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For more of our reporting on this story, please see our recent column in the New York Times Magazine, and the latest episode of This American Life.

This morning, we reported on a charity called GiveDirectly that's trying to help poor people in the developing world in an unusual way: It gives them money with no strings attached. This is a somewhat radical idea in the charity world.

Most charities, of course, get money from donors and spend it on things they think will help people. They build schools, provide medicine or give people cows.

When we were in Kenya recently, we visited a village where people had been given cows by a group called Heifer International. And, we can report, these were very impressive cows. They looked strong and healthy.

And, like lots of charities, Heifer also spends money to provide training. Working with another group called Send a Cow, Heifer teaches people to make sure their cows get the right nutrition and to keep detailed logs tracking milk production. People visited the village to make sure everything was going well. And all this really helped. One woman told us her cow produces 15 times as much milk as local cows — and she sells most of the milk.

That's a traditional charity. GiveDirectly, on the other hand, takes money from donors and just gives it to poor people. (For more on how GiveDirectly works, see our story from this morning.) This is something of a challenge to other charities. Paul Niehaus, one of the group's founders, is pretty blunt about it.

"We would like to see organizations make the case that they can do more good for the poor with a dollar than the poor can do for themselves," he says. "And I think some may be able to make a convincing case. But if you go to the websites, today I don't think you're going to be seeing that argument being made. Nobody even bothers."

Neihaus says charities should be clear about how much they're spending and how much it's helping. And to figure this out, he says, charities should do actual experiments. In GiveDirectly's case, independent researchers are conducting a randomized, controlled trial. Basically, there are two groups of villagers. One group gets money, the other doesn't. The researchers do a detailed survey to compare the two groups and see what difference getting money makes. The results from the study are due out later this year. And they'll be made public.

If you were trying to compare giving cows and training with giving cash, you could take the same approach. Give people in one village cows and training; in the next village over, take the money you would have spent on cows and training and just give it to people.

Not surprisingly, Niehaus loved this idea. We called up Heifer International to see what it thought, and we talked to Elizabeth Bintliff, vice president of Heifer's Africa programs.

"As an African woman, that sounds to me like a terrible idea," she said. "It sounds like an experiment, and we're not about experiments. These are lives of real people." The world is "just not that linear," she said. "It's not an equation. It's an ecosystem."

Still, she said, Heifer has worked with independent researchers to measure its programs. "The University of Western Michigan evaluates Heifer's projects and has found that there's very positive return to families in terms of income, nutrition and other indicators," she told us.

Bintliff said she could send us those evaluations. After the interview, though, we got an email from a Heifer official. After thanking us for our interest she wrote: "As the sources cited are unpublished, we're not able to provide further information publicly at this time."

Until pretty recently, the charity world has been about doing stuff that helps, without really asking: How much does it help exactly, and how much does it cost? But there does seem to be this shift that's starting to happen. Philanthropy is getting nerdier; people are paying more attention to data.

Last year, the GiveDirectly guys gave a presentation at Google's corporate charity office. They didn't show any pictures of people. But they showed charts and studies and numbers. The people at Google were impressed. They gave $2.4 million to GiveDirectly and told them to figure out how to give money to lots more people.

Authorities in India say they've arrested one man and identified four others in the alleged gang-rape of a young photojournalist, apparently the latest in a series of recent sexual assaults that have shook the country.

NPR's Julie McCarthy reports that the woman, in her early 20s, was at a photo-shoot with a male colleague at a dilapidated building in the city's south on Thursday when the incident took place.

The Times of India, quoting Mumbai police chief Satyapal Singh, says the man that was arrested had confessed and given details of the attack.

The alleged victim's male colleague was restrained and then "two of the accused repeatedly raped the girl, turn by turn. There were only two men at first, they called one more, and then called two more," Singh says. "It was a very heinous crime."

He said the other attackers are believed to be in their 20s.

The Times says the alleged victim was interning for an English-language magazine.

McCarthy says preliminary reports suggest the woman sustained internal and external injuries and is described as critical, but stable.

The attack comes as the trial is concluding of four men accused in the gang rape of a 23-year-old Delhi woman in December. She died of her injuries after being lured onto a bus and viciously attacked.

In June, police arrested three men in the alleged rape of a U.S. tourist and in the same month, six men were sentenced to life in India after confessing to the gang rape of a Swiss tourist earlier this year.

Steve Ballmer will retire as CEO at Microsoft within the next 12 months, the software giant announced Friday.

According to the company:

"In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to a devices and services company that empowers people for the activities they value most."

The big idea in President Obama's new proposal for tackling the growing crisis in college affordability can be boiled down to this: linking federal higher education aid to a new grading system that would rate colleges and universities on the "value" they provide students.

While the president offered a series of ideas, the one with potentially the most bite would, come 2018, condition the size of Pell Grants — money the federal government provides for financially needy students — on how high the institution in question scores on the value index.

Obama described the factors he proposes throwing into the value mix:

"I think we should rate colleges based on opportunity — are they helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed ... and on outcomes, on their value to students and parents. So that means metrics like how much debt does the average student leave with? How easy is it to pay off? How many students graduate on time? How well do those graduates do in the workforce? Because the answers will help parents and students figure out how much value a college truly offers."