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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."
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.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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:
.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+.
.1% error, there's no way I'd accept a 1% error in the business of millions.
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
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
The whole census survey took about 15 minutes. They collected a lot of data - I'd say there were between 60 and 80 questions. Since I'm a geeky sort of person, I asked the kid how it worked and he showed me - the PDA (a Compac Pocket PC) just ran a macro in MS Office which dumped each survey as a file into a folder. That folder synced via wireless/mobile-phone link to where the main data center was.
The country has a population of about 4 million, and he said there were 200 people doing the survey for several months. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I can't imagine it cost that much - certainly labor and not the PDAs was the primary expense.
A-Bomb
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 know it sounds like a flippant witticism, but I'm sure of it, do the research and the figures will prove a direct *causal link* between the amount of money put in and project failure.
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.
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. So, my question is, what goes wrong? How can it possibly go so wrong? Are the people involved complete idiots? Or corrupt?
What are the factors that turn a simple software project into an impossible task? Is it the stress of high budgets? Too many crooks spoiling the broth? And more to the point, when is some bright person going to break from this pattern of failure and realise that to award a major government IT contract to *more than one* complete no-name outsiders bidding a fraction of the cost makes more sense than giving billions of dollars to one contractor and putting all your eggs in one basket?