The Times Gets It Wrong [Or Maybe Not]

Unfortunately, urban myths circulate in many areas.  Sunday Andrew Martin of the NY Times wrote:

While the food supply grew faster than the world’s population from 1970 to 1990, as the Green Revolution’s gains took hold, the situation has now reversed itself. Productivity gains in agriculture have slowed, and since 1990, the growth rate of food production has fallen below population growth.

This, of course, is not true, even though it's a prevalent concept.  Via Wikipeda we learn that the rate of world population growth has  declined:

In 2000, the United Nations estimated that the world's population was growing at the rate of 1.14% (or about 75 million people) per year,^[27] down from a peak of 88 million per year in 1989. In the last few centuries, the number of people living on Earth has increased many times over. By the year 2000, there were 10 times as many people on Earth as there were 300 years ago. According to data from the CIA's 2005–2006 World Factbooks, the world human population increased by 203,800 every day.^[28] The CIA Factbook increased this to 211,090 people every day in 2007, and again to 220,980 people every day in 2009.

Globally, the population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak of 2.19% in 1963, but growth remains high in Latin America, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.^[29]

Meanwhile, USDA in 2008 wrote:

The annual growth rate in the production of aggregate grains and oilseeds
has been slowing. Between 1970 and 1990, production rose an average
2.2 percent per year. Since 1990, the growth rate has declined to about 1.3
percent. USDA’s 10-year agricultural projections for U.S. and world agriculture
see the rate declining to 1.2 percent per year between 2009 and 2017.1

The ERS publication shows an increase in per-capita production in the period 1990-2007 and projects it to continue for the next 10 years, although at a much slower pace.

[Updated: I had made my point in an email to the NYTimes. Mr. Martin wrote back a response which says the wording could have been improved but the thought was correct, citing a conversation with Ron Trostle of ERS.  I'll try to research further.]

Service Oriented Architecture--Is It Alive or Dead? [Title Updated]

Following a sequence of links on service-oriented architecture, came upon an interesting discussion of the insurance industry vis a vis IT and this (in the context of the problems of developing "services" which apply to multiple situations):

Practices like this prevent any form of "standard insured" from being developed in the insurance industry. No insurance businessman will support this because there are nuances and implications built into the idea of an "insured" that are different for each product type. To see this, what happens when a covered person has no brain activity but is on a life support system; are they dead and does a life insurance policy have to pay, or are they alive and the medical insurance policy has to pay. In reality, life insurance policies assume you're dead when a death certificate is written, because doctors will only sign a document for people they pronounce as "dead". All of the language in a life insurance policy surrounding the word "insured" assumes this to be true. But some medical insurance policies assume you're dead when your organs can be harvested for transplantation, even without a death certificate. And all of the language surrounding their term "insured" works to limit the medical policy's liability within this context. So such a person is neither alive nor dead, and it will take a court case to decide which policy is liable. A software service could only deny all payment given these rules.

These kinds of "business context" assumptions are ultimately coded into the business rules of the systems and they make it very difficult to identify the differences between systems and the data resources the systems manage. As a result, it is difficult to decide what a "service" is and what it should do. 

Software developers need to understand that a service can only exist within an operating context; business people need to understand the an address is an address every place it appears. And while software systems might be able to standardize the data of an "insured", and they may be able to standardized the relationship between a policy and its "insured", the business context will always limit how the data is used, and the service will always have to include this business context. This means that every service will either provide just data, or the service will be specific to a business context, but unless the business itself is defined to use standard contexts, the services can never be shared between contexts.

It's this sort of thing which also causes problems in merging organizations, in handling silos, etc.

Google for Bureaucrats

Google provides a page listing its services which might help the poor bureaucrat.

Here's an excerpt which highlights one of my pet peeves with government web sites, and offers a fix, of course:

As many as four of five Internet users reach government and other public sector websites by using Google and other search engines.* The problem is that such websites often provide access to information, like public records, through a database application, and our "crawlers" generally can't access and thereby index the webpages in these databases. This means that much of the public information on these websites isn't included in Google's index, and that many search engine users could be missing out on the information and services that your website offers.

Calling the "..ra boys" (Kundra and Chopra).  Please pay attention.

Technological Silos in the ER

Informational silos refers to the idea that different organizational structures cannot communicate with each other--classically the only way the pre-WWII Navy and the Army communicated was through the President. 

Interesting piece at Technology Review discussing the fact that medical devices don't talk to each other.  Each device is the outcome of a long process of evolutionary development and improvement, aimed at one problem.  But when they're attached to/monitoring the same patient, they need to talk.  Or, as is said in Cool Hand Luke: "what we have here is failure to communicate".

Dana Milbank on the Obama Farmers Market

Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Post who snarks everyone.  Today he mocks the Obama Farmers Market.  The prices he quotes are too high for federal employees, at least those who support a family and are saving to put kids through college. (Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr cites the case of a Federal judge resigning because the pay is too low.) Meanwhile, Obamafoodorama gushes over Michelle's speech and leadership.  (I'm trying to resist the urge to imagine what the right may do in 2012 with Milbank's material.  All too easy to mock this as elitism for the few, far far away from the plight of the jobless and the middle class.)

"You'd Expect Presidents to Wear Socks"

Best line I've seen so far today--from Eugene Volokh's post attacking monarchy and suggesting elective kings or queens.

History of Jobs

Via a couple sites (Marginal Revolution and others), here's an interactive graphic showing change of jobs over the last 150 years. (Launch the full screen version for best readability.)  Some interesting trends: farming down, clerical up, etc.  But who would have known the proportion of the labor force serving as waitresses would have dropped from 1960 to 2000?  Or that clergymen would have maintained their proportion over the years?

Problems of Locavore Agriculture

Obamafoodorama has a post on various ag issues, including the problems faced by a farm in the DC metro area.

Some challenges: Georgia and Zach lease their land, for a shockingly high amount of monthly rent. They’ve spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours boosting the quality of their soil with amendments in order to grow better vegetables—but when their lease is up, they’ll have to start over elsewhere. There’s a huge problem with deer eating their crops; the growing area is fenced, but better, deer-secure fencing is incredibly expensive. Figuring out better direct marketing techniques would help, too; Zach and Georgia could have a big local CSA project where they sold to near-by residents, instead of having to drive more than an hour to DC for farmers markets. Although DC is considered local in food speak, it’s not Georgia and Zach’s own community—so they’re “relocating” their wealth elsewhere, as well as spending money on gas—and contributing to greenhouse problems.

A Third Surprising Statistic

From the NY Times today in an article on the possible banning of smoking from New York City's parks.  Apparently after the Mayor got smoking banned in restaurants and pubs the smoking rate dropped from about 20 percent to about 16 percent.

Why Are We Fat--We're Capitalists

Cornell has a study out which says:

The study found that fathers who worked long hours or had non-standard schedules were more likely to use takeout meals, miss family meals, purchase prepared entrees and eat while working. Working mothers in the study who worked under similar conditions purchased restaurant meals or prepared entrees or missed breakfast significantly more often than other women. About a quarter of mothers and fathers said they did not have access to healthful, reasonably priced or good-tasting food at or near work.

One of the things celebrated about our economy is our flexibility and hard work, the idea that unlike France people can and do change locations and jobs, meaning the economy is more friendly to innovation and change.  But the quote suggests we pay a price for that on our waistline.