USDA and E-Signature

Government Executive "reports" on a "Summit for Digital Government".

The upcoming summit will feature a case study of the USDA’s electronic signature initiative and educational sessions from the most experienced e-signature provider to government. e-SignLive will share best practices gained from more than 500 government customers and some of the longest running, largest paperless initiatives including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, GSA and the US Army.

It's really a promotion for Silanis, a case where the bureaucratic-industrial complex comes together: one or more bureaucracies get the chance to look modern and progressive and the vendor gets the implicit endorsement of a user. In this case the magazine gets free content, since the heading, artfully using grayer type than the black type of the article, reveals:

This content is made possible by our sponsor. The editorial staff of Government Executive was not involved in its preparation.

Maybe in addition to Ike's "military-industrial complex" we should have something like a "contractor-bureaucracy complex?"

"New York is the rat’s ideal habitat"

Growing up in Upstate New York, we knew that instinctively.  New York City was the home of all that was strange, and foreign, and bad, at least on those days when my mother, born in the city, didn't reminisce about going to the American Museum of Natural History during her visits to her grandmother.

The sentence is from a good article in the New York Times Magazines on rats and other aspects of urban ecology.  Did you know that white-footed mice are so "neophobic" (afraid of the new, like me) that the city supports genetically distinct populations?

US Digital Services

The newest thing, a legacy of the rush to fix the Obamacare website, is the US Digital Services.

Digital services' role "will stop when we get you to minimally viable project," Kruger said. The team can help define user needs, build in analytics, wireframe the user experience, deploy and test alpha and beta versions, and generally tune and refine a service to ensure it can serve the intended purpose. "When we're happy with that, we'll hand it back to the business unit, and they'll own it -- to maintain it, to make improvements over time."

"We're not going to be here forever," he said. It is up to the business unit to plan for ongoing maintenance and support, and "from the beginning, we're going to have that conversation."

I think there are some downsides to this idea, or at least there would have been in the old days of COBOL.  One downside was the difficulty of understanding what's going on and making changes to the code.  That was at least one rationale for all the documents produced in the old "waterfall" software development process: users and systems analysts were supposed to produce a lot of documents at different levels of understanding (data, system flow, etc.) which would then enable their successors to understand what was going on.  My own feeling/guess is that what happened when these documents were produced was the people involved learned the process by writing documents, so there was a reasonable base of understanding among enough people to be able to handle people retiring, etc.

Raisins and Vaccines

I've been active in commenting at Volokh Conspiracy on a post concerning the raisin marketing order case which went before the Supreme Court yesterday.

For some reason the issue raises my emotions; partly because I dislike free riders and that's how I view this cases.  It's ironic that the chattering class has been vocal about the measles vaccine, and the problem the anti-vaxers cause while they're united in support of Mr. Horne's free riding on the raisin producers.

Slavery and Mauretania

Kottke.org links to a desire map--Google analyzed the most common query "how much does X cost" by country. 

In four countries of east Africa the most common "X" is "cow".

In Mauretania the most common "X" is "slave", which led me to find this wikipedia entry on slavery in modern?-day Mauretania.

Today's Euphemism: Depopulation

"Handling a depopulation and disinfection on a layer site is more complex than a turkey site..."

from an agriculture.com post on the bird flu problem in Iowa.  (I wonder what position the candidates for President will take on it?)
 
Didn't know birds got flu?  They do, and they're likely the original source of human flu type A, the most common kind.  

Flu is a big problem for poultry producers because there's not much to do except kill the birds, and invent an euphemism for it.

Competition in E-Books?

Just found Amazon and Google offering a cheap price on a new book of historical essays (Inequality in Early America).  Don't know why, whether it's a result of competition or not, but I like it.

On a personal note, I got a Kindle for Christmas a couple years ago.  I like it.  I've been able to restrain myself from buying lots of pricey books ($9.99 and up) but not the cheapies--both the free and the 1 and 2 dollar specials from Amazon.  All in all it's increased my book purchases.

CRISPR--Gene Modification

Technology Review has an article on gene editing, which I've posted about earlier.  The idea of removing genetic material from a genome is less frightening than the idea of incorporating genes from one species into the genes of another.

For now, the techniques are being used to modify plants in more modest ways. “The first wave of this technology is just removing a few base pairs,” says Yinong Yang, a professor of plant pathology at Penn State University, referring to the combinations of DNA letters—A, G, C, and T—that make up a genome. By “knocking out” just the right gene, as researchers did with the potato, it’s possible to give a plant a few valuable properties.[The potato modification is intended to increase storage life of russet potatoes.]

The article goes on to mention another permutation--using this new technology to transfer a preferred genetic trait from one variety of a plant to another, the example used is a drought-resistant trait.  Again I don't see such modifications as raising the concerns that GMO opponents usually raise.

How To Improve Government: Twinkies

Via Ann Althouse, a Forbes story on the revival of Twinkies--the company went bankrupt twice, but a turnaround expert has revived the brand. From the article:

Metropoulos’ recipe was threefold. First he spent $110 million modernizing the remaining factories–everything from a utomation (massive, new $20 million Auto Bakers) to improving air flow in the bakeries so they’d be more tolerable for workers in the hot summer months. “You must improve employee conditions, fix the cracks on the floor and those types of things,” says Metropoulos. “It affects the pride, energy and culture of the plant, and that translates into everything.” Next came a $25 million SAP software system to manage inventory and logistics.

 The point is the owners of an enterprise (like the public) have to make their employees feel valued. 

(Even if you disagree with the moral I drew from the story, I recommend the story.)

Organic Farms: Does History Repeat Itself?

One of my problems with the food movement, defined as the people who advocate for organic farming, and/or local farming, and/or  family/small farming, is their ignoring of history.  I once had ambitions to be a historian, and I've kept up an arms-length interest in the subject and profession since my college days, so I tend to be aware of history.

In the past, say up to the 1930's or 1950's, depending on the area and the crop, American farms were essentially organic and the food they produced was often sold locally.  I remember reading a memoir/history from Ontario county, NY (where some of my ancestors had settled and lived for a few generations).  The writer talked about the family farms, about hog slaughtering in the fall, and about the fact that every family had its own recipe for bacon, and knowledgeable folks could identify which farm the bacon had come from.

My point is that time passed, and there were reasons for its passing.  The forces of the market and the way American society has changed were too strong.  However earnestly the food movement tries, unless and until they come to grips with the reasons, its efforts will be eventually futile.