This study’s goal was to understand how diet, beer in particular, impacts how attractive humans are to malaria’s primary vector in Africa, Anopheles gambiae Giles sensu stricto – or An. gambiae (or mosquito) for short. Diet is thought to be an important part of body odor, which has been shown to provide the female An. gambiae with an olfactory trail to human hosts. Therefore, diet may be an important factor behind variation in human attractiveness to mosquitoes — and possibly malaria risk.

To test this idea, the study’s authors randomly assigned 43 adult males to drink either beer or water. Participants in the beer group drank a local brew called dolo, a homemade concoction of fermented sorghum (reported to be the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage in Burkina Faso). The rest of the volunteers consumed a tall glass of tap water.

Guess who got the mosquito love? Answer here.

I wonder what a mosquito walk of shame looks like?

We at Masked Grammarian (a loosely-knit small group of grammar snobs) send corrections to sites on the web when we notice something that bugs us. Almost always, we do this only when it seems worthwhile — a site that we like with a significant error.

In this case, you used the word “impacted” to mean “affected”. Until just a few years ago, “impacted” was used only in a medical sense: unless otherwise stated, it was assumed to refer to fecal impaction. Of course, it could also refer to wisdom teeth, etc.

Due to the rise of MBA-speak, many nouns have become verbified, and we’ve all slipped into using words, such as “impacted”, which were formerly the domain of people who talk of synergy, best practices, 10,000-foot views, and the like.

We just wanted to point out your incorrect (albeit unfortunately well-accepted) use of “impacted” in your 1:08 PM post today. We also hope that we will not be impacted, in the traditional sense, by your light posting schedule, though it will negatively affect our day.

Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but not a revolutionary effect on econometric practice. As we see it, the credibility revolution in empirical work can be traced to the rise of a design-based approach that emphasizes the identification of causal effects.

Design-based studies typically feature either real or natural experiments and are distinguished by their prima facie credibility and by the attention investigators devote to making the case for a causal interpretation of the findings their designs generate. Design-based studies are most often found in the microeconomic fields of Development, Education, Environment, Labor, Health, and Public Finance, but are still rare in Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics.

We explain why IO and Macro would do well to embrace a design-based approach. Finally, we respond to the charge that the design-based revolution has overreached.

That is a new working paper from Angrist and Pischke.

I don’t really see sensitivity analysis and causal identification as substitutes. The former makes the latter more credible.

The sad reason we probably don’t see more sensitivity analysis? Some of the best techniques we have–from Imbens or Altonji–don’t have a Stata routine.

Interesting posts:

• A conspiracy of violence in Nairobi’s slums (wish I could stream the video live here in Kampala)
• Nigel Robert’s musings on Israel and Palestine
• Their call for ideas and proposals

I’m always amazed by how much people share with me when all I’ve done is ask. But when I went to Uganda a month ago, I was especially astounded. At a time when an anti-homosexuality bill threatens to criminalize loving and living, several gay friends nonetheless invited me to their homes and allowed me to take their photos, to write down their names, to risk further exposure.

That is Scarlett Lion. See her photos here and Time article here. Uganda’s parliament will vote on an anti-homosexuality bill in the coming weeks.

It’s hard to find a news story that fails to mention Uganda’s conservative and religious culture, solidly anti-homosexual. It’s impossible to find one that suggests Uganda is a gay African’s best hope. But that may just be true.

Homophobia is real and widespread. Yet Uganda boasts a vibrant gay rights movement, and nowhere else in Africa have I seen a more open and public debate. Gay men and women tell their stories in the newspapers; protests and legal battles get fair and often favorable coverage in the press. Every single editorial board of every major newspaper is solidly behind the gay rights movement.

The anti-homosexuality bill, simply put, is a backlash. A backlash from a group that, in the long run, is losing the battle of ideas.

Last week, This American Life replayed the story how a small group of American psychologists transformed their profession in just three years, ultimately removing homosexuality from the list of diseases and disorders. That the change could happen so quickly was unimaginable even to them at the time. Indeed, the American shift in attitudes towards gays, while far from complete, must be among the most rapid social transformations in human history. It has spread to Uganda.

Like most countries, Uganda remains a terrible and difficult place to be gay. But far from a losing war, Uganda is the front line in the battle for gay rights.

I think they are winning.

Edmonton’s water utility published this graph of water consumption during last Sunday’s gold medal Olympic hockey game. Roughly 80% of Canadians were watching.

I believe the beer consumption picture looks exactly the same, but upside down.

From Pat’s Papers. Hat tip to Jenny B.

Not so fast, says uber-poverty economist Martin Ravallion.

readers of their paper may be surprised to hear that there is any uncertainty about the trend decline since the mid-1990s; their main graph has 30 annual data points since 1995. But these are not real data points in any obvious sense; rather they are synthetic (model-based) extrapolations based on national accounts and growth forecasts.

We have national household surveys for all but 10 of the 48 countries in SSA since 1995. However, for only 18 countries do we have more than one survey since 1995; for 30 countries, there are is at most one survey since 1995.

Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin are doing the best that can be done with bad data: they use the scant surveys to get the shape of the income distribution, but discard what the surveys tell us about income levels. They calculate levels and poverty rates by tying the distribution to national income data.

I like the Sala-i-Martin method as a rough approximation, but some of the problems with the method are outlined in a paper of Ravallion’s with Shahoua Chen.

Another caution: Africa is halving poverty using only the more optimistic data, the Penn World Tables. Chatting with Michael Clemens, he points out that World Bank data show poverty falling, but by far less. Arvind Subramanian critiques the Penn series here.

I think there are two short stories here. First, poverty has fallen a lot in Africa, and that’s good news. Maybe it’ll halve by 2015, maybe later. But there is happy news from the South. No one disagrees there.

Second, never, ever take data from low income countries too seriously. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the World Development Indicators have annual infant mortality data for most countries in Africa for most years? It  should. Most of that data is interpolated, and the rest is (as often as not) close to made up. It’s not just the human development indicators. You wouldn’t want to be inside the sausage factory that is the GDP calculation in Chad.

The Director is Weijun Chen and the documentary is Please Vote for Me. It’s so perfect one wonders if it was choreographed. Watch this preview:

I laughed. I cried. I despaired the fate of humanity.

Buy the video here. It can be live streamed on Netflix. Someone please alert me if, like many documentaries, it streams free online.

Update: A reader delivers: see it in 5 parts on YouTube.

2. Owen Barder disagrees with me on Faith Based Aid

3. Getting funding for your first field experience

4. Primogeniture alive and well in Uganda?

Jeannie: Great!

Me: What a horrible job that must be. Every time you try to have a conversation with interesting people, they are probably just thinking of ways to ask you for money.

Jeannie: I don’t know. Just think how good it would feel to say no to all of the those really bad projects.