Should Aid Reward Performance? Evidence from a Field Experiment on Health and Education in Indonesia

This paper reports an experiment in over 3,000 Indonesian villages designed to test the role of performance incentives in improving the efficacy of aid programs. Villages in a randomly-chosen one-third of subdistricts received a block grant to improve 12 maternal and child health and education indicators, with the size of the subsequent year’s block grant depending on performance relative to other villages in the subdistrict. Villages in remaining subdistricts were randomly assigned to either an otherwise identical block grant program with no financial link to performance, or to a pure control group. We find that the incentivized villages performed better on health than the non-incentivized villages, particularly in less developed areas, but found no impact of incentives on education. We find no evidence of negative spillovers from the incentives to untargeted outcomes, and no evidence that villagers manipulated scores. The relative performance design was crucial in ensuring that incentives did not result in a net transfer of funds toward richer areas. Incentives led to what appear to be more efficient spending of block grants, and led to an increase in labor from health providers, who are partially paid fee-for-service, but not teachers. On net, between 50-75% of the total impact of the block grant program on health indicators can be attributed to the performance incentives.

Review of California Wildfire Evacuations from 2017 to 2019

Between 2017 and 2019, California experienced a series of devastating wildfires that together led over one million people to be ordered to evacuate. Due to the speed of many of these wildfires, residents across California found themselves in challenging evacuation situations, often at night and with little time to escape. These evacuations placed considerable stress on public resources and infrastructure for both transportation and sheltering. In the face of these clear challenges, transportation and emergency management agencies across California have widely varying levels of preparedness for major disasters, and nearly all agencies do not have the public resources to adequately and swiftly evacuate all populations in danger. To holistically address these challenges and bolster current disaster and evacuation planning, preparedness, and response in California, we summarize the evacuations of eleven major wildfires in California between 2017 and 2019 and offer a cross-comparison to highlight key similarities and differences. We present results of new empirical data we collected via an online survey of individuals impacted by: 1) the 2017 October Northern California Wildfires (n=79), 2) the 2017 December Southern California Wildfires (n=226), and 3) the 2018 Carr Wildfire (n=284). These data reveal the decision-making of individuals in these wildfires including choices related to evacuating or staying, departure timing, route, sheltering, destination, transportation mode, and reentry timing. We also present results related to communication and messaging, non-evacuee behavior, and opinion of government response. Using the summarized case studies and empirical evidence, we present a series of recommendations for agencies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from wildfires

A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources

Scientific data of importance to biologists in the Human Genome Project resides not only in conventional databases, but in structured files maintained in a number of different formats (e.g. ASN.1 and ACE) as well a.s sequence analysis packages (e.g. BLAST and FASTA). These formats and packages contain a number of data types not found in conventional databases, such as lists and variants, and may be deeply nested. We present in this paper techniques for querying and transforming such data, and illustrate their use in a prototype system developed in conjunction with the Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22. We also describe optimizations performed by the system, a crucial issue for bulk data

Internet and Facebook use among university students

The Malaysian government continues to invest heavily in computing and Internet resources in the belief that the Internet can improve the academic performance of students, offer e-learning for undergraduates, and provide the flexibility of distance learning for adult students. The use of the Internet and Facebook for educational purposes has been a topic of high interest among researchers in recent years. In Malaysia, Internet access is relatively easy, fast, and affordable. It is also a valuable source of information. Research shows that online consumers in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines are the most likely to have engaged on social media sites such as Facebook. For this very reason, students must be well-equipped with the requisite skills to exploit to the full the benefits of the Internet and Facebook by the time they graduate. Such skills would certainly help to enhance their employability in the competitive labour market. This study seeks to examine relevant literature regarding the extent of Internet and Facebook use among university students. The literature review will also explore how the use of the Internet and Facebook has impacted the academic performance of university students

A predictive CD8+ T cell phenotype for T1DM progression

In a cross-sectional study of individuals with type 1 diabetes mellitus, those who were designated to be slow disease progressors had an increased proportion of autoreactive, islet-specific CD8(+) T cells expressing an ‘exhausted’ phenotype. By contrast, rapid disease progressors had increased numbers of islet-specific CD8(+) T cells with a transitional memory phenotype