Group items tagged

There's a form of casual violence that kills 1.25 million people a year (3 times more than malaria) and injures up to 50ODI roads cover million more. 90% of the deaths are of poor people (usually men) in poor countries. No guns are involved and there's lots of things governments can do to fix it. But you'll hardly ever read about it in the development literature, although road safety did make it into the Sustainable Development Goals (as did everything else, it has to be said) - targets 3.6 and 11.2 for SDG geeks. So hats off to ODI (again) for not only painstakingly building the case for taking action on a major cause of death and misery in poor countries (see below), but also exploring the politics and institutions that so far have prevented governments from taking action.

Citizen-generated data is especially important for women's rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women's rights issues means data isn't gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state. Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.

"Between 2000 and 2015, nearly every African country improved childhood nutrition, especially in reducing stunted growth caused by malnutrition" .... " national averages do not tell the full story. In Kenya, for example, rates of wasting in children under 5 were below 6% on average nationwide in 2015, yet in certain regions plagued by several years of poor rains, crop failure and disease outbreaks, estimated levels of wasting reach as high as 28%."... "Such fine-grained insight brings tremendous responsibility to act. It shows governments, international agencies and donors exactly where to direct resources and support."..."This shows how crucial it is to invest in data. Data gaps undermine our ability to target resources, develop policies and track accountability. Without good data, we're flying blind. If you can't see it, you can't solve it."

Interesting discussion of a contentious issue related to the idea of a 'basic income' (but here, in a development context). Martin Ravallion (former Chief Economist of the World Bank, now at CGD) published a useful paper this week asking exactly this question. As he says, there's no simple answer - which is why the question is so interesting. Both 'the right to work' and 'the right to income' aim to secure a more fundamental right: freedom from poverty. Workfare has a long history, notably in India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) guarantees (in theory) up to 100 days work per year, paid at a minimum wage, to anyone who requests it. Cash transfers (often with conditions) have expanded enormously in recent years, while the hot topic of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has advocates across the political spectrum. Which of these approaches is most cost-effective? Ravallion sets out the arguments clearly.

Duncan Green (an advisor for Oxfam), writes a great blog on use of evidence in international development and aid. This one (a guest post) is really interesting on how we measure inequality... 'You would think a question like 'Is inequality going up or down?' would be relatively easy to answer, but sadly it is not. At Oxfam we have identified the growing gap between rich and poor and the impact of high inequality as a serious crisis. But how serious is it really?

In this case, because pancreatic cancer is relatively rare, the impressive-sounding 50% reduction doesn't amount to very much. According to the American Cancer Society, a 60-year-old man has a 0.41% (1 in 241) chance of developing pancreatic cancer during the next ten years. (Risk varies greatly with age and is much lower at younger ages.) So cutting that risk in half might bring it down to about 0.2% (1 in 480). It's a 50% drop, sure, but the risk was already very small to begin with. In this case, it's more helpful to news and health care consumers to describe it as a 0.2 percentage point reduction. And then there are the harms of regular aspirin use; the Yale news release that the tweet links to doesn't mention any. But taking aspirin regularly isn't a harmless intervention - far from it. It's well known that taking aspirin every day can cause serious bleeding in the gastrointestinal system and, less frequently, in the brain. That's why guidelines for aspirin use in cardiovascular disease prevention don't recommend it for people at low risk of a heart attack. The potential benefits may be outweighed by the risks of a serious bleed.

This week, Hannah Devlin speaks with some of the statistical vigilantes who are scouring datasets to identify cases of fraud and poor scientific practice. These include the consultant anaesthetist John Carlisle, from Torbay Hospital in Devon, who details his role in the Fujii scandal. Hannah also speaks to a PhD student from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Michèle Nuijten, about software she has helped develop to "spell-check" statistics found in psychology papers. And finally, we hear from the University of Cambridge's Winton professor for the public understanding of risk, David Spiegelhalter, who is also president of the Royal Statistical Society, about the dangers of statistical malpractice.

Scientists have typically justified excluding female animals from experiments - even when studying conditions that are more likely to affect women - on the basis that fluctuating hormones would render the results uninterpretable. However, according to Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University, in Boston, it is entirely unjustified by scientific evidence, which shows that, if anything, the hormones and behaviour of male rodents are less stable than those of females. Shansky is calling for stricter requirements to include animals of both sexes in research, saying the failure to do so has led to the development of drugs that work less well in women.

EVERYONE HAS A THEORY about who's to blame for the housing shortage that's driving up prices and chasing Bay Area families out of the region. A new poll offers surprising insights into where most of us point the finger: not at the government officials who control what homes are built where, but at the tech companies that have flooded this region with jobs and the real estate developers trying to maximize profits.

The more serious problem with California's law is one of effect size. Health, and cancer, aren't binary. Consumers can't just be concerned with whether a danger exists; they also need to be concerned about the magnitude of that risk. Even if there's a statistically significant risk between huge quantities of coffee and some cancer (and that's not proven), it's very, very small. Cigarettes have a clear and easily measured negative impact on people's health. Acrylamide, especially the acrylamide in coffee, isn't even close. Warning labels should be applied when a danger is clear, a danger is large and a danger is avoidable. It's not clear that, with respect to acrylamide, any of these criteria are met. It's certainly not the case regarding coffee. Whatever the intentions of Proposition 65, this latest development could do more harm than good.

BBC guidelines on reporting statistics - excellent resource for AEI! http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/guidelines/editorialguidelines/pdfs/ReportingStatistics.pdf The BBC "accepts recommendations [...] to improve statistical training for BBC journalists and to ensure that journalists are better placed to challenge statistical claims made by people in public office...." It also has "plans to create a 'hub' for data journalism, recruit a new head of statistics and develop guidance based on 'guidelines from, for example, the Royal Statistical Society and others'."

'Killer facts' are those punchy, memorable, headline-grabbing statistics that make reports special. They cut through the technicalities to fire people up about changing the world. They are picked up and repeated endlessly by the media and politicians. They are known as 'killer' facts because if they are really effective, they 'kill off' the opposition's arguments. The right killer fact can have more impact than the whole of a well-researched report.

As the author of this FactCheck, I was asked to review the facts on Australia's foreign aid spending from the Menzies era to 2016-17. Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister from 1949 to 1966, which is the Menzies era for present purposes. (Menzies also served as prime minister from 1939 to 1941.) I examined the evidence for and against this statement: Aid was at its highest under Menzies, at 0.5% … when per capita income was much lower. - World Vision Australia Chief Advocate Tim Costello, quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald, December 28, 2016. I found the statement to be incorrect, strictly interpreted, though Costello's broader point is valid. The ratio of Australia's aid to its gross national income has never exceeded 0.48%, and that level was achieved slightly after the conclusion of the Menzies era, in the financial year 1967-68. Below, I explain how I arrived at this conclusion, providing more detail than could be accommodated in the FactCheck itself.

When it comes to inequality, a growing body of evidence shows that people across countries underestimate the size of the gap between the rich and poor, including their wages. This can undermine support for policies to tackle inequality and even lead to apathy that consolidates the gap. But how exactly are existing perceptions of inequality measured by social scientists?

There is a black hole in our knowledge of women and girls around the world. They are often missing from official statistics, and areas of their lives are ignored completely. So campaigners say - but what needs to be done?