STill More on Census Handhelds

From this post on NextGov comes a little further insight on the Census problems. Allen Holmes suggests conflicting goals: a more accurate count versus saving money. But there's also mention of a GPS enabled handheld, to more accurately map household addresses. (Seems as if a two device application, one GPS device and one handheld would have been simpler. But what do I know?)

I'd guess a problem for Census is the decennial aspect--if you have to work on developing IT systems every year you're going to get more skilled than if you do two or three over the course of a career in Census.

Lessons from a Past War--Korea

I've been reading David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter,
a history of the Korean War. It's good, as one would expect of the author. (Since my early memories include following the course of the war, it's an exercise in nostalgia for me as well. I'm not learning much new about the political side from the American side (the UN is totally ignored) but the Chinese/Korean/Soviet side is newish to me.)

I just finished the account of the Wake Island meeting between Truman and Gen. MacArthur. MacArthur's at the peak of his glory, having pushed through the Inchon landing which created the most dramatic reversal in American military fortunes I can think of. (The North Koreans had succeeded in capturing 90 percent or so of South Korea, with the big issue whether we could hold onto the Pusan perimeter. Within 45 days of the Inchon landing, MacArthur's troops had crossed the 38th parallel and were close to conquering all of North Korea.) According to MacArthur, the meeting went very fast, no one raised big issues (how far north Mac should go, the likelihood of the Chinese intervening, etc.).

A couple things stand out to me:

1. I've been in meetings like that. Bureaucrats, like people, don't like conflict, so meetings of bureaucrats from different bureaucracies (at Wake, there were Truman and his civilians, the Joint Chiefs representing the military, and MacArthur representing himself) sometimes dissolve into conflict, but often skate over thin ice to get to the end of the meeting.
   
2. The psychology reminds me of our psychology around January 2002. We'd sent our Marines to Afghanistan and for a little while it seemed that our worst fears (following the Soviets and the British) were going to be realized. Then, all of sudden the bombing took effect, the Northern Alliance went forward, and the Taliban collapsed. So Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had the prestige and moral authority to do what they wanted. MacArthur did what he wanted, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and an eventual stalemate.
   

Census Screwups--Further Thought

From a Government Executive article on the failure of Census project to use handheld computers for 2010 census.

"[the contractor rep] ascribed the program's problems to continuously changing requirements on the part of the Census Bureau, which delivered 400 new or refined requirements to Harris in January, two-thirds of the way through the development process. "We were informed that there was concern that the requirements given to us for nonresponse follow-up may not be complete," she said. "We have designed what the Census Bureau asked for, but what they have asked for may not be what they need."

Census Director Steven Murdock admitted that the bureau could have done more to ensure that the contract was executed on time. "Clearly, we didn't do everything we should," he said. He admitted that the bureau didn't scope the requirements for the project fully or effectively communicate with the contractor as much as necessary.

The decision to return to paper was driven largely by the bureau's comfort with the old way of doing things. "Census Bureau officials are more comfortable addressing any such challenges through the paper process, with which they are more familiar," Janey said.

Murdock said reverting to paper would provide more flexibility and minimize risk, and he cited the bureau's knowledge and experience with the paper-based system as a justification for the decision.

The changing user requirements is a familiar cause of problems (how many times I heard that from our IT type--you can't change these requirements!). Bad requirements means they didn't have the right people involved in specifying them and hadn't trained them in what's involved in IT. Which probably relates to the culture problems in the last two paragraphs. A familiar story, as with the FBI.

What I don't understand is two things:

• Lehrer News Hour had a piece on the professional shoppers for Commerce (checking prices of products for computing cost of living index). The woman was merrily punching away on her laptop computer entering the data. So obviously Commerce has experience with hand-held applications that work on a distributed basis.
  
• Given my faith in the 80/20 rule (80 percent of your work comes from 20 percent of the cases)--has census and the contractor ever considered a rather simple handheld application that would do most of the cases, with a fall-back to paper for the complex ones? Eat the elephant one bite at a time??
  

More on Gov Credit Cards

Here's an article on Steve Kelman, the architect of government procurement reform. And an opposing view from the Project on Government Oversight.

Al Gore's Dubious Legacy--Gov Credit Cards

The Government Executive and other mags have articles on the GAO analysis of government misuse of credit cards. I briefly saw Sen Coleman (R-MN) on TV being interviewed. He noted that the cards do save money over purchase orders etc. That was the idea back in the 1990's when procurement reform was a big part of "reinventing government".

Problem is, while the savings in paperwork and flexibility were real, none of the sponsors of the idea (including Mr. Gore) had read the Federalist papers, or were asleep in class when their profs discussed how one needed checks and balances in government. At least when I was there, I saw no sign of any oversight, either by the supervisor or a central office, no summary reports, no flags raised for purchases at questionable vendors, nothing.

I don't really hold Gore responsible for the problems; politicians don't get down into the nitty gritty. But it's cautionary for people proposing other reforms of the bureaucracy.

Higher Food Prices: Helps or Hurts Organic Ag?

Tom Philpott opts for the "hurts" side in this post. Some interesting comments.

Growing More Liberal as He Ages?

Does that explain Prof. Douglas Kmiec, a conservative legal pundit, who just this year has endorsed Obama and now writes in favor of women? (Our stereotype is that people grow more conservative as they age, yet, at least on social issues, society has grown more liberal over the years, not only because the children are more liberal than parents, but because parents have grown more liberal as well.)

He attributes his views on women in law in part to having 3 daughters (2 sons). (There was a piece recently that suggested that legislators with daughters were more likely to vote for "feminist" issues than those without.)

Note that Orin Kerr and others are posting at Slate's "Convictions" blog.

Conflicting Priorities

Keith Good covers the conflicts over the farm bill. At issue, does the nation want more money for food stamps (recognizing rising food prices and unemployment), for conservation (recognizing the trend to plant more acres and farm more intensively in order to take advantage of $6 corn futures, etc.) or for farm payments (recognizing ?).

Althouse on Heston

Two striking bits from this post by Ann Althouse remembering Charlton Heston:

1. She's never seen his great films (Ben Hur, etc.). Somehow that amazes me--it shows there's less of a common culture than I had supposed. I would have thought anyone over 30 with a college degree had probably seen those films. How can you avoid Ben Hur on TV?
   
2. She initially remembers Michael Moore as being unfair to Heston in "Bowling for Columbine" when Moore pressed him with questions on the NRA, then later (to her credit) adds an admission that after rewatching the clip, it wasn't unfair. That's significant--shows how we all compress and simplify our memories, and all too often have knee-jerk reactions on the basis.

(I saw "Bowling for Columbine" after "FAhrenheit 451" and anticipated a simpler polemical piece than I saw on screen. Moore put together a surprisingly complex story there.)

Finally, my wife will remember Heston for the galley slave scene. RIP

Dairies in Poland

Elisabeth Rosenthal in the NY Times has an article on the problems of Polish dairy farmers. In the good old days, before EU, each farmer had a handful of cows (literally, since they milked by hand). The cows and the people may have lived in the same building (separate rooms). Under the EU's bureaucractic, industrialized agriculture regime, hygiene and sanitation become important, so dairies must either expand and modernize (a road that leads to 6,000 cow dairies and robot milkers), or revert to subsistence agriculture.

An excerpt:

[Farms are]"...a victim of sanitary laws and mandates to encourage efficiency and competition that favor mechanized commercial farms, farmers here say.

That conflict obviously matters to Mr. Master. But it is also of broader importance, environmental groups and agriculture experts say, as worries over climate change grow and more consumers in both Europe and the United States line up for locally grown, organic produce.

For reasons social, culinary and environmental, small farms like Mr. Master’s should be promoted, or at least be protected, they say. They not only yield tastier foods but also produce few of the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.

In part because Poland has remained one of the last strongholds of small farming in Europe, it is also a rare bastion of biodiversity, with 40,000 pairs of nesting storks and thousands of seed varieties that exist nowhere else in the world.

I think the European locavores/organic people can dream, but it's not going to work that way. The economic pressures are too great--first there will be consolidation of dairying. The modern world wants safety and consistency in its products and the best way to get them is through industrialized dairying. A few of the sons and daughters of the current dairy folk may be able to find organic/locavore niches, but only a few. (Look at France--over the last 50 years they've devoted much time and effort to preserving their agriculture, big subsidies and governmental regulation, but still the combinations and modernization has continued. Government can slow the pace and ease the pains of the transition, which I don't minimize, but not much else.)