Center for Effective Global Action
May 2015 - Impact Note
IMPACT
 
Evidence to Action: Engineering for Development   
Rajasthan, India, Gram Power

On May 4, CEGA hosted the 6th annual Evidence to Action event at Google San Francisco. This year's event focused on the essential role technology plays in accelerating development in the poorest countries. The day featured a keynote by Ann Mei Chang, Executive Director of the US Global Development Lab, as well as presentations by a number of CEGA affiliates. Videos and presentations from the event are available on our website.
 
UPCOMING

 

Working Group in African Political Economy Annual Meeting

Mbale, Uganda, Cameron Breslin 
This year, the 2015 WGAPE Annual Meeting will be held at the Watson Institute at Brown University. The meeting will bring together political scientists, economists, and other public policy experts to discuss new, policy-relevant research. This year will include a discussion of pre-analysis plans to encourage better transparency practices among social scientists.

 


Research Transparency Workshop

2014 BITSS Cohort
The 2015 BITSS Summer Institute will take place June 10-12 in Berkeley. The workshop will provide an overview of new tools and resources for open and rigorous social science. Participants can expect to finish the program with a thorough understanding of best practices for transparent and reproducible research. In response to increased interest in the workshop, the Institute will be recorded and made publicly available on the BITSS website. 
 
Global Resilience Challenge
 
CEGA is hosting a seminar on remote sensing and monitoring technologies for crisis response and community resilience as part of its participation in the Global Resilience Challenge. The workshop will discuss measurement of environmental and settlement changes during shocks, leveraging new technologies like micro-satellites, sensor networks, and mobile computing.
CEGA IN THE NEWS

The Relationship between Warmer Temperatures and Math Scores
istock, The Washington Post
CEGA affiliates Joshua Graff Zivin and Sol Hsiang have published a new working paper demonstrating the impacts of warmer temperatures on the brain. The authors are calling the study the "first economic analysis of the relationship between temperature/climate and human capital." The study was mentioned in The Washington Post.

 
How Climate Change Makes the World More Violent

  

This guest post on The Monkey Cage blog mentions research conducted by Faculty Director Ted Miguel and colleagues about the impact of climate change on conflict. As high temperatures impact crop yields, more people are likely to take up arms, leading to increased violence. 

 

Incentives for Open Science   

 

Executive Director Temina Madon shared the launch of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science on the LSE Impact blog.

  

EVIDENCE

A Scalable Satellite-based Crop Yield Mapper  
 
 Nepal, Silvia Prina
 

CEGA affiliate David Lobell has completed research on new advances in satellite data acquisition and processing. These advances offer promise for monitoring agricultural lands globally. Using these data to estimate crop yields for individual fields would benefit both crop management and scientific research, especially for areas where reliable ground-based estimates are not currently made. The strength of the approach lies in its ability to leverage physiological knowledge embedded in crop models to interpret satellite observations in a scalable way, as it can be readily applied to new crops, regions, and types and timing of remote sensing observations without the need for ground calibration. Learn more here.

 

 



OPPORTUNITIES

Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science Research
 
To encourage openness in research and the teaching of best practices, the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) has established  The Leamer-Rosenthal Prizes for Open Social Science. The prizes will be awarded to early-career researchers who adopt transparent research practices or pioneer new methods to increase the rigor of research as well as faculty leaders who teach best practices in social science research.