Refining Algorithms and Systems, Help Systems, Driverless Cars and Obamacare

I had occasion yesterday to call the Verizon help line for assistance on installing a new router.  It has been 2 or more years since I've made a similar call, so I was struck by the significant improvement in their system.  I think there were at least 2 aspects:

• improving the logic of the automated decision tree.  I got to the applicable problem-solver much faster, and when there it was quite logical.
• linking the automated phone system with databases.  It wasn't new that the system knew my phone number.  It was new that it confirmed my identity.  It was new that it knew that they had just shipped a new router, so logically my call would most likely relate to that.

What's nice about software is that improvements, once made, tend to last.  If you fix a problem or made an enhancement, it's done forever, or at least for as long as the organization behind the system lasts. The critical factor is the organization is working to improve the system, as opposed to letting it survive on inertia.  But this ratchet effect for improving algorithms means that Google's driverless car can handle increasingly unusual traffic situations.  It also means that Obamacare's website can continue to improve. 

Words of Wisdom from Kevin Drum

Towards the end of a rant (Kevin rants? yes) against Thomas Frank's new article on Obama:

"All of us who do what Thomas Frank does—what I do—have failed. Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction, and that didn't happen. In the end, we didn't persuade much of anyone. It's natural to want to avoid facing that humiliating truth, and equally natural to look for someone else to blame instead. That's human nature. So fine. Blame Obama if it makes you feel better. That's what we elect presidents for: to take the blame.

But he only deserves his share. The rest of us, who were unable to take advantage of an epic financial collapse to get the public firmly in favor of pitchforks and universal health care, deserve most of it. The mirror doesn't lie."

The White House Garden: The Truth Revealed

My title is false advertising.  I've not posted about the White House garden recently, though it had its spring planting a couple weeks ago or more.

Government Executive runs a piece from the daughter of the farmer who supplied the dirt and the initial plan for the garden.  It's nice, not sensationalistic as my title would suggest.  What does come through for me, as I may have commented on in past posts, is the tension between the public play-acting and the real reality (as opposed to the unreal reality, not to be confused with the fake reality).   As an Obama supporter I take the First Lady at her word--when she started the garden she probably did have the idea that the girls would participate and it would be a real garden.  Because we, the great unwashed American public, demand perfection of our temporary royalty, that was never possible.  In the real world we sow our seeds too thickly and don't get the crop we should.  In the world of the White House, the gardeners can't admit to such failings, must always be on display, meaning the plants must always live in Lake Woebegone. 

Taxpayer Receipt

At the Whitehouse website you can put in the income tax and FICA taxes you pay and see where the money went.  I tried to embed it here, but the code didn't work for me.  I wrote the White House--will be interested to see what the result, if any, is. 

Anyhow, it's a useful idea--people when polled have little idea of how much money goes for each function in government.

A Tale of Two Gardens

The White House garden is under snow for the second time since they removed their hoop houses.

 Having worked last fall I've two beds ready for peas, if and when we get a couple dry warm days. We've kale too, although we failed to harvest enough last fall so it's straggly now, and hasn't greened up.  Should bolt in 3-4 weeks at most.

Polar Vortex and the White House Garden

Today's Post had a garden column in which the writer bemoaned the fate of his fall-planted fava beans, but was glad he hadn't built a hoop house because the recent cold weather would have been too severe anyway.  Caused me to wonder how the White House garden survived the cold.  In past years Obamafoodorama has noted the hoop houses surviving snow, but the cold might have been too much.

On a personal note, my wife harvested the last fall-planted (transplanted) kohlrabi just before the single digit weather.  Still good.

Weird Sentence of the Day--Obamacare

From Wonkblog on Obamacare:

""The fact that they have about 2 million enrolled is not that far off from 3.3 million."

Sorry--in my math 2 million is a tad over 60 percent of 3.3, which in my dictionary is "pretty far off" from 3.3.

(I think I know what he was trying to say, but he didn't say it.

The White House Garden

I've failed to keep up with the White House garden.  Maintenance on it was shut down during the government shutdown in November.  They've had a harvest of fall vegetables, installed some hoop houses, and now are facing ice and snow as the storm moves through.  Don't remember whether they did hoop houses last year.  A few of our fellow gardeners in the community garden are using hoop houses; my wife and I aren't.

The swiss chard won't last through a hard freeze being outside a hoop house; the kale will be fine for spring.  Not sure what she means by the rosemary being gone--that should survive the winter.  Cilantro will be okay in the spring before it bolts.

ACA IT and Testing

I can't resist the temptation to comment on the healthcare software process.  (BTW, here's a link to their blog.)

They've taken hits for not fully testing, which I can agree with.  On the other hand, remembering the test process we had for System/36 software, I can only imagine the problems they would have had. If my imagination is right, they had these choices for beginning to end testing:

• use live data--i.e., have all the 20-something IT types try to sign up for health insurance for real using their software.  That has some obvious problems, particularly when you have to cover 36 state exchanges. 
• create test data.  The problem here is while you can create applicants, you need to have SS numbers which meet the SSA criteria, and/or you need to create credit histories over at Experian, then you need to tack on test data for those SSN's with IRS, etc. 
• use a subset of live data for test data.  That's what we used to do--get a copy of a counties files in and modify the data to create test conditions. That's very problematic, both from a security standpoint and from a Privacy Act standpoint. And  our FSA system was simple compared to the sort of system ACA requires.

Software Problems

There seem to be many experts who are diagnosing the problems with the ACA online system.  I'm not going to join their ranks--I'm no expert.  I expect only those on the inside, and only some of those, know really what has gone wrong and how hard or easy it will be to fix.

The one thing I will say (immediately contradicting the paragraph above) is that they shouldn't have changed the design to put establishing an account first, instead of putting it at the end.  The problem seems likely to have been the change.  It apparently was too late in the day to make it; they should have kept on with the general design they started with.  That raises the question of whether they had buy-in on the system design from everyone, by which I mean Tavenner, Sebelius, OMB, and the President, well in advance.  

The closest I've ever come to this sort of problem was the 1983 payment-in-kind program, in which the Reagan administration strongarmed the lawyers into a tricky device to swap CCC-owned grain for acreage reductions, a program which I remember as being slapped together in about 2 weeks (though memory is probably fallible).  The Secretary had the Under Secretary ramrodding the implementation, because it was a high risk endeavor, and he had regular (daily?) meetings with the peons who were doing the scutwork. 

Outed: the Secrets of the Obamas and Their Garden

Found 5.5 inches of rain in our garden plot over the last few days; actually more because the rain gauge only goes to 5.5.

Assuming the White House garden got equivalent amounts, the situation described in this long Obamafoodorama post from yesterday is even worse than the pictures show.  The point of the post is that the government shutdown means very little work done in the garden by staff, so it's quickly become overgrown and unharvested.

The garden evolved from a family project in the spring of 2009, where the girls were supposed to get their hands dirty, into a showcase project for gardening.  The post reveals explicitly for the first time that the plants growing in the White House garden were transplanted from an offsite greenhouse location.  Lots of other details about the garden in the post, [edit] including the fox now prowling the grounds.

Healthcare and the Amish

Always fascinated by the Amish, who are exempted from ACA (Obamacare) because they were exempted from Social Security way back in the last century, as this article describes.

The article doesn't mention the Amish occasionally being medical tourists--i.e., traveling to Mexico for some operations, something about which I've read in the last couple years.

Ezra Klein Differs on ACA Software

Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein are notably more damning of the Obama administrations healthcare exchange software than I have been.  This from Klein:

'But the Obama administration did itself -- and the millions of people who wanted to explore signing up -- a terrible disservice by building a Web site that, four days into launch, is still unusable for most Americans. They knew that the only way to quiet the law's critics was to implement it effectively. And building a working e-commerce Web site is not an impossible task, even with the added challenges of getting various government data services to talk to each other. Instead, the Obama administration gave critics arguing that the law isn't ready for primetime more ammunition for their case.

Obama's Open Government Fail--on Obamacare

I just love to tweak IT types and goo-goo types about openness, and occasionally I like to tweak my liberal friends.  In that spirit, let me quote this from the NYTimes post on activity on the healthcare exchanges:

"It is unclear what the [healthcare] exchanges meant in citing heavy volume; most did not provide numbers, or even return phone calls in the first hours of operation. It is also unclear to what degree problems with the Web sites were due to the kind of technical hurdles that supporters of the program had warned about and that opponents had predicted would demonstrate its unwieldiness."

 Too bad HHS didn't require each exchange website to post their count of unique visitors.

More seriously, I expect the dust to settle and the glitches to get resolved (mostly) in the next few days or weeks, just as Medicare Part D did back in the Bush days.

Rep. Issa Praises Obama Administration!!

The nether reaches of hell must be starting to freeze.

This FCW article reports this comment by Rep. Issa:

"The whole Recovery.gov effort has been a great success. I’m taking no positive shots at how they spent their money, because I don't think it created jobs. But it accounted for funding in a more transparent way than ever before, and did so on a small budget," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said at an event hosted by the Data Transparency Coalition on Sept. 10.

I have to admit I was skeptical of it, I haven't revisited the site since its early days, and I still suspect a subject-matter expert could punch holes in the data for her subject area.  But the fact remains, even if its reputation is a tad higher than it deserves, it does set an example for the future and there weren't many scandals related to the Recovery Act spending, once we got past the early glitches about the quality of data.    So at least one gold star for the Obama administration.

(Hmm, since I'm feeling devilish today, what's the odds of having a similar database for Pigford payments?)

My Feelings on Syria--the Obama Doctrine

I'm as ambivalent about Syria as I am on most things, but I'd urge my representatives in Congress to support limited military action in response to the use of chemical weapons.

Seems to me we want to raise the costs of the use of such weapons anyway we can, both now and for the future.  I'd even recommend a corollary to the "Obama doctrine:" anytime and anywhere we determine that chemical weapons have been used, the perpetrators of such use may be struck by our military forces. (Did you know there was an "Obama Doctrine"--I didn't until I checked wikipedia.)

Having said that, I'm assuming our military has identified targets, the destruction of which will thread all the needles of the obstacles critics have raised:  minimum harm to civilians, maximum harm to those involved in the use of the weapons, least degradation of Assad's command and control over such weapons, most painful to Assad, etc.

[posted prematurely]  

If You Want a Friend in DC, Get Sunny

To paraphrase HSTruman's words about getting a dog.  That's what I was reminded of by this Politico piece

Federal Program Inventory

Performance.govhttp://goals.performance.gov/federalprograminventory has a new inventory of federal programs.  I'm not sure why it exists, or how it differs from the Catalog of  Federal Domestic Assistance Programs maintained since I was a new bureaucrat by GSA.  The administration is cutting redundant data centers; are they creating redundant catalogs?

Harvesting the White House Garden

This week, they had a harvest event--inviting the kids who planted in April to harvest in late May.  More and more the garden becomes a publicity event, because a true garden would be harvested (and planted) right along, in succession.  Radishes, lettuce, scallions, peas, etc. grow on their own schedule, not the convenience of a PR event.  I'm not writing to criticize Mrs. Obama and her staff. It's just a matter of fact you can't live real life in the White House, at least not if you invite the cameras in.

As a followup to a previous post which I can't find so may not have completed, despite my skepticism their spring wheat is heading out and seems to be filling the rows pretty well.  Just a reminder I sometimes (often?) don't know what I'm talking about.

Support Beef, Vote Obama?

Who knew the President was a steak man?  I thought he was one of those effete liberal crunchies?  Guess that impression was wrong.