If you ignore the French stereotyping included just to annoy Jerome, this is an interesting profile of Esther Duflo who is an associate of MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, one of the pioneers of development economics. "Professor Banerjee says before Mme Duflo, theories of development economics existed and practical knowledge of aid programmes existed. She was one of the first to put them together systematically; to apply economic skills to discovering what was going wrong and adjusting policies..  "

The new face of the world-leading French intellectual is a brisk 36-year-old woman with the pleasant but no-nonsense look of a primary school teacher, who climbs mountains in her spare time.

She is Esther Duflo and was recently named one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world (she came 91st)
[....]
Mme Duflo is a "development economist" one of the world's greatest experts - perhaps the greatest - on why development programmes in poor countries often fail and why they sometimes succeed. Her precise field of expertise has existed less than a decade. She is among its inventors.
[....]
She investigates, in elaborate detail, the practical, small things which can make a difference in trying to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor. For instance, not just "education, education, education" but how to make sure pupils and their teachers turn up at school. (Answer: tiny incentives, such as free meals or uniforms, can transform attendance in poor countries.)

Mme Duflo has, above all, developed and promoted the concept of "scientific" testing of anti-poverty programmes - what works and what doesn't but also, crucially, why things work and why they don't. She believes - and has proved - that the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes can be explored by "random testing", in the same way pharmaceutical companies test drugs.

But other than that, გამარჯობათ!

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" - Oscar Wilde

Linkage

Give a politician an inch, and he'll think he's a ruler

"If you toss two coins, what's the probability that both show the same face ?"

They said 1 in 4, but unless they've changed the laws of probability since i was at school it's 1 in 2.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Announcer: We have gathered a few volunteers to try the new version of Windows Vista....I mean, Windows Mojave.... I mean, Windows 7. Here is what they had to say:

Joe SixPack: Sick!
Soccer Mom: Oh, my God!
Joe Average: Wow! It's, like, you know.... Stuff!
Barbie Doll: Totally!

Announcer: The new Windows 7 will revolutionize how people use PCs. The system has been designed from scratch to run smoothly on a mere 4 Gigabytes of RAM!

Joe SixPack: What's that?
Barbie Doll: 4 Gigabytes is, like, 2 gallons or something.
Joe Average: Feels faster than my AOL.

Announcer: Don't take our word for it. Visit Win7.MojaveProject.Microsoft.com and test drive the new Windows. Experience what so many other people have already experienced!

Armchair tourists who are used to travelling the globe with Google Earth can now use the same technology to crawl all over the masterpieces in one of the world's most famous galleries: the Prado.

The Madrid museum and the internet search giant today unveil the first use of Google's mapping programme to allow art lovers to get so close to their favourite paintings that even the brush strokes are visible.

"It allows people to see the main masterworks in the museum as they never have done before," the museum said. "You can see details that the human eye alone is unable to see."

Fourteen of the Prado's masterpieces - including works by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Hieronymus Bosch - can be seen online in almost microscopic detail. The technology allows internet users to fly across the surface of the canvases, homing in on details that would be invisible to the naked eye if they visited the Madrid gallery in person.

Greece is on fire, Slovenia likes nothing better than to masturbate and army officers in Lithuania spend their time pissing on their unfriendly neighbour Russia.

That is how Europe is officially portrayed by its new masters, who took over the continent on 1 January.

A new artwork, commissioned by the Czech government for its six-month presidency of the EU, was this morning installed in the headquarters of the Council of Ministers in Brussels.

The giant mock plastic board, entitled Entropa, is supposed to contain works of art from all 27 EU member states (for full details in pdf form, click here).

...

The creator of Entropa is the Czech artist David Cerny, who famously painted a Soviet tank, meant as a war memorial, pink in 1991.

He was briefly arrested because the Monument to Soviet Tank Crews was still a national cultural monument.

Alexandr Vondra, the deputy Czech prime minister, said: "Sculpture, and art more generally, can speak where words fail.

"In line with the Czech presidency motto, 'A Europe without barriers', we gave the 27 artists the same opportunity to express themselves freely as a proof that, in today's Europe, there is no place for censorship.

"In return, we got an uncommon, yet common, piece of art. I am confident in Europe's open mind and capacity to appreciate such a project."

I should perhaps explain Slovenia's interest in masturbation. Erwin Mrkosek, the artist, depicts Slovenia with the words: "First tourists came here in 1213."

He says these first visitors left an appreciative message in caves in Postojna, meaning Slovenians will sell themselves as visitors because they are descended from foreigners.

"This is a strategy associated with the delight of masturbation; we view the hand we use in autoerotic stimulation as the hand of another," the artist writes.

http://www.newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm

Opening up to investors

Executives need to become comfortable with transparency if they want to help investors make investment decisions.

CW is an expert on railways and when he speaks you can usually assume it's far closer to the truth than the govt would like to admit.

The biggest pretence, though, is that Network Rail is viable. There's a very simple way to refute that. Network Rail's debt has risen from the £9bn it inherited at its creation in 2002 to over £20bn now and that is set to rise to a staggering £31.5bn by the end of the next control period in 2014. While we are all used to talking about billions these days, that is a staggering sum. In other words, before a single train moves, by the middle of the next decade, Network Rail will require, on the entirely predictable assumption that interest rates rise again, around £1.7bn to service its debt each year. And that is likely to keep on growing.

 These figures show that the entire income from franchising will soon go towards servicing Network Rail's debt. In other words, all Network Rail's other costs - operations, maintenance, renewal and expansion - will have to come from government subsidies, apart from a few bits and pieces like property income and freight payments.

 That is completely unsustainable. First, there is the risk that the debt will eventually get onto government books, and frankly, given his golden rules have been thrown out of the window, who would give a damn. Secondly, the government has made clear that it wants the railway to be more self-financing. Will this include a requirement to start paying back this debt? If so, then passengers are in for a real hammering as fares will be forced up dramatically. And it that is not the case, what is the long term expectation of what will happen to this debt?

It doesn´t look like this man designs anything
that can actually be built.

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

http://avaaz.org/en/gaza_time_for_peace/

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

In the Cincinnati area, where legend holds that trends come 10 years late, "sexting" arrived well ahead of time.

Teens here are taking nude photos of themselves or others, sending them on their cell phones or posting them online.

Some teens do it as a joke.

For others, it's the new bold pickup line to get a date.

[...] "If I were to go through the cell phones in this building right now of 1,500 students, I would venture to say that half to two-thirds have indecent photos, either of themselves or somebody else in school," said Jim Brown, school resource officer at Glen Este High School. [...] "They were as graphic as you would see in any Penthouse magazine, I've been told." [...]

The stakes of taking and sending sexually explicit photos can be high, compared to the thrill at the time.

The consequences can range from humiliation to losing out on jobs to going to court.

Nothing better to do for kids in these troubled times? How far are they from child porno accusations?