Tag: hobbyhorse

Inconclusive

Morgan and Rego challenge the claims by Reichheld and crew that Net Promoter Score is the single customer satisfaction metric necessary to explain business performance. While their peer-reviewed work does identify measures (e.g., Top 2 Box Satisfaction) that do correlate with short- and long-term success (Tobin’s Q, market share, etc.), their computation of “net promoters” is flawed: it is only a rough approximation of the ratio promulgated by Bain and Satmetrix, based on the “how likely to recommend” 0-10 scale. This shortcoming in the work is pointed out by Timothy L. Keiningham et al. Nevertheless, that follow-up note says

Despite the problems with the Net Promoter and Number of Recommendations metrics, Morgan and Rego (2006) have provided valuable insight regarding the relationship between business performance and other commonly used customer metrics…. We are unaware of another longitudinal study that examines the predictive value of satisfaction and loyalty metrics in such a comprehensive way.

And five years after the publication of The Ultimate Question, I’m waiting to see independent research that backs up its claims.

Not just for coffee farms

Paul Stapleton introduces “evergreen agriculture.” In Africa, intercropping with trees of the genera Sesbania, Gliricidia, Tephrosia, and others improves yields and provides other benefits; dropped leaves from the trees provide natural fertilizer.

The indigenous African acacia (Faidherbia albida) is perhaps the most remarkable of these fertiliser trees. Faidherbia sheds its nitrogen-rich leaves during the early rainy season and remains dormant throughout the crop-growing period. The leaves grow again when the dry season begins. This makes it highly compatible with food crops, because it does not compete with them for light, nutrients or water during the growing season: only its bare branches spread overhead while the food crops grow to maturity.

Bank on it

Catherine A. Lindell, Ryan S. O’Connor, and Emily B. Cohen make a contribution to what we know about songbirds’ nesting success in active and abandoned coffee plantations and active pasture. Specifically, they studied White-throated Thrushes (Turdus assimlis) and Clay-colored Thrushes (T. grayi) in Las Alturas reserve (for four breeding seasons) and Rio Negro, an active coffee farm (unfortunately, only for one season).

These two species of birds, congeners of our American Robin, do not migrate north to the U.S. to breed (there are some records in south Texas for Clay-colored Thrush), in contrast to the charismatic migratory wood warblers (used to promote shade-grown coffee) that feed in forests and plantation overstories in the winter months. The thrushes of the research prefer to nest on the ground or low in a tree. The slightly surprising results of the paper are that nesting success is only indirectly affected by type of land cover, and the effect is through how well the terrain provides concealment from predators. In particular, nesting in a steep bank in pastureland provides the greatest protection (the nest can’t be detected from below, and cattle can’t trample it).

There is a scintilla of a hint that the birds can be more successful in an active coffee plantation—more humans means fewer predators—but keep in mind that only one year of data is available.

I’ll let the authors summarize the research’s conservation implications:

Conservation recommendations based on land-cover type would be relatively easy if we could rank land-covers as to the quality of habitat they provide for target species and if rankings were consistent across species. Our results indicate these conditions are not met for these species.

Waiting for a train

Michael Schaub points to Linton Weeks’ preview of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 and launches a zinger:

(Nothing against Ayn Rand, of course. Without her, bitter nerds who like feeling superior to everyone despite the fact that their taste in prose is less advanced than most border collies would have no favorite author.)

But it is Jennifer Burns of the University of Virginia, quoted by Weeks, who lands the solider blow:

On the one hand, Rand’s popularity points to the vigor and growth of the American right, particularly as seen in the Tea Party. On the other hand, it points to a certain intellectual weakness amid the conservative movement, given that their leading intellectual is a novelist who has been dead for almost 30 years.

Shade-grown coffee: state of play

The Birding Community E-Bulletin points to two reports: first, a recent summary by Robert Rice of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center on the supply of and market for the SMBC’s branded Bird Friendly® Coffee. It’s interesting that nearly 40% comes from Peru; Mexico and Guatemala are other major producers. On the demand side, nearly 350,000 pounds were consumed in 2008 (the last period for which full-year figures are available), divided almost evenly between Japan and the United States.

Amid the clutter of labelling and badging at the turn of the decade, the SMBC established criteria for coffee agriculture specifically designed to protect bird life, and chose to protect them with a mark. These criteria go beyond relatively simple organic certification. Rice’s precis:

… the coffee is:

  • Certified organic
  • Certified shade-grown (according to SMBC criteria developed in 1997 and based on scientific fieldwork)

Criteria include: a minimum canopy height of 12 meters; a species list of at least 10 trees in addition to the major or “backbone” species; at least 40% foliage density; and three strata or layers of vegetation that provide structural diversity. Criteria apply to the coffee production area itself, and industry and certification specialists consider them to be the strictest shade standards in the world.

Rice states that growers see a 5 to 10 cent per pound premium for meeting BFC standards, in addition to any price bump for being organic.

Unfortunately, as Ezra Fieser reports, that price differential has narrowed over the past few years from a 30-40% markon mid-decade to about 20% now. This trend is driving farmers back to conventional agricultural methods. According to the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education, costs to the organic grower run 15% higher (certification fees, losses to pests), while yields are 40% lower. As my old B school teacher liked to say, “Sell below cost, and in the long run, you’re out of business.”

Connecting the dots

The Economist summarizes recent publications by Adamatzky and Jones and Atsushi Tero that use Physarum polycephalum, a species of myxomycetes (a/k/a slime mold, probably my favorite simple organisms), to model the tradeoffs between efficiency and redundancy in designing macro networks, like rail lines or motorways.

Of course, neither Dr Tero nor Dr Adamatzky is suggesting that rail and road networks should be designed by slime moulds. What they are proposing is that good and complex solutions can emerge from simple rules, and that this principle might be applied elsewhere.

There’s no “I” in “theater”

We are heading to the wire!! Make those reservations, see those shows, do those ballots! And be thankful that there’s no chance of WATCH being sold to Dan Snyder, because y’all are a great team!

—Weekly report to WATCH adjudicators for 28 October 2009

Although the adjudication coordinator is dangerously close to exhausting her quota of exclamation marks.

One more good reason

Newly-published research by Shalene Jha and Christopher W. Dick indicates that traditional shade-grown coffee farms provide yet another ecosystem service: maintenance of genetic diversity of trees in the landscape. The paper studies Miconia affinis in Chiapas state, Mexico. The inference is that natural seed dispersers (birds and bats), harbored by shade-grown plantations, promote the needed gene flow, and that the farms knit together fragmented forest patches.