Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

ReconBW

  • The idea of a social safety net that guarantees a "basic income" has been gathering interest. The Dutch city of Utrecht is working with academics to set up an experiment comparing different forms, and the Silicon Valley tech incubator Y-Combinator is seeking someone to work full time on a five-year experiment giving a group of people in the U.S. a basic income (deadline for applications is Feb 15).
  • Want to start blogging about your research? The LSE impact of social sciences blog has six steps for turning your journal article into a good blog post.
  • China will be building its first overseas military base in Djibouti.
  • NPR's Hidden Brain podcast this week speaks with NYU's Oeindrila Dube about her RCT with Cilliers & Siddiqi looking at reconciliation programs and hidden costs in Sierra Leone.
  • RLetters is an open tool for content analyzing large databases of journals.
  • I just started using the Grammarly browser plugin for correcting grammar - it's found and recommended fixes for a bunch of mistakes in this post already (its/it's types of things).

And this might melt your heart, Syrian refugee kids sledding for the first time with the family that sponsored them. Classic demonstration of soft powder diplomacy.