Book review: the crises of microcredit edited by Isabelle Guérin, Marc Labie and Jean-Michel Servet

Do microfinance initiatives offer a panacea for poverty? In The Crises of Microcredit, editors Isabelle Guérin, Marc Labie and Jean-Michel Servet present a set of essays that examines the emergent problems in the microfinance sector. While the book will be of use to those wanting to understand how an apparent miracle cure now seems shrouded in crisis, Jason Hickel argues that the book does not fully explore the structural issues that render microcredit a fundamentally flawed means of enabling development and solving global poverty

Five reasons to think twice about the UN’s sustainable development goals

As part of the Africa at LSE and South Asia at LSE cross-blog series on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, LSE’s Jason Hickel critiques the new Sustainable Development Goals. He argues that the goals due to be signed at the UN Summit this week are not only a missed opportunity, but actively dangerous because they lock the global development agenda around a failing economic model

Electronic properties, low-energy Hamiltonian and superconducting instabilities in CaKFe4_4As4_4

We analyze the electronic properties of the recently discovered stoichiometric superconductor CaKFe$_4$As$_4$ by combining an ab initio approach and a projection of the band structure to a lowenergy tight-binding Hamiltonian, based on the maximally localized Wannier orbitals of the 3d Fe states. We identify the key symmetries as well as differences and similarities in the electronic structure between CaKFe$_4$As$_4$ and the parent systems CaFe$_2$As$_2$ and KFe$_2$As$_2$. In particular, we find CaKFe4As4 to have a significantly more quasi-two-dimensional electronic structure than the latter systems. Finally, we study the superconducting instabilities in CaKFe$_4$As$_4$ by employing the leading angular harmonics approximation (LAHA) and find two potential A$_{1g}$-symmetry representation of the superconducting gap to be the dominant instabilities in this system.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

Surface temperature mapping with infrared photographic pyrometry for turbine cooling investigations

Surface temperature mapping with infrared photographic pyrometry for turbine cooling investigation