Tag Archives: refugees

In light of the current crisis, a journalist reached out for general advice for people who want to make a difference, whether it’s with refugees or those still in country. Do send heavy blankets, used clothes, food, and teddy bears, preferably collected in at home and shipped overseas. Canned goods or dried beans are even better, both because of their high weight-to-value, and their widespread availability in the destination country.   Don’t support organizations that give the afflicted...

In light of the current crisis, a journalist reached out for general advice for people who want to make a difference, whether it’s with refugees or those still in country. Do send heavy blankets, used clothes, food, and teddy bears, preferably collected in at home and shipped overseas. Canned goods or dried beans are even better, both because of their high weight-to-value, and their widespread availability in the destination country.   Don’t support organizations that give the afflicted...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. There’s a lot of basic social science documenting humanity’s flaws, biases, and injustices, but less on fixes. The cover of the new issue of Science today features Salma Mousa’s paper using an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq to promote reconciliation between persecuted Christians and their Muslim neighbors (plain language summary here). Using contact theory, she randomly assigned Muslim players to some teams in a Christian soccer...

Under cover of its Russian S-400 air defence batteries, and ignoring US and European sanctions, Turkey is going on the offensive at sea, surrounding Cyprus, and by land, launching a weapon against the European Union against which there is no defence: a Turkish cannon firing 150,000 people at Europe’s borders each month. They are the refugees from the wars the US and NATO launched in Iraq, Syria and Libya. A Russian analysis entitled “Turkey will open the door to Europe for millions of...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Petronia (above), an online course and game from the National Resource Governance Institute, lets users run a fictional country where oil is discovered to see if they can avoid the resource curse. (h/t David Batcheck) From the Stata journal– A new command, baselinetable, creates handy summary stats tables for your baseline reports to make sharing your findings much easier. It exports to Stata, Excel, CSV, etc to make it really...

Last March, 15 activists chained themselves around an aircraft that was being used by British authorities to deport asylum seekers from Stansted Airport, many of whom had legitimate reasons to fear for their lives if returned to countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. While at first the Stansted 15 were charged with aggravated trespass, the charges were soon upgraded to terrorism-related offences. This is...

As many academics and community activists – in fact, anyone woke – will tell you, the US is a racist society steeped in the white supremacy of its majority population. White people are haters who keep ruining things. Which is why reading this story in the LA Times about people from Africa trying to cross from Tijuana into San Diego is so hearbreaking. The article describes African refugees who have fled their homeland for safety, who have braved all sorts...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. (Research team in Sierra Leone, photo credit: Jeff Steinberg) Please support the poverty researchers who really work amazingly hard (I can promise you HQ is not spending it on reliable copiers). Poverty-action.org/donate. Some nice news this week, the MacArthur Foundation awarded its big “100&Change” 100 million dollar big idea award to the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop. They’ll use it to implement an...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. (Research team in Sierra Leone, photo credit: Jeff Steinberg) Please support the poverty researchers who really work amazingly hard (I can promise you HQ is not spending it on reliable copiers). Poverty-action.org/donate. Some nice news this week, the MacArthur Foundation awarded its big “100&Change” 100 million dollar big idea award to the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop. They’ll use it to implement an...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. (Research team in Sierra Leone, photo credit: Jeff Steinberg) Please support the poverty researchers who really work amazingly hard (I can promise you HQ is not spending it on reliable copiers). Poverty-action.org/donate. Some nice news this week, the MacArthur Foundation awarded its big “100&Change” 100 million dollar big idea award to the International Rescue Committee and Sesame Workshop. They’ll use it to...