-TheWire.in A new study from LSE, funded by a grant from WhatsApp, shines a spotlight on Hindu males and disinformation against minority groups. New Delhi: New research suggests that the spread of fake news in India that sparks mob lynchings is largely done out of “reasons of prejudice and ideology”, rather than “ignorance or digital literacy”. “It can be seen…that assuming most misinformation spreads through rural and/or illiterate users and targeting functional digital...
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Do RTI Commissioners have the Right to Information? -M Sridhar Acharyulu
-TheWire.in The RTI Convention begs the question: who will save the RTI? Ideally, the 14th convention on the RTI, on October 12, where Central and state commissioners were present, should have resolved against the amendment which reduces their collective independence. However, I am surprised that even non-bureaucrat commissioners also did not raise their voice against it. The least a convention of commissioners could have done was to ask for information on the...
More »Explainer: What Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer won the Economics Nobel for -Jahnavi Sen and Kabir Agarwal
-TheWire.in All three winners argue that using randomised control trials can lead to better public policy interventions. New Delhi: The 2019 Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded to three economists who have focused on framing policies by first measuring the outcomes of alternative interventions on randomly chosen samples from a target population. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have all worked on using this method to argue that randomised control trials...
More »A logical bias could be keeping us from noticing South India groundwater crisis -Sagnik Ghosh
-TheWire.in "It's pretty ubiquitous and we need to pay attention to it." During World War II (1939-1945), pilots were interested in ways to make their fighter jets more resistant to getting shot. To this end, the Allied forces at least would inspect jets that returned from sorties and check where the bullet holes were. Then they would reinforce those areas and send the planes back. Fortunately for them, a statistician realised that this...
More »The intriguing case of a massive slowdown in the auto sector -Gurbachan Singh
-TheWire.in Did the auto sector's woes go hand-in-hand with the boom in affordable housing segment under PMAY? Sales in the auto sector and in related industries have fallen considerably in India. Maruti-Suzuki, the country’s leading car manufacturer, has reported a 32.7% decline in its total vehicle sales. There is a similar situation across the sector, including the two-wheeler industry. The sector has already lost over 300,000 jobs. What explains the massive slowdown in...
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