South African Agricultural Research and Development: A Century of Change

The 20th Century saw substantive shifts in the structure of agriculture and agricultural production in South Africa. Farm size grew, farm numbers eventually declined, and production increasingly emphasized higher-valued commodities, notably a range of horticultural crops. The real gross value of agricultural output grew steadily (by 3.32 percent per year) from 1910-1981, but declined thereafter (by 0.21 percent per year from 1982-2008). These long-run sectoral changes provide a context to present and assess an entirely new data series on public agricultural R&D (and related regulatory and extension) spending and associated scientist trends. South African agricultural R&D has been affected by a series of major policy changes. These are also documented and discussed here, along with the associated institutional changes regarding the conduct and funding of public agricultural R&D in South Africa. We reveal a number of disturbing trends, including an effective flat lining of the long-run growth in total agricultural R&D spending that took hold in the 1970s, an erratic path of funding per scientist, and a loss of scientific personnel in recent decades. Moreover, South Africa has lost ground relative to its competitors in international commodity markets such as the United States and Australia in terms of the intensity of investment in agricultural R&D. These developments are likely to have long-term, and detrimental, consequences for the productivity performance and competiveness of South African agriculture. They deserve serious policy attention as the 21st Century unfolds, with a firm eye to the long-run given the long lags (often many decades) that typify the relationship between agricultural R&D spending and productivity growth.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Married 6-year olds and other diseases of data

Presented at the National data integrity conference: enabling research: new challenges & opportunities held on May 7-8, 2015 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. Researchers, administrators and integrity officers are encountering new challenges regarding research data and integrity. This conference aims to provide attendees with both a high level understanding of these challenges and impart practical tools and skills to deal with them. Topics will include data reproducibility, validity, privacy, security, visualization, reuse, access, preservation, rights and management.Michael Kahn is the Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Department of Pediatrics, University of Colorado, Denver, Co-Director of the Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CCTSI) and Director of Clinical Informatics in the Department of Quality & Patient Safety. His research interests include real-time clinical decision support linked to clinical outcomes monitoring, clinical data warehouses for both operational and retrospective research support, integration of electronic medical records with prospective research, and translational research informatics for both T1 (bench to bedside) and T2 (bedside to community) translational settings. Prior to his current positions, Dr. Kahn was faculty in the Departments of Medicine, Computer Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Director of Advanced Clinical Systems at BJC Health Systems, and was in the commercial clinical trials software industry before returning to academics. Dr. Kahn has been a member of the board of directors of the American Medical Informatics Association, the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Library of Medicine and the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and the International Journal of Medical Informatics. He is a member of the American College of Medical Informatics.PowerPoint presentation given on May 8, 2015.Funding was provided by a contract from AcademyHealth. Additional support was provided by AHRQ 1R01HS019912-01 (Scalable PArtnering Network for CER: Across Lifespan, Conditions, and Settings), AHRQ 1R01HS019908 (Scalable Architecture for Federated Translational Inquiries Network), and NIH/NCRR Colorado CTSI Grant Number UL1 RR025780 (Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute)

Worst Law School Advice Ever

This Essay reflects upon multiple pieces of advice Kahn encountered while in law school. The author kindly rejects early advice he received—dubbed the “worst law school advice ever”—and affirms another—suggesting that a narrow course of study in law school may strengthen a student’s knowledge of a specific area of the law, but can limit the understanding of the law as in operates in whole. Kahn provides his own advice, suggesting instead a broad course of study that can prepare a future attorney to better deal with the rapid speed at which any given field of law can, and will, change