IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

ReconBW

  • The idea of a social safety net that guarantees a “basic income” has been gathering interest. The Dutch city of Utrecht is working with academics to set up an experiment comparing different forms, and the Silicon Valley tech incubator Y-Combinator is seeking someone to work full time on a five-year experiment giving a group of people in the U.S. a basic income (deadline for applications is Feb 15).
  • Want to start blogging about your research? The LSE impact of social sciences blog has six steps for turning your journal article into a good blog post.
  • China will be building its first overseas military base in Djibouti.
  • NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast this week speaks with NYU’s Oeindrila Dube about her RCT with Cilliers & Siddiqi looking at reconciliation programs and hidden costs in Sierra Leone.
  • RLetters is an open tool for content analyzing large databases of journals.
  • I just started using the Grammarly browser plugin for correcting grammar – it’s found and recommended fixes for a bunch of mistakes in this post already (its/it’s types of things).

And this might melt your heart, Syrian refugee kids sledding for the first time with the Canadian family that sponsored them. Classic demonstration of soft powder diplomacy.

(source)

16 Responses

  1. Can someone please tell Y Combinator that they need to set up a call for proposals (or similiar) and have some people help them select the candidates? I know it’s not very start-up-y, but they admit themselves that they don’t know much about this kind of research… Many readers of this blog would make great peer reviewers.

  2. Only the less developed parts of Syria don’t have snow. And where are the German families sponsoring Ukrainian migrants?

    Yes, this is soft-power diplomacy for the Islamic State and Poroshenko and against the only government which can credibly lead Syria and its primary backer.