The resale market for babies

The BBC reports: Indonesian babies held hostage by unpaid midwives

"There are lots of cases where, if the mother can't pay, the baby becomes the property of the hospital," says Mr Sirait. "They then believe they have the right to sell the baby to someone else."

Sperm banks

What rules should govern sperm banks? Donors may desire anonymity, but children conceived with donated sperm may seek to learn about their biological fathers, and both the children and society in general has an interest in preventing unintentional marriage of half siblings.

Haaretz reports Health Ministry preparing new regulations for Israeli sperm banks

"The regulations will require more detailed family histories from donors and those seeking a donation; limit the number of possible children from each donor; restrict donors to using just one sperm bank; and ban the practice of sperm mixing (in which more than one person's sperm is used).
...
""Israel has had 15 sperm banks, 13 of them public and two private, but only seven are still active. Sperm samples are not included among the standard healthcare services and the prices of imported sperm samples can cost hundreds of dollars (up to five times more expensive than sperm frozen in the country ). Despite the price gap sperm imports have been on the rise, especially for religious women, who have been advised by their rabbis to get a donation from abroad to avoid the slightest risk of unintentional incest."

The winner's curse: auction activist receives prison term

In 2008 I blogged about an environmental activist who disrupted an oil and gas auction by submitting some winning bids. Now he's been sentenced to prison:

Environmental Activist Tim DeChristopher Sentenced to Prison, Tells the Court, "This Is What Hope Looks Like"

The subheadline is "In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like." Read his words to the court."

They are worth reading.

HT: Yün-ke Chin-Lee 

Unraveling of college football recruiting

Two articles on unraveling in college football recruiting:
Timing is everything with offers: How programs wrestle between getting evals while also making prospects feel wanted

"While coaches like Dooley face challenges to offer early in a prospect's junior year, other coaches have to ramp it up even further. Georgia coach Mark Richt said not offering an in-state prospect can put the Bulldogs in a permanent trail position for a prospect.
"Our biggest problem at Georgia is trying to make those evaluations properly and making those offers," Richt said. "It does put pressure on us sometimes to offer a guy a bit sooner than you'd like to. I think everybody across the board has to project a little more. You have to hope that we've made the right projection.
"If you get your class nailed down a year in advance and all of a sudden some of those guys didn't keep progressing like you thought and some other guys came up, [you say] 'Man, I wish I had waited and offered that kid because I like this guy better than I like that guy.' Some people find a way to dump that guy and take that [other] guy. At Georgia, if we offer and he commits to us, we're not dumping him."

********

Iowa recruit not old enough to drive (HT: David Backus)
"Football programs are increasingly entering the territory of basketball scholarship offerings. John Allen was told twice last week Iowa was on the verge of offering his son Brian a football scholarship. John Allen didn't believe it either time. Brian Allen was after all only a high school freshman and had never played varsity football. But on Monday, John Allen called Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz as he was advised, and Ferentz confirmed that he would like to extend a scholarship offer to Brian Allen. "We're all kind of amazed by it," John Allen said. "I don't think it's sunk in yet. He's 15 years old. He can't drive a car yet, etc."
***********

One impetus behind the unraveling of markets is that people make early offers to avoid being left behind as others make even earlier offers. As Yogi Berra said (in a different context), "it gets late early out there."

Unraveling of law firm recruiting

The WSJ reports on the continuing unraveling of recruiting by large law firms, which reports how much of the critical hiring for positions beginning in September, 2013 is going on right now: Law Schools Push Recruiters

"Thousands of interviews for jobs at law firms are taking place now as top law schools, under mounting pressure to help indebted students snag jobs, increasingly push major law firms to recruit in August, months earlier than in previous years.

... 

"Law firms follow an unusual tradition of recruiting the lawyers they eventually plan to hire two years in advance. For example, they are interviewing second-year law students now for summer associate positions that start in May or June 2012. At the end of the 2012 summer, the firms expect, they will then invite almost all the summer hires to work full-time as junior lawyers, likely starting in September 2013.

...

"By forcing the big firms to recruit in August, rather than as late as the end of October, as in previous years, law schools are hoping to give their students an edge in the competition. "There was a race to the front of the line by law schools," said Keith Wetmore, whose title is chair of Morrison & Foerster LLP, which is sending partners to 28 campuses this month to recruit students for its 2012 summer associate class.

"In 2000, for instance, seven law schools held their interviewing weeks in August. By 2009, the number had increased to more than 70, and this year, the figure will top 100, according to Mark Weber, assistant dean for career services at Harvard Law School.

"During the market crash of 2008, both Harvard and Yale law schools "went essentially last" in the recruiting season, with their interview weeks in September and October. "Their students did get hurt, and got fewer offers," said James G. Leipold, executive director of NALP. "Our students still had great jobs, but you do even better when you're at the beginning of the [recruiting] process than the end," Harvard's Mr. Weber said. A spokeswoman for Yale Law School said she couldn't comment.

Kidney donation: the question of coercion

One of the things that makes selling kidneys repugnant to many is the intuition that, if kidneys could be sold, poor people might feel coerced to sell.

Of course, removing money from the transaction doesn't necessarily remove coercion. When a transplant center evaluates a living donor, one of the things it tries to determine is if the donor is really willing. Families, of course, can exert coercion.  Here's a recent advice column from the Washington Post...Family plays 'please pass the kidney'

"DEAR AMY:

One of my in-laws needs a new kidney. She will be undergoing the transplant process soon. Her family wanted me to give her one of my kidneys. My family said no to this, and so I did not get tested beyond the blood test (we are the same blood group). Now my in-laws are angry and have stopped talking to me.

"I would like to know how my sick relative is doing, but I don’t know what to say when I call, or whether I should call.

"In the past they have said horrible things to me because I did not donate my kidney; it seems now that our long friendship is meaningless.

"I still care for her and her family, but how do I let them know that I am thinking about them? I know if I try to call, the woman who is getting the transplant will say nasty things to me. What should I do? --

Upset"
********

Amy's reply seems sensible enough under the circumstances:

"DEAR UPSET: If donating an organ is what it takes to get in good with your in-laws, then their standards are a tad unreasonable.

"I assume there are other dynamics at play which created this pressure on you, but if you are eager to reach this in-law but don’t want to risk the verbal backlash, then the best way to do so is through a greeting card.

"When you send a message through the mail, you lessen the opportunity for back talk."
***********

HT: Dr. Scott Kominers

The opposite of price gouging: UK riot edition

UK riots: Amazon withdraws truncheons after bumper sales: Sales of baseball bats, Kubotans and other self-defence items soar inaftermath of rioting in English cities

HT: Chris Masse

Misc. repugnant transactions

A challenge to Canada's laws against assisted suicide:
  Group pushing B.C., Ottawa for the right to have planned suicides

"In Canada, the Criminal Code makes it an offence to help with suicide, punishable by a term of up to 14 years.

"But the Farewell Foundation is trying to have the law declared unconstitutional, with lawyer Jason Gratl arguing that it violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"The criminal prohibition on assisted suicide in Canada causes immeasurable physical and psychological suffering to persons of sound mind who are capable of making informed decisions and who wish to end their own lives in order to avoid that suffering,” states an affidavit filed by Mr. Ogden. “This suffering is certain and it is as extreme as any suffering humanity must endure. This case tests whether Parliament is entitled to cause such suffering to the people of Canada.”
*****

Ynet reports on a call by religious Israeli women for renewed polygamy.

"The ads distributed in the synagogues appeared in the "Shabbat B'Shabbato" weekly bulletin. They encourage Jewish Sephardic men to return to the ancient custom, and include a quote from a halachic paper written by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef several years ago, which does not rule out the polygamy phenomenon: "Courts imposing aggravated punishments on Sephardim over this matter are wrong."
...
"The Srugim website revealed that the ads were funded by a group of single religious women who have given up on finding a match.

"One of the women, 39, said: "I am a single religious woman who is afraid of losing the ability to become a mother." She added that there were 27 other women like her who would be happy to marry a married man."

*****

The WSJ reports "Buying and selling dogs is illegal in Iran, unless they are guard dogs or used by police. Dogs are considered "haram," or unclean, in Islam. "

And a black market has sprung up to fill the growing demand...
********

Reviews and reputation as a solution to search congestion

The NY Times has a story on how search can be unreliable, because it can be gamed by advertisers, and apparently this problem is particularly pronounced in the market for emergency locksmiths: Picking the Lock of Google’s Search

"According to Yelp, there are — no joke — nearly 3,000 locksmiths in Seattle, though with relatively rare exceptions these operations aren’t in Seattle at all.

"They are phone banks, typically set up in far-off places, often in other countries. Call them and they’ll dispatch a locksmith. Some are legitimate, but others may all too often do shoddy work and/or charge two or three times the estimate.

"In the last five years, some of these lead generation companies, as they are known, have become notorious. A few have been sued by state attorneys general. Several have shown up in gotcha television news stories, a selection of which can be viewed on YouTube by searching for “locksmith scam.”

"You might assume that lead gen sites would be no competition for people like Bob Strom. But for a couple of years, in one crucial arena, they have been crushing him: Google search results. Last Tuesday, the Haggler typed “emergency locksmith Seattle” into a browser, and the top results — most notably, the seven that appeared in the highly coveted Google Places spots, which are marked on an area map — appeared to be lead gen sites. "

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

This suggests that Yelp will be much more helpful than Google search for finding an emergency locksmith, since Yelp comes with reviews from users...

Repugnant transactions involving life and death

A lot of repugnance is associated with transactions that involve the boundaries between the living and the dead--abortion, deceased organ donation (is brain death sufficient), assisted suicide...

In The New Republic, Eric Posner reviews The Law of Life and Death by Elizabeth Price Foley (Harvard University Press).

As he writes,
 
"The distinctions matter. Killing a human being is murder; discarding unwanted cell tissue is not.
 
"Familiar culture-war controversies have erupted over these issues. The law embodies uneasy truces and compromises, and, as is always the case, contains ambiguities and inconsistencies; and state laws vary a great deal. But a rough logic has emerged. The gestational blob gains stronger legal protections as it ascends the ladder of development. Sperm, eggs, and embryos lack rights; their owners enjoy the power to control how they are used. Fetuses do better. A woman may not abort the fetus late in pregnancy without good reason, such as risk to life or health, and a stranger commits a crime by assaulting and killing a fetus because the fetus has stronger rights than the stranger does. But the assaulter is not guilty of murder unless the fetus, in an odd turn of the law, manages to get born before it expires from its injuries. A partially born child enjoys stronger rights still.


"Death poses another set of challenges. In the old days, death meant that a person stopped breathing and his heart failed; now this is known as cardiopulmonary death. But when new technology made it possible to animate the heart and lungs in a person incapable of “waking up,” brain death was invented. Brain death enabled surgeons to carve off organs from people deemed alive under the cardiopulmonary definition, but it threw up a new set of problems. Some apparently brain-dead people would regain consciousness; technological advances later revealed that the brains of apparently brain-dead people often threw off occasional sparks—raising the question, how much brain functioning do you need to be alive? Or, if you wish, how much brain functioning does a person need for it to be wrong to kill him? Cryogenics enthusiasts insist that technicians will be able to reanimate a cryogenically preserved corpse by defrosting it. If someone destroys such a corpse, is that murder? If not, is it a wrong at all? The destruction of the corpse of a person disappoints that person’s original plan to reoccupy his body after a temporary vacancy, but prosecution of the wrongdoer would pose problems of metaphysics for which legal training leaves one sadly unprepared.

"Then there is the question of suicide, the refusal of unwanted life-preserving medical treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. Some countries permit euthanasia—the killing of people with severe medical problems, including infants born with horrendous birth defects which condemn them to a short miserable life. In the United States, all states tolerate suicide; two states tolerate physician-assisted suicide; and no states permit euthanasia. The Supreme Court has recognized rights to abortion, contraception, and (obliquely) unwanted life-sustaining medical treatment, but not to assisted suicide. For reasons known only to the justices, a woman’s interest in abortion trumps contrary state law but a person’s interest in ending his life does not, unless he can do so by declining medical treatment. Interests pile up on both sides of each question; it is hard to understand why the Court balances them as it does."

Nature Reviews Nephrology reviews long kidney chains

Rebecca Ireland, writing in the section "Research Highlights" in the July 2011 issue of the Journal Nature Reviews | Nephrology, reviews our recent paper* in the American Journal of Transplantation. Her article is called Kidney-paired donation: do transplantations need to be performed simultaneously?

"Kidney-paired donation—where patients who have incompatible but willing living donors receive transplants from other living donors (nondirected donors or donors from other incompatible pairs)—is increasing in the USA. A study recently published in the American Journal of Transplantation reports that performing these transplantation chains nonsimultaneously increases the number of transplants carried out.

"Controversy surrounds the issue of whether transplantation chains should be performed simultaneously or nonsimultaneously. Until quite recently, all transplantations in a chain were performed at the same time (domino paired donation [DPD] chains), but nonsimultaneous chains initiated by nondirected donors (nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor [NEAD] chains) are becoming more common. “Some advantages of nonsimultaneous chains include the fact that chains can become longer because they are less constricted by logistical factors and that more people can be transplanted; in addition, the lack of need for reciprocity allows donors to be used more efficiently so that quality can be optimized,” notes Michael Rees, corresponding author on the latest paper.
...
"“Although nonsimultaneous chains are fast becoming fairly standard, a paper published in 2009 concluded—through the use of simulations—that nonsimultaneous chains wouldn’t produce more transplants than simultaneous chains,” says Alvin Roth, another author on the recent study. “Given our data in the real world, we disagreed with the data and assumptions from this paper,” adds Rees.
...
"Rees’ team used empirical data from the registry of the Alliance for Paired Donation to build a simulation model to test whether simultaneous DPD chains or NEAD chains would result in more transplants being performed. When they used the same assumptions as the 2009 paper, they confirmed the 2009 findings. However, when they allowed NEAD chains to be longer than three pairs, as currently often occurs in clinical practice, they found that NEAD chains produced more transplants than DPD chains.

"The authors also investigated the percentages of highly sensitized patients (panel-reactive antibody level >80%) and patients with blood type O who would receive transplants with the different methods. They found that increased numbers of these hard-to-transplant groups of patients received a transplant when NEAD chains were used.

"“Going forward, one of the big questions that we hope to explore is how best to end nonsimultaneous chains,” states Roth. “That is, when does it make sense to ask the final donor to wait for a future transplant opportunity, and when does it make sense for them to donate to someone on the waiting list? Sometimes a bridge donor can facilitate more and/or better transplants than would an immediate transplant to a waiting list candidate, but this may not always be the case. Our paper included both types of endings of NEAD chains, but we haven’t yet studied when each kind of ending would be most useful.”

******
*Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ; ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994.

Congestion in college applications and admissions

The Chronicle of Higher Ed writes about changes in college admissions: Those Tweedy Old Admissions Deans? They're All Business Now

"More applicants doesn't necessari­ly mean better applicants, however. Four years ago, Mr. Allen decided to refine his recruitment strategy to emphasize quality over quan­tity. How? By shrinking the college's prospect pool. Since then, his office has done more to identify and engage students who are genuinely interested in the college.

"That move, coupled with the recession, has shrunk the college's application total. In the 2007-8 cycle, Grinnell received 3,900 applications; for this fall's freshman class, it received 3,000. During that time, however, Grinnell increased its enrollment of minority, low-income, and first-generation students, as well as those from other countries.

"This wouldn't have happened if apps had been skyrocketing, and we didn't know who all these applicants were," Mr. Allen says. "My experience helped me get off the treadmill of thinking that more applications are better. They're still important, but as a crude measure, they're not the most important thing."

"In other words, Mr. Allen had to re-evaluate his relationship with one of the most powerful numbers in his profession. He predicts that in a market­place saturated with messaging, colleges will need to rethink recruitment in the coming years. "The new enrollment manager," he says, "is going to have to take a more-sophisticated approach to pierce through all that stuff, to make an impression on students."

Divorce in Malta

The BBC reported a few weeks ago on the retreat of another formerly-more-widely repugnant transaction, divorce.

Malta has voted "Yes" in a non-binding referendum on legalising divorce

"Almost three-quarters of the electorate voted on Saturday on whether divorce should be introduced in Malta.

"A majority Catholic country, Malta is the only EU country not to allow divorce.

"Figures from the electoral commission late on Saturday showed turnout was 72%, the Times of Malta reports.
...
"Dr Gonzi, who campaigned against the introduction of divorce, has said it is now up the parliament to enact a law legalising the dissolution of marriage on the island.

"The Catholic Church, which is very influential in the archipelago, had also supported a "No" vote during the campaign.
...
"Malta is one of only two countries in the world (with the Philippines) to ban divorce - apart from the Vatican.

"Chile was the last country to legalise divorce in 2004 after overwhelming public pressure."

Carbon trading down under

An ongoing carbon market in New Zealand and a proposed one in Australia...

The NZ ETS: carbon pricing in the neighbourhood, by Basil Sharp and Nan Jiang.
"Participants in the New Zealand ETS surrender emission units that match their annual emission levels. A New Zealand Unit (NZU) is the primary domestic unit of trade. To meet obligations under the scheme, participants can surrender free units, if they have any, at the rate of 1 for every 2 tonnes emitted. Otherwise, participants have to either pay the fixed price option, or purchase NZUs or other Kyoto compliant units."

***********

Australia Proposes Carbon Trading Plan, Again

"Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia announced a plan on Sunday that would tax the carbon dioxide emissions of the country’s 500 worst polluters and create the second-biggest emissions trading program in the world, after the European Union’s.
...
For the 500 companies — which would include mining giants with operations in Australia like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata — the government has set a price of 23 Australian dollars, or $24.70, for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted starting July 1 of next year, rising 2.5 percent annually before shifting in 2015 to a market-driven trading program.

"A similar proposal by Ms. Gillard’s predecessor, Kevin Rudd, was largely blamed for having led to his political downfall."
...
"When the European Union initiated its carbon-trading program in 2005, many polluters passed on the cost of the free permits they were given to consumers, creating large corporate profits. That is unlikely to happen in Australia, said Mr. Jordan of Deutsche Bank.

“Australian policy makers learned the lesson from Europe that there’s a risk if you hand out too many free permits and you hand them out to the wrong sectors, that you get emitters both passing on the cost of carbon but also pocketing the value of those permits,” he said."

Debate over kidney sales in Scotland

Here's a 4 minute interview on Radio Scotland from August 2011, on kidney sales, in which Sarah Toom talks to me about the debate there about whether payments to living kidney donors should be allowed, and other ways of increasing transplants (including kidney exchange).

The proximate cause was a proposal by Sue Rabbitt Roff, a senior research fellow at the University of Dundee, in the BMJ: "We should consider paying kidney donors."
Her proposal calls for a tightly regulated system with a standard payment to donors of around the current average Scottish salary (at which price transplantation is still a bargain compared to dialysis).

She concludes "So it’s time to begin to explore how to pilot paid provision of live kidneys in the UK under strict rules of access and equity. We need to extend our thinking beyond opt-in and opt-out to looking at how we can make it possible for those who wish to do so to express their autonomy in the same way as current donors are encouraged to do by making available a healthy kidney for a fee that is not exploitative.

The proposal has sparked a lot of British press coverage, e.g. here, and here, and here, and here. In each of the articles, the other reported comments are all negative. (I can't tell if British reporters work differently than American reporters and only solicited negative views to balance the proposal being reported as the main story, or if it is harder to find pro as well as con views in the UK.)
*******

Here are links to my previous blog posts on compensation for donors, and to my two papers that lead to unexpected calls on this subject from radio journalists in far places.

Roth, Alvin E. "Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21:3, Summer, 2007, pp. 37-58. 

Leider, Stephen and Alvin E. Roth, ''Kidneys for sale: Who disapproves, and why?'' American Journal of Transplantation , 10 (May), 2010, 1221-1227.

Incentives for cheating and for cheating-detection

A chilling and surprisingly complicated story from Panos Ipeirotis at NYU Stern (who blogs under the title "A Computer Scientist in a Business School): Why I will never pursue cheating again (since deleted, but that URL now has related links). Apparently he got a cease and desist letter, and the story has since attracted some press.

Here's one story about it: NYU Professor Catches 20% Of His Students Cheating, And He's The One Who Pays For It,

and here's another: NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash

Ultimately he draws a market design conclusion:
"In Mr. Ipeirotis’ view, if there’s one big lesson from his semester in the cheating trenches, it’s this: Rather than police plagiarism, professors should design assignments that cannot be plagiarized.

"How? He suggested several options. You could require that projects be made public, which would risk embarrassment for someone who wanted to copy from a past semester. You could assign homework where students give class presentations and then are graded by their peers, ratcheting up the social pressure to perform well. And you could create an incentive to do good work by turning homework into a competition, like asking students to build Web sites and rewarding those that get the most clicks."

A secret of school performance...(admissions)

From kindergartens to colleges, one thing that helps a school produce lots of good graduates is if they admit lots of good students. Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, are supposed to admit students by lottery, and many run very public lotteries to make it clear that they aren't trying to influence the results. But it's tempting to cheat, hence this story from the NY Times:

Bronx Charter School Disciplined Over Admissions Methods

"A South Bronx charter school has been put on probation for what city education officials called “serious violations” of state law mandating random admissions, including possibly testing or interviewing applicants before their enrollment.



"The school, Academic Leadership Charter School, opened in 2009 and is the first New York City charter to be disciplined for violating the rules for random admissions.


"The violations go to the crux of the debate over charters, which are publicly financed but independently operated. Random admissions is a key tenet in most states, but critics have long contended that the schools surreptitiously weed out students who are unlikely to do well on standardized tests or are more difficult to educate.
...
"At most city charter schools, students are selected at public meetings where applicants’ names are picked from a box. But city officials found that at Academic Leadership, which has about 200 children in kindergarten through second grade, hundreds of applicants were left out of this year’s drawing. The lottery was supervised not by an impartial observer, but by a member of the parent association, the letter said. And while students who applied after the lottery should have been added to the waiting list, scores of them were not, it said.
“They are treating it like it’s a private school on the Upper East Side,” said a former school employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “Like people are applying to Dalton. This isn’t Dalton.”
*************


At the other end of the spectrum from charter schools are exam schools, which are charged with admitting the best and the brightest. And maybe it's good for good students to be together with other good students (and not just good for a school's performance). I'm inclined to think that it is, but it's hard to show. A recent NBER paper suggests that good schools don't change the standardized exam scores for their students very much; the ones who just made the cutoff in public exam schools, and the ones who just missed getting in, do around the same on  tests.


The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools
by

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Joshua D. Angrist, Parag A. Pathak
NBER Working Paper No. 17264
Issued in July 2011


Abstract: 
"Talented students compete fiercely for seats at Boston and New York exam schools. These schools are characterized by high levels of peer achievement and a demanding curriculum tailored to each district's highest achievers. While exam school students clearly do very well in school, the question of whether an exam school education adds value relative to a regular public education remains open. We estimate the causal effect of exam school attendance using a regression-discontinuity design, reporting both parametric and non-parametric estimates. We also develop a procedure that addresses the potential for confounding in regression-discontinuity designs with multiple, closely-spaced admissions cutoffs. The outcomes studied here include scores on state standardized achievement tests, PSAT and SAT participation and scores, and AP scores. Our estimates show little effect of exam school offers on most students' achievement in most grades. We use two-stage least squares to convert reduced form estimates of the effects of exam school offers into estimates of peer and tracking effects, arguing that these appear to be unimportant in this context. On the other hand, a Boston exam school education seems to have a modest effect on high school English scores for minority applicants. A small group of 9th grade applicants also appears to do better on SAT Reasoning. These localized gains notwithstanding, the intense competition for exam school seats does not appear to be justified by improved learning for a broad set of students."

Romeo and Juliet with an Afghan twist

The NY Times reports on one of the oldest of repugnant transactions, marrying outside of approved circles. But there's an unexpected twist at the very end of the story (the newspaper story, not the story of the young lovers, which is still unfolding):
In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers

"...a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

"When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

"The riot, which lasted for hours, ended with one man dead, a police station charred and the two teenagers, Halima Mohammedi and her boyfriend, Rafi Mohammed, confined to juvenile prison.
...
"Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed."
...
"Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid."

College admissions in England

Inside Higher Ed follows the Plan to Restructure British Higher Ed

"The British government released its long-awaited "white paper" on the future of higher education, offering a sweeping set of proposals that would produce dramatic changes in how the country would educate students and fund institutions.
...
"The reform plan released by British government's Department for Business Innovation and Skills says that in the first year of the new funding regime, around 65,000 high-achieving students will be able to go to whichever university will have them. This represents a change from the present strict controls on the number of students each university can accept. It raises the prospect of some elite institutions expanding their intake to vacuum up more top students.

"The government’s aim is to ensure that students with very high grades -- AAB or above -- on the country's college entrance exams will have a better chance of reaching their first choice of university.
...
"However, this new contestability will sit within an overall cap on the total number of student places in the sector. Consequently if some elite institutions expand their intake, it will be at the expense of others, which will necessarily have to shrink.

"It also means that highly selective institutions, such as those in the 1994 and Russell Groups (consortiums of elite universities), will have to compete for a large proportion of their students, many of whom already achieve AAB or above on the "A level" exams.
...
"Willetts denied that the government’s aim was to create an elite set of institutions in which all the top-achieving students were concentrated.

“I’m not trying to plan the system. The whole point about this is we’re taking some steps back and it will be the choices of students and the reaction of institutions – I have no view on that,” he said.
"He argued that with funding following the student, and universities and colleges forced to compete for those students, the quality of teaching and learning, and the student experience, would rise.
“We’ve got very strong incentives to reward research, and the intense competition through the [research excellence framework] and research councils has yielded an incredibly strong research [base]. We haven’t had comparable incentives on teaching,” he said."


**********

A followup article elaborates on the two tier structure being contemplated: New Competition in the UK

"Asked for comments on the changes ushered in by the white paper, two vice-chancellors were critical of plans to make another 20,000 student places "contestable" by auctioning them off to institutions that charge average fees, after waivers, of below £7,500 (about $12,000).
...
"Under the government’s proposals, universities with students who secured grades of AAB or higher would lose those students from their standard allocation of places, but would then be allowed to recruit as many above the AAB threshold as they wanted, provided they could attract them.

"As an estimated 65,000 such places become contestable, some universities will lose AAB students and will be forced to drop their average fees below £7,500 if they want to claw back their numbers.Times Higher Education understands that an elite group of just 10 institutions have 40 percent of all AAB students
...
"Martin Hall, vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, said the combined effect of the AAB plans and the sub-£7,500 auction would be to increase "social sorting." Applicants would increasingly "end up going to universities with students like themselves," he argued.

"Hall said the government was allowing universities with more privileged student cohorts to charge £9,000 because they were perceived to be "high quality," while seeking to force down fees at universities such as Salford with high proportions of disadvantaged students.

"We serve that group. That is our mission, and we try to serve them well," he said. "The assumption that we don’t do that through providing quality is completely untested. If you are serving students … from non-traditional university backgrounds … you have to provide more resources to help [them]. In my university, teaching provision costs more than in a so-called 'top' university, where students come in with two As and a B."

Update on efforts to ban circumcision in CA

Here's a legal update on the matter, from the Volokhs... Court Tentatively Decides That State Law Preempts Proposed San Francisco Ban on Circumcision of Boys.

Some background on the effort to ban circumcision is in my earlier post here.