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...
Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about...
For ‘explication’ of a pre-theoretical concept in terms of a scientifically precise concept a number of criteria is given to the proposed explicatum to (i) be sufficiently similar to the original concept to be recognisably an explication of it; (ii) be more exact or precise, and have clear criteria for application; (iii) play a unified and useful role in the scientific economy (so that it is not just gerrymandered and accidental); and (iv) be enmeshed in conceptual schemes simpler than any other putative explication that also meets criteria (i)–(iii). These are good constraints to keep in mind. However, this model is altogether too compressed: for it presumes that we have an independently good analysis of the scientifically precise concept (in effect, it suggests that scientific...
Sample SelectionIt is always desirable for the sample in a study to be representative of the population of interest, but this is not as important in experiments as in observational studies. The sample should be chosn to be as similar as possible to the relevant population, so it is essential to be able to describe just how the sample was chosen. Another way of combating variablity is to increase the sample size. Larger samples enable us to evaluate effects of interest more precisely. In a designed experiment there may be several conditions, called factors, being controlled by the investigator. The distinction between within subject and between subject comparisons is important. It is not possible to say what the best design is in any given circumstance. The choice of factors to control,...
The Syrian National Agricultural Policy Center (NAPC) recently published the Syrian Agricultural Database 2006 in CD-ROM and Online formats, and in both Arabic and English.
Now in its fifth year the NAPC’s production of the SADB 2006 demonstrates a commitment to accurate, clear, accessible and user-friendly statistics in agriculture. Via the Internet or the distributed CD-ROM, users can access...