High Paid Teachers

In the US our highest paid teachers are college football coaches (a coach is a teacher right).  Jim Harbaugh just signed a contract with a $5 million base salary, with incentives and raises. 

In South Korea, the highest paid teachers are math coaches, also being paid millions of dollars.

Bureaucratic Meetings and Science Fiction

My employees thought I was bad when I held weekly staff meeting, which over time turned very boring.  I would have loved to tell them about the International Space Station meetings, once a day.
And five sets of bosses.  And a a schedule in a spreadsheet.  

I read a good amount of science fiction back in the 1950's and I don't remember any meetings or bureaucratic rules in those novels. 

How Fast Things Change

From a Vox post on Rep. Scalise:

Let's be as generous as we can to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Let's say he spoke to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization but had no idea it was a white supremacy group backed by David Duke. Let's say the name didn't raise any red flags for Scalise, or if it did, he didn't follow up on them. Let's take him at his word that, in 2002, he didn't know there was such a thing as Google (or any of its competitors), and neither he nor his staff even cursorily vetted the groups he accepted speaking invitations from. [emphasis added]

Looking at the history of Google, I suspect very few people were automatically checking Google in 2002. Amazing how fast things change, and how quickly we assume the past and the present are similar.

Best Pun of the Day

In this paragraph from Sugar Mountain Farm, accompanying a picture of a mended boot.

Boots wear out. Sometimes we wear out our souls. Sometimes we get punctures in the sides from projections like sticks or rocks. Even the best boots we’ve found to date wear out. If a boot lasts a year we’re doing well. Wet feet are no fun. Especially in the winter.

F35 and the A10

James Fallows has a long article on the military in the Atlantic.  Part of it is a discussion of the F-35 and A-10.  He doesn't like the F-35 and does like the A-10.  The logic is that the F-35 tries to meet too many goals, do too many functions for all our military air forces, and is essentially political, with subcontractors spread across many congressional districts.  Conversely, the A-10 is single purpose and cheap.

There may be a couple parallels here:

• Robert McNamara's F111 fighter bomber which was initially designed for multiple services.
• Efforts to rationalize bureaucracy by combining organizations, like the USDA Infoshare effort which aborted.

I'm not sure whether it's always the case that working across organizations fails, but it's certainly difficult.  I believe some of the big car companies have tried, sometimes with success, to build different cars using the same chassis/drive train.  So maybe it's a matter of judgment--picking one's shots.

Refining Algorithms and Systems, Help Systems, Driverless Cars and Obamacare

I had occasion yesterday to call the Verizon help line for assistance on installing a new router.  It has been 2 or more years since I've made a similar call, so I was struck by the significant improvement in their system.  I think there were at least 2 aspects:

• improving the logic of the automated decision tree.  I got to the applicable problem-solver much faster, and when there it was quite logical.
• linking the automated phone system with databases.  It wasn't new that the system knew my phone number.  It was new that it confirmed my identity.  It was new that it knew that they had just shipped a new router, so logically my call would most likely relate to that.

What's nice about software is that improvements, once made, tend to last.  If you fix a problem or made an enhancement, it's done forever, or at least for as long as the organization behind the system lasts. The critical factor is the organization is working to improve the system, as opposed to letting it survive on inertia.  But this ratchet effect for improving algorithms means that Google's driverless car can handle increasingly unusual traffic situations.  It also means that Obamacare's website can continue to improve. 

"Egg Famines"

Via The Way of Improvement Leads Home, this post on the blog of the Massachusetts Historical Society describes egg production and marketing from an early 20th century farm.  The big take-away is the "egg famine"--no eggs in winter, an abundance in summer.  These days of course we turn on the electric lights in winter so no more egg famines, when the price of eggs hits $15 a dozen (inflation adjusted).

We were using electric lights back in the 40's.  My mother recalled with rare bitterness that neighbors thought they were a signal to Germans to bomb (my maternal grandparents were German immigrants)--an example of the sort of popular panic and ignorance we've never outgrown.

FSA IT Crimped

On page 29 and 30 of the Cromnibus, FSA IT is somewhat crimped: half the $132 mill is withheld pending a detailed analysis/report on projects over $25K.  (Copy and paste from GPO documents is unsatisfactory, so read yourself, if interested.  Everything has to fit the "Farm Service Agency Information Technology Roadmap", which sounds like something which should be available on the internet?

FSA Offices Are Frozen

No, they didn't lose their heating system, but the cromnibus apparently had language in it, via Chris Clayton at DTN

Under the funding provision approved by the House, Farm Service Agency would be blocked from cutting staff or offices.

The bill blocks the Farm Service Agency from closing 250 county offices or eliminating 815 staff. The budget agreement actually puts a "temporary moratorium" on closing FSA offices or relocating employees" until a comprehensive assessment of FSA workload is completed by USDA. "This agreement reiterates dissatisfaction with the agency's budget submission. The budget request did not provide a rationale for the proposed office closures and staffing changes, did not clearly describe the effect of the proposed actions, and did not include a timeline for implementation that demonstrates how savings could be achieved."

A Good Day for Engineers

Eugene Volokh praises the Kipling poem "Sons of Martha", which he sees as an ode to engineers, and Lynn Beiser thanks the engineers at Honda for saving her son's life and body.