Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 January 5

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January 5

Advantage of large families on farms

I have heard of farmers wanting to have children because that means more hands to work. I would think it would also mean more mouths to feed. Please elucidate. 108.233.194.156 (talk) 07:23, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Having spoken to various farmers in a third world nation as part of a job with the UN, the reasons given for large families was more hands for work (presumably each family member can produce more than they eat) and more children surviving childhood to take care of their parents when they grow up. WegianWarrior (talk) 09:01, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Not quite sure what your question is, but in a traditional agricultural economy the advantages of having more hands available to work far outweighs any additional feeding costs. But now that most of the labour can be replaced by machinery, that is no longer the case.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:11, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

If that's the case, then what's the point of the extra hands? Isn't food production the whole point of a farm? Of course, if there are zero people working, you get zero food. One person will presumably grow more food than zero people. Maybe that one person would want a second person to help with, say, lifting loads too heavy for one person to manage alone. I guess what I'm really asking is this: Can a family of four really grow more than twice as much as a family of two? Can even a family of two grow substantially more than twice as much as one person alone? If so, where does the advantage come from? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.233.194.156 (talk) 11:15, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I think you are making a mistaken assumption that 2 people require twice the resources as one. Provided they share the same house, car, etc., the resources required by 2 may be only slightly more than for 1. Also consider what happens to production when one person is sick or injured. With no backup, the crops may rot in the field. As for large families, there are additional economies of scale there, like handing down clothes. Also, with more people, you are likely to find some have needed skills that might be lacking with just a few. Perhaps one is good at fixing tractors, another is good at assisting livestock with calving/foaling, and another is good at predicting the weather. StuRat (talk) 11:30, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

More daughters can mean more bride price in places. More sons for more dowry. Worth the cost of feeding them yourself for a while, if they're attractive. InedibleHulk (talk) 12:15, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

I googled "farm child labor", all the results were about the Obama administration backing down from new child-labor rules after protests from farm groups; seems most of those protesting were defending their right to put their own children at work on the farm, despite the law only applying to paid workers on farms that did not belong to their parents. See Grain_entrapment: 2011 proposed regulations. The article in Christian Science Monitor starts off with "As he watched his 10-year-old son ease a tractor across a soybean field, Dennis Mosbacher acknowledged the risks of farming." So mechanization hasn't made much difference in that regard.

Extra hands will do the work more efficiently, because a lot of jobs need to be done on a daily basis (milking, feeding...) and switching between them takes time (to go there, prepare for the job, maybe wash and clean up after it). Say all that takes 4 hours and you spend 10 hours a day, then only 6 of those are spent productively. Divide it among four people, each will do useful work for 9 hours.

Also some jobs require more than one person: stacking hay for example, whether loose or in bales, or using a hay elevator,is much more efficient with one person on top and one on the ground. Ssscienccce (talk) 15:38, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

It seems to me that you have several points of confusion. Some of these have been elaborated on by others but I wonder if it's helpful to look at it from a different way albeit very simplistic way.

First, you're correct that there's a limit to how much a farm can produce, as with most things there will come a point where adding more workers will not increase productivity of the farm. The farm is of a limited size so there's a limited amount it can produce. Of course with the rise of mechanisation and other technology means that this limited is fairly complicated and fewer people are needed and frequently you'll get more advantage from other things.

However, and it sounds like this main be your main area of confusion, an extra person does not have to double production to benefit the farm. This isn't just because people are sharing resources, although that's a relevant point, but also because the whole point of a farm is that the resources you obtain from it are greater than what you put in. If this didn't happen, then farming wouldn't work and we would all need to be farming otherwise we'd starve. (Of course some would suggest the prevalence of subsidies in some areas suggest farming isn't working as it should, but I digress.)

I'll stick to your food example, since that's what you're using. If we start with the single farmer, if they consume 1000kg of food a year, they need to be producing more, really significantly more, than 1000kg of food a year. Otherwise their farm wouldn't be successful. This could be 5000kg of food, 10000kg of food, 20000kg of food or whatever. We know this is happening, because particularly in the developed world with the rise of technology, very few of us are farmers. Remember, if each person consumes on average 1000kg and the average farm with one farmer is only capable of producing 2000kg, every other person will need to be a farmer to keep that average consumption working. (Well in reality, a farm with 10 people may product 50000kg even if a farm with a person only produces 2000kg, but let's not complicate things.)

If we move on to adding people, if the added food cost of a child/farmhand/whatever is 1000kg a year, but the labour of that person increases food production by 1500kg a year, then adding that person is clearly a benefit to the farm. It doesn't matter whether you're going from producing 1500kg a year to 3000kg a year or instead going from producing 10000kg a year to 11500kg a year, it will still be a benefit.

Now it's probably better to think of it in terms of money since there are a lot of costs which aren't food, and even in terms of the food the actual worth of the food depends a lot on the type of the food, but it doesn't really matter for this simplistic viewpoint.

Nil Einne (talk) 14:14, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

What golf course is seen in this music video?

What golf course is seen after four seconds in this ([1]) music video? Calle Widmann (talk) 11:43, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Ballistics database

1) Does any jurisdiction which requires gun registration also fire a bullet from each gun, photograph the striations, and enter it into a ballistics database for later matching with crime scene bullets ?

2) Do the striations for a given gun change over time ? If so, how long does this take ? StuRat (talk) 15:17, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Ballistic fingerprinting: Databases mentions such a an attempt in Maryland. I must say the information there about the California Department of Justice survey makes me wonder how accurate ballistic evidence really is... Ssscienccce (talk) 15:45, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. But does the poor success rate reflect their low quality ballistics comparison process, or is ballistic fingerprinting just fundamentally flawed ? StuRat (talk) 16:01, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Seems that the survey involved markings on the cartridge, and automated identification. Maybe the experts do a much better job than these automated systems? I found an Interpol report (17th Interpol International Forensic Science Managers Symposium 2013) with results from two blind tests:

• 15 bullets from ten barrels, 183 examiners: 11 errors by 7 examiners
• obturation markings on casings from ten consecutively reamed chambers, 64 examiners 192 comparisons: 11 inconclusive, 3 incorrect

There's much more in that report btw, fire investigation, explosives, fibres, handwriting, audio and video analysis, bitcoins and Silk Road, bittorrents... even the Rasberry Pi is mentioned. 922 pages on forensic science, doesn't go into details but has lots of references (about 5000)...

Is the PDF under a free license? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 22:25, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Much depends on the specific techniques used in the production process: self-sharpening grinding wheels produce different markings every time, but in metal injection molding the details of the mold will be found in all the parts made with it. Ssscienccce (talk) 20:07, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

How much they change over time may depend on the type of weapon, different studies reached different conclusions, see this google book result (Ballistic Imaging; 3-C.2 reproducibility and permanence of markings), three pages about tests and results. Ssscienccce (talk) 20:40, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Barrels are largely unregulated, even in strict regulation places. Ballistics are based on those barrels. Some manufacturers put serial numbers on the barrels, so I suppose those are linked to whatever testing they do. But most are not. The overwhelming majority of firearms deaths in the U.S. that aren't suicides (suicides account for about 60% of all "gun deaths" in the u.s.) are handgun homicides. There is also cartridge forensics that look at how the firing pin and maybe the ejector device ejected the round, but those are very less precise than ballistics. 07:08, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

In the UK, gun crime is almost invariably associated with illegally held weapons. These have been illegally imported or converted from de-activated weapons that used to be legal. Legally held weapons are sometimes stolen and used in gun crimes, but these are generally shotguns. The ACPO National Ballistics Intelligence Service keeps a database of ballistic evidence recovered from crime scenes. See GUN CRIME AND GANGS - Association of Chief Police Officers. Alansplodge (talk) 10:41, 6 January 2014 (UTC)