Twenty-odd years ago, this was Pablo Escobar’s town, with an annual homicide rate that peaked at 381 per 100,000. In New York City that would add up to an almost inconceivable 32,000 murders a year.

But Colombia’s second city has lately become a medical and business center with a population of 3.5 million and a budding tourist industry, its civic pride buoyed by the new public buildings and squares, and exemplified by an efficient and improbably immaculate metro and cable car system. Linking rich with poor neighborhoods, spurring private development, the metro, notwithstanding shrieks elsewhere in Colombia over its questionable construction cost, is for residents of Medellín a shared symbol of democratic renewal. Even on the rush-hour train I took the other morning, crowds stepped aside to let a cleaning woman with a mop and bucket scrub the floor [...]

The city has made big strides, after all, using cutting-edge architecture as a catalyst. But here young architects press for yet more creative solutions. They take for granted as their jobs both formal innovation and also the humanitarian role of architectural activism, leapfrogging an older generation of architects and others who have remained fixated on eye-catching buildings to grace the covers of glossy magazines.

Interactively explore energy and material intensities in US cities

prototype implementation of a RESTful, interoperable, Internet-scale microblogging protocol

Companies are allowed to use almost any ingredient they wish. The U.S. government doesn't review the safety of products before they're sold. Our staff scientists compare the ingredients on personal care product labels and websites to information in nearly 60 toxicity and regulatory databases.

Please don't advocate learning to code just for the sake of learning how to code. Or worse, because of the fat paychecks. Instead, I humbly suggest that we spend our time learning how to …

Research voraciously, and understand how the things around us work at a basic level.
Communicate effectively with other human beings.

projected during La Fura dels Baus openning show "Tempo de Encontros"

adds motion to a web site based on the current wind conditions at a place of your choosing

we're trying to create games that express unique emotions and push the boundaries of what we think games can do

on game design, bias, flow from balancing challenge vs. reward, the power of failure, just-in-time vs. just-in-case learning, social engineering, game-as-service vs. game-as-product, focus on at-risk youth, unqualified "accidental game publishers" vs. game developers & need for national public gaming initiative;

development method: define audience, understand context and desired impact, then select platform, create financial returns, execute, assessment (embedded) Q: what if you took [addictive design of Farmville etc] and applied it to eduction?

@35:00 Q&A re: influence on DoE, 21st century skills, "broken school" channel, NCLB, most tech and game companies are "irresponsible...you have to understand the teachers' needs, you have to reduce the friction for them to adopt [new technologies]"; NCLB, common core standards, Bill Gates' influence on assessment models around 21st century skills, DoE funding vehicles (SBIRs)
@42:00 gaming and addiction, violence, parental engagement and co-play
@47:00 re:business & philanthropy "...as publishers we do the same thing as we'd do as investors. They're two separate vehicles and we don't try to mix the two. There are companies that make money and then give a certain percentage away. When those companies scale, there's tension. If there's a tax on [the business], it's hard to scale. So we tend to focus the alignment in the core product itself vs. making money here and giving money there."
@57:00 part of the reason games like Flow, Flower and Cloud are successful is because all the major gaming platforms have online, downloadable services that enable short-form content that can be experimental
@62:00 on fablabs

The discovery of the Higgs boson would be a gratifying verification of present theory, but it will not point the way to a more comprehensive future theory. We can hope, as was the case with the Bevatron, that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the LHC will be something quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it’s hard to see how it could take us all the way to a final theory, including gravitation. So in the next decade, physicists are probably going to ask their governments for support for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed. That is going to be a very hard sell [...]

One thing that killed the SSC was an undeserved reputation for over-spending. There was even nonsense in the press about spending on potted plants for the corridors of the administration building. Projected costs did increase, but the main reason was that, year by year, Congress never supplied sufficient funds to keep to the planned rate of spending. This stretched out the time and hence the cost to complete the project. Even so, the SSC met all technical challenges, and could have been completed for about what has been spent on the LHC, and completed a decade earlier.

Spending for the SSC had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance. Physicists can point to technological spin-offs from high-energy physics, ranging from synchotron radiation to the World Wide Web. For promoting invention, big science in this sense is the technological equivalent of war, and it doesn’t kill anyone. But spin-offs can’t be promised in advance [...]

the Museum of Hellenistic Alexandria; the House of Wisdom of ninth-century Baghdad; the great observatory in Samarkand built in the 1420s by Ulugh Beg; Uraniborg, Tycho Brahe’s observatory, built on an island given by the king of Denmark for this purpose in 1576; the Greenwich Observatory in England; and later the US Naval Observatory.

In the nineteenth century rich private individuals began to spend generously on astronomy. The third Earl of Rosse used a huge telescope called Leviathan in his home observatory to discover that the nebulae now known as galaxies have spiral arms. In America observatories and telescopes were built carrying the names of donors such as Lick, Yerkes, and Hooker, and more recently Keck, Hobby, and Eberly [...]

The International Space Station was sold in part as a scientific laboratory, but nothing of scientific importance has come from it [...] the Space Station had the great advantage that it cost about ten times more than the SSC, so that NASA could spread contracts for its development over many states. Perhaps if the SSC had cost more, it would not have been canceled.

Q: Was there something about fin de siécle Vienna that nurtured ferment across intellectual and cultural life?
A: It was a synthesis of many strands, and the reason the ferment occurred is because Emperor Franz Joseph lifted travel restrictions throughout the empire and many of the young and gifted came to Vienna. That explosion in the arts, science, music, economics and philosophy occurred as a result of this influx of talent. The view of the human mind that we now hold in 2012 derives from Vienna 1900, [we're not rational creatures that the enlightenment thought].
Q: How can the lens of neuroscience help us understand something as ineffable as art?
A: Alois Riegl, a great art historian in Vienna in 1900, drew attention to the important problem of “the beholder’s share”—how the viewer responds to a work of art. The artist tries to give you the illusion that you’re seeing the real world in three dimensions in natural color when he’s actually working all the time on two dimensions and with artificial color. To figure out how the brain creates this illusion is a fantastically interesting problem. Two of his students, [art historians] Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, pointed out that what the brain does is recreate the work of art. When you look at a work of art, you’re undergoing the creative challenge that the artist undergoes in making the picture. It’s of a lesser magnitude, but the information coming in through the eyes is incomplete, and you have to fill it in with built-in rules of what is possible in the world combined with previous experiences that allow you to situate this correctly. This requires an immense degree of creativity. They realized the brain is a creativity machine. Subsequent neuroscience has absolutely confirmed that.

You’re in Queens now, pal, borough of immigrants. And this park, site of both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs but faded since those heady days, is now their backyard. Sprawling south from CitiField, it lies within walking distance for the Chinese of Flushing, the Mexicans and Ecuadoreans of Corona, the Colombians of Jackson Heights.

Things happen here in their own informal way, and this is what makes an overlooked park one of New York City’s glorious public spaces.

An open-source, privacy-enhancing web browser for iOS

@5:58 Some details really matter. Some details provide windows into unchartered realms of reality.
@12:25 We're used to physics giving us definitive explanations for the features we observe, but the point is if the feature you're observing can and does take on a wide variety of different values across the wider landscape of reality, then seeking one explanation for a particular value is simply misguided
@19:33 We are living through a remarkably privileged era when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration. It appears it may not always be that way.

participant list: http://watsoninstitute.org/euro/?page_id=159

[final segment Q: "Will Europe survive?"]

Kathleen McNamara: "...Yes...but it won't be pretty, and we should not be surprised."

Vivien Ann Schmidt: "...Yes, but not happily...It's conservative politics...We're still without leadership...There's just a bad discourse...This is codependency..."

Wade Jacoby: "...I have the irrepressible impression that we're going to run Goodhart's Law on a massive scale. Every indicator that you can think of to select as a proxy for some kind of good performance, when it becomes public that that's what the commission and the council are counting, will immediately be gamed by a variety of market actors, and those indicators will lose whatever information value they might have once had...Can it all survive the strain? Not in its current form and probably not in the form now envisioned for the future by the council and the commission, and not for lack of trying..."

Jonathan Hopkin of LSE: "...how do we turn voters into constituencies...People go out and vote and they think they're having some impact. Of course they're not, but if they go out and vote they have to think they have some kind of influence."

Peter Hall: "[Yes...there's a resilience in the EU that no one should discount. In minimalist terms, the EU will survive. But can we imagine a feasible path in which the EU is once again prosperous over the next 10-20 years? A weak path, yes. The EU at the moment has no growth strategy. Structural reform is not a growth strategy. Why is the EU clinging to it? Because there is no alternative currently. An alternative will require intense intergovernmental cooperation. Is this politically feasible? What does that mean? Someone else will cover the adjustment costs. We have to look at national electorates. The direction of politicization is toward radicalism. This is very worrisome. What will the EU look like going forward? I think we have to be hopeful, but I think we ought to be very, very worried.]"

Mark Blyth: ends with a 3-minute wrap-up of all the panels, if the Euro can survive all that, it can survive anything, but the EU and the Euro are at odds, fundamentally, and when you destroy trust between people, you destroy everything (implication: requires cultural and social approaches, not just technocratic and political ones; the burden is on people to discard their old ways of looking at themselves)

...to honor and reflect upon the many lives lost throughout "Operation Enduring Freedom" in and around Afghanistan. Each note represents a life, arranged by month and orchestrated by nationality, using only the fundamental notes and harmonics of the symphony orchestra.

Zaarly will help you find anything, whether you need a local caterer or a housekeeper, a used couch or a lawnmower – you ask and we automagically bring offers to you from people nearby.

Political art tends to protest, critique, or revolutionize. Banksy’s graffiti, Orwell’s allegories, and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin intended to motivate political action with clear confrontation. Modern art is often too elite and esoteric for the public.

But Enemy Kitchen is modern political art at its most accessible, open, and delicious.

Asimina, a 70-year-old pensioner, gathers laundry on the terrace of her home with the ancient Acropolis seen in the background in Athens

(need Silverlight)

@5:55 One of the things I want to talk about in this book is not just challenging incumbent interests, but also challenging incumbent language, incumbent ways of describing our reality that are holding us back in our own minds. If we can't progress in our own minds, we can't progress in society...We have to get past this 20th century language that's saddled with the burdens of the past that is disappearing so rapidly before us that we don't even have time to adjust, and part of the adjustment is finding new language and new ways of describing our circumstances and the possibilities for the future.

@10:30 Stop comparing with other countries. Americans should be more American.

40. In 2009, 5% of Americans accounted for 50% of all health care costs.

explore trends in life expectancy in the United States between 1989 and 2009

How can you realize the potential of continuous wireless communication as it relates to health?

"So at present extraction rates for drinking and small scale irrigation for agriculture groundwater will provide and will continue to provide a buffer to climate variability."

[another day on the scaffolds] Spectators atop the U.S. Capitol Building watch as Discovery and a NASA T-38 aircraft fly past the Washington Monument

Share links, images, and bits of text secretly with shortened urls that work once and only once.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we all lost.

[note comments] Is it possible to be both terrified and bored? That’s how I feel about the negotiations now under way over how to respond to Europe’s economic crisis

the Good Judgment Project – and the IARPA forecasting tournament of which our Project is one part – hope to harness the wisdom of the crowd to help people make better-informed decisions.

the concepts of control, choice, or decision do not imply that a conscious subject is in charge of the process; the concepts simply describe the fact that control devices in the organism regulate its operations relative to the critical goals it has to achieve: maintain life; secure the integrity of the soma; continue the species; manage the social environment [...]

emotions have been built on the backgrounds of drives and motivations

@33:45 the prodigious expansion of memory, symbol manipulation, and consciousness has allowed humans to create instruments of social and political organization, economy and finance as well as moral systems, law, medicine, arts, science and technology...all of these systems are projections of our biological systems

@35:15 when we talk about fallibility and reflexivity, we're dealing with problems that have come out of the fact that we have this relatively new system that is full of imperfections. We can not predict the future even if we know a lot. We also have a system that we tend to believe is perfect [and that] if you treat it with the attitude of a natural scientist...we convince ourselves these systems have a perfection and a capacity I doubt they have.

@46:30 Yves! asks Q re: cognition v. pattern recognition; different levels of rationality; "democratic deficit" throughout Europe

Yanis responds:
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/04/18/the-modest-proposal-and-the-democratic-deficit/

George Soros: "...the Euro has really broken down. It has sprung defects...and effectively, the heavily indebted countries have ended up in the position of a third world country - heavily indebted in a foreign currency. That's only one of the unanticipated results...The Euro crisis is a...sovereign debt crisis, it's a balance of payments crisis, it's a banking crisis, it's a competitiveness crisis, it's a structural [crisis]...The fact is we are very far from [rational expectations equilibrium]...when peoples' understanding of the situation actually corresponds to the situation. Right now there is a tremendous gap [...] This cognitive dissonance has created a political dynamic that is going to destroy, not only the Euro, [but also the common market and the Europe Union itself...] with worse conflicts between the European states than existed before the Euro..."

The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We've done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can't make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires :-)

"We are afraid that with all these new industries, we will not be able to migrate anymore. And if we cannot migrate anymore, our people may just disappear altogether."

here he turns his attention to The Wire, a show he identifies as the “crown jewel” in the golden age of TV. Like anyone else, Lavik admits that The Wire’s greatest achievements were in dialog, character, and plot, but then goes on to make an argument that the show’s unusual and disciplined shooting style contributed, seamlessly, to the impact of the end product. The result of this style was a show that allowed viewers the satisfaction of discovering the beauty of a story, instead of having it explicitly and repeatedly pointed out to them.

"For several years now, I’ve had an interest in the potential that digital technology has to reinvigorate film and television criticism," says Lavik of his labor-intensive project.

As a normally pro-forma gathering of hemispheric leaders gets under way in Cartagena, Colombia, this weekend, Latin America could instead be approaching its declaration of independence from the United States. For the first time, the region might come out against a US policy. The change in what seemed to be an immovable subservience has come gradually, but the immediate cause is drugs

This is an e-mail lottery. One person a day wins a chance to write to the growing list of subscribers. It could be you.

http://www.betabeat.com/2012/04/10/the-listserve-nyu-itp-project/

“How do we play with it to the point where we can find something out about how people are having conversations and how people are viewing things in context based on not only design choices, but contextual spaces?”

"This project is about context, it’s about medium, it’s about messing with the dials, and pushing up the scale, and having this very free-flowing conversation."

Yet at the same time, it's going to be a very controlled conversation because only one person gets to post a day, and the goal is to get the self-selected readers to actually sit back, read and absorb the text from a stranger with whom they have nothing in common [...]

there is no topic. Also, unlike regular community e-mail mailing lists, subscribers can't respond directly. The students have designed it so that readers have to respond elsewhere. That's because the focus of the project is a focus on the individual and what that individual will say when presented this random opportunity to engage [...]

maybe the urge to memorialize this war while it is still being fought is what is necessary to win it. Part of the problem does indeed seem to be knowledge. Not just of who is dying, but of who is doing the killing. So maybe the idea should be amended, and next to the victims’ sculpture, another should be constructed to memorialize (and publicize) the murderers. A series of maps, perhaps, of U.S. drug consumption, Mexican political corruption, stats of the more than a million persons deported from the United States into the streets of Mexico, a political history of the rise of the drug cartels. And yet… and yet this information has already been published as well. Perhaps, then, it is not that the public doesn’t have the knowledge, but that we are not using the knowledge [...]

And yet in the end what Borges does is worse than invalidate his friend’s testimony. He simply ignores it. He walks out into the street and lets himself succumb to the tides of forgetting. In Mexico we know of the corruption, the political criminality, and the surging numbers of the dead. The problem is not awareness, but what we do with the awareness. We can read and guffaw about the violence in our own homes, and nothing will continue to change. Especially if our minds are, as Borges describes, “porous for forgetting,” knowledge is not an end in itself. Careful record keeping and the murder meter will not enact change; we need to enact it ourselves.

...a glorification of modern man.

“I view him,” he said with a certain unaccountable excitement, “in his inner sanctum, as though in his castle tower, supplied with telephones, telegraphs, phonographs, wireless sets, motion-picture screens, slide projectors, glossaries, timetables, handbooks, bulletins…”

He remarked that for a man so equipped, actual travel was superfluous. Our twentieth century had inverted the story of Mohammed and the mountain; nowadays, the mountain came to the modern Mohammed [...]

Daneri’s real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others.

...four futures for fMRI.

“The major shift is towards networks,” says Stephen Smith, associate director of the Oxford University Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, UK, whose team is working on such models. “What we're trying to get is the true underlying connectivity,” he says, “rather than make a superficial comment about everything being connected to everything because they're all correlated.” [...]

The low signal-to-noise ratio forces fMRI researchers to use statistical approaches to pick out what is significant in their scans — and that means that there are numerous ways to interpret a data set. “If you try them all, you're going to find something,” says Poldrack.

The project also strengthens Chile’s position in the vanguard of astronomy. Observatories are already scattered throughout the Atacama, including the Cerro Paranal Observatory, where scientists discovered in 2010 the largest star observed to date, and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, which was founded in 1961 and endured Chile’s tumult of revolution and counterrevolution in the 1970s.

But ALMA opens a new stage for astronomy in Chile, which is favored by international research organizations for the stability of its economy and legal system [...]

Developments elsewhere in Chile occasionally raise eyebrows here, like antigovernment protests that have rocked remote regions of the country this year and spread in March to the nearby mining city of Calama. “The protests are not directly a concern,” said Mr. de Graauw, ALMA’s director. “They are part of a democratic process, not a revolution.”

generate clean, well-formatted books in multiple outputs: .epub, print-ready PDF, InDesign-ready XML, and of course HTML

[whoa @9:00 - ]

If imitation were the path to excellence, art museums would be filled with paint-by-number works [...]

[Tucker’s] expertise is self-appointed, and his method, the equivalent of “the think system,” is obvious quackery. And the Gates Foundation, which has for some reason backed Tucker and his organization with millions of dollars, must be playing the residents of River City...

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet [...]

When people hear “social reading,” they think that it is proximate sociability on the device in real-time. But let’s not necessarily jam the social bit into the experience of reading. The explosion of conversation around those kinds of works is best done after the fact. The phrase “social reading” often causes people to misunderstand what it is [...] Because so much of our media in the 20th century was delivered in real-time, with very little subsequent ability to share, save, shift, store, we separated the consumption from the reproduction and use of media. We don’t actually think of ourselves as users of media, when in fact we are.

[from 1909] The Catskill Mountain water system being constructed for New York City is one of the most notable engineering enterprises ever undertaken. Ranking with the interoceanic canals at Suez and Panama, the Assuan irrigation works in Egypt, and the projects which are converting Western America's arid wastes into fruitful fields, the Catskill aqueduct, with its tributary reservoirs, probably surpasses any one of them in the variety of problems to be solved. Although undertaken by a municipality, these works in magnitude and cost compare with national enterprises.

Imperial Rome's longest aqueduct was fifty-seven miles in length; the Catskill aqueduct will be ninety-two miles long. Rome, with hordes of laborers from conquered domains, carried its aqueducts at the hydraulic gradient across valleys on imposing masonry arches. Modern explosives and rock-drills enable New York to tunnel in solid rock beneath valleys and rivers, avoiding masonry, which is now expensive, and which is likely to suffer in New York's severer climate.

sensor system designed to allow anyone to collect very high resolution readings of NO2 and CO concentrations outside of their home.

ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through December 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.

advert for the Guardian's open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion.

Peter-Paul Verbeek: "Every object of design shapes the behaviors and experiences of people [and] conveys at least our implicit consent to a world in which it is good and proper that such an object exists. It declares our consent to a certain version of what 'the good life' is...if you walk around and see the world that you and I and we built for ourselves...you get the shivers. Because of how little we expect of life."

WebAnywhere is a non-visual interface to the web that requires no new software to be downloaded or installed.It works right in the browser, which means you can access it from any computer, even locked-down public computer terminals.WebAnywhere enables you to interact with the web in a similar way to how you may have used other screen readers

The lack of preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: economic growth and competitiveness, physical safety, intellectual property, U.S. global awareness, and U.S. unity and cohesion, says the report. Too many young people are not employable in an increasingly high-skilled and global economy, and too many are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have an inadequate level of education.

"Human capital will determine power in the current century, and the failure to produce that capital will undermine America's security," the report states. "Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy."

now makes use of data from the USDA that includes information, mainly qualitative, that gardeners and botanists might find more useful.

A proxy alone isn't enough if you're connecting via a simple, unencrypted HTTP connection—a sneaky user could still watch what you're passing back and forth over a public network. The special sauce involves Hamachi, a free app that creates a secure, encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) between your computer and any other of your computers that you've installed and configured Hamachi on. By setting up a proxy on one computer, then connecting to that proxy using a secure connection via Hamachi, you're able to encrypt and secure your browsing session.

the U.S. programs, unlike the Venezuelan one, are not receiving government support and are dependent on private funding. Equally importantly, as Tunstall notes, the U.S. programs have also needed to be conscious of gathering data to show quantifiable success to funders, even though the most potent elements of El Sistema's pedagogy, the way it inspires kids, strengthens their egos, and provides hope, are not quantifiable.

This is the global information sphere at its best, performing a function journalism lays claim to but rarely if ever fulfills. The obscure message-senders behind a surprisingly popular attempt at political influence and persuasion were researched, poked and pried at by multiple hands, finally revealed to the public in their history, warts and all. Russell and Invisible Children lacked the odor of sanctity and the nuance of scholarship, but nothing was exposed to destroy the credibility of their campaign.

I have watched the video several times. A slick composite of emotion-laden visuals, it links small actions by the viewer to an important intermediate goal (Kony’s arrest), then to cosmic transformation (a political nirvana in which the public, armed with social media, makes known its wishes, if not its commands, to the people in power). Stripped of the hippy-dippy idealism, it’s a fair description of today’s political dynamics.

As a learning theory, connected learning posits that the most meaningful and resilient forms of learning happen when a learner has a personal interest or passion that they are pursuing in a context of cultural affinity, social support, and shared purpose.

[Interview w/ Steve Hargadon:
http://www.delicious.com/redirect?url=http%3A//audio.edtechlive.com/foe/mimiito.mp3
@49:25 ...the institutional configurations, and the broadly shared cultural norms, or scripts around education and parenting really do make a difference in the national frames. Right now there's been a lot of talk about the difference between the American and Finnish system, that the American system stresses competition, is much more individualized, and that results in a really different institutional culture around education...there's a lot of difference between classes, immigrant families and families who've been in a country longer...]

The Millennium Development Goals represent a stark belief in the simplicity of development objectives if not solutions. The Goals focus on health, education, and poverty reduction. It is no coincidence that these are exactly the areas that allow statistical tests of effectiveness [...]

Partly as a result, a cottage industry has sprung up to test development effectiveness in the kinds of programs that admit randomized trials. Even as these trials shed light on health and education interventions, however, they are having the unintended effect of marginalizing the vast majority of programs that do not let you set aside a control group.

Money for metrics is the new mantra. On its own merits, it is a very powerful mantra. Monitoring and evaluation have transformed development assistance into a learning enterprise over the past ten years [...] The trouble is the background assumption that everyone needs to measure the same thing [...]

The Millennium Development Goals have drawn criticism precisely because their uniformity contrasts with the growing sense that every country has a separate path to development. The newer concern is the idea that you just cannot tell whether those paths are heading in the right direction unless you describe them precisely.