holidays 2020

December 2020

Dear friends,

It’s been a rough year. Several friends lost parents to the coronavirus or other illnesses. Other friends contracted the virus, yet thankfully recovered. My thoughts are with all who have struggled with health or lost loved ones this year. My thoughts are also with those of you who have lost jobs, suffered pay cuts, or have otherwise struggled due to the pandemic.

My immediate family has also dealt with health issues. My sister and father have had various health concerns yet keep holding on. And Momma's radiation treatment last year may have slowed the growth of her lung cancer but did not kill it. Chemotherapy this year didn’t kill it, either, and she suffered debilitating side effects. Yet, after a bleak prognosis from her oncologist, and some new meds for her chronic lymphocytic leukemia, Momma is feeling better, at least for now, and is as feisty and interfering in my life as ever. Nothing like bad news to perk up my lineage. 😊

Treatment having failed, the lung cancer will eventually kill Momma, and she knows it, yet her equanimity is impressive. Not too long ago she sent me an email which read, “Today I am leading the book group at the synagogue. So-and-so was going to lead it, but she died, so now I am leading it.” The Buddha would be impressed, too.

I have been appreciative of my friends’ inquiries about Momma’s health throughout the year. I will miss her terribly when she is no longer in this life.

As for me, and as for many, my struggles this year were more internal: I have struggled with loneliness and depression, even more than usual. Thankfully, I am addicted to regular exercise, including yoga, which helps to mitigate. My piano and piano lessons over Zoom have been a source of comfort and growth. Next year I will investigate fostering a cat, since adopting a hippopotamus, while obviously preferable, alas, seems impractical. For now. 😉

And I don’t want the loneliness and depression to go away entirely. I can’t help but think the pandemic was nature’s wakeup call for us to pause and observe our current existence, and see where there is pain, personal or global, in need of remedy. Discomfort can spur us to act, and nothing aggravates me more than toxic positivity.

In the meantime, it’s been a year of impaired existence, constrained by masks and limited social interactions. We’re not making many new memories; we’re just trying to survive. It’s been a time of assessing the past versus working towards the future. I’ve found myself visiting places and things filled with memories: Ithaca, NY, and Cornell; extended stays in in New York City; my photos, journals, and yearbooks. Between these travels and double pigeon (yoga pose), I find memories -- good, bad, awkward, embarrassing – bubbling to the surface, all part of a journey backward. At least that is more interesting than the current mix of ennui and fear.

I re-read the editorial I wrote – with a heavy lift from my 9^th grade English teacher – for my junior high school yearbook. Borrowing from Francis Bacon, the theme was “Knowledge is power.” I noted how scientific discoveries had advanced civilization through the millennia. I was hopeful then.

I no longer think that statement is true. We have millions of books, thousands of journals and journal articles, sources of knowledge online and in print. We are drowning in knowledge. Yet none of that knowledge was able to prevent or stop this pandemic timely.

Bill Gates gave a TED talk in 2015 warning us about the risk of a pandemic, yet many were surprised when it arrived. The prior administration prepared a handbook for future administrations to use in case of a pandemic. Yet still, America failed in testing, in providing personal protective equipment, in tracing contacts, and ultimately in flattening the curve and controlling the spread.

I've come to see that while knowledge can lead to power, it is not equivalent. Knowledge must be applied effectively. Researchers have to work across disciplines, to make sure their findings are accessible to all those who need to hear them and become institutionalized. The elitism that permeates academia – and parts of government, by extension, which I’ve seen first-hand – only serves to alienate further those parts of the public that are already skeptical of experts.

Yet it is also incumbent on the public to be willing students, to stay informed and heed guidance. On an A train where a gently humorous sign showing right and wrong ways of wearing masks was posted, there were people on that same train wearing masks under their noses.

Of course, it doesn’t help when some of our leaders, for political gain, give mixed messages about proper behavior. While some direct their anger at opportunistic and craven elected officials – not unjustifiably -- I reserve most of mine for those who voted these cretins in.

So, at a time when we are overflowing with knowledge and technology, we have been anything but empowered during this crisis. Instead, we've gotten sick, watched loved ones get sick and die, seen faceless numbers in the news, how many infected, how many people died today, states in different shades of red on an online map. I feel especially badly for the health care and essential workers who have risked and lost their lives to sustain the rest of us. And the reports of people storming state capitols and attending large events without masks are disheartening.

It is difficult to quantify how often this is happening. Yet, America is dubiously leading the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths, and has among the highest of cases per capita among nations. Clearly, America is handling this pandemic atrociously.

Many of us don't seem to learn from the past. There were battles over wearing masks 100 years ago during the 1918 flu pandemic. And here we are again. We have the same problems generation after generation, whether problems with governance or tolerance. It is disappointing.

Thankfully, we are on the cusp of receiving vaccines, a relatively small comfort amidst vast suffering. I am grateful for the applied wisdom and perseverance of our scientists. In the meantime, it will be a difficult winter ahead. In the long-term, we still need to deal with climate change. It is enheartening that President-elect Biden will be creating a cabinet-level position dedicated to climate change. I fear it will be too little, and way too late.

Wishing you and your families resilience and safety during the holidays and in the months to come. Feel free to drop me a note to let me know how you are doing, especially if it’s been a while.

Love,

Rich

PUF the magic survey

We have a PUF.

That is, the survey on which I work, the Rental Housing Finance Survey (www.census.gov/hhes/rhfs) has just completed the first draft of a public use file (PUF). That is, the file with the data we collected from respondents. Multifamily housing researchers are eager to analyze the data, see the current state of the multifamily rental industry, and also see how the multifamily housing industry and stock have changed over the past ten or so years, since the last federal survey of mulitfamily housing was conducted in 2001 (http://www.census.gov/housing/rfs/).

The PUF doesn't contain the raw data, though. The survey team edited the data for inconsistencies among responses, and we averaged the highest and lowest figures for selected survey data and applied other measures so as to make it difficult to identify any companies that might be outliers. It's a balance between giving the purest data to researchers and making sure that no individual respondent could be identified through the responses. Title 13 requires that any data collected by the Census Bureau be kept confidential.

In that vein decennial census records are only made publicly available seventy-two years after they are collected. Earlier this year I helped my parents find their 1940 census records.

This has been about the most challenging project on which I have ever worked. There were times I felt like giving up, even quitting my secure federal job. In the process I was as frustrated with my own limitations, if not more so, as with various staff with whom I worked. I have never worked on a project where I made so many mistakes, and so openly.

Just earlier in the week, for example, the programmers asked if the subject matter area (my area) had identified all the variables we needed to remove from the file until we were able to satisfy the disclosure avoidance requirements of the Census Bureau's Disclosure Review Board (DRB). I wrote to the team -- or at least the part of the team involved with survey processing -- that, yes, indeed, I had identified all the variables...only to have my boss and me identify two more variables that need to be removed. I know it was frustrating to the programmers.

This was one of various mistakes I made in a process that frayed nerves and tested working relationships. The process was messy. To me, it seemed needlessly so because it's not like this is the first time the Census Bureau has edited data or produced a public use file.

Unfortunately the area of the bureau in which I work does have standard editing processes and procedures. We were somewhat inventing on the fly, which seems unfortunate.

My boss has more experience with reviewing and editing data than I do. For seven years I had worked at an organization where I was a semi-advanced to advanced user of public use files, also known as public use microdata sets (PUMS). I knew the files and their contents well. That hadn't automatically translated to being a good data editor and producer. On the one hand, I am supportive of people who switch jobs, who bring alternate experiences to federal service. On the other, I am seeing how it really does help to have sometimes decades of experience working within government.

I hope to write at least one blog entry a month, versus just one a year, which has been my track record. As an Aries, I tend to stop and start projects. Big hopes, false starts. But now that the dust has settled, now that we've given a public use file to our sponsor, for the time being, my workload has gone back to semi-normal levels and I hope to write more. For now I find I'm better at writing about the survey process than actually doing it, and hope to change that, too. I am tweaking my individual development plan.

Life gets messy, years of accumulated hopes and dreams and plans crashing against more evolved relationships and heightened responsibilities.

The honeymoon is over

In truth, the honeymoon with my not-so-new employer has been over for quite some time. Initially I was pleased to see how, it seemed to me, the Census Bureau had made some progress in areas in which it had been weak since I worked there last. After nearly ten months back at the bureau, I've seen how some of the efforts to correct previous problems have created new ones.

The bureau may have overreacted most strongly in the realms of security and data stewardship, an area which combines principles of privacy and confidentiality. Since data stewardship is such a complex and important issue, I'll just want to touch on the subject here and write a more detailed blog on the issue at some point. Briefly, over the past few years the bureau experienced a few high profile breaches of Title 13. Culturally it appears to have reacted in such a way that such data are treated more like a disease to be contained than a product to be used. In my main area of responsibility, creating a new rental housing survey, I've had to fight for procedures where we're allowed to share info, in the process of collecting data, among entities that already share such info routinely. Adherence to Title 13 appears, at least for now, to have trumped the purpose of collecting and distributing data, at least in the development of this new survey. It might be unwise to generalize to the whole bureau, but informal conversations with other Census veterans have confirmed my observations.

I've also seen how people with certain mindsets tend to replicate themselves as far as their hires, and that relative youth is no guarantee of an open mind. With this turn of the survey, alas, we don't have the same benefit of legacy experience that we enjoyed in previous similar efforts.

I visited my former employer today. I worked for a small trade association, the National Multi Housing Council, as the director of research for seven years. I got along famously with my boss (and still do), and knew while I worked there that the work environment was rarefied and exceptionally comfortable. I dealt with a personal crisis while I worked there (the subject of another blog, perhaps) but even at my nadir I recognized my situation was cushy. And I had become soft.

Working in a less civil, more combative environment as I do now, with employees with so many different viewpoints and agenda, I knew I was going to have to re-sharpen my claws. And so I am. And here I hope to educate, let off steam, and perhaps receive some feedback on my challenges.

seeds of change

During orientation I was warned I might have a few weeks of down time. Thankfully (or perhaps not so thankfully for this lazy sack), that down time did not materialize. Early last week a stakeholder in the survey I was hired to help create and manage decided to call a meeting of stakeholders to review the questionnaire. Never mind the deadline, given the survey timeline and tight budget, for offering comments on the questionnaire in time for pilot testing had passed two months prior. The experts in the meeting room, many of whom had never actually conducted a survey, were full of ideas about what we should be asking on the questionnaire. They asked for all sorts of questions, as they tend to do, ivory tower types who think that Americans are just waiting at home, twiddling their thumbs, eager to complete complex government surveys about their personal lives and finances. As someone who's had a foot in both worlds, both as a statistician at the Census Bureau and a researcher at a trade association, I feel like I understand both sides better than most. As a data user, I know how frustrating it is to be looking for data and finding it doesn't exist, or if it does exist, that it's packaged in such a hard-to-use format it might not exist at all.

So I spent my first full week at work trying to bridge the gap between the stakeholders who wanted all these questions and the worker bees at Census who were going to have to review and change the questionnaires. I relied primarily on my looks and charm yet by some miracle actually found that they sufficed. Still I hope such fire drills are not part of my routine.

In the process of managing this unexpected wrench, I became reacquainted with the Census Bureau. It had been more than seven years since I'd worked there last. The building is completely new -- the old, carcinogenic and otherwise toxic buildings have since been demolished. The promise of a new building was all that gave employees hope. The new building had some kinks and I know it disappointed many, although I find myself pleasantly surprised by the features and how conducive it is to working. I also had the chance to see how the bureau has made some progress on some key issues that challenged the agency -- stovepiping in survey development, lack of documentation, haphazard and unequal security measures, lack of quality control. The Demographic Surveys Division has created a checklist for those creating new surveys, to make sure that all new surveys have standard documentation and procedures.

The bureau is creating a new area that will be focusing on quality control. In several of the demographic surveys the bureau needed to re-release some of its data sets because errors were found after they were released. Unfortunately when budgets were tight, the Census Bureau didn't have the resources to have the statisticians themselves develop research topics wherein they could test drive the data. The truth is sometimes it is difficult to spot errors in data, whatever quality checks you perform, unless you actually embark on a research project and have to use the data to answer a research question.

As a lowly functionary, I used to complain occasionally to senior management about some of the issues I saw in the trenches. I didn't think they were paying attention. I'm glad to see that they were.

anti forma

I am long overdue for a blog entry. Alas the adjustment to a new job -- not to mention a bout with bronchitis -- has subdued this modern literary giant. I emerge, hacking, yet writing.

My re-entry into federal service was ushered in via bureaucracy. I received an official letter offering me employment and directing me to a Census website where I was directed to complete upwards of fourteen forms. I think my favorite form was the employee address verification form, as if I would have, say, lied about my address on my direct deposit form for payroll. (Yes, I just report to work for fun; paychecks are optional!) At a minimum, the forms were redundant in that they required me to complete my name, and several forms asked me to complete my date of birth, address, and social security number. On top of that, I needed to complete an online form that started the wheels turning on a background check, requiring the same information. I completed a form for fingerprinting that the fingerprinting office ended up not using.

The offer letter was vague about what forms specifically I needed to submit prior to my employment, and which I should bring my first day of work, so I just sent them all in, and made a copy. At orientation I was given most of the forms back; the orientation staff said I hadn't needed to submit all of them prior. This made me wonder: Why I had been given a  huge fed ex envelope big enough to send all of them?

Then at orientation we dedicated forty five minutes to reviewing the forms, which were also in the orientation package I received that morning. Trees are optional, I guess.

On the one hand I appreciate that the orientation staff (who were very pleasant and earnest) had prepared for all contingencies. At the same time the process seemed redundant and wasteful. When I completed my mortgage application (rivaling these forms in their bureaucracy and complexity), the law office had already completed the administrative information; all I needed to do is sign. Now, granted, in this situation I am an employee, not a client. Still, I can't help but wonder why the web wizards at Census, who prepared this site (and at least there is this site with all the forms in one place), could not have prepared a portal wherein I could have entered all the information once, answered some questions about where I was living, and generated all the proper forms with the information all completed, saving me time, and reducing the possibility of errors. Or, given I had worked for the federal government, not to mention the SAME EMPLOYER before, why could I have not been prompted simply to update my contact information the way I might in LinkedIn or facebook? Not to mention the bigger issue as to why the federal government does not prepare a consolidated employee profile, rather than these separate forms. I know the government has to deal with a variety of hiring programs and backgrounds, but surely, from what I could tell, the backgrounds are not so diverse that a consolidated form covering most cases would not have streamlined the process.



Last, but not least, some of the forms were needlessly vague. A form I received after orientation, a health insurance enrollment form, asked about previous health insurance. I assume the form was referring to previous health insurance while employed with the federal government; but whither new hires? Simply adding the phrase "if applicable" in (parentheses) would have made the form applicable to all.

For my current carping, I guess this process represents an improvement over the process when I first went to work at Census twelve years ago, and I was sent the forms in the mail, and there was no centralized repository of forms. I remember calling the human resource officer half a dozen times with questions. I guess back then my expectations were lower. I was grateful to be having my first job where I actually made more than $30K a year.

first blog for everything

Well, the word is out to all: I quit my current job yesterday and I'm returning to the federal service at the Census Bureau in early November. My boss sent an email to staff and I sent one to my colleagues and friends outside my current organization, a trade association focused on promoting rental housing.

I didn't think I was ever going to work for Census again. I remember that late August 2003 day, leaving Census several hours before my work day was supposed to end, a huge grin on my face. I had brought beers to work to celebrate the occasion -- and my future boss, then acting branch chief (my regular boss was on vacation) -- refused to imbibe with me to celebrate my departure. "It's against federal regulation to have alcohol on campus." So I won't say definitively whether I went to the office next door to share my beers with another colleague. I did go to the office of my boss's boss to say goodbye to him, and ended up giving him an earful, not that alcohol had anything to do with it. When my boss returned, he seemed quite surprised that his boss was on his case about the survey that had been falling to pieces for about a year before I left.

But that incident was history until now...surely not on the mind of my future employer when he called me this past May to ask me if I'd like to return. One thing led to another, and I'm starting at Census in a few weeks.

I have two loves: piano and data. Whatever I write here, I do love the Census Bureau and I have a fondness for the many great people who work there, even as I'm starting this blog knowing I will need an outlet for the shenanigans I am sure to see there.

While it's on my mind, let me compile a wishlist for what I'd like to see happen while I'm at census:

• The survey I will work on will have comprehensible, effective questionnaires and will provide quality data to the various stakeholders
• Census will better organize the way it distributes population data.
• Census will investigate and make progress on its use of administrative records in helping to collect and verify data for various censuses and surveys.
• Census will make efforts to streamline and integrate the various surveys so as to improve data quality and to reduce respondent burden.
• Census will develop an effective, documented, transparent, comprehensible model for creating and updating its master address file.
• Census will integrate its processing of demographic data.
• Every overweight census employee (including this one) will lose at least ten pounds and will wear reasonable and appropriate business casual attire.
• The Middle East will experience peace.

I think that's enough dreaming for one evening.