Misc. kidney exchanges and chains

At the University of Wisconsin hospital, a non-directed donor chain involving four donors and four recipients was completed in a day: At UW Hospital, four kidney transplants in one day and eight people are connected forever


Here's a 21 minute video interview of Dr. Matthew Cooper at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, about a 4 transplant non-directed donor kidney exchange chain conducted there over two days. Among the logistical issues he mentions (e.g. 8 operating room teams) are those involving protecting the privacy of all the donors and recipients (around minute 3:45). And (around 9:15, and not making any specific comparisons to other hospitals) "We take no shortcuts at the University of Maryland," he says. Here is another short video, with some OR footage. More videos here from UMMC.


Here's a 4 minute video, "United by their gifts," about the meeting of the donors and recipients in the three way NEPKE exchange I posted about earlier (Kidney exchange at NEPKE ).


There have been some delays in starting a national kidney exchange program in Australia: Waiting for Kidney eXchange "One of the driving forces behind the exchange program is Professor Paolo Ferrari. He helped introduce it in Western Australia in 2007.
"We really hope it can be rolled out nationally before an election is called," he said.
"Otherwise it will be pushed back months."
A spokeswoman for the Organ and Tissue Donation Authority said the exchange program was expected to begin in Australian hospitals in August or September.
"The first step will be to enrol potential participants in the program, followed by the clinical process of matching donors and recipients, followed by the surgical processes," she said.
The spokeswoman said all states and territories had now considered the detail of the program.
"This process, through senior medical representatives, was completed last week, paving the way for health ministers to be briefed during July."
It took the UK three years to set up its kidney exchange program. "

Signaling preferences in matching markets

Preference Signaling in Matching Markets, by Peter Coles, Alexey Kushnir, and Muriel Niederle, NBER Working Paper No. 16185, July 2010. (Here's an ungated version.)

"Abstract: Many labor markets share three stylized facts: employers cannot give full attention to all candidates, candidates are ready to provide information about their preferences for particular employers, and employers value and are prepared to act on this information. In this paper we study how a signaling mechanism, where each worker can send a signal of interest to one employer, facilitates matches in such markets. We find that introducing a signaling mechanism increases the welfare of workers and the number of matches, while the change in firm welfare is ambiguous. A signaling mechanism adds the most value for balanced markets."

Two of the three authors of this paper are on the AEA job market committee that instituted the AEA's job market signaling mechanism. This new working paper brings some theory to the party.

See also

Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," revised April 6, 2010, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010.

marketdesigner.blogspot.xxx

Sex domain .xxx approved by regulators .
"ICANN, the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, which is responsible for overseeing the creation and distribution of web addresses, finally gave the go-ahead for the special .xxx domain name at a meeting in Brussels.

The adult entertainment industry has long campaigned in favour of a special .xxx suffix, similar to the .com and .co.uk domain names used by other companies."

Polyandry

Polyandry is much less common in the world than the other form of polygamy, polygyny, in which a man has two or more wives. In polyandrous households, one wife has two or more husbands. It was a form of plural marriage in resource poor regions.

Now, the NY Times reports, One Bride for 2 Brothers: A Custom Fades in India

In the remote villages of this Himalayan valley, polyandry, the practice of multiple men marrying one wife, was for centuries a practical solution to a set of geographic, economic and meteorological problems.
"People here survived off small farms hewed from the mountainsides at an altitude of 11,000 feet, and dividing property among several sons would leave each with too little land to feed a family. A harsh mountain winter ends the short planting season abruptly. The margin between starvation and survival is slender."...

"Polyandry has been practiced here for centuries, but in a single generation it has all but vanished. "...

"Polyandry has never been common in India, but pockets have persisted, especially among the Hindu and Buddhist communities of the Himalayas, where India abuts Tibet."

David Blackwell

David H. Blackwell dies at 91; pioneering statistician at Howard and Berkeley

"David H. Blackwell, 91, who rose from poverty in Southern Illinois to become one of the country's most prominent statisticians and the first African American to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, died July 8 at a hospital in Berkeley, Calif., of complications from a stroke.

"Dr. Blackwell was also the first black tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became chairman of the statistics department. ...

"While in Washington, he became interested in statistics after hearing a lecture by Agriculture Department statistician Meyer A. Girshick. After Dr. Blackwell challenged one of Girshick's assertions, the two met and became friends and colleagues.

"They wrote a 1954 book, "The Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions." It established them as leaders in the burgeoning field of game theory, which uses mathematics to understand winning strategies in situations that can be applied to economics, biology, engineering, political science and international relations. "

Consolidation and competition among economics jobs aggregators

At VoxEu, there's an announcement today (July 16) of a new service and a combining of forces: Introducing a free database of nearly all jobs for PhD economists by Raphael Auer and Richard Baldwin, founders of walras.org and Vox respectively.

They write:

"To help grow the next generation of economists, VoxEU.org has teamed with walras.org to form the world’s largest database of job openings for PhD economists. In addition to this comprehensive database of nearly all job openings for PhDs in economics and related fields, our partner walras.org also offers a free online application system allowing the exchange of all application documents and reference letters."

It looks like this puts them in pretty direct competition with the combination of Econjobmarket.org with the European Economic Association. And they are both competing with software providers who deal directly with the HR departments of universities and provide university-specific web sites for handling the information flow of job applications. (The AEA's Job Openings for Economists doesn't propose to handle the application process, but of course it is another big aggregator of job ads.)

We anticipated some of this in our forthcoming paper

Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," revised April 6, 2010, forthcoming in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010.

In that paper we wrote

"Two kinds of web applications have a presence in the market. Some departments are in institutions that use a university-wide platform, usually purchased commercially and then operated by the Human Resources department. Such university-specific systems impose high costs on applicants and references because they require individual uploading for each application and letter of reference.

"Other employers use third-party services such as EconJobMarket.org, AcademicJobsOnline.org (run by Duke’s Math Department, offering services to all sorts of departments), and others such as Academic Careers Online (http://www.academiccareers-job.com/), Economist Jobs (http://www.econ-jobs.com/), EconCareers (http://www.econcareers.com/), and LiberalArtsFacultyJobs.com. The job listing aggregator walras.org may also start such a service. The website of EconJobMarket.org (accessed March 1, 2010) indicates some consolidation: their service has been merged with that of the European Economic Association and has been endorsed by other economics organizations."

Dov Samet on marrying well

Dubi Samet has a paper on stable marriage, explaining why you might have married as well as you did, and explaining how, when there is substantial agreement on rankings, you and your spouse can't have done too differently well.

(I conclude that if, like me, you "married up" it is because your spouse has contrarian tastes.)

The paper is "Matching of like rank and the size of the core in the marriage problem" by Dov Samet

"Abstract: When men and women are objectively ranked in a marriage problem, say by beauty, then pairing individuals of equal rank is the only stable matching. We generalize this observation by providing bounds on the size of the rank gap between mates in a stable matchings in terms of the size of the ranking sets. Using a metric on the set of matchings, we provide bounds on the diameter of the core---the set of stable matchings---in terms of the size of the ranking sets and in terms of the size of the rank gap. We conclude that when the set of rankings is small, so are the core and the rank gap in stable matchings."

Game theory from A to Z

I'll be travelling this morning to Stony Brook, to participate in the part of their annual festival that is celebrating Bob Aumann's 80th birthday, and Shmuel Zamir's 70th.

Here's a picture I took of the two of them at a Stony Brook party in honor of Lloyd Shapley in the summer of 2003.

"Aumann" and "Zamir" were two of the first names I learned to conjure with, when I started studying game theory in the 1970's.

יום הולדת שמח, Happy birthday Bob and Shmuel.

And here's the program.

The Stony Brook Game Theory Festival of the Game Theory Society in Honor of Robert Aumann’s Eightieth Birthday

July 15, 2010 in Honor of Shmuel Zamir’s Seventieth Birthday

9:00 - 9:45	Olivier Gossner (Paris School of Economics & London School of Economics) The robustness of incomplete codes of law
9:45 - 10:00	Coffee Break
10:00 - 10:30	Alfredo Di Tillio (Bocconi University) Reasoning about Conditional Probability and Counterfactuals
10:30 - 11:00	Eduardo Faingold (Yale University) The strategic impact of higher-order beliefs
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
11:15 - 11:45	Marco Scarsini (LUISS) On the Core of Dynamic Cooperative Games
11:45 - 12:15	Todd Kaplan (University of Haifa) The Benefits of Costly Voting
12:15 - 13:45	Lunch Break
13:45 - 14:30	Robert John Aumann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) My Shmuel
14:30 - 14:45	Coffee Break
14:45 - 15:30	Abraham Neyman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Rate of Convergence in Repeated Games with Incomplete Information
15:30 - 16:15	Shmuel Zamir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) On Bayesian-Nash Equilibria Satisfying the Condorcet Jury Theorem: The Dependent Case
16:15 - 16:30	Coffee Break
16:30 - 17:15	Al Roth (Harvard University) Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Markets
18:00 - 21:30	Reception Dinner (Three Village Inn)

Hiring Indian wombs

Steve Leider writes:

The Indian Parliament will be considering legislation to regulate the practice of commercial surrogacy in India. There are approximately 350 clinics overseeing an estimated 1500 pregnancy attempts annually, one third of which involve foreigners, making up a $445 million industry. Surrogacy in India is much cheaper than in the United States: “The entire process costs customers around $23,000 — less than one-fifth of the going rate in the U.S. — of which the surrogate mother usually receives about $7,500 in installments.”

Surrogacy in India has been largely unregulated since being legalized in 2002 - the Indian Council of Medical Research issued guidelines in 2005, but IVF clinics often establish their own policies. The draft legislation proposes several substantial restrictions:

“Exploitation of surrogates by infertile couples, and vice versa, has been a serious concern ever since in-vitro fertilization (IVF) started in India. ‘But this will put an end to it. Infertile couples don't have to go hunting for surrogate mothers. The bank will help them get one. As a result, the couple will have all information about her background and medical history before hiring her womb,’ said Dr R S Sharma, deputy director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), who has been involved in the process of drafting the Bill.”

“These banks - both private and government - will be accredited by state boards. The board will also have a registration authority which will maintain a list of all IVF centres and monitor their functioning. ‘So far we didn't have any law regarding surrogacy. This is a step towards legalizing surrogacy and fixing responsibilities of the parties involved in the process," said Dr Sharma’”….

“These ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] banks will be independent of IVF clinics. Oocyte (unfertilized egg) and semen preservation will be their main focus. ‘In the past few years, IVF clinics have mushroomed in the country. There is no check on their practices. There is no quality check on the semen and oocytes preserved by them and offered to infertile couples. These banks will have a proper system, where every minor detail about gametes and surrogates will be documented,’ said a senior doctor at AIIMS who too is involved in the drafting of the bill.”

“Experts say that once a bank is in place, it will maintain a database of surrogate mothers. A woman is allowed five live births, including her own children. ‘It has been seen that poor women sell their womb several times for money. This has a damaging effect on their body. The new bill clearly states that a woman can't have more than five live births and donate oocytes more than six times in her life,’ said Dr Sharma.”….

“The bill proposes stringent rules for foreigners looking for surrogate mothers. It will be mandatory for foreign couples to submit two certificates - one on their country's policy on surrogacy and the other stating that the child born to the surrogate mother will get their country's citizenship. "They also have to nominate a local guardian, who will take care of the surrogate during the gestation period," said Dr Sharma.”

Prominent IVF doctors like Dr. Nayna Patel (who was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007) have objected to the new regulations:

It's a suggestion that has caused a stir in the medical community. Patel insists that she will not accept a surrogate sent to Akanksha unless she herself is permitted to perform medical and background checks. She maintains that ART banks will not have enough experience to determine whether a woman is fit for surrogacy, let alone replicate the personal bonds she cultivates with her surrogates. ‘The trust they have with me is what makes the whole thing secure and safe,’ she says. ‘And at the end, when they want to buy a house or a piece of land for farming, we get them the best deal. With this bill, we will not know what they are going to do with such a big amount of money.’”

Two recent court cases highlighted the need for increased regulation. In 2008 a Japanese couple divorced during the surrogacy:

“The husband still wanted to raise Manji, but his ex-wife did not. The father found himself in a catch-22. India requires that a child be legally adopted before leaving the country, but bars single men from adopting. Manji's father was denied travel documents for the baby. The situation was widely covered in Indian and global media, and grew into a legal and diplomatic crisis. Manji was eventually permitted to leave for Japan [after custody was granted to the child’s grandmother].”

A German couple also experienced legal problems:

“Since the day they were delivered more than two years ago, twin toddlers Nikolas and Leonard Balaz have been stateless and stranded in India. Their parents are German nationals, but the woman to whom the babies were born is a 20-something Indian surrogate from Gujarat. The boys were refused German passports because the country does not recognize surrogacy as a legitimate means of parenthood. And India doesn't typically confer citizenship on surrogate-born children conceived by foreigners. Last week, Germany relented, issuing the Balazes travel visas, and the entire family is finally going home.”

Surrogacy is also subject to substantial disapproval within India, being criticized as the "commoditisation of motherhood" and “a peculiar form of prostitution”. Surrogates often hide their pregnancy by moving away from friends and family temporarily: "Otherwise, we'll be treated like social pariahs… This isn't a respectable thing to do in our society." Others say it is their husbands’ baby, and then after giving the baby to the intended parents say the newborn has died. The Catholic Church has also opposed the new law for legitimizing surrogacy:

“An Oriental-rite Catholic Church in Kerala says it plans to try and torpedo an upcoming bill to legalize surrogacy in India, which it says will destabilize a family system already struggling ‘under Western influence.’ ‘The Church will take all possible steps to stop the bill and will alert elected state representatives about the impact it will have on family life,’ Syro-Malabar Church spokesman Father Paul Thelakat told ucanews.com on June 24. ‘We have been teaching our faithful about moral living, so if the government enacts a bill which is against our teachings, how can we sit idle,’ the priest said.”

A documentary focusing on the outsourcing of surrogacy (particularly to India) called Google Baby recently premiered on HBO (an additional trailer is available on the director’s website).

The market for musicians (in top orchestras)

Need a Job? Help Wanted at the N.Y. Philharmonic . These posts, naturally, are rarefied and have little to do with the normal job picture nationwide. But the number of openings prompts the question of why so many spots stand vacant in a market glutted with talented musicians looking to move up to better orchestras or just to find jobs.

"The economy has had an effect. It is cheaper to leave jobs unfilled and to pay substitutes, who usually receive close to the minimum base pay and fewer benefits. Starting salaries at the 10 top-paying orchestras next season range from $101,600 (Minnesota) to $136,500 (Los Angeles), but principal players can earn two or three times that.

“It happens that you do save money,” Mr. Mehta acknowledged, but he said the lingering vacancies in New York were not cost-saving measures."...

"The elaborate logistical demands of orchestral auditions cause delays. First auditions are advertised. Then time must pass for applicants to send in résumés and tapes and practice the assigned excerpts from the orchestral literature. A committee of players, usually in the section, has to be formed, and preliminary rounds of auditions have to be scheduled. After the finalists are chosen, a time must be found when the busy music director and committee members can hear them. The process can easily stretch out for many months.

"Often no winner is chosen. That happened last year with the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet job. Two rounds of auditions for associate principal horn player and a double bassist also produced no result. The music director in New York has final say but makes the decision in consultation with the committee.

"The Boston Symphony usually has a high number of openings, because the demands on the players — the Tanglewood festival, the Boston Pops and regular concerts — make scheduling auditions especially difficult, as does the orchestra’s system of hiring based on a two-thirds majority in committee.

"The finest musician can have a bad day: it’s a paradox of the process, in which less than an hour of playing is supposed to determine whether a musician is suitable for the continual day in, day out life of an orchestra member. And in another contradiction, the aspirants play alone for a job that depends on group effort. (Winners are usually on probation for a year or two, effectively a tryout with the ensemble.) On occasion, when no winner is chosen, established orchestral players from elsewhere will be invited to play as guests in a kind of informal tryout. It’s an imperfect system, but no one has figured out a better one."

The orchestra audition process is the topic of the paper"Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse American Economic Review (September 2000)

"The practical power of game theory"

That's the title of Northwestern's news release about my 2010 Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture. (The title of the lecture was "Market Design," and after some general introduction to market design I focused mostly on kidney exchange.) Here's the video (1 hour, 20 minutes).

Egg shortage in Britain

Desperate hunt for donor eggs forces couples to seek IVF abroad, the Telegraph reports.

"Waiting lists for fertility treatment involving donated eggs have risen in this country since laws were changed to prevent women from donating anonymously.

"Now research shows the national shortage is the main reason couples go abroad for fertility treatment, with almost half of British "fertility tourists" going to Spain, where anonymity is allowed, and donors receive generous compensation.
"The study for the Economic and Social Research Council found that women who left Britain for IVF treatment were most likely to do so in search of a donor eggs, after encountering long waits in this country. "...
"Almost half of the women went to Spain thanks to policies which pay women up to 1000 euros to donate eggs, while remaining anonymous.
"Next was the Czech Republic, which also allows anonymous donation, and more generous payments than this country, where clinics are only allowed to provide £250 to those who donate eggs.
"Others went to the United States, South Africa, Barbados, Russia and Ukraine."...
"Research collaborator Dr Allan Pacey, a fertility expert from Sheffield University, said the findings of the research suggested more should be done to encourage egg donation in this country, including more generous compensation payments for those who underwent the procedure.
"Since legislation was passed in 2004 ending donor anonymity, the number of egg donors fell for three years, only rising marginally in 2008, the last year for which figures are held, when 1,084 eggs were donated.
"Experts believe more than double that number of donations would be required to meet current demand.
"Dr Pacey said he believed the shortage of donors in Britain was more to do with the small amount of compensation women were given rather than the lack of anonymity.
"Egg donation is a pretty horrendous thing to go through, so I think you could easily argue that £250 [the limit set in Britain] is not sufficient," he said.
"Regulators are currently reviewing the rules they set in 2006 which set the current limits.
"Prof Lisa Jardine, the chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has said that a rise in payment levels could encourage more women to donate eggs, meaning fewer infertile women would feel forced to seek treatment abroad."

Same sex marriage in Kagan's confirmation hearings

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan provide an excuse for a NY Times OpEd by Jonathan Rauch to speculate on how she might feel about same sex marriage, based on some general principles she admitted to. (Rauch writes that he is himself a spouse in a same sex marriage that is recognized where he works, in Washington DC, but not where he lives, in Virginia.) A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage

"Civil rights, she implies, are important, but so is judicial modesty, and a sensible judge balances the two. A sensible judge can say something like, “Same-sex marriage may indeed be a civil right, but not all civil rights demand immediate judicial intervention, and other important interests militate against imposing this one on the whole country right now.”

"Viewed in that light, the argument for upholding California’s gay marriage ban has merit — not because the policy is fair or wise (it isn’t) but because it represents a reasonable judgment that the people of California are entitled to make. Barring gay marriage but providing civil unions is not the balance I would choose, but it is a defensible balance to strike, one that arguably takes “a cautious approach to making such a significant change to the institution of marriage” (as the lawyers defending Proposition 8 write in one of their briefs) while going a long way toward meeting gay couples’ needs."

Boston Judge Rules Federal Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

Judge Rules Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

"A U.S. judge in Boston has ruled that a federal gay marriage ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.

"U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro on Thursday ruled in favor of gay couples' rights in two separate challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA.

"The state had argued the law denied benefits such as Medicaid to gay married couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions have been legal since 2004.

"Tauro agreed, and said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.

"The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment. For that reason, the statute is invalid," Tauro wrote in a ruling in a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley.

"Ruling in a separate case filed by Gays & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Tauro found that DOMA violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"We've maintained from the very beginning that there was absolutely no basis for this law treating one class of married Massachusetts couples different from everybody else and the court has recognized that," said Gary Buseck, GLAD's legal director.

"The Justice Department argued the federal government has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits -- including requiring that those benefits only go to couples in marriages between a man and a woman.

"The law was enacted by Congress in 1996 when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriage and opponents worried that other states would be forced to recognize such marriages. The lawsuit challenges only the portion of the law that prevents the federal government from affording pension and other benefits to same-sex couples.

"Since then, five states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage."

Here's an earlier post: Same sex spouses versus Defense of Marriage Act, and here's an even earlier one: When a protected transaction meets a repugnant one: The MA suit over the Defense of Marriage Act

Deceased organ donor registry in NY

The NY Organ Donor Network has issued the following news release about a change in NY State to facilitate online registration. NEW YORK ORGAN DONOR NETWORK APPLAUDS GOVERNOR PATERSON’S SIGNING OF ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE ACT

"New York, NY - July 8, 2010: Governor David Paterson today signed into law an electronic signature bill that will dramatically improve the organ donation process in New York. The law will allow New Yorkers to register online to become organ donors. The bill passed the Assembly unanimously on April 27 and the Senate on May 12. The Electronic Signature Act eliminates the need to download enrollment forms and mail them in."

Here's a previous post on the issue.

HT Judd Kessler

Cryonics as a repugnant transaction

The NY Times has an article on those who wish to have their remains frozen after death, in the hope of eventual resurrection at a time when medical technology might make that feasible. Much of the story focuses on economist Robin Hanson of GMU, and his wife Peggy Jackson, a hospice worker who finds the idea unpleasant. The article goes on to say that this is quite common: many people, in particular the spouses of enthusiasts, find the idea repugnant. (It's not every NY Times article about an economist that includes references to Gilgamesh and Voldemort...)

Until Cryonics Do Us Part

"Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.

"Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

"Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist history, starting with the prime mover. Robert Ettinger is the father of cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. “This is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than200 patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife. Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?” "
...
"Whether or not the human race subconsciously equates attempts to defeat death with treachery, it’s true that a general air of menace hangs over the quest for immortality in Western literature. Think Gilgamesh or Voldemort. “There is a lot of ancient cultural stereotyping about the motives and moral character of people who pursue life extension,” says James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit organization enamored of life extension. Hughes has chosen not to participate in what he considers a worthy experiment. “Although it’s a rather marginal bet for a potentially huge payoff,” he says, “I value my relationship with my wife.” "

HT to Tyler Cowen at MR, whose post contains some related links.

The Market for scientists

"It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” says Harold Salzman in a Miller-McCune story by Beryl Lieff Benderly about the market for scientists:The Real Science Gap

"It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career."...

"Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA. And many who do earn doctorates in math-based subjects opt to use their skills devising mathematical models on Wall Street, rather than solving scientific puzzles in university labs, hoping a professorship opens up."

Growth of kidney donation by unrelated donors

Kidney exchange has allowed more people to receive kidneys from unrelated donors, but that isn't all that's going on, it has also become more acceptable for people to receive a kidney from friends and even people who they met on the internet.

George Taniwaki--a prospective donor who publishes a very interesting blog--has a post on this, The rise of unrelated donor transplants.

It includes admirably clear data graphics and analysis.

"Even more interesting is the extremely rapid rise of alternative sources of living donors. The last three lines from the figure above are rescaled in the figure below. The fastest growing source of living donors is paired exchanges. ... Kidney exchanges have the potential of becoming the leading source of live donor kidneys within a few years."

In addition, he has some insights into some of the complicated politics of kidney transplantation, in which there is some over-claiming of "firsts."

"The final fast-growing source of donors are people who donate without a specific recipient in mind. They are called nondirected or altruistic donors. Johns Hopkins Medicine claims to have performed the first nondirected live donor transplant in September, 1999. However, UNOS data shows two earlier donors in 1998 and one in 1988, the first year data is available. In addition to increasing the total number of donations, nondirected donors also play an important role in starting donor chains in kidney exchanges. Donor chains reduce the risk to recipients of their matched donors backing out an exchange after the first transplant takes place. Thus, nondirected donors reduce the need to perform the transplant surgeries simultaneously. This simplifies scheduling personnel and operating rooms for kidney exchange transplants."

Grade inflation in law schools

The NY Times report that some law schools are retroactively raising the grades they have given to their students, in an effort to improve their prospects in the difficult market for many law grads: In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That.

"[Loyola Law School in Los Angeles] is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.
Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings. Once able to practically guarantee gainful employment to thousands of students every year, the schools are now fielding complaints from more and more unemployed graduates, frequently drowning in student debt.
They have come up with a number of strategic responses. Besides the usual career counseling measures, many top schools have bumped up their on-campus interview weeks from the autumn to August, before the school year even starts, because they want their students to have a chance to nab a job slot before their counterparts at other schools do. "
...
"Harvard and Stanford, two of the top-ranked law schools, recently eliminated traditional grading altogether. Like Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, they now use a modified pass/fail system, reducing the pressure that law schools are notorious for. This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview. "


For a paper on grade inflation and job markets, see

Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz, 2010, "Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2(2): 34–63.

It's behind a subscription wall, but here's the abstract:

"This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early contracting is impossible, the same, "balanced" amount of information is disclosed in essentially all equilibria. When early contracting is allowed and information arrives gradually, if schools disclose the balanced amount of information, students and employers will not find it profitable to contract early. If they disclose more, some students and employers will prefer to sign contracts before all information is revealed."

Future organ replacement

I expect that your grandchildren will have the luxury of viewing all the work on kidney exchange and transplantation generally as primitive medicine ("Grandpa, they used to take an organ from one person and sew it into another??").

At the XXIII International Congress of the Transplant Society next month there will be some discussion of Stem Cells and Regeneration, along with more prosaic, current clinical issues.

A small step towards that future is reported in Science: Rats Breathe With Lab-Grown Lungs
and in the Boston Globe: N.E. researchers create functioning lung tissue--A vital step in the quest to build organs.

From the Globe: "Two teams of researchers from New England have built living, breathing lung tissue in the laboratory — feats of engineering that could speed up the development of new drugs and bring researchers a step closer to the tantalizing dream of growing replacement lungs for patients."

In the meantime, I'm cheered by the progress we're making in primitive medicine, back in these days at the dawn of the 21st century (see here and, more generally, here, or my post last summer at which a prize was awarded to Mike Rees for some of that progress).

HT: Steve Leider