Week in Review

Hello all,
Happy International Day of peace to all of you. Highlights from this week include a new report on violence containment, an article on measuring child well-being, a note on Big Data and some stats on HIV.

Children succeed (NPR 19.09.2012)
In a new book launched this week, Paul Tough argues that a child’s success can not be measured by IQ scores, tests or quizzes, rather it should be measured by how children grow their character.
See more on child well-being on the Wikichild portal

Violence Containment Spending in the U.S. (Institute for Economics and Peace)
A new report from the Institute for Economics and Peace provides a new methodology for categorising and accounting for economic activity related to violence. The research shows that the U.S. spend $2.16 trillion each year on violence containment - the same size as the entire UK economy.

Enhancing public policy decision making using large scale cell phone data (UN Global Pulse)
This blog post by guest blogger Vanessa Frias-Martinez, shows how the analysis of behavioral patterns gathered from big data can help provide an understanding of how civil society interacts with their environments. This is critical information for urban planning, crisis management and global health.

Number Crunch
At the end of 2011, an estimated 8 million people were receiving antiretroviral therapy for HIV or AIDS in low- and middle-income countries, up from 6.6 million people in 2010 and up from just 400 000 in 2003. Source: UNDP

That’s all from me this week. I wish you all a wonderful weekend and hope you can tune in again the same time next week.

Yours in Progress,

Philippa Lysaght