David Roodman on Microfinance
Center for Global Development Senior FellowDavid Roodmantalks about his latest book‘Due Diligence, An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance’.
David discusses the evidence surrounding the effects of microfinance on the lives of the world’s poor and its implications on aid donors, within the context of his book’s key findings. David then goes on to speak about what he himself has learned about the roles of different kinds of evidence, along with the unusual way in which he used open blogs to guide and inform the writing of his book.
This Graph Is Disastrous for Print and Great for Facebook—or the Opposite!
If you work anywhere near media, you’ll want to take a long look at this graph. It tells you where Americans direct our attention (in BLUE) and where advertisers pay money to capture our attention (in RED).
- Takeaway #1: We still love TV.
- Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.
- Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.
According to this chart — adapted from a Mary Meeker slideshow excerpted by Bill Gross — we spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print. But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile. Either the eyeballs are moving faster than the advertisers, who will eventually stop paying for print … or the ad teams don’t think a minute spent around mobile ads is worth a minute spend around print ads. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.
We can take this chart in a lot of directions. Could print see another mass exodus of money? Is mobile advertising about to explode?
Source: The Atlantic
The Fibonacci Sequence As Seen in Flowers gallery by Environmental Graffiti is a math and history lesson wrapped in a pretty package of flowers.
Source: environmentalgraffiti.com
A former black metal band decides to cover 16 obscure psychedelic tracks from the 1960’s. What should we expect? One of the best albums of the year, of course! Another masterpiece from the wolves…
Hans Rosling was speaker at the SKAGEN Funds’ New Year’s Conference 2012 - “Poor to Rich - in the G20World”. He is a Swedish Professor of international health at the Karolinska Institute. He co-founded the Gapminder Foundation which promotes a fact-based world view by converting international statistics into moving, interactive graphics. Using animations of global trends Hans Rosling lectures about past and contemporary economic, social and environmental changes in the world. In 1993 he was one of the initiators of Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden.
Behavioral Macro: Big, Fat Cognitive Illusion (and all of us are more Greek than we think)
Joe Wiesenthal at Business Insider put out a quick post this morning on the Pew Research Center study, “European Unity on the Rocks”, released today. It is an eye opening read.
To start with, it strongly supports the working hypothesis of many that the political forces now unleashed in…
Source: markdow
Creating Order Amidst Civil War
A new article by Paul Staniland, professor at the University of Chicago:
Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, this article offers a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution of territorial control and the level of cooperation between states and insurgents. Orders range from collusion and shared sovereignty to spheres of influence and tacit coexistence to clashing monopolies and guerrilla disorder. Examples from contemporary South Asian conflicts illustrate these concepts, which are scalable and portable across contexts. Scholars need to think more creatively about the political-military arrangements that emerge and evolve during war. A key policy implication is that there are many ways of forging stability without creating a counterinsurgent Leviathan.
You can download it here (ungated). Highly recommended!
Source: themonkeycage.org
An Audience with Neil Armstrong
From CPA Australia:
In this four part series the first man to walk on the moon, gives a personal commentary on Apollo 11’s historic lunar landing, his thoughts on leadership and taking risks to innovate for the future.
If you’re interested in that marvelous expedition, you must see the videos. They’re really amazing.
Creating maps with TileMill
From the always interesting FlowingData blog:
TileMill is a tool that makes it easy to create interactive maps. Soon they will be adding some new features that will treat maps more like images in terms of modifying the look and feel. This will allow you to apply blending to polygons and GIS data.
I can envision many different types of data being drawn with blending techniques as opposed to simply flow diagrams and the like. It will be interesting to see what comes out of these new features.
Some beautiful maps made with TileMill by Aj Ashton:
You can check their website here. The software is open source and it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. Give it a try!
Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of São Paulo. 
