Blasphemy as a repugnant transaction in Pakistan

The Guardian has the latest:
Pakistan asks Facebook and Twitter to help identify blasphemers
Companies approached in effort to locate Pakistanis at home or abroad so they can be prosecuted or potentially extradited

"Under the country’s strict blasphemy laws, anyone found to have insulted Islam or the prophet Muhammad can be sentenced to death.

The interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, said an official in Pakistan’s Washington embassy had approached the two social media companies in an effort to identify Pakistanis, either within the country or abroad, who recently shared material deemed offensive to Islam.

He said Pakistani authorities had identified 11 people for questioning over alleged blasphemy and would seek the extradition of anyone living abroad.

Facebook said it reviews all government requests carefully, “with the goal of protecting the privacy and rights of our users”."

Kidney donation in Tennessee

Here's a story from the Tennessee Tribune, about Dr. Clarence Foster, an African-American transplant surgeon, who is trying to raise awareness among minority patients.

Minorities Wait for Kidney Transplants

"In 2016, 226 African American Tennesseans received a kidney transplant compared to 222 white and ten Hispanics, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The numbers are almost identical for 2015.

But, the list for Tennessee residents who need kidney transplant is far longer. Last year, 1, 283 African Americans, 1,166 Whites, 63 Hispanics and 29 Asians, 9 Native American and 29 Multi-Racial people waited for kidney transplants.

Jill Grandas confirmed that the numbers of African Americans waiting for a kidney are almost equal to white patients.

“Among patients in Tennessee waiting for a kidney, about 50 percent are African Americans and they are transplanted at almost the same rate – 48 percent of the patients who received a kidney were African American.”

However, in Tennessee, the number of African American kidney donors is far less than the need. Last year, 211 kidneys were donated by white donors, 43 by black donors, 11 by Hispanic donors and 2 Asian donors and these were from deceased donors.  Among living donors (usually a close family member) there were 55 white donors, 7 black, one Hispanic and one Asian.

“Among, 2,107,231 on the ‘Donate Life Tennessee Organ and Tissue Donor Registry,’ 9.2 percent are African Americans,” said Grandas.

“Our rate of donation from African Americans is much less than from other races. We would assume that if more African Americans would donate, more African American patients would receive an organ from an African American donor.”

“African Americans can safely be a living donor.  We need to overcome the mistrust between the community and the medical profession,” said Dr. Foster."

Bob Wilson and Game Theory: two very short videos

In connection with Bob Wilson's 2017 CME Group-MSRI prize, here's a short (2 minute)video in which Roger Myerson, Phil Reny, Bob Wilson, David Eisenbud, and I respond to the question "What is game theory?"  (Phil also remarks on what role it has played in his long happy marriage...)

And there's another short video (which I couldn't embed), talking about Bob Wilson, at this link to the CME prize page (scroll down til you see the game theory video, it's right next to it):
Robert Wilson Awarded the 2016 CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications

Match Day and the medical match as an economic game by Moblab

Not only is the medical Match important for doctors, now there's an in-class game from Moblab which econ instructors can use to introduce matching. Here's a post about it:

A Personal Note on Match Day and our KR Matching Game.
17 Mar 2017/ by Doug Norton 

Germany en route to annul historical convictions of gay men

Deutsche Welle has the story:
Germany set to annul historical convictions of gay men

"German men convicted on the basis of a 19th century law criminalizing homosexuality now have a chance at getting late justice in the wake of an expert study commissioned by the Anti-Discrimination Agency.

Their supposed crime was the same during the Nazi era as it was in the federal republic founded in 1949: They loved other men and had homosexual sex.

Those who were caught engaging in homosexual acts or who were denounced as homosexuals were spared no mercy by the state. The law containing the infamous Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men dates back to the 19th century, but it was applied especially zealously under Nazi rule. The law remained intact even after 1945. Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, but Paragraph 175 was not abolished until 1994.

By that time, more than 50,000 men had been convicted for being gay, something that "violated the very core of their human dignity," said Christine Lüders, the head of the government's Anti-Discrimination Authority, in Berlin on Wednesday. At her side was Martin Burgi of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The legal expert has compiled a study on the rehabilitation of homosexuals convicted under the law. He's confident it can be done, saying there's no legal barrier to rehabilitating the men.

...

"For laypeople, it's hard to understand why men convicted under Paragraph 175 by the Nazis have been rehabilitated since 2002, while verdicts handed down in the post-war era are still being upheld. The logic is as appalling as it is banal: The Nazi dictatorship was declared an unjust state; the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other hand, is based on democratic principles. That means the men who had the misfortune to be found guilty of homosexuality in the post-war era still have criminal records.

But Burgi says that "collective rehabilitation" of those affected by the law can be achieved with the help of social and democratic principles."

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Here's the Associated Press story from ABC: German Cabinet OKs plan to annul homosexuality convictions

"Germany's Cabinet on Wednesday approved a bill that would annul the convictions of thousands of gay men under a law criminalizing homosexuality that was applied zealously in post-World War II West Germany.

The decision also clears the way for compensation for those still alive who were convicted under the so-called Paragraph 175 outlawing sexual relations between men.

The legislation was introduced in the 19th century, toughened under Nazi rule and retained in that form by West Germany, which convicted some 50,000 men between 1949 and 1969.

Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969 but the legislation wasn't taken off the books entirely until 1994.

The bill approved Wednesday by Chancellor Angela Merkel's Cabinet of conservatives and center-left Social Democrats still requires parliamentary approval. "
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This echoes recent events in England: see my earlier post on that

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Turing's law: UK posthumously pardons thousands of gay men

Unmarried sex is a crime in Abu Dhabi

The Telegraph has the story:
Expat couple arrested in Abu Dhabi for sex outside of marriage

"An expatriate couple have been detained in Abu Dhabi for almost six weeks after being arrested for having sex outside of marriage.

South African Emlyn Culverwell, 29, took his 27-year-old Ukrainian fiancée, Iryna Nohai, to a medical centre in the UAE city after she developed stomach cramps.

The doctor said she was pregnant and informed authorities after they could not provide marriage certificates. They were first brought to Yas Police Station, before being moved to Al Wathba Prison."   

Matching shipping containers to shippers

A matching problem that John Vande Vate is thinking about has to do with the large number of shipping containers that travel empty to their next destination after being unloaded. "Street turns" would match them to shipments near their previous destination.

Here's his report on the considerable upside to improved matching:
e‐Street‐Turns:TheEasyStreettoGreen

Congestion in SF public school choice

One thing that computerized school choice is supposed to do is reduce congestion that sometimes stops school districts from matching students to schools in a timely way. San Francisco has a computerized system, but they are nevertheless running into congestion this year. SFGate has the story:
High anxiety as SF public school assignments run late, By Nanette Asimov

"A school district glitch has parents biting their nails in San Francisco this week.
Thousands of dollars are on the line for families that are prepared to lay out hefty deposits for private schools by this week’s deadlines — but hope they won’t have to if they can get into a public school of their choice.
The trouble is, the San Francisco Unified School District may not be able to tell them about their public school options, from elementary through high school, before private-school down payments are due Wednesday through Friday. The district missed its March 17 deadline for sending out school-assignment letters because of “unforeseen staffing emergencies,” said spokeswoman Gentle Blythe.
“We have people who haven’t slept in days” trying to make sure that 83,000 school options for 14,000 students are all correct, Blythe said, adding that she can’t reveal more about the problem because of employee confidentiality.
...
"The deadline for private high school deposits is Wednesday at noon for parents applying for financial aid and Friday at noon for those paying full price. Private elementary and middle schools have a Thursday deadline. And although most private schools coordinated their deposit due dates with the public school district this year, the district’s glitch has thrown the careful planning into disarray."
****************

Update: SF school-assignment letters to be mailed out Monday night  By Nanette Asimov Updated 4:19 pm, Monday, March 20, 2017

"The San Francisco district sends out public-school assignments by U.S. mail because “the letters provide the documentation families need to register at school sites and serves to further verify their address,” spokeswoman Gentle Blythe said.
However, parents facing an imminent private-school deadline who haven’t gotten a letter by Tuesday can email enrollinschool@sfusd.edu.
“We will do what we can to help you after March 21,” says a notice on the district’s website."

A 5 pair internal kidney exchange at Ohio State

US News and World Report has the story
A five-way kidney exchange was successfully completed at Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center.

"Rimmer and DeVoe were part of a five-way kidney exchange at Ohio State on Tuesday. All five recipients had a family member or friend willing to donate to them, but each was incompatible.
...
"More than 98,000 people in the United States, including about 2,200 in Ohio, are waiting for kidneys. Ohio State was the site of 209 kidney transplants in 2016, and roughly 40 percent were from living donors. A goal is to boost both numbers, said Washburn, who operated on two of the recipients, including Rimmer.

The five-way kidney exchange is the second largest of such procedures performed solely at Ohio State. Most such "internal" exchanges are smaller, but the university's largest, in 2011, involved 12 patients and six transplants. This week's exchange initially included 16 people, but one person was not well, so three pairs had to drop out.

Since 2010, 60 kidney transplants have been performed at Ohio State through similar internal exchange groups. Surgeons there also perform about 10 transplants annually through "external" exchanges that involve other hospitals."

Mohammad Akbarpour on Iran's kidney market

My colleague Mohammad Akbarpour at Stanford GSB is featured in their newsletter.  

He thinks about kidney transplantation from a number of different angles...here's a snippet.

Is It Ever OK to Sell (or Buy) a Kidney?

"Iran’s paid kidney market emerged after the country’s revolution at the end of the 1970s. In the early ’80s, foreign sanctions against the government inhibited its ability to get dialysis machinery. The number of Iranians needing a kidney transplant, however, kept increasing, so in 1988 the government organized a system that regulated and funded kidney transplantation. Their system included compensation for donors.

Officials euphemistically described the money given to each donor as a “gift,” says economist Mohammad Akbarpour, an assistant professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, who, has been working with several colleagues to study Iran’s market and unpaid kidney exchange markets globally. “They were paying for it, but using different words,” says Akbarpour. The system worked so well that the kidney transplant wait list in Iran was nearly eliminated by 1999.

“We have this discussion in the West about what would happen if you have a paid market for kidneys,” says Akbarpour. “The expectation has been that poor people will be selling their kidneys to rich people. But the debate has been largely based on speculations, as opposed to evidence.”

Akbarpour looked at five years’ worth of data about kidney sales and transplantation in the country, and his preliminary findings show that the average wealth of those buying kidneys is almost exactly the same as the average wealth of Iranians. Most of the payment for each transplant comes from the patient, not the government.

“It’s not just rich people who can buy a kidney in Iran,” he says. “Even poor people find the money for it, because it’s so valuable. There are also charities they can tap.”

But one suspected consequence of a cash market for kidneys did turn out to be true: Poor people sell kidneys far more than any other economic group. In Iran, most kidneys come from those whose incomes are in the bottom 25% of earners."

Match Day for American doctors and foreign medical grads

Today is Match Day for the National Resident Matching Program. Congratulations to all the newly matched residents.

Here are some articles in honor of match day, concerning difficulties in the interviewing process that proceeds the formal match, and some other things (including the US travel ban that is once again being adjudicated):

Match Day is coming up. Here’s how medical students game the residency system
"Writing love letters

This is the most common way to game the match. Applicants send emails to residency program directors expressing their interest in the program, hoping to influence how the director ranks them. Applicants sometimes end up writing multiple letters professing their love to different programs. Sometimes, they tell more than one program director that their program is their first choice.

While programs often say that they don’t adjust their rankings based on “love letters,” some do. For one of my friends, a residency director for surgery told her, “the love letter could be a deciding factor in how we rank you.”

So, we’re stuck: If you don’t send one, it might look like you’re not interested."
***********

Am Surg. 2016 Dec 1;82(12):1163-1168.

Behind the Match Process: Is There Any Financial Difference Lurking Below the Specialty of Choice?

Oladeji LO1, Raley JA, Smith S, Perez JL, McGwin G, Ponce BA

Abstract: The Match was developed in response to a chaotic residency selection process. While the match has remained relatively unchanged since it was introduced, the number of medical school graduates has increased at a rate outpacing the number of residency positions leading to a more competitive process for applicants. In May 2014, an 18-question mixed-response questionnaire was distributed to fourth year allopathic medical students via an E-mail distribution list for student affairs representatives. The individual surveys were accessible via SurveyMonkey and available for completion over the course of a 4-week period. Approximately 65.1 per cent of students performed at least one audition rotation and documented average expenditures of $2494 on housing, food, and transportation. The average applicant applied to 32 programs and attended 12 interviews while spending $4420 on the interview trail. Applicants for surgical programs applied to approximately 42 programs and attended 13 interviews compared with primary care applicants who averaged 23 programs (P < 0.001) and attended 12 interviews (P = 0.002). Surgical applicants averaged 20 days on the interview trail while spending $5500 ($423/interview) on housing, food, and transportation compared with primary care applicants averaged 19 days away from home (P < 0.05) and spending $3400 ($283/interview) on these same items (P < 0.001). The findings in our study indicate that the "Match process" contributes to the financial burden of graduating medical students and it is more expensive and time consuming for the candidates interested in surgical specialties.

************

No Heart Surgeon Match Day for Major Medical Center
Columbia University missed deadline to submit residents' ranking list
"Medical students hoping to train in cardiothoracic surgery at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in New York City got some bad news over the weekend: The center will not be able to select residents in Match Day for cardiothoracic surgery.
The center confirmed Monday that it missed the deadline to submit its ranking list for residents in the specialty."
************
And this:( 
Travel Ban Adds Stress To 'Match Week' For Some Doctors

Here incidentally is the NRMP statement on the travel ban:

NRMP Statement On The Executive Order On Immigration

February 3, 2017

NRMP has released a statement on the Administration’s Executive Order on immigration. We ask the medical education community to support all international medical graduates and their families during these difficult times. Please be assured that NRMP will do all it can to address the uncertainties the order has created. As for the current Match cycle, we hope that applicants and programs will continue to rank each other in the order of true preference, based on the qualifications and qualities each seeks in the other.

NRMP statement

Maria C. Savoia, M.D., Chair
Mona M. Signer, President and CEO

What do immigrant doctors affected by the travel ban bring to America?

"What do immigrant doctors bring to America" is the question asked (and answered) by The Immigrant Doctors Project, a website compiled by a team of youthful looking scholars in response to the six country travel ban reinstated by the White House after an earlier version was found illegal by the courts.

One of the authors, Jonathan Roth, is quoted at length in a news article on the particular effect this ban may have in Los Angeles: Hundreds of doctors in LA County could be affected by new travel ban

"The executive order, which is due to go into effect on Thursday, temporarily blocks visas from being issued to citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen to "to protect the Nation from terrorist activities by foreign nationals." The ban does not include permanent residents and those who already have visas, but doctors applying for new visas or seeking to renew expired ones would require a waiver. Several states are challenging the order's constitutionality in court.

"Los Angeles is actually the metro area in the United States which has the highest number of doctors from the banned countries," according to Jonathan Roth, a Harvard PhD student and one of the researchers who worked on the Immigrant Doctors Project.  

Roth, along with other researchers from Harvard and MIT, used the location of the medical school where a doctor was trained as a way to calculate a doctor's country of origin. Since many doctors train abroad, Roth says it's likely that the number of doctors affected by the ban is much larger than their estimates. 

More than 900 doctors in Los Angeles went to medical school in one of the six countries listed in the executive order, more than three-quarters of them in Iran, he says. "

**************
You can here a brief interview with Jonathan R. here: http://www.byuradio.org/episode/01e0c780-5621-4307-ba99-954c81776308?playhead=2440&autoplay=true
*************

Tomorrow is Match Day for new medical residents and fellows, and we have yet to hear how the immigration ban may have affected this year's match. (See earlier post: Travel bans and rank order lists for the resident match)

AEA Econ job market scramble is open

Good luck to those on the job market. If you are still looking (for jobs or for economists to hire) this is the week to enter the Scramble.

Economics Job Market "Scramble" for new Ph.D.s

2017 Job Market Scramble Timeline:

Registration for the 2017 Job Market Scramble will open on March 15, 2017. 

The deadline for registration is March 22, 2017 at 5:00 pm ET. 

The Scramble will open for viewing by registered participants only on March 24, 2017. Scramble viewing will close on April 10, 2017. 

Brief Description:

Occasionally prospective employers of new Ph.D. economists exhaust their candidates before hiring someone during the winter/spring "job market" period. Similarly, new economics Ph.D.s seeking a job sometimes find that all of the prospective employers with whom they have interviewed have hired someone else before they have secured an appointment.

To address these problems, the AEA has established a "Job Market Scramble" web site to facilitate communication between employers and job seekers in late spring. In March, employers that continue to have an open position previously listed in Job Openings for Economists (JOE) may post a short notice of its availability (with a link to theJOE listing). Similarly, new or recent economics Ph.D. job seekers still looking for a position may post a short announcement of their continued availability, with a link to their JOE candidate profile. The web site will open for viewing to those who have listed a position or availability soon after listings close. There is no charge to participate in the "Job Market Scramble."

See the Scramble Guide for more detailed information.

Signaling interest for college admissions

I've blogged before about Initial View, a service for overseas applicants to American colleges. It provides a video interview that can be part of their application, and also a signaling mechanism by which they can send a "star" to up to two colleges, to signal particular interest.

Some colleges make clear that they value such signals: here's a paragraph from the page for international applicants of Bates College.

"Does Bates accept interviews conducted through InitialView?

Yes. InitialView includes an interview and writing sample. Please list Bates as a recipient for your interview and designate a star if Bates is a top choice college for you."

In the market for new economists, some employers have adopted the same strategy and encourage applicants to send one of their AEA signals to them:

Signaling (by candidates) and advertising (by employers) on the Economics job market

Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo: Who Gets What and Why in Italian

Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo  
(Matchmaking. The economics of giving to each his own).

I guess that's a pretty good way to translate Who Gets What and Why.

Nico Lacetera writes: "I like the subtitle  "a ciascuno il suo", which refers to a latin way of saying (suum cuique  ~ to each, their own) -- in turn, this is the title of a famous novel by a major Italian contemporary writer, Leonardo Sciascia."

It's costly to interview for residency programs

Here's a debate about how to reduce the time and money cost of interviewing faced by many applicants for medical residencies and fellowships.

Medical physics has a fairly recent match, here's a debate in the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics that focuses primarily on replacing on-site interviews with either electronic interviews (skype or equivalent), or with interviews at a conference, i.e. all in one place.

Maximizing the cost benefit of physics residency interview
Justus Adamson and/vs Sonja Dieterich

US Organ donation laws by state

Here's a handy map of U.S. organ donation laws by state.

Check out the tabs for legal consent, medical examiner/coroner, and support for living donors.

Who Gets What and Why in Polish

Matchmaking. Kto co dostaje i dlaczego

Ekonomia kojarzenia stron transakcji i projektowania rynku 

From the publisher MT Biznes

Matchmaking. Who gets what and why  Alvin E. Roth

Experimental macroeconomics

The annual experimental macro workshop and summer school that have in the past been in Barcelona will this year be at Stony Brook (the email address seems to be stonybrook in barcelona:):

Call for Papers: WORKSHOP ON THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL MACROECONOMICS
The Eighth International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics will be held July 18-19, 2017 in Stony Brook, NY as part of the Stony Brook Summer Game Theory Festival.
The keynote speakers for the 2017 workshop are Xavier Gabaix (NYU) and Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé (Columbia University)
Researchers working on behavioral, experimental and theoretical approaches to addressing macroeconomic questions are invited to submit a paper for this two-day conference. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2017. To submit a paper, please send your paper to stonybrook@upf.edu. 
For several decades, macroeconomic models have been built on explicit micro-foundations about the behavior of firms, consumers and government agencies, leading to closer ties between micro/game theorists and macro theorists.  On the applied side, the assumptions and predictions of macroeconomic models have historically been tested using non-experimental field data, collected mostly by government agencies. An alternative empirical approach attracting increased attention is to evaluate these models using controlled laboratory settings with human subjects, minimizing noisy, unknown, and confounding factors present in field data. Experimental findings can be informative about questions like equilibrium selection or the efficacy of various government policies as well as for the validation of various behavioral theories.
Further information about the Workshop is available at: http://gtcenter.org/Downloads/call_for_papers.pdf

SUMMER SCHOOL IN EXPERIMENTAL MACROECONOMICS: Call for applicants
The 10th Experimental Economics Summer School in Macroeconomics will be held in Stony Brook, NY, USA, from July 17-23, 2017.
The location of the 2017 summer school (and the related workshop) has been changed from Barcelona to Stony Brook, NY, USA.  This year’s summer school will be a part of the Stony Brook Summer Game Theory Festival.
For more details about the summer school including how to apply, visit the summer school webpage:
https://www.upf.edu/leex/events/bleess_2017/index.html
The deadline for applications is Friday, April 7, 2017.
We will provide (shared) accommodation for all invited summer school students in the dorms of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. Depending on our funding we will additionally provide some scholarships to a few students.
Summer school students are also invited to attend the 2-day, 8th International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics from July 18-19, 2017 that will also take place in Stony Brook, USA.
Please forward this announcement to all interested parties.
Workshop and summer school organizers:
John Duffy (University of California, Irvine)
Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Barcelona GSE)
Shyam Sunder (Yale University)

Thoughts on 'extreme altruism,' focusing on nondirected kidney donors

Here's an interesting article about altruism, non-directed kidney donors, and the difficulty of studying them (but maybe they are the opposite of psychopaths):
The Selfless Biology of the Extreme Altruist
What is the opposite of a psychopath? What is the limit of human goodness?
by Tanya Basu
(the url is as informative as the headline: https://www.inverse.com/article/28280-kidney-donation-extreme-altruism-can-people-be-selfless)

The article focuses on one particular non-directed donor, but also discusses some altruism researchers (and has a slightly confused view of economics).

Here are some sentences that particularly caught my eye:

"In 2015, Brooks and his wife were on a summer road trip. They were listening to Freakonomics, the NPR podcast spun off from the best-selling pop-economics book, when an episode called “Make Me a Match” came on. It was a profile of the Stanford economist Al Roth, whose Nobel Prize-winning work considered kidney donation matching as an economic market, maximizing its efficiency and potential. Roth’s work was unique because it looked at this unique market as an example of how non-monetary systems could run efficiently purely by matching, no system necessary. Brooks — otherwise a smooth talker — stammers when describing the power of that podcast, saying he felt he’d “been struck by lightning” when he first heard it. He shudders with emotion describing the realization that he, too, should donate his kidney."
...
"By September, he’d matched with a patient on the National Kidney Registry; by November, he’d given up his spare kidney to a total stranger (he later learned her name was Danielle). In February 2016, he founded Donor to Donor which matches non-direct donors with those looking for a kidney, citing his experience as an epiphany in shaping his life’s purpose. Before meeting me at the Yale Club, he’d convinced a potential donor to go through with the operation. He described the feeling of doing so as being something like getting a good grade."