The study paper is linked and seems to say there were 115 participants identified and then assigned into various groups. Table 1 shows the differences in the cash and non cash group.
So the control group met the same conditions - they just missed out via randomisation.
“We screened 732 participants from 22 shelters from four shelter organizations across Metro Vancouver. Our preregistered screening criteria were: age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10) (21), alcohol use (AUDIT) (22), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) (23) based on predefined thresholds (see SI Appendix, Table S1 in SI Appendix, section 1.3.2). These screening criteria were used to reduce any potential risks of harm (e.g., overdose) from the cash transfer. To ensure accurate responses, the screening survey was conducted under a cover story without any mention of the cash transfer. Of the 732 participants, 229 passed all criteria (31%). Due to loss of contact with 114 participants despite our repeated attempts to reach them, we successfully enrolled 115 participants in the study as the final sample (50 cash, 65 noncash; see Table 1). The sample size was modest but was nonetheless adequately powered to detect statistically significant effects from the preregistered power analysis”
The researchers are basically telling you that they initially pruned out 70% of the homeless population for being "unqualified" and then half of the remaining 30% because they were unable or unwilling to maintain contact with a new person in their life. Therefore, only the top 15% of homeless people, in terms of responsibility, are even included in the study, and the other 85% are discarded.
This was interesting near the end... while the cash provided immediate benefits, control participants eventually “caught up” over time. This is consistent with prior work
In my opinion, if the $7500 was truly a game-changer, it would have immediate effect that would accelerate a person's re-introduction to stable society and therefore have multiplicative effects further down the road as they leveraged stable housing, clothing and food to get a job, perhaps attract a partner, etc. The fact that the non-cash recipients "caught up" suggests the exact opposite, seems a bit problematic.
> The fact that the non-cash recipients "caught up" suggests the exact opposite, seems a bit problematic.
The control recipients still received benefits designed to help the homeless so it isn't surprising that they also improved. What is exciting is that the cash:
1) gave much more immediate results, therefore reducing suffering
2) generated net savings via reduced social service use
So we have a method that is better and cheaper for a screen-able subset of the homeless population, it might not be a "game changer" but its an improvement over the status quo worth exploring further.
It isn't that the control group "improved," it's that they entirely caught up. The immediate cash did not have long-term (and we're only defining "long-term" as a few months) benefits when compared to the non-cash recipients. Further, this isn't an anomaly, it is consistent with prior work.
And again, the study ignores 85% of the homeless population, you simply cannot extrapolate these results from the highly-responsible/functional group to the wider population.
Finally, the "net societal gain" of $777 was only about 10% of the distributed cash, but ignores the cost of administering such a program and the costs of, and compensation to, the coaches and workshops (the $777 was simply based on "reduced shelter use"). Fully loaded, those costs would almost certainly exceed the modest reported savings.
> you simply cannot extrapolate these results from the highly-responsible/functional group to the wider population.
I didn't?
> Finally, the "net societal gain" of $777 was only about 10% of the distributed cash, but ignores the cost of administering such a program and the costs of, and compensation to, the coaches and workshops (the $777 was simply based on "reduced shelter use"). Fully loaded, those costs would almost certainly exceed the modest reported savings.
Half of the cash group didn't receive coaching, and part of the control did, so some of the cost and effect of coaching is priced in. Its unfortunate that the study couldn't include analysis of all four original conditions but its possible the coaching and/or workshops had little effect on outcomes. It would be hard to gauge administrative costs from a small study but cash transfers generally have low administrative costs.
I don't think its a slam dunk but its definitely interesting enough to explore further, either for different levels of intervention or for other parts of the homeless population.
You are bang on about having a redundant PLB seperate from other comms channels.
I carry a PLB and an InReach when I am in remote areas. Partly because I’m often by myself but also InReach does go down sometimes and I’d prefer to have a dedicated reliable channel to search and rescue that I can just leave I my bag and forget about except replacing every 10 years!
That’s a rather cynical view of it, and I note you haven’t included the first bit of the sentence.
> “is a senior writer at Future Perfect, Vox’s effective altruism-inspired section on the world’s biggest challenges”
The point of the project/section is - in a very quick summary - to come at an issue presenting to an audience that cares about it and is looking for answers or ways to improve their lives.
This is a piece of journalism - a good jumping off point. My point is that I come to HN for comments and discussions on topics and issues like AI, hoping to hear from real experts on things on the big technology issues, etc.
I wish there was more of that - playing the ball - and less playing the writer.
Excuse me if I’m missing something, but why do you need the internet at all? Can’t you collect your location with a GPS watch as you run and just handle the gpx file offline when you get home?
Unless you’re looking to share location with others as you run - in which case your request makes sense.
This sounds like a job for Hugo, GitHub and Netlify.
Simple. Easy. Free.
You can even set up a form and get comments into your email. (Then just manually copy/paste into the markdown and commit it again and force a rebuild).
I’ve thought about writing a AWS Lambda that you POST the comment form to which then adds a file to the git repo that then Hugo can grab when Netlify is building the site, but that seems rather complex and I think it’d take me a lot more time than just doing it manually.
But I haven’t found a good, lightweight, privacy focussed way to solve this yet.
I'm also interested in this (although not AWS): what would be interesting would be a protocol-first approach where we can come up with several interoperable implementations. i personally would go with a simple PHP script, but i can see reasons for which someone would use another tech that's closer to the rest of their stack.
Don't host comments. The day when comments tended to have any value on the web passed ages ago. No one blogs anymore, and no one reads blogs anymore, so most of the traffic you get is just going to be bots or cancerous trolls anyway - if you're lucky enough to get any actual human readers at all in the latter case.
Or use a hosted service like Disqus or an alternative if you want comments, but the better solution is not to bother.
As someone who has a public email written on their blog, i've found the signal/noise ratio in the emails i reply to be very good. Of course, if you have a public HTTP form you're gonna have more SPAM, but most SPAM is fully automated and will not pass a simple "what's 2 + 2" CAPTCHA.
If you need better vetting, consider using webmention/ActivityPub federation and allowlisting individual hosts for automatic approval. There is definitely spam on such protocols too, but they tend to come from the same domain/IP so denylisting is very efficient in dealing with it.
Netlify has a Forms functionality, that can be used to trigger serverless functions, I was thinking it'd be possible to add the comment to a file, git push it and trigger a rebuild. Hah, rebuilding a whole site on every submitted comment seems like overkill though...
Pity there isn't a single one from the southern hemisphere. That said, they are gorgeous. I'd just like to see something from the other side of the globe.
This (https://sylvan.apple.com/Aerials/2x/entries.json) appears to be the new URL for all the screensavers. The new entries file includes both normal and HDR versions of each of the screensavers, though on non-HDR displays, the SDR versions look a lot better than the (converted) HDR ones [1]. Unfortunately, all the new screensavers are encoded using HEVC [2] so they can't easily be played on OS versions without native support.
I've got 100Mbps plan over copper with FTTN. Generally get about 96mb/s down and 35Mb/s up. It's great.
But I'm lucky, and I get that. We play the broadband lotto, and it's not easy to win. If I move I no doubt will be back in the ADSL2 world hoping I'm close to the exchange.
I'm holding my breath for when the NBN finally rolls through my area. Even 25Mbps would be acceptable at this point.
I had a chuckle today when I saw a restaurant in the Perth CBD was using a Vividwireless 4G modem. I would have thought the middle of the city at least would have a decent wired connection.
FWIW (and I know this is a single data point), but my experience with NBN has been positive.
It's also Fibre to the Node (FTTN) which is often maligned in internet/tech circles for being a poor technology choice. I'd prefer FttP, but it's not an option and I'll take what I can get.
I'm now getting close to my plan's speed (50/20), but you're right about the increased cost. It's roughly 45% more. But the speed from the old ADSL2 plan is probably 4-5 times faster.
The only complaint I would have is that speeds during peak are pretty off the advertised plan speed. They fall to around 18-20mbs down at night.
So the control group met the same conditions - they just missed out via randomisation.
“We screened 732 participants from 22 shelters from four shelter organizations across Metro Vancouver. Our preregistered screening criteria were: age 19 to 65, homeless for less than 2 y (homelessness defined as the lack of stable housing), Canadian citizen or permanent resident, and nonsevere levels of substance use (DAST-10) (21), alcohol use (AUDIT) (22), and mental health symptoms Colorado Symptom Index (CSI) (23) based on predefined thresholds (see SI Appendix, Table S1 in SI Appendix, section 1.3.2). These screening criteria were used to reduce any potential risks of harm (e.g., overdose) from the cash transfer. To ensure accurate responses, the screening survey was conducted under a cover story without any mention of the cash transfer. Of the 732 participants, 229 passed all criteria (31%). Due to loss of contact with 114 participants despite our repeated attempts to reach them, we successfully enrolled 115 participants in the study as the final sample (50 cash, 65 noncash; see Table 1). The sample size was modest but was nonetheless adequately powered to detect statistically significant effects from the preregistered power analysis”