Census Chatter

 Quietly right now, we are in the midst of a German census.  If approached or if you get a form....by law (threat of a fine)....you have to respond.

It got brought up yesterday that the census people are having a problem.  I read through the Focus piece and would best describe the issue this way.  There is a goal of contact with 30-million Germans....gathering up data.  X-amount of people will be personally visited by interview 'experts' (government says 100,000 of them).

To carry out this face-to-face interview....a Tab is being used to record data....with a software program that they 'bought'.

The software program?  It was designed for this effort, and the company (to be left anonymous).....said 'yeah, sure....we tested it and it works'.  Well....it doesn't work, and it's got bugs in the operation.

If you look over the record so far.....they should be around 66-percent through the collection.  They aren't exactly giving indicators of this achievement, and it makes you wonder if an extra month (or two) will be required.

What happens at the end?  This is now openly discussed, and there's some feeling that the facts will not make sense or will be distorted.  Trust in the census?  It'll take a big step down.  I won't say the word 'worthless'.....but you won't be able to make any governmental decisions if the public doesn't trust the data.

Years ago....I was brought in to be a tester for some software package.  There were around eight key functions to have as a goal.  Seven of them were no issue.  The key problem was connecting to a database.  You'd query something, and it'd indicate no record existed.....yet we knew a record would fit the query and should show.  The software, in my humble opinion....was worthless if the query business didn't function.  

I see the same effort here.....testing was probably minimal.  

How this will end?  I would suggest that the German census will just halt.....a delay of six months will occur as they try to assemble the data via plain spreadsheets, and politicians try to avoid using the data because it's so corrupted.  In the end, they will cite that they have data over three or four million Germans that they trust, and that will be the basic (bottom line) of this entire effort.  That data?  Mostly all collected on paper....not by computers.  That's my prediction.