In the past decade, hundreds of impact evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of education interventions in developing countries. The impact magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard deviations, " making them difficult to communicate to policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of schooling" and another in the net present value of potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15 and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual schooling. The results further show that even modest gains in standard deviations of learning-if sustained over time-may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better understand the potential benefits of increased learning.

• Preface: spiritus mundi
• Introduction : Bloody Sunday
• Looking for the Heart of the Revolution (1916-1917)
• The World of Tomorrow (1800s-1921)
• Russian Roulette (1921-1928)
• The End of Reason (1928-1932)
• Voyage of discovery (1932-1935)
• Trone's America (1935-1936)
• A simple matter of perspective (1936-1940)
• Investigating Trone, investigating the world (1940-1949)
• End game (1945, 1945-1953)
• Bibliography

• The birth of the steam navy
• Building foundations
• Retrenchment in the name of reform
• Woolwich and the first steam factory
• Iron construction
• Gaining the technological edge
• Equipping and running the steam factories
• Greene, scamp and the integrated factory
• HMS Volcano and the development of mobile logistics
• Integrating the factories
• Mechanisation supreme
• The first iron warships
• HMS Achilles
• Coaling the Navy
• The great extensions.

By the end of the Napoleonic wars, the shore-based facilities of the Royal Navy employed nearly 16,000 people in the UK. This volume is an account of the development of the dockyard as the continuing introduction of new technology forged a revolution in ship design and construction.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Studying le vers Part One. Baudelaire
• 1. Rhythm in Theory
• 2. Rhythm in Practice
• 3. Rhythm and Prose Poetry Part Two. Rimbaud
• 4. Challenging an Exclusive Poetics
• 5. A Formally Inclusive Poetics
• 6. Restoring Poetic Mystery
• Part Three. Mallarme
• 7. Towards an External Ideal
• 8. Protecting a Poetic Fiction
• 9. The Internal Ideal and Poetic Form Conclusion Bibliographies Appendix (Dates of Texts) Index Authors Works by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France's most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer's poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Studying le vers Part One. Baudelaire
• 1. Rhythm in Theory
• 2. Rhythm in Practice
• 3. Rhythm and Prose Poetry Part Two. Rimbaud
• 4. Challenging an Exclusive Poetics
• 5. A Formally Inclusive Poetics
• 6. Restoring Poetic Mystery
• Part Three. Mallarme
• 7. Towards an External Ideal
• 8. Protecting a Poetic Fiction
• 9. The Internal Ideal and Poetic Form Conclusion Bibliographies Appendix (Dates of Texts) Index Authors Works by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Rhythm, Illusion and the Poetic Idea explores the concept of rhythm and its central yet problematic role in defining modern French poetry. Forging innovative lines of inquiry linking the detailed analysis of poetic form to the evolution of fundamental aesthetic principles, David Evans offers extensive new readings of the literary and critical writings of the three major poets at the centre of France's most important poetic revolution. The volume is of interest to all students and readers of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarme, since here is presented for the first time a thorough comparative study of developments in each writer's poetic form and theory, focusing on the themes of illusion, deception and the musical metaphor. The book is also intended to stimulate wider critical debate on the interpretation of metrical verse, prose poetry and vers libre, and offers original analytical methods which facilitate the study of poetic form. The author proposes a radical shift in our understanding of the role and mechanisms of poetic rhythm, suggesting that its very resistance to definition and fixity provides a conveniently opaque veil over the difficulties of defining poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The birth of the Weimar Republic-- the Weimar Republic - the early years 1920-3-- the Weimar Republic - years of challenge 1924-8-- the Weimar Republic - years of crisis 1928-33-- the Nazis come to power-- the Nazi consolidation of power-- Adolf Hitler-- the Nazi Nationalist Socialist philosophy and ideology-- Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft-- opposition to the Nazis-- education and culture in Nazi Germany-- the German economy under the Third Reich-- Nazi foreign policy-- Hitler's war-- postscript - the Nuremberg trials, a time of reckoning.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

An exploration of German history from the end of World War I to the fall of the Third Reich. The political, social and economic impact of the Weimar and the subsequent Nazi regime are examined through an in-depth narrative and a range of documentary source material. It includes a historiography, progressive exercise sections and advice on tackling structured, essay and source questions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Abstract: "Traditional static checkers are limited to detecting simple anomalies since they have no information regarding the intent of the code. Program verifiers are too expensive for nearly all applications. This thesis investigates the possibilities of using specifications to do lightweight static checks to detect inconsistencies between specifications and implementations. A tool, LCLint, was developed to do static checks on C source code using LCL specifications. It is similar to traditional lint, except it uses information in specifications to do more powerful checks. Some typical problems detected by LCLint include violations of abstraction barriers and modifications of caller-visible state that are inconsistent with the specification. Experience using LCLint to check a specified program and to understand and maintain a program with no specifications illustrate some applications of LCLint and suggest future directions for using specifications to check source code."

Despite dramatic global gains in access to education, 130 million girls of school age remain out of school. Among those who do enter, too many do not gain the essential skills to succeed after they complete their schooling. Previous efforts to synthesize evidence on how to improve educational outcomes for girls have tended to focus on interventions that are principally targeted to girls, such as girls' latrines or girls' scholarships. But if general, non-targeted interventions-those that benefit both girls and boys-significantly improve girls' education, then focusing only on girl-targeted interventions may miss some of the best investments for improving educational opportunities for girls in absolute terms. This review brings together evidence from 270 educational interventions from 177 studies in 54 low- and middle-income countries and identifies their impacts on girls, regardless of whether the interventions specifically target girls. The review finds that to improve access and learning, general interventions deliver gains for girls that are comparable to girl-targeted interventions. At the same time, many more general interventions have been tested, providing a broader menu of options for policy makers. General interventions have similar impacts for girls as for boys. Many of the most effective interventions to improve access for girls are household-based (such as cash transfer programs), and many of the most effective interventions to improve learning for girls involve improving the pedagogy of teachers. Girl-targeted interventions may make the most sense when addressing constraints that are unique to girls.

Access to school has risen dramatically in recent decades, with large gains from reducing costs. Few studies report long-term impacts, however. This paper reports the impact of an educational intervention that reduced out-of-pocket schooling costs for children in poor communities in Kenya by providing school uniforms. The program used a lottery to determine who would receive a school uniform. Receiving a uniform reduced school absenteeism by 37 percent for the average student (7 percentage points) and by 55 percent for children who initially had no uniform (15 percentage points). Eight years after the program began, there is no evidence of sustained impact of the program on highest grade completed or primary school completion rates. A bounding exercise suggests no substantive positive, long-term impacts. These results contribute to a small literature that demonstrates the risk of fade-out of initial impacts of education investments.

The 2014 Ebola Virus Disease outbreak in West Africa is the largest to date by far. Ebola Virus Disease causes disproportionate mortality among the working-age population, resulting in far more mortality for parents of young children than other health crises. This paper combines data on the age distribution of current and projected mortality from Ebola with the fertility distribution of adults in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, to estimate the likely impact of the epidemic on the number of orphans in these three countries. Using the latest mortality estimates (from February 11, 2015), it is estimated that more than 9,600 children have lost one or both parents to Ebola Virus Disease. The absolute numbers of orphans created by the Ebola epidemic are significant, but represent a small fraction (1.4 percent) of the existing orphan burden in the affected countries. Ebola is unlikely to increase the numbers of orphans beyond extended family networks' capacities to absorb them. Nonetheless, the pressures of caring for increased numbers of orphans may result in lower quality of care. These estimates should be used to guide policy to support family networks to improve the capacity to provide high quality care to orphans.

In the past two years alone, at least six systematic reviews or meta-analyses have examined the interventions that improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. However, these reviews have sometimes reached starkly different conclusions: reviews, in turn, recommend information technology, interventions that provide information about school quality, or even basic infrastructure (such as desks) to achieve the greatest improvements in student learning. This paper demonstrates that these divergent conclusions are largely driven by differences in the samples of research incorporated by each review. The top recommendations in a given review are often driven by the results of evaluations not included in other reviews. Of 227 studies with student learning results, the most inclusive review incorporates less than half of the total studies. Variance in classification also plays a role. Across the reviews, the three classes of programs that are recommended with some consistency (albeit under different names) are pedagogical interventions (including computer-assisted learning) that tailor teaching to student skills; repeated teacher training interventions, often linked to another pedagogical intervention; and improving accountability through contracts or performance incentives, at least in certain contexts. Future reviews will be most useful if they combine narrative review with meta-analysis, conduct more exhaustive searches, and maintain low aggregation of intervention categories.

Cash transfers have been demonstrated to improve education and health outcomes and alleviate poverty in various contexts. However, policy makers and others often express concern that poor households will use transfers to buy alcohol, tobacco, or other "temptation goods." The income effect of transfers will increase expenditures if alcohol and tobacco are normal goods, but this may be offset by other effects, including the substitution effect, the effect of social messaging about the appropriate use of transfers, and the effect of shifting dynamics in intra-household bargaining. The net effect is ambiguous. This paper reviews 19 studies with quantitative evidence on the impact of cash transfers on temptation goods, as well as 11 studies that surveyed the number of respondents who reported they used transfers for temptation goods. Almost without exception, studies find either no significant impact or a significant negative impact of transfers on temptation goods. In the only (two, non-experimental) studies with positive significant impacts, the magnitude is small. This result is supported by data from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. A growing number of studies from a range of contexts therefore indicate that concerns about the use of cash transfers for alcohol and tobacco consumption are unfounded.

As evidence from rigorous impact evaluations grows in development, there have been more calls to complement impact evaluation analysis with cost analysis, so that policy makers can make investment decisions based on costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important considerations for implementing cost-effectiveness analysis in the policy making process. The analysis is applied in the context of education interventions, although the findings generalize to other areas. First, the paper demonstrates a systematic method for characterizing the sensitivity of impact estimates. Second, the concept of context-specificity is applied to cost measurement: program costs vary greatly across contexts-both within and across countries-and with program complexity. The paper shows how adapting a single cost ingredient across settings dramatically shifts cost-effectiveness measures. Third, the paper provides evidence that interventions with fewer beneficiaries tend to have higher per-beneficiary costs, resulting in potential cost overestimates when extrapolating to large-scale applications. At the same time, recall bias may result in cost underestimates. The paper also discusses other challenges in measuring and extrapolating cost-effectiveness measures. For cost-effectiveness analysis to be useful, policy makers will require detailed, comparable, and timely cost reporting, as well as significant effort to ensure costs are relevant to the local environment.