IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas

  • There’s a new documentary about Ghanaian reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas, who has gone undercover to expose corruption, abuse in psychiatric hospitals, killing of albinos, and many other things (including once hiding disguised as a rock to film). On The Media had a nice interview where he explains that the problems his country faces requires a more forward style of journalism than often seen in the West.
  • Dan Kopf at Priceonomics has been writing about the obscure histories of common statistics. His latest looks into why the average won over the median, which involves an 11th C. Persian mathematician trying to figure out the longitude of a city in (now) Afghanistan.
  • Sierra Leone’s latest export is Sea Cucumbers (which are more of a slug than vegetable). They’re considered to have healing and aphrodisiac properties in China, which is never good news for a species.
  • Venezuela is declaring Fridays for the next two months a holiday to save electricity. Marketplace has a nice primer on their economy since the 1920’s, which is essentially the story of the resource curse – freely flowing oil discourages the economy from diversifying. The Caracas Chronicles journalism project projected that by May the Bolivar will be worth less than the paper it’s printed on.
  • The YouTube drama Sex and an African City chronicles the lives of five Ghanaian women who return home after living abroad, and their career and personal lives.
  • ICYMI, Chris has an interesting thread on twitter asking how to secure data when working in an autocratic country. (Both IPA and ISIS prefer TrueCrypt for data encryption, its backstory is in the New Yorker).
  • A new Science paper from the research team who exposed the LaCour fraud, finds the same technique – long (~10 min) non-judgemental conversations – does change attitudes, in this case about transgender rights (10 points on a 100 point scale, persisting three months later). The problem with this approach is that canvassing is very time-consuming (e.g. expensive) because of the many non-responses. In this case, they were able to better target people willing to participate by using a pre-screening survey. FiveThirtyEight talks about the paper here, and Princeton’s Elizabeth Paluck has a commentary on it in Science here.

And we may have lost Merle Haggard, but the only economics country singer, Merle Hazard (give it a sec) is still going strong.

Harvard’s general examination in the Department of Economics, in 1953

Question 5 is as follows:

“Future historians may well write the epitaph of our civilization as follows:

From freedom and science came rapid growth and change.

From rapid growth and change came economic instability.

From instability came demands which ended growth and change.

Ending growth and change ended science and freedom.”

Discuss this alleged conflict between economic growth and measures to secure economic stability. In your answer refer to the views of some of the great economists, for example, Schumpeter and Keynes, on this problem.

Here is the full exam. Two reactions.

First, the blogger noted this:

Needless to say all this has changed dramatically. Earlier it required understanding of history and economics, now it is just about math.

Actually, my development and labor field exams at Berkeley were full of general questions like, such as “What do we know about the effects of raising the minimum wage” or “why is there corruption and what are its consequences?” Some of the answers required math. And a lot of the evidence I had to marshal involved complicated statistical studies. Economic history was ignored, but then I didn’t take the economic history field exam. But history was central in the department, with figures like Eichengreen and Delong as leaders, and a cohesive group of historians across the UC system who met together all the time.

So I don’t recognize the caricature of economics graduate school many paint.

Second, I am so asking this question on my political economy of development exam in May. Some of the most prominent political economists alive today have built their careers, articles and books tackling Question 5. Economics has never been more focused or better on this question. It could be better, I’m happy to see it trending in the good direction.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

PoliticalHacker

  • Bloomberg Businessweek’s How to Hack an Election profiles Andrés Sepúlveda, who has been manipulating elections in Latin America for a decade.
  • IPA is funding research into financial services for the poor (deadline April 29).
  • The great Development Impact Blog turns five today, and contributors look back over some of their favorite posts.
  • A friend posed a good question: Why aren’t the horrible sexual abuses by UN peacekeeping troops of children they were sent to protect sparking the same public outrage as the Catholic Church abuses?
  • Markus Goldstein and David Evans have a helpful post on turning your research into a 15-minute presentation (hints: skip the lit review, decide on model or results, and no tables).
  • From AER, big impacts for sons when mothers got a cash transfer as part of the first US welfare program (1911-1935). They:

    …lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers. They also obtained one-third more years of schooling, were less likely to be underweight, and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers.

  • Previous research has suggested a U.S. Southern “Culture of Honor,” among Southern white men, where disputes can more often result in violence (including the famous insult experiment). A new political science study looks at whether the President’s background matters for conflicts:

    Interstate conflicts under Southern presidents are shown to be twice as likely to involve uses of force, last on average twice as long, and are three times more likely to end in victory for the United States than disputes under non-Southern presidents.

And, some poor State Department worker was forced to delete a series of tweets warning Americans about dangers traveling for spring break after upsetting a number of people. Because if there’s one truth about international affairs we can’t handle, it’s that we might not be hot:

StateDepartmentTravelWarning

(h/t Lindsey Shaughnessy & David Batcheck)

Thrilled to announce I’ll be joining the Trump campaign to advise on development and humanitarian assistance…

…Is the most common April Fools joke I am seeing in my Facebook and Twitter feed. We really did all wake up with the same idea this morning.

The thing is, somebody really does need to start advising him. The transcripts of his foreign policy discussions and Washington Post and New York Times have to be read to be believed. The simplest and probably correct reading is that he has not spent much time thinking about the issues, in part because it’s not a serious primary issue, and so is making it up as he goes along. In the absence of any advisors, it’s actually a very effective way to float and get feedback on policy ideas, especially if you have no compunction about doing the opposite of what you said later on. It’s the gift of a populist too.

Meanwhile, the American Politics faculty at Columbia ran a panel for other faculty yesterday on what we’ve learned about politics from Trump and what we haven’t. Many interesting things were said. A sampling:

  • For all the talk of the party not getting behind Trump as the nominated candidate, it’s important to remember that this hasn’t happened in a century. Anything is possible, but both parties have unified behind polarizing figures in the past. Therefore you can expect some serious foreign policy advisers to jump on soon.
  • History also suggests that, in the general election, a candidate’s ability and character matter less than the party affiliation and current conditions. That is, it might be more accurate to think about the general election as a referendum on the Obama administration that a vote for (or against) Clinton or Trump.
  • Primary rhetoric is partly emotion and partly an act. The politicians know this. A lot of the public knows this. And divides that seem impossible to bridge often have bridges six months later.
  • If you looked at the breadth of candidates at the outset, it wasn’t hard to predict that the Republican primary would go to the convention. But no one would have predicted it would be these three.
  • Looking back, you can understand Trump as having some advantages in this kind of crowded field: a gift for capturing the mood of the people, a guy who can think on his feet.
  • Also, while there have always been voters with a degree of intolerance, and a taste for the authoritarian, historically they have been spread across both parties. But that distribution has changed in recent years. You no longer have many conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans, in Congress or the voter ranks. So that raises the support base for their kind of candidate.

My reading is that the political scientists haven’t decided to change their theories yet, so much as they have updated their beliefs about some features of the American public. You cannot fit a theory to a single case, and a single unusual result doesn’t and shouldn’t upend theories of how politics works.

Another way you might say this is that “Trump is in the error term.” That to me is the most plausible explanation.

An open letter to Senator Chuck Grassley from an Iowan high school student

The argument many Republicans are making is that Barack Obama is a “lame duck” president, and, because “the people have not spoken,” he should not be allowed to nominate a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia.

However, you are running for reelection in Iowa this November. At that time, Iowans will go to the polls and their voice will be heard. Until then, who speaks for the people of Iowa? You, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, carry significant power in determining who gets to become the next Supreme Court Justice. But senator, since you, too, are in an election year, how can you possess the authority to make a decision that will affect the future of our country if “the people have not yet spoken”? Following the direction of the Republican’s logic, I politely ask you to step aside as chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee until the elections take place.

Bonus points because the Harvard admissions committee will love this.

Everything I need to know about democratization I can learn from Wikipedia

In February 2002, just one year after its launch, Wikipedia was rising quickly, but it was still officially an experimental project of the for-profit company Bomis.com. When then-CEO Jimmy Wales mused on the Wikipedia email list whether to put advertisements on Wikipedia’s pages to generate revenue, it hit the community like a shock wave.

Influential members of the Spanish Wikipedia were so outraged by even a remote possibility of profiting from volunteer work that within days, they broke off into their own faction. So in 2002, very early in the Web site’s history, Spanish Wikipedians copied the entire contents of Spanish Wikipedia onto their own Internet server and asked community members to abandon Wikipedia in favor of this new alternative project, Enciclopedia Libre.

It was a jarring setback and a stark lesson about the passionate community Wales had assembled. Despite pleas from Wales, Sanger, and others that advertising was only an idea for discussion, and not in the works, the damage had been done. Most of the Spanish volunteers had left. It would take years for Wikipedia’s Spanish-language edition to recover from what is now known as the “Spanish Fork.”

Some good did result from the episode. It convinced Wales and his partners that they had to spin off Wikipedia into a nonprofit entity to convince the community never to doubt its intentions.

From the book The Wikipedia Revolution by Andrew Lih, which I’ve been reading in relation to my WIkipedia-based course (on which I’ll blog more later this semester).

I’ve been teaching students about the historical processes of democratization this semester, and the parallels are amazing. When citizens can exit or exercise voice, and are valuable to the elites, the citizens can force concessions of power. Unable to credibly commit, elites must find some way, perhaps a constitutional change, to credibly devolve power.

This reminds me: one of the valuable things on politics I’ve read this semester is this paper on a simple exit, voice and loyalty game by Clark, Golder and Golder. At first I thought it was just a useful framework for teaching about political power and change. But the more it sits with me, the more I think this simple model is a useful framework for thinking about a great deal of politics. It’s simplicity is a drawback but also a virtue. Maybe the most influential paper on my thinking in 2016.

This blogger might be the only thing that makes sense of this election season (and help you keep your sanity)

Move over Nate Silver, some of the election season’s most accurate election forecasts are coming from blogger and pundit, Carl Diggler, the fake persona created by two comedians who forecast primary winners based on their the worst caricatures and prejudices you can draw about a population.

For example:

The voters who will decide tomorrow’s Washington caucuses are what I like to call “Riot Grrrl Democrats.” Their main issues are reducing the cost of photocopying zines, ending the “one in, one out” penalty, and increasing subsidies for putting boys at the back of punk shows. One would think these acolytes of Bratmobile, Bikini Kill, and Sleater Kinney would flock to Hillary Clinton, a fellow female who has promised to form a committee to evaluate the constitutionality of drink minimums. Yet these riot grrrl votrrrs are fully in Bernie’s camp, seduced by the Vermont socialist’s promises of putting Glenn Danzig behind bars, where he belongs. In this veteran pundit’s mind, it “smells like Bern spirit” in Washington state.

From the same article, reflections on the Ted Cruz sex scandals:

The biggest issue Ted Cruz has run into this campaign has been people refusing to accept him as a human being. They look at his flesh, that resembles ashen wood that was bloated with water, then dried into a warped version of itself. They see his terrifying Russian doll eyes. They look at his gut, that isn’t large in the way Chris Christie’s is, but heaving, as if he’s carrying an egg similar to that of a lizard in pregnancy. They hear his voice screech about ad hominem attacks and the gold standard. Even if they agree with him, they’re likely to think, “someone should put him out of his misery.”
But a potential series of sex scandals would be a gamechanger. Once people get past the horrifying mental image of Cruz removing his proboscis from his pleated jeans, they’ll realize this is more or less a human being who has normal carnal desires. He’s standing in front of us and saying, yes, I am a man. Yes, I get desires. No, my mating habits do not differ from a normal person’s just because of my wholly repulsive being. Cruz may lose a bit of evangelical support, but he can more than make that up in the millions who were on the fence about his humanity. The fact that he can point to a potential five women that love him and accept his melted candle body is absolutely massive.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

UNInvolvedInAfrica

  • Evans, Goldstein, Jakiela, O’Sullivan, Montalvão, & Ozier, once again do a great job boiling down 120+ papers from Oxford’s Center for the Study of African Economies into one-sentence summaries, broken down by topic and methodology here and here.
  • Millions Saved is an amazing resource from Amanda Glassman & Miriam Temin with the Center for Global Development documenting what’s worked in global health. In an example academics should be emulating, the Key Findings page extrapolates basic one-sentence principles that policymakers should know. There will also be a book version.
  • The UN is being sued over cholera brought to Haiti by UN peacekeepers (perhaps just one peacekeeper), which has infected over 770,000 people there.
  • And a UN official explains why he’s quitting:

    Six years ago, I became an assistant secretary general, posted to the headquarters in New York. I was no stranger to red tape, but I was unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic that govern the place. If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again

    It’s worth reading the examples he documents of how bureaucracy, politics, and outdated rules have gotten in the way of the UN doing its own job.

  • Every few years, journalists write about how demand and prices for quinoa, the grain newly popular in rich countries, are rising and how terrible that is for the farmers in Peru who grow it, but can’t afford to eat it. Brooklynites can now rest easy thanks to Marc Bellemare, Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez and Seth Gitter, who show that quinoa producers and consumers in Peru have been doing pretty well since the boom. The best piece of critical writing on this is from Boring Development: Strong Demand For Things Poor People Sell Somehow Bad for Poor People.
  • State laws designed to protect the poor and minority job applicants by prohibiting potential employers from checking their credit scores sound good, but seem to have backfired. A new paper finds when those laws are passed minority hiring goes down. One more reason to test and phase-in policies. (h/t Dina Pomerantz)
  • A slightly better model (but still imperfect) for policymakers comes from Tennessee which tried to combat a spike in babies born drug dependent by criminalizing drug use by pregnant women. That law also seems to have backfired (discouraging pregnant women who might be drug users from getting prenatal care), but since it was enacted as a two-year trial, it will expire on its own. The point is that across the political spectrum, sensible-sounding policies often backfire, which is why J-PAL North America recently opened to help state and local leaders figure out which policies work before passing them into law. Lawmakers – please call them.
  • Senegal has just voted in a national referendum to reduce presidential terms.

A big thank you to my colleague Jenn Cowman, who’s been helping edit these links, but is leaving IPA for Australia. Expect to start seeing more misplaced commas and horrendous typos.

And from SMBC:

SMBC Economists No Longer Welcome in Hell

 

 

How many decimals of pi do we actually need?

How many decimals does NASA use to make it’s calculations? This was a question posed to NASA engineers. The full answer is amazing.

We can bring this down to home with our planet Earth. It is 7,926 miles in diameter at the equator. The circumference then is 24,900 miles. That’s how far you would travel if you circumnavigated the globe (and didn’t worry about hills, valleys, obstacles like buildings, rest stops, waves on the ocean, etc.). How far off would your odometer be if you used the limited version of pi above [3.14]? It would be off by the size of a molecule. There are many different kinds of molecules, of course, so they span a wide range of sizes, but I hope this gives you an idea. Another way to view this is that your error by not using more digits of pi would be 10,000 times thinner than a hair!

I found the finale particularly mind blowing:

Let’s go to the largest size there is: the visible universe. The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places. If you think about how fantastically vast the universe is — truly far beyond what we can conceive, and certainly far, far, far beyond what you can see with your eyes even on the darkest, most beautiful, star-filled night — and think about how incredibly tiny a single atom is, you can see that we would not need to use many digits of pi to cover the entire range.

One of the world’s largest cities in 1500 I’d never heard of

Screenshot 2016-03-24 06.44.28

Situated on a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls in the south and deep ditches in the north. Beyond the city walls, numerous further walls were erected that separated the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages.

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.

…Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace.

That is Mawuna Koutonin in The Guardian. Hat tip to Amitis Oskoui.

All of this is now gone, in part due to European intrusions. He concludes:

Curious tourists visiting Edo state in Nigeria are often shown places that might once have been part of the ancient city – but its walls and moats are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps a section of the great city wall, one of the world’s largest man-made monuments, now lies bruised and battered, neglected and forgotten in the Nigerian bush.

A discontented Nigerian puts it this way: “Imagine if this monument was in England, USA, Germany, Canada or India? It would be the most visited place on earth, and a tourist mecca for millions of the world’s people. A money-spinner worth countless billions in annual tourist revenue.”

Instead, if you wish to get a glimpse into the glorious past of the ancient Benin kingdom – and a better understanding of this groundbreaking city – you are better off visiting the Benin Bronze Sculptures section of the British Museum in central London.

What to do when your pre-tenure review leaves you on shaky ground

I had my third-year review in the spring of 2013, and it was rough. I wasn’t publishing enough and my future at the University of Texas at Austin was uncertain. As my very nice, very supportive chair sat across from me to explain the situation, he mentioned that our colleagues were afraid he would sugarcoat it. That was when I knew I was in real trouble. Of course, I knew the threat of tenure denial was real already — some of my favorite people have been denied tenure. And I could read my CV as clearly as anyone. But, as he talked about his worries, I knew that it was really real. I felt it in my bones. And I panicked.

That’s political scientist Bethany Albertson writing an essay called Operation Keep My Job. She did. How is important. Honest, thoughtful, and useful reading for young scholars.

The war on drugs explained by a Nixon adviser (or not)

Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door.

Full story by Dan Baum in Harpers.

Update: Several people pointed me to this counterpoint by Justin Sherin:

anyone with a basic knowledge of the tapes knows that Nixon’s War on Drugs was an earnest, if catastrophic, personal failing.

The basic point is that Nixon was too out of touch to understand and come to terms with casual drug use. It’s not the strongest or best-evidenced analysis, but to say “Ehrlichman is grossly exaggerating and rationalizing the anti-Black anti-left motive” is plausible.

Please stop using “novel” and “unique” in your abstract

Screenshot 2016-03-22 07.02.44I love this. Three researchers picked 20 top biomedical journals and searched all titles and abstracts since 1975 for positive, negative, neutral, and random words.

The absolute frequency of positive words increased from 2.0% (1974-80) to 17.5% (2014), a relative increase of 880% over four decades. All 25 individual positive words contributed to the increase, particularly the words “robust,” “novel,” “innovative,” and “unprecedented,” which increased in relative frequency up to 15 000%.

Here are the individual words:

Screenshot 2016-03-22 07.03.21The authors conclude: “Apparently scientists look on the bright side of research results.”

Some colleagues, especially junior ones, have told me they have to use these words to sell their paper. I disagree. As a referee, when someone calls themselves innovative, my first assumption is they’re not.

At minimum it signals a rookie writer. Let me give you some unique and innovative advice (see what I mean?): Instead of calling your data set novel, just say “We collected new data on X.” Instead of saying this is an unprecedented result, say “The results suggest that we should think differently about Y.”

Those of you perusing my old abstracts for errors of commission, you will find them. Remember that all advice is a mix of “don’t do what I did” and “be more like me”. And should be discounted accordingly.

Hat tip to Dave Evans.

Was the greatest contribution to American prosperity the resettling of refugees?

Andrew Grove died yesterday. From the New York Times obituary, the former Intel engineer and chief was “chosen Man of the Year by Time magazine as the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips” and was “in some ways was considered ‘the father’ of Silicon Valley”.

He was also a refugee. I saw him speak a few years ago, at an International Rescue Committee dinner. IRC resettled Grove’s family in the United States in the 1950s, after he survived the Nazi Holocaust and fled the Soviet invasion of his home country, Hungary. He was poor and sick and spoke no English when he arrived.

It occurred to me then: this one act of resettling one refugee may have created more prosperity for America than any other private decision in the past century. It’s at least a contender.

And that’s not even the right reason the Americas and Europe should welcome more refugees. To see what I mean, watch this video:

Links I liked

  1. My colleague Jeff Lax answers questions on filling the Supreme Court vacancy
  2. Retraction watch (in PLOS One): “Following publication, readers raised concerns about language in the article that makes references to a ‘Creator’, and about the overall rationale and findings of the study. …Consequently, the PLOS ONE editors consider that the work cannot be relied upon and retract this publication.”
  3. Should all research papers be free?
  4. The Development Impact blog has advice on power calculations and the eight most active researchers from developing countries
  5. Adele, James Cordon, carpool kareoke:

In case you are concerned about his road safety

Karl Marx’s seven habits of highly effective people?

Via Ken Opalo and Stéphane Helleringer this reportedly from a Prussian spy who visited Karl Marx in the 1850s:

In private life he is an extremely disorderly, cynical human being, and a bad host. He leads the existence of a real bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk. Though he is often idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has a great deal of work to do. He has no fixed times for going to sleep and waking up. He often stays up all night, and then lies down fully clothed on the sofa at midday and sleeps till evening, untroubled by the comings and goings of the whole world.

This sounds somewhat like me before children, and like a surprising number of my mostly childless (and most productive) colleagues. then again it also sounds like people I know who only play video games. So maybe the causal link to academic productivity is weak.

And from @kjhealy, a 32-tear old Karl Marx and family, recorded in Soho by the 1851 UK census as “Charles Mark—Doctor, Philosophical Author:

CeAlevXW4AAMOWf

And speaking of productivity, this is kind of incredible.

Hat tips to Suresh Naidu and @MaxCRoser.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Fiber masks from Boni village (Burkina Faso) perform in the Regional Stadium of Dedougou. Music is essential, played with traditional African nstruments, accompanies very ritual and ceremony.

  • Happy St. Patrick’s day, how about some qualitative macroeconomic research explaining Irish attitudes towards austerity? (Summary: early on, the Irish public was surprisingly accepting of austerity measures, which may come down to an Irish Catholic moral principle of “you should reap what you sow” but that’s changed recently with a water tax that’s seen as unfair.)
  • An AP investigative report concludes a flashy San Fransisco company contracted by the Sierra Leone government and WHO to work on the Ebola response completely bungled it, with errors in testing and confusion in its facilities.
  • Some beautiful photos (including the one above) from the FESTIMA festival held in Burkina Faso, celebrating masks from six West African countries.
  • A paper (PDF) suggests that urbanization of African populations has driven a quiet revolution in the agricultural supply chain. Senegalese prepackaged ready to cook meals which started out for the Dakar market can now be found in stores in the US and France.
  • Via Kim Yi Dionne, drones are being tested for delivering HIV blood test samples in Malawi, where road travel is difficult and a diagnosis takes an average of 11 days. (Meanwhile, USAID funded go-pro equipped vultures in Lima, and London is using Pigeons with tiny sensor backpacks for pollution awareness).
  • The creator of one of the most sampled beats in all of hip-hop is a political scientist (10:15 into the video, and more on him here) h/t Jad Abumrad.
  • Korea really wants a Nobel Prize for literature and is trying to industrialize literature production the way it has electronics.

For your next paper, consider a trailer (h/t Catherine Rampell).

Also, from the paper, they apparently didn’t get the grant:

Papernote

 

 

How the GOP defeated David Duke in 1991

Back in 1991, Duke finished second to Democrat Edwin Edwards in the state’s multiparty primary. In the ensuing run-off between Duke and Edwards, GOP incumbent Buddy Roemer—the third-place finisher in the primary—endorsed Edwards, not Duke.

More importantly, so did three-quarters of Roemer’s supporters, who were heavily Republican. Many of them detested Edwards, who had faced multiple allegations of corruption and would eventually serve eight years in jail for bribery and extortion. Indeed, six of ten people who voted for Roemer thought that Edwards was a “crook.”

But the vast majority of them voted for Edwards anyway, swayed by the campaign’s most famous bumper sticker: “Vote for the Crook. It’s Important.” Designed by a Roemer supporter who feared a Duke victory, the sticker became so popular that Edwards affixed one to his own car.

Full article in The New Republic.