Parry O'Brien, R.I.P.

The Times obits reports the death of another barrier breaker. Like the 4 minute mile, the 60 foot shot put and the 16 (I think) foot pole vault were athletic barriers when I was growing up. O'Brien broke the second right after Bannister broke the first, proving that the "barriers" had no more reality than the sound barrier (which Chuck Yeager had broken earlier).

Now, I guess, rather than seeing "barriers" we see statistical distributions. Such thinking doesn't allow for or create individual heroes to the extent that Bannister and O'Brien were. I'm sure it's more realistic, but I'll be an old fogey and mourn the loss of heroism for a minute.

(There, now I'm over it.)

About Time--Ronald Reagan Gets Modernized

I received a compliment, I guess, for being fair to GW, so I've got to be snarky to Reagan. This Post bit buries the news that Ronald Reagan is being modernized. One would think it would be the lead. Just another proof that the Post is liberal. (It's the carrier.)

Pollan's Back, and Can't Count

Michael Pollan resumes his role of causing my blood pressure to go up (I've got to look at why I get so much more emotional about him than many other people who write more poorly and say more stupid things).

This time, he can't count:

"Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.)"

Pollan has, I'm sure, mentally conflated "corn" and "feed grains" and "upland cotton" and "extra long staple cotton" to get his "five crops". Actually, the farm bill affects barley, grain sorghum, and oats as well as the two cottons.

Oh, one other thing. I'm talking about the "farm bill" of 1981, not the 2002 version. Currently direct and counter-cyclical payments are also made for canola, crambe, flax, mustard, rapeseed, safflower, sesame and sunflower, including oil and non-oil varieties and peanuts. See this fact sheet.

Brits and GIS

Apparently the British tried to be ahead of us in using GIS and IT to compute and issue payments. This article details some of the problems, including trying to implement a new program while downsizing the agency (sound familiar?). Specifically:

"Investigations by the National Audit Office and the House of Commons rural affairs committee found that implementation was rushed, partly for political reasons, and reforms were introduced at the same time as a £130m "change programme" involving cutting the Rural Payment Agency's staff numbers by half.

The agency's confidence was based on its appointment of a high-profile director of information systems on a salary of £225,000, and the contracting of a leading IT services firm, Accenture, to supply the claim processing system.

Sheer volume

Accenture executives told subsequent investigations that the IT worked as specified. But the system could not cope with the volume of inquiries from farmers - at least 10 times greater than expected. One reason was that, unlike in countries such as Germany, there was no minimum payout. The agency had to handle 14,000 claims for less than €100 each.

However the biggest reason for the overwhelming traffic was to do with mapping. The system set the minimum size of a parcel of land as 0.1 hectare, three times smaller than that permitted by the European Union. In all, there were 1.7m parcels of land on more than 75,000 farms. Calculating payments on these parcels required a sophisticated mapping system, involving digitised satellite images and aerial photography aligned up with conventional mapping data. The geographical data came from private sources, including the specialist firm Infoterra, as well as the state-owned Ordnance Survey."

USDA Releases SSN

This piece in the Times and this in the Post discuss this site which "revealed" SSN's. As I understand, some USDA agency (probably Farmers Home Administration, now mostly part of Farm Service Agency) included SSN in the loan number (makes some sense because FmHA loans were to the person, covering all operations). When the data was passed to Census for its database (which subsequently passed the data to fedspending.org the SSN part of the number wasn't edited. In a way, it's a tempest in a teapot--it was discovered when a farmer got bored and googled her farm's name. When the loan data came up, of course she recognized her SSN. IMO it's unlikely a casual hacker would have deduced that 9 of the 15 digits represented the SSN (presumably the others are state and county code and check digit, but maybe not.

Whatever--it's another argument for doing away with SSN's.

The Dean Isn't a Faceless Bureaucrat

I'm doing a Google Alert for "faceless bureaucrat" and ran across this (context, the Dean's wife brought their two young children to the Dean's workplace):

"For a week or two after a visit, I notice that the folks who saw me with them talk to me differently. It's like they suddenly stop seeing The Dean and start seeing an actual person. It fades quickly, and I go back to faceless-bureaucrat status, but for a brief window there's almost something like rapport."

For something which seems related to me, see John Tierney on prejudice in dating situations.

Farm Service Agency Morale Declines

The Post reports on surveys of federal agencies under the title "Best Places to Work...". Technically it's an "index score [which] measures the performance of agencies and agency subcomponents related to employee satisfaction and engagement." My old home FSA is at position 149 among 200+ subcomponent organizations, index of 59.4 down 6.5 points from 2005.

It's still a better place to work than USDA Administration, which is less than 50. It looks as if those components with broad and vague missions, like administration, tend to score lower than those with more defined missions. However, Immigration and FEMA are both low.

More on Closing FSA Offices

Secretary of Ag Johanns and Admin. Lasseter (of Farm Service Agency) are pushing to close FSA offices before they have to implement a new farm bill:

But both Johanns and Lasseter said they are convinced those closures would ultimately result in better service for farmers and ranchers. Johanns suggested today's tech-savvy farmers are nearly as used to doing business via phone, fax and Internet as they are face-to-face.

"For them, doing stuff on the computer is as natural as the work that they would do during the day on their crops," Johanns asserted. "I just think we have to move this whole system forward, and it really is time."

They're right--if offices are to be closed, they need to get it done in 2007. But I wonder whether they've talked to the administrative people. Once you have a plan to close offices, and approval to do so, it still will take some time. I haven't seen any reference to closing National Resource Conservation service offices or Rural Development. I think FSA has had more offices than NRSC, so probably many of the closures are at sites where FSA is the only one there. But if that's not always the case, trying to get two or three agencies to agree on a move and coordinating the logistics is a hassle.

Perhaps in some of the moves, the receiving site already has office space vacant, so people can move in. Or, perhaps, there won't be any people and equipment to move--the people will have retired or resigned instead of moving.

Cash Lease/Share Lease

From the Farm News:

"An unprecedented raise in corn prices last fall brought with it gross revenue increases for Iowa farmers that in many cases were double from the year before. For landowners who cash rent their land, revenues were unchanged.

‘‘We have had a lot of calls from landowners and farmers, especially when they see prices this high for corn,’’ said William Edwards, Iowa State University Extension economist. ‘‘They want to know how they can make the cash rent scenario more equitable on both sides.’’"

The article goes on to point out that Farm Service Agency has concerns whenever a lease is changed, because it can impact eligibility for payments. A larger point is that any dramatic change in economic conditions causes people to try to adjust, which can then undermine the assumptions upon which a given piece of legislation was written.

Back

I'm back from my trip and catching up. (Now if I can only remember the great ideas I had while away.)