Velvet has a tangerine day

Velvet was having a tangerine day. On a tangerine day every interview she touched would flow and glow and she was reminded of that song by Talking Heads which right now she couldn't stop hearing even if she wanted to:

I dont know why I love you like I do
All the troubles you put me through
Sixteen candles there on my wall
And here am I the biggest fool of them all

I wanna know that youll tell me
I love to stay
Take me to the river and drop me in the water
Dip me in the river, drop me in the water
Washing me down, washing me down.

Yep. It was one of those drop me in the water days.

There had been alot of those days since the retooling. The retooling was when she sent her laptop back to the company. Then, a few days later she got back a Wii.

It wasn't really a Nintendo. It was still a laptop. But it was also a Wii.

It was a Wii because now when she dragged the external data sources avatar onto the interview and there were still too many unanswered questions, she could shake and bake.

Shake and bake was a new resource. It used something called "connecting the dots" to turn unanswered questions into answered ones. The reason they called it "shake and bake" instead of "connecting the dots" was easy. Because you just didn't activate the shake and bake plan by dropping it on the interview and its lost sections. After you dropped the plan, it had to be simmered and cooked. That was when Wii came in.

Velvet would pick up her laptop and move it from side to side and back and forth until there was a fit and the answers covered all the questions.

The company never really explained the Wii except to say that the laptop was now capable of doing "lateral thinking" but the thinking had to be shaped. Hence shake and bake and Wii. And hence visualization. And hence the interviewer as cook.

It was all very natural. Smile.

Velvet wanted to look under the cover of shake and bake just like she would look under the cover at her boyfriend. But she knew this time she wouldn't understand anything she saw. Even so, Velvet couldn't let sleeping dogs lie. The sleeping dog in this case was a tip -- you know, one of those yellow popups that surfaced under a mouseover.

When Velvet moused over the shake and bake plan she got the tip. The tip said "self-organizing map". Sometimes it simply said "SOM". And sometimes there was the video.

Yep. Take me to the river and drop me in the water. It wasn't better than sex but Wii was it fun.

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Ting-lan

Ting-lan wondered twice.

Would her way be vinegar or might she succeed with the many?

Generally speaking, the Americans were premature. They were premature this and premature that. Both of the sexes. Need she say more?

Ting-lan had left the pack for a few weeks now.

She was working on the usable data problem. External data had been a disappointment. Too many unanswered questions. Sometimes it was easier not to use the external data at all.

Ting-lan had the insight that would minimize the unanswered questions. She would use the off-colors. The off-colors were the very small data islands on her screen that could not be located in question space.

Ting-lan liked answers without questions. As a little girl this had always been her way.

At first Ting-lan has thought the clustering algorithm would be easy to devise. She would discover the drifts in the questions with answers and use the drifts to reel in the off-colors at random and with brute force.

Only the net she cast was too large.

Now Ting-lan was working with majors and minors. Semantics, she thought, was a dog's day afternoon.

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Future Instruments -- Part IV

Velvet wasn't happy.

On the dashboard she was watching a picture develop that was nothing short of confusion.

The picture was an overlay -- a scattergram -- on top of a pipeline. The pipeline itself showed neighborhoods. Some of the neighborhoods were dark and some were light, depending on what happened after Velvet had dropped the external data sources.

External data sources made certain neighborhoods more or less light while leaving other neighborhoods in the dark.

Today this was not Velvet's problem.

Many dark neighborhoods in the overlay had been labelled "let sleeping dogs lie". The company would not pay her to ask the questions in these sections. Other neighborhoods that had only been partially illuminated as a result of the drop were now labeled "simulation candidates".

What was troubling Velvet were the neighborhoods marked "critical sections". These were empty sections that needed to be asked or not depending on the access roads. The trouble as Velvet looked at the scattergram was that it had waffled on the access roads.

Velvet, like most interviewers, wanted to see the access roads in black and white. Interviewers didn't have to enter a neighborhood connected to other neighborhoods on a black road. Being a person of color, Velvet wished the company had devised other color coding but she would muse on geek culture at another time.

Right now on the scattergram she saw dark neighborhoods labelled "critical sections" whose access roads were the color gray.

This could only mean back tracking. And back tracking always required a plan.

This had not always been the case. Before the advent of external data, interviews had been one way in and one way out for the most part. She wasn't sure why but external data sources had complicated this picture. In training they had simply told the interviewers that "now there is more than one way to skin a cat."

Velvet liked cats but she caught their drift.

On the dashboard Velvet flipped overlays to a plan called "the shortest distance between two points." This would be the plan that minimized back tracking which of course, Velvet thought, would have the side effect of maximizing the company's profits.

It didn't take Velvet more than a few pokes at this plan to decide it was high risk. Velvet's rule of thumb was to look at gate questions that would turn access roads to white coming from neighborhoods that were lit up by external data sources. In these situations Velvet judged whether the respondent would know the answer.

Now Velvet chose a plan called "NoMax". Velvet wasn't sure what "NoMax" did. Velvet did know that "NoMax" did not maximize the use of data from external data sources. So much for double negatives.

Velvet looked at the scattergram once more and liked what she saw. Instead of lots of gray access roads, everything was coming up roses.

She counted four roses. Velvet knew that this was a borderline case that required authorization. Velvet also knew she was not about to be second guessed by central authority. That was why as she dragged the current pipeline she had just devised on top of the central authority resource, Velvet waited with easy confidence.

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Future Instruments -- Part I

Just saw the article in Amstat International's newsletter on the situation at Statistics Netherlands.

Does one think that the shift to registers and administrative files as the primary data source is a phenomenon unique to the Netherlands?

Let's say it is not and see what happens (a thought experiment).

Let's say that the use of data banks in both establishment and household surveys becomes a requirement in the US too.

At the same time, as the article suggests, there may be "initiatives for new statistics". I would also add that with this data source, as with any other, there will also be missing data.

What kind of "instrument" is required to build the record under these circumstances?

It would be an instrument that largely filled in the gaps or, as people in the market research world might says, it would be an instrument that filled in white spaces in the single source of truth.

I try to imagine such an instrument.

Could we get by using the current paradigm which in this case would be a preload of the registers and an instrument that knew how to jump from one white space to another without interviewer intervention.

Would we not want to know before a survey went to a mode whether it was going to take five minutes or five hours depending on the missing data?

Would an interview that jumps between white spaces trash the context in which questions are normally asked?

Alternatively, if the context was preserved and an interview walked instead of jumped, wouldn't the cost of data points become prohibitive and the interview come to be seen as flat-footed?

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