Some blogger tells us that the country is in the very best of hands. Specifically, the website designed to show how well the Recovery effort is working shows many jobs created in apparently-fictional Congressional Districts. Among the fictional districts in New Hampshire is district number "00".

The site also shows $1,471,518 going to New Hampshire’s 6th congressional district, $1,033,809 to the 4th congressional district and $124,774 to the 27th congressional district. In fact, New Hampshire only has two congressional districts; inviting confusion about where the money listed for the 00, 4th, 6th and 27th districts is going.

When I see this data, I see a different problem. Whoever designed and wrote the recovery.gov website left several gaping holes in the software logic on the input end, and in the logic on the storing/validation system. There are also possibly problems in the display system used to show the data to the general public.

Specifically, they should have checked that the inputs made sense relative to the data that was expected. There are ways to make sure that when a wide variety of people enter data into a system, the entries are checked against a range of expected values.

As an example: most websites that handle online-order-forms have an entry for putting an address in. If that entry is for an address in the U.S., there is a state-code to fill out. It is good programming practice to make sure that every state-code put in is a code for a state that exists. Often, the web-site provides a drop-down menu with selections, to make it harder for someone to enter "AK" when they want to ship to Arkansas, or to mistakenly enter "AM" for Alabama.

The problem of having people enter data for Cogressional districts in which Recovery-jobs have been created is similar. Each state has a specific number of Congressional districts. It is absurdly easy (from a software perspective) to turn this input form into a pair of drop-down boxes. Thus, the entry would not be left blank (likely the cause of district "00"). Also, it would be harder for the person entering the data to put a State Congressional District into a box labelled Federal Congressional District. (This might be the cause of districts 4, 6, and 27 in New Hampshire...)

Not only is the management of the Recovery program suspect, but their programming team (and the management team doing the oversight) published some really sloppy work. The website looks nice, but behaves like a first draft ready for testing, not a finished product.

UPDATE: after a careful perusal of each State's data as shown in Recovery.gov, I found that all states except Nebraska and Nevada have some Recovery money spent in Congressional District 00.  Ten of the states (Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Tennessee) have 0 jobs saved/created in that row at some non-zero cost. Two states (Montana and New Hampshire), as well as the District of Columbia, have more than 1500 jobs listed in District 00. Most of the remaining states have fewer than 10 jobs listed in District 00, but a few have more than 100.

It looks like "00" is a default value, and a few states had almost all number of entries done without a specific Congressional District specified. Most of the states had a few remainders that resulted in this default value.

Posted by: karrde at 13:02 | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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