Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.
- A positive milestone, no new cases of polio detected anywhere in Africa for a year (h/t Elettra). In Slate, a Gates Foundation doctor and epidemiologist explains the painstaking process of polio surveillance.
- WIRED has an interesting feature about the business of ex-pat disaster rescue, focusing on the Nepal earthquake.
- Vox reports from the Effective Altruism conference at Google that a bunch of White male computer scientists decided humanity’s best charity investment is in …. computer science.
- The picture above comes from some amazing (and moving) data storytelling by the Tampa Bay Times on the racial segregation and academic failure of a group of Florida schools.
- NPR explains the wisdom of markets and pricing by asking 17,000 people to guess the weight of one cow named Penelope. The New York Times is letting you play the behavioral version where you win by guessing what other people are guessing.
And SMBC comics explains economists’ plan to fix the world in one cartoon.
2 Responses
RT @cblatts: IPA’s weekly links http://t.co/X8s6aYRTGc
That Vox piece was hugely unrepresentative of the EA Global conference and the EA movement as a whole. It was very confusing to read (as someone who reads most extant EA blogs and Tumblrs, and someone who ran an EA group in college). This review sums up the flaws rather well w/r/t what EAs care about:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/13/figureground-illusions/
As for the “white men” thing… Matthews (I think accidentally) covered up the contributions of a huge number of people:
http://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/126462072246/hey-have-you-seen-matthews-vox-piece-about-the
I’ve enjoyed past articles by Matthews, but for some reason, he missed the mark here (on pretty much the only issue I’d consider myself “expert” on).