Robin Hanson on Education

The maverick economist writes:

Schools are designed to, and do, stifle student imaginations. So why would we care much if teacher imaginations get stifled in the process? Do we care if prison guard imaginations gets stifled?

Sometimes I think he's the avatar of a 16-year old genius who's still in high school.

Reassurance for Liberals From Brad DeLong

The last two sentences of his post on the debt ceiling negotiations, referring to Matt Yglesias:

I'm not sure he should be that depressed--depressed yes, but not that depressed. Perhaps we will see Nancy Pelosi doing this to President Romney in 2013.

Conflicting Definitions, Resolving of

Sec. Vilsack isn't content with trying to come up with standard definitions of reporting dates, crops, and acreages among crop insurance, FSA, etc.  He also wants to standardize definitions of "rural".  He knows we have (at least) 11 now, and that's too many.

Good luck to him  I suspect he'll find several of them are written into law, and most of the rest likely trace back to law.  All of them, I guess, are well embedded into the procedures of the agencies which have to employ them.  So, feeling cynical today, I suggest he devote his time and energy to something more productive.  Perhaps a perpetual motion machine?

Great Phrase: "Procrastinating Pleasure"

I hadn't run into this phrase before, but it's part of a post (Carpe Diem) at Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

MIDAS Newsletter

See this for the summer newsletter.  It contains a link over to the Ask Midas page.  There are four questions there: 3 date from last summer, but the last dates from May 2011. The newsletter doesn't tell me much, except that the MIDAS effort is doing a lot of outreach, including a "Change Agent Network".   As an old geezer, I  say: bah, humbug, another bit of consultant jargon.  But I suppose it's worthwhile.

The May answer to what is MIDAS includes this:

"it’s NOT the only FSA modernization initiative. MIDAS is one of 4 modernization initiatives which include BPMS, EDW, and FSA-FMMI; and several on-going projects geared towards modernizing the delivery of FSA programs and services."

The old rule in the Directives Branch was: any new acronym you had to explain the first time. I think I know what FSA-FMMI is--financial management something something. BPMS might be "business process...something or other, but EDW?  MIDAS needs help on their materials, I think. (Rather than just griping, I did submit feedback on the point.)

As I've said before, I don't see how you can justify capital expenditures without cutting personnel, which will mean closing offices.  So I think they're being glib when they say MIDAS isn't about closing county offices. That's bad, you need credibility.

It's Who You Know, and How Many

This is not new, but worth repeating:

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren't those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.
"Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals and weddings, those were individuals who were tied into the community, they knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid," Aldrich says.

 Conversely, some years back there was a heat wave in Chicago which killed a lot of people.  A sociologist studied the deaths and found the people were those who had lost all ties to the community, particularly the old who no longer got out.

No Earmarks Equals Boehner Fail?

I wonder if there's a connection between Boehner's failure to get his debt ceiling bill through the House and the ban on earmarks? Usually there's a lot of horse trading, sometimes borderline illegal, needed to get these big controversial bills through and, if you don't have earmarks, your trading options are much more limited.  That's a cost of political reform which us good government types support.

Permaculture Makes the Times

Some quotes from the Times article:

"Yet in recent years, Mr. Mollison’s ideas seem to have bubbled up from underground, into the mainstream. “I just trained the Oklahoma National Guard,” Mr. Pittman said. “If that’s any kind of benchmark.” The troops, he said, plan to apply permaculture to farming and infrastructure projects in rural Afghanistan.

This “guild” of complementary plants is the opposite of annual row-crop agriculture, with its dead or degraded soil and its constant demand for labor and fertilizer. Permaculture landscapes, which mimic the ecology of the area, are meant to be vertical, dense and self-perpetuating. Once the work of the original planting is done, Mr. Mollison jokes in one of his videos, “the designer turns into the recliner.

At the lowest level of a food forest, then, are subterranean crops like sweet potatoes and carrots. On the floor of the landscape, mushrooms can grow on felled logs or wood chips. Herbs go on the next level, along with “delicious black cap raspberries,” Ms. Joseph said.
Other shrubs, like inkberry, winterberry and elderberry, are attractive to butterflies and birds. They’re an integral part of the system, too.

Ruling the forest’s heights are the 40 large pin oaks already in the park, whose abundance of acorns will make a banquet for squirrels."

Some comments:

• blackberries require work, just as any cultivar does.  In particular you have to fight weeds and prune the canes.  That's from personal experience.
• also from personal experience: I've nothing against pin oaks; I've got one by my house.  But I can testify along with acorns for the squirrels, it provides lots of shade.  Hostas and impatiens do well, but I wouldn't try growing vegetables under it.  I've never tried carrots or sweet potatoes and I wouldn't; I don't want to waste my effort.
• the idea of layering carrots, with herbs above, then raspberries is ridiculous, IMHO. 
• permaculture does offer advantages--less erosion, but the productivity from a unit of area is going to be much less than intensive gardening, whether one uses organic methods or not.  
• the bottom line: there's no free lunch, ever since we left the Garden of Eden you always have tradeoffs.

Surprise: I'm Not Always Down on Foodie Stuff

I usually am skeptical of organic farming, locavore, etc. But this research sounds intriguing,  They sowed Kentucky bluegrass as a cover crop between corn rows and get yields equal to traditional.

"The bottom line is that with our best treatment, all three years we found yields in the control and yields in the Kentucky bluegrass with herbicide suppression and fall strip till were not different, which is very exciting," he said.

The Kingsolvers Do Locavore

The Times has a piece on the problems Barbara Kingsolver, or rather her husband Steven Hopp, is having running an upscale locavore restaurant in their area of Virginia.  On the good side it's been in operation for 4 years; on the bad side it apparently is being subsidized by Ms. Kingsolver's income, since it hasn't made a profit.  Mr. Hopp is having to expand into some farming, because he can't get local farmers to produce everything he wants when and how he wants it.  And the locals would really prefer a Pizza Hut or McDonald's because the prices are too high (and I suspect the calorie count too low) for Mr. Hopp's food. 

You've got to credit their good intentions, and the money they've sunk into the place, and the jobs they've created, but I'm too mean and evil to resist a little schadenfreude.