Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

• The world’s first Dengue Fever vaccine has been approved for use in Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines.
• The women traders of Ghana’s markets were once so powerful they were targeted by the military (h/t Jeffrey Paller).
• Nathan Yau has a list of best data visualizations of 2015, some standouts:
  • The Fallen of WWII uses beautiful motion and animation to show how many died or were wounded in different parts of the war. It’s incredibly elegant and advances with narration but lets you pause and interact with the data.
  • A visual intro to machine learning is also very impressive.
• How Uganda became a leader in end of life care (h/t Rohit Naimpally).
• Contrary to many predictions, a new working paper finds the influx of 2 million refugees to Turkey did not lower wages (there were effects on employment, and a slight rise in housing prices, about .2%).
• Dan Ariely and New York Public Radio’s Only Human podcast are running an experiment anybody can join to better stick to new year’s exercise resolutions. Sign up and you’ll be randomly assigned to a strategy and sent tips for how to use it.

And this raccoon’s cotton candy is a good demonstration of what happens to that great finding once you add in the covariates.