Organising for donor effectiveness: an analytical framework for improving aid effectiveness

Donors have lagged behind aid recipients in adhering to the principles of aid effectiveness. Explaining the reasons for this demands greater awareness of organisational attributes within donor entities. To date, there have been only limited attempts to relate donor organisational factors to aid-effectiveness goals. This article elaborates on a number of such relationships based on an empirical examination of donor dynamics in Norway, the UK and Canada. Donor effectiveness provides an important lens through which to build a robust post-Busan global partnership

Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models

Despite a growing interest in diffusion-based language models, existing work has not shown that these models can attain nontrivial likelihoods on standard language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we take the first steps towards closing the likelihood gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based language models, with the goal of building and releasing a diffusion model which outperforms a small but widely-known autoregressive model. We pursue this goal through algorithmic improvements, scaling laws, and increased compute. On the algorithmic front, we introduce several methodological improvements for the maximum-likelihood training of diffusion language models. We then study scaling laws for our diffusion models and find compute-optimal training regimes which differ substantially from autoregressive models. Using our methods and scaling analysis, we train and release Plaid 1B, a large diffusion language model which outperforms GPT-2 124M in likelihood on benchmark datasets and generates fluent samples in unconditional and zero-shot control settings

SHAWEL: Sharable and interactive web-lexicons

A prototypical lexicon tool was implemented which was intended to allow researchers to collaboratively create lexicons of endangered languages. Increasingly often researchers documenting or analyzing a language work at different locations. Lexicons that evolve through continuous interaction between the collaborators can only be efficiently produced when it can be accessed and manipulated via the Internet. The SHAWEL tool was developed to address these needs; it makes use of a thin Java client and a central database solution

OPTIMIZING ROUTE LEAK FROM EVPN TO IP-VPN FOR SINGLE ACTIVE USE CASES

Optimizing the process by which host routes are leaked to an Internet Protocol (IP) virtual private network (VPN) unicast is of singular importance in a large network environment. To address this type of challenge, techniques are presented herein that support a dynamic means for limiting the host advertisements in a network where hosts are announced only on an as-needed basis. In effect, aspects of the presented techniques optimize what is leaked and optimize the total number of routes in a spine