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Brazil Using Smartphones For Planning the Future
shafiur writes "Brazil has bought 150,000 LG smartphones and has embarked on the world's first fully digital national census. Can they succeed when the US recently failed to go digital? The Brazilians say that the digital census has several advantages over paper and pen methods. They say that the data is more accurate since GPS data will pinpoint the exact location of a household. The GPS data is cross-referenced with satellite images to ensure that responses are correctly geo-tagged. The recently begun census will underpin future publicy-making decisions."
The claim that the US process cost 10x as much I imagine has more to do with the fact that the Census is a labor intensive process. So intensive that it altered our unemployment rates briefly.
So yes the cost per person was about 10x higher in the US but the cost per hour for a census employee was probably considerably higher as well.
The Brazilian Census cost about $1B USD. Of that only $75M was for their hardware. So in neither scenario was hardware cost significant. I doubt we spent $13B more than the Brazilians on developing custom hardware that we didn't use--so it's bad journalism and misleading reporting to suggest in the same sentence that our solution to develop custom hardware was an example of US waste.
Furthermore if we have 30% more people in the US that means we would need 320,000 census devices. That's not a bad run of a product and I would say safely warrants custom hardware. Especially if you could create a far less expensive device. slow RISC Processor + Basic software + Broad-com chip w/ AGPS should be less than $100 to make. This is the census we're talking about. 7 questions. You don't need anything more than a TI-83, GPS and an 3G antenna to make that an effective product. I would be surprised if you couldn't make something which uses less than $20 in wholesale components.
Also, Brazil is a relatively wealthy country.
In the US, you worry about the government spying on you or infringing on your rights, while giving the corporations free pass to fuck you in the butthole all day and night.
In the Nordic countries, we make sure our elected representatives and civil servants are people who do the right thing, in addition to expecting them to protect us from corporations too.
Worrying about civil liberties? You guys won't even allow homosexuals to marry, wtf is that for civil liberties... Stop living in the 19'th century, as America is no longer the bastion of civil liberties it once was. It's frankly quite insulting and ignorant point of view that more shows your ignorance than anything else.
BTW, per capita cost of health care in Norway (the most expensive country to live in in the world) costs less than half what it costs in the US, yet covers everyone. I believe that should be classed under 'nannying is damned cheap' if done using the Northern Europe style public management.
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