Chris Blattman

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IPA’s weekly links

Sting

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Sting

  • After 50 years of conflict, the government of Colombia and the FARC have reached a peace agreement, but it needs to be ratified in a national referendum.
  • Why to test policies, pregnancy edition: In Australia, a ten-year program to discourage teen pregnancy by handing out expensive baby-simulating dolls (e.g. crying during the night) to girls had the opposite effect. The girls were tracked until they were twenty and more girls treatment group than the control group had gotten pregnant and had abortions. (Research article in The Lancet.)
  • You may be getting artificially low t statistics, because different Stata regression commands can handle standard errors differently. (See the response from Stata in the comments for which command to use when.)
  • File under the power of defaults: A paper finds that 20 percent of published findings involving genes have mistakes, because of Excel auto-formatting when thousands of values are copied from computer output into tables. As described in Slate:

SEPT2, short for Septin 2, to “2-Sep.” Likewise, MARCH1—aka Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase—is rendered as “1-Mar.”

  • Preregistration is being accepted for studies of the 2016 election data before they’re released. $2,000 prizes and arrangements with poly sci journals to accept the papers in advance based on the design, not results. (h/t Stephanie Wykstra)
  • Researchers played Muzak for Sting while an fMRI machine scanned his brain, for science. #GrantsThatGotFundedOtherThanYours

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