate to send up to two signals.

From their website:
"Attent creates an economy with a scarce new currency (Serios) that enables users to signal the importance of their outgoing email by attaching value. Recipients can use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses."

HT: John Cawley

Where did all the MD license plates go?

When I was a child, it was commonplace to see cars with license plates indicating that the car belonged to a medical doctor. Where did they all go?

It isn't that they aren't still available to doctors who want them, e.g. here is the MA application form, complete with a picture of an MD license plate: Application for Medical Doctor (MD) Plates . So why have doctors reduced their use of this kind of signaling?

My guess is the answer has to do with changes in markets that changed the value of sending such a signal. Here are some conjectures:

Housecalls play a much smaller role in medical practice than they did when I was a child, and so the need for docs to park in odd places and rely on their plates to ward off parking tickets has decreased.

The reputational benefits of being a doctor have decreased.

Drug addicts started to break into cars with MD plates, looking for drugs to use or sell.

Feel free to leave other conjectures as comments...

Hal Varian on ad auctions

Muthu Muthukrishnan at Google in NY has a nice post about Hal Varian, Google's chief economist and a pioneer of the economics of the internet (among other things*). Here is a youtube video in which Hal gives an elementary explanation of Google's ad auction. MR points to this article about Hal in Wired: Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability.

Here is Hal's recent paper Online Ad Auctions, forthcoming in the May 2009 AER Papers and Proceedings. Here is Hal's earlier paper, Position Auctions, published in the 2007 International Journal of Industrial Organization. One nice thing about both these papers is that they explicitly take note of the link between ad auctions and the matching literature.

*Hal is the original Renaissance economist. Aside from his academic work on subjects from the internet to public goods provision, he's an author of bestselling texts and business books, and was for many years a NY Times columnist. One of his columns, When Economics Shifts From Science to Engineering, August 29, 2002, on the subject of market design, was about a paper of mine. When I marveled at how succinctly he was able to summarize, he told me that his secret (quoting Elmore Leonard) was to "leave out the parts that people skip."

Waiting lists and late college applications

Students who may be waiting to see if they will be offered positions from some colleges' waiting lists should also be aware that other colleges are still accepting applications.

The Common Application .org has posted a list of 67 of their members who are still accepting applications (including the University of Chicago):
Augsburg College, Berry College, Canisius College,Carroll College, Cazenovia College, College of Mount Saint Vincent, College of Santa Fe, College of St. Benedict-St. John's University, Colorado State University, Converse College, Creighton University, Culver-Stockton College, Curry College, Dominican University of California, Franklin Pierce University, Green Mountain College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Hofstra University, Illinois College, Illinois Institute of Technology, Keystone College, Lasell College, Lawrence Technological University, Loyola University New Orleans, Lynn University, Manhattan College, Marquette University, New England College, Nichols College, Notre Dame de Namur University, Oglethorpe University, Pacific University, Prescott College, Regis College (Massachusetts), Regis University (Colorado), Rollins College, Russell Sage College, Sacred Heart University, Sage College of Albany, Salem College (North Carolina), Seton Hall University, Seton Hill University, Southern New Hampshire University, St. Lawrence University, St. Norbert College, SUNY Fredonia, SUNY Oswego, TCU (Texas Christian University), The College of Idaho, Thiel College, Thomas College, University of Chicago, University of Dallas, University of La Verne, University of Maine, University of Maine at Machias, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of New Haven, University of Tampa, Utica College, Valparaiso University, Wabash College, Webster University, Westminster College (Missouri), Westminster College (Utah), William Jewell College, Xavier University

David Warsh on Auctions and Politics

David Warsh, the Boston-based economic journalist whose weekly internet column Economic Principals talks about economics and economists, writes about last week's NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, which he attended.

Market design has blossomed in the last decade, in directions that would have been hard to predict. It has also made enormous progress in one of its oldest streams, auction design. This first NBER conference on market design had as its main theme the progress that has been made in auction design, by economists and computer scientists, since the first spectrum auctions in 1994. Warsh writes about that, and the political processes involved in persuading governments to adopt the new auction technologies (not to mention simply communicating them): Auctions and Politicians.

Market for textbooks

The Washington Post has a story on the educational software company Aplia, founded by Paul Romer: An Economist, an Academic Puzzle and a Lot of Promise. It makes a number of interesting observations about the design of the textbook market, and how interactive software that gives students immediate feedback, and lets them participate in experimental economics style interactions, complements the traditional textbook and lecture style of instruction.

"Students seemed to like Aplia's engaging and easy-to-use software, as well as the feedback. Professors liked Aplia even more. It allowed them to leverage the grade-grubbing instincts of today's college students to get them to do homework -- but without having to spend countless hours reading and correcting the assignments. They also got reports from Aplia identifying which students were having the most trouble with the material and which concepts were stumping the class as a whole. "
...
"By relieving instructors of the considerable burden of reviewing homework assignments, the technology makes it possible for universities to require professors to teach more students, either by increasing class sizes or the number of classes they teach. More important, it frees instructors to spend more time preparing for class, working with individual students and even doing their own research. "

It may also allow publishers to circumvent the secondhand market for textbooks, as the software license can be separated from the book.

HT: Greg Mankiw

Markets for hunting

In New England, battles about repugnant transactions often pit social liberals against social conservatives, with the liberals trying to make some transaction possible that the conservatives believe should be banned, as in debates about Same sex marriage in Iowa, and New England.

But there are other kinds of transactions that liberals find repugant and conservatives defend. One of these concerns buying and selling permission to shoot captive game in game farms: Slaughter to some, game to others: Hunting preserves offer captive animals

"For the privilege of killing two boars, Cabral's father and grandfather paid $1,200. By their reckoning, that gets them enough bacon, pork chops, and ham to last their families nearly a year.
"I see it like I'm going grocery shopping," said Russell Mulgrew, Cabral's grandfather.
Not everyone shares that view. Opponents, including some hunters, say captive hunting is anything but sporting for one simple reason: There is no fair chase when the animal has no hope of escape.
As commercial interest grows in Maine to expand these preserves and opposition ratchets up across the country, a deep-seated ethical debate over the ranches is being pushed into the public eye.
"It's morally and ethically wrong to enclose animals and charge a fee to kill them. It's a theme park environment where the prize is a dead animal," said Robert Fisk Jr., president and director of Maine Friends of Animals.
New England's captive parks attract hundreds of hunters each year. In Maine, 388 animals were killed in 2005, although that fell to 262 by 2007. The parks rarely make headlines unless it's about someone notable - such as Massachusetts' former governor William F. Weld boasting about shooting a wild boar in 1991 but initially failing to say that it was in a New Hampshire game park.
Vermont banned new game preserves late last year, largely over concerns about disease, especially chronic wasting disease, a contagious, fatal neurological illness among deer. An effort to outlaw seven existing shooting ranches in Maine for ethical reasons, which was supported by Fisk's group, failed last month. Two other Maine bills are pending: one to permit a new game preserve and the second to expand the variety of animals at others. New Hampshire has two game parks, but no new ones are allowed.
Big-game shooting preserves are prohibited in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Still, it is estimated that there are more than 1,000 game ranches in at least 28 states, according to the Humane Society of the United States, which has an ongoing campaign to end captive hunting. Debates over the ranches have surfaced from New York to North Dakota in recent years."

In England, a legal ban on hunting foxes with dogs (the whole picturesque business, but no fun for the fox) seems to be falling into disuse:

Death knell for hunting ban as police abandon monitoring operations:
"Police forces are to stop monitoring hunts in a change of policy that sounds the death knell for the hunting ban, The Times has learnt."
...
"Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales and the Acpo spokesman on rural affairs, said: “Hunting is definitely not a policing priority. It is not illegal to wear a red coat and ride a horse in a public place.” The new guidance undermines one of the most controversial pieces of legislation introduced by the Labour Government, which took up 700 hours of parliamentary time. Since the Hunting Act came into force in 2004, there have been eight prosecutions, of which only three have been successful, with one pending. Hunting has thrived. Mr Brunstrom said that police had to chose which areas of law enforcement to devote scarce resources to. He said: “If you look at hunting, the penalties do not include a prison sentence for offenders. This puts the Hunting Act to the lower rather than the higher end of offences. Parliament had the chance to include imprisonment as a sentence but did not do so.” "
...
"A spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sport said: “We fought for 80 years for the hunting ban and, while we accept it is not a high priority for police, a ban was the will of Parliament and is the will of the people and we are going to press for more prosecution cases to be brought.” "

See also The hunt ban: a bad law with nowhere to run

More on open source software

I recently wrote about the new take on Open source software proposed by Michael Schwarz and Yuri Takhteyev. Now, while reading David Pennock's reflections on the recent NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, I followed his link to Paul Graham , on science, art, and engineering, who (in passing) has this to say:

"It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant to let hackers work on open-source projects. At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone who didn't. When we interviewed programmers, the main thing we cared about was what kind of software they wrote in their spare time. You can't do anything really well unless you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably be working on projects of your own."

Graham thus views open source as akin to the scholarly publishing that professors do, which is also uncompensated open source work. Like programmers, we also get rewarded for it in our day jobs.

Second life for Second Life?

One of the most interesting uses of the internet as a place to work and play and buy and sell and advertise was explored by Second Life , a virtual world in which individuals and companies can purchase and develop virtual real estate, and host customers and guests. On Second Life you could have an avatar that represented you personally, and you could develop an island for yourself or your company. Many companies opened islands to see what would happen, and the news agency Reuters opened a bureau in second life. But The Reuters Second Life bureau is now closed, and some of the early enthusiasm for the site has faded.

One reason for this is that the site became increasingly sexualized, and the management is now taking steps to segregate sexual content from other kinds of commerce: Red Lights Might Save Second Life:
"In a move obviously meant to attract more mainstream users to Second Life and salvage some of the realm's lost momentum, Linden Lab will soon be moving mature content to a secondary continent within the virtual world. This has got to be a relief to all those businesses that wasted precious resources building digital offices and outlets in the pixel-based universe over the last few years.
Once touted as an essential locale for hip businesses to open up their doors, Second Life saw something of a real estate boom as companies such as Dell and IBM rushed to build their presence on Second Life's sprawling landscape. But once built, these massive corporate structures turned out to be little more than vast wastes of time and money--gigantic ghost towns in a non-existent gold rush."

The latest news is that it is now possible to take the technology private, and host your own, private Second Life: Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall.
One of the early users of this technology is Case Western Reserve University: Case Western Reserve U. Debuts Private Version of Second Life (for some reason, the isolated version of Second Life is codenamed "Nebraska." ):
"Case Western is the higher-education test site as Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, develops the so-called Nebraska version of the virtual world. The concept is to provide all the functions of Second Life, but to let institutions install the platform on their own servers, in their own data centers, and behind their own security systems. The new platform is “completely disconnected from the main Second Life environment,” according to a Second Life blog.
But why would a school like Case, which already has eight islands in Second Life, want to bother with a stand-alone system?
A medical school interested in performing research involving personal medical histories could use a private environment, Mr. Johnson said. Another function would be programs that focus on both adults and kids. Right now, adults need to undergo background checks to access the Second Life teen grid. One use Case envisions for the Nebraska environment would involve the campus Hispanic club providing mentors to Cleveland public-school students in the online virtual world, said Wendy Shapiro, the university’s senior academic-technology officer.
Oh, and another thing: When you host your own universe, you get “God” privileges.
“You can control everything,” said Ms. Shapiro, sounding excited at the prospect. “You can control who comes in, who gets kicked off. You can control whether people walk or fly.”"

Delaying kindergarten entry

The Telegraph discusses the problem of "summer born children," who would be younger than their kindergarten peers if enrolled according to the usual school schedule: Does it pay to delay the start of your child's schooling?. The article focuses on the American experience:

"A survey by the US Department of Education in 2007 found that 14 per cent of children aged 5 to 6 had delayed entry into school, or had parents who planned to delay their entry. In some areas - most often those where parents can afford an extra year of pricey pre-school - the level can reach as high as 25 per cent of the classroom.
The practice is more common among boys and tends to be concentrated in some geographic areas, though nearly absent in others. “Middle-class parents are savvy about wanting to know what the trends are and wanting to make sure that their kids aren't outside the norm,” says one education professor.
That's what comes across in a recent post on a parenting blog from an anxious mother in New Jersey. “I am thinking of holding my daughter back so she is emotionally ready for kindergarten,” she wrote, “but I'm also thinking about it because I worry that she will be the youngest since everyone else is holding back.”
“It's pernicious,” says Morrison, who is concerned, as are many other educators, about the effects on the rest of the student body.
Already, teachers must reckon with children who are 12 months apart in age - a big difference when they are just 5 years old. “On every dimension you can think of, you are going to have kids stretched out along a continuum,” says Beth Graue, a former kindergarten teacher, who studies school readiness at the University of Wisconsin. “You've got to accept that you are going to have gigantic five-year-old girls and tiny five-year-old boys who are going to want to do different things.” When some children begin school a year later than their peers, the range - and the challenge for the teacher - is that much bigger."

If schools are tournaments, this could make sense:
"The notion that small differences in age might make a big difference on the field is familiar terrain to Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker magazine writer and bestselling author. In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell studied ice hockey teams in Canada, where the game is high on the list of national priorities.
By the time kids are just 9 or 10, they are already being selected for elite teams, extra training and top coaching, and at that young age, those born nearest to the January 1 cut-off date - the oldest in each year's grouping - are usually the best, with the extra few months giving them a real advantage on the ice. With more special attention, that advantage seems to stick: Gladwell found that in any grouping of elite hockey players, 40 per cent were born in the first three months of the year. "

This sounds a bit like the reverse of unraveling, the process by which transactions become earlier and earlier in some markets. That process can feed on itself; if everyone else is recruiting early, maybe you had better do so also. It sounds like holding children back from school entry could potentially have the same dynamic: if the other children will all be a year older, maybe you should hold yours back too, especially if you're raising a future football player...

College admissions essays: who writes them, and who reads them?

In England, as in the U.S., college applications require an essay. In England, as in the U.S., some students hire professional help, some plagiarize from the internet, and many get some advice from teachers and parents. In England, unlike in the U.S., students also have the right to see the letters of reference that their high school teachers write for them.

In reaction to all this, the University of Cambridge doesn't read the essays anymore, and may not pay much attention to the letters of recommendation: Personal statements mean nothing, says Cambridge admissions head.

"Many toil for months, writing draft after draft with care and attention. Some simply cut and paste somebody else’s work from the internet. Others order tailor-made versions online for as little as £24.99.
However they do it, writing a personal statement extolling their virtues and love of study has become a rite of passage for teenagers applying to university.
Now it turns out that many of them need not have bothered.
The University of Cambridge has admitted that it pays no attention to applicants’ personal statements when deciding whom to interview or offer a place.
“With the profusion of companies and websites offering to help draft applicants’ personal statements for a fee, no admissions tutor believes them to be the sole work of the applicant any more,” said Geoff Parks, the university’s straight-talking director of admissions. Much simpler just to ignore them.
“We certainly don’t assign any marks to personal statements,” he added. “I have been told by students after they have been admitted that their schools write the personal statements. Reading a very good personal statement doesn’t tell you anything about the student because you cannot be sure that it’s the work of the person concerned.”
Although the university may use the personal statement as the basis for discussion during an interview, it is not used to judge the student. At all.
Personal references from teachers are also treated with a huge pinch of salt. Now that students can ask to see their references, teachers have stopped saying anything interesting or controversial, Mr Parks suggests."
...
"A survey of 50,000 university applications two years ago — many of them for places on medical sciences courses and at Oxbridge — found that a significant minority of students had plagiarised them from the internet. The giveaway was the 234 applicants who all began their medical school application with the same anecdote about setting fire to their pyjamas at the age of eight."

The head of admissions at Oxford, however, says they still pay attention to essays, to help them distinguish among their applicants more than they can by just looking at grades and standardized exams.

University admissions in the UK

I've been trying to understand the semi-centralized application process for British universities, run by an organization called UCAS (Universities & Colleges Admissions Service).

It offers a common application process through which applicants can apply for up to five programs of study, with some restrictions. For example, "If you are applying for dentistry, medicine, veterinary medicine or veterinary science, you can apply for a maximum of four choices in any one of these subjects." And you can apply to only one of Oxford and Cambridge.

Students apply (mostly) by mid January, and Universities make their decisions in a decentralized way, and mostly report them back to students and UCAS by the end of March. Offers of acceptance may be either unconditional or conditional on the student achieving certain grades in upcoming exams.

Students who receive at least one offer can make a firm acceptance, an insurance acceptance, or decline. A firm acceptance is a commitment to attend (and a firm acceptance of a conditional offer is a commitment to attend if the student's grades meet the acceptance conditions). A student may firmly accept only one offer, but if that offer is a conditional one, may additionally choose to accept an additional offer as an insurance choice:
"You can accept an offer as an insurance choice if your firm choice is conditional. Your insurance choice can be conditional (CI) or unconditional (UI) and acts as a back-up to your firm choice, so if you do not meet the conditions for your firm choice but meet the conditions for your insurance choice, you are committed to that course. "
An insurance choice is also a commitment, and so students are advised that they don't need to make one.

Students are given individualized reply dates, depending on when their last decision from their five applications was received. Offers not accepted by the reply date are considered to have been declined.

Students who don't receive any offers or who decline all of those they do receive may apply to courses that still have vacancies, one additional application at a time, through a process called Extra. And, later in the year (in the summer), students who still don't have places, for example because they didn't meet the requirements of a conditional offer, can apply for vacant places through Clearing.

Here's a newspaper account from last year's Clearing process:
"Clearing fortnight is always an emotional rollercoaster. There are, after all, few sleepless nights to rank alongside the one before you get your hands on that ominous bit of paper showing your A-level results. But if you find yourself facing a column of grades lower than you’d expected, all is not lost: of the 413,000 university applicants given firm places last summer, nearly one in 10 (39,000) secured them through Clearing.
Find your course online
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, finding a last-minute place has never been easier. Whereas applicants would once have spent days trying to secure a berth at university – waiting for individual prospectuses to reach them in the post, then painstakingly wading through in search of viable substitute courses – the internet has revolutionised this process.
Today everything can be sorted out within hours: a visit to the Ucas online Track service will confirm whether you have scraped in, or have indeed lost your place, while the Clearing website offers a handy A-Z of courses looking to fill vacancies. "

This year, early newspaper reports reflect worries that cutbacks may mean that relatively fewer places will be available at Clearing: Students face chaos with no clearing places.

Piracy and armed merchantmen

Why is this headline such an outlier? Cruise ship opens fire to beat back Somali pirates

One reason is that ship owners are concerned about the longer term effects of escalating the level of violence in their encounters with pirates. But, it turns out, there are some market design reasons too (emphasis added):

"There have been calls for commercial ships to be allowed to carry weapons to deter increasingly bold pirate gangs, who are armed with automatic rifles and often rocket-propelled grenades.
But ships with arms onboard are not allowed to dock at non-military ports.
To bypass this rule, some operators are hiring private security teams who board as the ship enters a risky stretch of water and leave once the danger has passed.
Andrew Mwangura, head of the East African Seafarers' Assistance Programme in the Kenyan port of Mombasa, criticised the Melody for carrying guns.
"There are a number of other methods which can be used to deter the pirates, having weapons on board is dangerous because it raises the stakes for the pirates," he said.
"There is a far higher risk that a crew member of a merchant vessel, or a passenger, could die if the pirates feel they must fight harder to win the ship." The International Maritime Bureau said piracy incidents nearly doubled in the first quarter of 2009, almost all of them off Somalia. There were 18 attacks off the Somali coast in March alone.
Pirates have made millions of dollars from seizing ships and taking crews hostage. A Greek ship was released on Saturday after a £1.3 million ransom was paid.
But just hours earlier a German grain carrier was grabbed in the Gulf of Aden. "