Astounding Blog Post

I'm astounded, not by the idea women wearing red are most apt to be picked up when they hitchhike, but by the idea people are still hitchhiking.  I haven't seen a hitchhiker in many many years.

How To Avoid Cheating on Exams--the French Way

The always interesting Dirk Beauregarde discusses the handling of the big French exams, although his discussion is just a bit opaque.  He includes this factoid:

"Once the exam is over, the various appointed correctors (teachers) will head to their appointed exam centre and retrive their exam scripts. Teachers never correct in the same town where they live or teach, therefore on the day that they have to retrive the scripts, the drive, or take the train to a different town. In the case of my better half, she took a 200 kilometre round train journey to get her scripts from Orleans. The teachers from Orleans will either have gone to Tours or Bourges."

 Imagine if that happened in the US.  I can't.
[Updated to add the link]

Budget Savings from Cutting Direct Payments

Chris Clayton reports on a study by FAPRI:

"If direct payments are eliminated and there isn't a rush to ACRE, there would be a 10-year budget savings of about $41.7 billion from FY 2012 to 2012.

Yet, if everyone jumped into the ACRE program, assuming it stayed as is, then the budget savings over 10 years would likely fall to about $18.9 billion, FAPRI stated.

Cultural Transformation in FSA

Secretary Vilsack's "Cultural Transformation" has now become a mandatory training module, as outlined in this notice. 

I noted in a recent newspaper article on lessons of Secretary Gates, based on what he's learned working for 8 Presidents, he said: My experience has been over the years that if you try to impose change on an organization, you will fail,” he said.  The context was the need for the Army to become better at and focus more on training foreign militaries (like the Iraqi and Afghan armies), but he figured forcing it on the Army would become Gates' idea which would evaporate when he left DOD.

So, does Vilsack's cultural transformation have a chance?  I don't know.  It would be nice to see the training and the supporting documents, but they're only on the FSA intranet. Based on my experience with past mandatory civil rights, disability, and sexual harassment training I've some doubts.  The training sessions I remember best were on dealing with unions and disability.  That's because of the instructors: one was a retired government manager, the other a lawyer in a wheelchair. (Actually most memorable session was in the Jefferson Auditorium with the infamous "penis" flap, but I won't go into that.) I've my doubts that on-line training can be effective, given the resistance old white males (like me) will have to the subject.

I think there's a bigger chance of doing cultural transformation by redoing the business processes, to pick up jargon from the 1990's.  If your database tracks things like all contacts with customers and their outcomes, and your employee evaluation system rewards outcomes, you can change the agency. (Think of how Amazon or Netflix has tweaked its systems over the years.  Amazon can look at your aborted purchases, shopping carts abandoned in mid process, and react to them.  I keep getting emails from them offering me deals in areas where I went halfway and stopped.  That's very impressive organizationally.)

The other way to change the culture is to change the way you recruit your employees.  When I first went to the program division in 1978, there were 2 professionals who were women, both in the analysis side.  The operations types were almost totally male former county executive directors.  I think the culture at the county level was for the mostly male directors to do the PR and handle relations with the farmers, while the mostly female clerks/program assistants handled the detail work, the paper-pushing.  That often meant, when the males came to DC and had to design processes they weren't as good as the women would have been.  These days it seems the pendulum has swung so women are in the majority. I wonder how that's changed the culture in DC.

Can You Sneak Beets?

Obamafoodorama has a post of an interview with Sam Kass, the chef/gardener czar at the White House.  Despite the Obamas disdain for beets, he still plans to sneak them into a meal.

That's what he says, meaning he's either incredibly stupid or incredibly skillful. 

I like beets well enough, though beyond buttered, pickled, and souped I don't know what you do with them.  But beets are to me the vegetable least likely to be snuck anywhere. What other vegetable is there which will stain a deep red everything it comes in contact with?  You just can't do it without the diner's knowledge.  It's like saying in 1960 you're going to sneak Marilyn Monroe into a meeting of Catholic clergy. 

Rotate NRCS and FSA Employees?

In order to get the national security types, the FBI's and ATF's and so forth, to talk to each over, some Senators are saying, let's do what we did in DOD with the "purple" reforms of Goldwater: require employees of the different agencies to rotate among them.  Maybe Congress should require the same sort of rotation among employees of USDA in the field offices?

Kudos and Brickbats FSA County Offices: Strongly Recommended

Mr. Blankenship, a wheat grower from Washington, testified before the Senate Ag committee last week.  Excerpts from his testimony

"In my case, FSA is the easiest local office to deal with. FSA personnel are better trained
than others and more familiar with the actual impacts of changes to program eligibility, payment
limits, etc."

"All in all, the partners in Blankenship Brothers probably make 10 separate visits of several hours to our FSA office per year, minimum, for sign-ups, certification of acreages, CRP status checks, SURE eligibility questions and returning paperwork once proper signatures are collected."

"This GPS-based data management system meshes very well with the GPS-based mapping
recently adopted by my FSA office"  (But otherwise interaction is all paper, with FSA dataloading.)

"The differences between administrative perspectives of offices have caused
some producers to go so far as to buy a small parcel of land in a neighboring county in order to
transfer all of their acres to that county’s FSA office."

I strongly recommend it.  NASCOE will be pleased with it, as he leans towards FSA administering programs.  What he may not fully appreciate are the limitations on making programs operate the same way.

It's good to learn that the effort people like Kevin Wickey (NRCS) and Carol Ernst (FSA) (among many others) put into GIS so many years ago has finally paid off, at least for one operator in one county office.

Inefficient Government: If I Were Dictator

USA.gov has a post on changing your address if you're moving. It's a link to a page with a (short) list of links to sites where you can change your address (USPS, SSA, IRS, VA, USCIS.). 

Now if I were dictator, the government would have one place to change your address.

Global Warming: Northwest Passage for Whales and Plankton

This story from MSNBC suggests that the Northwest Passage is now available not only for cargo ships, but for whales and plankton.

School-End Poems

Dirk Beauregarde has school-end poems, including one familiar to me:


No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

But I don't know the others.