The Pace of Change

Does anyone remember electronic calculators and digital watches?  Both used to be big, big in popularity and big in price, if not in size.  I used to do office work on my summer job using an old hand crank calculator, so electronic models seemed a great advance.  Over time the price came down and the capabilities went up, and then the pocket calculator was really subsumed by other electronics.

I try to keep that lesson in mind: electronics changes faster than you expect.  Here's another example: a NM super computer which the latest thing in 2008 is now outmoded and uneconomical in 20013.

Gravity: There's Always a Catch

Technology Review has a piece on 3-D printing. It seems some people who try to use 3-D printing to make physical models of their fancy designs forget something.

"Sometimes, after an outlandish request—a character whose minuscule limbs simply won’t support a body, say—Carmy’s colleagues have to gently explain that different rules exist for physical product design. “We have gravity, for example,” she says."

Family Farm

I like this piece in the Atlantic, written by a person who grew up on the family farm in Alberta, but who is no longer allowed to operate the equipment:

"My dad farms 3,200 acres of his own, and rents another 2,400—all told, a territory seven times the size of Central Park. Last year, he produced 3,900 tonnes (or metric tons) of wheat, 2,500 tonnes of canola, and 1,400 tonnes of barley. (That’s enough to produce 13 million loaves of bread, 1.2 million liters of vegetable oil, and 40,000 barrels of beer.) His revenue last year was more than $2 million, and he admits to having made “a good profit,” but won’t reveal more than that. The farm has just three workers, my dad and his two hired men, who farm with him nine months of the year. For the two or three weeks of seeding and harvest, my dad usually hires a few friends to help out, too.

Technology and Dairy: the Use of Cellphones

Almost forgot to link to this post on the benefits of cellphones for the dairy farmer: when the cows get out and get lost you can coordinate your search and driving efforts using cellphones. :-)

Of course these days the number of dairies putting cows out to pasture is dwindling, but every bit helps.  ("Threecollie", who runs the site, also uses a birder app on her iPHone.)

The Making of a Myth: Apple Maps

Some ideas get transformed into myths, which seems to be happening in the case of Apple Maps.  Consumer Reports did a comparison of the Apple application with Google Maps and GPS and said Apple's version wasn't bad and had some nice features.  But such a lukewarm review can't stand up against the incessantly repeated statement that Apple screwed up.

By contrast, Apple's Siri was hailed on its release as great.  My impression is that continued use of it revealed it wasn't all that good, perhaps much like Maps.

Technology and Dairy Flourish in Small Countries?

The NYTimes has a piece on a technology test in Switzerland: managers of dairy herds can be notified by text if their cows are in heat (based on temperature of vulva and cow activity). (For those benighted souls reading this who never grew up on a dairy farm: you have to inseminate the cow within x hours of when she comes in heat.  If you don't catch her heat, or she fails to become pregnant, you're facing a month of payments for feed that's pure waste, except of course for the cow.) The story says it's harder to tell when a cow is in heat with modern dairy cows. Without challenging that assertion, I'd suggest the high ratio of cows to people in modern dairies also makes it more difficult.

I do wonder if down the line PETA will protest this mistreatment of cows. 

Another development on the technology front is the modification of bovine genetics so their milk is less likely to trigger allergies. Interesting that the development comes from New Zealand.  I wonder about the level of anti-science feeling there.

Abundance: the Book

Reading Abundance, the Future is Better Than You Think, by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. It's an easy read, bringing into one place descriptions of a lot of the recent innovations which the authors believe will make the future better than the present.

Unfortunately, from my view, because they cover so much ground, everything from 3-D printing to DIY bioengineering to agriculture, they fall victim to some fads, including Despommiers and his vertical farming.  In the appendices they include references for some of the ideas found in the text: for vertical farming it's a url from www.the-edison-lightbulb.com, a website containing ideas mostly from the young.  The vertical farming bit is a Chicago fifth graders pitch for vertical farming.  Pretty sad.

Having dissed that portion of the book, the bulk of it is a fast overview of all the reasons to be optimistic about everything.  I strongly recommend it if you're depressed about the future, though I wouldn't bet on the accuracy of any specific ino.  (Diamandis offered the "X Prize" for private spaceships.)

The Advantages of Animals Over Technology

I'm generally favorable to technology, but as my mother used to observe, there were advantages to animals. For example, when field work for the day was over, you could pretty much let the team of horses find their way to the barn.  And, according to her though I never experienced it, if you took a load of potatoes from her folks' farm to the city (Binghamton) to sell, once the load was disposed of the horses would take you home with little or no guidance.

I'm reminded of that when I read a recent post on Ricks' "The Best Defense".  Earlier I'd seen the progress people were making on developing a pack robot, four-footed, self-powered, capable of crossing irregular terrain carrying 1-200 pounds.  It looked impressive. Then there was Sgt. Reckless, a war horse in the Korean War, who carried 5 tons in 51 trips.  I bet she was a lot quieter and a lot cheaper to develop.

Copier Jams Are So Twentieth Century

This MSNBC piece reports that the Federal Reserve's decision yesterday was 7 minutes late because they had a copier jam, preventing them from distributing the release to all reporters simultaneous

You see, in the arcane world of covering the Federal Reserve, reporters are "locked up" in a room at the Treasury and forbidden to release the Fed statement until every reporter has a copy. This is to ensure a level playing field.
Then all the reporters get a signal to transmit the news. The idea is to get the Fed statement out there before the next reporter because the financial markets hang on every word, comma and period.

This sounds like the process used for NASS crop reports, which can also move markets.  John Kenneth Galbraith's only novel dealt with a plot to get an early look at the crop report and exploit the information.

My question: why don't all such institutions just post their data in the cloud, with email/twitter notifications to the relevant people.  Avoid this 20th century stuff and recognize everyone and her brother has an Ipad now.

Digital Archeology: An Answer to Obsolete Machines?

Technology Review reports on an exercise in understanding the operation of an obsolete CPU, the 6502 chip in the Commodore 64 and Apple II, among others.  I didn't follow the link in this quote, because I'm not really that techie, but it strikes me this is one answer to the problem of obsolete hardware causing the loss of data: the simulation of operations on modern hardware:

They've chronicled the results of their work at Visual6502.org, where they reveal that their understanding of the 6502 has become so sophisticated that they have not merely mapped all of its transistors and connections, they've actually managed to simulate the workings of the entire chip.

My Loss of Faith in Japan

The Japanese are great engineers, right?  And their society is unified.  And in the face of disaster they cooperate, they don't loot, they work together.

But my faith is severely undermined by this factoid, from a Times piece on the supply of electricity:

In theory, the Tokyo area could import electricity from the south. But a historical rivalry between Tokyo and the city of Osaka led the two areas to develop grids using different frequencies — Osaka’s is 60 cycles and Tokyo’s is 50 cycles — so sharing is inefficient.

 Darn right it would be inefficient.  That's even worse than the division of the US into separate grids, where the Texas grid doesn't really connect with the others so the idea for wind power on the High Plains doesn't work well.  It reminds me of the difference in railroad track gauges which we used to have.  (The Erie Railroad had a wider gauge than others; Southern roads varied.  The idea was to create a monopoly, a niche. It's rather like the difference between Apple and Microsoft: Gates went with open architecture and the advantages of networking; Jobs went with closed architecture and the advantages of specialization.  For years it looked as if Gates had the better argument, but now we're starting to doubt.)

The Unseen Benefits of Technology

Reston Patch has a post on the Fairfax County 9-1-1 Call Center.

“Back in the olden days, 18 months ago, much of the on-site emergency response coordination between departments had to be completed by telephone at the dispatch center,” said Steve Souder, the 9-1-1 Call Center’s director. Sometimes this would require multiple phone calls back and forth.
“Before cell phones, if an accident occurred on a highway, someone would have to drive to the next exit and get off to look for a pay phone,” Souder recalls.  “The caller had to have coins available to place a call and once the 9-1-1 call was placed, hoped they remembered approximately where and in which direction the accident took place.” ....

The call is automatically assigned a code for the type of emergency—police only, fire, basic life service—and as the communicator enters details, that information immediately becomes available to police, fire and rescue dispatchers who place calls to responders.
Since all police, fire and rescue units are equipped with global positioning systems, dispatchers can immediately tell who is closest to the emergency. The police department can immediately pull up a history of responses for a given address. Public safety communicators also have instructions on how to walk the caller through life-saving techniques until responders arrive. 

Answering 9-1-1 calls requires the ability to handle the more than 100 different languages spoken in Fairfax County. The county uses the services of Language Line headquartered in Monterey, CA to assist in taking the call.

The net result of all this should be faster response to emergencies, with long term effects on reduced deaths from accidents, reduced hospital costs from accidents, less property damage from fires, more effective police protection.  Of course none of these gains will show up on the front page of the newspapers, nor will any be credited as more effective government.

Sad Sentence of the Day: the Replaceable Kevin Drum

From a post on the advance of computer intelligence in replacing people, Kevin writes:

In the meantime, I just hope that Mother Jones doesn't figure out that they could almost certainly find some extremely bright, knowledgable, plugged-in Indian blogger who would work much harder than me and for a quarter of my salary.There probably aren't a ton of Indians who could replace me, but there don't need to be tons. There only needs to be one.
[Emphasis added]

Sic Transit Gloria: Ken Olsen

Back in the day (whoops, did I use that already) Once the Digital Equipment Corporation was high in the sky.  I remember using the DEC All-in-one system to communicate with Kansas City, writing requirements and discussing schedules.  This was the mid-80's. In DC we had started our word processing with the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter, changed to the CRT-based Lexitrons, briefly to Wang, and then to the DEC terminals with their email, wordprocessing and rudimentary spreadsheet package.  (The spreadsheet was an attempt to compete with Lotus 123--I remember using it for some computations, maybe on wheat allotment in the runup to the 1986 farm bill.) 

Anyhow, it was on the DEC that I first learned the golden rule of email: black and white type does not convey your meaning, particularly when you're joking, sarcastic or whatever.  (Early days of smileys.)   All this reminiscing is triggered by the death of Ken Olsen, one of the cofounders of DEC.

It's a cautionary tale, matched in later days by the AOL/TimeWarner saga, Alta Vista, and maybe Yahoo, and Ebay.  Who knows the future?

How To Reorganize

So Obama proposed reorganizing government last night.  But by focusing on duplicated functions he implies the sort of reorganization which takes some silos and puts the silos together under one roof.   For example, taking Rural Housing and putting it under HUD, or Forest Service and combining it with Interior.  That's the sort of reorganization FSA experienced in 1994, when parts of the old Farmers Home Administration were combined with ASCS.  I'm not sure the reorganization has been terribly successful; it wasn't successful quickly. We still have county office employees who are Federal and those who are not.  16 years of effort hasn't changed that.   And I suspect we still have IT employees in St. Louis and IT employees in Kansas City. And the IT applications may not have been as integrated as they might be, as were dreamed of in 1991 under Info Share.

I'd like to suggest a different model for reorganization, particularly for rural areas.  It's a model which will drive some FSA employees, particularly a certain CED, up the wall, but I think it's worth considering and testing.

Some assumptions:

• The number of farms in agricultural areas continues to fall
• The number of people in some rural areas continues to fall
• Technology permits telework to be effective in some cases
• Many people in rural areas are competent with modern technology, but some are not.

The new model office combines a lot of technological bells and whistles, with a set of "generalists", people who know enough about lots of  things to be able to serve as intermediaries with the true experts, either by consulting them remotely by messaging, and videoconferencing, or by putting the customer in touch with the expert. In some respects it operates as a "triage" center.  Its staff is trained enough to be able to refer cases too complex for them to handle, to hand hold for cases that can be handled remotely where the customer needs the assurance and the interpretation, and to take care of routine and simple cases.

The new model  field office works with the new model Federal agency, which tries to serve the public online, but using experts more locally based as intermediaries for those who aren't comfortable with technology.  So the new model Federal agency is doing lots of basic training of the personnel in the

So you set up the new model  field office and test it.  If it works, it's the field service center for all Federal government services and some new ones. (The new ones will aggravate people who might think I'm a socialist.)  So the new office would start by serving as a post office and a passport office (which some post offices do now). It would serve FSA programs, NRCS programs, Rural Development programs.  It would handle Social Security matters.  It would handle IRS matters.  It could serve as an interface for remote medicine.

That's my idea.

Pity the Generator Operators

That was my MOS (military occupational specialty) in my Army days: operating generators.  It was a good gig. First of all the generator sites were dispersed around the Saigon area.  So the enlisted men were out from under the company hierarchy;  there was very little control or leadership from on high--out of sight, out of mind.  Second, a generator is pretty fool proof; once you do regular maintenance there's not much else to do.  So there's plenty of time for pinochle games and napping. Third, electricity is vital, almost as vital as food and water.  So people don't mess with you. 

But sadly progress comes to all things, even the generator operators in Afghanistan according to this Grist piece.Solar panels are more reliable and they don't require an operator.

When Headline Writers Get It Wrong

As in the headline for this Freakonomics post: "When Technology Isn't the Answer".  The post cites a doctor who wrote a Time article describing problems with health care software.  As the commenters make clear, the problem is poor system design and the learning curve for health care software.  It's rather like a headline in 1900 saying: "Why the Automobile Isn't the Answer".

Scholarly Citations and Page Numbers in Kindle

Matt Yglesias endorses a complaint by John Holbo: Kindle doesn't show page number so it complicates the job of creating footnotes for scholarly articles.  Seems to me there's a simple cure: adopt a standard which adheres to the following format: [version of publications--Kindle, Google Book, etc.][search by Google, Kindle, whatever][date searched][number of result].

The point is, after all, not to specify the page number, but to allow someone coming after the writer to reproduce the writer's results, just as a scientific experiment needs to be specified in enough detail to allow reproduction. So if you specify a search engine and a text, and the terms you used to reach the material, that should be quite adequate.

Why Healthcare Is Costly

A nugget from a NYTimes article on the problems of providing adequate Wi-Fi connectivity to conferences, particularly of techies.

"“I’ve been to health care conferences where no one brings a laptop,” said Ross Mayfield, president of the business software company Socialtext and a technology conference regular."

 That's sad, and also revealing.  I doubt there's any conference in USDA where laptops aren't present, at least those conferences where there are worker bees.

Early Precision Agriculture?

Here's an extension report on the savings from precision agriculture from better information on the farming operation and more precise application of inputs of fertilizer, seed, pesticides, etc. which cuts the amount needed.  Coincidentally I was reading a book, I think Bill Bryson's At Home, which mentioned Jethro Tull and the invention of the seed drill, which cut the amount of seed needed from the 3 bushels used in broadcast seeding to 1 bushel in the drill.