ProgEval: A blog on Program Evaluation

Low Success Rates Can Equal Big Successes

For many years, I have concluded that low success rates can still indicate that that a program or intervention works well. Some examples to help keep in perspective the fact that nobody ever gets it right 100% of the time ...

a) The best college baseball player this year his the ball 41.2% of the times he was up. He failed to get a hit 58.8% of the time. He will get a contract in excess of $10,000,000 per year when he turns professional later this summer. In the past 40 years, no professional baseball player has hit the ball 40% of the time over a season although it was fun to watch George Brett and Rod Carew try.

b) I planted about 25,000,000 wildflower seeds in my meadow last fall and this spring (yes 25 MILLION by the counts on the bags). At any time this spring, as various types come into bloom, there are probably 5,000--10,000 flowers in bloom in the meadow. 10 thousand of 25 million is still one heck of a lot of wildflowers and extremely pretty. But it is a low percentage of success.

c) It takes the average drug abuser about 12 tries in various types of programs to stay drug-free. Seeing somebody who has been drug-free for 10 years and the effect it has had on the user and his/her family is a privilege.

d) Working relationships among agencies need to be renewed every 2-5 years as staff change. Cooperating human service agencies are the most effective way of providing services.

Hit a ball and fail 60% of the time, plant 25 million seeds and watch 10 thousand come up, provide somebody 12 chances to kick a drug habit and rebuild a life, retrain agency staff every few years and watch the service system work ... victory can be snatched from defeat.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

QTUG Evaluation

We (Huba, Philyaw, Griffith, & Melchior of The Measurement Group) finished our evaluation report on the Quantitative Training for Underrepresented Groups program in 2008. This is an excellent way for members of underrepresented groups to be introduced to advanced topics in quantitative methods and to form peer support groups. Lisa Harlow and Herb Eber have done a terrific job of setting up this program. The 2009 training -- incorporating a number of the 2008 evaluation findings -- is in Toronto from August 2nd through the 5th followed by the meetings of the American Psychological Association.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Every time I think it works ... it doesn't: NVIVO 8

NVIVO 8: Crash, crash, crash, then I solve it for a month, crash, crash, crash, crash, no use for two months, crash, then I solve it for 3 weeks, crash, solve for 2 days, crash, crash.

Enough said.

I really like the program. I just can't stand the user experience.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Twitter vs. Blogging

In the past month, I have started to post a lot of the short, informational notices that I would put on this site on Twitter (www.twitter.com). Twitter supports a series of SHORT messages (140 characters or less). To get announcements (tweets) from me on Twitter, if you already have an account search for me (George Huba) and add me to the list of people you follow. If you do not have an account, you can establish a free one in just a few minutes. You can follow me (or any other user) without commiting to writing tweets (messages) yourself.

I find Twitter most useful when I enable the option for allowing new tweets (messages) from those I follow to be sent directly to my cell phone in SMS format. Of course, in order to do this, you probably want a cellular plan that includes many (or unlimited) SMS transmissions as these messages will add up if you follow a lot of people (from me, you would receive about 100 SMS transmissions per month).

A number of professional associations and other professional affinity groups are now starting to also send out messages via Twitter.

I will continue to make blog entries. But I will be sending more messages (tweets) via Twitter than posting blog entries. Information technology continues to advance.

I will also set Twitter to notify you when new blog entries have been made.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Twitter now set up

This account should now be set up to automatically notify Twitter followers of georgehuba that new posts have been made.

Twitter

A very abbreviated version of the posts here plus other information is being broadcast on Twitter. To receive these brief updates on your computer or cell phone, go to:

http://twitter.com/georgehuba

If you do not have a Twitter account, go to www.Twitter.com to establish a free account.

Most Twitter postings will be 50 words or (much) less.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

The ONE Professional Tool I Want with Me All of the Time

... the very modern smartphones from RIMM or Apple.

We bought some Rimm Storms (Verizon) and Apple iPhones (AT&T) for our company a few weeks ago. In addition to being monster email machines and good phones that can handle address books with thousands of numbers, these things have spreadsheet programs, a brain-damaged version of Word, and very good web browsers, all in something that fits in my shirt pocket. You can even REALLY type on them with your thumbs and the screens can be clearly read.

Darn if they don't play movies and tunes also.

If I could take but one professional tool to that to the proverbial desert island it would be one of those phones. Of course that assumes that the cell service works there which might be a problem since it only seems to work well in about 20% of the mainland US. (Or is it that the mainland US is a cellular desert?)

Anyways, it takes about a week to learn to REALLY use one of the two new super-smartphones, but it is well worth it. Both seem about 6 generations ahead of the Palm Treos I used for many years. And, as evaluation tools they let you do that one most important thing in program evaluation: COMMUNICATE with those being evaluated (whether by voice, email, SMS, or web site).

With apologies to Elvis (the Singer, not the Ex-President with the broken zipper who had the Vice President who invented the Internet and discovered global warming) ...

Well, its one for the money,
Two for the show,
Three to get ready,
Now go, cat, go.

But don't you step on my blue suede smartphone.
You can do anything but lay off of my blue suede smartphone.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Getting More Conscientious

It's been a while since a posting. This has been a combination of being EXTREMELY busy and being a little burnt-out on thinking about new topics every day or so. But, I feel energized and ready to go again, so ...

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Emptier Planes

The planes were even emptier last week. And fares are getting cheaper. You can see the economy tanking at the airports. It has not been this bad since 2002.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Flip Mino and Program Events

I received a Flip Mino from my kids for my birthday last month. The Flip is a small video camera a little bigger than a business card and 2 inches thick that can take pretty good quality 640x480 or 1280x960 video (and an hours worth at that) and then upload this to your computer with an attached USB port that just pops out. The software that comes with this can convert the video to various forms, send it to your web site, attach it to your blog, or upload it directly to YouTube. Just what we all need -- nearly invisible machines taping professional meetings -- and the video on the Internet 10 minutes later.

I would say that this seems far fetched had I not been at a professional meeting last week where the organizers used one of these (on a tripod) to record an 8 hour professional conference.

It's great for films of my young son shooting hoops or my young daughter mastering her bicycle. But let's keep these machines out of meetings.

My $.02.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Weirdness Cubed

Ever been to a professional meeting situated in a Las Vegas Casino? It is a new and exceptionally weird experience for me. Makes you want to stay in your room during unscheduled time and work on your blog.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Pockets of Opportunity (for a Little While)

The (un)planned efforts of the Economic Recovery Plan on service provision and health science research are starting to come out. But they are weird. (a) Announcements of potential funding are atypical and coming from unusual sources. (b) Funding is for two years and you have to start immediately and be done in two years which is almost impossible for good research programs and quality programs. (c) Much of the funding is coming through states, not the feds, so there is little standardization of what is being proposed.

We need more services and research and health science jobs. What we do not need is health services "bridges to nowhere." Asking the policy makers to stop a little while (like a week) before tossing money at the pet project of some Congressional or Governor's aide is not asking too much.

My $.005 (deflation).

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

$600 Wrenches and $2000 Toilet Bowls (at Union Labor Rates)

Take a chill pill.

In the next few days our country will be buying $600 wrenches, $2000 toilet bowls, and thousands of new cars government agencies don't need.

Where are the services for the poor and the monies to build a health services infrastructure at a time when our population is getting older, more in need of medical services, and dependent upon the next generation(s) to pay for all of this?

A chill pill with 60 days effectiveness is needed. The current spending frenzy does not represent change for the better but just change. This is sort of like the administration of Andrew Jackson when all of his friends came in and ran their pet agendae (thus necessitating the developing the federal public service system, a dubious achievement).

Think about how to spend monies intelligently for 60 days before committing the country to a decade of spending and a century of repaying for the goodies. And, think through what a REALLY EXCELLENT health and human services system needs to keep the average American healthy. Otherwise we get change for the worse.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

The "Expert" Interview: Part I

Over the past ten years I have come to the conclusion that for many evaluation projects, the best way to collect data is a semi-structured interview with an "expert" or at least "senior professional" in the field.

Not a questionnaire with five arbitrary response options. Not a survey form. Not an interview with a research assistant or research associate or grad student reading a script.

An informed conversation with somebody who has done similar work for 10 or 20 or 30 years.

What's different? Questions about why did you do this rather than that. Questions about what were you thinking when you made a specific decision at some time during the project. Questions about what the likely longer term outcomes may be. Questions about what you messed up and would like to do over. All tailored to the specific project and reacting to what was said 2 or 4 or 24 minutes earlier.

No specific response options. We just write down what you tell us and then code it later using empirically valid and reliable methods.

I do a lot of this now. I like it. I think it works. WELL.

More in Part II.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Information is Cheap(er), even Proprietary Information

Terabyte external hard drives are now selling for about $150--$175 for units from major companies. To put this in context, if you have a high-end notebook computer, the sum of your data and programs and system files is probably less than 150 GB or 1/6 of a terabyte. After 20 years, our company server contains several hundred gigabytes of data. After 10 years, I have about 400 gigabytes of digital pictures. My music (iPod and mpeg) files total about 350 gigabytes.

These terabyte drives are the size of a small paper back book. Did I mention that they cost $150, about the price of this year's hot basketball sneakers?

Proprietary data and information will be cropping up everywhere. And maybe it will now be too easy to acquire and store information that is proprietary and which should be confidential. After all, it costs $150 for the equipment to plug into somebody's server or notebook computer and download the work of a professional lifetime.

It will be a real challenge in the next five years to greatly strengthen and enforce intellectual property laws. After all, it is very cheap to make copies and most copy protection software can't keep the average 10-year-old out.

Scary. After all, the people who enforce intellectual property laws are professional "leakers" of information.

The USA is now a country whose future is based on intellectual property (I would argue that this has been the case for 20 or more years). We can't build cars cheaply or well enough so anybody wants them, and Nike can make sneakers in former countries we were at war with for pennies on the dollar as our capitalism accomplishes what our war machines could not. Our higher educational system -- as imperfect as it is -- produces a very high percentage of the world's top engineers, most creative medical researchers, and best strategic thinkers. This is the real infrastructure strength of the USA and needs to be protected.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

The New Demographic Categories: Progress Marches On

From the New York Times, January 22, 2009...

If these folks all get together for Thanksgiving dinner, there must be some very interesting conversations.

May the Census Bureau and university researchers have the wisdom to change their survey instruments to fit the new reality, not limiting themselves to the six traditional categories of race-ethnicity to categorize the daughters, sons, nieces, nephews, step parents, parents, etc., of many families. The sixth category ("other") is not going to cut it any more.

Personally, I like the fact that there is a (Hebrew-speaking Jewish) rabbi somewhere in the extended family of the President.

Now that the White House is (thankfully) diverse and this signals the country about the realities in our society, let's update those racial-ethnic demographic statistics that are used in our research and sometimes in budget allocations by the U.S. Congress.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved. (Information quoted from the New York Times is copyright the New York Times, 2009.)

Reminder: New Address for California Office

A month ago we moved our California office across the street to:

5753 Uplander Way
Culver City, CA 90230

We have the same main office phone number: 310-216-1800.

More space, better and brighter, better parking, and less noise. It was a no-brainer, especially since we saved money by moving.

For those who wonder where Culver City is, it is a legally independent city, totally surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, located about 3 miles north of the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Culver City has more movie-studio space and film-television production facilities than any part of Los Angeles County (and maybe the world) and is the center of the film-music-television industry. You often see Culver City locations (playing New York, Chicago, London, Las Vegas, etc.) at the movies and on TV. Our office are in a business park that houses many different kinds of entertainment industry production companies.

TMG goes Hollywood (or more accurately, Culver City)!

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Obama Economic Recovery Plan and Healthcare

According to the major media outlets, the healthcare portion of President-elect Obama's economic recovery plan is targeted at information systems for hospitals and large healthcare systems in order to reduce overhead costs. This is admirable and it is likely that the plan may actually save the taxpayers of the U.S. at least $1 for every $1 spent.

Been in a top hospital lately or a major medical clinic (I have great health insurance -- as do the other employees of the company my partner Lisa Melchior and I own -- and am 57 years old so I am at health providers much too often these days)? EMRs (electronic medical records) are everywhere and in emergency rooms interns and residents and nurses spend more time in front of the computer screen than in front of the patients' beds. For 3 or 4 years my primary care internist has been talking to me while cradling a small footprint notebook computer.

The healthcare problems of poor people who get beat up by their family members, heroin addicts and other drug abusers, the chronic (and even intermittent) mentally ill, those with HIV/AIDS or those performing behaviors that will make them acquire HIV, alcoholics, those who do not speak English fluently enough to be understood in the healthcare system, and many others are not going to be solved, or even changed very much, by fancy new computer systems. Yes, we need better information systems to manage cases more efficiently and bill public and private sources more efficiently but we mostly need more and better trained healthcare providers who will treat junkies, crazy people, those who smell when they come into the clinic, those who do not speak English or Spanish, those who just got beat up, those in acute withdrawal, and those who are "clueless" about how to access care.

We need more physicians (especially geriatricians), more nurses (primarily gerontological specialists and nurse practitioners to replace physicians), more social workers (especially those specializing in elder populations), and more counselors and therapists for mental illness and behavioral health problems. We need to train current healthcare workers better about how to provide superior care as well as how to use information system technology.

The accounting and health economics approach to healthcare did not work the last time Hillary and Bill Clinton tried it 16 years ago with many of the same players scheduled to be in the Obama Cabinet or Obama White House Advisors, and this is still not the answer to healthcare reform.

The economic recovery plan needs to include a lot of funds for more treatment programs and more and better providers. And a little for new computers and sofware. Many of the members of Congress know this; hopefully the new inhabitants of the Executive Branch will learn from this.

And keep Hillary and Bill and their friends out of healthcare reform this time.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

January 2, 2009

... next week will be THE week of the year, especially for a consultant. Makes you crazy just to think about it.

© 2009, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Existential Question for the End of the Year

Where does the month of December go?

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Happy Holidays 2008

... with wishes for a healthy, happy, prosperous, and productive 2009 ...

 

© 2008, George J. Huba. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Why you don't get late afternoon emails from me anymore ...

 

© 2008, George J. Huba. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Why you don't get early morning emails from me anymore ...

Sabra, a Newfoundland puppy, aged 3 months (and weighing 23 pounds!) walks me through our meadow every morning.

 

© 2008, George J. Huba. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know ... (SPSS Upgrades)

Are you bothering to upgrade your SPSS (or SAS) licenses with updated versions anymore? I find it hard to justify what are becoming increasingly large fees for what are tiny changes in statistical software (unless the companies are correcting computational bugs from version to version and not letting users know that their current versions do not give the right answers). I am very curious about this because our SPSS license fees are going up VERY rapidly and much more so than seems to be justified by any real improvements that are being offered.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Empty Planes this Week

Nobody was on planes I flew this week. I wonder how long it will take for the airline executives to go to DC and ask for an interest-free loan? Do you think they will fly there or drive an electric car?

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Obama = Increased Health and Social Services?

When Barack Obama was elected President, I was pretty sure that this would be good for the health and social service system. Now, it appears that so much of the budget is going to be devoted to keeping people (including greedy executives and union members with the best health plans in the USA) in their jobs that there is not going to be a lot left over for fixing the health and social service programs that so many elderly, poor, and disenfranchised people depend upon. We'll see. I would like to be pleasantly surprised.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

New Address for Culver City (Los Angeles) Office

We moved three blocks a couple of weeks ago. The new address is ..

5753 Uplander Way
Culver City, CA 90230

The telephone number remains the same (310.216.1800).

Nicer office, lower rent, more sunlight, and less noise in a one-story building.

Y'all come visit (whoops, thinking about our North Carolina office).

See ya there, dude. (Yup, in our California office we once had a UCLA student working part-time for us. He showed up at work unless it was windy and then he called in and went wind surfing in Marina del Rey down the street in order to "study" for the wind surfing course he was using to meet one of his course requirements at UCLA!)

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Health, Community Organization, and National Policy

I've been at the national meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program "Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Across the U.S." (or REACH U.S.) in Atlanta for the past few days. This a cooperative agreement funded by the CDC that includes several dozen grantees all addressing one disease in which there are significant health disparities among groups in their outcomes. We are working with a community group addressing diabetes among Haitian Americans.

In the grantee advocacy group (which includes all grantees but not the CDC project officers), one of the officers reminded that group that for the very first time in history the White House will be occupied by someone who had been a community organizer and services advocate for much of his career.

Think about that.

Yup, in a world where the banks and auto companies expect the American taxpayer to make great sacrifices to save corporate executives from their own greed and mistakes, there is hope.

It helps to remember this.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Airline Ticket Prices are in Free Fall

Airline tickets through the end of the winter are being heavily discounted. I guess it will be harder to use the "escalating airline and hotel prices make it impossible for me to go to the grantee meeting" excuse again for a while. It sure was great while it lasted.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Numbers I Still Can't Understand and Logic that Doesn't Qualify as Logic

$700 billion for banks (but which banks and for what and why won't banks issue loans?)

$100 billion to save American auto companies (but companies that refused to produce fuel efficient vehicles most of the world wants to purchase)

An unknown number of people who purchased bigger homes than they can afford will get part of their loans forgiven but nobody knows how many people will fit in this category.

There is no logic here. It is pure panic.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

NVIVO training

QSR International is offering a series of on-line webinar training sessions. Well worth the hour it takes. Recommended. QSR is now finishing up a series of these sessions, but I predict that their web site may offer additional sessions especially if users write in requesting more repetitions of these infomercials.

www.QSRinternational.com

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Change

The change in the presidency as exemplified in the election results last evening, represents a change in how we view the potential and value of all people in our society. It took a long time -- far too long of a time -- but there is now no going back.

Congratulations to Senator Obama and to American Society.

From Rosa Parks in 1955 to Barack Obama in 2008. A long time to many, a brief time to a few. But we got there.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Practical Limits for NVIVO

I have an NVIVO project with approximately 200 documents (of between 8 and 20 pages each) and about 150 nodes and matrix queries.

Before we added the last 40 documents (back when we had 160 in the project) you could run about 30-50 queries and leave them open without crashing the program.

Now you need to save the results about every 10 queries because if you do too many between program saves (and restarts), the program crashes and you lose your work.

I may be hitting a practical limit. More later.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Variance, Part II

... and I thought that stock prices were showing a lot of intra- and inter-day variance last week ...

Down 700, down 300, down 500, up 1100.

Societal level unrest captured in numbers.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Attack of the Canned Ham Particles, Part II

The solution I adopted last week -- using the SPAM filter Ella -- continues to prove to be a wise one. The filter has worked extremely well in the past week in taming all of the incoming junk. I continue to highly recommend this program.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Variance

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ are going up and down plus or minus 3 percent all morning. Never have seen anything like it for a behavior process (after all, much stock selling and buying has more to do with emotion than anything else).

Think I will go take a walk.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Dealing with the Attack of the Canned Ham Particles

On Sunday and Monday of this week, I became a victim of a spam attack that meant that I was receiving 500-1000 spam messages PER HOUR into my Outlook account. As best as I can tell, somebody spoofed my email address and then sent out tons of junk emails that got bounced back to my email account. Usually I ONLY get 1000 spams per day!

I had to become a fast expert on spam detection and elimination programs that could be integrated into Outlook.

What I ultimately settled on was a program called Ella (www.openfieldsoftware.com) that uses neural networks programming to identify what YOU consider to be spam and then moves spam to a separate folder you can review if you want. It takes about 15 minutes to initially train the neural network as to what is spam (it initially takes a conservative approach to this and training is VERY easy and consists of just pushing a button if spam makes it through the filter so that the program can study its properties for future spam identification) and a continuing commitment of about 10 minutes a day to fine-tune the programming. The program is conservative and rarely identifies a legitimate email as spam after a few minutes of training.

Free for 15 days. After 15 days, you have two choices: pay $29.95 as a one-time fee OR continue to use the program for free but let it put a little line at the bottom of your outgoing emails which is a link to its own web site. Your choice. I paid $29.95.

This program works better than anything I have tried. No question. Does not crash Outlook like many programs. Recommended.

(IMHO, spammers are at about the same evolutionary level as tape worms.)

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Updated Qualitative Data Analysis Program(s)

According to the web site for Atlas*TI, one of the two major qualitative data analysis (QDA) programs, Atlas*TI will be updated very soon to version 6. The major competitor to Atlas*TI is NVIVO, the program we use at The Measurement Group. All users win when one of these programs is updated as the other tends to immediately compete and leapfrog the new release with its own new version. NVIVO released its most recent version in Spring 2008.

For more information ...

Atlas*TI: www.atlasti.com

NVIVO: www.qsrinternational.com

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Numbers I Still Can't Understand and the Biggest Program Evaluation Error in History

I'm still having a hard time understanding the fact that $700,000,000,000 is needed to bail the U.S. banking system out from the bad management decisions of no more than 1,000 (and probably far fewer) individuals. Think about this ... The failure of the financial institutions is probably the greatest program failure in U.S. history (in its cost to the taxpayer to fix) and yet until about 60 days ago, nobody really saw it coming (some would argue that until 10 days ago, the Federal Reserve Chairman, whose job it is to recognize program failures a year before they happen, was asleep at his desk).

The government could not realize that its program to keep the U.S. (and world) financial system liquid was a catastrophic failure until it would take $700,000,000,000 to fix the problem. The failure to recognize this problem is undoubtedly the single largest program evaluation mistake ever made. Period.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Adventures in Measurement: #2 of Many to Come

I figured out what the highest score you can get on an incompetence scale must be; the scale itself (sadly) seems pretty valid. -700,000,000,000. MINUS SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION (DOLLARS). This is the score the American taxpayers have to deal with because a few thousand over-paid bankers acted with the reckless abandon of elected officials (like the NY governor or a presidential candidate from NC) calling up an escort service.

These banker bozos have put America in a situation of risk that terrorists can only dream about.

As context, 700 BILLION DOLLARS divided by $180,000 (the cost of four years of a Harvard education) could have put 3,888,889 students through our BEST colleges. Think about that. Think about what it would mean to our country to have almost 4 million more young citizens educated to lead the world. Instead, we are paying for the mistakes of a few thousand greedy pigs who acted like they were visiting a brothel. We could have had the best educated workforce in the world and instead we have to bail out the mistakes of a few jerks.

Sometimes it is better not to be able to quantify such things.

(Caveat: My estimate of lost educational opportunities above assumes that the American taxpayer, in the long term, does not receive any payback on its investment of $700,000,000,000. This probably will not happen. Let's say that we get back 75 cents on the dollar, because, after all, government bureaucrats and the same bozos who got us into this mess are going to be managing our investment, and I am still waiting for these guys to deliver the mail on time, so I am very skeptical that they can protect our investment dollar for dollar. Then, in this rosy scenario, ONLY ONE MILLION young people will have lost the opportunity to go to our best colleges. This is not exactly good news. Executive pay in the financial industries had better go down.)

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Countdown Week

Next week is Countdown Week for grants in medical and social services. The end of the federal fiscal year is approaching (September 29) and funds for the next fiscal year (starting on September 30) must be committed by September 29.

So ... If you submitted a grant proposal for a services grant for next year, you are waiting to see next week who got funded. In the old days (about 4 years ago) the feds used to let you know a few weeks in advance of the end of the fiscal year so you could staff up (or keep your current staff) and plan how to use federal monies wisely. Now, you read about whether you got funded in the press release issued during the last two days of September. And then scramble because the new rules require you to have your programming running at full-speed within 60-90 days.

These are the same guys who want to run the banks.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Financial Problems in the USA

The US government is "taking over" the commercial financial institutions of the country this week ... or at least all of the ones that have "failed" by being too greedy (shades of Gordon Grecko) and having the tax payers assume the debts of the idiots who got their companies into really dumb investments.

On the other hand ... the government running private companies?????

The best summary I heard about the situation this week about the government taking over was ...

"These guys can't deliver the mail. Do you want them protecting your life savings?"

Sometimes the devil you know is easier to deal with than the mis-guided angel.

My $.01 (I lost the other $.01 in the stock market this week).

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Adventures in Measurement: #1 of Many to Come

I plant a lot of wildflower seeds in a large meadow I am building at my home. An advertisement from a web site I purchase from states that the one-pound bag of red poppy seeds has (exactly?) 3,401,942 seeds per pound. Makes you really want to know how they measure this or what they would do if there was an "error" in their sorting machine and instead only 3,40,941 seeds made it into the bag. (I have the same reaction to a lot of measurements in the social sciences: who are they kidding?)

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Progress with a Hockey Stick?

I remember watching the Watergate Hearings on TV all day long, every day, in the summer after my first year of grad school. I am definitely something of a "bash-Nixon junkie."

The Chair of the Watergate Committee, Senator Sam Ervin, used to characterize himself as "an old country lawyer" even though (as his colleagues sometimes pointed out) he had gone to Harvard Law School, been in Washington for decades, and had had a corporate law practice.

Another guy who did this was Fred Thompson, the legal counsel for the Republican party, and now of "Law and Order" fame. Hillary Rodham (Clinton), a junior counsel for the Democrats sat in the back row and I am not sure if she ever got the opportunity to talk. I wonder if she was an "old country lawyer" too in spite of having gone to Yale Law School.

In 35 years, we have gone from professional politcians characterizing themselves as "old country lawyers" to the new label of "hockey moms." Personally, I like the hockey mom image better.

I definitely have the impression that a "hockey mom" is NOT a "soccer mom."

It's not boring this year ...

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

"Glitches" in Google Chrome (at Least if You are not Google or the FBI/CIA)

... but there are two glitches in Google Chrome ...

1. (the vanity issue). My blog does not look as good in Google Chrome as it does in Microsoft Explorer.

2. (the privacy issue). The new version of Firefox and the forthcoming version of Internet Explorer allow the user to turnoff the ability of the search engine to track (log) where the user has been on the Internet (the current geek term for this is "porno mode;" if you don't get it, be thankful; I prefer the term anti-FBI/CIA mode). Google does not like it when you turnoff the ability of the search engine to track you because without tracking where you have been they cannot serve you customized ads that marketers want to you see (for instance, been reading a story about a new Sony computer ... at the next click you will start seeing ads from retailers that sell Sony products) and Google makes most of its money from doing this. So, Google Chrome does not allow you to go into a private (or "porno") mode where they cannot track you and send you related ads (aahh, now you get this "porno mode" thing) because their business model is based on being Big Brother, sort of like the FBI/CIA (which undoubtedly can get your browsing history no matter what Firefox or Internet Explorer lead you to believe they are doing).

Chrome is a great product. You will like it and want to use it. The cost of doing so is losing privacy so that Google can make more money. As long as you know the rules this is no problem; an adult is entitled to call this one whichever way is best for them. And, Microsoft will undoubtedly remind you that if you want to anonymously browse a porno web site, they have a new browser for you.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

New Web Browser on Target

Consider googling for "Google Chrome" and installing it. Google Chrome is a very smooth, highly useful, new Internet browser.

Recommended.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Real People, Real Problems, and Real Strengths

This year, we have ...

... a Vice Presidential candidate who recently gave birth to a baby with Down Syndrome, who has a teenage daughter who is pregnant, and who endorses the "Right to Life" position ...

... a Presidential candidate, usually identified as African American, who was born to an 18-year old white mother, abandoned by his father, raised by his white grandmother, and attended a church whose minister has espoused racist views ...

... a Vice Presidential candidate whose family was killed in a car accident right after he started his public career and has been frustrated in several prior runs for the Presidency ...

... a Presidential candidate, incarcerated in a Vietnamese prison for many years, who upon his return to the USA abused alcohol and dumped his wife for a younger woman of great family wealth, has not lived with his current wife for more than a decade and commutes home on some weekends, is so wealthy he donates all of his senatorial salary to charity, and has adopted a child-of-color from abroad ...

Real people with real problems who may have learned real strength of character.

(These folks share a lot of problems and issues with the clients in the programs we evaluate.)

This is a lot more encouraging than it is to have four candidates who are white, male, of the same religion, have not been divorced, and who smile blankly for the camera wearing TV-blue shirts and red ties.

Real people who have addressed real issues and risen above them. This bodes well for America.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Fair Representation

Next January, there will either be a person of color or a woman among the two top elected executives in the USA. Finally ... a US Presidential ticket election where more than 50 percent of our population can say that one of the two top candidates is from their demographic group. About time.

[And, at a pragmatic rather than idealistic level, isn't it great that we will start to look for "raw talent" among our entire population when it comes to electing leaders. Liberal and conservative talent among all demographic groups, a concept that has finally come.]

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Abstract for Presentation at the Gerontological Society of America Meeting, November 2008

Paper by G. J. Huba, Ph.D.; Lisa A. Melchior, Ph.D.; Laura P. Giles, M.S.G.; and E. Thomas Brewer, M.P.H., M.S.W., M.B.A. to be presented on November 22, 2008, at the Gerontological Society of America Meeting

Evaluation of the 18-Project Archstone Foundation Elder Abuse and Neglect Initiative: Phase I Results. In 2005, the Archstone Foundation awarded 18 grants as part of its Elder Abuse and Neglect Initiative (EANI), a commitment of $3.7M over two years. The projects cover the areas of Education and Training for Mandated Reporters [4], Multidisciplinary Team Development [6], Systems Analysis [2], Forensic Centers and a Center of Excellence [3], Financial Protection [2], and a ConveningCenter [1]. The Measurement Group conducted a cross-cutting evaluation. A qualitative—quantitative strategy was used in which equated, quantitative indicators relevant for each project were developed from narrative reports and interviews. Among the indicators were types and numbers of mandated reporters trained; training quality; number of client screenings and assessments; number and quality of infrastructure development activities; number and quality of information dissemination efforts; cases identified for referral to the District Attorney; the disposition of cases filed by the District Attorney; assets preserved through litigation or negotiation; and guardianships. Phase I was successful, with the 18 projects collectively demonstrating highly relevant program activity and more than 600 significant outcomes including preserving $12M in assets, training almost 4,000 mandated reporters, screening 3,000 clients, and assessing 500. Quantitative and qualitative data collection and modeling methods (NVIVO and CHAID for studying relationships in qualitative data; small-sample, logistic regression and nonparametric tests for quantitative data) were used to show patterns in outcomes. Phase I was considered sufficiently successful by the Archstone Foundation to justify committing $4.0M for three additional years.

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Digital Photos that Tell a Story

I've been spending a lot of time this month experimenting with using digital pictures to tell the story of programs (such as the Quantitative Training for Underrepresented Groups Conference I attended in mid-August and am evaluating; sessions at the American Psychological Association Convention; and later our evaluations on elder abuse and homelessness). I am getting more and more convinced that if we can change the "every picture tells a story" category to "selected pictures can tell about program activities and outcomes," much more interesting and valuable evaluation reports are possible.

A good friend -- who is an architect -- is helping me conceptualize this since the outcomes of much of his work are told in pictures

More later...

© 2008, The Measurement Group LLC. All rights reserved.