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air pollution

10 March 2017

Posted on March 10, 2017 Leave a Comment

Wild, Booth and Valters’ “Putting theory into practice: How DFID is doing development differently” should have been 5 pages long so more people would read it. The ODI authors spent one year helping DFID change its practices and they document the experience in this paper. At the programme level, these changes look like moving from giving grants to CSOs to using DFID’s political savviness to help CSOs strategically connect with governments, parliaments and the media; or moving from financing the construction of a water and sanitation rural infrastructure to a pay-by-result system that pushes district authorities to construct and maintain the infrastructure. That means a problem driven approach with an emphasis on DFID’s facilitation role and the use of ‘everyday political analysis’. At the process and procedure level, these changes look like distilling mountains of guidelines into a handful of principles, smart rules or top tips.

I spent my Tuesday lunch break listening to NYU CIC’s Sarah Cliffe give an overview of conflict-related trends. Here is my summary. Four main trends: (i) there are more and more protracted crises, and humanitarian work has become development work; (ii) following a drop in international wars after WWII, conflicts and crises are increasingly internationalized again; (iii) multiple and combined sources of risks (eg populism, population growth, resource scarcities) make crises and conflicts harder to solve; (iv) populations are losing confidence in the ability of national and international entities to solve conflicts. Four underlying factors to these trends: (a) decades of inattention to inequalities; (b) lack of investment in shared identities; (c) shifting geopolitical patterns; (d) innovations in ICT. Three big picture solutions: 1. Strengthen the humanitarian-development continuum for better prevention; 2. Join the political/security part of the international system with its humanitarian-development part; 3. Rethink economic and migration models. I found this helpful in structuring my thoughts.

My graph this week is from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s new “Inclusive internet index”. Commissioned by Facebook’s Internet.org, the index codes four enablers of internet inclusion for 75 countries: availability, affordability, relevance, readiness. At the aggregate level, no big surprise in terms of who comes first. But breaking down results by country or enabler gives less expected results. Malaysia comes first and Chile fourth for readiness with Kazakhstan and Argentina at the 10th and 11th places. And Nepal, Tanzania and Senegal have the highest overall rankings of low income countries (56th, 57th, 58th).

 

 

My quote this week is from Anthony Heyes in “Air pollution brings down the stock market”: “Animals that breathe polluted air fight more than those that breathe cleaner air. People perform less well across a variety of tasks on polluted days than on less polluted days. Peach pickers pick fewer peaches. Baseball umpires are worse at calling balls and strikes. Call center employees field fewer calls.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: air pollution, conflict, inequality, internet, practice

25 November 2015

Posted on November 25, 2015 Leave a Comment

Martin Ford’s “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the threat of a jobless future” just won the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award (last’s year winner was Piketty). I read this book while preparing the last issue of Horizons where we looked at the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the future of work (and education needs). This is a well written and compelling book with a lot of killer facts: “global shipments of robots increased by more than 60% between 2000 and 2012” (p. 3); “The percentage of news articles that will be written algorithmically within 15 years: over 90%” (p. 85); “42 % of researchers in human-level AI believe a thinking machine will arrive by 2030” (p. 231). Unlike other publications on the topic, it is not too technology-optimistic. It shows that the new phase of automation brought by AI threatens all job types including white-collar ones. Ford argues that new machine-augmented jobs will not compensate for job losses: “While human-machine collaboration jobs will certainly exist, they seem likely to be relatively few in number and often short-lived. They may also be un-rewarding or even dehumanizing” (p. 126). He also claims that investments in education and training, which helped absorb previous technological revolutions, will not be sufficient to adjust to the AI disruption. His core policy recommendation is the adoption of a basic income guarantee that he argues could be supported by liberals seeking to promote equity as well as pragmatic conservatives seeking an “insurance against adversity”. In short: a good read with a broadening fan-club.

Yang and Chou’s “Impacts of being downwind of a coal-fired power plant on infant health at birth” shows that pregnant women living downwind from a coal-fired power plant increase their likelihood of having low birth rate babies by 42%, and this is true when they live as far as 40 miles away from the plant. This is one of the latest scientific reminder of the highly concerning effects of air pollution on human health, and that of children in particular. Two months ago, a study estimated that outdoor air pollution coming from different sources (e.g., transportation, heating, dust, fires) was responsible for 3.3 million deaths every year globally, a number predicted to double by mid-century. This is to be added to the 3.5 million people dying every year from indoor air pollution. These alarming facts and prospects are for a large part affecting Asia where some of our colleagues, e.g., Mongolia CO, working with partners and leading experts are identifying high impact interventions to reduce the impact of air pollution on children’s health.

My interactive tool this week is Fengler’s “What is my place in the world population?” which gives you a vivid picture of where you (or anybody else you choose, like a child you are working for) fits in the global population dynamics: How many people are older/younger than you? When will you be the 5/6/7th billion person in the world? When are you expected to die? If you lived in another country, how long will you be expected to live? I would lose 10 years if I were in Paraguay, 20 in Cote d’Ivoire, and gain 2 in Japan.

An important quote which has been attributed to many, including Benjamin Franklin, Cicero, Marie Curie, and Mark Twain, is in fact originally from Blaise Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales [1657]: “I have made this [letter] longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: AI, air pollution, book review, demographics

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