Social Science Bites

Amid all the handwringing about kids and the damage smartphones are doing them, child psychologist Ioanna Palaiologou is upbeat. “I don’t think,” she says, “we should worry as much as the media is making it. ... If the elements are there, it’s another toy for them.”

Palaiologou, an associate at the Institute of Education, University College London’s Centre for Leadership in Learning, has the background to make a judgment in that regard. Among other things, she’s an expert on children and play, as she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast.

Play, she explains, is innate - “we are mammals, and mammals do play” – necessary and ultimately informal, she tells interviewer Dave Edmonds. That doesn’t meant there won’t be rules, but that the wellspring of play in bottom-up, from children, and not top-down, from adults. “Play cannot be initiated by adults. It can be supported by adults, it can be facilitated by adults, but cannot be initiated by adults, in my view. Play can only be initiated by children.”

This doesn’t mean play is anarchy, or even that all play is the same. Palaiologou has identified five types of play -- physical, with objects, symbolic (such as drawing), pretending/dramatic, and games with rules – and adults may have a role. But that role is not dominant: “Instruction is fine, but we actually need play to interact with the environment and to make sense of the world with our own senses, our own minds, and to internalize that.”

In the discussion, Palaiologou and Edmonds also talk about cultural differences in play and how it is a vital part of children’s emotional development. All work and no play, it seems, does more than make Jack a dull boy.

Palaiologou has spent more than two decades studying education and early childhood in the United Kingdom and is a chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society and is the treasurer (and past chair) or the British Educational Studies Association. She is the co-director of Canterbury Educational Services where she is head of children’s services.

She’s published widely on early childhood, including authoring last year’s third edition of Child Observation: A Guide for Early Childhood and editing Early Years Foundation Stage: Theory and Practice and Doing Research in Education: Theory and Practice (the latter with David Needham and Trevor Male).

Direct download: IoannaMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:13pm PDT

Al Roth on Matching Markets

 

The system that runs the ride-sharing company Uber doesn’t just link up passengers and drivers based on price. It also has to connect the two based largely on where they are geographically. It is, says Nobel laureate Stanford economist Alvin E. “Al” Al Roth, a matching market.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Roth explains to interview David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, starting with a quick and surprisingly simple definition.

“A matching market is a market in which prices don’t so all the work,” Roth details, “So matching markets are markets in which you can’t just choose what you want even if you can afford it – you also have to be chosen.” But while the definition is simple, creating a model for these markets is a tad more complex, as Roth shows in offering a few more examples and contrasting them with commodity markets.

“Labor markets are matching markets. You can’t just decide to work for Google – you have to be hired. And Google can’t just decide that you’ll work for them – they have to make you an offer.” And like say university admission, matching markets require something to intervene, whether it be institutions or technology, to make this exchange succeed. In turn Roth himself helped engineer some high profile matches in areas where the term ‘market might not traditionally have been used: kidney donors with the sick, doctors with their first jobs, or students and teachers with schools. Or even the classic idea of ‘matchmaking’ – marriage.

Roth turned to game theory to help explain and understand these markets, and his work won he and Lloyd Shapley the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As the Nobel Committee outlined:

"Lloyd Shapley studied different matching methods theoretically and, beginning in the 1980s, Alvin Roth used Lloyd Shapley's theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Alvin Roth demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods."

Roth is currently president of the American Economics Association, and sits as the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University. He is also the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University

 

Direct download: RothMixSesM.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 4:50am PDT

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