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If you ever find high-impact data that could need cleaning or could need to be pulled from like PDFs & scanned images then let me know as I often work develop tools related to this in my day-job.
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AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
Agree the value is high. But practically, there's two big questions that pop to mind since I work / study around this area:
What I'm suggesting is really about:
On the new data sets front, I've been looking at last-mile health record digitization and interoperability. There are some promising cases of traction via smartphone-compatibility like UCS in Tanzania, or MedTrack in Ghana (who I've been directly working with). Speaking for MedTrack, I can say that we're already working with the goal of creating a usable administrative data set.
On the front of currently inaccessible but existing data, I think there's more potential for looking to business than government. Mobile money platforms have already done some limited cooperation with research, to my knowledge. They'd likely be reluctant to form a large number of data sharing partnerships, but a single partner that translates the data into an anonymized aggregate set and then acts as the go-between could create a lot of potential for assessing economic impact. From an incentive perspective, they could make some kind of commission from access, and it makes for good CSR optics.
On the last point, I'd propose that there's an underserved need for simplified impact eval that rules out obviously ineffective interventions or deployments early and affordably. We spend so much time focusing on the maximum of rigor in analysis that we can lose sight of the operational value of quick and dirty numbers, especially if that practice can be low friction enough to become normalized in the sector. What I'd really want to see is an interface to set up live dashboards that just run a straightforward a/b test or something.