Assorted Links

Here are some items that may be of interest to our readers:

This is a flow chart about a subject that has received significant attention in development news. What do you do with your stuff? Here is a flow chart from Peace Dividend that provides some wisdom about the tradeoffs of sending your stuff to a developing country. Could you sell the stuff for money that could be better used in developing countries? What are the transport costs of sending your stuff to this country? Could that money be better spent?

Trawling through the Freakonomics Blog I came across this interesting guest post by David Zetland, a post-doc at Berkley writing about the subtle nuances you might not notice in a discussion about getting "clean water" to the poor. This is an interesting account of how bureaucracies want to measure the wrong thing because at least it looks like they're doing something.

Chris Blattman explains that rebels where those pastel colored croc shoes to distinguish themselves from non-rebels. How knew crocs were the preferred footwear of rebels?

Lynn Kiesling dispels a false presentation of statistics . . . not that the statistics themselves were false, rather, what they were used to imply about how poor the U.S. record of energy consumption is relative to other more "sustainable" countries like Denmark. Always be wary of statistics and how they are presented, they can hypnotize the passive mind. She also offers some thoughts on the oil spill situation and the call for regulation.