My Relative With a Gold Medal

Here's a picture of a cousin of mine with an Olympic gold medal.  It's an illustration from his father's blog on attending the Olympic games.

Cass Sunstein and Catch-22

Cass Sunstein is leaving as head of regulatory review for the Obama administration, but before he's out the door he's pushing the idea of making government forms simpler, by testing them through focus groups or similar processes.  That's fine and dandy, but...

What's my but?  

Most government information collections (forms) are well-established, but some are new. The memo which Sunstein's post links to, further links to earlier guidance, including a detailed Q&A put out by the Bush administration.  There we learn that you need to have OMB approval before using focus groups over 9 people in total.  So if I've got a new program which requires a new data collection and a new form, I've got to get OMB approval twice: first of the draft form, second, after I've run the draft through my focus groups of the final form.  It would make more sense to give blanket approval of focus groups without this Catch-22.  Matter of fact, changing the guidance for OMB approval of information collections to require focus group (or equivalent) testing in the documentation would be good.

But I've got another but.

Sunstein's initiative shows how stuck in the past OMB is.  He should have been leading a transition from paper-based collections to Web-based collections.  He didn't.

Paul Ryan and the Farm Bill

Chris Clayton at DTN is fast off the mark in evaluating the impact of the selection of Paul Ryan as VP candidate on the prospects of the 2012 farm bill.  In a sentence:

"At the same time, the selection of the Wisconsin lawmaker now makes it unlikely House leaders would consider passing a farm bill without major modifications to satisfy fiscal conservatives --- certainly not before the presidential election."

[Updated with link]

Switchblades and Crime Myths

Volokh Conspiracy had a puzzle post on switchblades, which long ago were the subject of a civic moral panic, perhaps centered around the movie Blackboard Jungle.  As teen culture rose to prominence in the 1950's, the violent teen with a blade was feared, and we passed laws banning switchblades.

Amy Wilson at the Rural Blog links to a post at Metrotrends Blog on 10 crime myths. For anyone under 40 you're safer from crime now than you've ever been.  I'd question his statement on fingerprint matching being "entirely subjective" but otherwise it seems well founded.

My point: the public can panic based on false impressions.

What's the puzzle: what category of people is excluded from a switchblade ban?  Go to VC for the answer.

[Updated to change to "moral panic".

Bureaucrat of the Month: Mr. Masao Yoshida

Who is this Yoshida and why does he matter? 

According to this NYTimes article, he was a manager at the Japanese nuclear reactor site hit by the tsunami.  The article reports on a set of videos just released which document the chaos at the site over some days.  But, if I read it correctly, Yoshida was onsite, doing his best to direct workers, getting bad advice and orders from big shots who were ignorant, and generally being a good bureaucrat by this definition: when the environment the bureaucracy was designed to handle goes berserk, a good bureaucrat does her best.  Two paragraphs:

At one point in the videos, as conditions at Reactor No. 3 are deteriorating, raising fears of an explosion, Mr. Yoshida sends a team of workers out from the bunker with this message: “I’m truly sorry. Please proceed with the utmost care.” 

He later suggests that if the situation does not improve soon, he and some older workers will consider “a suicide mission” to pump water into the reactor, a decision officials at headquarters said they would leave to him.

Six Weeks (on the Western Front of WWI)

Six Weeks is a book Tom Ricks recommended at the Best Defense blog.  The title refers to the average lifespan of a junior officer in the British Army assigned to the Western Front.  It's good, although given to the rosy.  The writer organizes his work by the phases in an officers life, education, training, etc. and uses lots of quotes from memoirs, letters, biographies.

He notes early on there was 5 inch difference in height between the (upper class) officers and the "other ranks"-enlisted men.  That's rather shocking, a dismal reflection on the British class system.  But then there's this difference in our own class system: having a college education makes a difference in lifespan of over 10 years.

What Does a Modern Cow Look Like?

Northview Dairy has a picture of the udder of a dairy cow, along with terms used in the judging standards.  A modern cow likely produces twice the milk of a cow in my boyhood.

Sikhs and Amish

Ann Althouse quotes a prof who studied the effect of the mass killing of Amish. Changed the image from wearers of strange garb to sympathetic victims.

Our Great Postal System

Sarah Kliff at Ezra Klein has a post describing the results of a competition among 159 national postal systems.  The issue was which system was best at identifying nonexistent addresses and returning mail to the senders.  USPS came in first, both accuracy and speed.  Given the size differential among the competitors that's an outstanding result.

The Hole in School Gardens/Local Food for School

This is prompted by something I read a few days ago, on the difficulty of caring for school gardens during summer vacations. [Updated: here's the link.]

The food movement, including Mrs. Obama, has pushed for local food in school cafeterias.  It's also pushed for schools to teach their kids gardening.  Both efforts are laudable; both have a hole.

What's the hole?  Schools, most schools anyway, don't operate year round; they close down during the summer.  So to develop local sources of supply you're asking a farmer to ramp up production in the spring and fall, and idle the operation during the summer, or find another market.  It's doable, I suppose, but it adds in another level of complexity for management.

In contrast if school cafeterias rely on national suppliers and don't limit their requests to fresh food, the suppliers can more easily manage things to provide a flow of food during the school year and direct the flow elsewhere (food processors).  Diversification of the market leads to more stability in price and more resilience in response to disruptions and disasters.