Cornell gets credit/blame for initiating the rise of sliced apples, which has increased sales of apples, in this study.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. In our local Safeway, the amount of cooler space devoted to packaged salad green mixes has exploded, as has the number which my wife has bought in the last year. And what I thought was a temporary display of guacamole and other dips keyed to the Super Bowl stationed just inside the doors has mutated into a permanent display of packages of things like fresh pineapple chunks, etc.
In some ways the trend is good. I assume there's less waste of food; even ugly apples can yield good slices. I don't see people being as picky over the box of salad greens as they are over a head of lettuce. And possibly the location of waste in the food chain shifts, more at the processing plant, less at the store. It's convenient--the labor of cutting up a pineapple or making guacamole is centralized and more efficient than the ordinary househusband doing it. It saves shopping time--by standardizing (the academic "in" term is "commoditizing" the shopper needs only to grab a box.
In other ways the trend is bad.It increases the amount of packaging material which needs to be disposed of. It encourages consumption, leading to obesity. Tradeoffs everywhere.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Monday, May 30, 2016
I'm With Trump, for One Time Only
What could possibly put me in the same camp as Donald Trump?
His position on Rolling Thunder--it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Actually, he said he was disappointed in the size of the crowd he addressed yesterday; he thought it be more like the March on Washington and blamed the officials for not permitting people to attend.
I've a long history, going back to 2005 (albeit in a draft post I never had the guts to post) of questioning the overblown claims for the event. It seemed every year that the number of motorcycles coming down Constitution Avenue was higher, but the number was always inconsistent with any reasonable assessment of how many cycles could pass a point over any period. Anyone who doubts my claim will have to do a search on the blog; I never did create a Rolling Thunder tag.
Maybe Trump's disappointment will cause the organizers to quietly fold their tents and fade away, like the old soldiers they are. (This Steve Hendrix piece on the organizers is good, he treats them seriously and sympathetically but to a cynic like me the story explodes the possibility that an event attracting hundreds of thousands could be supported out of a garage.)
His position on Rolling Thunder--it's not all it's cracked up to be.
Actually, he said he was disappointed in the size of the crowd he addressed yesterday; he thought it be more like the March on Washington and blamed the officials for not permitting people to attend.
I've a long history, going back to 2005 (albeit in a draft post I never had the guts to post) of questioning the overblown claims for the event. It seemed every year that the number of motorcycles coming down Constitution Avenue was higher, but the number was always inconsistent with any reasonable assessment of how many cycles could pass a point over any period. Anyone who doubts my claim will have to do a search on the blog; I never did create a Rolling Thunder tag.
Maybe Trump's disappointment will cause the organizers to quietly fold their tents and fade away, like the old soldiers they are. (This Steve Hendrix piece on the organizers is good, he treats them seriously and sympathetically but to a cynic like me the story explodes the possibility that an event attracting hundreds of thousands could be supported out of a garage.)
Sunday, May 29, 2016
The Future of Jobs? From Linen to Games
We've gotten into Game of Thrones, now on season 2. Last night the commentary mentioned Banbridge. Banbridge is a town in County Down, Ulster of about 16,000. It happens to be near where my great grandfather was born, and has been mentioned by my cousin who has made regular trips back to Ulster. Turns out the town was into linen; in the words of Wikipedia: "The town owes its success to flax and the linen
industry, becoming the principal linen producing district in Ireland by
1772 with a total of 26 bleachgreens along the[River] Bann. By 1820 the town
was the centre of the 'Linen Homelands' and its prominence grew when it
became a staging post on the mail coach route between Dublin and
Belfast."
But linen has fallen on hard times, and there's just one linen mill left operating. One of the others failed in 2008, and has since been converted to a production studio.It's this studio which hosts a part of Game of Thrones for some seasons.
When you think about movies, they're made all over. Vancouver and Montreal, Morocco and Eastern Europe, New York, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico are just a few of the locations I remember being used for the movies and TV shows I've seen recently, not to mention the old standbys of Britain and Italy.
And the remaining linen mill in Banbridge has long specialized on fine linens and bespoke linens.
So what we have is a shift of jobs from making products to making entertainment. What's notable is these jobs presumably are safe from automation, which is more than we can say for manufacturing or many service jobs.
But linen has fallen on hard times, and there's just one linen mill left operating. One of the others failed in 2008, and has since been converted to a production studio.It's this studio which hosts a part of Game of Thrones for some seasons.
When you think about movies, they're made all over. Vancouver and Montreal, Morocco and Eastern Europe, New York, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico are just a few of the locations I remember being used for the movies and TV shows I've seen recently, not to mention the old standbys of Britain and Italy.
And the remaining linen mill in Banbridge has long specialized on fine linens and bespoke linens.
So what we have is a shift of jobs from making products to making entertainment. What's notable is these jobs presumably are safe from automation, which is more than we can say for manufacturing or many service jobs.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
No Violence, Please
Having lived through 1968, I'm maybe a bit more sensitive to violent protests at political functions. I hope the scenes outside Trump's rally as described by Molly Ball here fade away as the summer continues, but I won't bet on it.
[Update: Josh Marshall observes that last night's (6/2/16) violence was well documented; everyone not involved was taking cellphone videos/pics. Hopefully that enables prosecution and puts a lid on the violent trend.]
[Update: Josh Marshall observes that last night's (6/2/16) violence was well documented; everyone not involved was taking cellphone videos/pics. Hopefully that enables prosecution and puts a lid on the violent trend.]
Myths Never Die: Millions of Slaves Imported
Since the NYTimes doesn't offer a comment section on this article about what DNA tests of African-Americans show about their migrations, I'm <s>nitpicking</s> criticizing here.
Its first three sentences read:
Second, a bit less serious, the South wasn't the only region importing slaves, the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies/states also participated.
Slavery was bad enough, it doesn't need to be clothed in mythical figures.
[I see the Times has issued a correction for the millions figure as of 5/31]
Its first three sentences read:
Two serious errors in the second sentence. First, the colonies and the US did not import "millions" of slaves. In fact, as Prof. Gates of Harvard writes here, there were less than 400,000 imported. The vast majority of the close to 13 million slaves went to the Caribbean and South America."The history of African-Americans has been shaped in part by two great journeys.The first brought millions of Africans to the southern United States as slaves. The second, the Great Migration, began around 1910 and sent six million African-Americans from the South to New York, Chicago and other cities across the country."
Second, a bit less serious, the South wasn't the only region importing slaves, the Middle Atlantic and New England colonies/states also participated.
Slavery was bad enough, it doesn't need to be clothed in mythical figures.
[I see the Times has issued a correction for the millions figure as of 5/31]
Friday, May 27, 2016
Strawberries of the Past
Slate has a piece on strawberries of the past, linking to this USDA resource with pictures of old strawberries. See the previous piece.
Surprise: African Immigrants More Educated than Asian
In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in
higher education, African immigrants to the United States were found
more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group.
African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any
other native-born ethnic group
including white Americans. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants
hold a college diploma. This is slightly more than the percentage of
Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate of native-born
white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.
From here, via Chris Blattman.
From here, via Chris Blattman.
Autonomous Vehicle: Top Down or Bottom Up? Trainable Cars
I've posted several times on "self-driving" cars, also known as autonomous vehicles, or driverless-cars. If I understand, Google and perhaps some others are taking a top-down approach, which seems to involve extensive mapping of roads, signs, etc. etc., feeding the database to the car, and letting the car do its work. That seems a little reminiscent of some old efforts to teach computers language by inputting vocabulary, grammar rules, etc. Something similar also seems to have happened with robots.
It strikes me that a bottom-up approach might be more quickly usable, or call it a car with a memory. It's the same principle as teaching robots, learning by doing.
Assume a car with the ability to follow a route, avoiding other vehicles and humans, and with a memory, a trainable car. Suppose I want my trainable car to take me to the grocery store and back. I or another driver jumps in the car and drives it to the store, with the car storing the route and the environment of the route in its memory. Perhaps we repeat the process several times, until the car is satisfied it knows the route. Then I can get in the car, tell it to take me to the store, and it will do so (or tell me the conditions have changed so it can't).
You may ask: what use is that, I need a car for more than going to the store? Good point, but my guess is that most driving is done on repetitive routes: that 80 percent of driving is done on 20 percent of routes. My percentage is much higher than that. So a trainable car could be rented for such repetitive routes (remember once one trainable car learns the route, the data can be copied to all others). So Zipcar could train a car to drive to my house, and I could train it to drive to the store, etc.
There are many people who because of age, inebriation, disability, poverty, etc. do not and cannot drive. I saw a couple women outside the grocery store the other day, waiting with their groceries for a cab to pick them up, too poor to be able to afford owning a car. For these people a trainable car would be valuable.
For drivers the trainable car would also work, because the 80 percent of the routine routes, the commuting to work, etc. could be handled by the car and allow the "driver" to be on their cellphone, making the roads safer for everyone.
Lastly and perhaps most important, is the fact that data on roads and conditions is flowing up the organization, since a trainable car can transmit updates to the manufacturer which can then flow to the rest of the fleet. I think that's important: in any structure getting data going up is as important and getting it going down.
What use would a car like that be?
It strikes me that a bottom-up approach might be more quickly usable, or call it a car with a memory. It's the same principle as teaching robots, learning by doing.
Assume a car with the ability to follow a route, avoiding other vehicles and humans, and with a memory, a trainable car. Suppose I want my trainable car to take me to the grocery store and back. I or another driver jumps in the car and drives it to the store, with the car storing the route and the environment of the route in its memory. Perhaps we repeat the process several times, until the car is satisfied it knows the route. Then I can get in the car, tell it to take me to the store, and it will do so (or tell me the conditions have changed so it can't).
You may ask: what use is that, I need a car for more than going to the store? Good point, but my guess is that most driving is done on repetitive routes: that 80 percent of driving is done on 20 percent of routes. My percentage is much higher than that. So a trainable car could be rented for such repetitive routes (remember once one trainable car learns the route, the data can be copied to all others). So Zipcar could train a car to drive to my house, and I could train it to drive to the store, etc.
There are many people who because of age, inebriation, disability, poverty, etc. do not and cannot drive. I saw a couple women outside the grocery store the other day, waiting with their groceries for a cab to pick them up, too poor to be able to afford owning a car. For these people a trainable car would be valuable.
For drivers the trainable car would also work, because the 80 percent of the routine routes, the commuting to work, etc. could be handled by the car and allow the "driver" to be on their cellphone, making the roads safer for everyone.
Lastly and perhaps most important, is the fact that data on roads and conditions is flowing up the organization, since a trainable car can transmit updates to the manufacturer which can then flow to the rest of the fleet. I think that's important: in any structure getting data going up is as important and getting it going down.
What use would a car like that be?
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Eight Inch Floppies, COBOL, and Windows 3.1
No doubt we'll hear a lot about them--GAO has reported on the aging government technology here,
To those of us who date from that era it evokes some nostalgia. For those who don't, be reassured to know that the floppies are only used: "For those in the nuclear command area, the system’s primary function is to send and receive emergency action messages to nuclear forces"
[Update: CNN piece.]
To those of us who date from that era it evokes some nostalgia. For those who don't, be reassured to know that the floppies are only used: "For those in the nuclear command area, the system’s primary function is to send and receive emergency action messages to nuclear forces"
[Update: CNN piece.]
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