- Nice interview with Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton on Randomized Control Trials and the future of development economics (via Gareth Roberts). Deaton’s book is in my top three list of next books to read. An excerpt from the interview:
TO: Do you think there are promising leads in abolishing world poverty
AD: From RCTs?
TO: From anywhere.
AD: I know what I think which is that we should be thinking much more about politics than about micro-detailed studies. So I’m basically in the same boat as Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson.
- Great source of “For” and “Against” arguments for the “Top 100 Debates“
- Two new (2015) books published by UNESCO: “Investing against evidence: the global state of early childhood care and education” and “Mobile phones & literacy: empowerment in women’s hands; a cross-case analysis of nine experiences“
- EdNext interview with U-Mich’s David Cohen on “Teaching and its Predicaments” – I was interested to hear that he thinks that charter networks could have a large positive impact, and also discusses the possibility of technology, reaffirming the usual refrain: “Technology is no better than the people that use it“
- Nice list of course outlines/readings for those interested in political communication, propaganda, media etc. See Stanford’s “Political Communication Lab“
- Stanford’s Design-School has quite a cool handout “Interview for Empathy” and “Empathy Map“
- One of the people I’ve met here works at the AltSchool in Palo Alto or san Francisco (I can’t remember). This sounds like a pretty fascinating school that’s rethinking how to ‘do’ school. Check out the videos here. It is also $20,000/year and part of a for-profit company.
- What looks like a cool Stanford course: “Building Innovative Brands“
- Stanford anthropologist James Ferguson discusses “The Politics of a Post-Jobs Economy” and highlights the case of cash transfers in South Africa. Here’s the bio: “Most of the left’s politics for most of the last century and a half have been framed around the idea that the principle way we get money is that we work: we trade our labor to businesses that need it. But what happens if we re-think the way we distribute money, and it isn’t about work anymore . . . it’s about your rights as a citizen to a share of the value that the economy’s producing? We’ll discuss the places where this is actually happening, and what it means for our economics and our politics”
- My kind of fashion blog – http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/
Nic Spaull 