Citizen science for observing and understanding the Earth

Citizen Science, or the participation of non-professional scientists in a scientific project, has a long history—in many ways, the modern scientific revolution is thanks to the effort of citizen scientists. Like science itself, citizen science is influenced by technological and societal advances, such as the rapid increase in levels of education during the latter part of the twentieth century, or the very recent growth of the bidirectional social web (Web 2.0), cloud services and smartphones. These transitions have ushered in, over the past decade, a rapid growth in the involvement of many millions of people in data collection and analysis of information as part of scientific projects. This chapter provides an overview of the field of citizen science and its contribution to the observation of the Earth, often not through remote sensing but a much closer relationship with the local environment. The chapter suggests that, together with remote Earth Observations, citizen science can play a critical role in understanding and addressing local and global challenges

Transferability of Human Capital and Immigrant Assimilation: An Analysis for Germany

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and labor market experience accumulated in the home countries of the immigrants receive signi cantly lower returns than human capital obtained in Germany. We further nd evidence for heterogeneity in the returns to human capital of immigrants across origin countries. Finally, imperfect human capital transferability appears to be a major factor in explaining the wage di erential between natives and immigrants

Peer effects and textbooks in African primary education

Textbooks could be a cheap and efficient input to primary school education in Africa. In this paper, we examine the effects of textbooks on student outcomes and separate between direct effects and externalities. Using the rich data set provided by the ‘Program on the Analysis of Education Systems’ (PASEC) for five Francophone, sub-Saharan African countries, this paper goes beyond the estimation of direct effects of textbooks on students' learning and focuses on peer effects resulting from textbooks owned by students' classmates. Using nonparametric estimation methods, we separate the direct effect of textbooks from their peer effect. The latter clearly dominates but depends upon the initial level of textbook availability