Why Was Reprogramming Mature Cells Worth a Nobel Prize?

[arildno]

You're looking at it backwards, the purpose of interconnected european economies was to mitigate the need for escalation.

So the establishment of the Coal and Steel union prevented Great Britain from attacking Finland in 1952?
Or Spain from attacking Portugal in 1964??

There are no incidents (or non-incidents) whatsoever in which EU can be shown to have had any peace-keeping role whatsoever, that idea is a merely religious dogma, without any sort of empirical foundation.

 

[Redbelly98]

The Economics Prize was announced today.

http://news.yahoo.com/americans-roth-shaply-win-nobel-prize-economics-110737894.html

The award citation said Shapley had used game theory to study and compare various matching methods and how to make sure the matches were acceptable to all counterparts, including the creation of a special algorithm.

Roth followed up on Shapley's results in a series of empirical studies and helped redesign existing institutions so that new doctors could be matched with hospitals, students with schools or patients with organ donors.

When I read that, I thought of eBay and craigslist, matching people who want to get rid of stuff they no longer want with people who want that stuff.

 

[AlephZero]

Roth followed up on Shapley's results in a series of empirical studies and helped redesign existing institutions so that new doctors could be matched with hospitals, students with schools or patients with organ donors.

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19946503 I got the impression that (1) Gales and Shapley invented some theory, (2) Roth discovered that the hospitals were already doing the same thing as the theory predicted they ought to be doing, (3) therefore the theory must be right.

You could draw the alternative conclusion that (3) having the theory didn't add any value to the situation - but hey, this is economics, not "hard science".

Actually, this is a bit more informative (though even Ms Flanders doens't have much time for macro-economists, it seems): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19954671

 

[Redbelly98]

You could draw the alternative conclusion that (3) having the theory didn't add any value to the situation - but hey, this is economics, not "hard science".

But the theory has been used to improve other situations. From your 2nd link to the Flanders article:

Mr Roth helped New York City redesign its system for allocating children to public school places. Using his algorithm led to a 90% fall in the number of students who ended up in schools that they had not even included among their five listed preferences. Now cities all over the US use some form of Mr Roth's algorithm for allocating students to schools.

 

[AlephZero]

But the theory has been used to improve other situations.

An audio explanation of why solving this problem was worth a Nobel prize: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nbrjc

Skip to time 18:30. (Note this will only be available for a few days).