Initial Friday Cat Blogging

The first time I've added a photo to my blog. (Takes us old people time to get caught up with new-fangled ideas. Coffee is vital to me so I wear out coffee carafes. Carrie decided the box the latest one came in was just the right size for her:

How Slowly We (Govt) Adapt to Change

From the GAO on e-mail and official records (my comments in italics):

E-mail, because of its nature, presents challenges to records management.

• First, the information contained in e-mail records is not uniform: it may concern any subject or function and document various types of transactions. As a result, in many cases, decisions on which e-mail messages are records must be made individually. Why make decisions at all?
• Second, the transmission data associated with an e-mail record--including information about the senders and receivers of messages, the date and time the message was sent, and any attachments to the messages--may be crucial to understanding the context of the record. So keep the whole thing.
  
• Third, a given message may be part of an exchange of messages between two or more people within or outside an agency, or even of a string (sometimes branching) of many messages sent and received on a given topic. In such cases, agency staff need to decide which message or messages should be considered records and who is responsible for storing them in a recordkeeping system. Again, why decide anything--keep the whole sequence.
• Finally, the large number of federal e-mail users and high volume of e-mails increase the management challenge.
  

Preliminary results of GAO's ongoing review of e-mail records management at four agencies show that not all are meeting the challenges posed by e-mail records. Although the four agencies' e-mail records management policies addressed, with a few exceptions, the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials whose e-mail practices were reviewed. Each of the four agencies generally followed a print and file process to preserve e-mail records in paper-based recordkeeping systems, but for about half of the senior officials, e-mail records were not being appropriately identified and preserved in such systems. Print and file makes no sense--electronic is cheaper

Instead, e-mail messages were being retained in e-mail systems that lacked recordkeeping capabilities. (Among other things, a recordkeeping system allows related records to be grouped into classifications according to their business purposes.) Unless they have recordkeeping capabilities, e-mail systems may not permit easy and timely retrieval of groupings of related records or individual records. Gee--I think being able to do a Google search on a body of text is a whole lot better than relying on poorly paid clerks to perform groupings according to a subject scheme that is likely 20 years out of date.

Further, keeping large numbers of record and nonrecord messages in e-mail systems potentially increases the time and effort needed to search for information in response to a business need or an outside inquiry, such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Factors contributing to this practice were the lack of adequate staff support and the volume of e-mail received. In addition, agencies had not ensured that officials and their responsible staff received training in recordkeeping requirements for e-mail. If recordkeeping requirements are not followed, agencies cannot be assured that records, including information essential to protecting the rights of individuals and the federal government, is being adequately identified and preserved.

My comments, and perhaps the emotion, date from some years associated with records management. Records management was part of the rationalization of business (see Alfred Chandler's writings)--creating, processing and filing information. But it rests on the economic fact it was costly to generate a memo (or equivalent piece of paper). You had to have a specialized individual (called a clerk-typist or secretary). She (or sometimes he) had to be able to handle multiple carbon copies for the multiple files, including something called the "official record". The piece of paper had to be routed through levels of bureaucracy until it got to an approving official. Once signed, the copies would be distributed appropriately. But all that's so 20th century.

Food Expenditures

John Phipps links to the NYTimes graphic on living expenses (which I'd read on paper, but it's a whole lot neater on line) as a great example of presentation of complex data.

What's interesting is looking at food expenditures, which are 15 percent of total. But when you mouse around the expenditures for various foods, it looks as if we're eating pretty sensibly at home. I mean snacks, misc. foods, and frozen foods together are about 1 percent of total or about 6.5 percent of food costs. That's not too bad. Vegans will have problems with all the money spent on meat (close to 2 percent). Fruits and vegetables seem to be about 1 percent of total. Dairy about 1 percent. Alcohol a little over 1 percent. Eating out about 6 percent. Coffee, tea, other drinks about 1 percent.

A little noted item--domestic service is .2 percent. Remember in the good old pre-WWI and WWII days, everyone (i.e., upper middle class and upper) had servants; now they have permanent press and fast foods.

Too Good for Your Own Good

Ah, for the days of planned obsolescence. My wife will mourn this loss of the unbreakable glass from France, as reported by Mr. Beauregard.

New Young "Farmer"

Back once again to the old question: "Who is a farmer"? Here's the blog post of a young idealist (as mentioned in the LA Times article) just starting out. She finds that FSA isn't of help.

FSA's definition is someone who is selling to a wholesale distributor and is growing on owned (albeit mortgaged) land. That's because the law authorizing loans to beginning farmers defines it that way, probably because back in the New Deal days (when the program originated) that was all we had. Now if Ms Bradbury contacted her representatives in Congress and one of them were on the appropriate committee and...and... and...20 years from now the law might be changed.

Bottomline: while the bureaucracy has its own impediments to change, our beloved founding fathers made sure the rules by which the bureaucracy operates would be slow to change.

Even Farmers Market Farmers Get Old

The LA Times has an article on the graying of farmers selling at farmers markets. An excerpt:

IN GENERAL, experts say, new farmers market growers tend to come from one of three groups: young idealists looking for a rural lifestyle, immigrants who use farmers markets to make money from small plots of land, and those like Coleman who inherit family farms.

Assuming that's right, it tells you few people go into farming to make money, even though money can be made, at least in good years like this one. Of course, that statement is also true of teachers and even public servants (as us bureaucrats like to be known).

Al Gore and Procurement Fraud

I blogged about a month ago on abuse of government credit cards and noted Al Gore's contribution. The Project on Government Oversight has this perfectly ironic note.

"One of the more ironic stories of purchase card abuse comes to us from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where a U.S. Forest Service employee, Suzanne Poetz, has pleaded guilty to stealing $300,000 from her agency's program. As part of her plea, Poetz admitted to over 150 instances of theft. But the best part of all? In 1998, Poetz received a Hammer Award from Vice President Al Gore--for developing the Agriculture Department's purchase card program. (The Hammer Awards were given to federal employees whose work "resulted in a government that works better and costs less")."

All I need to see now is a story telling how someone, maybe a Republican congressman, who pushed for contracting out government services made money by taking bribes from such a contractor.

What Should They Fear?

Economists (if "they" = "political candidates).

So says Brad DeLong

Somehow, I'm not convinced that economists are fearsome. Truman supposedly wanted a "one-armed" economist, because his always said: "on the one hand...on the other hand".

Best Result of the Night

The report that the Indiana ID law denied the vote to some nuns (no picture ID, too infirm to file a provisional ballot and then get an ID). I wonder how our mostly Catholic Supreme Court is feeling now about their recent decision upholding the law. (If I recall, the decision rested mainly on the idea that no harm had been shown--no one had been denied the vote.)

[I'm waiting for this to be revealed as a belated April Fool joke.]

Clearance Process

This article says OMB is going to rely on automated matching of data to speed clearance process.
Here's a followup article

I have some doubts--the TSA watch list shows some of the problems of putting together databases. And genealogists run into the problem regularly--does record A refer to the same person as record B? I think a learning, evolutionary process could work. By which I mean, assign something like a credit rating to a person based on available data, track the person's history and adjust the rating accordingly. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking doesn't fit with the black and white, binary choice world of security clearances.