N.B. PDF attached preserves formatting and includes good graphics and all of the footnotes.d
I. Dysfunctional Right to Know Legislative
Advisory Committee
Right to Know Advisory Committee
State House
Augusta, Maine
Dwight Hines
March 3, 2014
Odd, most days when I get up the stairs, I expect to see Ken Curtis or James Longley. But they aren’t here anymore. When
I turn the corner to head into the Legislative Library, I expect to see
Senator Minette Cummings and Senator Joe, sitting at a table across
from each other, pushing things that look like raisins along an
imaginary line. I’m
just there to get or give her a printout full of numbers — on a good
day, a day after a weekend when the university in Orono let me run my
data on the weekend because it was too much, too big for Orono’s IBM
Sierra mainframe to run during the week (1), numbers that she would look
at like they were her prize orchids growing, “Look at them smile”,
she’d say while we stood on the front porch of her island house built by
a family of rich dwarfs. But
I never interrupted her and Senator Sewell, they were too intense and
just watching and listening to them moving raisins, then scribbling on
the back of an LD, then murmuring back and forth too quick for me to
catch all the word shapes held my attention better than a slow cooking
fresh blueberry pie. What
they were doing was a semi- quasi- qualitative multiple regression —
though they never called it that — using raisins as indicators of groups
of people who would be impacted by the details of the bill that the
Democrat and the Republican they were (2) were hammering and chiseling
and twisting and cajoling into near form shadows that went outside
normal dimensions. It
was a classical mini-max calculus problem — though they never called it
that — but deep, deep enough that someday, when computers got more
powerful you’d be able to run these very human problems, problems that
had to be optimized for alleviating pain without inflicting damages or
distress in those unaware of how valued they were by the Senators. They
did it, and not once did they call what they were doing statistics or
calculations or even figuring, or just working for their people. I
still sense them there, or off in one of the small rooms, Senator Joe
humming to himself as he tried different fits, different structures
Senator Cummings nodding slow yes or brief no. Often,
I couldn’t wait to see the form, the architecture, the Gestalt they
created, a figure-ground that would be warm and happy in a fine art
museum. Mr.
Sunstein, who knows about the freedom of information top-down and
spinning and in qubits, knew and approved of what the Senators were
doing, and has explained it to the rest of us in “Nonsectarian Welfare
Statements”, “A central question is whether they [institutions, RTK
committees] are helping a nation’s [Maine’s] citizens to live good
lives.” (3). If they are not helping, they be dysfunctional.
Then,
all alone, without the canopy of the old ones, it’s today, right now
and I can’t hear Governor Longley, and he was always heard, even when he
couldn’t be seen, and I’II walk into the Joint Judiciary Committee
room, into a Committee that is not just arithophobic but innumerate,
lacking even the gentle rocking back and forth of the elected Rabbis who
knew that numbers, little and big, blue, green, orange and lavender,
moderately sprinkled with hard potato facts were their guide, the light
on the path they needed to do their sacred jobs. In ‘63 and ‘64, those Rabbis were everywhere, thank God.
The
Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee, with only one elected
Representative, Kimberly Monaghan-Derrig, and only one elected Senator,
Linda M. Valentino, is not data driven, is not best evidence based and
has biases almost as deep and warpled as the ugly green ones I saw in
the Louisiana Capitol, in Baton Rouge, in 1963. A
sad time that fresh gumbo couldn’t set right. Information was not
recognizable, and logic and reason were lost in the sheets that scrawny
men wore as they shuffled in slow, white buzzard circles. My
mother would have said their wives don’t think much of their husbands,
letting them go out like that in unwashed, wrinkled up and rumpled old
sheets. Representative Monaghan-Derrig said not a word, not a sigh or shriek. Senator
Valentino, in a strong voice, that let you know she would not tolerate
laziness, said we are going to get us an expert in information
technology.
The RTK committee gave me more quotes to use than will fit on this page or the next. Like
when Harry Pringle, appointed by the Governor to represent the school
system bellowed, “We don’t want parents’ emails being found using the
Maine Right to Know Act because all someone needs to get into your bank
account is your name and email address” (4). Him
saying that didn’t bother me but a little. The fact that no one
corrected him, not even Percy Brown or Perry Antone, was proof my body
and mind and soul were all in the wrong place. Percy and Perry knew better but they ignored me eye-nudging them.
So a major theme of the right to know advisory committee was it maybe good for you to know, but you’re damned if you disagree. Harry,
maybe at a different meeting, maybe not, said that we needed to raise
the charge that agencies and towns charge for processing and copying
public records because “everything else has gone up so why shouldn’t
information cost more too.” No
one disagreed, again, and then the raise was approved. [(5) with graphs
to let you know the error sizes of his statement)]. There be ripples
from vacuums like this that start slow, with a heavy amplitude sine wave
that gains strength as it rolls out the door, down the hall and over to
the Augusta Police Department, where they are unable to find the owner
of a pickup truck when they have the license plate number, and the
Chief, maybe bumped by that sine wave, maybe not, goes to the City
Council and has them approve a charge of $25.00 for each police report
someone requests, after the first one (6) It’s sad the Augusta City Council thinks not of state law, or little of it, and builds on Mr. Pringle’s errors. (7)
A
mildew scent comes into the RTK room that is too familiar because Harry
Pringle doesn’t know how prices for computer hardware and software over
the last ten years have dropped to levels that strain my economically
challenged brain because as the prices have marched south, following
General Sherman to and through Atlanta, the crank power, the amount and
quality and speeds of volatile and fixable memory, all done with chips
and mirrors, have gone north, past the pole and into the northern
lights. Yep,
that old von Neumann slab of silicon, without morphing into non-von
Neuman slabs, as some said was ordained by physical laws, by God, made
Moore and Moore’s law answers to prayers of dollar struggling
pointy-headed nerds. Prayer answers that continue to defy economic gravity with their every 18 months doubling answers.
As
I sit in the back of the room, taking page after page of notes to keep
my attention on these folks and their crippled advice that the
legislators are going to rely on for their law making decisions, I
accept that no one on the RTK committee represents the ordinary citizen,
the taxpayer, the one who is without resources when attempting to
obtain information about his government. My
acceptance is soon verified and validated by Mr. Richard Flewelling,
who tells another committee member sitting across the room, so it’s a
loud telling, to be sure to give the RTK requesters only PDFs, not
spreadsheet files. In
those words, which echo around in my ears, you know that a significant
component, some democracy and governance specialists would say the most
substantive component, of the RTK, the component that transforms the
roles of the requester and the responder from US versus THEM, to We, is
lost. Barrier placement between
citizen and government, even when it requires extra work of the
government, reminds me of how much effort the government spent in making
some people sit in the back of the bus, and go to a completely
separate, but not equal, school. In
those few words, a RTK Advisory member squint-narrowed the sharing of
useful information to the community, the state, and the individual,
without a single objection from the rest of the committee (8).
Footnotes
1) Computer Programs 200K or larger, with data, were too large to run during the week. Today,
my 3 year old MacIntosh MacBook Pro has 8 Gigabytes of volatile memory
(RAM), one terabyte of hard memory, and a CPU with blister speeds of 2
GHz.
2) The Senators were
problem-solving driven, they knew there would be many years for them to
discuss party affiliations and political differences after they solved
the problems and created the opportunities for Mainers. The Senators could have written Cass R. Sunstein’s, Incompletely Theorized Agreements in Constitutional Law, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Papers No. 147, 2007. <http://ssrn.com/abstract=957369>.
3) Sunstein, C. Nonsectarian Welfare Statements. Preliminary Draft, 8/28/2013, Regulation & Governance, Symposium on Institutional Dysfunction.
<http://ssrn.com/abstract=2317909>.4)
There was excitement when a newspaper reported that a “hacker’ had
gotten into a school’s computer system and stolen all the email
addresses of the parents. The excitement tripled when the hacker sent the parents an email. It then appeared that the hacker received the emails attached to an email the superintendent unknowingly sent to him. But, it was too late. Well,
the RTK Advisory Committee, based on bad information, recommended to
the legislature that school email addresses for parents be confidential. I believe that law passed.
“ except: E-mail addresses obtained by a political subdivision of the
State for the sole purpose of disseminating noninteractive
notifications, updates and cancellations that are issued from the
political subdivision or its elected officers to an individual or
individuals that request or regularly accept these noninteractive
communications. [2013, c. 339, §3 (NEW).]”
5) Ernst R. Berndt, Zvi Griliches, Neal Rappaport, Econometric Estimates of Prices Indexes for Personal Computers in the 1990s, NBER Working Paper No. 4549,August 1995. <http://www.nber.org/papers/w4549.pdf>
In
this paper we construct a number of quality-adjusted price indexes for
personal computers in the U.S. marketplace over the 1989- 92 time
period. We generalize earlier work by incorporating simultaneously the
time, age and vintage effects of computer models into a fully saturated
parameterization, and then develop a corresponding specification test
procedure. While the simple arithmetic mean of prices of models by year
reveals a price decline of about 11% per year, use of a matched model
procedure similar to that commonly used by government statistical
agencies generates a much larger rate of price decline -- about 20% per
year. Since the matched model procedure holds quality constant, it
ignores quality change embodied in new models. When data on new and
surviving models are used in the estimation of hedonic price equations, a
variety of quality-adjusted price indexes can be calculated, with
varying interpretations. Although there are some differences, we find
that on average these quality-adjusted price indexes decline at about
30% per year, with a particularly large price drop occurring in 1992.
Parameters in hedonic price equations for desktop PC models differ from
those for mobile PCs. Moreover, quality-adjusted prices fall at a
slightly lower AAGR for mobile models (24%) than for desktops (32%). We
conclude that taking quality changes into account has an enormous impact
on the time pattern of price indexes for PCs.
SNIP -- SEE ATTACHED PDF FOR GRAPHICS AND REMAINING FOOTNOTES.
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