Strawberries of the Past

Slate has a piece on strawberries of the past, linking to this USDA resource with pictures of old strawberries. See the previous piece.

Surprise: African Immigrants More Educated than Asian

In an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Journal of Blacks in higher education, African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group. African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any other native-born ethnic group including white Americans. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is slightly more than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans.

From here, via Chris Blattman.

Autonomous Vehicle: Top Down or Bottom Up? Trainable Cars

I've posted several times on "self-driving" cars, also known as autonomous vehicles, or driverless-cars.  If I understand, Google and perhaps some others are taking a top-down approach, which seems to involve extensive mapping of roads, signs, etc. etc., feeding the database to the car, and letting the car do its work.  That seems a little reminiscent of some old efforts to teach computers language by inputting vocabulary, grammar rules, etc.  Something similar also seems to have happened with robots.

It strikes me that a bottom-up approach might be more quickly usable, or call it a car with a memory. It's the same principle as teaching robots, learning by doing.

Assume a car with the ability to follow a route, avoiding other vehicles and humans, and with a memory, a trainable car.  Suppose I want my trainable car to take me to the grocery store and back.  I or another driver jumps in the car and drives it to the store, with the car storing the route and the environment of the route in its memory.  Perhaps we repeat the process several times, until the car is satisfied it knows the route.  Then I can get in the car, tell it to take me to the store, and it will do so (or tell me the conditions have changed so it can't).

You may ask: what use is that, I need a car for more than going to the store?  Good point, but my guess is that most driving is done on repetitive routes: that 80 percent of driving is done on 20 percent of routes.  My percentage is much higher than that.  So a trainable car could be rented for such repetitive routes (remember once one trainable car learns the route, the data can be copied to all others).  So Zipcar could train a car to drive to my house, and I could train it to drive to the store, etc.

There are many people who because of age, inebriation, disability, poverty, etc. do not and cannot drive.  I saw a couple women outside the grocery store the other day, waiting with their groceries for a cab to pick them up, too poor to be able to afford owning a car.  For these people a trainable car would be valuable.

For drivers the trainable car would also work, because the 80 percent of the routine routes, the commuting to work, etc. could be handled by the car and allow the "driver" to be on their cellphone, making the roads safer for everyone.

Lastly and perhaps most important, is the fact that data on roads and conditions is flowing up the organization, since a trainable car can transmit updates to the manufacturer which can then flow to the rest of the fleet.  I think that's important: in any structure getting data going up is as important and getting it going down.


What use would a car like that be? 

Eight Inch Floppies, COBOL, and Windows 3.1

No doubt we'll hear a lot about them--GAO has reported on the aging government technology here,

To those of us who date from that era it evokes some nostalgia.  For those who don't, be reassured to know that the floppies are only used: "For those in the nuclear command area, the system’s primary function is to send and receive emergency action messages to nuclear forces"

[Update: CNN piece.]

Hypocrisy: Thy Name Is Agricultural Groups

That's the point made here, in a Tim Mandell pickup of a post at Progressive Farmer.

Briefly, commodity groups want to exclude promotion board data from FOIA because the boards aren't federal, but justify the mandatory checkoffs which fund boards as governmental.

Of course, we humans are all hypocrites.

Strange Bedfellows: Farmers Union and Crunchies

The crunchies, the food movement, generally like to criticize "corporate farming" and praise the family farm.  That's in line with the populism of Great Plains farmers, which were able to get passed bans on corporate farming years and years ago.  See this Blog for Rural America post on the renewed fight in ND.  (I don't see the ND food movement weighing in .)

The Influence of Vested Interests and How to Overcome Them

 Political scientists and others like decry the power of special interest groups, sometimes described as having pretty complete power over public policy.  That's often true, but not always.  Take the example of the nutrition label on food, which has just been changed.

As background, consider this NY Times  article, which includes this: 

A team of researchers at the University of North Carolina conducted a detailed survey of the packaged foods and drinks that are purchased in American grocery stores and found that 60 percent of them include some form of added sugar. When they looked at every individual processed food in the store, 68 percent had added sugar.

Naturally the food processors liked the status quo.  But with Michelle Obama as the spokesperson, they were defeated.  Among the factors: Obama's image and clout, the easy contrast between self-interested food processors and those who want to improve the nation's health, and the absence of any broad-based coalition in favor of sugar.  There's no NRA, no grass-roots organization, to provide support to the processors.

The Influence of a President

I thought this article in the NYTimes, "Economic Promises a President Trump Could (and Couldn’t) Keep, Much of what Donald Trump vows to accomplish in his first 100 days, if elected, is not feasible. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have room to maneuver."  was a good discussion of the influence of a President.

While the bureaucracy does restrain some of the impulses of the chief executive, her message can set the tone.  As a further instance, I'd go back to the Reagan Administration and its handling of EEO in USDA.  I'm sure Reagan didn't give orders, but his tone definitely said civil rights is not important in this administration.  That IMHO set the stage for what happened in 1996-7, now known as the Pigford suit.  Had the EEO machinery been kept in place and tuned up a bit, the problems of some of the lead plaintiffs in the suit might have been alleviated enough so there wouldn't have been the leadership to organize the lawsuit.

Oh for the Days of Panty Raids: College Students Then and Now

Catherine Rampell in the Post has a column on today's college students.

"But many  such {anti-bias] programs have mission-crept into disciplinary, pseudo-parental roles.
They have encouraged student informants to rat out peers (anonymously, if they choose) for building a phallic snow sculpture; playing a party game called “mafia” (which one student complained was anti-Italian); or chalking sidewalks and marking whiteboards with support for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee."

I hate to show my age, but back in the day we were just on the down slope of panty raids, and in the middle of uprisings against in loco parentis rules.  There was a curfew in the women's dorms (yes, the dorms were single sex), male visitors had to sign in, and the one foot on the floor rule applied. My sister's class was, I think, one of the last to wear freshman beanies. Hazing of freshmen was in retreat, finding a refuge in the fraternities and sororities.  We felt like adults, and wanted the university to cut back on its babying.

Maybe it's an illustration of cycles in history--sometimes we progress toward an end goal, but other times, as in the regulation of conduct among new/near adults, we waver back and forth.

The Value of Urban Farming

Seems to be not the tangible produce grown, but the intangibles, the community building David Brooks would like to see. Brad Plumer reports on a study:

" Urban farming likely won't ever provide cities with all that many calories. And the environmental advantages are … debatable. But urban farms can provide a bunch of other neat benefits, from bolstering local communities to (sometimes) encouraging healthier diets. They can also give city-dwellers a better appreciation of how our food system works, which is less nebulous than it sounds."

Like many crunchy things, urban farming tends to be more white and rich than black and poor. Strictly speaking it's not locavore per se, but I'll tag it that.