Month: April 2001

How Not to Make IT Decisions

The university I work at is in the process of providing an example of how not to handle technological change, especially when dealing with technology that is likely to become obsolete in the future.

Six years ago the university introduced a new magnetic stripe ID card and also reached an agreement with a bank to link some financial services. There was a basic chip embedded on the front of the card that turned it into a smart card capable of securely handling transfers of small amounts of cash. The system was used entirely on campus.

I could go to a card reader on campus, for example, and have $20 deducted from my savings account and added to my employee ID card. Then I could use the ID card for everything from making copies in the library to buying Diet Coke at McDonald’s. It never really caught on, except for two core user groups (based on my personal observation) — a) people like me who did a lot of research in the library and b) foreign students. I’d say 90 percent of the students I’ve seen using the system are foreign students (maybe because smart cards are becoming common outside the U.S., but pretty much non-existent here?)

Anyway, the bank that the university was working with was recently bought by another bank. The new bank says it is not interested in continuing the smart card technology and the university hasn’t been able to find another vendor, so effective May 30, 2001, the system is gone for good.

That would be bad enough. I can’t believe they went through all of the trouble, expense, and time for a system that lasted a mere 6 years. You’d think they’d at least have a commitment in place in case of just such a contingency.

Even worse is the timetable. People with smart cards have until May 30, 2001, to redeem any money they have stored on their smart cards. After that, the money goes “poof.” The problem with that, of course, being that most students left campus two weeks ago with the conclusion of finals week and won’t be back until late August.

I’m sure they’ll be happy to learn that the university waited until April 26 to issue a memo noting that the deadline is May 30, 2001 to redeem any value off of these cards.

Which sort of explains another technological fiasco they’re embarking on. Somebody in the upper levels of management decided there would be nothing cooler than to set up an 802.11b wireless network all over campus. They’ve been going around with various signal testing instruments to figure out the best places to deploy the system and expect to have it up in the Fall.

The problem is that the security system in 802.11b is known to have a number of flaws that only recently came to light, but the official line here is that the security issues for a wireless and a wired LAN are exactly the same. Now at the moment nobody’s found an easy way to hack their way into an 802.11b system, but it’s probably just a matter of time.

Regardless, do you really want to spend a lot of money on a system that some 15-year-old in Finland might render unusable at any moment? Not to mention that although bigger and better versions of the 802.11 standard are in the works, its becoming pretty clear that it is very unlikely there will be any backward compatibility or cost efficient upgrade path for 802.11b.

Which doesn’t matter to me. If someone wants to go to the lengths of breaking into the wireless system I’m setting up at home, they’re not going to find much and more importantly if a hack does ever become widespread I’ll just ditch the equipment and be out what, $300-$500 or so. But the university is going to sink a lot more than $300-$500 in it (plus I imagine there would be a lot more of interest on the president’s laptop than on mine).

I know why large organizations do these sorts of things — layers of bureaucracy — but it still never fails to amaze me.

One last silly technology story. At one place I worked we used a lot of audiovisual control equipment to switch between literally dozens of different audio and video sources. One of the main pieces of equipment — which was originally packaged with a proprietary control system — was on the edge of breaking down and both it and the control system needed replacing.

So a single manager who never actually used the equipment made the purchasing decision by himself and ended up with a $30,000 piece of junk which had less functionality than a number of $6,000 to $8,000 systems on the market at that time. But, it had a visual, point-and-click mouse-driven interface which the manager thought was the wave of the future, so that was the route we had to go.

Public School Teachers for School Choice?

Jennifer Garrett, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation, recently wrote an amusing look at the state of the school choice debate in California (originally written for Scripps Howard, the op-ed was republished at CapitalismMagazine.Com. It seems a state legislator decided to try to hold public school teachers to their anti-choice rhetoric and, predictably, the teachers had a fit.

Garrett writes about the exploits of Republican state senator Ray Haynes, who recently introduced a bill that would have required teachers in public schools to send their children to public schools. That proposal did not go over very well. In fact the anti-choice California Teachers Association said, through spokesman mike Myslinksi, that “People have the right to put their children in [private schools.]”

Of course many of them already do. According to Garrett, a study by the CTA itself recently showed that one-third of teachers in California’s public school system send their children to private schools.

This is the same union, however, that Garrett notes successfully led the fight against California’s Proposition 38 which would have given parents vouchers to send their children to public schools. When a public school teacher sends his or her children to a private school that’s a choice; when a poor parent in a failing inner city school district wants to do the same thing, that’s called undermining the public school system.

Source:

Look Who’s Supporting School Choice Now!. Jennifer Garrett, Capitalism Magazine, April 30, 2001.

Some Harsh Words about the Equal Rights Amendment

Wendy McElroy recently wrote an article for Fox News (E.R.A.: R.I.P.) that had some extremely harsh — but accurate — words for feminists who have decided to resuscitate the Equal Rights Amendment. As she sees it, feminist groups such as the National Organization for Women are resurrecting the ERA because they have nowhere else to turn.

McElroy, for her part, has no use for the latest attempt to push the ERA,

THere are many reasons to oppose the new ERA, not the least of which is that the Constitution already applies equally to both genders. What organizations like NOW are hoping to achieve is not equality, however. They wish to sneak in some agenda items through the back door.

What sort of things would NOW like to sneak through the back door? As McElroy points out, NOW would almost certainly use the ERA to demand that all states fund abortions. Section 1 of the ERA says, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” (emphasis added). The Supreme Court has previously ruled that states may fund abortions if they choose, but cannot be compelled to do so.

But with the ERA in place, NOW and other groups would likely argue that when a state says it will pay for, say, an appendectomy but not an abortion, that this decision is a prima facie denial of a woman’s right to equality under the law.

Think this is some absurd right wing idea? NOW and others filed legal briefs in a New Mexico abortion which case which argued just this: that a version of the ERA adopted by New Mexico required state funding for abortions. The New Mexico Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favor of this notion in 1998, and ordered the state to begin paying for abortions.

Like McElroy, I am pro-choice but against forcing taxpayer to fund of abortions, and the feminist duplicity on this point is difficult to stomach. On the one hand filing briefs in New Mexico arguing that ERA language means states can’t opt out of funding abortions, but simultaneously attacking as a right wing myth that the passage of the ERA means mandated funding for abortions.

On the other hand, the mainstream feminist movement has become its own worst enemy when it comes to preserving abortion rights. According to McElroy,

Eventually, gender feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon refused to share a stage with women who argued on any grounds for the right to publish pornography. At that moment, I knew the feminist movement would not be able to regroup should abortion rights ever come under sustained attack. The most innovative voices in the movement — most notably Camille Paglia — were relegated to the status of “anti-feminist” because they disagreed. What happened to the feminism in which every woman’s voice should be heard?

You can see this inability to defend abortion rights in the rhetoric that has been coming out of NOW ever since the election of George W. Bush. I expected to see a sophisticated, coordinate opposition to Bush’s initiatives on abortion, but instead NOW seems reduced to shrieking that Bush will create some sort of Afghanistan-style oppressive regime if we don’t all hit the streets in protest today. All NOW and other groups seem to have left when it comes to abortion is hyperbole and vicious ad hominem attacks — most pro-abortion groups, in fact, don’t even seem interested in actually defending the morality of abortion (which might not be so bad, since for the last decade they have been decisively outmaneuvered by abortion opponents on the rhetoric front).

But while they don’t seem to be able to make the case for abortion, they have no problem with regularly sending me fund raising letters/pamphlets that highlight their continuing campaign against Rush Limbaugh. I guess for NOW that’s enough of a consolation prize for the organization’s continuing irrelevance.

Source:

E.R.A.: R.I.P.. Wendy McElroy, Fox News, April 20, 2001.

Newsweek Donated Ad Space to PETA; PETA Reaffirms Its Foot and Mouth Stance

Apparently not troubled at all by Ingrid Newkirk’s recent declaration that she hoped foot-and-mouth disease comes to the United States, Newsweek recently donated ad space to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

According to The New York Post, copies of the March 26 edition distributed in the New York area — including New Jersey and parts of Connecticut — featured a one-column, black-and-white ad featuring Bill Maher. Newsweek told The Post that the advertisement was a pro bono ad inserted to fill unsold ad space (a common practice with newspapers and magazines).

Bud Pidgeon, president of the Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, gave a great quote to The Post,

Newsweek provided an ad to a group [PETA] who has paid the legal fees of convicted terrorist Rodney Coronado. This same group’s chairman has stated her hope that the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Europe will strike the U.S. meat industry. I really think Newsweek needs to re-evaluate who they provide free space to.

Speaking of Newkirk’s statements on foot and mouth disease, PETA recently reaffirmed her statements. In an interview with the Associated Press on April 27, she restated her hopes that the disease comes to the United States. “It’s a peculiar and disturbing thing to say,” Newkirk told the Associated Press, “but it would be less than truthful if I pretended otherwise.”

PETA’s Bruce Friedrich also got in on the act telling the Associated Press,

These animals suffer unmitigated misery throughout their lives, during transport to slaughter and in slaughterhouses where they’re routinely skinned and dismembered while conscious. Anything that accelerates the demise of the meat industry … is a very good thing.

Friedrich added that he fully supported Newkirk’s views on foot and mouth disease saying, “I can’t imagine anybody who cares about animals arguing with that statement.”

Sources:

State veterinarian, PETA Head Differ On Outbreak. Steven Barrett, The Associated Press, April 27, 2001.

Dog-Gone Legislation May Target Hunters. Ken Moran, The New York Post, April 25, 2001.

Africa Malaria Day

African nations marked April 25, 2001 as the first Africa Malaria Day to highlight the continuing persistence of the diseases that kills more than a million people every year on the continent (90 percent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa according to the World Health Organization).

The BBC reported that UN agencies and others met in Nigeria to discuss ongoing plans at dealing with the disease. Several countries also were expected to announce that they were removing duties and taxes on malaria fighting technologies. This seems a bit absurd, but many countries in Africa apparently tax things like mosquito nets and have only recently removed such taxes.

In 2000 the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia made such moves, and this year Ghana, Kenya and Mozambique were expected to join them. On the other hand, you have to wonder why such countries would have policies that raise the costs of dealing with such a widespread and deadly disease in the first place.

Like the AIDS epidemic in Africa, malaria is helped along by the endemic poverty in the region which makes it difficult for health care systems to deal with it. The BBC reports that in Zambia, for example, in 1980 there were about 12 deaths from malaria for every 1,000 malaria patients. Today, however, the are more than 60 malaria deaths per 1,000 malaria patients.

Source:

Africa tackles malaria scourge. The BBC, April 25, 2001.

Polio Eradication Effort Appears to Be Working

A worldwide effort to eradicate polio by 2005 appears to be making great strides — since 1998 reported polio cases have dropped by 99 percent.

In 1988, 350,000 cases of polio were reported, but worldwide only 3,500 cases of the disease were reported, with all of those cases occurring in only 20 countries in Africa and Asia.

“Victory over the polio virus is within sight,” World Health Organization director-general Gro Harlem Bruntland told the Associated Press. Last year WHO managed to immunize 550 million children under the age of 5 against polio, but reaching that last 1 percent of cases may be difficult since they tend to occur in remote areas plagued by civil strife or in areas that will require massive vaccination efforts, such as in India, to ensure the disease is truly eradicated.

Still even with those obstacles to overcome, the WHO and other organizations are confident they can meet their goal of ridding the world of the disease by 2005.

Sources:

Polio eradication draws closer. The BBC, April 3, 2001.

U.N.: Worldwide polio eradication at 99 percent. The Associated Press, April 3, 2001.