There is something Orwellian about last week’s World Bank announcement of a new poverty line, and the Bank’s entire effort to categorize the poor, that I found moderately disturbing. This top-down attempt to box the problem and then convince ourselves that, because of some statistical shenanigans, there are now more (or fewer) people living in poverty is the kind of pointless navel gazing that I want us to avoid getting trapped into at Acumen Fund.
We have had internal discussions about this, which inevitably end with the realization that we will know poverty when we see it. What’s more, we need an honest check against moving too far up market - thereby neglecting our charitable intent and our aim of trying to serve the poor, who we define in terms of lack of income, lack of...
The UK's Research Information Network (RIN) just published a report on a project to investigate the publication and quality assurance of research data. The report 'To Share or not to Share: Publication and Quality Assurance of Research Data Outputs', finds that realising the full potential of data requires further progress in data management policies and practice.The report argues that "research findings in digital form can [nowadays] be easily moved around, duplicated, handed to others, worked on with new tools, merged with other data, divided up in new ways, stored in vast volumes and manipulated by supercomputers if their nature so demands. There is now widespread recognition that data are a valuable long-term resource and that sharing them and making them publicly-available is...
from Reuters Alert NetWASHINGTON, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Anti-poverty groups the ONE Campaign and DATA, both co-founded by rock star Bono, will merge in the United States to form a single organization in tackling poverty, especially in Africa, officials said on Monday.The new organization will be known as ONE in the United States and will include the ONE Campaign's 2.4 million members, a U.S.-based project launched in 2004 to build citizen support to fight disease and extreme poverty.Outside the United States, DATA -- or Debt, AIDS, Trade Africa -- will retain its name and focus on debt cancellation, AIDS treatment and more effective development assistance."ONE and DATA are two organizations with the same outrage: extreme, stupid poverty in the 21st century makes no sense when the resources...