One of the most important things while designing an intervention is to try to ensure that your study will have enough statistical power to test the hypotheses you're interested in. Picking a large enough sample is one of a variety of things to increase power. Another is block stratified randomization, of which paired randomization is the extreme.
Old problems, wider tensions? In a momentous two weeks that saw two of the euro area (EA) countries under joint EU/IMF programs have their sovereign debt downgraded to “junk” status, market tensions widened to include two larger economies that together represent almost thirty percent of the whole EA GDP. Is this behavior by the markets truly justified? |
These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.
"NEW forms of information communication technology (ICT) have begun to counter the paradigms of exclusion by empowering the silent, the invisible, the marginalised, the cynical, the passive and the apathetic to engage and act. ICT has transformed advocacy by endowing transnational networks and communities with a greater capacity to research, report, publicise, organise, campaign and develop policy on pertinent issues.
It is clear that there is a gap between professionalised civil society organisations and the constituencies they purport to represent. Currently most traditional civil society organisations use social media as primarily a promotional add-on to their existing work." READ MORE
· A new randomized trial is testing smelly socks as a way to stop malaria!
A glance at the world’s news headlines will tell you all about today’s military wars, terrorist attacks, and territorial disputes. But there is an oft forgotten war occurring everywhere in the world and at all times; the war in our homes.
To paraphrase a worker at Vancouver’s Rape Relief & Women's Shelter: no country in the world, developed or developing, is exempt from the otherwise ordinary men who beat their wives or lovers.
As much advantage as there is to the world of the internet, there are disadvantages too, the main inconvenience being securing privacy. This has become a particular issue of concern when visual images against political reprisal are exposed. Granted, this very exposure can draw world-wide attention and support for a cause or struggle, but often it leaves advocates involved in demonstrations vulnerable to political targeting and exploitation.
Or, à Madagascar, seule 1/5 de la population déclare faire entièrement confiance à la Présidence et les taux sont encore plus faibles pour des institutions comme l’Assemblée nationale (6%) et les Tribunaux (4%).Comment s’attendre à ce que le Gouvernement puisse être performant, à travers sa politique budgétaire, si la vaste majorité des Malgaches ne font confiance ni à leurs institutions, ni à leurs dirigeants ?
How can one go to scale? This is the continuous challenge that confronts all successful social entrepreneurs. 
For Grupo EOZ in Mexico, there were a few key elements behind their answer: a combination of funding, partnerships and publicity, much of it due to its participation in a national TV competition called Iniciativa México.
From August to November 2010, 50 finalists from a pool of 47,000 initial applicants were featured weekly on the national TV competition.
Does a remote double-landlocked Commonwealth of Independent States country have the potential to grow at 8 percent a year for the next 20 years? Call me an optimist, but I have just been to the country and I am convinced it’s true. My lecture to a packed audience in Tashkent on ‘Uzbekistan: New Strategies and Opportunities for Structural Transformation’ was well received. Perhaps they were just being extraordinarily polite hosts, but officials there thought my visit marked a transformation point and at the end of my visit, they said they’d start working on a long-term development vision report together with the World Bank and their think tanks.
The recipe for dynamic growth in a developing country is to tap into latecomer’s advantages by developing industries in accordance with its comparative advantages in a well-functioning market economy with the state playing a facilitating role. In the case of Uzbekistan, the potential of late comer advantages have been enormous in many sectors including the traditional ones, such as carpet, garment and horticulture, and modern ones, such as consumer electronics and cars. I visited a carpet factory in Samarkand. Impressed by the owner’s entrepreneurship and the abundant supply of well-educated, disciplined, wage-competitive workers, I am convinced Uzbekistan can out compete Turkey as the world’s production center of synthetic carpets in the coming years.
I’m currently attending this large conference in lovely Toronto and trying to pack-in as many sessions as possible. A handful of papers have stood out to me – two evaluations of on-going pay-for-performance schemes in health and two methodological papers related to the economics of obesity.
