Show me the data...

It's about time the pushback for cramming Big Data down our throats got some more attention.  For this farmer, it is not, as the general media seem to think, rooted in obstinacy and ignorance.

But the story of prescriptive planting is also a cautionary tale about the conflicts that arise when data entrepreneurs meet old-fashioned businessfolk. Farmers might be expected to have mixed feelings about the technology anyway: although it boosts yields, it reduces the role of discretion and skill in farming—their core competence. However, the bigger problem is that farmers distrust the companies peddling this new method. They fear that the stream of detailed data they are providing on their harvests might be misused. Their commercial secrets could be sold, or leak to rival farmers; the prescriptive-planting firms might even use the data to buy underperforming farms and run them in competition with the farmers; or the companies could use the highly sensitive data on harvests to trade on the commodity markets, to the detriment of farmers who sell into those markets. [More]

I'm not buying into precise seed-by-seed technology because there is no data to prove it consistently pays off, especially on my farm. The reasons are obvious and ignored in the rush to sell the Apparatus of Big Data to us.

Just off the top of my head, here are my objections:

1. ALL of the ideas are based on predicting the growing season weather. This overriding factor of production hath made fools of us all too often.
2. There are no definitive differences between hybrids sufficient to accurately attach them to soil types and conditions. How do you know there wasn't another hybrid you could have selected which wouldn't have boosted your profits far more? We are dealing with a system of enormous complexity and more variables than even this gadgets can begin to demonstrably manage.
3. The non-trivial costs of multi-hybrid, variable population, and other planting gimmicks are seldom if ever added into the cost/benefit calculations.
4. Hybrid turnover is now so rapid, there is no possibility of proving claims of site-specific benefits over a range of years and conditions. Besides your choice is limited to whatever seed Monsanto, et al. produce the previous season, so you're not really choosing between thousands of hybrids - you're picking whatever is in the warehouse.
5. The premium for more uniform soil-type fields should become more pronounced as the need for site-specific solutions would be less.
6. Knowing what is going on at every inch in the field is a far cry from being able to remedy any problem at the inch level. Other than lower your yield projection what will knowing there is a 20 acre patch of fungus or bugs in your corn field in August do? Are you going to pay for and aim a plane/highboy with that degree of specificity?

By the way, here is how the Economist article cited above understands what Monsanto is doing.

The Climate Corporation planned to use these data to sell crop insurance. But last October Monsanto bought the company for about $1 billion—one of the biggest takeovers of a data firm yet seen. Monsanto, the world’s largest hybrid-seed producer, has a library of hundreds of thousands of seeds, and terabytes of data on their yields. By adding these to the Climate Corporation’s soil- and-weather database, it produced a map of America which says which seed grows best in which field, under what conditions.FieldScripts uses all these data to run machines made by Precision Planting, a company Monsanto bought in 2012, which makes seed drills and other devices pulled along behind tractors. Planters have changed radically since they were simple boxes that pushed seeds into the soil at fixed intervals. Some now steer themselves using GPS. Monsanto’s, loaded with data, can plant a field with different varieties at different depths and spacings, varying all this according to the weather. It is as if a farmer can know each of his plants by name. [More]

I suppose it is possible producers who load up on this questionable and technology will blow the rest of us out of the water. But it could also be they will fall behind because they become high-cost producers during a period of volatile prices. Nothing will stop this false precision in its tracks faster than $4 corn, IMHO.

Why we can't have nice things...  

Count me alongside Kevin Drum on the issue of better credit cards here in the US.

In any case, we're finally getting EMV technology in the United States starting in 2015. But in possibly the stupidest decision in the history of payment networks, we're actually getting chip-and-signature cards. Why? I've been unable to find a straight answer to this. The banks vaguely talk about merchant resistance to getting new terminals that accept PINs, but that makes no sense. PIN terminals aren't very expensive, and the cost would be effectively zero if you have a five or ten-year phase-in.
Alternatively, they make noises about American consumers not being used to PINs, but that doesn't make sense either. We all use PINs for our debit cards already. We'd learn to use PINs for credit cards in about five minutes.
And then, to add insult to injury, the cards we're getting will mostly be signature-only. That's not a requirement of the technology, though. They could be "signature preferred," which requires a signature if possible but accepts a PIN if not (at automated kiosks, for example). Why not do that? I truly have no idea.
Honestly, the whole thing is just a mystery. EMV technology is old and well-tested. Everyone knows how to make the transition because dozens of countries have already done it. It's not wildly expensive. It wouldn't spark a consumer revolt. So why are we getting idiotic signature-only PIN cards, which are probably the worst possible compromise imaginable? They require more expensive cards and upgrades to infrastructure, but they don't provide much additional security and they don't work universally outside the US. [More of a quality rant]

I got a new Citicard with chip before going to Africa last year. Just called them up and asked. But I didn't realize it wasn't a real EMV card like my European friends have.

Cripes, if we admit they can build better cornheads why can't we accept they have better credit cards? And adopt them?

First off, it's not a game...

I'll be writing a column about the hyper-fashionable droning on about drones for FJ, but the hype surrounding this technology is spiraling out of sight.

The Associated Press reports that some farmers have already begun flying their own drones ahead of Federal Aviation Administration approval for commercial use of drones. There are roughly 2.2 million farms in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Not every farmer is going to buy a drone, of course. But many will. And when it comes to agriculture, drones are a complete game changer. [More breathless hyperbole]

Where to begin?

1. In the above article the author doesn't seem to grasp the difference between a 2 HA. rice paddy and a section of wheat. Drones don't scale up well, at least on the budgets we're looking at in 2014 and beyond. 
2.  Look at a typical farmer-affordable drone. Even if we forked over thousands we'd still end up with a payload of (drum roll, please) about 2 pounds for a popular model. But wait, on the plus side, it will fly for a whole ten minutes! I suppose we could be talking about spraying on weed or a small patch, but if it's beans or corn below 6' that's what tall sprayers are for. It looks to me that any problem that a drone could handle is not likely to be visible on your bottom line or yield map.
3. The one task we know drones can handle are surveillance. OK, you can send a drone to criss-cross your cornfield in a perfect pattern videoing your crop. You end up with hundreds of gigs of video someone must review or watch in real time.  And then you.....?  What crop problems are you going to be able to identify from 10 feet at 20 mph or? Let alone mitigate? 

• Bugs? I'll be generous and allow you have super vision to see the damage under leaves or in a whorl AND identify the bug in question (which is preposterous, of course) but then you run into issue (2).
• Population? Too late.
• Fungus? Too late, usually. Besides we really don't have a great selection of curative fungicides.
• Drainage. Cripes, you should know those problems before you plant. I will give points for finding new tile holes.
• Fertility? Yard-by-yard measurement of greenness is much less useful than infrared satellite images, IMHO. I can see applicators with greenness sensors - at least they are closer to the plant. And I'm not sure the science is there to tell us what to do with whatever data product we get back.

The basis for all this hype seems to be split-second monitoring of crops can make a crucial difference. Maybe. But if you're standing there flying your drone, I'll bet it might occur to you to, well, walk into the field and look around.

I just don't think this is The Next Big Thing. I think it's the Next Ephemeral Fad and I've started the clock on its fifteen minutes. 

Besides, anybody want to bet what these agri-toys will cost 5 years from now? All those who think they'll be the cost/utility ratio won't plummet raise your hands.

I think we've learned this lesson. It won't change my game. 

Breaking the seed corn cartel would. This looks like a bright shiny object to draw our gaze away from real issues like that.

Congress-killer-app...  

I think this beats those FB, NCGA, et al pre-written e-mails, letters, cards, etc. all hollow.


Capitol Bells Demo from Ted at Capitol Bells on Vimeo.

Downgrading the gun debate...  

As fast as folks seem to be buying weaponry, they may be becoming lame. In an outcome I certainly didn't imagine, the macho-ness of personal firepower could become quaint, like being able to chop a tree with an ax or cultivate corn.

TrackingPoint, a startup tech company in Austin, Tex., has just started selling the most advanced long-distance rifle available on the civilian market. The weapon incorporates laser and computer technology, as well as a three-dimensional color graphics display, to allow even a novice shooter to hit moving targets at 500 yards (five football fields) or farther. Its Wi-Fi transmitter permits the user to stream live video and audio to an iPad (AAPL) and post impressive kill shots on Facebook (FB) or YouTube (GOOG).
“This is a weapon that will get the Call of Duty generation into the real shooting sports,” says TrackingPoint’s chief executive, Jason Schauble, a 38-year-old decorated special-ops officer who formerly served in the Marines. A genial, smooth-talking ballistics pro who retired from the military after being seriously wounded in Iraq, he is making the rounds in New York and elsewhere to promote TrackingPoint. Schauble readily acknowledges that to make the transition from pretend shooter games to the real-life range or hunting grounds will require serious money. TrackingPoint’s customized rifles sell for $22,000 to $27,000 apiece, depending on just how tricked-out consumers want their weapons.
The gun part of the TrackingPoint system resembles a modern military-style bolt-action rifle. The science-fiction part looks like a three-headed long-range scope. Shooter tracks targets on the graphics display. By pushing a small button near the trigger, they lock a red laser dot on their quarry—a deer or bear, for example. The red laser tag remains on the target, even if it moves. Shooters then align the red dot with a blue cross-hair, or reticle, which also appears on the screen. They depress the trigger. The gun “decides” exactly when to fire. That happens only when the cross-hair aligns perfectly with the red dot, taking into account the distance, barometric pressure, temperature, the curvature of the earth, and other variables. [More]

So as I understand it, you find the target in the scope, pull the trigger, and wave the gun until it passes the optimal firing point. Kinda takes the sportsmanship out of hunting, I would say.  It reminds me of straight rows nowadays - just not a big deal or the sign of ag prowess it used to symbolize.

Or worse still, why bother to pick up the firearm at all?

The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets.
Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade, or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it, including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct both the video system's aim and the direction of the guns after recoil pushes them off-target. [More]

Knowing the South Koreans, there will be  a home model available someday, and then we'll see an interesting Supreme Court case. For that matter, I wonder what the NRA will do about such advanced weapons. While they seem to be OK with laser weapons, taking the human out of the firing decisions doesn't strike me as the best membership program ever conceived.

Like so many seemingly intractable public debates, maybe this one will simply fade into irrelevance as technology advances beyond what we think are the defining parameters.  After all, think of all those knights who were good at riding down peasant while wearing tons of armor and wielding a whacking sword. Did we think guns were the last word on killing?

Technology answers...  

One of my greatest reasons for optimism about the future is the flood of new adaptations of novel technologies to surprising problems.



I don't think we can begin to envision the scope and ingenuity of such ideas, nor evaluate their impact.  Which makes any long term prediction or analysis suspect.

What to do...  

When you don't "get" the Latest Thing. Let's just hypothetically say this references an elderly but still hip blogger/writer and say, Facebook, to pick a subject entirely at random. Even as his less cyber-savvy friends (and even the occasional wife) have gotten on board, he still treats it with disdain.

Well, folks, he's not the only one coping (or not coping) with this dilemma.

The fact of the matter is our professional lives now churn with change. Markets change. Technology changes. Consumers change. Channels change. Competitors change. This is an era of disruption. Not disruption as the occasional event, but disruption as the constant, chronic condition of our professional lives. You would hope that we were getting better at understanding and managing change. And sometimes we are. Too often however, our response is to ignore and forget change, to fake our way through it, to pretend an engagement and a mastery we do not have. And that's bad. That means we are not getting better at change, but steadily worse. We are denying disruption, instead of adapting to it.
We seem to adopt and adapt to something like Twitter by stages, a little like Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief. Except in this case, it's a passage from confusion to congratulation. Self-congratulation.
Stage 1. Confusion. We don't quite get it. We sign up for the new app. We give it a whirl. Not really getting it. By this time, gurus are reassuring us that Twitter is the greatest thing ever. But that doesn't help. We're still not getting it. And so we turn to Stage 2.
Stage 2: Repudiation. It turns out there are lots of people who don't get the new technology and now social life is a little like a competition to show that we're not "falling for it." At this point, there can more social capital in saying that we don't like the tech than that we do.
Stage 2 is marked by snappy one-liners. With the practiced ease of stand-up comedian, we can now be heard saying stuff like, "Twitter. What could I possibly say in 140 characters?" Or, "FourSquare? Why would I want to be mayor of my living room."
Stage 3. Shaming. This is when we are so persuaded that we're right and the new innovation is wrong that we are prepared to make fun of the credulous among us. I was on the receiving end after I gave a presentation on new media to a large advertising firm. When I finished, three planners took turns patting me on the head and telling me, "This Twitter thing. It's just a fad. Give it a couple of months and it will go away." We heard a lot of this sort of thing about Pinterest in the early days. Now it's valued at $2.5 billion.
Stage 4. Acceptance. By this time, the innovation is taking off. The middle adopters are signing on. It's clear now even to us that Twitter is here to stay. Confronted by accomplished, irrefutable fact, we cave in and sign on.
And that brings us to Stage 5.
Stage 5. Forgetting. This is where we destroy the evidence. Now we are inclined to act as if we always understood and approved of a world installed with new innovation. [Please read the rest for suggested therapy]

I'm sure this gentleman has used the described procedure before, but has altered his memory suitably to allow him to maintain his out-sized ego. The author does have some concrete steps that might help if you finish the short article. Maybe the fellow in the example should try them.

I think you need to watch this...  

I have been hearing about Aereo for a few months but when I saw this, I decided I needed to get up to speed a little more.

How worried are the owners of the major broadcast television networks about Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed digital television service they’ve been trying unsuccessfully to sue out of existence? Worried enough that at least two of them are actively entertaining the possibility of pulling their free over-the-air signals altogether.
That may sound like a doomsday scenario, but it’s happening, says Garth Ancier, a former top-level executive at NBC, Fox and WB. A Reuters story about the threats posed by Aereo and Dish Network’s ad-skipping Hopper DVR to the broadcast business model quoted Ancier making the claim that two of the Big Four networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox — have for months been evaluating whether they might be better off becoming, in effect, cable channels. [More]

So some backstory.

Aereo, on the other hand, pulls broadcast signals out of the air and redirects them online to paying subscribers using a fleet of mini-antennas. The system is designed, in large part, to avoid having to pay the broadcasters any retransmission fees.
“We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content,” Carey said on Monday. “This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal.”
Aereo quickly responded with a statement, which noted that “having a television antenna is every American’s right.”
How many Americans are currently exercising their antenna rights? According to Nielsen (NLSN) and SNL Kagan, about 100 million of the 114 million U.S. homes with TV sets subscribe to cable, satellite, or fiber-optic pay-TV systems. If News Corp. limited Fox to cable and satellite subscribers, in other words, the majority of Americans wouldn’t even notice.
The 14 million homes that do get Fox over the airwaves shouldn’t expect to lose the signal anytime soon. The legal battle between Aereo and the broadcasters is just getting going. [More]

Here is a demo of how this works.


The implications are bigger for rural Americans, of course. It basically dooms us all to getting a satellite dish, I think. (Although a vast majority already do) That wouldn't be so bad if we could have a la carte pricing.

Where does that stand? Maybe closer to reality than we think as giant Verizon stunned the TV world with a step in that direction.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Verizon has plans to shake up the TV industry. It simultaneously wants to offer more channels on its FiOS TV service—and only pay for the shows its viewers are actually watching.
The Journal article outlines Verizon's proposal, which amounts to paying individual channels by how many "unique views" of five minutes or more they ratchet up every month. That runs completely counter to the usual business model that Verizon currently has to play along with, paying a fixed, monthly per-subscriber fee.
But wait, it gets more controversial! Because Verizon wants to use data from its own set-top boxes—and not from the ratings body Nielsen—to calculate how much it owes each channel. Essentially, this amounts to the a la carte utopia envisioned by Apple for a TV service—and it's going to be raising plenty of eyebrows. [More]

The bottom line is things could change pretty radically pretty fast, IMHO. Despite having to crawl through the courts, if a clear outcome becomes apparent, events will run ahead of any settlement/decision.


 

Sprawl returns ...  

And probably sooner than we think. The recession, especially in housing combined with gas prices, and gridlock to bring urban expansion into the country to pretty much a halt. In fact, it has been reversing.

Now, with crop prices soaring and housing in a deep slump, the economics of land investment have turned upside down. Farmers and investors are buying land that had been slated for development and using it for agriculture. And they are paying a small fraction of what housing developers paid for the same land before the recession.
The trend, if it continues, could represent a historic shift away from development in the far reaches of metropolitan areas. These properties had fueled much of the housing industry's bubble last decade.
In September, the Vanderweys, an Arizona dairy farming family, paid $8 million for a 760-acre alfalfa and cotton field that had fallen into foreclosure in Buckeye, Ariz., about 30 miles west of Phoenix. That same parcel, called Liberty Farm, had been sold to real-estate speculators in 2005 for $40.8 million. The Vanderweys want to plant hay.

California farmer Paul Singh bought this land from housing developers.

"These prices are becoming the new normal," said Nick Vanderwey, one of four brothers who purchased the farmland. "Everything in this area is coming back into farmers' hands."[More]
(Note: this article was from 2011)

 But wait!  This song isn't over, and Google may be writing the next verse with its autonomous car. There are others working on this, but Google provides a convenient benchmark. And it has a powerful argument about feasibility.

Watch and marvel.


The implications for such vehicles are simply staggering, and one may be a chance for those exurban farmer super-fortunates to sell their land again to developers as cities begin to expand.

Many anticipated consequences of driverless cars have already received attention on this blog and elsewhere, such as their impact on the mobility of the elderly, on taxis and car sharing services and on the future of the car industry. A crucial aspect which has escaped attention is the impact of driverless cars on urban form, which I anticipate will follow two broad predictions:

• Cities will greatly expand, again: Faster and more efficient transportation will convert locations that are currently too remote for most users into feasible alternatives, abundant with space. Like suburban rail in the early twentieth century and the mass consumer automobile that followed, driverless cars will generate a gradual, but dramatic expansion of cities.
• Buildings and parking will be uncoupled, freeing up valuable land: After dropping off passengers, driverless cars will independently seek parking (or their next car-share customers) and they will show up for the return ride at the tap of an app. As soon as driverless cars are common enough, the demand for adjacent parking will dwindle and parking lots in areas where land is sufficiently valuable will be ripe for conversion to other land use. As parking in high-value areas is thinned out or altogether purged, the micro-structure of cities will change – you guessed it – dramatically!

Why will cities expand?

Driverless cars will make it less “costly” for people to travel a given geographic distance, partly because they will be free to engage in other activities while travelling, but primarily because of reductions in travel time. Unlike human drivers, autonomous vehicles will follow optimal routes given real-time traffic conditions without fail. More crucially, as soon as suitable roads such as freeways (or lanes thereof) are declared off limits to manual driving, driverless cars will travel – safely – at much higher speeds than we do today. Gains in efficiency will follow from coordinated traffic management protocols, too. Once vehicles communicate with each other traffic through intersections and merges will flow much more smoothly than permitted by today’s traffic signals, stop signs and merging lanes, leading to substantial gains in travel time (a partial, human-mediated step in this direction is explored in this article).
If people currently forego affordable, spacious dream homes because the associated commute is too long, a technology that condenses the time needed for commuting along the same route – and allows doing so in the back seat – will make those homes more agreeable. Similarly, businesses whose location depends chiefly on access to appropriate labor or clientele will find that potential locations which are currently too remote will become feasible. It will still be crucial for them to sit “close” enough to their talent pools or their customer base, but because what matters for “closeness” is travel time rather than geographic distance, these firms will be able to reap the benefits of more remote locations without giving up “closeness.”

How far will cities expand?

The extent to which cities expand will be determined by the extent to which travel times are reduced. The more efficient traffic flow becomes the broader the geographic range in which living and working becomes feasible.
Will we ever hit a point at which people are no longer interested in the extra space offered by more distant locations? This is unlikely. Today swimming pools and three car garages are common in suburban homes, but who would have imagined that possible before the advent of the mass consumer automobile? Perhaps the current equivalent is the wish voiced by some home buyers – typically just beyond the urban fringe – that neighbors’ homes be out of sight. That seems like a lot to ask in today’s suburbs, but it could well become the norm looking forward.

When will this happen?

Most estimates suggest that the arrival of the fully self-driving car on the consumer market will occur within a decade. Provided that it will be possible to install these systems in existing manually driven cars – much as hands-free cellphone devices can be installed today – then there will be no need to wait for the entire stock of cars to gradually be replaced, and a much faster process of adoption will ensue. The speed of the process will be determined by people’s willingness to give up the driver’s seat, and by the adaption of the legal environment, first to permit driverless cars and then to secure them an exclusive right of way (a separate lane on the freeway). Google and the automakers will go to great lengths to ensure that legal barriers are removed and that the driverless car is adopted quickly. The devotion of a separate right of way may be a more challenging feat, but it will be difficult to reject in light of the gains it will offer.
Following these developments, the gradual process of city expansion will take place over many decades, much as the ramifications of the mass consumer automobile continue to play out almost a century after its arrival. [More worth reading despite my generous excerpting]

I fear the autonomous car will arrive about 20 minutes after I end my career at USFR and don't have to make my 3 hr. 7 min. commute to South Bend. That's OK. But I wonder what farmers could get up to in our ever-expanding off-season if distance were less of a hassle.

If any group in the US should grasp the possible impact the autonomous car could have, it is we farmers. Let's face it - I'll probably lose control of my grain cart before long.

Forget the Segway - I'm betting on this as the Next Big Thing.

Another clue...  

About the world we live in.

It is World Water Day, and time for the United Nations to remind us how many people in developing countries still lack basic sanitation.

Surprisingly, the UN reports there are now more people with mobile phones (six billion for world population of seven billion) on earth than there are with access to clean toilets (4.5 billion).
That phenomenon is easily visible in Indonesia, for example, where it is common to see people who live in metal roofed shacks without bathrooms surfing Facebook on their smartphones or feature phones. And it shows how, in the developing world, multinationals are often better at responding to peoples’ needs than governments are. [More]

It also explains why the health worker I interviewed in Mozambique in the isolated village of Ruasse listed his two greatest needs not as medicines or equipment, but clean water supply and sanitary toilets.

Iglesias add more:

In rich countries we tend to think about technologies in terms of their order of adoption and it seems obvious that plumbing is more basic. But from an infrastructure investment standpoint, it's easier to build a mobile phone network than a sewer system. For that same reason, even though there tends not to be all that much competition in wireless telephony it's a lot less monopolistic than electricity. In other words, part of what makes the mobile phone a great technology is that it's useful to people even in parts of the world where the basic institutions of governance are really bad. [More]

I think it is difficult to overestimate the ability of technology to circumvent bad governance and physical problems.

Bandwidth for all...  

As servers get busier, jerky video and dropped connections are pretty common. Here is rural America, it's expected. But the answer may not be as hard as we think. 

It could be math.

The practical benefits of the technology, known as coded TCP, were seen on a recent test run on a New York-to-Boston Acela train, notorious for poor connectivity. By increasing their available bandwidth—the amount of data that can be relayed in a given period of time—Medard and students were able to watch blip-free YouTube videos while some other passengers struggled to get online. "They were asking us 'How did you do that?' and we said 'We're engineers!' " she jokes.
More rigorous lab studies have shown large benefits. Testing the system on Wi-Fi networks at MIT, where 2 percent of packets are typically lost, Medard's group found that a normal bandwidth of one megabit per second was boosted to 16 megabits per second. In a circumstance where losses were 5 percent—common on a fast-moving train—the method boosted bandwidth from 0.5 megabits per second to 13.5 megabits per second. In a situation with zero losses, there was little if any benefit, but loss-free wireless scenarios are rare.
Medard's work "is an important breakthrough that promises to significantly improve bandwidth and quality-of-experience for cellular data users experiencing poor signal coverage," says Dipankar "Ray" Raychaudhuri, director or the Winlab at Rutgers University (see "Pervasive Wireless"). He expects the technology to be widely deployed within two to three years. (More)

How exciting is this? The extra bandwidth should arrive just in time for our cranial Internet implants.

Resistance is futile.

Why Bruce was right...  

Jan likes Bruce Springsteen's music. So I have heard "My Hometown" a few times. And I could not help but think of the line, "...these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back" as I read these seemingly disconnected news items.

But now Amazon has a new game. Now that it has agreed to collect sales taxes, the company can legally set up warehouses right inside some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Why would it want to do that? Because Amazon’s new goal is to get stuff to you immediately—as soon as a few hours after you hit Buy. (Disclosure: Slate participates in Amazon Associates, an "affiliate" advertising plan that rewards websites for sending customers to the online store. This means that if you click on an Amazon link from Slate—including a link in this story—and you end up buying something, Amazon will send Slate a percentage of your final purchase price.)

It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this move will shake up the retail industry. Same-day delivery has long been the holy grail of Internet retailers, something that dozens of startups have tried and failed to accomplish. (Remember Kozmo.com?) But Amazon is investing billions to make next-day delivery standard, and same-day delivery an option for lots of customers. If it can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed. [More]

The crucial aspect of this is the impact is in the service sector - not manufacturing. The former is supposedly the sector of the Future for jobs.

Next, jobs in an industry that is a little closer to home for some of us.

But à la carte would blow up television, which has been the most dependable and lucrative business model in modern entertainment history. The Internet gutted the music industry. Print journalism has been forced to innovate or die -- or, sometimes, both simultaneously -- in response to the Web. The American movie industry has survived fundamentally because it learned to diversify away from the terms "American" and "movie industry" -- most of their revenue now comes from overseas and "merchandise-able" franchises. But the cable bundle is still basically the cable bundle, and it is still growing by hundreds of thousands of subscribers a year. Innovation is an answer to a problem. As long as cable providers don't have a revenue problem, they have less need to innovate.

The debate between DirecTV (a provider) and Viacom (a "content" creator) is about finding the right price that providers should pay for content that most people don't watch. That's where bundles are useful. They disguise the price of things we don't use. But with pay TV growth slowing, we're at the edge of a revolution. "DirecTV thinks video streaming is eating away at the ratings of channels like MTV and Comedy Central," Jeff Bercovici writes at Forbes, and the company has "demanded that Viacom give consumers the right to select channels a la carte."
The Aereo story is different. It's not about cable. But it is about distributing broadcast networks online. Once sports fans can get the Olympics and NBA and other shows without a cable package, whenever they want it, it could serve alongside Netflix, Hulu and other services to replace the cable bundle.
The Internet is ruthlessly efficient at stripping cross-subsidies and allowing content to shine on its own. (As Jim Fallows has pointed out, newspapers once paid for international coverage with classifieds and cars. Now, if you want classifieds and cars, you go to a classifieds site or a cars site. Bye-bye, cross-subsidy.) Devices like Aereo combined with cases like Viacom's could be leading to an a la carte model for television. The question isn't really if the Internet's unbundling revolution will visit the television industry but when. [More]

But, this post, while subject to great debate in the econoblogosphere, strikes me as coming close to describing reality as any explanation I've seen.

 

 

When I look at this graph I see evidence of the computer age everywhere. After the recession of 2001 ended profits came roaring back and equipment investment eventually started ramping up sharply, but the employment ratio increased only between September of ’03 and December of ’06, the most frenzied time for both the construction and financial industries.

And since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 GDP, equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are all now at their all-time highs (non-financial profits are near their historic high). The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers.

So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers.

As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate. This doesn’t mean that companies are about to stop hiring altogether; there are still plenty of things that humans alone can do. But it means they’ll need to hire at an ever-lower rate, compared to how quickly they’re growing, making money, or buying equipment. Because America’s working age population will continue to grow for at least the next few decades, I predict that the employment ratio will not start to trend upward in the coming years. If anything, I think it’ll decrease. [More]

It is clearly reasonable in our subsector (cash grain). We're replacing people at an increasing rate matched by our acquisition of technology. When we can have one guy monitoring 2-3 field machines, it will be obvious, but our current self-deluding pseudo-stats about "jobs that depend on ag" help us to imagine this isn't happening.

More importantly, there is no political solution to this trend, I doubt. Pretending there is leaves us without any plans for adapting to it.

Before the Segway...  

The best we could do was this for personal transportation.

 

Looks like something for scouting cornfields to me.

This seems harsh...  

But pretty close to reality.

Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don't know how to use it, or don't have the background to ask the right questions, you'll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it's an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor. [More]

Ryan Avent adds his two cents.

The question is: is this an iron rule of innovation in information technology—that the cheaper information becomes and the easier it becomes to manipulate it the greater will be the gap, productive and otherwise, between the informationally capable and the rest?
That's certainly possible, and there's little in recent history to convince us otherwise. It is not, however, a given. We might well be in an intial phase of the information age in which technology amplifies cognitive gaps which gives way to a period in which technology mutes those gaps. Mr Drum's line is taken from a post concerning the utility of search returns given search-box inputs; smart people are probably going to be better able to formulate search queries that return desired results. But who among us imagines that search technology and the interface between human and database won't substantially improve over time. Just take iPhone's Siri, for example, which applies voice-recognition and automated search technologies unimaginable not long ago. [More]

I think both have a point, but down here on the farm it plays out against the constraints of the zero-sum rule: technology like the Internet makes smart people smarter faster than it does dumb people (I'm not fond of the latter adjective, but we'll stick with their designations). The result is fast adapters crowd out - usually permanently those slower to understand and utilize.

For example, it doesn't matter if smart phones eventually lift every user's capabilities as they flow down the food chain. The biggest rewards will already have been claimed, and in our world there are only so many.

File under "Holy S***!"...  

Not being a gun enthusiast, this item blew me away.

Earlier this month, a British Army sniper Corporal Craig Harrison broke the world’s record for superaccurate shooting, taking out a pair of Taliban machine gunners from a mile-and-a-half away. It was a one-in-a-million feat — one performed under “perfect” conditions, Harrison says: “no wind, mild weather, clear visibility.” [More]

But wait, there's more.

The U.S. military has been after self-guided bullets for years. Now, government researchers have finally made it happen: a bullet that can navigate itself a full mile before successfully nailing its target.
The breakthrough comes courtesy of engineers at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories. They’ve successfully tested a prototype of the bullet at distances up to 2,000 meters — more than a mile. The photo above is an actual image taken during one of those tests. A light-emitting diode was attached to the bullet, showing the amazing pathway that the munition made through the night sky. [More]

Between stuff like this and drones, is there a good argument against being paranoid?

Better mice...  

Note how fast it returns to the start after mapping.

Update: the embedding isn't working. Click here.

Sorry

Ya gotta believe this kind of software will be what we turn on at the entrance to a field soon.

The best words...  

Written about Steve Jobs:

As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”.  The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance. If the unprecedented and phenomenal success of Steve Jobs at Apple proves anything it is that those commentators and tech-bloggers and “experts” who sneered at him for producing sleek, shiny, well-designed products or who denigrated the man because he was not an inventor or originator of technology himself missed the point in such a fantastically stupid way that any employer would surely question the purpose of having such people on their payroll, writing for their magazines or indeed making any decisions on which lives, destinies or fortunes depended. [More]

Even though I have grown to love Apple products, I have never really felt totally on-board like other fans. I did have a respect for Jobs simply because he was a class act in a world full of few.

Fry's point above about style and substance I found intriguing. Engineers are skeptical of style, even while we suffer for our convictions that substance will win out in the end.

It's kinda like all of us farmers who think fundamentals will eventually decide the market.


Yeah - that's working well...

The grid adjusts...  

To all the wind and solar projects. As I have discussed before, one big obstacle to alternative energy is the fluctuation problem - wind speeds, cloudy weather, etc. To accommodate more variable energy generators the grid has to be able to balance the voltage and frequency with varying supplies and demand.

This is a hot new area for investment and research.

If you think twirling the mass of a family car hundreds of times a second is an unlikely way to keep power grids humming at perfect pitch, think again. Flywheel developer Beacon Power Corp., based in Tyngsboro, Mass., is already making money that way in Stephentown, N.Y., where it operates more than 160 1150-kilogram magnetically levitated flywheel motor-generators. These machines continuously accelerate and decelerate to balance electrical supply and demand and thus keep New York state's grid tuned to 60 hertz.
AC frequency fluctuates from second to second as generators turn on and off and consumer demand varies. When demand exceeds supply, the extra load slows down power plant turbines, thus depressing frequency. Meanwhile, the turbines accelerate whenever supply is in excess. Frequency regulators add or remove power to restore balance.
Beacon's flywheels can regulate frequency with superior speed relative to the dominant method today—throttling power generators up and down. And grid operators are changing outdated rules to favor faster-acting regulators, including flywheels and grid-scale batteries. The prize: priority access to a frequency regulation market worth US $495 million in the United States last year and growing with the expansion of ever-varying wind and solar power.
...
One challenge will be competition from battery-based frequency regulators, which are cheaper per megawatt to install. Several battery systems are testing the market, including a 20-MW frequency regulating facility that Arlington, Va.–based power firm AES is building in Johnson City, N.Y. The $22 million plant uses lithium batteries from A123 Systems.
...
Kema's Hawkins agrees that batteries will lose their edge over flywheels under that level of use. "A battery really doesn't like to be totally charged and discharged," says Hawkins, "whereas flywheels can handle a pretty severe duty cycle." But he says that another threat looms, one that could eviscerate the market for frequency regulation: millions of electric vehicles. Plugged in to the grid, they could respond to frequency deviations at the local level.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy, proved a similar concept a few years ago, showing that electric water heaters and dryers could correct frequency dips by temporarily turning off their heating elements. In March, PNNL licensed the concept to Texas-based semiconductor start-up Encryptor, which hopes to make chips for appliances.
So in the future, the frequency regulator could be you. [More]

It is developments like this that renew my belief in our ability to weather storms and adapt to new circumstances. It also makes me want to keep an eye on plug-in sales.

Looks like a right-fielder to me...

Slowly and creepily they get better.

Google sets the menu...

I had no idea so many people use the whole Internet as their recipe book. (What would Jan do without her clipping files from food mags?) Anyhoo, like most foodies I seldom go past the first page of search results, so when Google changes the rules for search, a whole lotta suppers are decided differently.

In late February, when Google announced that it was adding a new kind of search, specifically for recipes, it seemed like good news for a site like ours -– at last Google was shining its searchlight on content we deeply care about. But then came the bad news: once you get your new recipe results, you can refine the results in just 3 ways: by ingredient, by cooking time and by calories. While Google was just trying to improve its algorithm, thereby making the path to recipes easier and more efficient, it inadvertently stepped  into the middle of the battle between the quick-and-easy faction and the cooking-matters group.
Before these new changes, Google recipe results favored sites with lots of content and good Search Engine Optimization (that is, those that organized their pages and chose their words with Google's preferences in mind) – e.g. AllRecipes and Food. Now, recipe results favor these sites, but also those with lots of additional information, such as ratings, calories, cooking times, and photos.
Imagine the blogger who has excellent recipes but has to compete against companies with staff devoted entirely to S.E.O. And who now must go back and figure out the calorie counts of all of his recipes, and then add those numbers, along with other metadata. That’s not going to happen. So the chance that that blogger’s recipes will appear anywhere near the first page of results is vanishingly small. (See Craig Goldwyn's piece on this in the Huffington Post.) [More]

It seems to me the accumulated nudges of such minor information flow influences could be considerable. Given the intensity of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) efforts by businesses, all those plans by the myriad of "ag advocates" planning to use search engine results to tell their story might be a tad naive.

While we have been worrying about the right and FNS or the left and the MSM, geeks have been undermining both on the Web. It also presents a real challenge for ag organizations who are deciding what medium to communicate through to various audiences.

I have always depended on Google and have been satisfied with the results and efficiency. But the rise of content farms and similar "first-page hogs" has diluted the results for even my arcane searches.

I may have to go to page 2!