iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I just posted two articles on LinkedIn recovered from the defunct FHI 360 research blog. Both are reports from a rapid evidence review I conducted with Jacqueline Shieh on interventions addressing the dual burden of malnutrition in LMICs. Review covered 78 SRs and umbrella SRs. Links in comments.

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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 26/08/2026

A new study found that one in four former NFL players who died over a recent six-year period — and likely many more — had the incurable, progressive brain disease known as CTE. Here are five takeaways from the study and reaction to it.

nyti.ms

5 Takeaways on the Fallout From an Alarming C.T.E. Study

At least one in four N.F.L. players, and likely a much higher percentage, had the brain disease when they died. Will anything change?

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

This reveals an acute awareness among GenZ of mental health conditions. It also makes one wonder about what assumptions are used for the DALYs we still rely on so heavily.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Yesterday my class anonymously answered the time trade-off question used for DALY disability weights, paraphrased: "how much of a year's duration would you give up to avoid having this disability for the remaining portion?" Their ranges: Back pain - 0-25%; Depression - 20-70%; Blindness - 40-97%.

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NORC at the University of Chicago @norc.org · 29/07/2026

Children's health holds steady after aging out of Peru's Cuna Más childcare program, but mothers reported significantly higher rates of depression. New research co-authored by NORC’s Angelo Cozzubo points to a need for transitional support for caretakers. View the full study: go.norc.org/4fsySXz

doi.org

Motherly Care: The Impacts of Exiting a Childcare Program on Child and Maternal Health

We investigate the unintended impacts of exiting Peru’s Cuna Más public childcare program on child and maternal health. With increased public childcare use in developing countries, understanding th...

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 29/07/2026

Reminder that on his last day of his first term, Trump awarded a commendation to Dr Fauci "in recognition of his exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed"

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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Taylor Farms' parent company has given $2.2M to GOP PACs this election cycle. That includes $1M to Trump's own PAC, just 6 days after the FDA delayed new food tracing requirements last year. Money in politics is sickening.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

In which Moss argues, "Which brings me back to the misguided rationale in some circles that more rigorous randomized studies can save smart development policy in Washington DC and help us rebuild something akin to USAID again. I don’t buy it." open.substack.com/pub/toddmoss...

open.substack.com

More Evidence Won’t Save Development

We don’t need more studies. We need a new coalition rebuilt on political priorities

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

This @danbanik.bsky.social essay was worth breaking the rule not to start the morning on my phone. The label "evidence-based hope" doesn't work for me, given the overuse of "evidence-based", but the messages woke me up, esp that "hope is a practice that you do." open.substack.com/pub/globalde...

open.substack.com

Why hope is what we need

Hope is not a mood or a forecast. It is a politics, and a public good we cannot afford to lose.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Great new post by @dmckenzie.bsky.social reviewing @johnlist.bsky.social's new book. I appreciate the links to articles and posts that cover some of the points David thought were missing. #econsky blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...?

blogs.worldbank.org

I just read all 700+ pages of John List’s Experimental Economics Textbook, Should You?

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

I am one of so many who benefitted from knowing Raúl, especially as an @egap.bsky.social colleague, and who is stunned and devastated to learn of his passing. What a terrible loss.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I have to wonder when Claude declares that his following response is "more intellectually honest" than his former responses.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Great post in the @agencyfund.bsky.social blog by Cameroonian Yanick Kemayou about agency and #locallyleddevelopment in #Mali looking at entrepreneurship and questioning formalization. H/T @dmckenzie.bsky.social #econsky It’s the mindset, … open.substack.com/pub/theagenc...

open.substack.com

It’s the mindset, …

Reflections on the power of agency

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I'm really enjoying the 2026 Midwest International Economic Development Conference at the #UniversityofWisconsin! It's my second year at #MWIEDC, and I continue to be impressed by the quality and relevance of the research. This is the view from the current session!

Photo from classroom building on University of Wisconsin campus looking out over a sparkling lake with a blue sky a few trees and the roof of building between.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Flowers from this morning's dog walk.

A close-up photo of a bright pink flower with white edges on the petals. There is another one in the background.

A closeup of a yellow daffodil flower with an orange center. The petals are fully open. There is a filed of similar daffodils in the background.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Another summary of fascinating research in This Week in Social Science. These posts are always succinct and well written. TWISS #54: Apple of your (mind's) eye open.substack.com/pub/twisswee...

open.substack.com

TWISS #54: Apple of your (mind's) eye

Aphantasia, its prevalence, and its impact on emotional processing.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Long read but GREAT @brookings.edu policy analysis by @econsarahreber.bsky.social and my grad school compatriot Sarah Turner. Excellent teaching resource on policy analysis, the complexity of well-intentioned policies, and importance of administration. Courts too! www.brookings.edu/articles/the...

brookings.edu

The past, present, and future of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program | Brookings

Senior Fellow Sarah Reber and and UVA Professor Sarah Turner explore the different facets of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 23/03/2026

I enjoyed this @voxdev.bsky.social podcast on today's dog walk. It is a mini master class in the evolution of rigor in evidence, using the contact hypothesis as a case study. It ends with a meta-analysis based just on pre-registered experiments. Great for teaching! open.spotify.com/episode/4xrF...

open.spotify.com

S7 Ep12: Can contact between groups reduce prejudice?

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Easy to read summary of very interesting research by @egap.bsky.social researcher Chris Grady. TWISS #49: The Paradox of Self-Interest open.substack.com/pub/twisswee...

open.substack.com

TWISS #49: The Paradox of Self-Interest

Why we expect selfishness in a world built for reciprocity.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

That amusement when you're told to bring your presentation on a thumb drive and you search your office frantically for one, to see that the only file on the drive you find is dated 2011. Time flies!

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Center for Open Science @cos.io · 25/02/2026

⏰ REMINDER: Applications for AREN's Local Network Leads program are open through March 16. This program trains researchers & research professionals in #Africa to become #openscience leaders who can establish a community of practice at their institution. Learn more & apply:

africanrn.org

African Reproducibility Network (AREN)

Reproducibility Network (RN) in Africa

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Alex Coppock @aecoppock.bsky.social · 27/01/2026

🎺 Call for proposals 🎺 1️⃣ replicate an existing experiment 2️⃣ run a novel experiment on repdata.com 3️⃣ coauthor with Mary McGrath and me to meta-analyze the replications and existing studies 4️⃣ publish your study details: alexandercoppock.com/replication_... applications open Feb 1 please repost!

Call for Proposals: Data Collection for
Replication+Novel Political Science Survey Experiments
Alexander Coppock and Mary McGrath
January 27, 2026
We invite proposals for a survey experiment replication+novel design competition. Se-
lected replication+novel design survey experiments will be conducted on large samples of
American respondents, quota sampled to match U.S. Census margins and filtered for quality
and attention by the survey sample provider Rep Data (repdata.com).
Each proposal consists of two parts: (1) a replication study of an existing, previously
published survey experiment, and (2) a novel experimental design on a topic of the authors’
choosing.
The replication studies and reanalyses of the existing studies will be combined into a
meta-paper to be co-authored by all authors of accepted proposals along with the princi-
pal investigators (Coppock and McGrath). As a condition for acceptance, authors commit
to sharing the data and producing a write-up of the findings from their novel design for
submission to a scholarly journal, and public posting of a working paper pre-publication.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

On the first prediction, stay tuned for forthcoming @nature.com article by Andrew Tyner and @briannosek.bsky.social of @cos.io (and almost 300 coauthors including me) on the replicability of published findings in the social sciences. Due out mid-March.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

A big thanks to @justinwolfers.bsky.social, Joshua Hill, and MacMillan Learning for a great webinar today on "AI won't replace econ professors, but it will change the way we teach." I left a little less scared of AI and much more curious about what I can create!

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

There's something very special about Harrison Ford and Michael J. Fox sharing the screen.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Thank you for sharing this finding! We would *hope* that many of our hypotheses are based on good theory or intended to cumulate evidence on prior findings. So, it shouldn't be 50-50, right? But there are still many empirical questions (theory can go both ways) or true equipoise experiments.

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Ryan Briggs @ryancbriggs.net · 11/02/2026

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

It must be very hard to publish null results
Publication practices in the social sciences act as a filter that favors statistically significant results over null findings. While the problem of selection on significance (SoS) is well-known in theory, it has been difficult to measure its scope empirically, and it has been challenging to determine how selection varies across contexts. In this article, we use large language models to extract granular and validated data on about 100,000 articles published in over 150 political science journals from 2010 to 2024. We show that fewer than 2% of articles that rely on statistical methods report null-only findings in their abstracts, while over 90% of papers highlight significant results. To put these findings in perspective, we develop and calibrate a simple model of publication bias. Across a range of plausible assumptions, we find that statistically significant results are estimated to be one to two orders of magnitude more likely to enter the published record than null results. Leveraging metadata extracted from individual articles, we show that the pattern of strong SoS holds across subfields, journals, methods, and time periods. However, a few factors such as pre-registration and randomized experiments correlate with greater acceptance of null results. We conclude by discussing implications for the field and the potential of our new dataset for investigating other questions about political science.

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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · 07/02/2026

There, there…

tweet: “as English speakers we have to sort out the 'had had' situation. it's frankly embarrassing to the language”

Merriam-Webster Quote Tweet: “But, it’s not wrong that that occurs.”

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

I just listened to the @voxeu.org podcast with #GiancarloCorsetti about this research. Great insights and evidence about what is going on with the dollar exchange rate right now. #econsky cepr.org/voxeu/column...

cepr.org

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Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) @egap.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

REMINDER: Our West Africa Hub is hosting a Learning Days workshop at CERAP this June 🌍 We welcome applicants from Africa-based researchers & evaluation professionals from university, government, & civil society orgs. Apply by: Feb 27, 2026 Learn more: buff.ly/9l0bdig

buff.ly

Learning Days 18: EGAP West Africa Regional Hub Learning Days Workshop 2026 – EGAP

En Français

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

I recommend that everyone read this new essay by Dario Amodei, CEO of @anthropic.com. It is sobering, especially as I think about what the future holds for my 20 yo daughter. I appreciate Amodei's transparency, which he says is the first defense. www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-ad...?

darioamodei.com

Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology

Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 25/01/2026

Thank you @dktrdr.bsky.social and Eddy Malesky for invite to be discussant for "Major Challenges in Development" panel at the upcoming @egap.bsky.social meeting at #Duke! Fab panel includes @nataliasbueno.bsky.social, @melinaplatas.bsky.social, & Eddy and co-discussant @danielnposner.bsky.social.

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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 25/01/2026

Winter weather is set to impact many states in the U.S. this weekend. If you do lose power, there are right and wrong ways to handle it. Here are six important tips from the experts.

washingtonpost.com

How to stay warm and safe in a winter power outage

There’s a lot you can do to navigate cold-weather blackouts safely, much of which can be accomplished long before a storm hits.

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Annette N. Brown @anbrown.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Nice article about the Government of Bangladesh program together with @ifad.org and @iom.int to promote the use of #remittances for financing investment in start-ups. I'd love to see a formal evaluation of this program! www.newagebd.net/post/opinion...

newagebd.net

Optimal use of remittance

THE inflow of remittances by millions of Bangladeshis working abroad, which contributed to the foreign exchange reserves now exceeding $33 billion, has robustly propped the interim government since it...

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