Your weekly reminder that, as twitter dies (and turns into an absurdly sinister X – what is that about?), I’m moving some activity to Linked In – please follow.
Potholes Activists seem be particularly creative and effective. Here’s Joe Coughlan in Bromley, South London. Much ruder versions also get results, apparently.
The torrent of opinion pieces on AI (some of them written by humans) continues:
Generative AI, humanitarian action, and the aid worker. ‘ChatGPT could really open doors for smaller organizations that can’t afford proposal writers. This will result in a deluge of professional-looking and very similar applications, bids, and tenders. Donors must change their evaluation criteria to focus more on technical knowledge, experience, and an understanding of the context that can’t be sourced from the internet.’
Or a more caustic take (on using AI for evaluations): ‘AI looks so good because a lot of developmental and humanitarian work is based on set approaches and jargon’ ht Giulio Quaggiotto
Finally one of my LSE students, Francesca Feruglio on how her peers are using AI in their studies.
Kate Raworth: ‘What’s the good news story on global population? Check out this great graph from Danny Dorling’ begs a few questions – are we now accepting the framing that too many people are the problem? And what about the ratio of wrinklies to youth, aka who’s going to pay for us boomers in our old age?
Lazarus-style, UK aid seems to be rising from the grave. ‘Is the FCDO turning a corner on Official Development Assistance (ODA)?’
Debt and the grain deal, Kenya’s neglected drought, and a slavery reparations push from The Cheat Sheet, the reliably excellent weekly round up from The New Humanitarian, including this quote ‘Starve the city people and they riot; starve the rural people and they die…’
And a rather wonderful 14th Century ‘wives’ prayer’ ht Weird Medieval Guys
Finally, just some whales practising for the synchronized breaching championship