Outstanding Protection of SSN Data

From an FSA notice,explaining that travel documents show the Social Security number, which needs to be hidden:

The recommended method, provided by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) to hide
SSN’s, is to manually mark-out SSN’s on travel documents.
Notes: OCFO currently has no plans to modify the NFC OnLine Travel System to hide SSN’s
when travel documents are printed. Marking-out SSN’s is the only solution currently
recommended by OCFO, at this time, to protect an individual’s SSN.
An ink pen is more effective in hiding SSN’s than a felt-tipped pen.

I'm glad to see the USDA taking the protection of privacy so seriously.

Fallows, Chinese Peasants, Lowell Girls, and FSA Clerks

Sometimes I go off the deep end. Did that the other night, listening to James Fallows (renowned draft dodger [tongue in cheek] from the Nam era and now writer for the Atlantic) talk about his travels in China. (Here's a link to the Atlantic, but subscription is required.) He was describing a common practice: peasant girls from the country come to the city in their late teens, go to work in factories working long hours, living in factory dormitories, eating factory food. They end up saving enough money to go back home and move to a higher social class. (In the old days, they'd be earning a dowry--I'm not sure that's a Chinese concept though.)

As he talked, I remembered the "Lowell girls". The early New England spinning and weaving industry was typified by Lowell, MA, a factory town where country girls came to live under the eye of the management, working long hours, etc., etc. As we would say in Vietnam, "same, same". (The Wikipedia article is a little more anti than one recent scholarly article might suggest.)

Of course, the choice is between marrying young, which assumes you have available young men with available land, or delaying marriage and childbearing. In 1815 Massachusetts the land was taken, single men were moving west and leaving women behind. (Men being more mobile than women in general.) Women could go into teaching (as the public school system was taking off), or into the newly developed factories.

The issue of what do to with women (sounds more chauvinistic than I mean to) is common in rural societies. Some kill them (either in the womb or in the cradle) or, as the Chinese, prohibit them from being born at all (1 child per couple). In America, we've hired them as teachers, nurses, telephone operators, secretaries, and servants. In a minor way, the New Deal helped in rural America by opening up offices to run the farm programs. The paperwork needed women to handle it, so I'd expect you'd find a majority of women in the clerical ranks of the AAA/PMA/CSS/ASCS/FSA over the years. Just one way to keep them, if not on the farm, at least in the rural towns.

The Enemy of the Good--Health care and NASA

The attempt to do things perfectly is often an enemy to the good. This Government Executive piece outlines a familiar story: do you use a military standard software system that's centrally designed and inflexible, or do you use a locally developed system that works better, at least for some. This is in the area of military healthcare. An easy response is that it's such a vital area that things need to be exactly right, hence the need for a centrally planned and managed system.

A counter to that is a piece in the PC Magazine, including this discussion on NASA and even DOD:

The space agency itself has released at least 20 open-source applications under the NASA Open Source Agreement, including Livingstone2, a reusable artificial-intelligence software system that lets a spacecraft operate with minimal human oversight even if its hardware fails.

As the first federal agency to commit an open-source policy to paper, the Department of Defense has continued to encourage open-source deployments.

"Open-source software . . . connects and enables our command and control system to work effectively," said Brigadier General Nickolas Justice at an open-source technology conference in Arlington, Virginia. "When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source."

More recent uses include the Navy's DDG 1000 Zumwalt class destroyer, built primarily on Red Hat Linux, and the Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration, which allows quick handling of huge volumes of geospatial data. Such initiatives could streamline federal agencies and offer a new transparency to government.

So it's good to use open source in destroyers, but not in health care. (I recognize the difference between "open source", where the source code is public and available for people to change and improve, and "locally developed", where the source code is probably not public and almost certainly was not managed in a way that invites public comment and change. But, the psychology is similar--do you, the manager, want total control or do you want to steadily improve the software your users employ?

Closing the Border Is Impossible?

Roger Simon at the Politico has some good observations on immigration, focusing on the problems in eliminating illegal immigration. Takes the position that you need a database of all legal residents in order to check new employees. I tend to agree, although I'd say there are more possibilities to improve the situation than most discussions allow for.

Farm Bill Progress

Jim Wiesemeyer has an interview with the chairman of House Ag on the current status. This quote:

Biggest problem is the farm program payment cap issue: Peterson said he does not intend to offer changes to the limits on direct payments during upcoming 2007 farm bill deliberations. He had originally sought to have farm subsidies distributed to single attribution -- only to individual farmers instead of co-operatives. That language was defeated in Tuesday's markup by the General Commodities and Risk Management Subcommittee. But it is widely expected there will be a debate over payment limits during House floor debate on the farm bill. "I'm not doing anything on payment limits in the full committee," Peterson said. “Cotton, rice and peanuts will have to beg me to put it back in,” Peterson said.

I still think a compromise is to switch from a cap to a graduated scale of limitations. Just intuitively, the graduated scale seems fairer, so there's a chance you can sell it to more people than a cap.

How Do You Know When You've Lost It?

When your wife gives you a list to take to the store, and you forget to check the list.

Cheney, II

The Post continues its series on Cheney, today focusing on the debates over torture and cruel treatment of prisoners.

A couple second thoughts from yesterday. You can bypass bureaucracies effectively. The new book out on Nixon and Kissinger in China describes this well. They brutally cut out the State Department, humiliating Secretary of State Rogers. But it worked. My vague memory of reading Clark Clifford's memoirs has Truman cutting out the bureaucracy at one point, perhaps on the Marshall Plan.

The two examples show a key--if you're going to bypass the bureaucracy, you need to change the world in which they operate. Once we recognized China, once Marshall had made his speech, the bureaucracy had lost its veto power. Yes, bureaucrats could sabotage from within (as the remnants of the China Lobby tried to do with Nixon and his successors. But they don't have the leverage.

In the context of treatment of prisoners, Cheney tried to shift the parameters permanently, but the bureaucracy (and the structure of the U.S. government) ensured he couldn't do so. He would have been better off to claim a strictly temporary emergency power for the President--waterboard a handful, then declare the emergency over until the next time. The American people like to think of ourselves as holding to higher standards--we need our illusions.

Cheney and the Bureaucratic Dark Side

Post today has the first of four articles on VP Cheney's work while in office. What's interesting is that Dick (he's only 2 weeks older than I, but I'm much better preserved) has gone over to the dark side. Both he and Rumsfeld offered bureaucratic precepts before beginning service in the Bush administration. Cheney says perfectly good things like: "no surprises". Every player in the bureaucracy needs to know what's happening so they'll go along.

But the reality since 9/11 has been different. Cheney makes a practice of doing end runs around the bureaucratic machinery, predictably making the bureaucrats mad. He's become a bureaucratic Darth Vader. Or a leopard who hunts in the dark, leaving only the rags of its victims behind. It is a way to get results but it only works in the long run if you are either: (a) successful or (b) terrifying. Bush and Cheney succeeded in being terrifying until the lack of success became obvious. (Obvious to all but the most loyal and most blind.)

The article does elaborate on a bureaucratic tactic I don't remember seeing as well used--lack of feedback. Apparently Cheney will never offer suggestions or feedback. That tends to drive people up the wall. I well remember a boss who would reject a draft memo without being very clear on what was wrong. I used to call it: the "I'll know it when I see it" school of management.

Are Americans Really Know-it-alls?

A comment on a post: "I don't understand, but then again you americans think you know everything!" from a Canadian. It was a little misplaced, because I was almost in a state of wonderment that possibly the Canadian government administered their farm program(s) entirely through the Internet. Obviously I wasn't clear, but the commenter makes a very serious charge.

Of course, I often claim to know it all, that's an occupational hazard for a blogger. But do Americans think we know it all? Really? Remember Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady: "men are ...." ("A Hymn to Him) Just replace "men" with "americans" and that's probably fair, "we are a marvellous sex..", we only want others to be like us.

I have to plead guilty to the charge on behalf on 300 million + residents of the U.S. At this point, it's appropriate to refer to the post just below this one.

Incompetence and All Children Above Average

Garrison Keillor says in Lake Woebegone all children are above average. Two professors publish an article suggesting that incompetent people overestimate their abilities. To quote the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

There's problems with this. Teenagers are incompetent drivers, but think they're invincible. Most drivers of all ages think they're above average drivers, which is mathematically impossible. (I'd suggest the most realistic drivers are those between 50 and 65--after 65 you start to lose it but are in a state of denial :-( )