Chris Blattman

Search
Close this search box.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Have a research idea on financial services for the poor? IPA (with a grant from the Gates Foundation) is looking to fund new research (deadline is August 2).
  • Bloomberg Businessweek had a special issue explaining to us novices how code works (at a non-technical level) in one long article. It reads almost like an anthropology of coding.
  • The famous Stanford Prison Experiment assigned average people to what was supposed to be a prison simulation, but quickly grew out of control. It is considered one of the progenitors of modern research ethics rules, and now is portrayed in a (very dramatic-looking) movie, trailer here.
  • The US Supreme court upheld the healthcare law, apparently citing, in part, the work of a rising second year Ph.D. student. (So if you were having a good week…)
  • A newly published AEJ Applied paper reports on a randomized controlled trial of the One Laptop Per Child XO computer with 1000 students in Peru. There were no impacts found on academic achievement or cognitive skill, and lower teacher reported student effort (published paper, ungated version here).
  • Three new cases of Ebola reported in Sierra Leone (h/t Tom Murphy)
  • If you missed it, there’s a good article in Foreign Affairs by the IRC’s David Miliband and Ravi Gurumurthy, on how to make aid more efficient and effective, which Chris blogged about and probably summarized best on Twitter:

Amazing but true: “be more efficient” and “stop doing things that don’t work” are revolutionary statements in aid

 

And from Reddit via Max Roser, as you can see, people are divided about 50-50 on cutting off the Y-axis:Tunkating Y Axis

 

News producers agree:

 

Bush-tax cuts

 

Why We Fight - Book Cover
Subscribe to Blog