1.
Looking for breakfast reading? A
new study on improving rural sanitation (specifically investment in hygienic latrines) came out in Science yesterday, comparing (1) community motivation & information campaign, (2) subsidies, and (3) sales agents who gave advice on installation and gave referrals to latrine-building masons. Subsidies directly increased ownership by 22 percentage points (and by 8 percentage points among unsubsidized neighbors). They also reduced open defecation by 14 percentage points. Nothing else made any difference.
4. Pointed questions for Big Data advocates. Morten Jerven asks how big data would overcome sample bias, the need for a benchmark, and the fact that lots of big data are privately owned.
5. Seeking a defense for all that Tweeting & blogging? Asit Biswas & Julian Kirchherr make an argument in the LSE Impact Blog for publications in the popular media counting for tenure:
“Many government leaders now maintain a standing instruction to prepare a two-page summary every morning of what the popular media writes about their policies. In India, this practice was started by Indira Gandhi. Ministers in Canada insist on similar round-ups. Governments in the Middle East even summarize discussions on new social media these days. No decision-maker would ever ask for summaries regarding publications and discussions in academic journals. If academics want to have impact on policy makers and practitioners, they must consider popular media.”
6. What’s the promise of mobile phone surveys? Results reported in a new paper (and a blog post from last month) show how well these surveys reach the poor, who gets excluded, and the sample precision, in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe).
from "Piled Higher and Deeper," by Jorge Cham ( www.phdcomics.com)
- My question is: Did the information campaign include the psychedelic, not-to-be-missed Take the Poo to the Loo video?
- Sample Expressions of Interest and Terms of Reference for IEs
- Sample consent forms, sample questionnaires, and sample enumerator manuals for household surveys, community surveys, health facility surveys, school surveys, and farmer surveys.
- Templates for policy briefs and impact evaluation reports
- And a collection of methodological readings
4. Pointed questions for Big Data advocates. Morten Jerven asks how big data would overcome sample bias, the need for a benchmark, and the fact that lots of big data are privately owned.
“One celebrated Big Data application was the idea of using phones to detect potholes in roads so that road maintenance departments could accurately devote resources to fixing them. But this approach hit a bump of its own when it became apparent that this would mean that road departments were reacting more quickly to fixing problems in neighborhoods with higher smartphone density.”
5. Seeking a defense for all that Tweeting & blogging? Asit Biswas & Julian Kirchherr make an argument in the LSE Impact Blog for publications in the popular media counting for tenure:
“Many government leaders now maintain a standing instruction to prepare a two-page summary every morning of what the popular media writes about their policies. In India, this practice was started by Indira Gandhi. Ministers in Canada insist on similar round-ups. Governments in the Middle East even summarize discussions on new social media these days. No decision-maker would ever ask for summaries regarding publications and discussions in academic journals. If academics want to have impact on policy makers and practitioners, they must consider popular media.”
6. What’s the promise of mobile phone surveys? Results reported in a new paper (and a blog post from last month) show how well these surveys reach the poor, who gets excluded, and the sample precision, in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe).
- Rural women get left out; and there’s large variance in access to phones across countries.
- They use an RCT to test giving a monetary transfer as an incentive to participate, and it didn’t work at all; the same was anecdotally true in the Liberia Economic Impact of the Ebola Crisis survey, also reported here. Time to try a different incentive.
- Innovations for Poverty Action’s weekly links
- Chris Blattman on offering psychotherapy + cash to criminals in Liberia
- Recent Education Links at the Center for Global Development blog
- Recent links I liked from Chris Blattman
from "Piled Higher and Deeper," by Jorge Cham ( www.phdcomics.com)
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