More on the AVUE Saga- OR Why Does the USDA Approach Seem, Well, Worse?

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Great piece by Stephanie Ogburn in High Country News here (Thanks to Matthew for finding it).

Yet the switch comes with its own set of costly hassles — and questions about the value of government outsourcing meant to save money. While the Forest Service won’t comment on the decision to switch to eRecruit, a service offered by an Australian company NGA.net, or on its dealings with Avue, employees within the agency currently aren’t able to access any data from Avue, including thousands of job descriptions it needs to populate the new system. (Known as position descriptions, or PDs, these are key for matching applicants with jobs.) And not only are are Forest Service employees unable to access old data. If they have downloaded copies of position descriptions from Avue, they aren’t allowed to use those either. An agency memo lays it out:

“In no event … can you use a PD (position description) from the Avue system, in whole or in part, to create a new or modified PD in the new eRecruit system.” The Forest Service is also in ongoing negotiations with Avue about accessing that old data, but won’t comment on that either.

Linda Rix, CEO of Avue Digital Services, says the focus on the missing position descriptions misses the point, though. She says eRecruit isn’t able to do many of the complex tasks that Avue did, and that is partly why the transition has been difficult. “What eRecruit is doing for the Forest Service is about 40 percent of what we were doing for the Forest Service.”

And despite the difficulties of using Avue, its complexity had a purpose, she adds. When the Forest Service contracted with Avue, says Rix, it was at pains to implement a system where “you can definitely show that you are not practicing discriminatory hiring.” Avue’s system does this, she says, because it “auto-calculates” matches based on specific job and legal criteria like the Fair Labor Standards Act, matching people — regardless of race or gender — based on the position needs and their own skill set. The new system, says Rix, lacks these capabilities.

Forest Service employees might argue that the auto-calculation was precisely what they wanted to get rid of. Avue’s automated application screening process, according to a 2011 GAO report, “frequently result(ed) in situations where highly qualified candidates were wrongly eliminated from consideration or unqualified candidates were listed along with qualified candidates.” Employees, particularly those in the wildfire program, complained about these baseless disqualifications as well as the overall difficulty of the application process.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to be a giant federal agency, with thousands of applications for seasonal openings needing to be evaluated every year. Yet, by 2013, one would hope that the U.S. Forest Service would have figured it out. The Bureau of Land Management, NOAA and a number of other agencies use jobs giant Monster.com, but instead of joining that system, the Forest Service’s jump to eRecruit is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s overall shift to a comprehensive human resources management program called “OneUSA,” which aims to provide a simpler way for the whole Agriculture Department to hire qualified candidates.

Sharon’s questions: What is the USDA thinking? And why can’t they tell Forest Service folks why they need to buy solutions that appear to be second-rate compared to other agencies? And if you tick off all the diverse candidates due to your application process, how does that help you meet your goals? Is there some research that shows that diverse people are more likely to put up with bureaucratic bizarreness? Not to speak of all the dedicated employees who are simply trying to hire qualified people and you are torturing… I had a boss once who wanted to outsource the administrative part of our region to the BLM, which was located right down the road from our Regional Office. He seems wiser, in retrospect, on that issue, as time goes on.

Region 1 Annual Year in Review

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Here’s the link:

This article shows some of the numbers we have been interested in..

“We’re a relatively small player in overall forest dynamics,” said Gene DeGayner, the region’s director of renewable resource management. “This year, we’ll treat with commercial timber sales about 12,000 acres a year, regionwide. We’ll do maybe another 8,000 acres of pre-commercial thinning.
“But we’re looking at 6 million acres of beetle kill. Last year, we had more than 1 million acres burned. What we can affect with mechanical treatment is 1 percent of 1 percent of the region. We are a small player. We cannot move the needle on a lot of these issues.”

The 2012 Year in Review publication released last week on the Internet features 24 pages of stories of projects, awards and accomplishments in Region 1. In its introduction, Regional Forester Faye Krueger invited readers to “look at this publication as the bridge to how much more we can accomplish in 2013.”
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The agency cast a somewhat bigger shadow in less labor-intensive efforts like noxious weed management and prescribed burning. But DeGayner said a large chunk of its expected timber harvest stalled in lawsuits challenging the Colt-Summit forest restoration project near Seeley Lake.

That project was the keynote of the Forest Service’s latest tactic for getting stuff done in the woods: the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program. These pilot projects got special funding from Congress to see if a combination of including community members in the planning, bartering timber for restoration work, and seeking matching funds from state or private sources might speed up workflow.
In Region 1, CFLRP provided about $9 million in operating funds, which was to be matched 1-to-1 in partnership agreements. The biggest local effort was the Southwestern Crown Collaborative, to do logging and landscape restoration in the Lolo, Helena and Flathead national forests. It claimed credit for producing 32 million board feet of sawlogs, 18,834 acres of noxious weed treatment, 19 miles of stream restoration and 268 miles of trail maintenance between 2010 and 2012. It’s allocated $4 million a year in CFLRP funding for 10 years.
“We’ve got a good portion of that program tied up in litigation, but we hope to prevail on those this year,” DeGayner said.

A federal district judge ruled in favor of the Forest Service on nine of 10 claims, but ordered it to provide more explanation how the project might affect threatened lynx habitat. DeGayner said that extra paperwork would not change the size or scope of the project.

The other main way the Forest Service cut trees last year was through travel safety projects that clear beetle-killed stands along roads. In 2012, it tallied about 500 miles of easement clearing, which paid for itself by the sale of timber.

Here’s a link to the press release from Region 1, but there is a warning that it is a large file. The actual link to it is imbedded from the press release page.

Let’s Get the Public in the Science Priority Pipeline

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For those who haven’t heard, there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the Big Science community about sequestration. Here’s a post by Roger Pielke, Jr. on his blog. What we don’t talk about is why things people want are not funded and things scientists want, are.. or why the public is not involved in scientific priorities. After the excerpt from the blog post below, I’ll get to an example that I think illustrates the issue.

The scientists, and science policy scholars in particular, exist to generate evidence in support of that axiom in order to keep public funds flowing. Both conceits are problematic in science policy.

In a paper published in Minerva last year I explored the origins and symbolic significance of the phrase “basic research” (read it here in PDF). In that paper I argued that the phrase originated about 1920 in the context of the US Department of Agriculture, where “research was the basic work” of the agency. The phrase was shortened to “basic research” which ironically enough meant what we today call “applied research.”

Over time the phrase became part of the linear model of innovation, shown in the figure at the top of this post. The model is faith based, meaning that the relationship of basic research funding to societal benefits is taken as an “axiom” which often finds its expression in a misreading of economics. Scientists often demand a privileged place for science in government budgets based on claims that in “basic research” lies the key to growth and prosperity for all.

Unfortunately, the relationship of so-called “basic research” and outcomes like economic growth and other societal benefits remains poorly understood. For instance, in 2007, Leo Sveikauskas of the Bureau of Economic Analysis surveyed the economy-wide returns on R&D (here in PDF) and found a complex picture at odds with the elegance of the linear model:

Returns to many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero . . . Many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all, and do not belong in investment.
The exceptions that he cites include federal R&D in health, agriculture and defense — all instances of mission-oriented applied research.

Now here is another interesting article from New Scientist, publicly available and well worth reading, on a Resources For the Future study on how the U.S. is doing with climate change. The title is “how Obama Will Deliver His Climate Promise”. I don’t know about you, but friends and strangers feel comfortable lecturing me at how poorly the US is doing..
but what I found interesting on the topic “who funds whom to study what, and why?” is the box in the article.

Fixing America’s gas leak

Measured over a century, methane has 25 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide – so the last thing the planet needs is for the stuff to be escaping into the atmosphere. Yet that’s happening on a massive scale in the US, through leaks from production wells and the pipes that distribute natural gas.

The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates total losses at 2.4 per cent of the gas being extracted, but the true figure could be higher. A survey in Colorado, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year suggested the region’s wells were losing some 4 per cent of what is produced.

Putting firmer numbers on the problem is the goal of a study led by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) in New York City. It should have figures for production wells by the end of March, and for the entire distribution system by January 2014.

With better numbers in hand, the government could demand the leaks are plugged. “It is quite possible to produce natural gas with minimal ‘fugitive’ emissions,” says Mark Brownstein of the EDF. “It may just be a question of operational and maintenance practice.”

So this piece hits on two of my favorite topics..

1) if EPA and NOAA came up with different numbers, shouldn’t there be a joint story for why the numbers are different?
2) If this question is really important to the US fighting climate change, why isn’t someone besides EDF funding it? (Do we think they are objective?)

Which reminds me of this article in the Denver Post “Hickenlooper argues in D.C. for state regulation of fracking.”

Hickenlooper, a former geologist, talked about “fugitive methane” — poisonous gas escaping during gas production. He said Colorado officials are working with Colorado State University on a study to measure air quality in different seasons in oil-producing parts of the state to “understand the consequences.”

Doesn’t it seem like if natural gas is going to dig us out of our climate change hole in the short term, we would spend more federal bucks on ensuring it’s safe.. say compared to “basic science.” If we need to understand something vitally important to our energy future and to human health and the nevironment, hodgepodgery is not a good enough strategy. In my opinion.

NCFP Science Friday: Leaf, Rust, and Yeast

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lien leaf (Image: Mathieu Belanger/Reuters)
Alien leaf (Image: Mathieu Belanger/Reuters)

First a tree story,here.

Canada’s new banknotes show wrong maple leaf

IS THERE a botanist in the house? Canada’s new $20, $50 and $100 bills appear to have the wrong maple leaf on them.

Instead of a sugar maple leaf, one of the nation’s best known symbols, the bills feature the Norway maple, a native of Europe that is so invasive in North America that some US states have banned its sale and importation.

The leaf shown on the banknotes has five major lobes, unlike any maple tree native to Canada, while the sugar maple has just three lobes, says Julian Starr, a botanist at the University of Ottawa.

The Bank of Canada says there is no error. Since no maple is native to the whole of Canada, the designers chose a “stylised blend” of leaves to avoid regional bias, says Julie Girard, spokeswoman for the bank. “This way it’s representative of all of Canada,” she says, adding that the bank even consulted a tree specialist to avoid species bias.

I also thought that this story was interesting on the possible use of rust in solar energy.
To see the rest you have to subscribe or get a copy at your library..

MOST engineers would have been horrified to find even a little bit of rust on their electrodes. But Kenneth Hardee and Allen Bard had made theirs entirely of the stuff. In their pursuit of cheap solar power, the pair had been trying to coax a current out of the cheapest material they could find. And they succeeded: exposed to visible light, it produced a small but decent current.

That happened in 1975, just as silicon was becoming the next big thing. Silicon’s greater efficiency made it the mainstay of photovoltaic solar cells, and it has stayed at the top of the market ever since. Rust simply didn’t have the electrical properties to compete. The small breakthrough at the University of Texas at Austin fell by the wayside and the only time anyone thought about rust, if they thought of it at all, was when they wanted to get rid of …

And finally. because we had discussed coevolution of plants and humans earlier today (and it is Friday night!) the article “The 10,000-year bender: Why humans love a tipple” is interesting, as well, although also requiring a subscription or a library.

EVEN if you are teetotal, you cannot deny that humans, as a species, like to drink. We consume wine, beer, cider, spirits… in fact, the fermented product of almost anything we can turn to alcohol. Our fondness for this toxic substance, the cause of so much trouble, is something of a mystery. Maybe it is enough to say that we drink because it makes us feel good. But I think that to understand our love of alcohol you need a bigger, more evolutionary, explanation.

The story of alcohol is one of an intimate relationship between humans and yeasts, an affair that began millions of years ago and is still playing out today. We like to cast ourselves as the star of this drama, but in fact yeasts are the unsung lead character. Ours is a symbiotic connection – a mutually beneficial partnership. It is also one in which the balance …

Utah’s High Elevation Mortality

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This picture is located within the Cedar Breaks National Monument, where conifer mortality is quite excessive. There is really not much that can be done with this situation, other than spending lots of money to fell, pile and burn. Within the Dixie National Forest, this mortality dominates the upper elevations. Even at this altitude of over 10,000 feet, the land is very dry for 9 months, except for seasonal lightning storms. Like some of our public lands, we need a triage system to deal with such overwhelming mortality and fuels build-ups. In this example, we are too late to employ a market-based solution, which would do more non-commercial work.

I have seen this area over many years, and have watched as forests die and rot, with catastrophic wildfire being the “end game”. Anyone venture a guess at what will grow here, in the future?

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Enviros protect 8,000 acres of old-growth, or hold people of Utah ‘hostage?’

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This blog has highlighted the Dixie National Forest, Utah, “Iron Springs Vegetation Reduction Project” before.  Yesterday, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported:

Wildlife conservation groups on Thursday praised a decision by Dixie National Forest withdrawing a plan to harvest 8,000 acres of old-growth forest near Escalante.

“Conservationists are calling this a valentine for wildlife,” said Kevin Mueller, program director for Utah Environmental Congress. “The withdrawal really is a reprieve for wildlife.”….

Mueller said the harvest has appeared dead at least three times before, as far back as 1999.  “This is a horrible game of whack a mole that’s been going for about a dozen years, and I just really hope the Forest Service gives up the ghost on this project and doesn’t resurrect it again,” he said.

The timber harvest area of 8,306 acres is about 15 miles northwest of Escalante at elevations ranging from 9,000 to 10,750 feet. Mueller said the trees that were to be cut down are an estimated 150 to 400 years old.  Conservation groups have fought the harvest, saying the trees provide needed nesting and forage habitat for the threatened Mexican spotted owl and sensitive-species goshawk….

Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab said opposition by groups outside of Utah like the Montana-based Alliance for the Wild Rockies, is a “perfect example” of why state officials want to take control of public lands. “This is another reason why our Utah lands and forestry people and local people can do a better job of managing lands because we’re not held hostage to groups in … other areas,” he said.

Forest Products Laboratory and a Sustainable Studio Set

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Forest Service research led to the creation of Hollywood’s first 100 percent sustainable studio set.
Forest Service research led to the creation of Hollywood’s first 100 percent sustainable studio set.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt. Here’s the actual press release.

The U.S. Forest Service announces today that they have teamed up with Hollywood to build the first “100 percent sustainable studio set.”

The Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory teamed up to help create a hotel room for a two part episode of the show ‘Raising Hope.’

According to the release, the Hollywood set consists of “100 percent, USDA-certified bio-based and made with 100 percent cellulose fibers including post-consumer paper, wood and agricultural raw material sources” and “no toxic additives or adhesives.”

“Raising Hope” art director John Zachary is thrilled. “The ongoing use of tropical hardwoods in set construction is an environmental tragedy and this experiment provided a cost-efficient alternative to unsustainable forest products,” he said in the release.
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The team used “environmentally friendly paint, wallpaper, glue and carpet” during production.

The Forest Service Laboratory teamed up with ECOR Global to coordinate the program which shipped panels built at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. to San Diego.

“The collaboration between the Forest Products Laboratory and ECOR Global is a perfect example of how government and industry can work together to meet society’s needs,” says laboratory engineer John Hunt. “By combining our unique capabilities, we were able to turn research results into tangible products.”

Personnel Policy Changes and Unintended Consequences- Advertising in Multiple Series

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This story came up in my internet searches about the Forest Service: while it’s off the general topic, it does raise some interesting questions related to morale and administrative changes.

Here’s the link and below is an excerpt:

Hager left the INFRA program manager position in 2003, and the opening was advertised in February 2004. However, an intervening change in agency policy prohibited the Forest Service from posting interchangeable listings, so the job was advertised strictly under the professional series.

Here are ssome questions this story raised in my mind:

“if it was OK for a long time to advertise in multiple series, why was the policy changed?”

“Does the new policy help or hinder stated goals to get more diverse applicants available on certs?”

And “given the likely gender ratios in administrative compared to technical series, did that policy change have an unintended discriminatory effect?” (not related to this specific case, but worthy of examination on a broader scale)

Note: back when I was working, this cap on number of series caused a great deal of unnecessary work and annoyance. Hopefully, the policy has been changed back and this is now gone. There may be a good reason for this change, but if so, I am not sure that that was ever communicated to the rank and file.

I was also interested in these statements:

That is because she would have us ignore the time period shortly following her protected activity–the precise period when we ordinarily would expect any anger or resentment that her activity engendered in the Forest Service to be at its apex–and instead focus on a period almost two years removed from her protected activity merely because it was at that point that the Forest Service had its first opportunity to retaliate against her by taking a very specific adverse action,” Holmes wrote.

“[O]ur ability to draw … a causal inference from an employer’s adverse action” based on temporal proximity alone “diminishes over time because we may reasonably expect (as a matter of common sense) that the embers of anger or resentment that may have been inflamed by the employee’s protected activity–emotions that would underlie any retaliatory adverse action–would cool over time,” Holmes wrote. Conroy’s proposed approach, which focused on events nearly two years after her protected activity, “stands at odds with this temporal-proximity, causation rationale.”

Would that strong emotions always had that rate and trajectory of reduction! There would probably be fewer armed conflicts if it were that simple.. glad to know that legal organizations don’t have long-term simmering resentments..