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The most controversial articles on Wikipedia, sorted by language. (via Daily chart: Edit wars | The Economist)

Working-class academics learn to dress differently, to speak differently, to develop different interests and tastes—ones that conform to expectations and signal that we belong. [...] I learned to change some of my habits and to react silently and invisibly when faced with a gap in my knowledge. I learned, in short, to perform my role.

Jacqui Shine, Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history at the University of California, Berkeley.

See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/415-love-on-ice-what-tonya-harding-teaches-us-about-the-academy

#academia #chronicle #social class

La relación de las maras y el narcotráfico existe, pero no hay que sobredimensionar sus nexos. La idea del papel creciente de las clicas y sus líderes en la economía criminal de las drogas termina siendo una cortina de humo para ocultar el rostro de organizaciones mayores, la complicidad de funcionarios y el lavado de dinero

Juan Carlos Garzón, politólogo colombiano. Actualmente Global Fellow del Woodrow Wilson Center

http://www.elfaro.net/es/201403/opinion/14978/

#VCD #maras #el salvador

"The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that blend affordability, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency. Open to the public free of charge, the Solar Decathlon also demonstrates how energy-efficient and renewable energy technologies and design save money and energy while protecting local communities and boosting economic growth."

#energy #development #devt #colombia

For those who care about how students learn or learn not.

Source:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/taking-notes-by-hand-benefits-recall-researchers-find

#teaching #chronicle

When I remember the beleaguered state of Afghanistan in 2001, I marvel at the changes the American intervention has fostered: the rebuilding, the modernity, the bright graduates in every office. Yet after 13 years, more than a trillion dollars spent, 120,000 foreign troops deployed at the height of the war and tens of thousands of lives lost, Afghanistan’s predicament has not changed: It remains a weak state, prey to the ambitions of its neighbors and extremist Islamists. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but to pull out now is, undeniably, to leave with the job only half-done.

- Carlota Gall, 'What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden', New York Times, March 19 2014

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page MM30 of the Sunday Magazine

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/magazine/what-pakistan-knew-about-bin-laden.html?hp&_r=0

#afghanistan #taliban #pakistan #VCD

The delightfully quirky aspect of the success of the randomista movement is that it remains entirely faith-based. People with the ideas, passion, and capability set about the make the world a better place in ways that are empirically plausible and emotionally appealing to them.

"Development is nearly always a faith-based activity. People with the ideas, passion, and capability set about the make the world a better place in ways that are empirically plausible and are emotionally or otherwise appealing to them, and then these people use persuasion, often embedded in narratives, to attract resources and converts to their causes. "

- Lant Pritchett

#devt #development

picsoftheshard

govargas

"The Shard encapsulates the new hierarchy of the city. On the top floors, “ultra high net worth individuals” entertain escorts in luxury apartments. By day, on floors below, investment bankers trade incomprehensible derivatives.

Come nightfall, the elevators are full of African cleaners, paid next to nothing and treated as nonexistent. The acres of glass windows are scrubbed by Polish laborers, who sleep four to a room in bedsit slums. And near the Shard are the immigrants from Lithuania and Romania, who broke their backs on construction sites, but are now destitute and whiling away their hours along the banks of the Thames.

The Shard is London, a symbol of a city where oligarchs are celebrated and migrants are exploited but that pretends to be a multicultural utopia."

- Ben Judah

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/londons-laundry-business.html

Picture reblogged from picsoftheshard:

From St Thomas Street with a bird

#shard london

El director de la Dian, Juan Ricardo Ortega, aseguró que es necesario revisar el esquema especial del impuesto de renta, para evitar la evasión de fundaciones.

Se sabe que hay un mercado paralelo de licencias [de porte de armas] y que, por otro lado, se entregan masivamente salvocounductos a empresas de vigilancia o seguridad, un sector donde con una misma licencia se amparan varias armas sin que pueda determinarse cuál es la original y cuál no.

#Colombia weapons armas

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Explaining insurgent recruitment: need, creed, greed… or is it breed?

One of the most heated debates among students of civil over the last decade has been whether insurgencies are moved by ideological or material motives. Extending the public choice research programme to the study of insurgencies, Paul Collier famously argued that insurgencies were nothing more than large scale criminal organisations-- and their alleged motives, revolutionary or otherwise, just ex-post rationalisations of their predatory behaviour.

Given their involvement in the drug trade, Colombia's contemporary armed groups (both insurgents and paramilitaries) seemed to prove Collier's case. However, Gutierrez (2004) already had challenged this view and a paper just published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution goes in the same direction: Ugarriza (El Rosario) and Craig (NYU) surveyed 637 former Colombian demobilised combatants, of which 49 were FARC guerrillas, 41 per cent AUC paramilitaries and the rest belonged to other insurgencies. They found a consistent pattern where FARC insurgents displayed preference for socialist and Bolivarian ideas (the authors define Bolivarianism as a mixture of 'Pan-American nationalism, antibourgeois revolution and anti-imperialism'). Perhaps most interesting, the 'political leaning of family [was] the most powerful predictor of group tendency'. More specifically: the 'odds of being a guerrilla increase almost eleven-fold when the combatant was raised in a leftist environment'. Ugarriza and Craig thus conclude that 'arguments that claim the nonexistence of ideological elements in contemporary armed conflicts such as the Colombian one are misleading'.

Summing up, it seems that not only creed, need, or greed may motivate young men to enrol in rebel movements or private militias--breed, the worldview and the attitudes they get from our parents are siblings are just as important.

G Vargas, 27 June 2013

#colombia #VCD

Minería en Colombia II

¿Evaden el pago de regalías las empresas mineras? Sí, responde el director de la DIAN en una entrevista con el diario económico Portafolio e indica explícitamente que se trata de un caso de corrupción. ¿No debería informar a la Fiscalía?

#colombia evasion mineria

'Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el modelo extractivista'

Muy interesante el estudio sobre Minería en Colombia (clic para descargar PDF) publicado por la Contraloría General de la República hace unos días y editado por Luis Jorge Garay.

Particularmente interesante el capítulo a cargo de Mauricio Cabrera y Julio Fierro, quienes ofrecen impactantes estadísticas sobre la huella ambiental de la minería, por ejemplo, un megaproyecto minero produce entre 10 y 70 veces más desechos al año que una ciudad como Bogotá. También alertan sobre la debilidad de instrumentos como las licencias ambientales.

También interesante e ilustrado con abundante evidencia el capítulo de Guillermo Rudas y Jorge Espitia, que examinan la participación del Estado colombiano en la renta minera y encuentran que a pesar de que las tasas nominales de tributación en Colombia son parecidas a las de otros países, la proporción entre ingresos fiscales y valor agregado del sector está entre las más bajas del continente (ver gráfico).

Fuente: Rudas & Espitia (2013: 144).

El capítulo final, a cargo de Luis Alvaro Pardo, ofrece un recorrido histórico sobre la regulación minera y hace una serie de propuestas de reforma institucional. Teniendo en cuenta los hallazgos de los autores, no sorprende la reacción del gremio (clic para descargar PDF), que ha prometido un contraestudio para rebatir los argumentos de Garay y colegas.

#Colombia mineria desarrollo

'Economics versus Politics' by Acemoglu & Robinson

Addressing market failures may be bad for society: it may worsen inequality and weaken the state, argue Acemoglu & Robinson in the latest issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (click for PDF). Even when market reforms increase efficiency they can also weaken organisations that promote democracy and equality (e.g. labour unions) and give industries the political leverage to push forward reforms with dubious benefits for society (e.g. banks). Furthermore, they can hamper a government's ability to maintain political stability and thus lead to social and political unrest. Russia privatisation and Sierra Leone's war provide some of the vignettes that illustrate their argument. 'Economic policy should not just focus on removing market failures and correcting distortions […] its implications for future political equilibria should be factored in' they conclude. Not sure this is a very novel argument as they claim but still it's a point worth making--perhaps economics undergraduates should take a few compulsory courses on politics?

#economics politics jep

Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics How has publishing in top economics journals changed since 1970? Using a data set that combines information on all articles published in the top-five journals from 1970 to 2012 with their Google Scholar citations, we identify nine key trends. First, annual submissions to the top-five journals nearly doubled from 1990 to 2012. Second, the total number of articles published in these journals actually declined from 400 per year in the late 1970s to 300 per year most recently. As a result, the acceptance rate has fallen from 15 percent to 6 percent, with potential implications for the career progression of young scholars. Third, one journal, the American Economic Review, now accounts for 40 percent of top-five publications, up from 25 percent in the 1970s. Fourth, recently published papers are on average three times longer than they were in the 1970s, contributing to the relative shortage of journal space. Fifth, the number of authors per paper has increased from 1.3 in 1970 to 2.3 in 2012, partly offsetting the fall in the number of articles per year. Sixth, citations for top-five publications are high: among papers published in the late 1990s, the median number of Google Scholar citations is 200. Seventh, the ranking of journals by citations has remained relatively stable, with the notable exception of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which climbed from fourth place to first place over the past three decades. Eighth, citation counts are significantly higher for longer papers and those written by more coauthors. Ninth, although the fraction of articles from different fields published in the top five has remained relatively stable, there are important cohort trends in the citations received by papers from different fields, with rising citations to more recent papers in Development and International, and declining citations to recent papers in Econometrics and Theory.

Card, David, and Stefano DellaVigna. 2013. "Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics." Journal of Economic Literature 51(1): 144-61.

http://www.aeaweb.org/atypon.php?return_to=/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jel.51.1.144&etoc=1

#economics

Comprender Mali, resolver Mali

Los Tuareg han habitado el Sahara desde el siglo IV y durante el siglo XX organizaron varios levantamientos armados, primero contra Francia y luego contra Niger y Mali, para independizarse y formar su propio estado-nación, conocido como Azawad. La más reciente rebelión, lanzada el año pasado, agrupa a cuatro organizaciones armadas aliadas desde el punto de vista militar pero divididas en cuanto a su visión de la naturaleza secular o islámica del estado que pretenden constituir. El rápido avance de los rebeldes tomó por sorpresa al gobierno de Mali y propició el golpe de estado de marzo de 2012 (organizado por militares frustrados ante la débil respuesta política y militar del presidente Touré), así como la reciente intervención francesa. La explicación a la crisis más escuchada en las últimas semanas es que la rebelión es una nueva manifestación del 'choque de civilizaciones' augurado por Huntington. Esta teoría ofrece pistas sobre las raíces históricas del conflicto en Mali pero no encaja del todo con la evidencia: no todos los rebeldes apoyan la idea de crear un estado islámico ni todo el mundo islámico está en abierta confrontación con Occidente. Las variables económicas tampoco dan muchas luces sobre las raíces del conflicto: Mali es un país relativamente pobre—en 2011 su Indice de Desarrollo Humano fue de apenas 0,359 (el de Colombia fue 0,840 en 2010)—pero en los últimos años la economía ha crecido a tasas anuales del 5% con tasas de inflación de un dígito, avances notables en la reducción de la pobreza y volúmenes crecientes de inversión extranjera. A finales de los 1990s, la producción de oro en Mali creció notablemente y hoy ronda el 75% de las exportaciones totales del país. Por supuesto, la abundancia no siempre es una bendición y las economías que dependen de recursos minerales son particularmente propensas a padecer conflictos armados separatistas. Pero este no parece ser el caso de Mali pues los yacimientos auríferos se encuentran al sur del país, lejos de la zona dominada por los Tuareg. Las recientes sequías y los recurrentes conflictos por el uso del suelo entre pastores Tuareg y agricultores de otras etnias también pueden haber jugado un papel catalizador del conflicto pero no explican el rápido avance rebelde de 2012. La clave de la crisis parece residir en factores políticos e institucionales y, en particular, en la incapacidad del gobierno para acomodar satisfactoriamente las demandas de los Tuareg y para enfrentar las consecuencias de la inestabilidad regional causada por la caída de Gaddafi, a quien los Tuareg apoyaron militarmente hace dos años. Los Tuareg usaron en su avanzada las armas que habían recibido del régimen libio y de esta manera doblegaron rápidamente al ejército de Mali, algunos de cuyos miembros desertaron para unirse a las filas rebeldes. En este contexto el reto de Francia es triple: en primer lugar reagrupar y entrenar a las fuerzas armadas para que mantengan el control territorial sin alienar a los Tuareg; en segundo lugar impulsar una coalición política ‘suficientemente incluyente’ que de a los Tuareg mayor autonomía política y administrativa en el contexto de un estado secular a cambio de cerrar las puertas a las organizaciones islámicas radicales; y en tercer lugar evitar que la crisis contagie a los países vecinos que también albergan minorías Tuareg, como Argelia y Niger. Se trata de un esfuerzo sostenido, que se medirá en términos de años y no de meses, y que requerirá también apoyo técnico y financiero para construir y consolidar un estado viable y legítimo. Buena suerte con eso.

#vcd #Mali

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