TaRL Delivered 1.85 Years of Learning in 30 Hours. The Kenyan Analogue of Its Delivery Channel Delivered Zero.
Test whether Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), one of the most rigorously evaluated pedagogies in development economics, retains its measured effect size when the delivery channel shifts from NGO implementation to government implementation, and identify why the mechanism breaks.
79% of Adults Have a Bank Account. 70% of Sub-Saharan Africa's Mobile Money Accounts Didn't Move Money This Month.
To test whether the headline financial-inclusion metric — account ownership — actually tracks financial inclusion, or whether it has become disconnected from account use. I compare World Bank Global Findex 2025 ownership data against GSMA mobile money activity data to see what the gap implies for inclusion policy.
The World Bank Buried Doing Business for Fraud. B-READY Just Reburied the Evidence.
Evaluate whether the World Bank's replacement flagship business-climate ranking, B-READY, actually corrects the methodological and political-capture problems that got Doing Business cancelled in 2021, or whether it repackages the same ideological priors under a cleaner name. Focus specifically on the reinstated 'employing workers' indicator, since that indicator's scoring logic is the clearest test of whether anything structural changed.
WHO's 71% TB Cure Rate Is Real. It's Also Measuring the Wrong Denominator.
Examine WHO's 2025 Global Tuberculosis Report treatment-success metrics for rifampicin-resistant TB, and quantify what fraction of the true annual case burden is actually cured once diagnostic and treatment-initiation gaps are factored in alongside the reported success rate.
A Deep Learning/Machine Learning Approach for Anomaly-Based Network Intrusion Detection — Reem Almuhanna and Samia Dardouri (2025)
Assess whether a heterogeneous ML/DL ensemble improves anomaly-based network intrusion detection across multiple attack classes while addressing severe class imbalance and testing generalization.
The $492 Billion Heist: How Global Tax Abuse Disproportionately Devastates Developing Nations and Why the UN Tax Convention Is Their Best Hope
Document the scale of global tax abuse and its disproportionate impact on developing nations, analyze the competing OECD Pillar Two and UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation (UNFCITC) reform tracks, and assess whether the UN Tax Convention can deliver equitable taxing rights for the Global South that the OECD-led system has failed to provide.
Drug Courts "Reduce Recidivism" — Compared to What, Exactly?
Test whether the commonly cited claim that problem-solving courts (adult drug courts, mental health courts) meaningfully reduce recidivism holds up once completion-based survivorship bias, quasi-experimental design limits, and inconsistent outcome definitions are accounted for. Compare reported effect sizes against national baseline recidivism rates to judge practical significance, not just statistical significance.
Leveraging Data Analytics to Revolutionize Cybersecurity with Machine Learning and Deep Learning — Asadi Srinivasulu, Tae-hoon Kim, Ravikumar Chinthaginjala et al. (2025)
Test whether data analytics with convolutional neural networks and related ML/DL techniques can improve automated cybersecurity classification and threat analysis.
Leveraging Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Early Detection and Mitigation of Cyber Threat in Large-Scale Network Environments — G. Nalinipriya, S. Rama Sree, K. Radhika et al. (2025)
Develop an explainable AI-based detection framework that identifies cyber threats early in large-scale networks while giving analysts interpretable reasons for alerts.
Empowering Machine Learning for Robust Cyber-Attack Prevention in Online Retail: An Integrative Analysis — Kamran Razzaq, Mahmood Shah, Mohammad Fattahi and Jing Tang (2025)
Synthesize evidence on machine-learning practices used to prevent cyber-attacks in online retail and identify technical and research gaps affecting adoption.
The Common Framework Relieved 7% of At-Risk Debt. The Tool That Triggers It Doesn't Measure the Right Vulnerability.
This piece evaluates whether the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments and the IMF-World Bank Low-Income Country Debt Sustainability Framework (LIC-DSF) that feeds it are functioning as designed for the 36 lower-income countries currently in or at high risk of debt distress. It uses completed and stalled restructuring cases (Chad, Zambia, Ghana, Ethiopia) as the test of the system, not the press releases about it.
Norway's 20% Recidivism Rate Isn't a Rehabilitation Miracle. It's a Denominator Problem.
The Norway-vs-US recidivism comparison (20% vs 76.6%) is one of the most widely shared 'proof points' for rehabilitation-oriented prison policy. This piece checks whether the headline numbers are actually measuring the same thing, in the same populations, over the same time window -- and finds they are not.
The Adaptation Finance Gap: Why Vulnerable Nations Need $310 Billion Per Year and Get Less Than $28 Billion
Analyze the global climate adaptation finance gap affecting vulnerable countries, documenting the shortfall between adaptation needs ($310 billion/year by 2035) and current flows ($28 billion/year), identifying structural barriers that prevent finance from reaching the most vulnerable nations (SIDS, LDCs), and evaluating innovative financing mechanisms that could bridge the gap.
Governments Say 10% of the Ocean Is Protected. MPAtlas Says 3.3%, and the Number Is Falling.
Quantify the gap between reported and effectively enforced marine protected area (MPA) coverage, and test whether the current trajectory can plausibly reach the 2030 30x30 target. The question is not whether governments are designating protected ocean area, but whether that designation corresponds to any enforced reduction in extractive activity.
Soil Carbon Sequestration Saturates in 10-40 Years. The "4 Per 1000" Pledge Prices Credits as if It Never Does.
Evaluate whether the '4 per 1000' soil organic carbon (SOC) initiative's annual sequestration target is achievable as a sustained, globally uniform rate, and assess whether voluntary regenerative-agriculture carbon-credit protocols are pricing credits against a decay curve the feasibility literature has already falsified.
The World Spends $0.04 Per Person on Mental Health in Poor Countries. Task-Shifting Won't Close a 1,600x Gap.
This piece quantifies the global mental health treatment gap using WHO Mental Health Atlas 2024 data and asks whether task-shifting to lay health workers -- the field's favorite scale-up strategy -- is actually structured to close a spending gap this large, or just to make the gap look smaller on a dashboard.
GLASS Enrolled 130 Countries for AMR Surveillance. Only 104 Reported, and "Reported" Isn't Standardized.
This piece tests whether WHO's GLASS antimicrobial-resistance surveillance expansion (25 to 130 enrolled countries, 2016-2024) reflects genuine gains in surveillance capacity or mainly reflects enrollment growth uncorrelated with lab accreditation and sampling representativeness. It cross-checks GLASS reporting figures against an independently modeled burden estimate to see where the two diverge.
The 25-Year Deorbit Rule Has a 90% Compliance Rate and a 200-Year Debris Growth Curve. Both Are True.
Evaluate whether reported compliance rates with orbital debris mitigation guidelines (the 25-year post-mission disposal rule and ESA's tightened 5-year standard) actually correspond to a stabilizing orbital debris environment, or whether aggregate compliance statistics are masking continued structural growth in collision risk.
Cash Transfers "Work" — But Only If You Don't Ask Which One
This piece stress-tests the popular claim that unconditional cash transfer and basic income pilots have settled the question of whether giving people money works. It compares three of the best-documented trials — Finland's national basic income experiment, GiveDirectly's Kenya UBI RCT, and Stockton's SEED program — to show that "cash transfers work" is not one finding but a grab-bag of incompatible designs being cited as if they were replications of each other.
The Foundation Model Transparency Index Fell From 58 to 40, and Nobody Panicked
Assess whether the AI industry's self-reported safety evaluations can be trusted as evidence of risk mitigation, using the 2025 Foundation Model Transparency Index and recent reproducibility critiques of frontier AI red-teaming as the test case, and ask why declining transparency scores have produced no corresponding policy response.