World’s Biggest Compute Job Done by Pen & Paper

I read a very interesting article this morning from ZDNet, the article was called “World’s Biggest Compute Job … to be Done by Pen & Paper”

The premise of the article is the fact that the US Census Bureau, after 10 years, has not been able to get their hand held computing device sufficiently usable in order to undertake the 2010 census. The cost for running the 2010 census has blown out by US$3 billion to US$14 billion due to the fact that they now need to recruit and train some 600,000 additional temporary staff to undertake the census - using pen and paper.

A big failing of the hand held computer they are using is that it proved too complex for the temporary staff to use.

Now, I don’t know what they are using as a hand held computing device, but it must be some form of PDA (Update: there is an image of the PDA being used here). From experience, it takes at least 15 hours of training to get a person comfortable using a PDA, longer if the person is unskilled. PDA’s also have serious limitations when it comes to battery life. I imagine that the average temporary census worker is not greatly computer savvy which is going add huge burdens to the support staff, and I also imagine that they are going to be out door to door for many hours at a time - how will they keep doing that with the power source?

Now it appears that they will mostly be abandoning the hand held computer, called an enumerator, and reverting back to pen & paper.

Now you might call me biased, but it appears to me that the very fact that they have trained staff going door to door writing things down and needing to get that data quickly back into a database lends itself perfectly to a digital pen & paper solution.

The temporary staff are already trained in filling the form, the only additional training requirement for them to use a digital pen & paper solution is to tick `send’ when they have finished filling in a form.

Once they tick send, they have finished their part, the mobile router takes care of the rest and sends the data through the mobile phone GPRS network back to the processing servers. This is encrypted for secure transmission. Additionally the GPS co-ordinates can be taken as the data passes through the mobile routing device, giving certainty that the census form was completed at the correct address.

The battery will last at least several days, most likely a week, in a digital pen being used intensively.

There is complete redundancy inherent in a digital pen & paper solution. Using the hand held computer, if it breaks, gets lost, runs out of juice etc - it is useless and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to fill in the census data. On the other hand with a digital pen solution, if the pen is lost, breaks etc, you can keep on filling in the forms with a 20cent biro. Then later when it is back in the collection center we can write over the pen marks again with a digital pen and bring it back into the system.

Writing with pen & paper is less intrusive and makes people feel more comfortable than sitting there with someone tapping away on a keyboard or tapping a screen with a plastic pretend pen.

A system like this could be deployed at a lower overall cost due to the commercial availability of the pen and the greatly reduced training and support burden of the technology.

Maybe for the 2020 census they US Census Bureau may realise that yes, digitally collecting and collating census data is the only way, but they may also realise that this is possible with the tried and true pen & paper.

Some other links regarding the 2010 census.

Computer World

CNN

Washington Post