Last week Effective-States.org made a quantum leap into the 21st century by leaving html behind and diving head first into a WordPress-powered adventure. All our projects are now included, core researchers have profile pages, and there are tags everywhere (you can find me under PEA, public sector reform and state capacity). Plus we have just launched the new ESID blog, which I will be editing with the help of our communications and editing team. My chief goal is to turn it into a platform for online commentary on the politics of development (guest posts are welcome!), as well as a window into how a research organization actually works, what the research process looks like in the months or years between proposal and peer review. Stay tuned.
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Pythodology: Experiments
It’s not J-PAL, but it is still one of the greatest examples of social science methodology:
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Spy-proofing the internet
NSA whistleblower/traitor/hero/crazy person Edward Snowden made an appearance at the TED conference that took place this week in Vancouver, Canada. He was interviewed by organizer Chris Anderson and even exchanged some words with father-of-the-web Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Check out the video, and maybe follow it up by reading about what it would take to make the internet spy-proof in an era in which your Amazon browsing habits are not encrypted.
[Suggested reading: Cryptonomicon (1999), by Neal Stephenson]
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The legacy of Alan Turing
British chancellor George Osborne announced yesterday that the government of the United Kingdom will found an Alan Turing Institute dedicated to research on big data. Universities and other organizations can bid for the £42 million, 5-year grant to establish the Institute. A public gesture which is nonetheless small compensation for the government’s persecution of a man who played a central role in the Allied victory in World War II.
I recently borrowed Umberto Eco‘s classic Foucault’s Pendulum from the University of Manchester central library. It’s a 2001 hard-bound copy in pretty good shape; the stamp sheet only registers 7 loans between 2005 and 2007 (who knows how many times the book has been loaned since the library went digital). But what’s interesting about this book is that one of the few past readers made a handful of pencil annotations on the margins. The first one, on page 60, is a statement of stylistic frustration: Eco writes “My uncle and aunt from *** arrived that evening”, and the reader has drawn an arrow pointing at the asterisks and written a question oozing frustration next to it: “Why do they do this?” This tells me that the previous reader of Foucault’s Pendulum was an introspective person, perhaps a truth seeker with little patience for literary flare. But it is the second annotation that really struck me.
Via BoingBoing I have come across this little gem in OpenCulture: “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction“. Given that the mediocre-to-appalling quality of academic writing seems to be a neverending concern, I think that it may be useful to consider Hemingway’s tips are actually applicable to how we write in the social sciences.
Last month I gave a presentation on ESID‘s project on political economy analysis at the workshop “Making Politics Practical II: Development Politics and the Changing Aid Environment“, which was held at the University of Birmingham. The presentation introduced my work with David Hulme on the organizational challenges that the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development face in introducing political analysis into their operational work. Thanks to the folks at Birmingham you can listen to it right here:
You can find the other presentations here.