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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published November 3, 2011

Let the Little Boys Die

A hard-hitting, must-read Global Dashboard post by David Steven in reaction to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2012’s claim that “four million girls and women ‘go missing’ each year in developing countries”:

So what’s going on? The answer is slightly hard to follow: girls are significantly less likely to die of infectious diseases than boys, but they are even less likely to die of perinatal conditions (in or just after childbirth). So while all children benefit as infectious diseases are tackled, girls benefit slightly more than boys.

In other words, there’s no discrimination in play and this section of the report is based on a statistical artefact. Or a red herring. Or a tendentious attempt to beef up a press release (and if the result implies the health of poor girls matters more than that of poor boys – well, hey ho).

My conclusion: the 4 million figure is an advocacy stat of the worst kind. Lazy in its execution. And borderline dishonest in its presentation – especially for those who read the op-ed, and fail to find the detail buried in the report.

The WDR website may be cock-a-hoop that it garnered “156 news stories published by lead print news outlets across the world, in just a week.” But I don’t think a blitz of favorable media for the Bank is what the WDR should be all about…

This post is merely a digest of David’s post, so be sure to read his post in its entirety.

Published November 2, 2011

Spent

I’ve been unemployed for just one month, and already I’ve sent my only child to school crying because other kids make fun of him for being on the free lunch program, driven away from a fender bender with a parked car because I didn’t have the money to pay for the accident (luckily no one was around), been fired from my temp job for talking to a union organizer, put my kid’s dog to sleep because we couldn’t afford its medical care, and applied for food stamps — which won’t arrive until next month.

I’m not proud of myself, but this is what it takes to survive as a poor person in America — and now I know, because I played the game Spent, designed by Jenny Nicholson, herself once a child who grew up in poverty.

This is Christopher Mims discussing the game interactive presentation Spent in a post over at Technology Review. You can play Spent for free by clicking here. You might even be surprised at the very difficult choices poor Americans have to make every month.

The game is sponsored by the Urban Ministries of Durham, which provide food, clothing, and shelter to Durhamites in need.

(HT: Raul Pacheco-Vega.)

Published November 2, 2011

Assessing the Impacts of Telemedicine

My Sanford School colleague Manoj Mohanan talks about one of his current research projects, which aims about assessing the impacts of telemedicine in India: