The Learning Curve in Transparency

This Post article the other day shows the Obama Administration learning some lessons on transparency, particularly the need for validity checks on data entry and error correction routines.

Tiger Woods and Albert Einstein

Funny, I was sure that was a combination of search terms that was rare, if not unique. 

Wrong!

188,000 hits on Google.  (My thought was to point out that Albert got forgiven his infidelity.)

People Are Irrational

In the recent flap over mammographies people resisted a study that said, roughly, the costs and risks associated with routine blanket mammographies beginning at age 40 instead of age 50 weren't worth the benefits. 

Meanwhile, in today's NYTimes, there's an article discussing the routine use of tamoxifen to prevent breast cancer. Apparently lots of women resist the idea of taking a pill to prevent breast cancer. 

Somewhere in this vast nation, there's someone who's willing to undergo radiation to detect a tumor but not willing to swallow a pill to prevent it. 

A New Route to Nitrogen Fertilizer

One of the arguments of the organic people (as opposed to us inorganic robots) is tied to the concept of "peak oil"--as we exhaust our oil and natural gas we lose the feedstock for fertilizer. But a reminder that the future is different from an extrapolation of past trends comes in this Technology Review post, Cornell profs "developing reactions to make nitrogen into organo-nitrogens directly", bypassing the need for ammonia.

A Question for Foodies

According to this post at Universal York, by 1900 the small city of York, PA had five thriving farmers markets.  So my question to foodies, who push farmers markets, what happened?  Why did the markets fade away, and what does that mean for their current renaissance? 

My own answer is--efficiency and lower costs in satisfying consumers desires was the cause, which means only a small niche in the future for farmers markets.

Extension Service and Health Care Reform

The New Yorker's Atul Gawande has an article on health care reform that includes praise for a USDA bureaucrat, Seaman Knapp, the father of the Extension Service. And praise for the hodge-podge of USDA programs to help farmers (in the 1890-1930 era):

"What seemed like a hodgepodge eventually cohered into a whole. The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn’t leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop of experiment and learning and encouragement for farmers across the country. The results were beyond what anyone could have imagined. Productivity went way up, outpacing that of other Western countries. Prices fell by half. By 1930, food absorbed just twenty-four per cent of family spending and twenty per cent of the workforce. Today, food accounts for just eight per cent of household income and two per cent of the labor force. It is produced on no more land than was devoted to it a century ago, and with far greater variety and abundance than ever before in history."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/12/14/091214fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=3#ixzz0ZhhRVRUu

 

My first reaction was Gawande's attempt to parallel USDA's attempts to help farmers with the pilot projects in the health care bill and the general situation of health care in the US with the situation in agriculture in 1900 were far-fetched.  But he's a persuasive writer.  I recommend the article.

PS: He has perhaps the first interview with an extension agent ever to appear in the New Yorker.

Transparency is Good for Professors?

Am I being really mean by highlighting Brad DeLong's post here?  Or is he trying to gain what we used to call brownie points by admitting to being less than clear?

Data Sharing

Back in the day (i.e. 1992) when I was part of the Info-share project, we tried with some success to pull data from multiple databases of different agencies into one database that was accessible by farmers.  It weems some 17 years later, the federal government has reached the point where the data can be pulled on the fly--at least Mr. Kundra says, according to this Federal Computer Weekly piece,  Education and IRS will be able to support a new student aid application process by populating it with IRS data.

Transparency Is Good, Even If It Hurts

The Environmental Working Group led the way with its FOIA request to get farm payment data from FSA and putting the data up on the Internet.  News organizations are following the precedent--here is a CBS report from Florida spotlighting FSA payments made to dead persons.  They matched data from the SSA's death index to payment data from EWG's database to identify such cases. 

I find the matching interesting because one of the conditions under which USDA provided the data was that social security numbers were replaced in the data by constructed numbers, meaning EWG doesn't have social security numbers.  But, given the advances in computing it was presumably easy enough for CBS to match using name and address from EWG's files to the name and address from SSA's files--they got along without the SSN.

There's some misinformation in the article--notably when an EWG type compares making welfare payments to a dead person with making farm payments to a dead person.  The comparison is invalid, because the farm payment goes with the land, not the person. And I wonder how many cases there are of the heirs leaving an estate open just out of inertia and procrastination. As usual the media and critics make things seem simpler than the reality is, at least the reality seen by a good bureaucrat.  But the bottom line is, if FSA doesn't follow its rules, people should be able to find out.  And if people think the rules are wrong, then in a democracy they can get them changed.

Under the Obama adminstration's open government initiatives, I'd like to see FSA put up its own database, including all the data it gives to EWG, plus the matching to SSA's files.  Of course, that would take resources FSA doesn't have, so maybe it's better to out-source this stuff to EWG and the media.

Pigford and the Women

From a Government Executive post:

two key House members introduced legislation Thursday to establish a $4.6 billion compensation fund for female farmers who have been denied loans since 1981.

The article discusses Pigford and the other discrimination cases filed against FSA and USDA.  But there's no substantive discussion of the basis for the amount or any indication of what lawyers are involved.  (In the Pigford case there were allegations of misconduct by some of the lawyers.)

Updated:  See the press release on De Lauro's site for more details.  I refuse to use my dwindling brain cells to analyze the differences between De Lauro's process and Pigford but it looks as if it's the two track process again: one track for people who credibly claim to have applied for a loan, another track for people who can prove discrimination.  The first track gets $5,000 instead of the $50,000 for Pigford; the second gets an adjustable $109,000. 

One white male chauvinist legalistic remark:  there's no provision to prevent double-dipping by a black female  farmer (or, in the event, a Hispanic female or a Native American female farmer).