Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Politicians and newspapers talking about upcoming scheduled cuts in government spending are concentrating on the dire consequences from any cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The implication is that this is an agency with no fat and any cuts will go straight to the bone. (They probably felt that way in Spain when they couldn’t pay air traffic controllers $1.2 million per year anymore; in 2011 they started a process of competitive bidding for control tower operation and the results have been a roughly 50 percent cost saving (source).)

This gives me a chance to recycle my June 2011 posting about how three FAA employees came out to my house on two separate occasions and from as far away as Florida in order to make sure that I was surprising myself with random drug tests… of myself.  Also to point out the 2004 Government Accounting Office report that says “Historically, the modernization program has experienced cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls of large proportions and has been on our list of high-risk programs since 1995. To date, FAA has spent $41 billion and expects to spend an additional $7.6 billion through fiscal year 2007.” Have things improved since then? This fiscal year 2013 report says “Increasing airspace capacity and reducing flight delays depend on the successful implementation of the En Route Automation Modernization program (ERAM)—a $2.1 billion system to replace hardware and software at FAA’s facilities that manage high-altitude traffic. FAA originally planned to complete ERAM by the end of 2010. However, software problems have impacted the system’s ability to safely manage and separate aircraft and raised questions as to what capabilities ERAM will ultimately deliver. FAA rebaselined the program in 2011, which pushed its expected completion to 2014 and increased cost estimates by $330 million.” Four years and $330 million over budget… but actually “If software problems persist, the program’s cost growth could exceed $500 million, and delays could stretch out to 2016.”

It seems safe to assume that the FAA is representative of other federal agencies, neither dramatically worse or better in terms of efficiency.

If the unprecedented did occur and federal spending were to be cut it would be interesting to see what these agencies would do. Companies get more efficient when revenue falls but they have to worry about competitors. A government agency with no competition could simply cut back on services delivered. On the other hand, the agency could do that even without a budget cut if they were truly indifferent to output and productivity. Perhaps it is fear of being privatized or having responsibilities assumed by another agency that drives government agencies to try to deliver services. If so, in the event of a cut they should be motivated to do as much as possible with the available funds.

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The New York Times published an article yesterday about how people who donated money to senators and election-related groups such as the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee earned billions of dollars in additional profits from selling software that typically has few benefits for patients or society (see this January posting).

In that January posting I talked about how a system such as Google Docs would deliver, for free, most of the benefits of the systems for which our society is now spending tens of billions of dollars. One of my spies within Google sent me the following email in response:

In the days immediately after the Haiti earthquake there was a severe problem around collecting basic patient information and records… folks were getting moved between medical camps, doctors were moving around, all sorts of workers from different non-profits were helping out in different areas with no information sharing standards. Frequently patients would go to different doctors and due to the lack of infrastructure – buildings, power, etc., there were basically no medical records or patient histories being collected ever, which caused problems if one doctor prescribed medicine and then the patient went to another doctor, lots of wasted effort collecting the same information every time a patient came in, etc.

Anyway the google.org engineers came up with a total hack that they wanted to try out – create a Google Apps for Business domain, stick every doctor and nurse into it with an account, and then setup an enormous domain-wide shared Google Docs folder where anyone could put patient histories. Each patient history would be a single doc with the patient’s name and everything was appended as text. They thought the cell network could be kept up and running on generators so they made a really simple iPhone app (at the time very few doctors were using Android) that used the Docs APIs to make it a little bit easier to find patient records and append text to them.

They got the whole thing working in a couple of days; I don’t know how widely it was deployed, I was only involved briefly at the beginning when they needed to figure out how to set up the domain and provision users and came to the Enterprise team with questions. It was interesting how the requirements affected their design – because of the totally absurd time-crunch – people were dying and they needed to make efficient use of the doctors – basically all the requirements around privacy of information, structured records, limiting who can see whose data and keeping audit trails, etc – went out the window. And once they were gone it was actually a really easy system to build and deploy.

It is a little bit interesting that the New York Times never loses its enthusiasm for Big Government. They publish articles lauding proposals by politicians to spend billions in taxpayer money on something that is supposed to do a lot of good. Then a year later the newspaper will publish an article about how great it is that the do-gooding is actually happening. Then a year or two later the newspaper will do a follow-up about how much or most of the money turned out to be wasted, funneled into the pockets of cronies, etc. These cycles continue, usually about 50 of them in parallel, without the Times ever running an article on how government spending tends to be wasteful and to result in the enrichment of cronies.

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A friend of mine is involved with Kids on Computers, a non-profit organization that sets up computer labs in schools in poor/remote regions of the world. This is how my old laptop computers make it down to Oaxaca. I have a simple Windows 7 Lenovo 13″ laptop whose broken screen did not seem worth replacing until I tried Windows 8. As an experiment, and with the ultimate goal of eventual donation to Avni Khatri and Kids on Computers, my friend John and I decided to see how hard it would be to replace the Lenovo’s screen.

It turns out that buying the screen is a little tough. Given the number of laptops that are dropped you’d think that Amazon.com would sell these or that they’d be at the local Best Buy, but in fact http://www.laptopscreen.com/ was the only source that we could find. A $65 investment, including shipping, resulted in the arrival of a new LCD screen in a box. The site has helpful videos showing consumers installing the screens. Using some inappropriately large household tools, John and I were able to get the new screen installed and working in about 10 minutes.

I wonder why this isn’t a more popular home craft project given that it actually takes less time than driving to a store to have someone else do it (and a quick Google search indicates that repair shops charge a lot more than $65 to do this work).

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Folks:

I came back from Antarctica with a bunch of panoramic photos made with a Sony DSC-RX100, a truly awesome point and shoot camera that, set to “green idiot mode”, produced far better JPEGs than the $3000 Canon EOS 5D Mark III. The little Sony has a nice feature for showing panoramics on its rear LCD. You press a button and the photo is expanded to occupy the full vertical height of the rear LCD and then slowly scrolls from right to left.

I’d like to replicate this interface on a Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, but so far I can’t find any software that does it. All of the software is either entirely (1) unaware of panoramas and has no option to set the zoom so that the height of the image matches the height of the monitor, (2) a little bit aware and premised on the idea that the viewer wants to be active with a mouse to pan and zoom.

Ideally I would like a slide show that displays one panorama at a time, first shrunken to fit and then panned right to left or left to right. I guess this could be done in Javascript but it seems that the software should exist already somewhere.

Ideas?

Here’s an example of one of the photos (click twice to download the original file):

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Looking at the news today, some friends and I were attracted to photos of the Carnival Triumph being towed back to port and of Hugo Chavez’s daughters visiting their beloved papa in a Cuban hospital. As there presumably won’t be a tremendous near-term demand for leisure cruises on the Triumph it occurred to me that perhaps the engine-room fire on the Triumph represents a great opportunity for the U.S. taxpayer.

Seventeen percent of Floridians are age 65 and older, i.e., nearly 3.5 million people. That’s the age at which an American becomes eligible for Medicare, i.e., a cash cow for the local doctors and hospitals. America is chronically short of doctors while Cuba has a large surplus of physicians. Cuban doctors must be doing a pretty reasonable job since life expectancy in Cuba is higher than in the U.S. Also, it seems doubtful that Hugo Chavez would choose second-rate care for himself when his life is at stake.

The Carnival Triumph can cruise at about 22 knots, which means that it could cross the 90 miles of water that separate Florida from Cuba in about 4 hours. Why not set the ship up as an ambulatory care clinic staffed with Cuban doctors? The ship can sail every day from Florida to Cuba and back. Any Medicare patient who can be treated on board will enjoy the round-trip sail, the waterslide park, and the rest of the amenities on board. Any Medicare patient whom the doctors deem to require more extensive treatment can get off in Cuba and be admitted to a hospital there for a procedure to be performed at a tiny fraction of the cost to the U.S. taxpayer.

The Triumph would leave every morning at around 8:00 am. Medicare clients would enjoy a Cracker Barrel breakfast on board the ship. The ship would arrive in Cuba at 12 noon. Those who were well enough to walk could enjoy a stroll around Havana. The Triumph would pick up patients returning from hospital care in Cuba and anyone who’d been enjoying the sights, then depart around 2:30 pm. An early bird special dinner would be served on board starting at 5 pm, with an arrival back in Key West at 6:30 pm.

As the Triumph holds approximately 3000 people, approximately 1 million patient-days of ambulatory care could be delivered each year via this means, plus however many days of hospital care delivered to those who stayed in Cuban for a few days. If we assume that each procedure performed by a Cuban team rather than a U.S. team saves Medicare an average of $500, operating the ship should conservatively save U.S. taxpayers $500 million per year while relieving Carnival of an embarrassment.

Anyone have a better idea for what to do with the Triumph?

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American Airlines and US Airways propose to merge to top the list of world’s largest airlines. According to this WSJ article on a 2012 J.D. Power survey, American and US Airways  were near the bottom in customer satisfaction among U.S. legacy carriers, all of which as a group were disliked compared to newer carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest. In fact, US Airways, whose management team will be running the combined behemoth, ranked dead last among all U.S. airlines.

In a free market it would be surprising if the folks who delivered the worst customer experience ended up with the largest market share. So to what can we attribute this spectacle?

• the airline market is not free: (1) carriers such as US Airways and American that are allocated international routes end up with an almost insuperable advantage over carriers that don’t get these handouts from government, (2) efficient foreign carriers such as Ryanair are prohibited by the U.S. government from taking Americans from New York to Chicago, which they could do for 25 percent lower costs than Southwest and JetBlue
• the airline market works, but sluggishly due to the long lead time for ordering new airplanes (this seems less plausible given how many airliners are leased from big neutral leasing companies such as AIG and GE Capital and could be moved quickly from one carrier to another)
• customer satisfaction surveys are meaningless; consumers will fold themselves into the cramped coach seats of a hated carrier such as US Airways or American if it is $10 cheaper

[Separately, for those who are concerned about the apparent lack of fairness in the American economic system, Tom Horton, the guy who impoverished American Airlines shareholders while earning a $3.3 million annual salary (source), will receive an additional $20 million in severance pay (source). Plus, since a guy with $20 million in the bank won’t be able to afford the new fares that American, United, and Delta are able to collude on, he also gets to fly for free for the rest of his life on American. (The shareholders of AMR, who might have invested hard-earned funds as early as 1930, are getting a 3.5 percent stake in the new merged company, worth about $350 million supposedly; when Tom Horton came back to AMR in 2006 the shareholders had something worth about $6 billion (source).)]

Related: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

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I’m just back from a trip to Antarctica that, incidentally, required staying a few days in Argentina. Considering that the country was the fourth richest in the world it is shocking how far it has fallen in the last 100 years. The CIA Factbook puts per-capita purchasing-power adjusted GDP somewhere in the middle of the world’s nations, but the statistic doesn’t square up to the realities of life in a country where people have to stare at the ground whenever walking down the sidewalk (to avoid tripping over broken pavement, stepping in dog poop, or tripping over discarded bags of trash). Also, now that the government is a little over a year into its money-printing campaign it is hard to know what things cost. Do you use the official required-by-law exchange rate of 5 pesos to the dollar or the real one of 8? The CIA says that Chile has about the same per-capita income but in fact material life in Chile seems much richer, with newer cars, functional systems, etc.

I last visited Argentina about 10 years ago, shortly after the “peso crisis”, and the country does not seem to be in better shape now than then.

Things that don’t work in Argentina:

• Internet: incredibly slow in most hotels; a hotel owner in Buenos Aires told me that he has connections from both the cable company and the phone company so as to have a good chance of being able to use one. “It will go out for a few days at a time and I’ll call and they say they’re working on it.”
• Post Office: Hotel clerks didn’t know how to send a postcard.  There are no mailboxes on street corners. I asked an Argentine friend how this could be and he replied “you should know the mail system doesn’t work! people don’t use mail there, they walk to banks to pay bills and use couriers for the rest. I haven’t seen a letter come or go in decades. If you mail something (from there or to there) it goes to /dev/null”
• Domestic airline flights: The roughly 180 people on our Antarctica cruise suffered a variety of sudden schedule changes, delayed checked luggage (for which there were no explanations and the fancy bar coded tags were never scanned in at the origin airport so they couldn’t be tracked), unexplained late departures, etc.
• Getting out: On a Monday night it took almost two hours of standing in line to check in at United Airlines (1 hour; the airline was operating a total of two flights that night), get through security (30 minutes; four metal detectors working and one idle), and be photographed and fingerprinted at passport control (20 minutes).

It is not hard to see why people would be unenthusiastic about doing business here.

I’d be interested to know readers’ thoughts on how Argentines have managed to accomplish this economic nosedive.

One theory would be to blame the political system. Argentina has a democracy, a system for handing out the fruits of economic growth to political cronies, in an economy with minimal growth. In order to get elected or remain in power, politicians are forced to hand out massive amounts of public wealth to various interest groups. This results in a huge drag on folks who are trying to earn money without political connections.

Another theory would be to blame a nationwide attempt to get something for nothing. It seems that Argentina has tried virtually every possible method of getting wealthier except working harder. The current government has currency controls, an official exchange rate, laws against changing money at the real rate, a variety of export and import controls, etc. Graffiti demands “Bread. Work. Justice.” This theme has been echoed in demonstrations since the 19th century and is depicted in a 1934 oil painting by Antonio Berni at the MALBA art museum (see accompanying photo album). It is hard to think of a country where mass demonstrations of people demanding that they be made wealthier has resulted in an actual increase in average wealth (the Greeks are trying this right now!).

Finally one could look at the Argentines themselves. The government didn’t throw trash in the streets. It was in each case an individual who was too lazy to walk a block or so to a dumpster. Nor did the government decide to walk a dog without carrying a pick-up bag. On my 2003 trip to the country I remember a young man telling me that the American government, especially the CIA, was responsible for keeping Argentina down. I pointed out that the U.S. government had been unable to get rid of Fidel Castro, 90 miles off the Florida coast, despite four decades of trying. What made him think that the same government was somehow able to stop him, 5000 miles farther south, from going to college or manufacturing a product and selling it to the Chinese?

I’d be interested to hear from readers who’ve lived in Argentina. Meantime, check my photo album.

[I do recognize that Argentina’s comparative material poverty does not mean that the U.S. is a better place to live. The life of the soul can be richer in Latin American countries, as I note in http://philip.greenspun.com/non-profit/. In a society where it is more difficult to get ahead with hard work people generally spend more time with friends and family. Also, the layout of Latin American towns fosters easier social connections than the U.S. with its bleak lonely suburbs.]

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President Obama wants more 4-year-olds to go to “preschool” (a.k.a. “day care”) rather than being home with a parent or relative. People are debating the merits of having a child learn from a day care worker rather than from a parent or relative. What I haven’t seen is a discussion of what the effect is likely to be on childhood obesity.

As the parent of a three-year-old and the owner of lenses from 8mm to 600mm, I spend a lot of time at an upscale preschool/day care center as one of the “yearbook photographers.” Oftentimes I see the same kids outside of their school. One thing that I have observed is that the children are much less physically active than the same children at home, in a museum, or at a friend’s house. First of all, the preschool needs to do crowd control. There are footprints painted on the floor in front of the sink, for example. Before snack or lunchtime the kids will line up on these footprints and wait until it is their turn to wash. A child at home who wanted to go out would throw on a coat, hat, and gloves and run out the door. A child in day care must wait for the 15th child to finish this process while standing patiently on a painted footprint. Instead of running out the door the child must hold onto a rope so that the teachers can verify that nobody is unaccounted for. Out of a 7-hour day care day the children get about 45 minutes of outdoor unrestricted running around time.

Once indoors it is often the case that there is one teacher in charge of 15 children. There are, by law, additional workers in the room, but they are often busy cleaning up from the previous activity and/or setting up the next meal or other activity. The easiest way for an adult to control 15 children is to tell them “sit on your bottom” and then allow only one child at a time to speak, touch a musical instrument, or get up and retrieve something. A lot of stuff is “serialized” as we say in the world of computer nerddom. One child does while 14 children sit and watch.

A friend of mine who is a medical doctor and mother of two said “Even when it is not explicit, day care encourages children to be sedentary. The teachers will subtly reinforce that a child sitting quietly is a good child and a child running around is a bad child. Even if they aren’t aware of it themselves and aren’t saying anything directly, the teachers reward the children who don’t move.”

I have a bunch of friends who are stay-at-home parents. Their children behave like members of a different species. They literally run laps around the yard or a tennis court while the day care children are saying “I want to go back in the house.” The non-day care kids are much harder to manage in the home, running, jumping, climbing, etc. The day care child plays with magnetic tiles. The non-day care child puts the magnetic tiles on top of a T and hits them across the room with a baseball bat (I witnessed this just on Tuesday!). His younger sister is apparently getting ready for a career in professional wrestling, to judge by the alacrity with which she jumps on my stomach if I am lying down.

Personally I do think a child benefits from a nursery school/day care/preschool environment for a certain number of hours per week, e.g., on the traditional schedule for nursery school of three hours per day/three days per week. But after a point, I wonder if we aren’t risking raising a generation of kids for whom physical activity is an alien concept.

[There is an exception to the day care = idleness rule that I’m aware of… some friends send their children (ages 4-6) to a Waldorf school, three days per week, where the children take a two-hour walk outdoors every day, rain, shine, or snow.]

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Folks:

Having failed to get a Google Chromebook to work as a photo backup device, due to its inability to read exFAT SD cards and its inability to communicate with a Canon 5D III body, I invested $400 in an HP laptop computer running Windows 8. Using a Lexar card reader, the machine was able to read a 128 GB CF card and the laptop also included a built-in SD card reader. Via USB the machine was able to recognize and browse files on cards within the camera body. So far so good. After downloading some extra software from Microsoft, the computer was even able to display the RAW files within the File Explorer.

Windows 8 on a non-touch laptop proved to be even more frustrating than using Windows 8 on a touch-equipped computer. The included photo applications proved flaky. If you popped in an SD card the computer would ask if you wanted to import the photos on the card. It worked great the first couple of times, putting photos into folders by date. After that the application either would try to re-import all of the photos, including ones that it had already imported, or just a handful, missing a lot of new photos.

Some combination of the laptop and the software resulting in the computer exhausting its battery while I thought it was sleeping. This resulted in a rapid shutdown and, after that, all of the critical “Libraries” from File Explorer were inaccessible. Double clicking on a library would result in a message “Videos.library-ms is no longer working”. None of my files were lost but my confidence in NTFS on Windows 8 was shaken.

Mostly my memory of trying to use this device is constant pressing of the “Windows” key on the keyboard to get out of some Metro app, then using the mouse to click on the “Desktop” app to get back to whatever it was that I was trying to do.

The only thing that truly worked well was Picasa, which made sorting files and pushing them up to shareable albums very easy. The one knock against Picasa is that it doesn’t seem to be bandwidth-smart. If you’re on a slow connection and add the same photo to two online albums it seems to upload the photo twice. Also, the minimum size/quality for Web sharing is 2048 pixels. That’s way too big when one is connecting to the Internet via an Iridium satellite phone.

There must be something that Windows 8 is good for.

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I’m co-hosting an Argentina/Antarctica-themed party this evening and trying to shop for Argentine products. It is easy to find Argentine wine but none of the stores in Cambridge have Argentine cheese. I searched a bit and discovered http://www.usitc.gov/publications/docs/tata/hts/bychapter/1210C04.pdf, which gives the import quotas for cheese by country. It turns out the annual aggregate amount is about 50 million kg of cheese from all countries. That works out to about one third of a pound per American. That’s only about 1/100th of total cheese consumption in the U.S., therefore that can legally be from a foreign country.

It is a good thing that we are so eloquent at educating other countries on the benefits of free trade…

[Separately, note the crazy amount of cheese that can come from New Zealand, nearly half as much as from all of the European Community.]

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