Another Web Site for Agriculture

The NAL Blog references a new site, called the Agriculture and Public Health Gateway, sponsored by Johns Hopkins U. I've a couple reservations: some of the documents are from journals, meaning all a layman can get for free is an introduction or summary; and, at least for the farm bill area, the only documents are dated 2007 or before.

Government Management

Government Executive assesses the prospects for Obama to continue Bush management initiatives and thinks the financial reporting, e-government, and integrating performance ones will survive. The managing people and competitive outsourcing are more controversial and more likely to change greatly.

The Four Thousand Dollar Cellphone

DOD/NSA is praising its new cellphone, which costs a mere four thousand dollars. Actually, allowing for price drops for quantity purchases, it may be a bargain (it handles both secure and non-secure internet sites, etc. etc.). Now if the FBI and Census would adopt it and get some competition going, we might have something. But I'm waiting for a populist to complain about the cost.

Handling Comments

Kevin Drum is the latest to pick on the Bush administration for their procedures in handling comments on the regulations they want issued before January 20.

I never had to deal with anything like 200,000 comments, but I would give the EPA a break. 200,000 of anything can be sorted into categories. So reviewing the comments would be a relatively simple process:

1. take a random sample of comments, say 500 or so, and develop a set of categories, including a "further review" category
   
2. have your "reviewers" sort the remaining 199,500 comments into the categories
3. analyze each category and develop a response
   
4. analyze each "further review" comment and handle appropriately.

Simple, but it's a process I'd be comfortable defending against challenges.

I might challenge the Obama administration: what are you going to do with the input to your website? How will the process be better than what the EPA is doing?

[Note to self: Obama's been elected 3 days and I'm already challenging him?]

Dissing Bush

David Katz at Treehuggers.com suggests that President Obama should reinstall the solar panels on the White House roof. That's well and good, but a Google search would have revealed they were reinstalled, not under the Clinton/Gore administration, but under GW.

One propensity of political partisans is to refuse to believe the good about their opponents. (I earlier blogged about the comparison between Bush's house at Crawford and Gore's place in Tennessee.) It means humans are hypocrites.

Bob Bergland Advises

Quotes from the Chair of House Agriculture Committee, Agricnews Online via Farm Policy:

“He also wants to turn his attention to re-organizing the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He said former agriculture secretary Bob Bergland told him ‘good luck.’ An audience member asked Peterson about the National Animal Identification System. Peterson said he’s not sure it’s the No. 1 fight he wants to take on at this time.

“The United States will probably have to have NAIS if it wants to be in export markets, he said, and if a terrorist introduces Foot and Mouth Disease in this country, the U.S. will wish it had NAIS.

This I want to watch. It's going to be a fight within the agricultural community--Obama doesn't/shouldn't have a dog in the fight.

Obama's Rural Change Page

From change.gov, Obama's new web site, here's the link for rural issues.

(Don't get all excited, I think they just copied the rural page from their campaign website, not that there's anything wrong with that.)

What Is Moore's Law for Genomes?

Recently had a DNA test run by ancestry.com for genealogical purposes, so I'm following news on the genome side a bit more closely these days. In IT there's something known as Moore's law, which talks about the rate at which technology improves (doubling every 18 months). In genome decoding, there seems to be something similar going on, according to this Technology Review article:

• first genome = $300 million
• James Watson's genome = $1-2 million
• Yoruba man's genome = $250,000
  

The 30-Year Bond

Remember when the Bush Treasury killed the 30-year bond? Those were the days when people worried about budget surpluses forever and what would happen as the debt was reduced.
Calculated Risk talks here about the problems of financing the debt in today's environment. One thing that strikes me is the supply of treasury bonds is going to expand greatly. That means the price is going to go down, meaning the effective interest rate goes up. That can put President Obama back in the vicious circle we had in the late 80's--high interest rates mean the budget cost of financing the debt rises, making it all the more difficult to balance income and outgo.

A Role for Newspapers

One problem with blogs and online journalism is, how do you preserve memories? You buy a newspaper for historic dates, like 11/4/2008. See Joel Achenbach.