The Ridiculous and the Great: What's the Difference

This is ridiculous: a post on a person who's developed the second largest drone company in the world. What the bio for Jordi Munoz at the company's site doesn't say is he started at 20 and is now 28, 

Jordi Muñoz is co-founder and CTO of 3D Robotics. He was born in Ensenada, Mexico, and raised in Tijuana. He studied briefly at Ensenada’s Center for Technical and Higher Education before moving to southern California in 2007, where in his free time he designed and built his first drone. The autopilot ran on circuitry he lifted from a Wii remote.

Soon Jordi was making a living off his ingenuity. He hacked a toaster that he bought at Target, turned it into a reflow oven, and set up a small manufacturing facility in his apartment, designing UAV parts and selling them to pilots around the world.

Jordi’s work impressed Chris Anderson—the two met virtually through the DIY Drones online community—who supported Jordi with an initial $500 check. Chris continued to advise Jordi’s production efforts over email, and in 2009 the two co-founded 3D Robotics. In 2012, Chris quit Wired to join Jordi full time.

Jordi lives with his family in San Diego

Research Using Acreage Report Data

Here's a report from a Stanford team which used acreage report data.

Lobell's team examined an unprecedented amount of detailed field data from more than 1 million USDA crop insurance records between 1995 and 2012.
"The idea was pretty simple," he said. "We determined which conditions really matter for corn and soy yields, and then tracked how farmers were doing at different levels of these conditions over time. But to do that well, you really need a lot of data, and this dataset was a beauty."

The takeaway appears to be this: "But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated corn under the hottest conditions. This suggests farmers may be pushing the limits of what's possible under these conditions."

Wonder what other conclusions could be supported by "Big Data" in the form of FSA or RMA datasets?

Line of the Day

"Also, “Man Bites Man” is always going to be an interesting story.  “Man Kills Man” is, sadly, not a novel event."

Joel Achenbach, on World Cup soccer and other diversions from serious concerns,

USDA Website and New Farmers

USDA just unveiled a new website intended to help new farmers.  I've mixed feelings about the USDA home website and the new one, but yet I don't know how you do it, "it" being to develop a website which serves all possible new farmers.  Looking at the USDA site I have a scattering of reactions.

I see USDA has yet to come up with one way to locate all offices which would serve new farmers--they still have one url for NRCS/RD/FSA service centers and a separate one for cooperative extension service.

I don't see any mention of state and local government offices which might be of concern, or government offices outside USDA (i.e., EPA, BLM).

So far, all the links to the website from the USDA home page seem to be time-driven (I'm searching for a word here--they appear in lists of radio news releases, or the slide show of current news, there's no "new farmers'' link.

If I use the search box to search for "new farmer", I get the blog posts, as well as an NAL page, but not the home page for the new farmer website.  The NAL page is also on the first page of Google results for "new farmer".  I wonder if the people heading the new farmer effort ever worked with NAL, or were aware of their effort. 

Locavore and Organic

Technology Review has a piece on LED lights in greenhouses.  Includes this surprising factoid:

Consequently, the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In the Netherlands, for example, greenhouses occupy around 0.25 per cent of the land area of the entire country.

 It reports on a study showing LED lights would be much cheaper than sodium lights, with the interesting possibility of tailoring the color spectrum output to match plant characteristics--certain plants use some parts of the spectrum and not others, etc.

I wonder whether greenhouse plants can be organic, if grown under unnatural lights.

NY Times February 14, 1883 Want Ads

I happened to do a search which led me to the NYTimes issue of 2/14/1883--it's only available to subscribers, apparently.  It had been a while since I'd been in their archive, which they've improved.  They now display the whole issue, which was 8 or 10 pages then.  Very business oriented stuff, lots of reports of commercial activity--shipping and prices and such.

There were some want ads, though instead of being ads of job openings, they were ads for jobs wanted, mostly by servants, maids, cooks, coachmen etc.  Not sure why the difference, or when the want ads shifted to mostly job openings.  Might make a nice paper for some aspiring historian/economist.

Record Retention Policies

I've not followed the IRS scandal in detail, mostly because as a liberal I doubt if there's anything much there.  The latest is IRS is unable to provide Ms. Lerner's emails from a period in 2011.  The right is screaming 18 1/2 minutes, the left is blase.

Megan McArdle says the IRS story is possible.

I've no idea what actually happened.  When I came to ASCS, the records management people were still remembering the Billie Sol Estes scandal (a Texas wheeler-dealer, one of whose scams was transferring cotton acreage allotments from one county to another in order to make more money).  Congress tried to investigate, and found the ASCS correspondence and records were in a mess, resulting in establishing a new system of central files and documentation.  They were proud of the system; I remember in the 70's they showed it off to a visiting Soviet representative(s).  The system worked with the hierarchical nature of the organization: correspondence came up the line or from the public, replies went down the line or to the public, decisions were made using CCC board dockets mostly, or reflected in memos or directives to the field.

By the 90's, everyone who'd been involved in creating the system was gone and there was no one left who really understood the importance of records management. And since the early 80's we'd been using one email system or another (Wang, Dec Allinone, etc.) finally ending with a central email system.  Telecommunications costs had come down and we used more conference calls etc.    But the multiplication of communication channels and the gradual decline in the hierarchical nature of the organization meant there was less of a clear division between decisions which were considered official records and those which were not.  And when you looked at email that was especially true.  The initial starting point was that not all emails were official records, those that were had to be printed out and stored on paper in established files.

Bottomline, by the time I left, I had no confidence in the record management of FSA--management had never given it the time and money it required.  Another scandal might lead to a change in the situation, but it was very unlikely to be solved otherwise.

I don't know whether the same situation held in other government agencies then, or in IRS today, but I wouldn't be surprised.  Here's a link to a search on the GAO site for records management.

Farming in DC

Everyone needs their own agricultural research station, even DC, as outlined in this article.

Here's the URL for UDC's college of agriculture.  It looks to me as if they're pushing the envelope a bit to make use of extension funding? 

I mock, a little, but this is the result of our weak government because of federalism. 

You Gotta Laugh, Even If You're a Bureaucrat

From today's Post:

"In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”

When will people learn that laughter is valuable, even if you're the butt of it.

A Divided Country and a Flawed Commentary

The NYTimes Charles Blow weighs in on the recent Pew report describing how divided and partisan the nation is becoming.

He leads with this:

"For an increasing number of Americans, the tenor of politics has reached a near-religious pitch, in which people on opposing ends of the ideological scale take on theological properties: good or evil, angels or demons, here to either save our way of life or destroy it."

After a discussion of the report he writes:

"There are some moral issues on which there can be no ambiguity. For instance, people cannot be treated differently because of the way they were born, developed or identify;  women must have access to the full range of reproductive options; and something must be done about the continued carnage of gun violence in this country. "

I commented with this:

Though I think Mr. Blow and I share the same positions, mostly (liberal Democrat, Obama contributor, etc.) I disagree with this paragraph: "There are some moral issues on which there can be no ambiguity...country. " We cannot, in our political life, distinguish between moral issues and other issues. In politics everything is subject to practicality, to compromise, to limits. Outside the political sphere everyone is welcome to believe any damn thing they believe, but our politicians should lead us to compromise in our policy. Roe v Wade was an example of such a compromise, not a trumpet call to a pro-choice position. The alternative to compromise can be seen in someplace like Ulster over the last century.

Kevin Drum has a take on the report.