Pigford and the Indian Case

Not much more than this in the ABC post.

A federal judge has approved settlement talks in a decade-old discrimination lawsuit filed by American Indians against the U.S. Agriculture Department.

Bureaucracy Is Always Fascinating--US Army

I do find bureaucracy endlessly fascinating, not that it's a wide spread taste. FDR famously mocked government bureaucracies, ending with the Navy.  But Tom Ricks, who used to be the Post's defense correspondent, has a nice blog.  From a post in a series on Army doctrine, there's a nice phrase which suggests the Army is perhaps more primitive than the Navy: "Tensions with the field forces always existed, but were muted -- and senior leaders at the top fully embraced and endorsed TRADOC's central role in the Army constellation of tribes."

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.