Computers May Thwart 2010 Census

smooth wombat writes "With the Constitutionally mandated census of 2010 just around the corner, it appears the Commerce Department's attempt to use handheld computers to gather census information may not come to fruition. Originally, the contract was awarded at a cost of $596 million to Harris Corporation. However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion and the equipment may still not work properly. There is consideration that the paper and pencil method might have to be employed to complete the census."

Anyone have any idea...

[Darundal]

...what accounts for the differences in the estimate and the cost? What cost(s) were underestimated?

1% error

[Red Jesus]

He also said the computers actually are easy to use, with a failure rate of less than 1 percent when tested in the field.

One percent of three hundred million is three million.

Are you serious?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Originally, the contract was awarded at a cost of $596 million to Harris Corporation. However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion and the equipment may still not work properly.

1.4 billion is one hell of an overrun...and after all that, the equipment may still not work properly?

Is the Harris Corporation currently hiring? I'd like to get me some of that boondoggle.

Re:Anyone have any idea...

[petermgreen]

Government departments often have regulations that require them to put contracts out to tender and give them to the lowest bidder to prevent people handing out government contracts to thier friends.

The problem is if they put them out for bidding as fixed price contracts they probablly wouldn't get any bids and if they did those bids would be very high. So the bids are only estimates. Of course this makes the bidding a farce as everyone tries to put in the lowest estimate they can and sponge more money later once the governement department is locked in.

Re:Another waste of money

[drinkypoo]

BTW, I'm assuming here that a census should be just counting heads; that all of the other questions that the census people ask, such as level of education, are none of their business. The constitution requires that people be counted. The goal was to ensure proportional representation. It does not require all of the intrusive questions that they ask now.

You are not required to answer any other question on the census, either.

You can really just say "nine people live here, go away" and they will.

All that information IS necessary for the government to provide all the services they provide today in a reasonable and efficient manner.

Unfortunately, it would also require that those in charge be interested in reason or efficiency. All they want to do is separate you from money.

So, I agree, but only in that the government should get their nose out of places it doesn't belong in a more general sense. Unfortunately, we could probably argue about what those things are all day.

Re:1% error

[eepok]

Ya, people are really bad when it comes to big numbers. I was a part of a research study as an undergraduate with the following premise:

You're on a jury for a murder case with the scenario that a tan/brown man seen running away from a murder scene on a college campus. There was not enough of the attacker's DNA at the scene, but they were able to extract a DNA derivative that has matched that of a tan man in custody. Given that this derivative has a 99.9% successful rate, do you feel comfortable convicting the man in custody.

I was the only one in my group of 12 to say "No, I will not convict based on this evidence." No one else understood that .1% = 1/1000. Nor did they realize that our university alone had 20,000+ people on the campus at any time let alone that it was in the middle of a city of 200,000+.

Most people know what "fifty" is. Many know what "one hundred" is. Few understand what "one thousand" is. Too few understand the effects of millions, billions, and trillions.
There's no way I'd convict with a .1% error, there's no way I'd accept a 1% error in the business of millions.

Use the Post Office

[wile_e_wonka]

I think they should just use the post office to conduct the census. They already go to everyone's house. They could just hire some more people for the census and expand the job of the mailperson for a few months.

Paint me Blue...

[whisper_jeff]

Paint me blue and call me stupid, but really, how hard is it to make a hand-held computer designed to take and store census data? It's not like these machines need to calculate pi. It's data entry and retention. Right? How could that possibly require $2 billion dollars to implement? What am I missing? (beyond the obvious corruption and inflation of budgets to line the pockets of fat cats)

Re:Anyone have any idea...

[homey of my owney]

This is what decision by committee yields.

My Other Computer is a Pencil...

[mkcmkc]

One thing that 20+ years in the computer industry has taught me is that if you don't need a computer for a task, don't use one.

Coincidentally, my first paying job was working as a US Census enumerator for the 1980 census. Paper worked fine. The real problems were with my fellow citizens who didn't want to be enumerated (which I can understand, though calling the police on me seemed like overkill).

Finally, apropos of this topic, I recently discovered that the best "organizer" in the world is an empty file folder (or perhaps several) and a supply of sticky notes. Portable, easy to reorganize, no problem if you run your car over it, easy to back up, etc.

Re:Any history buffs out there?

[Kozz]

I remember now. I remember how it started. I can't remember yesterday. I just remember doing what they told me.

Politicians say "no" to drugs, while we pay for wars in Saudi Arabia.

Re:1% error

[SatanicPuppy]

1% is pretty good in the real world...Most hardware failure rates for hand held devices are much higher than that.

As far as 99.9% certainty...It's almost impossible to get that good in the real world. What would be your standard for guilt? Eyewitnesses, fingerprints, photos; for the most part they're not 99.9% accurate for identification purposes.

It's an ugly inductive world. You're never going to be 100%

Re:Another waste of money

[Harmonious Botch]

....the lowest income quintile keeps getting poorer. If the Federal government is going to do anything to help these people along, it needs to know a little more about them.

Why are we implicitly assuming that the feds should do anything in particular to help these people? The last thing they need is more government 'help'. The 'war on poverty' has been going on for 40+ years now, and - as noted - the poorest group is getting poorer, not wealthier.

If you think Congress makes dumb decisions, then complain about the dumb decisions. But don't cut off their access to information that could help them make better decisions.

Parent - and congress - seem to assume that if you just knew enough about people, you could make good decisions for them. The latest atack on poverty didn't work? Well we just need more data.

But the fact is that you can never know enough about a person's needs and circumstances as the person himself. Leave him alone, quit meddling in his life, lower his taxes ( by not wasting his money on cencus boondogles ) and he will probably get rich on his own.

Republicans are "Computers"?

[Doc Ruby]

So how does yet another Republican boondoggle contract for an essential government service mean that "computers" will thwart the 2010 Census? Are these incompetent Republicans really just a computer simulation?

Maybe this really is all just some kind of Y2K bug VR nightmare. Would someone please reboot Gore, so I can go back to watching _the Simpsons_ when it was still funny?

It is done elsewhere

[Thelasko]

This is not new and pioneering technology. There are companies [acnielsen.com] that take similar surveys for market research purposes. Have you ever been asked to take a survey at a mall? Have you ever been at a bar when a beautiful woman with a tablet computer asks you to take a survey about cigarettes? I have. The Government is wasting billions of dollars to develop technology that has existed for years.

Why doesn't the government just outsource the whole census to a market research company and be done with it?

Re:Are you serious?

[Tablizer]

The more pressing question on my mind is why they haven't been sued into oblivion. How can you seriously get away with that?

Something this large and complex probably results in "gripe room" for both sides. The company can probably cite delays or problems with information, personal, staff testing, etc. that the gov't was supposed to supply but was either late with or bungled. And there's probably some vague contract wording that can be used as a weapon by both sides. It's an age-old dance with these kinds of contracts.
   

Re:Anyone have any idea...

[Dahamma]

Which is why I've always felt that the process should pick the second lowest bid. It's trivial to shoot for the bottom ... it's impossible to shoot for second from the bottom.

Unless there are only two bidders.

Good old government waste.

[MaWeiTao]

They could have purchased hundreds or thousands of off-the-shelf PDAs and had a company develop a basic piece of census-tracking software for a mere fraction of what this project costs. Instead they'll argue they need some elaborate, over-priced piece of hardware under the pretense that only something so fancy can reliably handle the government's needs. The best part is that the devices might not even work properly. What in the hell are these companies doing that even with this much money thrown at them they can't do anything right?

Still, that doesn't excuse the government's stupidity. It's like that stimulus package. As if enough money hasn't already been dumped into that some halfwit decided they needed to send out letters informing recipients that they were going to be receiving these checks. In many cases these notices will be arriving barely a month before the check arrives. Sending these letters out has cost the government over $40 million.

It's time the government's budget were capped at the rate of inflation making allowances only for population growth. It's time they learned how to manage their expenses like the rest of us have to.

Re:Anyone have any idea...

[SourceVisigoth]

I could buy that argument if it were possible to recruit, train, and manage 800,000+ people who have decent technical skills for a low paying, short term job. Keep in mind that that most non-response follow-up enumerators work for 2-3 months tops, make around $12/hour, are part-time, and have no particular interest in data integrity or security.

The decennial census absolutely needs to be a turn-key operation for the tens of thousands of local recruiters and trainers. When you have an organization that expands from 20,000 people to nearly a million for the span of a few months, you simply can't demand that they "Just hire smarter people!". People with good technical skills and no other job/commitment just don't exist in those numbers.

Re:Major IT failures seem so common

[DerekLyons]

Bet if you did a study, a serious one, you'd find there's an irrefutable inverse relationship between the amount of money bid for a project and the success of that project.

I can refute it without even breaking a sweat. The Manhattan Project. The Apollo Project. The creation of the Polaris, Atlas, and Titan missiles... The creation of nuclear powered ships... Etc... Etc... Big ticket projects all - unqualified successes all.
 
 

I mean, what is it with these large scale IT projects? They take a simple problem and turn it into a money pit. Here in the UK we've had several high profile massive budget IT failures in the last 10 years, air traffic control, national health patient record databases, in fact the more critical it is the more of a spectacular unqualified fuck-up it becomes.

Mostly because we really don't have all that much experience building huge monolithic IT projects from scratch and to spec. The vast majority of the [truly tremendously] big IT projects to date (the telephone system, the networks big banks use, etc...) have been built piecemeal and grown from small beginnings.
 
 

Now, if you got a couple of average hacker nerds and gave then the same specs, but didn't tell them it was for a large scale project, or for whom, they would give you a faultless solution using commodity hardware, stock methods and free software in a few months at one *millionth* the cost we're looking at here. Every one of you here knows it to be true.

I know it's a common conceit of IT workers to believe so. I don't believe for a single second that it's true. 'Average Hacker Nerds' have essentially zero experience in building large systems, triply so for distributed ones.
 
 

So, my question is, what goes wrong? How can it possibly go so wrong? Are the people involved complete idiots? Or corrupt?

Or, just maybe, the projects are Really Hard in extremely specialized project domains.
 
 

What are the factors that turn a simple software project into an impossible task?

The persistent belief that these projects are 'simply software' and thus easy to do. Especially among people with essentially zero knowledge of the problem domain(s) and the issues involved.

Re:Horrible...

[Anonymous Coward]

Two reasons:

#1) It's nobody's damned business what private citizens do with their lives.
#2) The 8th Amendment precludes the government from making most of the "decisions with billions of dollars at stake" such as entitlement programs. But that old document hasn't mattered for more than 50 years.

Re:Anyone have any idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I work for Census, on another project on this contract.

I don't know where your information is coming from, but it's not true. My boss mentioned she heard it on the radio this morning and was wondering who said that and why.

The problem is essentially that the software doesn't work the way it's supposed to, for a multitude of reasons. Our training and manuals are very good - I'm reviewing some now, and I was impressed with how well they explain the software and procedures. Our debriefing notes from the people that worked on operations that are already completed for the 2008 Dress Rehearsal reflect very few problems with the training/manuals.

Also, by the way, when you are hiring 500,000 people (yes!) who probably don't already have full-time jobs (because they don't have time to work on the Census), you sort of have to plan for getting people with low educations and the like.