Earlier today, I made a presentation at a well-attended lunch-time seminar at the LKY School at the National University of Singapore on the work done by LIRNEasia’s systematic review teams on mobile phone impacts in rural areas, mobile financial services and ICTs in the classroom. Sujata Gamage, the leader of the education SR team, presented the education section. The slides are here. Perhaps the most interesting thing I took away from the discussion was that generally SRs tend to systematically confirm what we already know. At most, like with our SR which showed that the evidence of impacts from mobile-based information services was not solid, it questions established knowledge.
Nirmali Sivapragasam, Researcher at LIRNEasia for the past three years,has joined the MPP program at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She is the third to join the LKY School from LIRNEasia on full scholarship, the others (Sriganesh Lokanathan and Tahani Iqbal) already having graduated. The LKY School with its Asian focus and high quality faculty will continue to be a favored destination for LIRNEasians.
The Asian Journal of Public Affairs (AJPA) would like to invite you to be a part of its forthcoming issue. Contributions from postgraduate students or above can be made through scholarly papers, case studies and/or book reviews. For this edition, submissions on the topic of food security are particularly encouraged. AJPA is a peer-reviewed, academic publication concerned with public affairs issues in wider Asia – including the Middle East, Central and South Asia, and the Asia-Pacific. Spearheaded by graduate students of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, and published on a biannual basis, AJPA was established to analyse and influence policymaking through an interdisciplinary lens, including but not limited to public policy, public management, international relations, international political economy, development studies and economics.
A conference entitled, ‘Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?’, is being organized by LIRNEasia, together with the Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore and the University of Hong Kong, to be held from 26 – 27 February, 2009, at the University of Hong Kong. Sponsored by the IDRC, Canada, the conference will bring together distinguished scholars and practitioners who are experts in the area to address essential issues in regulations through conceptual and empirical studies. The conference will address the following questions: Does regulation work? What kind of regulation works?