Christmas Tree Exhibited in 1840

I follow a couple of York, PA blogs because one line of ancestors lived there for a while.  Here's a post on an exhibition of a Christmas tree in 1840, plus related bits and pieces.

GPRA II Fails

I blogged on Senate passage of this bill but it failed in the House.  Brought up under suspension of rules, it failed to get 2/3 of the votes.  The incoming chair of Gov Oversight, Rep. Issa, has some problems with it because the Senate stripped his amendment requiring program-level goals.

New Type of Crop Insurance--Weather-Based

Via Farm Policy, here's the website of WeatherBill, which touts itself as a new type of crop insurance. I'm not clear how it works, but the leader used to work for Google so presumably it's based on better/faster access to data.   You do have to input some of the data from your crop insurance policy. And the policies are weather-specific: i.e., "rain on hay", "spring freeze", etc. Whether they can reinvent crop insurance, we'll see.

On Teachers and Education

Greg Mankiw passes on an estimate of the value added by a teacher who's one standard deviation better than the average: $400,000 for a class of 20.  Meanwhile, a comparison of the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) scores by discipline puts elementary educators 5 rungs from the bottom, with secondary and higher education above, but still below average.  (Public administration was just above elementary education, but I was happy to see, as a failed historian, history was third from the top--all rankings based on verbal scores.)

Declining Usage of Productive Capability

This post at Calculated Risk has a series of graphs, one of which shows the usage of productive capability over the years. What strikes me is that usage was at 88 percent or so in 1967, but the peak declined to 85 percent in the 1980's and 1990's and to about 82 percent in the 2000's. I wonder what's going on?

• Is there a systemic problem with the statistics?
• Are companies investing too much in capabilities?
• Have tax breaks for investment resulted in over investment?
• Something else?

Madison Is Right Again: Joe Lieberman

I interpret Madison's arguments for a big republic in the Federalist Papers as predicting Joe Lieberman would be a darling of the liberals, at least for a day. I may be stretching a bit, but Madison foresaw a number of different interests in competition, which seems to me logically to result in overlap and cross-pressures.  So while Lieberman has been a hawk and a friend of McCain on many issues, so much so he was beaten in the last Democratic primary, he's been good on many domestic issues and turned up trumps on Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

I'm probably showing my age, but I've more tolerance for such politicians than many, such as the Republicans who go hunting for RINOS (Republicans in name only).

Vertical Gardens Again

The Economist has a good piece on vertical gardens, which ends thus:

Rooftop farming may not be able to compete with other suppliers in a global market unless people are prepared to pay a premium for fresh, local food, says Mr Head. And it is much less glamorous than the grand vision of crops being produced in soaring green towers of glass. But, for the time being, this more down-to-earth approach is much more realistic than the sci-fi dream of fields in the sky.

Reihan Salam who is often a conservative I can listen to is duped  by Valcent.

How We Pay Teachers

From Ralph Luker's Cliopatria

Looking toward the AHA's annual job market orgy in January, one of our colleagues suggests Colonial Williamsburg's listing as a commentary on the state of our profession. CW wants a doctorate in early American Studies, with experience in museum-related historical research, and expertise in a half dozen or more programming technologies and languages. Must be both a self-starter and a collegial builder of community. Bring all of that to the job and you could hope to make up to $40 K.

Peter Hessler and Rapid Development in China

Been reading Peter Hessler's "Country Driving".  (I strongly recommend his previous books: "River Town" and "Oracle Bones".)  He is or was the New Yorker's correspondent in China, having first lived there as a Peace Corps teacher (River Town).  He's got a sharp eye for detail and for the culture, plus the daring to drive where he's not supposed to, and the ability to get along with people, although according to him in the Chinese countryside and in the new industrial areas people are uniformly welcoming, and friendly, except for the man nicknamed the "Shitkicker".

Anyhow, just read his description of the process of designing a 21,000 sq ft factory building (3 stories, with the dormitory for workers on the third floor) in southern China.  Guess how long it took?

• 3 months
• 3 weeks
• 3 days
• 3 hours
• none of the above

The answer is "none of the above".  Actually took 1 hour and 4 minutes for the two bosses to design it with the builder, the builder committed to providing a bid by the next morning.  3 months is the time it took to build it.

Paragraph of Dec 18

From RecoveringFed: 
"One day, as I was tweeting on the hotel computer, I noticed that on the French computer one does not have to shift to use the exclamation point. I think that says something about the French."