Your regular reminder that AI continues to routinely produce incorrect word salad. Sometimes having an "assistant" like this can be exhausting.

Nice @markusgold.bsky.social and Juan Manuel Menendez post about how far empirical economics still needs to go in studying sub-Saharan Africa www.cgdev.org/blog/researc...

Motivating for @poverty-action.bsky.social's initiative promoting LMIC research collabs poverty-action.org/research-col...

Really useful resource for RAs and others interested in doing field work in international settings, or any rigorous empirical work in social sciences
@poverty-action.bsky.social just launched the IPA Knowledge Hub
data.poverty-action.org

That sinking feeling when you're trying to access a really useful online repository of measurement tools and... it doesn't load. Then you remember it was USAID-funded.

www.youthpower.org/resources/me...

How is everyone doing with the end of Skype? Do people even use it still?

We're moving everything to Teams (were going to do that anyway), but I was wondering what happens to all those contacts and conversations. Not that important, really just feeling nostalgic already.

Interested in running lab in the field experiments with farmers? This paper has a lot of practical advice. 👀

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

#devecon #labinthefield #agecon

🚨🚨Data science jobs at IPA!!🚨🚨

Apply your data science & engineering skills to problems of global poverty with more data than you can imagine.

Seeking data scientists in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Mexico, or Colombia.

poverty-action.org/data-scienti...
poverty-action.org/senior-data-...

And then there is the WhatsApp chatbot for post-partum Peruvian women at risk of depression. It feeds them voice notes from a curated library to address their questions and problems. youtu.be/Q1ArvaCqKpQ?... Slightly creepy but wise girlfriend "Juntina" has a backstory and lots of advice for moms.

One talk I liked shows how a chatbot mentor for Kenyan small biz owners had real impact... for those who learned prompt engineering

Entrepreneurship training can be effective, but it's hard to scale. Could AI solve that problem? youtu.be/Q1ArvaCqKpQ?...

A fun one to start with is Ben Manning's 13-minute talk on using synthetic subjects (!) to construct respondent populations with which to conduct experiments:

Give a short prompt and the AI comes up with hypothesis, study subjects (!), designs survey, runs experiment, analysis, and results. Boom.

The race is on for developing #AI assistants. I feel like Clippy was prematurely introduced, and killed off, when his time is now.

Come join me at the fast-growing Applied Research & Methods group at IPA as a Research Associate, working on Poverty Measurement and Research Methods Initiative.

Submit your code sample, resume, and cover letter by May 15. bit.ly/armra27

Please share with your networks in Africa and Latin America!

Come join my data quality team as a Data Manager! Support IPA's country offices in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Apply by April 26.
bit.ly/ipac2grds