Census Bureau To Scrap Handhelds — Cost $3 Billion 264
GovTechGuy writes "The Census Bureau will tell a House panel today that it will drop plans to use handheld computers to help count Americans for the 2010 census, increasing the cost for the decennial census by as much as $3 billion, according to testimony the Commerce Department secretary plans to give this afternoon."
Surplus (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Surplus (Score:5, Funny)
Layne
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Re:Surplus (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I think this is a good thing. Better to spend money to do things the tried and true way than to experiment with a "hi-tech" solution that may or may not have exploitable weaknesses in it. We've all seen how faulty the electronic voting machines have been, I think it's wise that the census folks don't want to go down that road.
Kudos to the Census people, and to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Neb) for supporting and encouraging their wise decision.
Re:Surplus (Score:5, Informative)
From the Article -
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That's only roughly 6000 citizens entered into each computer. Sounds like paper's more effective.
I wrote a handheld inventory and distribution control system for my company and it handles 6000 pallets every day. The handhelds cost $3000 each, can be run over by a forklift and dropped at least 5', have a barcode reader and wifi built in. My time, the hardware, and the infrastructure cost less than $50,000.
I'd say this census project was just horribly m
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That's Craaaaaaaazy (Score:3, Funny)
No wonder the project failed. Why not have them develop 1 handheld computer, and produce 525,000 units for enumerators to use?
So this is hell...the government and society from Idiocracy, without the handjobs. Sartre was right.
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It is likely that they are going to continue with the current contractor and just spread it over a lot longer time in an effort to save money and let hardware develop to a point of performance per dollar spent that makes it less expensive.
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I'm coming to take your computer back.
Yours truly,
Shade of Herman Hollerith.
Re:Surplus (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel the same way about voting machines. Test them out in a few places, get to know the equipment, and if you still figure it's going to work, you have a place to go. But this mass exodus from one system to another is just lunacy.
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RTFA (Score:2)
The $3Billion is what the paper alternative will cost now that the handhelds aren't happening.
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And let's not forget that to get a ~$600 MILLION proposal through, someone had to sell someone else on a huge cost saves. Now that they've failed to get this simple questionnaire system
Re:Surplus (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Surplus (Score:5, Insightful)
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First of all, the information on a census is more complex than counting the numbers of SKUs. It also contains sensitive personal data -- not that private industry doesn't deal with that too, but it has a thoroughly dismal record of protecting privacy. Also, while some widget might not be in the right aisle, it's not likely you'll find a bunch of stuff in a store that you di
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(BTW, does everyone now have hideous Reply to This buttons on their comment display or do I need to refresh something?)
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I've got them too. Big honking balloon-ish grey buttons. I don't mind buttons, but it would be nice if they used the same buttons as the "Post Comment" form "Preview" and "Submit" buttons. Those are much nicer.
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I know that
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Gee, thanks alot.
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Government Warehouse (Score:2)
The Ark is in the south wing; the handhelds are in the north wing in between the Roswell saucer and the automobile that runs on water.
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I certainly won't hold my breath, but they ought to sell them for a few cents on the dollar and donate the money to NASA, where funds get cut constantly, and a few million dollars goes a fairly long way.
But the current administration would probably piss it away to the DoD....idiots.
Dammit! I get a decent idea going, and then I remember the fuckers who are running this joint.
Promise and risk of electronic census. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done a census and think GPS enabled devices would greatly increase accuracy but it will also greatly increase costs. A sad fact is that people don't really go all the places they are supposed to go and honest enumerators don't last long in places that stick to quotas. GPS and time tracking devices will prove that the enumerator actually visted each and every place they should have. A mashup with something like Google maps will show if areas have been neglected. An honest census will take significantly more manpower than the one we have now.
There are, of course, the same kinds of risks we have seen with electronic voting. The only solution is to be as transparent as possible. Non free software is a no-no.
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Transparency reduces problems. (Score:2)
Making as much of the data as possible available will help you and others determine what's up to snuff. The route taken by enumerators will make it easier to tell what's been counted and what has not. GPS data can be held up to any map or satellite imaging and it can be checked on foot by people who have a problem. That kind of information is not verifiable now. Better, more verifiable data is better for everyone.
nothing new here. (Score:2)
Hmmm, yes I did provide something useful. It's amazing how people like reading informed opinion and how often people who know what they are talking about recommend free software and transparency. The US census is not incompetent but it can be improved. Improved processes and informed opinion are some of the better things you can get from Slashdot when tools like you don't fill the place up with bullshit.
It's all borrowed anyway... (Score:5, Interesting)
Just another example of the mind boggling inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current American administration. $3 billion dollars would cover roughly a week of expenses in Iraq - so the sum must be inconsequential.
Or - $3 billion dollars could pay for the college tuition of thousands of students, could dramatically raise NSF funding, or could help rebuild our roads. Don't these people even shame anymore?
One of the fun points about this is that the current Administration was elected (partially) on their supposed business expertise. Which appears to be actually true as many major businesses flub their own large scale IT projects.
Well - given that we're running a fantastic deficit, we'll just throw the extra costs of the the census project into our staggering debt.
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First, TFA says $2.2 billion to $3 billion. Second, TFA says only some of those costs are associated with the handhelds vs. paper issue; the rest is due to increases in other costs (mainly gas and postage). Third, the original contract was for $595 million for devlopment. It is
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As much as don't appreciate this current administration, I wouldn't put all the blame on them. I blame this on government an bureaucracy. Why this turned out to be so complicated in implement, beyond the changing requirement is hard to tell, then again if the range of changing requirements we that big, then this is certainly evidence of bad planning.
In Canada our census forms are available both o
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Of course a good chunk of that was lost to the bubble collapse, and a good chunk of the gain was actually spurred by events in the Bush-Sr era, but thats still why its pretty easy heh.
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Congress is as much involved in this program as Bush. The problem is that the federal government is too big, too incompetent, too focused on self-interest, and too focused on the next election cycle.
We need a revolution that gives all power back to the states and then they decide what to give a federal entity.
The founding fathers had it right in the beginning.
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Just take your BDS and shove it. If you even bothered to RTFA, (or even think outside your BDS box for a SECOND) you would see that the Census is being run by The Census Bureau. NOT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION! The waste was due to:
Why between them? Because:
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You may hate Bush, and that's fine, but blaming him for everything that you don't like is really quite silly. This is nothing more than 'Government Waste As Usual'.
Government - no matter who is in charge - is wasteful and inefficient, which is one of the reasons why it should be as small as possible.
$10/person ?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:$10/person ?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:$10/person ?!? (Score:5, Informative)
So it actually costs somewhere around $37/person to count and classify each of us, or around 7 hours of minimum-wage labor. It's far worse than you think.
Also, the handhelds were for field operatives collecting data from people who didn't send in their forms -- the cost estimate above includes the distribution and processing of paper forms that you fill out yourself, which you could reasonably expect to be cheaper than going door-to-door collecting data, thus increasing the per-person cost of personal data collection.
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If you simply mailed every household a short form with the questions that they could return with free postage, you'd get most of the same people counted, at far less cost.
Actually having people go door to door to do this seems pretty archaic.
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If they just asked "number of occupants", that would work. Some people might still miss it, but the vast majority of people would fill it out and return it.
Instead, they ask a few dozen annyingly personal questions (and that does describe the short form - Some "lucky" percentage of people get a 20
what was wrong with laptops? (Score:2)
Does each enumerator REALLY use $1k in paper? I call mega-shennanigans.
Hell they could have just bought every enumerator a macbook!
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There's got to be more to this story. FTA the original contract was $595M for 525K handhelds that were supposed to replace "costly" paper forms and maps?
Does each enumerator REALLY use $1k in paper? I call mega-shennanigans.
It's not just the physical cost of paper. Once you add in the cost of shuffling those papers around, doing the data entry, verifying the data entry, etc etc etc... it gets expensive real quick.
There's a lot of bureaucracy in the Federal Government.
OMG! That's 3 days of Iraq war spending! (Score:4, Insightful)
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So, I wonder who we're at war with.
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Just ask the CIA or NSA (Score:2, Insightful)
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The information the CIA and NSA collects on us is classified, you doofus. They have to collect it all again so they'll have an unclassified copy.
Duh.
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What a mess-- INSANE (Score:2)
In 2006, the Census Bureau awarded a $595 million contract to Harris Corp. to develop more than 525,000 handheld computers that enumerators would use to collect data from Americans who did not send in their census forms. The handhelds would replace the millions of costly paper forms and maps that enumerators must carry when going door to d
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Actually $595,000,000/525,000 = $1,133.33 per computer. While I, too, would be happy to do the job for $50,000.00 per computer, perhaps a quick refresher on approximations using exponential notation would be time well spent for you. :-)
595*10^6 / 525*10^3 =ish 1.x*10^3
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What is the #%&kin' problem?!! (Score:2, Troll)
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Why can't anyone develop a computerized voting system that exceeds every attribute of all other voting systems (inexpensive, simple, open, secure, reliable, maintainable, anonymous, auditable, etc.)?
Because very few people (and no it's not just government) have learned how to write a contract for software development, and the Big Software development companies know this. They get paid no matter if the project fails or not.
The other big failing is getting all the requirements up front and not changing them.
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Why aren't the vendors ever responsible? (Score:2)
Are government procuring agents not sophisticated enough to write a binding contract? Or are these contracts really sweetheart deals, in which it's a tacit understanding that Harris gets $595 million as a gift, and in return are not actually expected to deliver anything more than paper proof that they kept themselves really busy?
Why isn't Harris
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Great! I'd like for you to develop an application for me. I'll sign a contract to pay you $595,000 for it. But you have to agree that, if I add 400 requirements a year into development, you have to keep the original schedule or else you pay me $3,000,000.
Ready to sign? Hello?
Big Software and it's failings. (Score:2)
There's this belief that software can be developed with a "I want one of those doohickeys that makes my job easier. Give me the Final Product in 2 years" attitude. Then someone goes about trying to figure out what the doohickey is. Sometimes they do it right, other times they don't. Most of the time the people designing the system don't really know what they want.
That's fine, people don't know what they wan
about $8.50 (Score:2)
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Good sense (Score:2)
Device requirements? (Score:2)
In general, any tri or quad band cellphone with any (even very slow) data access and a real, simulated (touchscreen),
sudden outbreak of common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
1) They tested 3 years in advance.
2) When it became apparent they were no where near ready (approx. 400 new requirements) and that with the new reuirements, plus testing and training they would not meet their deadline they pulled the plug.
Now if only the private sector would learn this...
Census? Just count me out. (Score:2)
Up here in Canuckistan (you know, Canada ..) the last 2 census (censii?) I've received the detailed long questionaire. Both times, I've refused to fill them in because there are questions that are either racist or illegal, or both.
Both times, they've said I must, it's the law, I could get fined, go to jail, yada yada yada.
I just say "Fine, let's tell it to a judge."
By my census, it's me 2 : gubbimint 0.
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The last one asked "What is the ethnic origin of your parents?" This was a lame attempt to replace the "What is your race?" question from the previous census.
The ONLY way I would answer such a question is with a court order - and I'd argue against it to a
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I think that in progressive societies (societies w/o genocide, for example), understanding population characteristics, race included, could be a very useful thing. For example, finding out that one county's minority population is 13% below the poverty line, while another county's rate is only 5%. It would be useful to know
Re:Census? Just count me out. (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see ...
When you buy something at the store, you're standing in line with other members of the public, so your purchases are essentially public information, right?
When you take a book out of the library, your reading tastes are essentially public information, right?
When you visit a hospital or clinic and are sitting with strangers in a waiting room, your medical problems are essentially public information, right?
When you take a book out of the library, your reading tastes are essentially public information, right?
When you pick a dvd off the shelf to rent, your viewing interests are essentially public information, right?
When you shop for groceries, your eating habits are essentially public information, right?
When you buy a present for that someone special to surprise them, your purchase is essentially public information, right?
So, where do you draw the line?
So you would make it that aid to help people escape poverty should be targeted by skin colour, rather than need? Come on, poor is poor - when you're broke, hungry, and homeless, your skin colour doesn't make your stomach growl any less.
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Up here in Canuckistan (you know, Canada ..) the last 2 census (censii?) I've received the detailed long questionaire. Both times, I've refused to fill them in because there are questions that are either racist or illegal, or both.
That's just stupid. We need census information for service provision. If a significant proportion of people withhold their details, they have no right to complain when there aren't enough schools or hospital beds or even houses in the right places. How else are governments supposed to get demographic information?
If you don't want to include race information, just put 'Jedi' like everybody else.
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The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate reco
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The local city or county authority knows who you are by your billing information, water usage, electric usage, and cars registered to your address. Additionally, what information is not known about you from your ISP can usually be garnered from the telephone people (they hear everything you know).
I'm from the UK. The local authority has nothing to do with my utilities. Imagine the row if utility companies started supplying records to the government.
We use building permits to know how much activity is happening in new homes and home modifications and real estate records for sales of existing homes.
Building permits and real estate records tell you nothing about the use of homes, ie who lives there. Electoral records don't count the number of children or cover the needs of the community (for school/hospital planning etc).
Besides which, tax records, health service and insurance records cannot be shared across departments because of privacy la
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Not sure where you are from, but around here I don't imagine that too many illegals actually participate in the census taking. For some reason TimeWarner is apparently convinced that there are enough of them to put on EXTRA Spanish language channels though. Wonder how they knew that without accurate census data?
Part of taking a proper census is finding a way to calculate the undercount of the census. This undercount represents the number of people they think are skipping out on the census. With this knowledge you can get a fairly accurate picture even if many people skip out.
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Re:Census? Just count me out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Census? Just count me out. (Score:4, Insightful)
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If a significant proportion of people withhold their details, they have no right to complain when there aren't enough schools or hospital beds or even houses in the right places. How else are governments supposed to get demographic information?
When the teacher:student ratio starts creeping up, build more schools. When the doctor:patient ratio starts creeping up, build more hospitals. That's the beauty of capitalism. Supply and demand sort of sorts itself out. Oh that's right, you've socialized medicine so some bean counter gets to decide how many doctors per citizens are sufficient. Good luck to you.
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If we don't fight it, it becomes accepted as "the new pink" - the "norm."
We see new erosions of freedoms south of the border ... we could be next if we are not vigilant.
Bad enough we've had racist governments elected at the provincial level - the Parti Quebecois with their ethnocentric policies, dividing people into Quebecois, Bloke, and "Les Autres" (french, english, and "the others" - often spoken by the older, more ignorant generation, with a curled lip) ...
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CENSUS DATA DISPROVE GLOBAL WARMING! WORLD GETTING COLDER, NOT WARMER! FILM AT 11.
You should be able to get a "research grant" from Exxon to fund your activism.
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What's with the duplo-block-sized titles, do we suddenly have armies of babies and old people reading the site?
And to stay on-topic: my stepfather was working for the census while they considered this transition, and it was the most painful decision they had to make in all his years working there. Digitizing something as flexibl
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Re:Bzzzt, wrong! (Score:4, Informative)
I think it was a situation of the "Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing". Not an uncommon problem in both corporate AND governmental circles. Having previously worked for a company that dealt with government contracts, I can say without a doubt that it is pretty much par for the course when doing that type of work.
I'm just glad to see that the Independant panel had the good smarts to decide to just scrap it and go back to the old way. I can't imagine how much money would have been wasted trying to implement things as they were. Good-on them.
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Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing... Or, to extend your metaphor, what the feet are doing, and where you are in proverbial traffic.
I've heard that the hardest part of software development isn't writing the code, nor is it debugging, but getting the friggin' specs out of the user/customer!
Not that I'm in that industry yet, but I do statistics work for my college. They'll give me a stack of paper surveys, and say "Can you turn this into a chart? Kthx." Regular paper generally has two
Typical late changes. (Score:2)
It's hard to tell who screwed up here but it looks like the typical IT train wreck. When you follow the links, you find that the field trials produced some 417 new or improved specifications. This means the original request was inadequate or that neither party was able to forsee all of the problems. Government contracting seems to go like this, just look at the mess electronic voting is.
That's too bad because there's a lot of promise in GPS enabled enumeration [slashdot.org] and electronic voting.
Re:Bzzzt, wrong! (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears that the government shares some of the blame. 400 new/modified requirements tells me they didn't have good idea of what they needed the system to do. A system is only as good as the specification provided.
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Had you RTFA, you would have seen this:
Not sure how you get from "the government missed or mis-stated 400 requirements" to "it is a corporation that is to blame", but calling people names doesn't lend credence to your view. It's much more likely that both contractor and
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But more than likely the gist of what you and the other folks who responded said is correct: both parties probably made mistakes. I'm just tired of this cynical, "The government always screws up and waste
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That's very brave of you, Anonymous Coward.