ryancbriggs.net

Randomized Controlled Trials

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:57:00 -0400

Bill Easterly has a good post questioning the utility and ethics behind using randomized controlled testing to evaluate foreign aid interventions. His whole post is worth reading, but I want to elaborate on his second question, “Can you really generalize from one small experiment to conclude that something ‘works’?”

When it comes to aid the answer is pretty easy: no. There is a good reason for this, and it highlights one major difference between randomized controlled trials for aid and randomized controlled trials for medicine. First, the basics. A randomized trial is an experiment. In the experiment the researcher takes a sample from the population and divides the sample randomly into two groups, the control and the treatment. The experiment is set up so that the only systematic difference between the two groups is that the treatment groups gets the medicine and the control group doesn’t. The resulting difference between the two groups represents the effect of the medicine.

There is an obvious, but often overlooked, assumption at work here. The assumption is that the two groups that make up the sample are representative of the entire larger population. In the case of medicine, the control and the treatment groups are taken to be representative of the entire (much larger) target population for the medicine. The validity of RCTs for medicine hinges on this assumption being true. It usually is true because at a biological level most people are pretty much alike.

In political and social life this condition is rarely, if ever, met. A randomized trial in one country will tell you if the intervention worked in that specific place and time, but it will not tell you if the intervention works in general because different countries are far more different than different people. If tylenol works on someone in Botswana then it will probably work on someone in Vietnam. This is not true for aid interventions because the relevant social, political, and economic systems in any two countries are very different—far more so than the biological systems in different people. These systems also change rapidly when compared to human biology.

In short, an assumed equivalence between people underpins RCTs in medicine, but this equivalence is clearly lacking between countries. Because of this, RCTs can be used to see if an aid intervention worked, but it is impossible to use them to see if an intervention works. They are useful for small scale testing and can produce useful knowledge about what works in very specific contexts, but they cannot speak to anything larger. No one should expect them to do that.

—UPDATE: Jul 16, 2009—

Tim Ogden has a comment on Easterly’s blog that is worth highlighting. Here is an excerpt, “In fact, if you have a policy agenda, talking to Duflo, Kremer, Karlan et. al. can be maddening since it’s virtually impossible to get them to commit to a policy recommendation beyond the local context of an experiment they’ve run.” He is right, and I should have pointed out that the academics pushing RCTs for aid are well aware of the issues I raised in my post.

"Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than..."

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:30:38 -0400

“Yet a man who uses an imaginary map, thinking that it is a true one, is likely to be worse off than someone with no map at all; for he will fail to inquire whenever he can, to observe every detail on his way, and to search continuously with all this senses and all his intelligence for indications of where he should go.”

- E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.

The internet is like a big phone, right?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:16:00 -0400

About a week and a half ago the new Conservative party introduced a bill to modernize police power and internet interception rules in Canada (see more here). The bill is based on the assumption that the internet is analogous the phone system. On the program Search Engine Minister of Public Safety Peter Van Loan said, “What we did is we […] tried to find a way of modernizing and updating out laws on intercept technologies of the police, and we tried to create a regime for the cyber world, the internet world, that parallels as much and as closely as possible that which existed in law for the old world of the analog telephone and the single telephone company. We think we have done that.” I also think they have done that, and I think that it is a horrible idea.

The basic problem is that the internet is not like the telephone, so any system that tries to apply the same logic to both is bound to be incoherent. The basic idea behind the new legislation is that internet communication consists of a stream of data between two points, just like the phone system. Under the new bill, the police would not need a warrant to gather information about either end of the transmission—who you are, where you live, your phone number, etc.—but would need a warrant to know the content of the transmission. The is broadly similar to how phones taps are legislated.

The problem is that the internet is composed of many systems, and they are not all analogous to the phone system. First, we have email and instant messaging. This system is essentially equivalent to phones. Policing emails and instant messages in the same way as phones makes sense. If the police do not need a warrant to gather information on who is phoning to who, but they need one to know what people are talking about, then the law is consistent across phones and the internet. People may disagree with the outcome of the law, but it is consistent and Conservative policy is sound.

Unfortunately, there are other systems at work on the internet that are nothing like phones. This is common sense, but it seems the Conservatives missed it. Besides point-to-point messages like emails, the internet also operates like a giant library. People access information on webpages, and leave their IP address behind in records. Allowing the police to attach these IP address back to names without a warrant is exactly equivalent to letting the police connect library card numbers to names without a warrant. This represents a large expansion of police power.

The third, and most unique system, is that the internet allows anyone to create easily accessible information with minimal effort or expense. There is no good analogy for this kind of system, as it is probably represents the biggest technological and social shift that any of us will ever experience. Legislating this new form of information production as if it were a rotary phone is madness. This system is unique, and part of what makes it special is that people can produce information with a degree of anonymity that other previous information dissemination technologies lacked. Currently the veil of anonymity can be punctured, and this is a good thing. If someone breaks the law—by posting child pornography, to use the Conservative’s favourite example—then the police can get a warrant and learn that person’s identity. The key is that they need a warrant. This judicial check on police power allows all law abiding citizens to create and share information free from government control and snooping. This should be a small government, pro-private sector party’s dream. Apparently it isn’t.

When I think about this bill, I am only left with two options. Either the Conservatives are intentionally trying to vastly increase police power in Canada, or they are so dumb that they actually think that the internet is like a big system of rotary phones. Honestly, I don’t know which one is worse.

The NY Times Code

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:05:00 -0400

Today I am releasing the Processing code that I used for this map and these graphs, and the code that I used to get the data from the NY Times. To run the programs, (download Processing, then) unzip the programs and place them in your sketchbook folder.

The code used to gather data from the Times’ API can be found here. Jer has a great introduction to working with the Times’ API in Processing that is worth reading. In order to use my code (or Jer’s), you need to make an account with the NY Times and request an API key. This is painless and you can do it at developer.nytimes.com.

The code for the map program can be downloaded here. For this program I used an .svg map of Africa that I found on this wikipedia page. Wikipedia has lots of other .svg maps that you can use.

The code for the graphs is here. The bulk of this code comes from Ben Fry’s book Visualizing Data.* I lightly edited the code, wrapped it in loops, and made some changes to make it read my input and output image files.

If you need a general introduction to Processing the tutorials and reference sections of the Processing webpage are great, as is Casey Reas’ book Processing. Casey Reas and Ben Fry are the founders of Processing and I found both of their books very helpful.

All of the above code (except for the excerpts from Ben Fry’s book or Jer’s webpage) was written by a complete amateur and probably has lots of problems. My goal at the beginning of this project was to learn how to use Processing just well enough to solve my problems in the fastest amount of time possible. If that philosophy doesn’t appeal to you, then my code probably won’t either.

*Today I started using Amazon Affiliate links on books and media that I really like. I am hoping that this can help me buy more books that I really like. It also introduces a conflict of interest, so I felt that I should disclose it publicly.

The (delayed) NY Times Code

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:11:00 -0400

A few people have asked me where they can find the processing code that I used in my recent visualizations. Right now it is messy and incomplete and sitting on my desktop. It will stay there until I can clean it up. I’m aiming to have the code ready for public consumption before I travel to Chicago on June 18th.

Also, I am flattered by the positive response that the visualizations received. Thank you. It is really uplifting.

Archive of Accepted Proposals

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:35:03 -0400

I am thinking about writing up and publishing some short pieces that I have kicking around in my head, but most of my ideas are not rigorous (or long) enough for academic articles. I might be able to pitch these ideas to quality newspapers or magazines, but I have never pitched an article before and I don’t know where to start.

Anyone else in this situation should really check out Dan Baum’s archive of accepted article proposals. He has written for Wired, the LA Times, The New Yorker, and many others. His archive is proving invaluable for me. I hope you find it useful too.

Texas in Africa recently asked: If you took all the stories...

Fri, 29 May 2009 23:48:00 -0400

Texas in Africa recently asked:

If you took all the stories about African countries in American newspapers and removed those about poverty, disease, and war, I wonder what would be left?

I don’t have a perfect answer, but I can offer a tentative one. The New York Times tags all of its stories on a number of variables, including the article’s geographic subject and its relevant overarching themes. This information is free for people to play around with (do it). I modified one of the programs I used previously to find out what themes were prevalent when an article was about the continent of Africa. Two caveats:

These numbers are drawn from articles on the continent as a whole (as are the numbers for the graph above). Articles on specific countries or cities in Africa were not included unless wider Africa was an important part of the story.
Each article can be tagged as having more than one overarching theme. I wanted to show the data as a pie chart, but the non-exclusivity of the themes made that impossible.

With that out of the way, the juicy stuff:

16% of the articles on Africa in the New York Times between 1981 and 2008 were tagged as being about AIDS
12% were on foreign aid
5% were on famine
5% were on civil war and guerrilla warfare
4% were on immigration and refugees

Don’t add the the percentages up! Each bullet is true on its own but you can’t add the percentages and say that 42% were on stereotypical themes. There is likely overlap between the “immigration and refugees” category and the “civil war and guerilla warfare” category, for example. There were some more nebulous categories as well:

21% were on US International Relations or International Relations
11% were on economic conditions and trends
6% were tagged as being on third world and developing countries

As you can probably gather by now, the labeling system that the Times uses is a little opaque and can be hard to follow. I would not rely heavily on these numbers (only 6% were on developing countries?), but they do provide some insight into how Africa is portrayed in one major newspaper. Texas in Africa, that is the best I can do right now.

The picture above shows the New York Times coverage of nine...

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:17:00 -0400

The picture above shows the New York Times coverage of nine African countries from 1981 to 2008. You can click for a larger image. If you want to download the entire set of (much better quality) images, you can get them here. The set contains 48 pictures (continental Africa plus Madagascar) and a text file with some extra information and caveats.

I would love feedback, but I am not a fan of blog comments. You can reach me on twitter at @ryanbriggs.

—UPDATE: May 28, 2009 —

Andrew Hughey pointed out that I was missing some articles on the DRC because I forgot to includes those titled Zaire. The image for the DRC is now updated to reflect the additional articles, as is the map.

The New York Times’ API is really fantastic. —...

Tue, 12 May 2009 22:33:00 -0400

The New York Times’ API is really fantastic.

— Update: May 28, 2009 —

A point of comparison (requested by @theresac) is that in the same time period Canada had 10905 articles, Mexico had 10042, Germany had 10161, Norway had 1393, and Bangladesh had 900. I will soon upload the graphs of each country in Africa over time, as they show where coverage spiked. The point of the original exercise was to allow for comparisons within the continent (and to learn how to use processing), but if I find some extra time over the summer I might expand the project to the rest of the world.

— Update #2: May 28, 2009 —

Andrew Hughey pointed out that I was missing some articles from the DRC because I forgot to includes those titled Zaire. The map is now updated to reflect the additional articles.

I have been playing around with the New York Times API and...

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:15:00 -0400

I have been playing around with the New York Times API and Processing over the last few days for a project I am working on. I am looking at how the Times’ coverage of Africa has shifted from 1981 (the earliest date accessible by the API) to 2008. The picture above shows the (predictable) spike in the number of New York Times articles about Rwanda in 1994.

Expect more visualizations of Times data over the next few weeks as I wrap up the project. I didn’t find anything earth shattering, but having data to back up hunches is always nice. If anyone wants to learn how to use processing I can’t recommend Processing and Visualizing Data enough. Both were written by the people who created the Processing language. The picture that I made above draws heavily on code written by Ben (one of the creators) in an example in his book.

When everything is finished I will post the code and the final visualizations to this page.

A final note: if you are interested in the link between media attention and violence, you should check out this recent post from Alex de Walle on the SSRC webpage.

The world would be a better place if everyone read xkcd.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:32:50 -0500

The world would be a better place if everyone read xkcd.

Reading on the internet

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:57:00 -0500

I am a person who reads from a screen. Excluding books, I never read off of paper. All I need is a Kindle, and I’ll never read off of paper again (which would be sad, because I do like books). This post is aimed at other people like me.

I want to share two bookmarklets that are central to how I read online.

First, we have instapaper by Marco Arment. Instapaper allows you to save an article to read later. When I come across something interesting while I am working, I click “Read Later” and then close the window. Later when I want something to read I go to instapaper.com and read the articles I have saved. Marco even made an iPhone application, so I can read the articles I saved while riding the metro.

When I come across an article that I want to read now, I often click “Read Now.” Doing that runs a bookmarklet called Readability by Arc90. This separates the content that I want to read from the ads, formatting, and layout, and gives me a clean page to read from. It might sound picky, but if you read the New York Times or Economist pages regularly, then you will love it. It is a one-click cure for ADD.

My biggest challenge when working with my computer, especially when I am online, is staying focused. Both of these bookmarklets are drop-dead simple ways to help me stay focused. If I see something cool but not currently relevant, I file it away with instapaper. If I want to read something now, I remove the clutter and read it. I hope you find them as useful as I do.

Elizabeth Gilbert gives a brilliant TED talk on the burdens of...

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 00:49:25 -0500

Elizabeth Gilbert gives a brilliant TED talk on the burdens of creativity.

I was just listening to BBC’s Africa Today podcast and the...

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:22:00 -0500

I was just listening to BBC’s Africa Today podcast and the Eritrean ambassador to the UN, Araya Desta, was speaking about the border conflict between Eritrea and Djibouti. When he was explaining that Eritrean troops were only stationed on Eritrean land he referenced the above map:

“I would like to underline that we are in our sovereign territories. The border has been demarcated by France and Italy in 1900 and 1901 and the islands and the mountains that we are talking—Ras Doumeira—are Eritrean. You can see in the google map [above] clearly Ras Doumeira [the little island on the right] is in Eritrea and there is no reason why we should move from our sovereign territories.”

Reminds me of the minor fiasco when Hasboro almost released Monopoly “World Edition” with the property “Jerusalem, Israel”.

African Development Reading List

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:50:00 -0500

I need to read (a lot) more on Africa and development. This is the list that I have compiled over the last few days. It is broken down into journal articles, academic books and fiction. My goal with the reading list is to create a solid base that I can then specialize on top of. Journal titles are missing, but there should be enough information on each item to track it down on google scholar. A lot of this list was taken from sources in this book and various syllabi I grabbed off the internet.

I know this list makes for a long post, but I imagine someone else out there will find it useful some day. It leaves out what I have read in the past, but it is still pretty thorough. It is biased towards political economy and governance.

Articles:

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, & James Robinson (2005) “Institutions as the fundamental cause of long-run growth”
Alesina, Alberto & Beatrice Weder (2002), “Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Foreign Aid?” American Economic Review, 92(4), 1126-37.
Alesina, Alberto & David Dollar (2000), “Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?” Journal of Economic Growth, 5(1), 33-64.
Banerjee, Abhijit and Esther Duflo (2006). “The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(1), 141-167.
Barkan, Joel & David Gordon (1998) “Democracy in Africa”
Birdsall, Nancy (?) “Seven deadly sins of donor agencies…” (or something like that, it is on the CGD website)
Bloom, David & Jeff Sachs (1998) “Geography, Demography, and Economic Growth in Africa”
Boyce, James & Léonce Ndikumana (2001) “Is Africa a net creditor? New Estimates of Capital Flight from Severely Indebted Sub-Saharan African Countries, 1970-96”
Brautigam & Knack (2004) “Foreign Aid, Institutions, and Governance in Sub-Sharan Africa”
Chauvin, Nicolas & Aart Kraay (2005) “What has 100 billion dollars worth of debt relief done for low-income countries?”
Clark, Anne Marie (1995) “Non-governmental organizations and their influence on international society”
Collier, Paul & Jan Willem Gunning (1999) “What has Africa grown slowly?”
de Long, Bradford & Barry Eichengreen (1991) “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program”
de Waal, Alex (2003) “How will HIV/AIDS transform African governance?”
Easterly, William & Ross Levine (1997) “Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions”
Easterly, William (2001) “Think Again: Debt Relief”
Easterly, William (2002) “How did heavily indebted poor countries become heavily indebted? Reviewing two decades of debt relief”
Easterly, William & Tobias Pfutze, Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 22, No.2, Spring 2008
Ekeh, Peter (1975). “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 17(1): 91‐112.
Emery, James (2003) “Governance and Private Investment in Africa”
Englebert, Pierre (2000) “Solving the mystery of the AFRICA dummy”
Englebert, Pierre (1997) “The Contemporary African State: Neither African nor State”
Finan, Frederico and Claudio Ferraz (2007). “Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effect of Brazil’s Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes,” IZA Discussion Paper No. 2836
Freeman, Richard & David Lindauer (1999) “Why Not Africa?”
Glaeser, Edward et al. (2004) “Do Institutions Cause Growth?”
Gordon, David (1992) “Conditionality in Policy-Based Lending in Africa: USAID Experience”
Herbst, Jeffery (1990) “The Structural Adjustment of Politics in Africa”
Kanbur, Ravi (2000) “Aid, Conditionality, and Debt in Africa”
Kaufman, Daniel & Aart Kraay (2002) “Growth without Governance”
Kenny, Charles & David Williamson (2001) “What do we know about economic growth? Or, why don’t we know very much?”
Killick, Tony (2004) “Politics, Evidence, and the New Aid Agenda”
Krasner, Steven (2004) “Sharing Sovereignty: New Institutions for Collapsed and Failing States”
Kremer, Michael & Edward Miguel (2007) “Illusion of Sustainability” Quarterly Journal of Economics. vol. 122, issue 3, pages 1007-1065
Lewis, Peter (1996) “Economic Reform and Political Transition in Africa: The Quest for a Politics of Development”
Lindauer, David & Lant Printchett (2002) “What’s the Big Idea? The Third Generation of Policies for Economic Growth”
Mallaby, Sebastian (2004) “NGOs: Fighting Poverty, Hurting the Poor”
Mistry, Percy (2000) “Africa’s record of regional co-operation and integration”
Ndulu, Benno & Stephen O’Connell (1999) Governance and Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa”
Ng, Francis & Alexander Yeats (1996) “Open Economies Work Better: did Africa’s protectionist policies cause its marginalization in world trade?”
Pritchett, Lant & Lawrence Summers (1996) “Wealthier is Healthier”
Rogerson, Andrew (2004) “The international aid system 2005-2010: Forces for and against change”
Simmons, P.J. (1998) “Learning to live with NGOs”
Shleifer, Andrei and Robert Vishny, (1993). “Corruption,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 108(3), 599-617.
Subramanian, Arvind et al. (2000) “Trade and trade policies in eastern and southern Africa”
Svensson, Jakob, 2005, “Eight Questions about Corruption,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19:3, 19-42.
Theobald, Robin (1982 ) “Patrimonialism”
Van de Walle, Nicolas (2002) “Africa’s Range of Regimes” Journal of Democracy
Schatzberg, Michael (1993) “Power, Legitimacy, and Democratisation in Africa”
Weinstein, Jeremy (2005) “Autonomous Recovery and International Intervention in Comparative Perspective”
Journal of Democracy (1998) - Special Issue on Africa & Journal of Democracy (2001) - Special Issue on Francophone Africa

Books (Academic):

Bates, Robert (1981) Markets and States in Tropical Africa
Bates, Robert (2008). When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late‐Century Africa.
Bauer, Gretchen & Hannah Britton (2006) Women in African Parliaments
Boone, Catherine (2003) Political Topographies of the African State
Bratton, Michael & Nicolas Van de Walle (1999) Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transition in Comparative Perspective
Callaghy, Thomas and John Ravenhill (1993) Hemmed In: Responses to Africa’s Economic Decline
Cumming, Gordon (2001) Aid to Africa: French and British Policies from the Cold War to the New Millennium
de Soto, Hernando (1989) The Other Path
de Soto, Hernando (2000) The Myster of Capital
Dollar, David (1998) Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why
Englebert (?) State Legitimacy and Development in Africa (there is an article on this also)
Harford, Tim & Michael Klein (2005) The Market for Aid
Herbst, Jeffrey (2000) States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control
Hyden, Goran (1983) No Shortcuts to Progress: African Development Management in Perspective
Jackson, Robert & Carl Rosenberb (1982) Personal Rule in Black Africa: Prince, Autocrat, Prophet, Tyrant
Jackson, Robert (1990) Quasi-States, Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World
Joseph, Richard (2000) State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa
Lancaster, Carol (2000) Transforming Foreign Aid: US Assistance in the 21st Century
Landes, David (1998) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are rich and some are poor
Leonard, David and Scott Strauss (2003) Africa’s Stalled Development: International Causes and Cures
Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
North, Douglas (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change, and Performance
Nugent, Paul (2004) The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective
Perkins, Dwight, Steven Radalet & David Lindhauer (2006) Economics of Development
Posner, Daniel (2005) Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa
Reader, John (1999) Africa: A Biography of the Continent
Sen, Amartya (1999) Development as Freedom
Tangri, Roger (2000) The Politics of Patronage in Africa: Parastatals, Privatization, and Private Enterprise in Africa
White, Howard, Tony Killick & Steve Kayizzi-Mugerwa (2001) African poverty at the Millennium: Causes, Complexities, and Challenges
Young, Crawford (?) The African Colonial State in Historical Perspective

Books (Fiction):

Achebe, Chinua (1958) Things Fall Apart
Achebe, Chinua (1988) Antills of the Savannah
Dangarembga, Tsitsi (1988) Nervous Conditions
Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth
Green, Graham (1948) The Heart of the Matter
Holman, Michael (2005) Law and Order at Harrod’s
Marechera, Dambudzo (1993) The House of Hunger
Naipal, V.S. (1979) A Bend in the River
Rush, Norman (1991) Mating

Circle Plot Code

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:22:00 -0400

Before you even start reading this, you deserve a warning. This post exists mostly so I can keep track of my code and ideas. I am putting it online because it seems conceivable that some one on the internet might find it useful.

At the bottom of this post, you can download the latest version of the processing code that I used to create my circle plots. It is also the first program I have written since high school, and it still needs a lot of work. That said, it does most of what I need it to do. It is only 72 lines long and I tried to keep it readable, so hopefully you can see what I am trying to do pretty quickly.

To use it, you first need to download processing and download my sketch. The program relies on two external files. First, you need to load a font into the sketch. The font that I use is called Silkscreen. It is free to download and use. Second, you need to create a .csv file with your data, name it “data.csv” and add it to your sketch. The variables in the file control (in order): country name, position on x axis, position on y axis, size of the circle, and colour (blue to red).

The program is incomplete. The biggest problems are:

All variables in the .csv file (except the country name) must be scaled 0-100 outside of the program (100 is the max value and 0 is the min). I have been doing this in SPSS. This means that all of the positioning is relative, not absolute.
- The program needs a way to internally scale the raw numbers so that SPSS is not needed.
- The program needs a way to decouple the x and y values from the size of the sketch, which could allow for plotting raw numbers without scaling them against each other.
The font doesn’t scale with the image size. A larger font should be used when the image gets to a certain size.
- A simple if statement will fix this, but I wanted to fix the previous problems first because they might complicate this fix.
The output (in the window that appears when you run the program) doesn’t match the image that is produced and saved in the sketch’s folder. The image is there, but the output window doesn’t show it.
- This only started happening after I downloaded the most recent beta, version 0154.
I would like a way to show changes over time, perhaps by showing a circle for each year, starting with high transparency, and then making the circles less transparent as they move through time.

This would involve changing the arrays and I haven’t thought it through yet. I would probably add a year variable to the end of each line in the .csv file.

It might be nice to be able to colour each circle after a region, so that all of Europe, for example, was the same colour. It would make comparisons easier.

If I did this then the current colour scaling code would need to be either replaced to added on to.
This might also necessitate adding another variable, because the current colour variable must be scaled 0-100 and links to an attribute that exists for each circle.

The code was last updated on Nov 1, 2008.

Download the code, as a processing file, here.

Here is another image I made with processing (and pixelmator)....

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:03:00 -0400

Here is another image I made with processing (and pixelmator). The x-axis is population density. The y-axis is GDP per capita. The bottom left holds the low values. The colour of each circle is determined by the country’s Polity IV score (democracy score). Blue is more democratic and red is more authoritarian. The size of each circle is determined by the size of the country’s population.

The inlay blows up the chaos of the bottom left corner and scales down the radius of the circles to improve visibility. The sizes and placement of the circles within the inlay are correct relative to each other.

Click the image to download the much larger version (2000x2000 px).

I recently started playing around with Processing and this is...

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:18:00 -0400

I recently started playing around with Processing and this is the result of my first experiment. I wanted to generate a picture that would show general trends in 4 variables across many countries in an intuitive way. I looked at 43 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The variable selection (this time) was almost random. The x-axis is the number average number of children in a family in 2003. It ranges from 2 to 8. The y-axis is the total amount of ODA in 2003, ranging from 10 million to 5 billion. The colour is tied to the Polity IV scores for each country: blue is more democratic, red is less. Finally, the size of the circle is the population size. Nigeria is the huge circle. A few countries were too small to show up and labels were not generated for them.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the circle all alone at the top. Its ODA in 2003 was apparently 5 billion. That seems way too big to me, but debt forgiveness (and other things you may not think of as aid) are included in ODA. Still, its placement may be due to an error in the data set.

Click the picture to get a higher quality version of the picture. Kottke made the font. I would love suggestions or criticism. I will post the code after I clean it up.

President Koroma's Speech

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:29:18 -0400

Sunday night I saw President Koroma of Sierra Leone speak at American University. His speech was mostly focused on development issues in Sierra Leone and I thought some readers might find it interesting.

President Koroma outlined his priorities as follows:

Energy
Agriculture & Infrastructure
Tourism & Mining

His energy policy had two goals. First, providing a reliable amount of energy to Freetown by completing the Bumbuna dam and the transmission lines. Second, by testing and implementing pilot projects involving mini-dams to provide power to rural areas.

The agricultural policies were mentioned second. The end goal of the policies was to stop being a rice importer by 2011. This would require increasing domestic rice production by 500 000 metric tons. Nor surprisingly, Sierra Leone’s rice production fell drastically between 1990 and 2000. President Koroma vaguely identified two ways of increasing production: increasing investment in agriculture and “reviewing the land tenure system.”

Tourism and mining were mentioned as third tier priorities and ways of increasing foreign exchange. The plan for increasing tourism centered around building better hotels and improving the country’s image. The government is also apparently reviewing mining licenses, although I do not know exactly what that means.

President Koroma included passing references to corruption “as a cancer of society” and said that education “was the most important investment in our future”. He finished by stating that there would be elections within 36 months and that if he lost he would step down without a hassle. He then answered questions from diaspora Sierra Leonians in the audience, one of which I will include:

Q: What is your government doing to prevent FGM?
A: FGM is a sensitive issue in our country. We (Sierra Leonians) need a solution that is acceptable both to the women of Sierra Leone and the international community. This issue is currently under review.

ryancbriggs.net

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President Koroma's Speech