Misc. kidney exchanges

The New England Journal of Medicine has created a virtual library of it's kidney transplant articles, I think all of which are now ungated. See e.g.
A Nonsimultaneous, Extended, Altruistic-Donor Chain by Michael A. Rees, M.D., Ph.D., Jonathan E. Kopke, B.S., Ronald P. Pelletier, M.D., Dorry L. Segev, M.D., Matthew E. Rutter, M.D., Alfredo J. Fabrega, M.D., Jeffrey Rogers, M.D., Oleh G. Pankewycz, M.D., Janet Hiller, M.S.N., Alvin E. Roth, Ph.D., Tuomas Sandholm, Ph.D., M. Utku Ünver, Ph.D. and Robert A. Montgomery, M.D., D.Phil.
N Engl J Med 2009; 360:1096-1101March 12, 2009

The University of Michigan performed its first simultaneous 3-pair kidney exchange this summer, on July 21 2010: UM Paired Kidney Exchange Program performs its first triple kidney transplant exchange.
One of the recipients was quoted in a local news story as pointing out another advantage of live donation: ""Nobody else had to die for us to get this"

College admissions statistics, sampled for 2010-11

The NY Times offers a table of statistics (which I can't copy properly for some reason) and an accompanying story about the admissions results from some selective colleges, including information on

Applicants

Admits

Admit Rate

Offered Spot on Wait List

Accepted Spot on Wait List

Wait List Admits

Enrolled

Total Admits Attending (Yield)

The story says "The percentage of students accepted at many of the nation's top institutions hit new lows, while waiting lists reached new heights, says Barmak Nassirian, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "Mr. Nassirian points to the economic downturn as fueling uncertainty among colleges about how many accepted students would actually attend — the so-called yield. "The underlying method by which families have historically paid for college was basically obliterated by the triple whammy that this recession has delivered,” he says. "As a result, colleges had to hedge their bets this year: some offered a waiting-list spot to more than three times as many students as their entering class, leaving hundreds, even thousands, of students dangling, sometimes into late summer. " Meanwhile, at the University of Iowa, Undercounting Freshmen, Iowa Scrambles for Room "IOWA CITY — Like an airline overselling a flight, the University of Iowa extended admission this year to several thousand more applicants than it could accommodate on campus in this fall’s freshman class. "While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were surprised to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500. " And at Harvard, Harvard College Admits 12 Fall Transfers "After two years during which no transfer students were admitted, 12 new students have arrived at Harvard as the latest additions to the classes of 2012 and 2013. "Out of 614 transfer applicants, 13 were accepted and 12 decided to attend, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67. ... "The students—four sophomores and eight juniors, according to transfer student Sarah L. A. Erwin ’13—come from a variety of universities around the world, including small private schools like 26-student Deep Springs College, research universities like Brown and Georgetown, and international schools such as McGill in Canada and Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Chile."

Ethnic dating sites

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Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate

That's the title of a paper that Judd Kessler and I recently finished, motivated by one aspect of organ donation in Singapore (and recently also in Israel), namely that registered donors receive priority for organs should they need a transplant themselves:
Kessler, Judd B. and Alvin E. Roth, Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate," June 2010.  (As an added bonus, Judd is on the jobmarket this year.)

Here's the abstract: "Organ donations from deceased donors (cadavers) provide the majority of transplanted organs in the United States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the relative ease of becoming one. We study in the laboratory an experimental game modeled on the decision to register as an organ donor, and investigate a variety of strategies for increasing the donation rate. We find that an organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors has a significant positive impact on registration.

And this is from the concluding section
"Before further considering the benefits of the priority rule, it is worth noting that there are other ways to change policy that could positively affect the number of registered organ donors. For example, one proposal that has received a good deal of attention would change the current “opt in” registration method used in the United States to an “opt out” system in which everyone is presumed to be a donor unless he or she actively indicates otherwiseAnother proposal, “mandated choice” would require everyone (e.g. who applies for a driver’s license) to specifically indicate whether they wished to be a donor or not. We want to briefly argue here that the priority rule that we consider may create a more direct link between registration as an organ donor and subsequent successful organ recovery and transplantation than policies that change the procedure by which individuals register as organ donors.

Attempts to increase organ donation rates by changing the default organ registration status (and adopting an “opt out” policy) would surely generate more registered organ donors since those who do not take any explicit action would automatically be registered as donors (see Johnson and Goldstein 2003, 2004, who find direct evidence that registration rates are higher with an “opt out” system).[2] However, such a policy may weaken the link between the registration decision and the legal clarity of the potential donors’ last wishes. Under current United States gift law, changing the default status is likely to have legal consequences that could be detrimental to organ retrieval.

Since the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968 (UAGA), an individual can make his or her own legally binding decision to be an organ donor after death, which does not require the consent of next of kin (Glazier 2009). However, a donor symbol on a driver’s license has not been considered sufficient evidence of the deceased’s intent to donate in order to proceed without permission from the next of kin. Aside from the fact that the driver’s license is often not available in a timely way, the law allowed that a registered donor could have changed his or her mind about donation subsequent to the issuance of the driver’s license (Glazier 2006).

In recent years, computer registries have allowed for fast checks of organ registration status. They also provide individuals with a way to easily change their organ donor status online, which allows the presence in the registry to be interpreted as intent to donate. The legal status of the anatomical gift has meant doctors can recover donated organs without receiving explicit permission the next of kin (see Glazier 2006). In contrast, a donor registration that does not reflect a positive decision to donate (as under an “opt out” policy) may not be taken as evidence of the deceased’s intent in the legally compelling way that registration does currently. Under an opt out policy, approval from next of kin might again become necessary for an organ to be transplanted.[3]

A "mandated choice" system would also change the way in which individuals became registered donors (see Thaler and Sunstein 2008 and Thaler 2009). Under “mandated choice,” every individual who registered for a driver’s license (or potentially other state or federal documentation) would be required to indicate that he will be an organ donor or that he will not. While there is evidence that a “mandated choice” policy would (like “opt out”) generate more registration of organ donors (Johnson and Goldstein 2003, 2004), similar concerns arise about whether a change to mandated choice would lead to more donated organs and transplants. While the UAGA makes registering to be a donor legally binding under an “opt in” policy, failing to register as an organ donor is not a legally binding decision, whereas registering as a person who declines to donate would likely be legally binding on the next of kin. Discussions with the staff at the New England Organ Bank suggests that they are able to recover organs from about half of all non-registered potential donors in New England by approaching next of kin. This means that more than half of the people who are not currently registered under “opt in” would need to choose “yes” in mandated choice to increase the recovery rate.[4] Consequently, it remains an empirical question whether a change to “mandated choice” would generate more organ transplants.

Even though registration under “opt out” and “mandated choice” systems may raise legal concerns about the intent of registrants under the UAGA, changing the procedure by which individuals register as donors may still be a fruitful avenue to pursue to increase organ donation and recovery.[5] Gift laws can also potentially be changed to address any legal concerns that might arise from new policies. We simply see these legal issues as additional hurdles to monitor and overcome in successfully implementing a change in registration policy. One attraction of the priority rule is that it seems to avoid these additional hurdles since it preserves the current donor registration process as is (and thus is consistent with current United States law regarding donor intent at time of death).

While comparing the different mechanisms in our experiment, the priority rule, rebate, and discount all generate an incentive to donate that offsets the costs of donation. But the priority rule has two advantages over the rebate and discount both inside and outside of the laboratory. First, the simplicity and elegance of the priority rule (as suggested by its outperformance of the rebate and discount at the start of the game) suggests that its benefits are particularly clear and salient. Second, and more importantly, the priority rule is feasible to implement and can be implemented without any additional costs to the system. In contrast, decreasing the costs of registering to be an organ donor is difficult (it is difficult to both understand the costs and to decrease them) and providing a rebate through the form of monetary incentives is not currently allowed by the U.S. National Organ Transplant Act and by similar legislation in many countries.

...

The priority rule used in Singapore appears to be a powerful policy tool. Results from this experiment suggest that it performs as well as or better than discounts and rebates that are of a similar magnitude to the benefits of priority. It is a plausible mechanism to increase rates of registration, and policy makers should consider allocation policy along with other policies to generate more organ transplants."

---

The wheels of justice and Ladies' Nights

A year ago today I blogged about a lawyer who objected to differential pricing for the two sides of a matching market: he didn't like "ladies' nights" at bars, and brought suit to end them.

Today, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, chief conspirator Eugene Volokh points us to the resolution of the case, which was rejected by the district court, and has now been confirmed on appeal to the Second Circuit. Here's the court's opinion.

The opinion begins "The facts of the case are straightforward. During “Ladies’ Nights,” several New York City nightclubs (“Nightclubs”) charge males more for admission than females or give males less time than females to enter the Nightclubs for a reduced price or for free. Den Hollander, who was admitted to the Nightclubs under this admission regime, attributes these pernicious “Ladies’ Nights” to “40 years of lobbying and intimidation, [by] the special interest group called ‘Feminism’ [which] has succeed in creating a customary practice . . . of invidious discrimination of men.” Den Hollander filed suit, on behalf of himself and others like him, alleging violation of his equal protection rights pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983."

As it happens, the case doesn't depend on any economic arguments, but on the fact that nightclubs aren't state actors...

Further consequences of the unraveling of the market for law grads

The NY Times reports that some of the young lawyers who were made permanent offers after their second year summer associateships in August 2008 (for permanent jobs in 2009), only to have them rescinded or deferred, are finding satisfaction in public interest law.

Young Lawyers Turn to Public Service

"With offers of employment made in August 2008 and the full force of the recession hitting in October, many big law firms — like Latham & Watkins, where Mr. Richardson was a summer associate — had to re-evaluate the job offers made to members of the class of 2009. As a way to keep their costs down while holding on to promising associates, many offered the graduates the chance to take up to a year off before starting as associates, complete with a stipend of $60,000 to $75,000. They could travel, do research, or choose — as many did — to work in the public sector.

"With the deferral year ending, some of these newly minted lawyers are surprised to find themselves reconsidering their career goals and thinking about staying with public interest law. When Latham & Watkins asked Mr. Richardson to defer his start date until at least October 2010, he took his interest in environmental issues to Resources for the Future, a nonprofit policy group based in Washington, where he did legal research on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and climate change.

"Now, despite heavy student-loan debt and a family to support, he has decided to say no to Latham and stay with public interest law, even though it pays far less.

“This is an amazing work environment,” said Mr. Richardson, who graduated from the University of Chicago Law School. “I’m working with a lot of really smart people and getting published. I’m not sure if there’s anywhere else I could do this, at least at this point in my career.”

"Mr. Richardson claims that everyone he knows has at least considered staying in public interest — and law school faculty members confirm that they are seeing a growing interest in that field."
...
"David Stern, executive director of Equal Justice Works, an organization devoted to getting new legal talent in the nonprofit and public sectors, notes that the pay gap between public interest and private firm work is steep. “The gap is multiples of the public interest salary, with a public interest attorney starting at, on average, $35,000 to $39,000 a year,” he said. “In a big law firm, these attorneys are starting at $140,000 to $150,000.”

"Someone who took a stipend from a law firm and then opted for public service law could also find themselves negotiating a payback plan for the stipend; policies differ from firm to firm on whether or how much of a stipend must be repaid."

Update: Steve Leider points me to this Atlantic column, pointing out that lawyers deferred from BigLaw jobs and being paid to do pro bono work are now volunteering at public interest organisations and displacing other lawyers who would have worked there...Money for Nothing

Here are some earlier posts about unraveling of the market for lawyers.

The market for human wombs

While the unregulated market for human eggs in Cyprus may be one of the busiest in the world, the more labor intensive market for surrogate wombs seems to be bustling, equally unregulated, in India. But regulation is being considered. Here's an article from Slate: India, the Rent-a-Womb Capital of the World

"You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don't have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors. As a bonus, many Indians speak English and Indian surrogate mothers are less likely to use illegal drugs. Plus medical standards in private hospitals are very high (not all good Indian doctors left in the brain drain).


"Some describe this as a win-win situation. The doctors get clients, the childless get children and the surrogates get much-needed money. But some media horror stories have challenged this happy vision. ...
 
"The most shocking stories, however, concern the surrogate mothers. The surrogates, many of whom are cooped up in "surrogacy homes" away from their families for the duration of the pregnancy, are often in dire financial straits. One woman told a journalist that with a $4,000 debt and an alcoholic husband, she had first considered selling a kidney to get herself out of debt, but decided that the $ 7,000 surrogacy fee was the better option. In another disturbing case, an upper-class Indian woman hired a surrogate to carry her child and invited her to live in her home during the pregnancy. The client accused the surrogate mother of stealing and not only kicked her out of the house but coolly informed her that she didn't want her services anymore and that she should terminate the pregnancy. Surrogates get paid only on delivery of the baby, so this kind of situation is economically devastating for a surrogate. It can also severely compromise the ethical and religious beliefs of surrogates who may not wish to undergo an abortion.


"Last year, the government began looking to regulate the industry. An Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill is up for discussion in the next parliamentary session, causing renewed interest in the ethical issues. "Surrogacy—Exploiting the Poor?" was one theme of a very popular, Oprah Winfrey-esque talk show on India's NDTV channel. One academic, professor Mohan Rao, who teaches at the prestigious Jawaharlal Nehru University, said that the country was witnessing "reproductive trafficking," referring to the fact that most cash-strapped surrogate mothers are from rural India and travel to metropolitan centers to offer their services as a last-ditch effort to get money. This view is fiercely challenged by those who see surrogacy as a means to economic empowerment of women and as a decision women should be free to make for themselves. "

The article also links to this Stanford webpage on Surrogate Motherhood in India.

The market for human eggs

Here's a multifaceted article on the global market for human eggs and fertility treatment, with medical tourists flowing from countries with more restrictive laws to those with few or none: Unpacking The Global Human Egg Trade

"According to a 2010 study by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, nearly 25,000 egg donations are performed in Europe for fertility tourists every year. More than 50% of those surveyed traveled abroad in order to circumvent legal regulations at home. The Cypriot government estimates that, each year, 1 in 50 women on the island between the ages of 18 and 30 sells her eggs. One NGO analyst says that among the island's Eastern European immigrants, the rate may reach 1 in 4, and some women give up their eggs several times in a year. By comparison, only 1 of every 14,000 eligible American women donates.


"Donation is described as an altruistic act, which means no payments," says Savvas Koundouros, a Cypriot embryologist, as he draws heavily on a cigarette. "It sounds strange to all of us that a person would receive so many injections over weeks and then undergo general anesthesia just because they are kind people." Koundouros has impregnated more women than Genghis Khan -- and thanks to a system that does not in any way rely on altruism, he plans to seed many, many more. He recently invested more than 1 million euros in a state-of-the-art IVF clinic in the resort city of Limassol.
...
"Peter Singer, the Ira V. Decamp professor of bioethics at Princeton, doesn't necessarily have a problem with the sale of eggs. "I don't think that trading replaceable human body parts is in principle worse than trading human labor, which we do all the time, of course. There are similar problems of exploitation when companies go offshore, but the trade-off is that this helps the poor to earn a living," he says. "That's not to say that there are no problems at all -- obviously, there can be -- and that is why doing it openly, in a regulated and supervised manner, would be better than a black market." Note that he says "would be."


"While the clinics of Cyprus sometimes feel like frontier outposts, the ones in Spain can seem like established fortresses. Spain has been the top destination for European fertility tourists since the mid-1980s. At Barcelona's Institut Marquès, a 14th-century carriage house in one of the poshest parts of town, you can understand why....

"In 2007, the U.K. banned payments to egg donors. In 2009, the Institut Marquès opened a satellite office in London, offering full-service, pregnancy-guaranteed packages for as little as $37,000 for three IVF cycles. The stream of foreign customers has become so steady that the clinic no longer waits for patients to sign on before tracking down appropriate donors. Instead, it keeps a bull pen of women on hormones, ready to give up their eggs. "Sometimes we will lose the eggs if we can't find a customer, but it's a trade-off," says embryologist Josep Oliveras. "This way, we can guarantee a steady supply."
...
"Perhaps more than any other company, Elite IVF has transformed baby-making into a globalized, industrialized process. For Sher, outsourcing is simply the inevitable outcome of the science that allowed procreation to move out of the bedroom and into the lab. Like the Petra Clinic and the Institut Marquès, Elite IVF offers clients cheaper access to eggs and a full suite of fertility treatments; unlike those more-localized operations, Elite operates worldwide, with offices and partner clinics in Britain, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Mexico, Romania, and the U.S. Sher plans to expand soon to Turkey, taking advantage of new bans on egg donation there.


"Sher sees the regulatory and price differentials in eggs as an opportunity to reduce the cost of raw materials, pass the savings on to his customers, and offer them virtually any fertility service that they can't get at home. Want sex selection, which is illegal in most countries? A Mexican clinic can help you. Too old for IVF in the U.S.? Cyprus is the answer.

"Today, Elite IVF's network of clinics, egg sellers, and surrogate moms produces between 200 and 400 children per year, helping create families like Aron and Shatzky's. And it's just going to get more complicated. "The future is designer babies," says Sher. He describes an offer he once received from an investor interested in partnering with Elite IVF. "Surrogates in Asia would carry the eggs of superdonors from America -- models with high SAT scores and prestigious degrees who would be paid $100,000 for their eggs. Those babies could sell for $1 million each -- first to his friends, then to the rest of the world."

"Sher declined the offer, but says it is only a matter of time before someone moves in that direction. At that point, maybe governments will get more involved. McGee, the bioethicist, predicts that "we will soon begin to recognize the danger of an ant-trail model of reproduction whereby strangers without any responsibility to each other and clinicians able to vanish in a puff of smoke meet in a transaction that culminates in humanity's ultimate act: creation."

HT to MR

Law reviews and the declining cost of submission

Jacqueline Lipton at The Faculty Lounge has a post advising new law profs on Placing a First Law Review Article. Even though I've written about the different academic publishing cultures, and the fact that submissions to law reviews are made simultaneously to multiple reviews, I find the numbers of recommended submissions surprising...

"It appears that a number of people feel that Expresso has changed the game significantly in the sense that more people are sending more articles to more law reviews because of the speed and ease of doing it via Expresso.  Thus, the collective wisdom seems to be that a new professor may have to send an article to more reviews than would have been the case, say, 10 years ago when this was predominantly done through hard copy submissions.  I am interested in how others feel about this.  I guess back in the days of hard copy submissions, many of us were advised not to send an article out to more than maybe 70 or 80 general law reviews tops.  But a lot of junior folks today seem to be advised to send to at least 150.  The sense is that many of the top 100 law reviews now won't even look at a piece unless someone is trying to expedite up from a "lower ranked" journal. "

See my earlier post, Peer review and markets for ideas, in law and science

Why study social science?

That was the question I was asked to help answer this afternoon, as part of a panel discussing the Social Sciences at Harvard, for incoming freshmen who will formally begin college when Harvard's fall semester starts this week. (We were right after a similar panel in the same room, on the Humanities. I listened to the end of that discussion from the back of the room, and, let me tell you, it sounds like it would be loads of fun to be a Humanities major.)

We were each asked to speak briefly about our own work, and what excites us about it, and about what students could expect to learn if they studied in our department.

Our panel consisted of Eric Beerbohm representing the interdisciplinary Social Studies concentration at Harvard, Dan Carpenter representing the Department of Government,
Theodore Bestor, chair of the Department of Anthropology, Maya Jasanoff representing History, Nicholas Christakis  representing Sociology (one among many hats he wears),
and me, Al Roth, representing Economics.

As always, I'm amazed and delighted at the interests of my colleagues (and struck by the fact that I too rarely have the time and opportunity to listen to colleagues from the other social science departments).

Eric began by talking briefly about some of his work on polling (including not just assessing what people think, but how strongly they hold their opinions, and how they come to hold them).

Dan spoke about his work on regulatory bureaucracies, which he'll be speaking about at the White House in the coming days.

Ted (I actually don't recall if he's called Ted, or Theodore) announced that he studies sushi (at which point I recalled that I still hadn't read his book on the famous Japanese Tsukiji fish market), and quickly illustrated something about social change by asking students "who eats sushi?" (many hands raised), "who thinks your parents ate sushi?" (most hands remained up), "at your age??" (most hands came down).

Maya spoke about her studies of Revolutionary War loyalists who left the country after their side lost the Revolution. I thought about vacations we've had in the Anglophone Eastern Townships of Quebec, and as it happens she quickly ratified this line of thought by asking "who likes to travel?" and saying "then history is your ticket," and described her own far flung travels "and also Canada".

Nicholas introduced his work on networks (e.g. his well known work on how your friends influence your body mass index, and whether you smoke) with an analogy from chemistry: he pointed out that you couldn't hope to learn about how graphite is different from diamond just by studying carbon atoms, the differences result from how those atoms are connected to each other.

I spoke last, about my work in market design, and how economists thought about a much broader collection of marketplaces than freshmen might realize, such as the college admissions process they had just experienced. I pointed out that Harvard abolished its early admissions program only a few years ago and asked "how many of you applied to at least one other college?" (virtually all hands raised); how many applied to another college early admission (many hands, maybe a majority still raised); and "how many of you applied to another college with binding early decision? (one brave young man kept his hand up, and I told him some other college's loss was Harvard's gain). Then I explained that Harvard's decision to abolish its early admission program had prompted Princeton to abolish its binding early decision program, precisely because of the kind of strategic behavior that students could be expected to exhibit, as they had, and that this was the vantage point through which game theory entered economics. (I then briefly described how my colleagues and I got to help design school choice systems, and kidney exchange, and when I got back to my seat, Nicholas leaned over and told me that when I spoke about kidney exchange in the future, I might want to tell people about the movie Strangers on a Train, whose plot revolves around a proposed exchange of murders, so neither murderer could be connected to the crime by a motive...)

I confessed that I like Economics for some of the same reasons I sometimes like to hear gossip, because it gives me a picture of how other people go about getting what they want, and what choices they face that I might also face, or might have faced if my life had taken a different path.

Economics is often the biggest academic concentration for Harvard undergrads, so I don't doubt that many of the freshmen will soon be enjoying Greg Mankiw's introductory class Ec. 10 (often the class with highest enrollment at Harvard), where they'll be introduced to many of the more usual things that economists study, not only in class, but also on his popular blog.

It's clear that any of the social science departments offer a fantastic intellectual experience, and a window through which to understand those (big) parts of the world that human beings make when we interact with each other. I actually don't wish I was a freshman again, but I feel at least a tinge of envy at the range of exciting choices that freshmen face.

A marriage market in Iraq

Wanted: Jihadists to Marry Widows

"BAQUBA, Iraq — A snippet of news from a shadowy corner of Iraq: Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia recently issued a fatwa telling its fighters to marry the widows of those who have fallen."

...

"In Diyala Province east of Baghdad, the fatwa has produced about 70 marriages in a little more than three weeks, according to members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and their relatives and associates. They spoke to an Iraqi reporter conducting interviews for The New York Times.

While Diyala is one of the group’s last remaining strongholds, the mere fact that so many people would rush headlong into marriages to strangers seemed to reflect how far the American military and the Iraqi government remain from their goal of eliminating the organization.
Some members say they are taking third or fourth wives, but many new husbands are from among the group’s most dedicated fighters — confirmed bachelors previously wedded only to the work of killing invaders and their Iraqi allies."

Related posts: China’s Arranged Remarriages; Polygamous marriage in Gaza

The market for attention: recommender engines for Twitter

How to decide what to pay attention to? A paper discusses several possible models for recommender engines for tweets: Short and Tweet: Experiments on Recommending Content from Information Streams by Jilin Chen, Rowan Nairn, Les Nelson, Michael Bernstein, and Ed H. Chi

The regulated market for cemeteries

The NY Times reports, City Cemeteries Face Gridlock.

"More than 50 years have passed since a major cemetery was established within the city, and no new burial grounds are planned. But New Yorkers continue to die, some 60,000 a year.

"Accordingly, per square foot, burial plots in centrally located cemeteries rival the most expensive real estate in the city. A private mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx can easily cost more than $1,000 per square foot.

"“We have people who would like to disinter Mom and Dad and sell the graves back to make some money,” said Richard Fishman, the director of the New York State Division of Cemeteries.


"There are state laws limiting the profits on resold graves, but the fact that people would be willing to go to such lengths, Mr. Fishman said, illustrates just how valuable burial plots have become."
...
"Other major urban areas have taken measures to alleviate similar space crunches. London allows people to be buried upright, while cemeteries in Singapore and Sydney, among others, offer “limited tenure,” cemetery-speak for digging up bodies after a certain amount of time so that the plot can be reused."
...
"It might seem that an enterprising developer could find a way to make a lucrative business out of providing burial space.

"But that has not happened.

"First, by law, cemeteries in New York State must be nonprofit institutions. There are 35 privately owned cemeteries in the city and several dozen with religious affiliations. The closer to Manhattan and major transportation, the more crowded and expensive a burial ground will be. Farther away, particularly in Staten Island and parts of the Bronx, space is available. The indigent of New York City are buried on Hart Island in Long Island Sound.

"Woodlawn, which was part of Westchester County when it was founded in 1863 but was later incorporated into the Bronx, still has burial room. It hopes to be able to offer graves for another 40 to 50 years, but that relative abundance hasn’t kept its prices down.

“We want to have enough saved so that the income from the trust, once we are closed and have nothing left to sell, is enough to maintain the cemetery,” said John P. Toale Jr., the president of Woodlawn.

"While there is a space crunch in the city, there is more space in the suburbs, and cemeteries in upstate New York can barely give away plots, state officials said. Many New Yorkers who struggled and saved to live in the city end up buried elsewhere.

"Even as the broader real estate market languished in the recession, prices for graves in the city continued skyward. The state regulates the fees a cemetery can charge for services like excavation, but graves sell at market price. So burial plots are a cemetery’s revenue-generator.
...
"Now that an end to plot sales is in sight, Green-Wood is seeking to transform its image, according to Richard J. Moylan, its president. The graveyard charges admission for guided tours, giving people a chance to saunter through time among the tombstones of the notable and the notorious. The hope is that it will become much like Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a magnet for tourists."

See also this earlier post.

Intellectual property as trade secrets

How are English muffins baked?  It's a trade secret, and one surrounded with hints of espionage: A Man With Muffin Secrets, but No Job With Them.

"The company that owns the Thomas’ brand says that only seven people know how the muffins get their trademark tracery of air pockets — marketed as nooks and crannies — and it has gone to court to keep a tight lid on the secret.
That leaves one of the seven, Chris Botticella, out of a job — and at the center of a corporate spectacle involving top-secret recipe files, allegations of clandestine computer downloads and an extreme claim of culinary disloyalty: dumping English muffins for Twinkies and Ho Hos.
Mr. Botticella, 56, delved into the mystery of Thomas’ muffinhood (hint: it has nothing to do with the fork), after Bimbo Bakeries USA bought the brand early last year. At the time, Mr. Botticella was a Bimbo vice president in charge of bakery operations in California.
But he left the company in January, apparently allowing co-workers to believe he was retiring. But he had accepted a job with the rival baker Hostess Brands, which years ago had tried to crack the muffin code.
Bimbo obtained a federal court order barring the move, and late last month an appeals panel in Pennsylvania upheld the order."
...
"Neither Mr. Botticella nor a Bimbo spokesman would comment for this article, but the legal papers in the case suggest a muffin culture more reminiscent of Langley than Drury Lane. Recipe manuals are called code books. Valuable information is compartmentalized to keep it from leaking out. Corporate officials speak of sharing information on a “need-to-know basis.”
According to Bimbo’s filings, the secret of the nooks and crannies was split into several pieces to make it more secure, and to protect the approximately $500 million in yearly muffin sales. They included the basic recipe, the moisture level of the muffin mixture, the equipment used and the way the product was baked. While many Bimbo employees may have known one or more pieces of the puzzle, only seven knew every step.
“Most employees possess information only directly relevant to their assigned task,” Daniel P. Babin, a Bimbo senior vice president, said in a written court declaration, “and very few employees, such as Botticella, possess all of the knowledge necessary to produce a finished product.” "

Medical resident training regulations

Dr. Pauline Chen, writing in the NY Times, describes the new regulations about the training of medical residents: Someone to Watch Over Me
She worries that, with the new emphasis on making sure resident physicians aren't awake too many consecutive hours, something valuable might be lost.

And here's a description in the NEJM of The New Recommendations on Duty Hours from the ACGME Task Force

Some politicians love their spouses

Bettina Klaus points me to the following cheerful story: Germany's opposition leader breaks from politics to donate kidney to wife: Frank-Walter Steinmeier prepares for operation to save life of his partner of 20 years

Interdisciplinary research

Practical market design is almost by definition an interdisciplinary activity, and fortunately Economics as an academic discipline revels in its interactions with other disciplines such as psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. Debate also breaks out periodically about the value of such work, and how to conduct it, or to assess it, or incorporate it.

So I find it very interesting (both as a market designer and an experimental economist) to follow the debate going on among philosophers about their field's so far tentative foray into "experimental philosophy." This debate recently surfaced in several short pieces in the New York Times "Room for Debate" blog.

Joshua Knobe, one of the young X-Phi pioneers, writes that experimental philosophy is A Return to Tradition:
"Traditionally, no one worried very much about the distinction between philosophy and psychology. Philosophers were just supposed to think, at a very broad and fundamental level, about the nature of the human condition. And, as a matter of course, they were supposed to make use of all the intellectual resources available to them, including psychology, history, literature, and much else besides. ...
"I find it puzzling that people sometimes regard these recent developments as somehow taking things in a radical new direction. A more natural response would be to say that they are taking things back to their old direction, back to the direction of David Hume’s immortal Treatise of Human Nature (1739), with its subtitle, "Being An Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects."


A contrary view is given by Timothy Williamson: Is It Imitation Psychology?

"The real issue concerns the most effective way for each side to learn from the other. There are philosophy-hating philosophers who would like to replace the traditional methodology of philosophy, with their stress on a combination of abstract reasoning and particular examples, by something more like imitation psychology. Without even properly defining what it is they are attacking, they use experimental results in a selective and unscientific spirit to try to discredit the traditional methodology.

"In other cases experimentalists draw lessons for morality from the results of brain scans in comically naive ways, without realizing how many philosophical assumptions they are uncritically relying on in their inferences -- precisely because they neglect traditional philosophical skills in making distinctions and assessing arguments. The danger is that the publicity such crude work attracts will give a bad name to constructive developments in which experimental results really do cast light on philosophical questions.
"Philosophy has most to contribute to the pursuit of truth by refining its own distinctive methods, not by imitating other disciplines. Philosophers are not needed as amateur experimentalists or writers of pop science. We do more to help through our skill in logic, in imagining new possibilities and questions, in organizing systematic abstract theories, making distinctions and the like. "

Following either of the above links will also connect you to the contributions by Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ernest Sosa, Brian Leiter, and Tim Maudlin.

Those of you who follow the debates about neuroeconomics will recognize the general terrain.

Easing into a national kidney paired donation program

UNOS has a press release on the progress being made towards setting up a national kidney exchange program, headlined Getting it Right: Kidney committee easing into KPD with two-step pilot project

"Some transplant centers throughout the country have been using this method, known as kidney paired donation (KPD), for several years. UNOS has now embarked on a pilot project designed to assess the feasibility of a national kidney paired donation program in which all centers could participate.

"Members of the OPTN/UNOS kidney transplantation committee began discussing the idea of kidney paired donation in 2004. They went as far as proposing a concept they distributed for public comment.

"After receiving positive feedback, the committee distributed a more fully developed proposal in August 2006. Although fleshed out, the proposal was still not ready to go to the OPTN/UNOS board of directors because of concerns about transplant law. As we know, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) prohibits the sale of organs.

"In 2007, Congress definitively clarified that NOTA’s definition of “valuable consideration” did not apply to the organs in a KPD exchange. The law was later titled the Charlie W. Norwood Living Organ Donation Act in honor of the long-time Georgia representative, a lung recipient and sponsor of the bill, who died in February 2007 before the bill became law.

"Around that time, the OPTN/UNOS kidney transplantation committee had issued a request for information from experts in the field. Committee members wanted to know what centers performing KPD were doing, and how they were doing it. The
community responded generously.

"Then, in February 2008, representatives from multiple transplant centers, OPOs, universities and private organizations across the country came to UNOS to share not only their knowledge but also the software they were using for the complex
matching that KPD required.

"Members of the kidney committee wanted to proceed cautiously before taking on the considerable challenge of coordinating a national KPD system. After much deliberation, they determined that the best strategy was a two-phased pilot project" ...

In Egypt, marrying an Israeli is a repugnant transaction

Egyptians Married to Israelis to Lose Citizenship
"CAIRO (AP) -- An Egyptian appeals court on Saturday upheld a ruling that orders the country's Interior Ministry to strip the citizenship from Egyptians married to Israeli women.
"The case underlines the deep animosity many Egyptians still hold toward Israelis, despite a peace treaty signed between the two countries 31 years ago.
"The Supreme Administrative Court's decision also scores a point for Egyptian hard-liners who have long resisted any improvement in ties with Israel since the signing of the 1979 peace treaty.
..."Saturday's decision, which cannot be appealed, comes more than year after a lower court ruled that the Interior Ministry, which deals with citizenship documents, must implement the 1976 article of the citizenship law. That bill revokes citizenship of Egyptians who married Israelis who have served in the army or embrace Zionism as an ideology. The Interior Ministry appealed that ruling.
..."In 2005, former Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel issued a religious edict, or fatwa, saying Muslim Egyptians may not marry Israeli nationals, ''whether Arab, Muslim, or Christian.'' The possibility of a Jewish spouse was not mentioned.
"Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the late Grand Sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's premier institution and oldest university, has said that while marriage between an Egyptian man and an Israeli woman is not religiously forbidden, the government has the right to strip the man of his citizenship for marrying a woman from ''an enemy state.''"

Online real estate markets: Yahoo and Zillow

Yahoo Pairs with Zillow on Real Estate Listings

"The deal also helps Yahoo and Zillow challenge Move Inc. (MOVE), owner of Realtor.com, the most-used real estate site."
...
"Until now, Yahoo has focused mainly on selling ads from large marketers, such as mortgage companies and credit agencies, not the local real estate agents that are Zillow's mainstay, Schultz said. In May, Yahoo was No. 3 in the online real estate market with 6.14 million users, while Zillow.com was second with 7.05 million, according to ComScore (SCOR) of Reston, Va. The market was led by Move Inc., with more than 12 million."