"Our Animal Natures"

Very interesting long piece in the NYTimes today with that title.  The co-authors, a cardiologist and a writer, look at the diseases which animals get, which (human) animals get.  (They repeat a joke among vets: "What do you call a physician?  A veterinarian who treats only one species.)

The whole piece is amazing, though obvious, or maybe amazing because obvious, at least once you think about it.  Another reminder of how easy it is for us to fall into tribalism, in this case dividing ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom.

You Can Lead a Child to the Soil, You Can't Make Her Garden

That encapsulates a lesson Mrs. Obama has learned:

Neither Sasha nor Malia appear in photos in the book; they don't like to garden, Mrs. Obama has said during recent interviews.

PicturePHones and Video Teleconferncing

As it happens, I just finished a book on Bell Labs (The Idea Factory) when I saw this IRM notice on FSA video teleconferencing.  (Bell Labs gave us the transistor, fiber optics, communications satellites, cell phones, and information theory, among many other things.)

As almost everything does these days, the conjunction called up memories. Bell Labs came up with the Picturephone in the 60''s, demoed it at the NY World Fair, and released it in a couple of cities.  Though user reaction was favorable at the fair, it fell flat as a consumer product.  The problem was the cost was too high for a communications device where both parties needed the device to communicate.

The book, which I recommend, compared the Picturephone and the cell phone.  The cell phone was also bulky and costly at the beginning, but its big advantage was you could call anyone who had a regular phone or a cell phone with it; it linked you with the existing network and didn't require building a new network.

In the 1980's ASCS tried out a new version of the picturephone (not from AT&T): IRMD got 4-6 devices and I got one to communicate with KCMO.  Again it was a flop--it appealed to the techies but it didn't do much .

A bit later IRMD set up a teleconference center to communicate with KCMO.  We used it for a few teleconferences between programmers and program people, but it required a lot of scheduling and coordination.   We didn't have enough business with KCMO that required the attendance of a lot of people, particularly as we made more use of email. And the value-added of seeing people talk was small.  Our use tailed off to nothing.  I don't know how long IRMD kept it going.

So I've considerable curiosity about the new system in FSA.  The notice indicates it's popular and getting a workout, which is good, but it also sounds complicated which is bad.  It sounds as if it's more capable than something like Skype or similar cheap apps.   On the other hand if I were forced to bet, I'd say FSA probably never did a lot of training on things like Skype.  Am I wrong? It sounds as if it's a dedicated system, separate from the regular communication network, which is a minus.  If people have to share,  they often don't.

I think I commented a while back about the ancillary benefits of conferences/face-to-face meetings (in the context of the uproar over GSA).  The recent bio of Steve Jobs said he was careful to design Apple offices so as to throw people together.  The Bell Labs book says AT&T did the same.  Of course, that's workplace design, not travel conferences, but the principle is the same: people learn from each other and they often learn the most from people they don't work with on a daily basis.

To come back to Claude Shannon and information theory: his measure of "information" says the more redundancy in a message, the less information is conveyed. Most of our daily business is redundant; we do similar things over and over so we don't gain much information and we don't learn.  That's why failure is so good: the first time you try something everything is new, little is redundant, there's lots of learning and lots of information.  That's also why some meetings are good (though not the weekly staff meetings with which I used to bore my employees) provided they introduce new people, new subjects, or new surroundings.

Technology on the Farm

Slate has a discussion of the future of robots on the farm.  The theory is that young farmers come from outside agriculture so don't mind hand work and don't have the money to invest in expensive robots.  On the other hand they're more likely to be techies than the production farmers who are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's, so might be early adopters.    So it's a good, decisive on-the-one-hand, but on-the-other article.

I remember the farmers in Sherman County, KS in 1992 were almost all over 40, which the CED saw as an obstacle to adoption of Infoshare then. That's 20 years ago so a lot of them are now retired, and the number of farmers has probably dropped a good bit.

Why Did It Need a Cloture Vote

The farm bill in the Senate passed its cloture vote with ease, so they can now go on to debate and propose amendments and ultimately vote.  I'm curious though whether such a vote has always been needed or whether in the good old days they could just proceed, perhaps by unanimous consent. 

Innovation in Crop Reporting

No, this isn't an instance where FSA has innovated.  It's innovation on the crop insurance side, driven by smartphones and private enterprise.

Lake Woebegon and GSA

According to Federal Times:

Last year, 87 percent of General Services Administration employees got bonuses averaging nearly $1,200 per recipient, according to Federal Times' analysis of government data.

Some things are just ridiculous.

Farm Bill Is in the News

In both the Post and the Times.

From the Post:

 It may the be most tangible symbol yet that the age of austerity has dawned in Washington. The bill, which sets the nation’s agricultural and food policy for the next five years, enjoys rare bipartisan support and could be the only significant piece of deficit-reduction legislation to gain congressional approval this year.

The lede from the Times:

At the same time that high crop prices are prompting farmers to expand into millions of acres of land once considered unsuitable for farming, Congress is considering expanding a federal insurance program that reimburses farmers for most losses or drops in prices. 

Yes, they're writing about the same piece of legislation.
[Updated: The White House is now supporting it.]

FNS and Lost SNAP Cards

A smattering of stories reporting on the Food and Nutrition Service's proposed regulation (out for public comment) permitting states to request justification for issuing a replacement SNAP (food stamp) EBT card when it's the fourth one within a year.  Here's the FNS post.

This bothers me, but probably not enough to do the research I'd need to.  I'm bothered in part by this language:

The proposed minimum threshold is based on an analysis by FNS of electronic transaction data that demonstrates a statistically significant difference when a client reaches his or her fourth replacement card, indicating that transaction activity is three times more likely to be flagged as potential trafficking, which is the exchange of benefits for cash or other consideration, compared to clients with three or fewer replacement cards.

Now I'd assume the EBT cards operate like a debit card; lose one, you notify the issuer and they put a hold on the account and you get a new card.   I can understand that some of the SNAP recipients are prone to lose their cards; while not a recipient I've trouble losing things as my senility comes on faster.  So what I would imagine happens: recipient goes to the store on Monday and uses the card.  Recipient absent-mindedly puts the card in the trash on the way out.  Recipient needs the card on Wednesday and finds it's missing.  Recipient notifies issuer.  If someone found the card and used it, then there'd be a couple days of transactions.  So I could handle issuing a replacement with no more justification than "I lost it and can't find it" and having the government cover the transaction costs..  And it'd probably be hard to differentiate between the misuse of a found card and the use of a card sold by the SNAP recipient, just by looking at the transactions.

But, from the language I quoted I'm not sure that's what's going on.

And my bottom line would be, the default position for the government should be no more forgiving than a commercial bank is.  

Obama's Personal Economic Stimulus: Eating Out

See this post at Ezra Klein showing the impact of a POTUS visit on a sandwich shop.