Evidence and gap maps: Using maps to support evidence-based development

Evidence mapping began in the early 2000s and has taken off in the last ten years, notably with the innovation of an online interactive visual Evidence and Gap Map by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and the different types of maps produced by the Campbell Collaboration. In the CEDIL Methods brief, ‘Evidence and gap maps: Using maps to support evidence-based development’, Howard White, Research Director, CEDIL, describes what evidence and gap maps are, what sort of evidence is being mapped, and the various ways in which these maps are being used and how you can commission one.

George Sorter’s Influence on Accounting Thought

An innovative accounting theorist and educator, Sorter was concerned about how accounting information could be used in financial and management decision making. He formulated an events approach to accounting that called for providing a vast array of presumably relevant information to users of financial reports to allow them as individuals to select whichever data they deemed suitable to make their own long run forecasts and their own financial and management decisions. He emphasized that valuation of the firm is a subjective endeavor, a matter of individual user perception. He served as the research director of the AICPA’s Trueblood Report (1973), which laid the foundation for the FASB’s Conceptual Framework.

L’accompagnement selon une démarche réflexive sur-dans-pour la pratique tel que vécu par trois types d’acteurs

Collective accompaniment, as per the reflexivity approach on-in-for practice, requires the adoption of different postures, whether one is placed in the role of the accompanying or accompanied person. This article presents the lived experiences of an accompaniment process fostering research and training within an individual and collective reflexivity approach. Three types of actors are interrelated: an accompanying research director, an accompanied and accompanying doctoral candidate, and accompanied and accompanying English as a second language teachers. Advocating for an action-research approach using the first-person point of view (“I”), each actor was invited to reflect on their practice from an on-in-for perspective. The discussion presents three dimensions: the role of ethical rules, the art of questioning, and the interdependence between involved actors.

Work at the Anna Freud Centre

This chapter will place Fonagy’s work in institutional context, exploring his work as research director for the Anna Freud Centre in the 1990s, and attempting to characterize some features of his leadership of the Anna Freud Centre since 2003. The Centre has seen an incredible transformation in this time. We will seek to situate this transformation in relation to the challenges and opportunities of the wider social context. The chapter will close with an attempt to introduce some of the major collaborations from different eras of Fonagy’s work, introducing the dramatis personae for the rest of the book.

The people behind the papers – Clément Dubois, Shivam Gupta, Andrew Mugler and Marie-Anne Félix

ABSTRACT Cell migration needs to be precisely regulated during development so that cells stop in the right position. A new paper in Development investigates the robustness of neuroblast migration in the C. elegans larva in the face of both genetic and environmental variation. To hear more about the story, we met the paper's four authors: Clément Dubois and Shivam Gupta, and their respective supervisors Andrew Mugler (currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, where his lab recently moved from Purdue University) and Marie-Anne Félix (Principal Investigator at Institut de Biologie de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and Research Director at CNRS).

Combining economic modelling and randomised controlled trials: An unexploited synergyCombining economic modelling and randomised controlled trials: An unexploited synergy

Over the last decade, many researchers have conducted randomised trials alongside economic models. The work of these researchers has shown that both approaches are strengthened by their combined use and the conclusions they lead to are full of policy implications. In the latest CEDIL Methods Brief, Edoardo Masset, Research Director, CEDIL Programme, uses three examples to offer tips on the application of modelling to evaluate development interventions and explore various policy questions. The brief shows that models and experiments should be seen as complementary, rather than as alternative approaches. This brief is based on the CEDIL Inception Paper No. 9, Structural Modelling in Policy Making, by Orazio Attanasio and Debbie Blair. This paper is available on the CEDIL website.

The central philosophical viewpoint/concept of "mathematics of the commons" as a promising direction of applied mathematics.

Professor Emeritus Yasumasa Nishiura is a mathematician who has dedicated his career to understanding more about the profound impact mathematics has on the world around us. He worked as Research Director at the Alliance for Breakthrough between Mathematics and Sciences (ABMS) (2007–2016) in Japan where he was supporting research activities in mathematical science that highlights their potential for solving societal problems. Nishiura is working with a team of researchers based at the Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University in Japan where they are studying self-organisation patterns that naturally manifest without design but have rhythm in space and time, such as polymers, convection, slime molds, and chemical reactions, to help learn more about pattern dynamics.

The Muslim Council of Britain: Progressive Interlocutor or Redundant Gatekeeper?

Since its inception in 1997, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) has evolved to become one of the most enduring British Muslim organisations. It is a representative body for over 500 member bodies (‘affiliates’) including mosques, schools and charities. During the course of the last two decades, it has been subject to external comment and sometimes critique by academics, media commentators, policy-makers, and others. This special issue of the journal Religions has provided a welcome opportunity for the current leadership of the MCB to write about the organisation from ‘within’, based on their long-standing time volunteering with it. This paper is based on an oral history methodology involving extended interviews with the oversight of a research director, supplemented by reference to existing academic and other sources. Therefore this paper is essentially a type of ‘edited transcript’ aggregated wholly from a series of first person interviews undertaken with the current senior elected leaders of MCB; reorganised for clarity and drafted out with added ‘prose’ allowing for it to be presented in essay form. The result is the first documented ‘insider’ perspective on the ways in which the MCB has tackled issues such as internal governance, the challenge of ‘representation’ in view of the diversity of British Muslim communities, changing relationships with government, and policy work. It becomes apparent through the paper that the MCB has matured into a constructively self-critical, pro-active, and more strategically professional body, that contributes to the flourishing of Muslim communities and the place of Islam in British society. The production of the paper is itself an indicator of the growing confidence and capacity of the MCB, and its ability to contribute positively to academic discourse and debate about Muslims in Britain.