I. Dysfunctional Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee

Right to Know Advisory Committee and SubcommitteesState House

Augusta, MaineDwight HinesMarch 3, 2014

Odd, most days when I get up the stairs, I expect to see Ken Curtis or James Longley. But they arenʼt here anymore. When I turn the corner to head into the Legislative Library, I expect to see Senator Minette Cummings and Senator Joe, sitting at a table across from each other, pushing things that look like raisins along an imaginary line. Iʼm just there to get or give her a printout full of numbers — on a good day, a day after a weekend when the university in Orono let me run my data on the weekend because it was too much, too big for Oronoʼs IBM Sierra mainframe to run during the week (1), numbers that she would look at like they were her prize orchids growing, “Look at them smile”, sheʼd say while we stood on the front porch of her island house built by a family of rich dwarfs. But I never interrupted her and Senator Sewell, they were too intense and just watching and listening to them moving raisins, then scribbling on the back of an LD, then murmuring back and forth too quick for me to catch all the word shapes held my attention better than a slow cooking fresh blueberry pie. What they were doing was a semi- quasi- qualitative multiple regression — though they never called it that — using raisins as indicators of groups of people who would be impacted by the details of the bill that the Democrat and the Republican they were (2) were hammering and chiseling and twisting and cajoling into near form shadows that went outside normal dimensions. It was a classical mini-max calculus problem — though they never called it that — but deep, deep enough that someday, when computers got more powerful youʼd be able to run these very human problems, problems that had to be optimized for alleviating pain without inflicting damages or distress in those unaware of how valued they were by the Senators. They did it, and not once did they call what they were doing statistics or calculations or even figuring, or just working for their people. I still sense them there, or off in one of the small rooms, Senator Joe humming to himself as he tried different fits, different structures Senator Cummings nodding slow yes or brief no. Often, I couldnʼt wait to see the form, the architecture, the Gestalt they created, a figure-ground that would be warm and happy in a fine art museum. Mr. Sunstein, who knows about the freedom of information top-down and spinning and in qubits, knew and approved of what the Senators were doing, and has explained it to the rest of us in “Nonsectarian Welfare Statements”, “A central question is whether they [institutions, RTK committees] are helping a nationʼs [Maineʼs] citizens to live good lives.” (3). If they are not helping, they be dysfunctional.

Then, all alone, without the canopy of the old ones, itʼs today, right now and I canʼt hear Governor Longley, and he was always heard, even when he couldnʼt be seen, and IʼII walk into the Joint Judiciary Committee room, into a Committee that is not just arithophobic but innumerate, lacking even the gentle rocking back and forth of the elected Rabbis who knew that numbers, little and big, blue, green, orange and lavender, moderately sprinkled with hard potato facts were their guide, the light on the path they needed to do their sacred jobs. In ʻ63 and ʻ64, those Rabbis were everywhere, thank God.

1

The Right to Know Legislative Advisory Committee, with only one elected Representative, Kimberly Monaghan-Derrig, and only one elected Senator, Linda M. Valentino, is not data driven, is not best evidence based and has biases almost as deep and warpled as the ugly green ones I saw in the Louisiana Capitol, in Baton Rouge, in 1963. A sad time that fresh gumbo couldnʼt set right. Information was not recognizable, and logic and reason were lost in the sheets that scrawny men wore as they shuffled in slow, white buzzard circles. My mother would have said their wives donʼt think much of their husbands, letting them go out like that in unwashed, wrinkled up and rumpled old sheets. Representative Monaghan-Derrig said not a word, not a sigh or shriek. Senator Valentino, in a strong voice, that let you know she would not tolerate laziness, said we are going to get us an expert in information technology.

The RTK committee gave me more quotes to use than will fit on this page or the next. Like when Harry Pringle, appointed by the Governor to represent the school system bellowed, “We donʼt want parentsʼ emails being found using the Maine Right to Know Act because all someone needs to get into your bank account is your name and email address” (4). Him saying that didnʼt bother me but a little. The fact that no one corrected him, not even Percy Brown or Perry Antone, was proof my body and mind and soul were all in the wrong place. Percy and Perry knew better but they ignored me eye-nudging them.

So a major theme of the right to know advisory committee was it maybe good for you to know, but youʼre damned if you disagree. Harry, maybe at a different meeting, maybe not, said that we needed to raise the charge that agencies and towns charge for processing and copying public records because “everything else has gone up so why shouldnʼt information cost more too.” No one disagreed, again, and then the raise was approved. [(5) with graphs to let you know the error sizes of his statement)]. There be ripples from vacuums like this that start slow, with a heavy amplitude sine wave that gains strength as it rolls out the door, down the hall and over to the Augusta Police Department, where they are unable to find the owner of a pickup truck when they have the license plate number, and the Chief, maybe bumped by that sine wave, maybe not, goes to the City Council and has them approve a charge of $25.00 for each police report someone requests, after the first one (6) Itʼs sad the Augusta City Council thinks not of state law, or little of it, and builds on Mr. Pringleʼs errors. (7)

A mildew scent comes into the RTK room that is too familiar because Harry Pringle doesnʼt know how prices for computer hardware and software over the last ten years have dropped to levels that strain my economically challenged brain because as the prices have marched south, following General Sherman to and through Atlanta, the crank power, the amount and quality and speeds of volatile and fixable memory, all done with chips and mirrors, have gone north, past the pole and into the northern lights. Yep, that old von Neumann slab of silicon, without morphing into non-von Neuman slabs, as some said was ordained by physical laws, by God, made Moore and Mooreʼs law answers to prayers of dollar struggling pointy-headed nerds. Prayer answers that continue to defy economic gravity with their every 18 months doubling answers.

As I sit in the back of the room, taking page after page of notes to keep my attention on these folks and their crippled advice that the legislators are going to rely on for their law making decisions, I accept that no one on the RTK committee represents the ordinary citizen, the taxpayer, the one who is without resources when attempting to obtain information about his government. My acceptance is soon verified and validated by Mr. Richard Flewelling, who tells another committee member sitting

2

across the room, so itʼs a loud telling, to be sure to give the RTK requesters only PDFs, not spreadsheet files. In those words, which echo around in my ears, you know that a significant component, some democracy and governance specialists would say the most substantive component, of the RTK, the component that transforms the roles of the requester and the responder from US versus THEM, to We, is lost. Barrier placement between citizen and government, even when it requires extra work of the government, reminds me of how much effort the government spent in making some people sit in the back of the bus, and go to a completely separate, but not equal, school. In those few words, a RTK Advisory member squint-narrowed the sharing of useful information to the community, the state, and the individual, without a single objection from the rest of the committee (8).

Footnotes1) Computer Programs 200K or larger, with data, were too large to run during the week. Today, my 3 year old MacIntosh MacBook Pro has 8 Gigabytes of volatile memory (RAM), one terabyte of hard memory, and a CPU with blister speeds of 2 GHz. 2) The Senators were problem-solving driven, they knew there would be many years for them to discuss party affiliations and political differences after they solved the problems and created the opportunities for Mainers. The Senators could have written Cass R. Sunsteinʼs, Incompletely Theorized Agreements in Constitutional Law, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Papers No. 147, 2007. <http://ssrn.com/abstract=957369>.3) Sunstein, C. Nonsectarian Welfare Statements. Preliminary Draft, 8/28/2013, Regulation & Governance, Symposium on Institutional Dysfunction. <http://ssrn.com/abstract=2317909>.4) There was excitement when a newspaper reported that a “hackerʼ had gotten into a schoolʼs computer system and stolen all the email addresses of the parents. The excitement tripled when the hacker sent the parents an email. It then appeared that the hacker received the emails attached to an email the superintendent unknowingly sent to him. But, it was too late. Well, the RTK Advisory Committee, based on bad information, recommended to the legislature that school email addresses for parents be confidential. I believe that law passed. “ except: E-mail addresses obtained by a political subdivision of the State for the sole purpose of disseminating noninteractive notifications, updates and cancellations that are issued from the political subdivision or its elected officers to an individual or individuals that request or regularly accept these noninteractive communications. [2013, c. 339, §3 (NEW).]”5) Ernst R. Berndt, Zvi Griliches, Neal Rappaport, Econometric Estimates of Prices Indexes for Personal Computers in the 1990s, NBER Working Paper No. 4549,August 1995. <http://www.nber.org/papers/w4549.pdf>

In this paper we construct a number of quality-adjusted price indexes for personal computers in the U.S. marketplace over the 1989- 92 time period. We generalize earlier work by incorporating simultaneously the time, age and vintage effects of computer models into a fully saturated parameterization, and then develop a corresponding specification test procedure. While the simple arithmetic mean of prices of models by year reveals a price decline of about 11% per year, use of a matched model procedure similar to that commonly used by government statistical agencies generates a much larger rate of price decline -- about 20% per year. Since the matched model procedure holds quality constant, it ignores quality change embodied in new models. When data on new and surviving models are used in the estimation of hedonic price equations, a variety of quality-adjusted price indexes can be calculated, with varying interpretations. Although there are some differences, we find that on average these quality-adjusted price indexes decline at about 30% per year, with a particularly large price drop occurring in 1992. Parameters in hedonic price equations

3

for desktop PC models differ from those for mobile PCs. Moreover, quality-adjusted prices fall at a slightly lower AAGR for mobile models (24%) than for desktops (32%). We conclude that taking quality changes into account has an enormous impact on the time pattern of price indexes for PCs.

4

5

Moore's Law

“You have probably heard about Moore's Law. It says that CPU power doubles every 18 to 24 months or so. History shows Moore's law very clearly. You can see it, for example, by charting the course of Intel microprocessor chips starting with Intel's first single-chip microprocessor in 1971:

In 1971, Intel released the 4004 microprocessor. It was a 4-bit chip running at 108 kilohertz. It had about 2,300 transistors. By today's standards it was extremely simple, but it was powerful enough to make one of the first electronic calculators possible.

In 1981, IBM released the first IBM PC. The original PC was based on the Intel 8088 processor. The 8088 ran at 4.7 megahertz (43 times faster clock speed than the 4004) and had nearly 30,000 transistors (10 times more).

In 1993, Intel released the first Pentium processor. This chip ran at 60 megahertz (13 times faster clock speed than the 8088) and had over three million transistors (10 times more).

In 2000 the Pentium 4 appeared. It had a clock speed of 1.5 gigahertz (25 times faster clock speed than the Pentium) and it had 42 million transistors (13 times more). [ref]

You can see that there are two trends that combine to make computer chips more and more powerful. First there is the increasing clock speed. If you take any chip and double its clock speed, then it can perform twice as many operations per second. Then there is the increasing number of transistors per chip. More transistors let you get more done per clock cycle. For example, with the 8088 processor it took approximately 80 clock cycles to multiply two 16-bit integers together. Today you can multiply two 32-bit floating point numbers every clock cycle. Some chips today even allow you to get more than one floating point operation done per clock cycle.

Taking Moore's law literally, you would expect processor power to increase by a factor of 1,000 every 15 or 20 years. Between 1981 and 2001, that was definitely the case. Clock speed improved by a factor of over 300 during that time, and the number of transistors per chip increased by a factor of 1,400. A processor in 2002 is 10,000 times faster than a processor in 1982 was. This trend has been in place for decades, and there is nothing to indicate that it will slow down any time soon. Scientists and engineers always get around the limitations that threaten Moore's law by developing new technologies. [ref]

The same thing happens with RAM chips and hard disk space. A 10 megabyte hard disk cost about $1,000 in 1982. Today you can buy a 250 gigabyte drive that is twice as fast for $350. Today's drive is 25,000 times bigger and costs one-third the price of the 1982 model because of Moore's law. In the same time period -- 1982 to 2002 -- standard RAM (Random Access Memory) available in a home machine has gone from 64 kilobytes to 128 megabytes -- it improved by of factor of 2,000.

What if we simply extrapolate out, taking the idea that every 20 years things improve by a factor of 1,000 or 10,000? What we get is a machine in 2020 that has a processor running at something like 10 trillion operations per second. It has a terabyte of RAM

6

and one or two petabytes of storage space (a petabyte is one quadrillion bytes). A machine with this kind of power is nearly incomprehensible -- there are only two or three machines on the planet with this kind of power today (the monstrous NEC Earth Simulator, with 5,000 separate processor chips working together, is one example). In 2020, every kid will be running their video games on a $500 machine that has that kind of power.

What if we extrapolate another 20 years after that, to 2040? A typical home machine at that point will be 1,000 times faster than the 2020 machine. Human brains are thought to be able to process at a rate of approximately one quadrillion operations per second. A CPU in the 2040 time frame could have the processing power of a human brain, and it will cost $1,000. It will have a petabyte (one quadrillion bytes) of RAM. It will have one exabyte of storage space. An exabyte is 1,000 quadrillion bytes. That's what Moore's law predicts.

Between 1981 and 2002, the processing power, hard disk space and RAM in a typical desktop computer increased dramatically because of Moore's Law. Extrapolating out to the years 2021 and 2041 shows a startling increase in computer power. The point where small, inexpensive computers have power approaching that of the human brain is just a few decades away.

The computer power we will have in a home machine around 2050 will be utterly amazing. A typical home computer will have processing power and memory capacity that exceeds that of a human brain. What we will have in 2100 is anyone's guess. The power of a million human brains on the desktop? It is impossible to imagine, but not unlikely.”

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

6) Augusta Police Department has more than likely spent over $50,000 dollars in the past 2 or 3 years on computer hardware, software, and training. If they have even a primitive database system for storing and retrieving and printing reports, even one the free, no cost, no maintenance, open-source spreadsheet and database programs (OpenOffice or OfficeLibre), which Iʼve yet to see used by any town or department or agency in Maine, a timed report search would reveal that the actual search time for retrieving a report would be less than ten seconds, assuming the operator of the computer knows how to use the system and has a name or report code number. Printing might take another 10 seconds. There is no way the police department can justify charging $25.00 for a single report. Eliminating the threat that comes from outside examination of their records is a more valid reason for the $25.00 charge.

7

7) It is odd, if not perverse, that while developed countries, non-governmental organizations, and international judicial organizations (InterAmerican Court for Human Rights; European Court for Human Rights) attribute economic development to the rule of law (including human rights) and to open government (open records and open meetings), Maine towns and agencies and the Right to Know Advisory Committee act as if economic development is achieved by restricting both the rule of law and open government. 8) One possible explanation of the bias in the RTK committee is that the newspapers in Maine are being subsidized by the local and state governments via Maine statutes that require legal notices be published in newspapers. That this is an antitrust violation remains to be seen but typical consequences of antitrust violations are poor quality, a lack of innovation, and the receivers of the subsidy identifying with the provider of the subsidy money. We now have data on several towns on the poor coverage and will be filing a formal complaint with the Department of Justice.

N.B. The RTK Advisory staff, Margaret Reinsch and Colleen McCarthy are not part of the dysfunction, They do their homework, documents used by the committee are available before the meeting starts — often color-coded for ease of keeping track of changes, and they provide good interpretations of present statutes.

For great examples of how a functional committee acts, one that is fact-based, focused, organized, and is concerned with the citizens, attend the Government Oversight Committee meetings. GOC and OPAGA are doing an excellent job, repeatedly.

End of Part 1

8