MIT's [Massachusetts Institute of Technology ]Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a network of 59 affiliated professors around the world who are united by their use of Randomized Evaluations (REs) to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation. J-PAL's mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence. Their current work in the Education…
Posts By Me
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has put together another engaging interactive that personalises the 2006 Australian Census data for the user in an interesting and very visual way. [The 2011 Census in Australia was just completed in August ] The site is called "Spotlight" and takes some of the data from the last Census [2006] and shows just a few…
Another very nice piece of work visualising data. Visualizing.org is displaying some animated age-pyramids that tell a unique story of the challenges of growth in the coming decades. From the site: On October 31, 2011, demographers at the United Nations reported that the earth’s population had reached 7 billion. That number marks an increase of 1 billion in…
The disturbing scenes in London over the last few days bring in to a stark contrast the competing challenges of the immediate, short-term need for social order and the extended, long-term need for social inclusion. There are many thousands of pictures and words that will be written about this London summer. Jonathon Freedland, writing in the Guardian says: The soul…
One can't help but wonder if the the lack of agreement between the Democratic and Republican parties over the proposed extension of the US debt ceiling is anything more than grand political theatre, although this time it appears to be a different ball-game with the growing role and influence of the "tea-party" members. Perhaps more telling is the role of…
My research [Masters] in comparative education and equity is leading me to many interesting and challenging topics. One of hundreds... "What are the long-term effects of class sizes on the achievement gap? In essence, this paper suggests that findings on the social distribution of the immediate and lasting benefits of small classes have been mixed. Link: JSTOR - American Journal…
A collection of vocational education and training (VET) related research and policy documents from various regions of the world are now available online on VOCED, including many of the older print-based copies. VOCED is the international research database with over 35,000 documents available. Link: New international documents available on VOCED.
Some more wonderful musings by Kevin Kelly on specialisation and the growth of long-tail niches. These trends do have profound impacts for markets, education and most notably, Government policy; in fact the impact is and will be felt in all walks of life. I hope to write more about this later. Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first…