The WHO has recently debated whether to reaffirm its long-standing recommendation of mass drug administration (MDA) in areas with more than 20% prevalence of soil-transmitted helminths (hookworm, whipworm, and roundworm). There is consensus that the relevant deworming drugs are safe and effective, so the key question facing policymakers is whether the expected benefits of MDA exceed the roughly$0.30 per treatment cost. The literature on long run educational and economic impacts of deworming suggests that this is the case. However, a recent meta-analysis by Taylor-Robinson et al. (2015) (hereafter TMSDG), disputes these findings. The authors conclude that while treatment of children known to be infected increases weight by 0.75 kg (95% CI: 0.24, 1.26; p=0.0038), there is substantial evidence that MDA has no impact on weight or other child outcomes. We update the TMSDG analysis by including studies omitted from that analysis and extracting additional data from included studies, such as deriving standard errors from p-values when the standard errors are not reported in the original article. The updated sample includes twice as many trials as analyzed by TMSDG, substantially improving statistical power. We find that the TMSDG analysis is underpowered: it would conclude that MDA has no effect even if the true effect were (1) large enough to be cost-effective relative to other interventions in similar populations, or (2) of a size that is consistent with results from studies of children known to be infected. The hypothesis of a common zero effect of multiple-dose MDA deworming on child weight at longest follow-up is rejected at the 10% level using the TMSDG dataset, and with a pvalue < 0.001 using the updated sample. Applying either of two study classification approaches used in previous Cochrane Reviews (prior to TMSDG) also leads to rejection at the 5% level. In the full sample, including studies in environments where prevalence is low enough that the WHO does not recommend deworming, the average effect on child weight is 0.134 kg (95% CI: 0.031, 0.236, random effects estimation). In environments with greater than 20% prevalence, where the WHO recommends mass treatment, the average effect on child weight is 0.148 kg (95% CI: 0.039, 0.258). The implied average effect of MDA on infected children in the full sample (calculated by dividing estimated impact by worm prevalence for each study and applying a random effects model) is 0.301 kg. At 0.22 kg per U.S. dollar, the estimated average weight gain per dollar expenditure from deworming MDA is more than 35 times that from school feeding programs as estimated in RCTs. Under-powered meta-analyses (such as TMSDG) are common in health research, and this methodological issue will be increasingly important as growing numbers of economists and other social scientists conduct meta-analysis.

Autonomous vehicles are one of the most highly anticipated technological developments of our time, with potentially wide-ranging social implications. Where dominant popular discourses around autonomous vehicles have tended to espouse a crude form of technological determinism, social scientific engagements with autonomous vehicles have tended to focus on rather narrow utilitarian dimensions related to regulation, safety or efficiency. This article argues that what is therefore largely missing from current debates is a sensitivity to the broader social implications of autonomous vehicles. The article aims to remedy this absence. Through a speculative mode, it is shown how a mobilities approach provides an ideal conceptual lens through which the broader social impacts of autonomous vehicles might be identified and evaluated. The argument is organized across four dimensions: transformations to experiences, inequalities, labour and systems. The article develops an agenda for critical sociological work on automated vehicles; and it calls on sociologists to contribute much-needed critical voices to the institutional and public debates on the development of autonomous vehicles.

for helpful comments. Michael Kremer declares that he is a former board member of Deworm theWorld, a US non-profit organization. He has received no funding from Deworm the World. He is also a part-time employee of USAID, which financially supports deworming activities. This paper was written in his academic capacity and USAID had no influence over the writing of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Within Western contemporary social thought, the claim that social acceleration is a key feature of the late-modern world has been widely circulated. A criticism of this argument is that it is often based on conjecture and hyperbole instead of on actual empirical evidence (Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009; Wajcman, 2008). A viable way to subject the social acceleration argument to a higher degree of empirical scrutiny is to deploy the sociological study of sleep as a key indicator. Such an insight builds upon research in the nascent sociological study of sleep, which has established how some developments in people's sleep lives may signal broader shifts in the socio-temporal order (e.g. Baxter and Kroll-Smith, 2005; Melbin, 1987; Williams, 2005, 2011). I contribute to this emerging body of literature by emphasizing the importance of being sufficiently precise and nuanced when sleep research is deployed as a measure of the social acceleration phenomenon. I appeal to Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration (2003) as a way to advance a more explicit, multi-faceted and open-ended understanding of the social acceleration concept. Rosa's theory is unique because it identifies three distinct facets of the concept that can be empirically grounded. By undertaking an exploratory study of what evidence regarding people's sleep lives can be used to test these three facets, I find that this yields a more discontinuous and context-driven view of social acceleration.

Within the field of disasters research, there is a tendency to define disasters as rapidly occurring events. Some accounts argue for maintaining such a temporal definition of disasters because it is intended to prevent disasters from being theorized in an overly broad fashion. In this article, I critically appraise such a way of conceptualizing disasters. While there is merit in imposing limits on the meaning of disasters, I find that there are ways of theorizing disasters as involving a protracted component that do not completely threaten the wholesale integrity of the concept. This involves developing a theoretical account of disasters, which encapsulates—but also differentiates between—social disruptions that are temporally focused and those that are temporally diffuse or recurrent. Adopting this typology of disasters is fruitful because it opens up fresh lines of inquiry to be undertaken. It positions largely unexplored phenomena within the purview of disasters research and it pushes the study of certain phenomena, such as climate change and heat waves, more into the field’s mainstream. Slow-moving and chronic social breakdowns are particularly important to theorize as disasters since they may be more impactful than disasters that are rapidly onset. It is precisely because they are less visible—in that they are normalized as everyday problems—that slow moving and recurrent disasters have the potential to cause greater damage to environments and human life.