What's Possible and What's Not

The Priest/Arkin series on the post 9/11national security bureaucracy is filled with interest.  As a sidelight, two small scenarios show the difference between what's possible in IT and what isn't.  Here's what's possible:

To understand how these firms have come to dominate the post-9/11 era, there's no better place to start than the Herndon office of General Dynamics. One recent afternoon there, Ken Pohill was watching a series of unclassified images, the first of which showed a white truck moving across his computer monitor.
The truck was in Afghanistan, and a video camera bolted to the belly of a U.S. surveillance plane was following it. Pohill could access a dozen images that might help an intelligence analyst figure out whether the truck driver was just a truck driver or part of a network making roadside bombs to kill American soldiers.
To do this, he clicked his computer mouse. Up popped a picture of the truck driver's house, with notes about visitors. Another click. Up popped infrared video of the vehicle. Click: Analysis of an object thrown from the driver's side. Click: U-2 imagery. Click: A history of the truck's movement. Click. A Google Earth map of friendly forces. Click: A chat box with everyone else following the truck, too.

And here is what's not possible,  from the first article:

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

So, in one case IT is able to correlate information from different sources into one presentation; in the other it's unable to.

Why the difference? This is just speculation, but I see two key differences. In the first instance different kinds of information are being brought together and the sources of data probably were created within the last 5 years.  In the second instance similar kinds of information from different bureaucracies are coming in, and probably all of them had deep historical roots.  (For example, FBI's case file system dates back to J. Edgar Hoover's prime in the 1920's.)

Best Sentence of July 23

"But who expected in 2003 that in 2010, the president of the United States would have "Hussein" in his name but the president of Iraq wouldn't?"  Tom Ricks at the Best Defense

Curves

My mind's on curves. Not female curves, but something more nerdy. 

• On the one hand, there's the curves of economics.  I'll probably get the terms wrong, but there's a supply/demand curve that shows for any price there's a market clearing point at which supply and demand are in equilibrium.  And implicit in that, or maybe something else, is a curve that shows the marginal cost of producing something declines as production goes up--mass production saves money in other words.
• There's also the learning curve.  The more time you've spent making stuff/learning a subject, the easier it is. 
• Finally in my thoughts is the Pareto 80/20 rule.  Now it's not usually talked of as a curve, but if you visualize it you can see it.  To me, it's the exact opposite of the supply/demand curve and the learning curve.  I used to use it in discussing software development.  It would be easy to do software to handle simple cases, but as the cases got more difficult it would become harder and take longer.

It seems this week I've got more questions than answers; because in this case I can't figure out how the curves work together, if they do.  Or is it just a case of different tools for different situations.

Must Reading for Those Discouraged by the State of Dialog on the Web

See this post of Dan Drezner's.

Bureaucratic Triage

I'm musing on a question, stimulated by the Sherrod uproar: is it ever right for a bureaucrat to discriminate (in the technical sense, not the pejorative sense) among his clients/customers/public and, if it is, for what reasons? We all agree a bureaucrat working on behalf of the public should not/may not discriminate based on race, religion, etc. But what discriminations are appropriate and why?

I'm thinking about MASH, or other hospital shows, which show a triage process.  If you consider the medical staff to be bureaucrats, then they're discriminating among their clients, but using criteria which normally we'd endorse. 

There used to be a field called operations research, coming out of the whiz kids and WWII, which tried to evaluate different strategies for handling customers: first come, first served; express lines, etc.  Is first come, first served discriminatory?   Or is giving priority to the simple cases, which speeds average throughput, be discriminatory?  Is it okay if you're transparent about your algorithm?

We all know, I think, that some people get treated better than others for reasons of personality.  Is that ever right?

No answers today, but it's an interesting question.

Sherrod: The Albany Movement, New Communities, and Pigford

Shirley Sherrod's husband was one of the leaders of the Albany Movement. 

Apparently they were leaders of the New Communities: 

One of the most important initiatives of the Southwest Georgia Project was the organization of New Communities, Inc., a land trust. By January 1970, the group had purchased nearly 6000 acres of land in Lee County Georgia, which made it the largest single land mass owned by Blacks in the United States. The purpose of the project was to upgrade the quality of life of rural, poor, and mostly Black communities by offering meaningful employment, creating economic leverages to ensure and improve the income of small farmers, and ownership opportunities for its settlers.

Apparently the trust ended up losing the land, under circumstances which led to the award under the Pigford suit.  At this early date it's not clear the ins and outs of how the Sherrods' relate to the money awarded--are they still trustees and who would be the beneficiaries. Fox has a piece here.  My guess is that New Communities was one of the case subsumed under the Pigford class action suit.  The suit was resolved by having two tracks:  Let me quote from the 2005 CRS report:

The Pigford consent decree basically establishes a two-track dispute resolution mechanism for those seeking relief. The most widely-used option — Track A — provides a monetary settlement of $50,000 plus relief in the form of loan forgiveness and offsets of tax liability. Track A claimants had to present substantial evidence (i.e., a reasonable basis for finding that discrimination happened) that
! claimant owned or leased, or attempted to own or lease, farm land;
! claimant applied for a specific credit transaction at a USDA county office during the applicable period;
! the loan was denied, provided late, approved for a lesser amount than requested, encumbered by restrictive conditions, or USDA failed to provide appropriate loan service, and such treatment was less favorable than that accorded specifically identified, similarly situated white
farmers; and
! the USDA’s treatment of the loan application led to economic damage to the class member.

Alternatively, class participants could seek a larger, tailored payment by showing  evidence of greater damages under a Track B claim. Track B claimants had to prove their claims and actual damages by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., it is more likely than not that their claim is valid). The documentation to support such a claim and the amount of relief are reviewed by a third party arbitrator, who makes a binding decision. The consent decree also provided injunctive relief, primarily in the form of priority consideration for loans and purchases, and technical assistance in filling out forms

7
Finally, plaintiffs were permitted to withdraw from the class and pursue their individual cases in federal court or through the USDA administrative process.

Sounds to me as if the New Communities must either have been a Track B, or an individual case. Although I've reservations about Pigford issues, the Track B cases are the most likely awards to be warranted, IMHO. And without knowing how awards are computed, the current market value of 6,000 acres of Georgia farmland would be high.

[Updated: it's possible the suit was outside Pigford entirely--no doubt this will be clarified as time goes on.]

The Blindness of the Chattering Class

One common meme among the chattering class in discussions of how to fix the deficit is to mock the great American public. Polls often show the public preferring to cut foreign aid as their first choice to fix the deficit, not realizing how small a percentage of the budget is spent on foreign aid.

But, as the Bible used to say, remember the beam in your eye before the mote in your neighbor's eye. The chattering classes, both right (Breitbart et.al.) and left (Vilsack and NAACP) missed the lies in the framing of the Sherrod video.  The main one: that RD spends $1.2 billion in Georgia is easily debunked if you have a sense of the numbers.  My thought process:

• how big is Georgia--don't know, but Atlanta has been growing, so let's say it's 15 million people.  
• the U.S. is something over 300 million, so Georgia is 1/20 of the US.
• if Georgia gets 1/20 of the RD funds, that means RD is spending $25 billion total.
• no way RD spends that much.  The USDA budget is somewhere around $100 billion, about 50-60 percent food stamps and other nutrition programs, etc. $15-20 billion for farm programs, doesn't leave much for all of the rest.

Now I haven't checked my accuracy, except to find I overestimated Georgia's population and, to find RD spends closer to $1.2 billion nationally

Shirley Sherrod's Speech, Book to Follow?

I have to apologize to Shirley Sherrod.  From the video bit, I thought she wasn't the best story teller.  But reading the transcript of the full speech (well, almost the full speech--I guess the transcriber got bored when she started on the Rural Development programs) she's pretty good.  I think she's a bit younger than I, so I remember some--the sheriff she mentions who fined everyone coming through the county.

Not great--she says growing up she wanted to leave the farm, get away, go north and get herself a Northern husband.  But she ended up marrying someone in the civil rights movement.

About now there should be a handful of journalists contacting her and offering to write her memoirs.

There are some things she describes which fit into the Pigford case.  I may incorporate them into a future post.
[Updated--she and her husband apparently won the biggest award under Pigford--I say apparently because the release here isn't quite as explicit as I'd like.]
[Update 2--her husband, Charles Sherrod, has a short bio here.]

15 Minutes of Fame, Zero to a Million Hits

Andy Warhol famously said everyone had 15 minutes of fame.  Somewhat along the same lines, is anyone keeping records on how fast people get their fame--I'm thinking of the skyrocketing number of hits for "Shirley Sherrod"?   Now it takes about 15 minutes for people to get their 15 minutes.

2 Cents on Shirley Sherrod

In response to a request from a reader, here's my two cents on Shirley Sherrod (Google if you haven't heard it). (I've started a longer post which takes off from the episode, but it's not really on point.)

• The subtitles added to the video, either by Breitbart or Fox, are clearly lies. The video excerpt dates the episode to the 1980's (right after Chapter 12 bankruptcy was passed for farmers), so Sherrod's talk is not describing her current work or attitudes.
• There's no way in hell that Rural Development spends $1.2 billion in Georgia each year. They might possibly have that amount in outstanding loans made in Georgia, but that would represent several years worth. RD has three categories, which are mostly making loans and guaranteeing loans: Rural Business, Rural Utilities (the old Rural Electrification Agency), and Rural Housing. Here's a link to the USDA budget for 2011, RD begins on page 56. 
• It's not that clear from the video clip, but Sherrod is not describing a federal job--as she says she assumed the farmer was referred to her from USDA or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. So she probably had no legal obligation to treat applicants equally. (In the mid 80's there were lots of farmers going  under.)

 Personally, I find her current explanation believable, as apparently do some conservatives--Glenn Beck right now looks (5:08 pm)  as if he's going to pivot to trashing Vilsack/Obama for pushing her out.  I guess miracles do happen.

Regardless of how the episode turns out,there's no way Fox News should have run the video with the obvious errors in the text.