So When Will the U.S. Do a Wiki?

Canada has just launched a wiki for its government, according to this post.

I hope our next President will follow suit.

Another Liberal Joins the Club

There's a group of moderate and conservative Republicans who have endorsed Sen. Obama (Sec. Powell most notably, and just today Reagan's chief of staff, Ken Duberstein). They get called "Obamacan's", I think.

Maybe there's a club for liberals who think, as I do, that Gov. Palin will be a significant force in American politics, even if the McCain/Palin ticket is defeated. Eugene Robinson, columnist for the Post, just joined today. His last three sentences: "She has learned much in a very short period.

And she will learn more. I predict we'll have Sarah Palin to kick around for a long, long time."

HFCS, Corn Subsidies and Obesity

An interesting study of the relationship among sugar usage, corn subsidies, and obesity from Iowa State. Its abstract:

Major changes in the use of US sweeteners have occurred since 1970, in both the amount and composition. Increased consumption of caloric sweeteners, especially in beverages, has been linked to excess energy intake and lower-quality diets. We examine how US farm policies (specifically agricultural research and development [R&D] expenditures and commodity programs) have affected the consumption and composition of sweeteners in the US diet. R&D expenditures have lowered the unit cost of most commodities and increased their use in food production, ceteris paribus, although corn has benefited more than sugar crops in the technical progress. Commodity programs have raised the price of sugar and decreased the price of corn; high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) became an inexpensive substitute for sugar in food beginning in 1970. However, the effect of this change in the price of ingredients has become less important
over time. Today the farm value share in sweetened food is very small (below 5%), and HFCS has become a specialized input in many food items. Countries with different or no commodity programs experience similar increases in consumption of added sugar. We conclude that the current link between the US consumption of caloric sweeteners and farm policy is tenuous, although historically the link was stronger.

I would have liked more research on the next to last sentence, but it's good to read.

Counting Chickens--Sec of Ag

According to this piece, Tom Vilsack, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, and Tom Buis are possible Obama Secretaries of Agriculture. Sandlin would cost a seat in the House, but helps on diversity.

Re-reading a Study

Sara at Down to Earth highlights a Cornell study which finds some meat/dairy in a diet is more efficient than a pure vegetarian diet, since it enables use of poorer quality land (study was done in NY and NY has lots of poorer quality land) for grazing.

Very interesting, but I'd like to highlight a different aspect of the study. The idea was to figure out, using a complete diet of only foods that can be grow in NY, the "agricultural land footprint" of the diet. "Locavore" isn't mentioned in the study but that's the definition. They compared 42 diets with different mixes of foods and found that one person takes .44 acre on vegetarian and 2.11 acres eating 3/4 a pound of meat a day. But the best case is NY land can support between 22 and 32 percent of its population. (I'd assume the study used all sorts of assumptions in terms of farming methods and agricultural workforce.)

Errors in Acreage

Delta Farm Press reports USDA screwed up. Agweb provides some detail:

After the Oct. 10 reports were issued, FSA analysts noted a discrepancy between the raw data on its mainframe and the data it had provided to NASS on a system known internally as a “data mart.” The data mart correlates and organizes the raw data for presentation to FSA county staff, NASS and other users in a more concise and accessible format.

USDA analysts have confirmed that data mart information used in previous reports was consistent with the information in the FSA mainframe database. Database management experts will review the discrepancies in the October data, focusing on how the two systems interact and how the mainframe data are transmitted and translated into the format used in the data mart.

Interesting that the first report seemed to blame NASS, the second makes it seem like a screwup in FSA.

Only the Sharpest Become Economists

Or those damn older sisters:

Steven Levitt at Freakonomics:

That ["rogue" = bad] is not what my sister Linda told me when she gave me the moniker the “rogue economist.” She told me being a rogue is a good thing, and I believed her; just like when I was five and she convinced me that, since a penny is bigger in size than a dime, it is worth more. I happily traded all my dimes for all her pennies, cutting my net worth at the time roughly in half.

USDA, EEO, and GIS

I blogged earlier about the problems USDA has in trying to get a reliable and effective reporting system for civil rights cases and issues (in the context of a critical GAO report).

This page of a new manual for USDA agencies on GIS (geo-spatial information) systems shows what the problems are in a different context: three different agencies (NRCS, FSA, RD), three different approaches to GIS data. (Almost 11 years since I retired and 16 years since InfoShare, I can only laugh. Matter of fact, it looks as if the entire manual is, from the right viewpoint, great comic material for a computer head. ) More seriously, I can only guess at the problems the authors of this manual had, so a tip of the hat to them.

Clinton Is Out of Touch

When he became President, he admitted he didn't e-mail. It's not clear he's learned since. Certainly he doesn't keep up with grain prices on the Internet. See this bit from treehugger:

Speaking to a struggling food economy where grain prices have doubled and some food items in Haiti and Ethiopia are five hundred times greater than normal, Clinton said,

Food is not a commodity like others. We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves.

Clue: corn was down to $3.80 the last I checked. (The link is to a UK scientist who in March predicted: "price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations."

Nuanced Bureaucracy, Found in Social Security Administration

One of the legacies of the old days of bureaucracy is the binary evaluation: an application or whatever has to be evaluated. So every application goes through the same process, resulting in a yes or no decision. With the advent of software algorithms, it's quite possible for a bureaucracy to become more nuanced, to use different systems for different folks.

As an example, SSA is using a new approach to disability applications: claim you have ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), if the diagnosis is confirmed you get your approval. Claim you have lower back pain, and it takes a good while. Of course, our legislators don't necessarily keep up with advances--there's still a mandatory 5-month waiting period for all claims.