Notes from "Counting Working-Age People with Disabilities"

Book Discussed

Houtenville, A. J., Stapleton, D. C., Weathers, R. R. II, & Burkhauser, R. V. (Eds.). (2009). Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement.  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

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I read several chapters of this inexpensive book.  This post presents my notes on (as distinct from a review of) those chapters.

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Preface

I had previously noticed that Cornell had a website with a lot of information on disability statistics.  This preface explains why.  The U.S. Department of Education’s National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) awarded Cornell a grant for a Rehabilitation, Research, and Training Center (RRTC) (which Cornell called StatsRRTC).This book grew out of a conference on disability statistics research in Washington, DC in October 2006.

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Chapter 1

Stapleton, D. C., Houtenville, A. J., Weathers, R. R. II, & Burkhauser, R. V. (2009). Purpose, overview, and key conclusions.  In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 1-26).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

The title's focus on working-age people follows from an earlier article by Weathers in which he identified the 18-64 age group as being the traditional group of working age, and further pared away the 18-24 group as being in a school-to-work transition stage, and the 62-64 group as being in a work-to-retirement transition stage.  As in that earlier article, this chapter (p. 6) focuses on the group of people aged 25-61.

The authors identify (p. 9) a number of reasons why state-level data on the prevalence of people with disabilities (PWDs) are important -- why, that is, federal data do not capture important local variations.  Some of the reasons include different physical, cultural, economic, and policy environments.  They refer (p. 13) to the National Disability Data System (NDDS), which does not exist in any formal sense (although it should) but can be understood, at present, as the aggregate of a number of disparate data collection and analysis efforts on federal and other levels.  For instance, data from administrative records suggest that only about half of the total number of PWDs estimated by the American Community Survey (ACS) are actually enrolled in federal programs that provide assistance to PWDs (p. 15).

One section of this chapter discusses shortcomings in statistical knowledge about disabilities.  The book has whole chapters that address this and related topics, so I did not read this section in any detail.  I was surprised, though, to see the authors praise the 2008 ACS as having “an improved set of disability questions” (p. 23).  I had not thought that the new set of questions was better, but of course I was not the expert.  So while I was not sure, at this point, that I would read those chapters in their entirety, I was interested to see what this book said about the new ACS.

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Chapter 2

Weathers, R. R., II (2009). The disability data landscape. In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 27-68).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Weathers says that this book will be using concepts based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) published by the World Health Organization (WHO).  The concepts from the ICF are “impairment,” “activity limitation,” “participation restriction,” and “disability.”  An impairment is “a significant deviation or loss in body function or structure” (p. 29).  An activity limitation is “a difficulty that an individual may have in executing activities,” particularly activities of daily living (ADLs) (i.e., activities inside the home, e.g., dressing).  A participation restriction is “an inability to engage in societal activities”; it can be either a work limitation or an instrumental activity of daily living (IADL) (i.e., an activity outside the home, e.g., shopping).  A disability is any one or more of these (e.g., an impairment that is also an activity limitation).  Weathers further divides impairments into sensory (e.g., hearing, seeing), physical (i.e., difficulty performing physical functions), and mental (i.e., difficulty performing mental functions).

Weathers uses these distinctions to talk about what one can learn from five major surveys:  the American Community Survey (ACS); the Community Population Survey (CPS), and especially its Annual Social and EConomic supplement (CPS-ASEC); the 2000 Decennial Census; the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).  Weathers notes that “the disability data landscape is rapidly evolving” (p. 61); for example, he says new disability-related questions are being added to the CPS and to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) produced by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  There have also been other changes since Weathers wrote this chapter (apparently around 2006), including the elimination of disability questions from the Census (which I therefore don’t discuss here) and the revision of disability questions in the ACS.

In an analysis that may not be entirely current, Weathers traces how each of these surveys operationalizes these concepts.  In the case of mental impairments, for example, the ACS asks about difficulty in learning, remembering, or concentrating because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition lasting at least six months; the CPS-ASEC has no questions; the NHIS asks about sadness, nervousness, worthlessness, etc. over the past 30 days; and the SIPP asks if you have a learning disability, mental retardation, a developmental disability, a problem with confusion or forgetfulness, or any other mental or emotional condition.

Weathers identifies four main kinds of questions that these surveys can be used to answer:  distinguishing subpopulations (e.g., the NHIS and the SIPP ask numerous questions, so you can tell what’s happening with with people who have severe vision disabilities, whereas the ACS doesn’t distinguish different types of impairments (see preceding paragraph)); capturing state and local disability data (only the ACS); capturing long-term trends (especially the CPS and the NHIS); and capturing changes in the circumstances of the same individuals through reinterviewing (especially the SIPP, also the CPS).  The message from this analysis is that the best results come from knowing what each tool can do and being able to use them in combination when necessary.

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Chapter 3

Houtenville, A. J., Potamites, E., Erickson, W. A., & Ruiz-Quintanilla, S. A. (2009). Disability prevalence and demographics. In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 69-100).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

The authors say that there is a “generally accepted conclusion that there has been a decline in disability among the elderly,” and there seems to have been no change for the working-age population (aged 25-61) from 1997 to 2000, but there was a sharp rise for the working-age population between 1984 and 1996 (pp. 72-73).  The total increase during that period varied by age group:  18%, for those aged 18-29; 52%, for those 30-39; 46%, for 40-49; and 20%, for 50-59.  This change is theorized to stem from either a change in health or an increase in reporting.

In 2006, working-age disability prevalence by state varied from 9.1% in New Jersey to 21.4% in West Virginia, with a median of 12.6%.  There were fairly strong regional tendencies.  All southern states from New Mexico to West Virginia (except Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Virginia) were in the worst bracket; no other states except Alaska, Maine, and Montana were in that bracket.  The second-worst group was dominated by the other states of the Northwest, from Wyoming westward, and by the midwestern states from Missouri to Pennsylvania (including Michigan, excluding Illinois).  The best rates were California-Nevada, Colorado, the north-central states (including Illinois, excluding North Dakota), and the small states (except Rhode Island and Delaware) from Massachusetts to Maryland.

Working-age disability rates in 2006 varied dramatically by age and race.  All categories of disability (e.g., physical, mental) appeared at least two to three times more frequently among people in the 55-61 group as in those aged 25-34.  Only 6% of Asian-Americans, but 22% of African Americans, reported any disability.

The authors note that differences in socioeconomic status (SES) may explain some of these variations among states and races.  SES can influence lifestyle factors (e.g., smoking, obesity), access to health care, and the kinds of jobs that people have.

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Chapters 4-7:  not covered here

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Chapter 8

Ballou, J., & Markesich, J. (2009). Survey data collection methods. In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 265-298).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Here is the chapter's summary (pp. 290-291):

Recommended Best Practices

Include people with disabilities

PAR [participatory action research] must be considered. Although there is limited research to document the differences in research conducted with and without the participation of people with disabilities, current evidence suggests data quality can be improved by including people with disabilities. Researchers should be vigilant about addressing the need to include people with disabilities in all phases of the survey process.

Use available resources

Surveying Persons with Disabilities: A Source Guide (Markesich, Cashion, and Bleeker 2006) provides a starting point for any disability research project. Although the research included in the collection of sources may not be definitive, these citations provide extensive information related to the methodological issues associated with surveying persons with disabilities and include documentation on approaches that have been used to improve accessibility.

Plan your research

Using the guidelines listed in Table 8.2, researchers must keep in mind the key steps in the process that can impact data quality, particularly for research about and with people who have disabilities. At a minimum, reviewing these guidelines can help in making thoughtful and deliberate decisions about survey methods. In addition, information in this chapter identifies steps in the survey process where particular attention is needed to improve measurement quality.

Train interviewers

Current research identifies what interviewers should know to make sure they have the tools needed to communicate with people who have disabilities. This training should include recognition of types of disabilities, criteria for the selection of proxies, and options that can be used when interviewing people with disabilities, such as alternate wording of questions and qualitative approaches that may differ from interviews with people who do not have disabilities.

Provide documentation

The information presented in Table 8.1 shows what is needed to provide full disclosure of survey methods. It is feasible to provide complete and easily accessible documentation on disability survey information, and doing so has the added benefit of describing how various methods improve survey quality. This documentation is also essential for analysis to assist researchers in evaluating data quality.

Perfecting Best Practices

Meta-analysis of current research

A useful next step would be to conduct a meta-analysis that synthesizes data on similar topics. A systematic analysis of information would identify consistent research results that can be used to set best practice standards with increased confidence and to target the knowledge gaps that require research.

Conduct methodological and experimental research

We described examples of research that is needed to inform a set of best practices for surveying persons with disabilities in our discussion of the steps in the survey process: sampling, questionnaire design, and data collection methods. A goal of the planning group was to establish priorities for future research. This was a tremendous challenge because there are multiple issues that need to be addressed. Information from a meta-analysis could provide guidance on future research priorities.

Educating researchers, both those using data for analysis and those designing surveys to obtain data from and about people with disabilities, will result in improved disability information. One of the major changes needed in disability research is the inclusion of people with disabilities in all phases of the process. Being attentive to the methods used to collect survey information will increase the confidence that the data used for a range of public policy and service provision decisions more accurately represents people with disabilities.

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Chapter 9

Stapleton, D. C., Wittenburg, D. C., & Thornton, C. (2009). Program participants. In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 299-352).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

This chapter discusses programs that provide data about “working-age (aged 18-64) participants in the largest federal and federal-state programs that serve people with disabilities, including Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Medicare, Medicaid, state vocational rehabilitation (VR) services, and disabled veterans benefits programs” (p. 299).  These are sometimes called “administrative” data sources, as distinct from “survey” data sources.

The authors are particularly interested in efforts to “match” administrative and survey data sources.  Generally, this appears to mean that survey participants agree to give researchers access to their personal files maintained in administrative databases.  Matching expands the amount of information that survey researchers can draw upon to understand groups of participants.  Given the sensitive nature of confidential medical and other administrative records, there are several major restrictions upon researchers’ access to such data.  The Census Bureau has come up with an alternative, known as a “synthetic” data file, in which the individual data points do not correspond with any actual human being, but collectively the data represent the characteristics of the target population.

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Chapter 10

She, P., & Stapleton, D. C. (2009). The group quarters population.  In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 353-380).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

There is the household population, and then there is the nonhousehold population.  The latter includes people who live in institutional group quarters (GQ), noninstitutional GQ, and homeless settings.  The ACS is in the process of becoming the main source of information on disabilities among the nonhousehold population.  That population is believed to have disabilities at far higher rates than the household population. 

The authors use the 2000 Census and three surveys of prison and jail inmates:  the Survey of Inmates of Local Jails (SILJ), the Survey of Inmates of State Correctional Facilities (SISCF), and the Survey of Inmates of Federal Correctional Facilities (SIFCF).  The authors welcome the recent expansion of the ACS to include the GQ population, but note that it “does not contain the wealth of information that can be found in other surveys of the household population” (p. 374).

In the institutional GQ, the authors observe that, up through 2000, there was a gradual decline in the percentage of the general population that lives in nursing homes, and a rapid rise in the share of the population that consists of people (especially young men) in correctional facilities.  The latter phenomenon seems posed to halt if not reverse, given current budget difficulties in many governmental entities. Nonetheless, the draining of people with (especially mental) disabilities from the household population into the nonhousehold population, especially into correctional facilities, may artificially depress the reported rate of disabilities in the household population:  “It is possible that growth in the incarceration of young adult males helps to substantially explain the decline in disability prevalence for young males” (p. 372).

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Chapter 11

Stapleton, D. C., Livermore, G. A., & She, P. (2009). Options for improving disability data collection. In A. J. Houtenville, D. C. Stapleton, R. R. Weathers, II, & R. V. Burkhauser (Eds.), Counting working-age people with disabilities: What current data tell us and options for improvement (pp. 381-418).  Kalamazoo:  W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

The differences in time horizons and other features of the major surveys (see the last paragraph under Chapter 2, above) means that they can complement one another if they are asking the same questions.  To this end, the ACS questions are now used also by the CPS and NHIS.  But there is generally a tradeoff between large sample sizes (as in the ACS, which covers large numbers of people and therefore can provide estimates down to the county level) and the amount of information collected per person.  That is, the ACS questions do not capture the same amount of detail as some of the others (e.g., SIPP):  “One particular concern is that the ACS might fail to identify many people with significant psychiatric conditions” (p. 391).  Moreover, there are typically not enough people with a particular health condition to provide much detail from a statistical perspective.

According to the authors, “The surveys that provide the most in-depth information about people with disabilities are those that are conducted very infrequently or have only been conducted once” (p. 387).  In particular, “The NHIS Disability Supplement (NHIS-D) represents the most ambitious effort to date to collect a wide range of disability-relevant information from a large, nationally representative sample of people with disabilities of all ages.  The survey was conducted in two phases in 1994 and 1995.  The data are now more than a decade old, and the survey has not been repeated” (p. 388).

The authors advocate including the ACS questions in all federal surveys:  “In 1977, the [Office of Management and Budget] mandated the use of a standardized set of questions on race and ethnicity in all federal data collection.  A similar mandate for those at risk for disability now seems justified and would be welcomed by many users of disability data and statistics” (p. 392).  The reason is to provide comparability among surveys.  If, for example, the SIPP included the ACS questions, both would show the same prevalence of disabilities, but the ACS would then be supplemented with the greater data and somewhat longitudinal advantages of the SIPP.  That is, researchers would have much more insight into the characteristics of that 10% or 12% of the population that is identified as having a disability.  Presumably it would also be possible to speculate, at least, about county-level disability details (e.g., the numbers of people having a certain disability in a certain county) by interpreting SIPP data in light of ACS county-level data.

The authors advocate a number of other improvements to disability data collection, including stronger longitudinal data collection (especially in the SIPP), better matching of administrative and survey data, and better researcher access to matched records.  The authors want to see periodic disability supplements to existing surveys, periodic surveys of specific subpopulations, and periodic national disability surveys like the NHIS-D.  The top priorities, they say, are the inclusion of ACS questions in all federal surveys and the strengthening of longitudinal and administrative data (p. 410).

Some Suggestions for Child Protection Courts

If a child were a mere manufactured product on an assembly line, and if some stage of that line ceased to pass quality control tests, a competent manager would repair that stage promptly or shunt products over to another line.  A focus on children, even as mere products manufactured by society, requires that they all be subjected (as they are, although inadequately) to appropriate formal and informal tests (conducted by adults and peers alike) on all significant aspects of their functioning and capability.  Just as a single defective product in the hands of the consumer has the potential to tarnish the brand name, to be returned to the store at a net loss, and even (in the case of spectacular public failure) to impair the corporate future, so also the graduation (not only from school, but also from the family and neighborhood of origin) of an improperly or incompletely finished child damages both the prestige of the American brand and the financial prospects of its developers.  To put it concretely, today’s kids are among those who will be paying my Social Security and wheeling me around my nursing home.  Even if I had no concern for their individual well-being, I would prefer that their generation would set the gold standard for what children can become.

The child welfare system stands, at present, as a poor cousin to the general, “normal” flow of childrearing.  By setting up a system that dwells upon cases of relatively extreme failure, we have created a caricature of upbringing in which the many who get by without involvement in that system tend to be treated as though they were all more or less OK.  And that would be wonderful, if so many of them were not then proceeding on into adulthoods that feature such regrettably high rates of mental illness, marital strife, career difficulty, and other varieties of misfit with or malfunction in the society that supposedly vetted them for their roles.

In the system we have, what I see in governmental incursions into child welfare is, too often, a matter of middle-class people – with, on average, a beige complexion – “handling” the “cases” of markedly lower-class and/or darker-skinned parents and children (as if to underscore in nomenclature their otherness in fact).  Having observed and experienced enough of childhood to conclude that most kids outpace their parents and other adults in many ways (e.g., inquisitiveness, risk tolerance, exercised imagination), I suggest that this “normal” caricature of upbringing tends to disserve not only the few who enter the system, but also the many who do not.  The assumption of apparent normalcy – of putting on a good show, on the way to frequently unsustainable pretensions of homogeneity and success in adulthood – becomes an expectation from which visible departure is stigmatized, both formally and informally.  Not surprisingly, in this strange arrangement, many children and parents who need extrafamilial help consider themselves successful if they can avoid it.

This spring, introductory exposure to juvenile courtrooms and to the national health care debate have shown me, in parallel lessons, that societal insurance arrangements are most likely to be supported and improved by those who use and can benefit from them.  One can safely predict that if members of Congress and other wealthy persons and their families (or, for that matter, the entire middle class) had been restricted, all along, to the same health care arrangements as the poor, and subjected to the same quality and extent of family oversight and intervention (and, for that matter, to an equal system of compulsory military conscription), I would have encountered a very different nation this spring, and very different learning opportunities on those topics.  I am suggesting that we will all benefit if we end the legal tolerance for gross inequality in societal benefits among citizens.

While that should happen across the board nationally, one small step in that direction would be to implement it earnestly within local child protection courts.  At present, if people were colored socioeconomically rather than racially, such courts would display more clearly the imposition of “white” values upon “dark” subjects.  This is not to say such imposition should never occur.  Society is capable of self-improvement through pressure to implement research findings to which the elite have better practical access.  Such findings may disproportionately impact the values and lifestyles of people who tend not to keep up with such knowledge (though that observation itself calls for caution).  But that imposition should not transpire in the manner of an arrogant cultural colonialism.  Intrusion into families is an exceeding sensitive matter.  Eventually it should be destigmatized and improved (in quality and alacrity), as hinted above, by making it compulsory for every family if it is to become compulsory in effect for any family; but in any event, in present terms, it should be primarily an educational and therapeutic affair, attended as closely on a week-by-week basis as any other educational or therapeutic process, and demanded by persons of obviously superior power only to the extent that education and therapy fail.

I have had the pleasure of observing a sweet-mannered referee in a child protection court.  Unfortunately, neither the law nor the legal culture guarantee comparable sweetness in all child and adult encounters with all persons of power in this system.  To the contrary, I have heard repeated reports of abuses by and ineptitudes of case managers (whose roles, if funding existed, could apparently benefit from lighter caseloads and better staffing).  In other words, sweetness is great, but it is not mandatory.  Nor is it always genuine.  Sometimes it operates selectively and/or proves to be self-congratulatory.  I have encountered people (not unlike those objectionable caseworkers) who fancy they are doing the Lord’s work, figuratively or literally, as they endorse or personally inflict damage on vulnerable individuals and families.  By contrast, I have recently encountered some student lawyers and pro bono attorneys who do seem dedicated to serving these people and learning how to become better at this sort of work.  It would be fantastic if attorneys who are familiar with this area of the law could leverage their knowledge for the benefit of others who lack adequate representation, especially during these times of relatively high unemployment for young lawyers, by offering continuing education or pro bono training opportunities for these students after graduation and/or for others of good intent who might wish to add this area of practice to their résumés.

Restoring GRUB on Dual-Boot Vista-Ubuntu (9.10) Machine

I had Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) installed.  I reinstalled Microsoft Vista.  This knocked out the GRUB boot menu.  To restore the boot menu, I followed some Ubuntu community documentation.  The steps I used there, boiled down for my purposes, were simply to reboot from the Ubuntu CD, go into the Ubuntu partition via the Places menu, type "mount | tail -1" to make sure the Ubuntu partition was now mounted (in my case, it said something like "/dev/sda2 on /media/UBUNTU type 3" because I had named the partition using GParted), type "ls /media/UBUNTU/boot" to make sure I had the partition containing GRUB (along with memtest86+ and other files), and then run "sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/UBUNTU /dev/sda."  That last command did not end in a number (e.g., sda2); it was simply the drive containing the boot partition.  In place of UBUNTU in my example, I would have typed the long UUID if that was what the mount command had given me.

That pretty much fixed it.  When I rebooted, I did have a GRUB menu.  But when I opted to go into Ubuntu, I got an error message:

One or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstab cannot yet be mounted:

SWAP: waiting for UUID=[UUID number]

Press ESC to enter a recovery shell.

I pressed ESC.  I went to Applications > Accessories > Terminal and typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  This opened fstab.  The lines weren't wide enough to view clearly, so I expanded the box.  Fstab contained an entry for SWAP, which (above) was the partition that didn't boot in my case.  I started another Terminal session and typed "blkid" to see what the UUIDs were.  I saw that the UUIDs and the /dev entries for SWAP didn't match.  I changed the fstab line for SWAP to match what blkid had given me, for both the UUID and the /dev location.  (I had to use the right-click option to copy from the Terminal output for blkid.)  I saved fstab and rebooted.  That seemed to fix it; the boot proceeded normally.

Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP): Core Questions on Disability

In an exploration of Census Bureau statistics on disabilities, I wanted to examine the questions that were asked in the most recent panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).  A SIPP Data page at the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) seemed to indicate that results from the 2008 panel were only starting to come out.  Similarly, at the Bureau's own SIPP website, a 2008 Panel SIPP Data Product Schedule indicated that, as of March 2010, Waves 1-4 of the 2008 Panel were to have been completed, but only the Wave 1 data were actually supposed to be available.

The Census Bureau indicates that the SIPP consists of core content plus topical modules.  At present, the most recent core content shown on the Bureau's Core Content webpage is that of the 2004 Panel.  That is, the 2008 questionnaire did not appear there; this seemed to be one of several Bureau webpages that seemed not to be maintained currently.  I went back to that NBER webpage, went down to the 2008 Panel listings, and saw that there was not yet a PDF file listed on the 2008 Wave 1 Core row.  I took a look into the 08w1.zip file listed next to it, but when I unzipped it I saw that it contained only a .dat file suitable for opening in a statistics program like SPSS.

I went looking for the 2008 Panel questionnaire.  On the Bureau's SIPP User Guide webpage, I found this statement:

We are currently updating the Third Edition, 2001. The revised chapters include information on the 2001 Panel, 2004 Panel and current up-to-date information on the 2008 Panel. All chapters are currently being revised.

I opened the SIPP Users' Guide, Third Edition, 2001 PDF.  It seemed to contain a lot of useful information, but not an actual copy of any questionnaires.  This was not surprising; the 2004 questionnaires, with instructions and all, had been several hundred pages long.  I found another page, described as the SIPP FTP page, and it offered several files related to the 2008 Panel -- some data files, and also some technical text files -- but no copies of the 2008 questionnaire.  I found the reason in a footnote (p. 16, n. 11) to a Census Bureau Research Report by Moore et al. (2009), "The 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation Event History Calendar Field Test:  Study Design and Initial Results."  That footnote referred to the "automated" SIPP questionnaire.  This explained the odd format I had seen in the 2004 questionnaires:  they had apparently been attempting to replicate, on paper, the different decisions that a computer program would make, regarding which questions to ask next, based on what the respondent said.

Revising my search, I found a reference to AttA - W1 Core Items Booklet.pdf in a RegInfo.gov webpage.  RegInfo.gov, apparently maintained by the Regulatory Information Service Center, turned out to be a repository of materials currently under review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).  In length and format, the W1 Core Items Booklet was very similar to the 2004 questionnaires that I had downloaded earlier (above).  Unfortunately, it was dated August 22, 2007, which meant that it might not have presented the final set of questions that were actually posed to the 2008 Panel.  I searched for "W1 Core Items Booklet" and found another entry at RegInfo.gov with what appeared to be the same PDF document.  On a webpage at GovPulse.us, which appeared to be a website set up by three people who wanted to make the Federal Register more searchable, I found an indication that the Census Bureau was requesting OMB review of the Wave 6 topical modules for the 2008 Panel, with this statement:  "The core SIPP and reinterview instruments were cleared under Authorization No. 0607-0944."  A search for that authorization led to a different RegInfo.gov page, bearing the appealing certification date of January 28, 2010.  This webpage indicated that the relevant Information Collection Review (ICR) pertained to something known as the SIPP 2008 Panel Survey Instruments; and when I clicked on that link, I found myself back at the original RegInfo.gov webpage.  It seemed, in short, that the W1 Core Items Booklet dated August 22, 2007 seemed to be the final 2008 Panel Core Questionnaire.

I searched that 2008 Panel Core Questionnaire for references to "disability" and its cognates.  I found a number of such references.  I found no references to "impair" or its cognates in this Core Questionnaire, however, and the references to disability tended to be using accepted terminology rather than defining it -- referring, for instance, to "disability compensation," "disability insurance," and "disability benefits."  Because the SIPP is oriented toward income and benefits that people receive, it appears that it may be possible at least to use the data from its Core Questionnaire to make estimates about the portion of its target population for which disability affects the ability to work.  Whether that would prove necessary seemed to depend on what I could learn from SIPP's disability-related topical questionnaires.

Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP): Topical Questions on Disability

My search for disability statistics led me to the 314-page 2008 Panel Core Questionnaire for the U.S. Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).  While the Core Questionnaire did have some disability-related questions, those questions tended not to ask about the nature or extent of a disability; the concern was, rather, with whether the disability interfered with (or was perhaps the source of) the respondent's income and benefits.  It seemed that disability-oriented topical questions posed to the SIPP's 2008 Panel of respondents would shed more light on the nature and extent of disabilities experienced by people in the United States.

As with the Core Questionnaires, the Census Bureau's SIPP website did not provide ready links to its Topical Module Questionnaires after 2004.  Fortunately, the 2008 Panel SIPP Data Product Schedule found on one of the pages in that website indicated that data collection for the Work Disability History module was scheduled to take place as part of Wave 2, in January through April 2009, and that the corresponding data products were expected to be released in April 2010.  Data collection for the other disability-related Topical Modules, Functional Limitations and Disability for adults and children, was scheduled to take place as part of Wave 6, in summer 2010, with data products being released in September 2011.

By pleasant coincidence, the 2008 Panel Wave 6 Topical Modules seemed to be included on the same RegInfo.gov page from which I had previously obtained the 2008 Panel Core Questionnaire, so it was easy to get the Wave 6 modules.  The link provided on that page produced an 82-page Wave 6 Topical Modules Items Booklet, in which the Functional Limitations and Disability section ran from pages 31 to 53.  A preliminary look at some of these questions confirmed that they were not at all limited to income production, as had been the case with disability-related questions in the Core Questionnaire.

The remaining step was to find the Wave 2 Topical Modules Booklet that would hopefully include the Work Disability History module.  A search led to a Federal Register entry that cited the same OMB Control Number 0607-0944 that had applied to the 2008 Panel Core Questionnaire.  A search for that number led to a different RegInfo.gov page, where I downloaded a 2008 Panel Wave 2 Topical Modules Items Booklet, in which the Work Disability Topical Module appeared on pages 1 through 5 (PDF pages 3 through 7).  As the "work disability" moniker suggests, the questions in this module appeared to be oriented toward disabilities that interfered with work.

My ultimate purpose, in this pursuit, was to become informed on defensible ways of estimating the numbers of persons with disabilities in a particular location.  The page counts (above) told me that I was likely to get a more extensive treatment of disability concepts in the Wave 6 Topical Module, and it also seemed that that module's questions would take a broader perspective on the meaning of disability.  In a subsequent post, I look more closely into that module.

Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP): An Introduction

The Survey of Income and Program Participation has its roots in the War on Poverty of the Johnson Administration in the late 1960s.  It was hard to find good data on welfare and income for poor people.  To meet this need, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now HHS) created the Income Survey Development Program (ISDP) in 1975.  According to Citro and Scholz (2009, pp. 18-19), the transition from ISDP to the new SIPP survey proceeded in fits and starts, narrowly surviving cancellation until 1984, when the first SIPP panel of about 21,000 households finally began.

From 1985 through 1993, new panels were introduced every February, on a rotating basis.  Within each panel, households were followed through multiple four-month waves (Citro & Scholz, p. 22).  That is, the sample was divided into four groups, and all of the households in a given group were interviewed once every four months, also on a rotating basis.  After a major redesign effort beginning in 1993, panels were interviewed every four months over a four-year period, and one panel was completed before another was introduced.  After 1993, then, panels were introduced in 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2008 (pp. 23-24, 29).

SIPP seems to have been plagued, throughout its existence, by irregular and inadequate political support and funding.  In 2006, the Bush Administration proposed to cut its budget from $44 million to $9.2 million, and to focus more than half of the latter figure on the creation of a new data collection program called the Dynamics of Economic Well-being System (DEWS) (p. 28).  DEWS would rely upon administrative sources of data, rather than a survey, to update and complement decennial census data.  Congress was persuaded that SIPP was important, however, and instead cut its 2007 budget to $33 million in 2007 (p. 29).  DEWS was downscaled, and now seems to survive as the "re-engineered SIPP."

In the 2004 and 2008 panels, it was planned that households would be followed for as many as 12 waves.  These panels used 51,400 households in 2004 and 45,000 in 2008 (pp. 25, 29).  Budgetary and resource restrictions forced a significant cutback in the numbers of households and waves in later years of the 2004 panel.  The 2008 panel now seems to have sufficient funding to carry through to completion.  Data from the 2008 panel will apparently become available in 2012.  The next panel is planned for 2013, structured as a three- or four-year series of annual interviews.

In their book, Citro and Scholz provide extensive information on strengths and weaknesses of SIPP, recommendations for improving data quality and using administrative records effectively, potential innovations in data collection, and other matters.  The general sense is that these authors consider the SIPP flawed but capable of being greatly improved, and in any event irreplaceable as a practical matter.

Ubuntu 9.10: Mounting and Dismounting Blues

I was using a couple of external USB drives with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).  I found the easiest way to switch them between computers was to wait until they were inactive and then yank the USB cord from one machine and plug it into another.  This had worked pretty well, but then I got this error message:

Unable to unmount DAILY

umount:  /media/DAILY mount disagrees with the fstab

This seemed to have been related to some kind of bug.  I got this after a previous error message:

Could not display "/media/DAILY".

Error:  error stating file '/media/DAILY': Input/output error

Please select another viewer and try again

DAILY was a manually created folder in /media.  I couldn't figure out how to delete it either:  it wasn't visible in "sudo nautilus" and there wasn't an option to delete it in ordinary Nautilus.  Chris Jean fixed a similar problem with this kind of command:

sudo fuser -km /media/DAILY

This seemed like a reasonable command, given some basic information about the fuser command, so I closed down everything else and tried that.  I got this response:

Cannot stat /media/DAILY:  Input/output error

I looked that up.  It didn't seem to be a very common problem.  Several of the entries that came up in that search referred to GRUB, but I wasn't sure what to make of that.  Charles A said the input/output error usually means that a drive is going bad.  Going from something else he said, I did a search for how to mount an NTFS drive by using its UUID.  Ganesh suggested "sudo fdisk -l" to see if DAILY was connected.  It did not appear to be . . . because it wasn't.  I had just pulled out its USB cable a few minutes earlier and had neglected  to plug it back in.  I did that, but now I got this:

Unable to mount DAILY

Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with:

mount: according to mtab, /dev/sdf5 is already mounted on /media/DAILY

mount failed

I typed "df" and saw that DAILY was mounted at /dev/sdf5.  I clicked on DAILY in Nautilus and got the "Could not display '/media/DAILY'" error shown above.  I got an indication that this was, again, a bug.  I decided to reboot.  That fixed everything for the time being.

Later, I took a different approach.  As advised in an Ubuntu community document, I installed pmount in Synaptic.  The recommended syntax was "pmount /dev/sdb5 DRIVE," where any available location could be used in lieu of sdb5 and where DRIVE is the name of the partition.  If just the drive name is used like this, it will be mounted by default at /media/DRIVE.  But, oops, I mounted it as root, when the whole purpose of pmount was to make it possible for a non-root user to mount a drive.  So I unmounted, typed "exit" to get out of the root prompt, and tried again:  "pmount /dev/sde5 WEEKLY."  Unfortunately, it hung.  I wondered if it was because I had already mounted and disconnected (without unmounting) a device at sde5.  Maybe I needed to use the largest previously unused letter.  I killed Terminal, unplugged and replugged the USB cable on the drive, and as a user in a new Terminal session I typed "df -h" to see what was available.  I already had something mounted as sdf5, so I tried "pmount /dev/sdg5 WEEKLY."  This gave me "device /dev/sdg5 does not exist."  It took me quite a while to discover that, actually, I had not plugged the drive back in after all.  Now it mounted as "WEEKLY_" with an underscore at the end; and when I tried "umount /media/WEEKLY," I got "/media/WEEKLY is not mounted (according to mtab)."  So, OK, I pulled the USB plug, typed "sudo nautilus," went into File System/media, right-clicked, and moved WEEKLY to trash.  I replugged the USB, killed sudo-Nautilus, and at a user prompt typed "df -h" and saw that WEEKLY had reclaimed its old post at /dev/sdd5.  Now it seemed to be working OK.  Later, when I tried using pmount another time, I got some errors, like this:

Error: directory /media/[directory name] is not empty

Error:  device /dev/sdf1 does not exist

I looked at a more detailed pmount documentation page and saw that /dev/sd?? had to be a "block device in /dev."  A forum post told me that I could identify my system's block devices by typing "sudo fdisk -l."  (That's an L, not a one.)  This sobered me up on the question of what my /dev options were.  I really had only one choice as to where to mount the drive, and when I tried pmount there, I got "Error: device /dev/sde5 is already mounted to /media/[partition name]."

(Having run out of time to fiddle with this, I left this post as a draft at that point.  I believe this problem ultimately got solved by a reinstallation.  No further comments on this issue here.)

The Purpose of a Lawyer

The Purpose of a Lawyer

A lawyer is a professional.  This means that, instead of rolling the dice and playing for all or nothing, clients place their money (a lot of their money) on someone who has spent years studying and practicing this sort of thing.  Because this person will have been interested in learning about the kinds of extreme failures that could subject him/her to malpractice liability, odds are good that his/her errors will not be too dramatic.

On the other hand, unfortunately, a professional is someone who handles the same sort of case day after day, year after year.  S/he is not necessarily very interested in the details of the client’s problem.  To borrow an example from another field, imagine a psychological specialist who is currently treating a dozen patients for grief related to the deaths of their loved ones.  This specialist may understandably confuse the names and other details of these cases from time to time, or may fall asleep during sessions after a big lunch.  Some clients will find this sort of thing distressing.  The point is, the attorney will not share the client’s interest in the case, and thus will not ride herd on everything to the extent the client might prefer.

Professional training reduces the worst-scenario costs, then, by avoiding terrible outcomes, in exchange for increasing the total numbers of client irritants:  of things that clients don’t understand, of fears that fester in their dreams, of details that the attorney mishandles, and of opportunities that slip through the cracks.  Clients become frustrated because, in many cases, their attorneys do not return their calls.  Then again, the attorney invariably has an answering machine or voicemail on which clients can vent their frustration, usually at much lower cost than if the client were actually keeping the attorney on the phone.

In short, the purpose of a lawyer, down through the centuries, has been to help sincere people to transition away from impractical expectations of truth and justice, and to realize how much their involvement with the professional system of justice will actually cost – so that, in the end, they will be grateful that it did not cost more.

Legal Specialties

Lawyers go through roughly similar educational and training processes across the country.  That said, there are a number of specialized fields of legal practice, and those fields do sometimes create their own unique sorts of situations for clients.  A few examples are provided here, so as to give some sense of what the educated client should watch out for.

Divorce.  The primary purpose of divorce law is to make the parties as angry as possible, for as long as possible.  This insures that the couple will not inadvertently become reconciled, in which case their assets might be withdrawn from the jurisprudential maw before they can be properly researched and rifled; it maximizes the incentives for warring spouses to retaliate against one another by having sex with their attorneys; and it also protects attorneys from the risk that the parties will remain on speaking terms and will thus be able to compare notes and detect inconsistencies in their attorneys’ statements.  By this arrangement, the practice of divorce law serves the important social policy of encouraging people of modest means to avoid divorce law.

Criminal Law.  Criminal law is that branch of legal practice in which wealthy people pay enormous sums to prove that they are innocent.  (An obscure subpart of criminal practice deals with those less important instances in which multitudes who cannot afford criminal defense attorneys are given opportunities to pay fines and/or go to prison for relatively acceptable periods of time.)  Mainstream criminal practice thus serves as an important resource for the generation of cultural narratives about law (in e.g., books and films), through which members of the public learn that the legal system is good and that their own experiences with it are exceptions.

Bankruptcy.  Bankruptcy is a process in which, as in criminal law, clients of sufficient means must pay a substantial retainer up-front to prove that they are innocent of accusations against them.  One difference from criminal practice is that bankruptcy law allows advance planning, prior to any crimes that may be committed, and is therefore more amenable to inferior legal talent, whereas the rules of criminal law mandate that the client must first commit the wrong, in order to see what it is like, and can only then commence the task of denying it.

Constitutional Law.  This final example of a legal specialty is one of the most prestigious of all.  Constitutional lawyers strive on behalf of those fundamental principles by which a proud nation of 300 million people can remain divisively united.  As in personal injury law (which is not covered in this brief survey), constitutional law employs a lottery system where, out of millions of players, few ordinary people will find attorneys who are willing to take their cases on an affordable basis; and of those few, very few achieve ultimate fame and fortune.  Clients should take care to minimize their exposure to constitutional law, insofar as its grand scale often aggravates the sorts of delusional thinking (regarding e.g., truth, justice) noted above, provoking dangerous departures from day-to-day realities of the justice system.

Client Education

As the preceding remarks indicate, attorneys frequently bear a heavy burden of educating their clients in the esoteric principles and procedures of law.  For example, it is often not easy for an unsophisticated person to grasp just how efficient it is to resolve disputes by simply increasing costs and delays until, as it turns out, 95% of disputes can be settled without any trial at all.  That is, 95% of the number of disputes taken to court; that number itself constitutes only a fraction of the far more numerous disputes that, thanks to the rule of law, are economically resolved without any judicial involvement at all, often through inexpensively self-administered psychological internalizations.  Where extrajudicial dispute resolution entails primitively obscene and violent measures due to the presumed inability to afford any other approach, civic-minded attorneys contribute to public legal education by advising poor people, through the media, to adopt cunning strategies of retribution that are more appropriate in a civilized society.

Fortunately, the process of client education is now being assisted by modern advances in court management and by technological innovations that make law more accessible.  Thanks to the Internet, clients now have rapid, direct access to the opinions in which judges explain their application of medieval principles.  Moreover, as legal thinking continues to pervade everyday social intercourse, it is slowly eliminating logical errors attributable to common sense, so that ordinary people gradually find it more natural to reject problematic spontaneity and to rely, instead, upon the law’s rich traditions of cautious, empirically unsupported reasoning.

Conclusion

Attorney-client communications can be frustrating on both sides.  Clients frequently approach the relationship with unrealistic expectations that the attorney may feel obliged to defuse slowly, over a period of weeks or months, so that the client does not experience an epiphany that might provoke him/her to bail out abruptly.

Attorneys who try to educate clients in the law often come up against a brick wall, as clients cling to impractical forms of reasoning and vague ideas about largely irrelevant abstract principles.  Specialized areas of law add further complications.  Attorney-client communication may be best understood as a process by which attorneys dictate capsule summaries of legal culture to people of inferior cultures who can barely understand the benefits that the law provides, much less produce such benefits for themselves.

Critique of Harris & Walton on Narrative Skills and School Conflicts

Article Reviewed:  Harris, A. R., & Walton, M. D. (2009).  “Thank you for making me write this.” Narrative skills and the management of conflict in urban schools. Urban Review, 41, 287-311.

In this article, Harris and Walton (H & W) state that Laursen, Finkelstein, and Betts (2001) “identified three types of conflict resolution strategies:  coercion, negotiation, and disengagement” in “a comprehensive meta-analysis” (p. 289).  This statement gives the impression that Laursen et al. studied categorizations of conflict resolution strategies and concluded that coercion, negotiation, and disengagement best represented the myriad taxonomies they had encountered.  That impression would be mistaken.  Laursen et al. (p. 424) did not study that question; instead, they looked to Jensen-Campbell et al. (1996) for evidence suggesting that negotiation, disengagement, and coercion might be the three strategies by which disagreements are closed.

The work done by Laursen et al. had to do, instead, with developmental trends in peer conflict resolution.  H & W observe that Laursen et al. compared the relative frequency of these three strategies at different stages of development.  H & W (p. 289) say that Laursen et al. found the following rankings at the following stages of development, with the most frequently used strategy listed first (N = negotiation, D = disengagement, C = coercion):

Childhood:  C, N, D
Adolescence:  N, D/C (equally)
Young adulthood:  N, D, C.

H & W infer, from this, that “conflict resolution strategies develop in a direction away from aggravating or aggressive strategies toward the more constructive strategies of mitigation and communication” (p. 290).  But that seems pretty glib.  One rarely finds children holding grudges for years and even decades, as adults do.  It seems that the children who try to imagine themselves in the violent settings of adults sports and wars might instead emulate adults’ admirable verbal conflict resolution skills – if the kids were seeing such skills as the standard of adulthood.

H & W devote some pages to the discussion of narratives by which children relate their conflict resolution experiences from their own perspectives.  The authors chose to focus on autobiographic narrative data because these data “show how children represent the different aspects of the conflict situation” and “can begin to reveal how children make sense of their conflicts” (p. 291).  It will soon develop, however, that some ways of making sense are privileged in these authors' eyes.

Notwithstanding the putative meta-analysis of the matter by Laursen et al., H & W divide their own discussion of these narratives into four, not three, categories:  communication and reconciliation, withdrawing from conflict, retaliation, and seeking adult help (or not).  It seems that Laursen et al. are enlisted selectively, for the purpose of supporting a scheme of linear developmental progression in the direction of negotiation and away from conflict.

So.  Having evoked the nonpresence of a tight theoretical framework, the authors proceed to marinate juicy excerpts from children's autobiographical narratives in the vinegar of their own values.  For starters, in a nation in which many adults report having no friends, and where that number is increasing, H & W aver that communication and reconciliation are the most mature conflict resolution methods.  Consider their Example 1, providing a quote from one of the children (p. 296):  “I told her how I felt when she bumped into me.  I told her that I got mad but, I knew that she [just] made a mistake.  So we both said that we were sorry.”  If only adult conflicts reaching the point of anger were routinely handled so maturely!

Oddly, the authors’ four categories do not include actual aggression or violence per se.  While I cannot lay my hands on a copy of the article by Jensen-Campbell et al. (1996) at the moment, I have the assurance of Laursen et al. that it was an empirically based piece.  Everyday experience provides its own empirical corroboration:  people do not consistently take, or even see themselves as taking, the meek route that the authors palpably prefer.  In the quote just offered, for example, the child admitted that she had been the one who had gotten mad, knowing that the other child had intended and did no harm.  The girl is commended for using “communication and reconciliation”; there is no comment on the reasonable impression that this was a conflict that she, herself, had created.

H & W provide quotes from two narratives as grist for their discussion of the communication and reconciliation strategy.  They offer a third excerpt in their discussion of the withdrawal strategy.  When they turn to the retaliation strategy, they provide their fourth quote.  “This story in Example 4,” they say, “shows much less social-cognitive and moral sophistication than did the previous examples” (p. 299).  Moral sophistication, for this purpose, appears to be measured in terms of whether the author takes “a moral stance” or assigns blame to oneself or to the other person (p. 295).  According to the authors, an instance of a “moral evaluation” occurs in Example 1 (quoted above) when the girl says, “I knew she made a mistake,” characterizing the other’s action as “an atypical lapse.”  But wouldn't it be the height of moral hypocrisy to graciously pardon the other for her mistake, when it may be one's own flash of unresonable anger that created the problem?

And so the child in the authors' Example 4 is a boy, the first such creature to appear in their examples; and his lack of moral sophistication is said to be found in his failure to offer moral evaluations, analyses of motives, or speculations as to others’ thoughts and emotions.  Apparently they think he should not have tried to describe how his little fistfight in the bathroom became a whole big to-do involving his dad and the principal and the other boy’s big brother and the Safety Council.  Had so many helpful adults become involved in the girls’ conflicts -- had their counterparts been backed up by a mean big brother -- perhaps they too would have had to devote their attention to explaining how all these people got into the mix, and why it all ultimately comes back to the fact that the other boy was hassling him.  How H & W can read his description and miss what they would otherwise consider a "moral" propensity to blame people is beyond me.

In the quoted excerpt, the boy instead takes what a lawyer might call a "strict liability" approach to the transgression at issue.  Basically, if you pick on me, you'll wish you hadn't.  It doesn't really matter what you are thinking about.  You may think you're the Queen of Sheba.  Whatever.  Just don't pick on me.  It seems, unfortunately, that H & W are not fond of a strict liability approach.  Tut-tut, they say:  there is “no evidence that the author has learned anything about how to avoid violence.”  But apparently there is no evidence that he has failed to learn anything about violence either.  Besides, why would the authors be encouraging him to “avoid” violence, when their own preferred strategy is to engage in communication and reconciliation?  The impression that both authors (Marsha and Alexis) are female does not generate confidence that they have considered the calculations by which he may have to appear strong, so as to discourage other aggressors.

The authors do go on to provide other examples that are not quite so lame.  I find their article underwhelming nontheless.  They do tell interesting stories, and their orientation toward letting the kids tell those stories themselves is commendable.  But this is one instance where conflation of conflict management and conflict suppression seems ill-advised.  The savages -- literal or figurative, in some faraway jungle or in a nearby school -- turn out to have their own cultures.  Long before the missionaries sally forth to change and fix them, we should try to understand and respect them.

Critique of Mano & Mesch on E-mail at Work

In a previous post, I critiqued a 2003 article by Friedman and Currall entitled “Conflict Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of E-mail Communication.” This post reviews a more recent article that brings out several important parts of the Friedman and Currall argument.

Article Reviewed: Mano, R. S., & Mesch, G. S. (2010). E-mail characteristics, work performance and distress. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(1), 61-69.

I found this article through a search for a present-day review of issues mentioned in my review of Friedman and Currall, whom Mano and Mesch cite. To quote the abstract, Mano and Mesch conclude (p. 61):

Using a secondary level analysis based on the Pew and American Life sample we show that extent, content, and increased volume of e-mail are (a) more frequently reported by managers than by non-managers (b) age, gender, marital status and education can become a critical issue (c) the amount of e-mail received and sent is positively related to work performance. 

Like Friedman and Currall, Mano and Mesch examined e-mail at work. Their general question for randomly dialed survey respondents (n = 394) was “the extent to which ‘.... using e-mail for work-related tasks has changed your work life’” (p. 65). Using factor analysis, they identified three major areas in which e-mail might affect respondents’ work life: work effectiveness, work distress, and work stress. In their construction, “work effectiveness” was improved if the use of e-mail increased the number of people communicated with, improved teamwork and awareness of current work events, saved time, and made the respondent more available to his/her colleagues.

“Work distress” involved the extent to which e-mail provided moments of relief, encouraged gossip, and made it too easy for people to reach the employee. “Work stress” asked whether e-mail made it impossible to get away from work, caused misunderstandings, was distracting, or added new sources of stress. Thus Mano and Mesch did not restrict their focus to the potential dispute-enlarging aspects of e-mail that had interested Friedman and Currall, but rather placed the alleged dispute-enhancing tendency into a context that took account of potential benefits of e-mail usage. Hence my critique of Friedman and Currall anticipated something similar to what I found in Mano and Mesch.

Mano and Mesch investigated four hypotheses, which boil down in general terms to the hunches that work effectiveness, stress, and distress are correlated with greater e-mail use (in terms of both time spent on e-mail and numbers of e-mails sent and received) and frequency of e-mail checking, but stress and distress are inversely correlated with the number of non-work¬related e-mails. I did not find their distinction between stress and distress to be either intuitively clear nor empirically crucial in most cases, and in this discussion thus sometimes adopt their reference to both as dimensions of “employees’ wellbeing” (p. 68) or other quality-of-life phrasings. Moreover, since they found that “e-mail with personal content neither contributes to work performance, nor is it detrimental,” and since personal e-mail was not in any event the core issue in their research, I will not focus on non-work-related e-mails. With these adjustments, their research hypotheses may be roughly phrased as the suggestion that greater e-mail use and frequency of checking is positively correlated with work effectiveness and negatively correlated with employee wellbeing. And this is essentially what they found.

The authors sought to nuance that suggestion with attention to several additional characteristics. Among such characteristics, they determined that organization size is negatively related to frequency of e-mail checking, and that numbers of e-mails are greater for managers than for non-managers. Mano and Mesch attribute the decreased well-being for employees that arises from increased e-mail usage to “information overload” (p. 68), where such overload emerges not only from the information management aspects of receiving numerous e-mails (e.g., understanding, storing, and retrieving) but also from the new tasks, priorities, and interactions required by the contents of such messages.

In addition to the limitations identified by the authors (namely, the limited number of variables available to their secondary data analysis, lack of sensitivity to occupation and task, and inability to distinguish technological and non-technological environments), I had some concerns. On a stylistic level, I was not reassured by the typographical errors and poor grammar, and I found it unhelpful that the authors would occasionally refer to undefined constructs (e.g., “better working time,” p. 66) whose meaning I could not readily ascertain. On a more substantive note, I was not impressed with the paucity of current research. On a subject as novel and evolving as e-mail (in e.g., a Facebook era), it is certainly strange for an article published in 2010 to draw upon a number of works from the 1980s (not to mention 1958), or to refer to a 2003 study as “recently published” (p. 63).

In terms of overall structure, I was not sure how the authors’ three research questions translated into their four research hypotheses, nor was it entirely clear to me that they rigorously worked through each of those hypotheses. For example, while their interest in the well-being of managers is worth noting, their concluding focus on it gave the impression that they had gotten distracted. I also found that some of their conclusory editorializing did not follow from their research. Indeed, in their remarks that “at the end of the day, work is done by people, and it is due to their individual wellbeing that work performance improves,” I thought I detected a contradiction of their apparent sense that e-mail-related well-being and performance tend to operate at cross-purposes. Nor was I persuaded that stress and distress are “undesirable” outcomes of work performance (p. 63); stress seems to be a work performance motivator in many circumstances. Most egregiously, for purposes of the present review, I was not impressed with the authors’ summary statement that unspecified “researches [sic] have shown that information conveyed via e-mail nurtures negative aspects of communication” (p. 68). I had thought that they intended, themselves, to look into e-mail as a generator of misunderstandings. I did not expect to see that notion resurrected in the conclusion if it did not emerge profoundly from their own data.

Despite such concerns, it did appear that Mano and Mesch provided a solid review of relevant literature. For purposes of learning about conflict management, this literature review (which actually began in the article’s introduction) was more informative than their own empirical research. They cite various sources for several propositions: that e-mail imposes a degree of technical neutrality insofar as very different people are compelled to communicate in a basic lingua franca, for example; that other data sets (unlike the one they used) permit differentiations among kinds of e-mails (e.g., announcements, task information); and that e-mail has the potential for multiplying positive interactions among individuals, including many who might otherwise not even become aware of one another.

Generally, it is worth considering that what e-mail opens is not Pandora’s box but is, rather, the door to the future. That is, there is a pervasive assumption that the workplace dare not become entangled in personal issues. So the personal difficulties and interpersonal conflicts of normal life become an 800-pound gorilla that everyone tries to ignore. This worked to some extent in an industrial era, especially when mental focus was not an essential ingredient in job performance. It does not work nearly as well in mentally challenging positions. It would be possible, in theory, to treat e-mail as an identifier of issues to be resolved – as, in other words, an exposer of what was previously swept under the rug. It seems that a mentally healthy workplace might coexist well with a commitment to deep, long-term integration of its participants. In that case, when Mano and Mesch observe that “e-mail has been found to generate negative outcomes as well such as ‘politicing’ and ‘petty tyranny’” (p. 62) – as if e-mail were the cause of, rather than merely an outlet for, office bullying. The analysis would be more persuasive if one were to take account of the productivity of workplaces in which there is no awkwardness-inducing device (e.g., e-mail) by which people can intentionally or inadvertently highlight barriers to growth and improvement.

Cornell's EDI 2008 Disability Status Report Webinar: A Review

Today, I watched a webinar presented by the Employment and Disability Institute (EDI) within the ILR School (formerly the School of Industrial and Labor Relations) at Cornell University.  Elsewhere, I have outlined some of the materials available on EDI's website generally.  Among those materials, it may be worth noting that EDI occasionally offers other webinars.  EDI maintains a Current News Bulletin webpage (also available in PDF and via RSS feed) that provides notifications of those webinars as well as notices of other disability-related developments; that webpage (or PDF or RSS) appears to be the best way of keeping up with such events. (The news bulletin appears to be produced by the DBTAC for the northeastern region (as distinct from the New England region), which in turn appears to be hosted by ILR.)

Today's webinar was described as "DisabilityStatistics.org Presents: The 2008 Disability Status Report."  The slides used in this webinar are presently available for PDF download.  As those slides indicate, the webinar amounted to a simple presentation of information that already seems to appear in EDI's Disability Status Reports.  It was, in other words, a video of a series of slides with voice-overs.


No doubt this presentation was exactly what some viewers needed:  it provided a summary of the printed data, in a format that some may find more accessible or interesting.  I also appreciate that, just as Cornell provides an essentially neutral home for other governmental materials, such as the United States Code, so also EDI may see its role in this regard as one of simply serving as a mouthpiece for the government.  But I was disappointed.  I hoped to hear the inside dope.  I didn’t want to just hear, without elaboration, that the 2008 ACS asked significantly different questions than previous years’ surveys, and that the resulting data are therefore not directly comparable to previous years’ results.  I already knew that; my previous post says so.  I wanted to hear why.

I wanted to hear, for example, that my own previous post was correct in its hunch that the data collection process was deliberately corrupted by the Bush Administration, in ways that no self-respecting statistician of disabilities can tolerate.  Or, alternately, I wanted to hear that, no, there were in fact very good reasons, beyond those I already surmised, for eviscerating year-to-year comparability.  I did not want to hear someone simply parrot the fact that, because of said evisceration, the loss of millions of Americans from the lists of the disabled did not mean that those people had actually ceased to have disabilities.  I wanted to hear that statisticians are taking countermeasures, in a bid to develop an approach that will give us an actual, halfway meaningful statistic on the prevalence of disabilities, and on other disability-related matters that the ACS should be covering.

Cornell ILR EDI 2008 Disability Status Reports

The Employment and Disability Institute (EDI) within the ILR School at Cornell University has now rolled out its Disability Status Reports on the American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2008.  These reports are available in PDF format for each state and also for the U.S. a whole.  Based on a review of a few such reports, it appears that each is a 65-page document covering the same list of topics, as presented in each report's list of contents.  (Note that the contents list items are clickable; for example, clicking on the line for "Prevalence:  All Ages" takes you immediately to page 10 of the report.)  Those topics are presented under two main headings, as follows:


Demographics
Prevalence: All Ages
Prevalence: Ages 4 and under
Prevalence: Ages 5 to 15
Prevalence: Ages 16 to 20
Prevalence: Ages 21 to 64 (Working-Age)
Prevalence: Ages 65 to 74
Prevalence: Ages 75 and Older
Prevalence: Gender and Age
Prevalence: Hispanic / Latino Origin and Age
Prevalence: Race

Outcomes
Employment
Not Working but Actively Looking for Work
Full-Time / Full-Year Employment
Annual Earnings (Full-Time / Full-Year workers)
Annual Household Income
Poverty
Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
Education: High School Diploma / Equivalent
Education: Some College / Associate's Degree
Education: Bachelor's Degree or More
Veterans Service-Connected Disability
Health Insurance Coverage
Type of Health Insurance Coverage


For example, the Employment section appears on pp. 32-33, apparently using virtually identical text and identically formatted graphs in each report, so that the first bulleted point on page 32 reads as follows in, say, the Michigan report.  I offer editorial comments on these reports in a contemporaneous post.

In 2008, the employment rate of working-age people with disabilities in MI was 33.6 percent.

whereas the Indiana report differs only by ending that first bulleted point with the words “in IN was 39.8 percent.”  In short, the reports provide a state-by-state, plain-English summary of key points that one will hopefully soon be able to obtain directly from the Census Bureau’s American FactFinder webpage for disability statistics.  (Note that EDI’s Disability Statistics webpage also links to disability data from the decennial Census and the Current Population Survey (CPS).

File Is Not Accessible. Access Is Denied.

I was using Windows XP in a VMware Workstation 7 virtual machine (VM), running on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).  In WinXP, I had moved some files to a new folder on a compressed external USB hard drive, and now I wanted to fiddle with the contents of that folder.  Unfortunately, I got this message:

[Filename] is not accessible.   

Access is denied.

I found a post that suggested that this might have something to do with folder sharing.  I went into VMware's VM > Settings > Options > Shared Folders.  There, I saw that the external drive was not included in the folders that were being shared.  I clicked Add, typed the name of the external drive, and went browsing for its host path.  But I couldn't add it; the dialog box was not seeing it.  It also wasn't visible in Ubuntu's Nautilus (i.e., File Browser), presumably because I had already connected to it in the VM, via VMware's VM > Removable Devices menu pick.  So now I disconnected it there, went back to Ubuntu, and waited for it to show up in Nautilus.  It didn't show up.  I went back to the VM to see what was going on, but it was definitely disconnected and was no longer visible in Windows Explorer.

Meanwhile, though, the external hard drive's light was on.  It was doing something, even though it did not seem to be recognized by any physical or virtual machines.  Some hours earlier, I had started it on a project of decompressing one of its folders.  That folder contained some large files.  So now it seemed that the drive was going to just stay locked in that process until it was done.  I left it for quite a while but, hours later, the hard drive light was still on, steady, without flickering.  I shut it down and started it back up.  Now, after a minute, Ubuntu saw it.  I went into the VM and connected to it.  When the VM saw it, I went back into VM > Settings > Options > Shared Folders and tried to add it.  But the VM still couldn't see it.  I suspected that the VM was reading from the fstab.  To explore that possibility, I disconnected from the USB drive in the VM, went back to Ubuntu, and, following some advice from one of my old posts, when Ubuntu saw the external drive again, I opened Terminal and typed "sudo blkid" and copied the UUID for the drive in question (named DAILY).  In a separate Terminal session, I typed "sudo gedit /etc/fstab" and added that UUID in two lines that looked like this:

# Entry for /dev/sde5 :

UUID=ADBG2454DBD /media/DAILY ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

I went back into the VM and connected to the external USB drive again, and then tried again with the VM's Shared Folders option.  DAILY was still not visible there.  Maybe it was a question of what drives were visible when the VM started up?  This external drive was probably not connected and turned on at that time.  I rebooted the VM to see what would happen if DAILY was connected the whole time.  That definitely took care of the drive recognition problem, but I still got the "not accessible" error when I tried to go into the folder I was trying to view.  So I went back into the VM's Shared Folders setting and tried to add DAILY to the list of shared partitions.  Unfortunately, it was still not listed.  Ah, but back in Ubuntu, I had an error message:

Unable to mount DAILY

Error mounting:  mount exited with exit code 1: helper failed with:

mount:  only root can mount /dev/sde5 on /media/DAILY

This gave me an idea.  Did I have to be running Workstation as root in order to add DAILY as a Shared Folder in the VM?  I disconnected DAILY from the VM and went to Ubuntu to take a look at the drive permissions.  DAILY wasn't visible on Nautilus until I clicked the computer icon in the toolbar.  When I did that, it became visible on the right side of Nautilus, and that also reproduced the "Unable to mount DAILY" error message.  So it seemed that message had been generated by Ubuntu's effort to mount DAILY when I disconnected it from the VM.  But why did root have to mount DAILY?  I right-clicked on DAILY (on the right side of Nautilus) and went to Properties > Permissions.  But it said the permissions could not be determined.  So, OK, I ran "sudo nautilus" and tried that again.  But DAILY wasn't visible in Nautilus.  So I exited that and tried "sudo blkid."  DAILY was still at /dev/sde5.  nixCraft told me to make a mount point for it (in this case, "sudo mkdir /media/DAILY").  Now "sudo fdisk -l" told me that /dev/sde 5 was NTFS, in which case I could use "sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/sde5 /media/DAILY" to mount it.  Now at least I was able to see that its permissions were root (not me).  Using "sudo nautilus," I went to File System > media and right-clicked on DAILY.  But I was not able to change its permissions; they changed back after I tried.  Following Merlin's advice, I went into Ubuntu's System > Administration > Users and Groups.  There, it looked like "ray" was the name of both my user and my group.  So I typed "sudo chown -R ray:ray /media/DAILY" to change the ownership of that drive (and everything on it) to ray.  This caused the external drive to grind away for maybe five minutes.  But the Permissions were still the same:  root.  Sebastian Abate made me think I might have to unmount the drive to change the permissions, and that the change of permissions would actually apply to the mount point, so I typed "sudo umount /media/DAILY."  Then I tried the "sudo chown" command again.  This time, of course, it did not make the external drive grind away.  Now I tried Sebastian's version of the "sudo mount" command:  first "sudo chmod 777 /media/DAILY" and that was the answer.  I now owned DAILY.

I went back into the VM, connected the external drive, and tried to play with it in Windows Explorer.  As I may have realized before (a day or two had passed by this point), the problem was peculiar to just one folder that I had created while the drive was owned by root.  So, OK, it seemed I needed to disconnect the drive from the VM again, go back to Ubuntu, and run "chmod -R 777 /media/DAILY."  The -R option would run the chmod command recursively, through everything on DAILY.  But that gave me "cannot access `/media/DAILY': Input/output error."  It sounded like this might have been caused by an improper shutdown, so I plugged the DAILY external drive into a WinXP computer, right-clicked on it, and did Properties > Tools > Check Now > Automatically fix file system errors > Start > Yes.  So now it would check that drive after I rebooted the Windows computer.  Meanwhile, I tried to manipulate that troublesome folder in Windows Explorer on that Windows machine, and what did I see but the same "access is denied" message!  It wasn't an Ubuntu or VM issue; it was an ntfs hard drive issue.  I rebooted and let CHKDSK do its thing.  Unfortunately, that didn't do it.  It seemed this folder was really very screwed up.  I rebooted with the Windows XP installation CD and ran CHKDSK /R from its Recovery Console.  For this 750GB hard drive, this took more than 24 hours to run twice (i.e., until CHKDSK /R reported no more errors fixed).  When it was done, I went back into that uncooperative folder.  Access was still denied.  I rebooted that dual-booting computer into Ubuntu and examined the folder there.  Ubuntu had no problems with it.  Right-clicking showed me that the folder was owned by root.  I re-ran chmod, this time specifying "sudo chmod -R 777 /media/DAILY/EXTERNAL," where "EXTERNAL" was the name of the folder in question.  This changed nothing.  I backed up another step to "sudo chown -R ray:ray /media/DAILY/EXTERNAL."  Then I re-ran chmod.  Still no change of permissions.  I tried "sudo nautilus," with Windows-style manual change of permissions but, as before, no effect.  WinXP's CHKDSK may have been good for the drive generally, but it did not seem to have changed anything regarding the recalcitrant directory.

Using Nautilus, I created a new folder, EXTERNAL2, and (in normal user mode, not root mode) I copied everything from EXTERNAL to EXTERNAL2.  Permissions were not changed.  I ran chown and chmod on EXTERNAL2.  As before, this changed nothing.  Using VMware Workstation, I went into a WinXP VM, set up DAILY as a shared folder, mapped it in Windows Explorer (Tools > Map Network Drive), and used WinEx to take another look.  Unlike in WinEx elsewhere, here I was able to view the contents of EXTERNAL and EXTERNAL2.  I deleted the contents of EXTERNAL2 in WinEx and copied them again from EXTERNAL.  Again, that in itself did not change permissions, nor did the same chown and chmod commands make any difference.  In Nautilus, I deleted EXTERNAL and renamed EXTERNAL2 to be EXTERNAL.  To delete EXTERNAL, I had to manually delete some files with names like .fuse_hidden0000ef520000009d.  In some cases, though, those files seemed to be recreated after deletion.  I found that I could delete them, one folder at a time, using the right-click Delete rather than hitting the Delete key, followed by F5.  So I did wind up with EXTERNAL2 renamed, in WinEx, to be EXTERNAL.  I bailed out of Ubuntu and rebooted into WinXP.  I noticed that, while the letters of EXTERNAL had previously been colored blue (indicating that it was a compressed folder, where it seemed that the problem may have arisen from an interruption of the compression process), this newly remade EXTERNAL folder was black (indicating no compression).  I was now able to go into EXTERNAL, see its contents, and rearrange its files and folders. I still did not know how to change its permissions in Ubuntu, but apparently that was not going to prevent me from working with it in Windows.

Summary

I think what fixed the drive was to view it in Ubuntu's Nautilus, make a copy of it, and then delete the original. I did not figure out how to change its permissions, but I was nonetheless now able to use it in Windows XP.

Backpack for Running

Contents moved to my running blog and updated.

Using a Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows XP on an Uncooperative Laptop

As described in another post, I was trying to install WinXP on a Compaq Presario CQ60-420US laptop that would not boot from a Windows XP installation CD.  This post describes the steps I took to try to install from a USB flash drive instead.

I looked for guides on how to create a bootable USB drive using WinXP SP3.  One webpage suggested that I could use UBCD for Windows (UBCD4Win).  I had already installed UBCD4Win on the computer I was using for this investigation, so I thought this approach might make the process faster.  Following the steps on that webpage, I created a supposedly bootable USB drive, using a cheap 2GB USB thumb drive I had gotten from somewhere.  (It sounded like I had better use at least a 1GB drive.)  The webpage said it could take as long as a half-hour on a really cheap (i.e., slow) USB drive.  I plugged this USB drive into the laptop and pressed Esc during the initial boot screen to open the Startup Menu, and then F9 to bring up Boot Device Options.  It gave me only two options:  the DVD drive and the hard drive.  I exited out of that, and the system tried to Start Windows Normally and then crashed and rebooted.  I powered down, powered up, and tried again.  Same thing.  No joy.  It wasn't working.

I started over, this time creating the bootable USB drive using an OCZ Diesel 4GB USB flash drive (using FAT32 rather than FAT16 as instructed).  It still wasn't a terribly fast process.  When I stuck this one in the laptop and rebooted it and hit Esc and then F9, like before, I got a very different Boot Option Menu.  This time, we had two new entries:  DIESEL and LEGACY PCI DEVICE.  I tried DIESEL.  The screen was completely black except for a white cursor that just sat there and blinked.  (Later, I realized that it would always take a while, and that I should just be patient.  I'm not sure whether that would have solved the problem here.)

I let it go for a few minutes and then restarted the machine and tried the Legacy PCI Device option.  This seemed to be designed for booting via a network connection, from a source at the other end of an ethernet cable.  I didn't have any idea of how to do that.  It appeared that the bootable USB drive process had gone correctly, but that whatever was preventing the system from booting from the WinXP CD was also preventing it from booting from the USB.  To test that, I put the Diesel drive in another computer, which I'll call the "test" computer, and set its BIOS to boot first from the USB-FDD option, second from the USB-ZIP option, and third from the USB-CDROM option.  This gave me "Remove disks or other media.  Press any key to restart."  I did that.  On reboot, it went into GRUB.  (I had this machine set for dual-booting into Ubuntu Linux.)  I went back into the BIOS and changed the first entry to be USB-HDD.  This was my last remaining USB option.  I plugged the Diesel back in.  Once again, "Remove disks or other media."  The Diesel USB drive had given me somewhat more clarity, but it was still not working.  I had tried creating a bootable USB drive once before.  I think that one was for Ubuntu, but it had used the same BartPE components that went into this one.  It hadn't worked either -- not only for me, as I recall, but for a number of other people.

I decided to try another way of making a bootable USB drive, not involving USBCD4Win.  This time, the webpage I followed began with installing BartPE to a folder with a name like C:\pebuilder.  I had already done that, in the process of setting up UBCD4Win.  Next, they had me download and install UltraISO Premium (free to try).  It didn't look like my other CD burning programs gave me the USB-HDD burning option that they recommended, so I went ahead with the installation.  I didn't bother closing my other programs before installing.  Then I ran it as they suggested.  The result was not encouraging.  When I clicked on the drive in Windows Explorer, I got an indication that the drive was not formatted.  I took it out and put it into the test computer anyway.  When I rebooted, to my surprise I got, "Start booting from USB device."  I hadn't yet copied the I386 folder to the USB drive -- couldn't, because the source computer wasn't recognizing it -- but now I yanked it out of the target (I had hit the Pause key at that point in the target machine, so it was just sitting there, politely waiting its turn) and shoved it back into the source machine, which now recognized the jump drive as drive I: (BartPE).  I copied the I386 folder.  While that was underway, I did a quick search for the option of installing XP from the I386 folder on drive C, which I had kind of forgotten about.  It looked like a hassle, so I didn't bother with it at this point.  The I386 copy process got interrupted by an irritating Windows message that one of the files in the I386 folder was being used, so I tried again, copying this time from the I386 folder on the slipstreamed WinXP SP3 CD.

When the I386 folder was all copied to the USB drive, I jerked it out of the source machine and rammed it back into the same USB port in the test machine.  I hit a key to un-pause that machine's boot process, but got "Disk Error -- Press any key to restart."  I did that.  Now BartPE loaded.  It flashed a Windows XP opening screen, so I knew WinXP was there somewhere.  Next, BartPE gave me a screen for DiskInternals.  I killed that.  It wanted to know if I wanted to start network support.  I said no.  I didn't see the DiskPart program described in the webpage, and actually I would have rather used GParted for that anyway.  I tried DiskInternals Partition Recovery, which seemed to be the closest thing to a partitioner, but it didn't look right.  I inserted the GParted CD and went to BartPE's Go > Shut down > Restart option.  On reboot, I went back into the BIOS setup and set the CD-ROM drive to boot before the USB-HDD.

Then I decided I didn't need to be fooling with the test machine anymore.  This USB drive appeared to be working.  So I put the GParted CD into the laptop instead, and also changed its BIOS boot order as just described.  I used GParted to set up a 25GB NTFS partition and then rebooted with the USB drive.  It booted!  This time around, I skipped the partitioning and formatting step described on that webpage, and instead went to BartPE's Go > Command Prompt.  This put me at an X:\minint\System32 prompt.  I guessed this meant that X was the drive letter assigned to the USB drive.  So I did a "CD \I386" and, sure enough, there it was.  So I ran the command they indicated:

X:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource /noreboot

Woo hoo -- a WinXP installation screen!  But then, dammit, an error:

Setup cannot continue because upgrade functionality is disabled and your copy of Windows XP only allows upgrades.

Now what?  I had never gotten this before.  There was, as far as I knew, no problem with the CD itself.  A search suggested no obvious solutions.  I suspected this might be a problem caused by the use of a slipstreamed CD with the BartPE process.  I decided to try again with the second approach, to see if that cheap 2GB USB drive could also be made bootable, but using an original Windows XP SP2 CD in that process.  While that was doing its thing, I took another look at that option of installing WinXP from the I386 folder.  I found a webpage that suggested using winnt.exe instead of winnt32.exe.  Unfortunately, I was not sure how to replace the other options in the foregoing winnt32 command.  (Later, I saw somewhere that the command to use would have been X:\i386\winnt /s:X:\i386, where the /S switch defines the location of the startup files).

By this time, BartPE had finished being reinstalled on the cheap 2GB USB drive.  I checked and noticed that the installed files (including /I386) filled 934MB.  The I386 files filled about 2/3 of that by themselves.  I rebooted the laptop with the cheap 2GB drive plugged in, and it worked.  Conclusion:  the UBCD4Win process did not work, at least not unless I wanted to reinstall UBCD4Win, in case it had become screwed up during my previous use of it.  But then, spoke too soon:  the cheap 2GB drive produced the same BSOD I had gotten when trying to install WinXP from the CD.  Why would the same BartPE process work with SP3 and not SP2?  I replaced the SP2 files on the cheap USB with SP3 files (using Beyond Compare to avoid having to recopy everything) and tried again with the cheap USB.  While this was underway, I also tried booting from the SP3 CD again, as I had done at the start of this post.  Nope:  still a BSOD.  When the cheap USB had the SP3 files, I tried booting it.  Nope:  still a BSOD.  So apparently there was some difference between the Diesel USB and the cheap USB.  I tried the Diesel USB once again, just to be sure.  Sure enough; once again it loaded BartPE.

Next, I downloaded WinSetupFromUSB.  It didn’t seem to have a homepage of its own; that link was the first in a long thread about it, and there was a download link there.  It came in a .7z form, and for some reason right-clicking didn’t open up the usual Windows XP “Extract” option, so I used 7-zip to extract it.  It was a standalone; no installation process needed.  It didn’t detect anything on the cheap USB drive, but it gave me options to reformat it with either Bootice or RMPrepUSB.  But then it didn’t seem to be working, so I killed it (Ctrl-Alt-Del) and started it again.  This time it identified it as 2020MB Total (FAT) and gave me an error indicating that I should not be using FAT16 on a drive > 2GB.  So apparently those other instructions were mistaken, and maybe this was why the cheap USB hadn't worked as well as the 4GB Diesel.

I clicked on Bootice and left the Destination Disk setting at the default USB.  The Bootice tooltip had recommended using Grub for DOS, so I clicked Process MBR and chose Grub for DOS > Install / Config.  I left the default settings as they were and went with Save to Disk.  This said, “GRUB4DOS is successfully installed onto this disk!  Please copy GRLDR (and optional menu.lst) to the root of any partition of this disk.”  I clicked OK > Return > Return.  This put me back to the main Bootice dialog.  Following the tooltip, I clicked Perform Format > USB-HAD HAD (Single Partition) and chose NTFS.  I got, “The partition has been formatted successfully.  You can install some kind of MBR and PBR onto it now.”  I had already done the MBR, though, and when I clicked on that it seemed to be indicating that I would be changing the MBR, so I went on to the PBR option.  I left it at NTLDR and hit Install / Config.  This, too, seemed to have been done already.  But then, when I exited all dialogs back to the WinSetFromUSB introductory dialog, I got an error message:

Could not find primary partition on the selected disk!

Please insert USB disk with a primary partition on it and click Refresh button.

I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong, so I clicked Refresh.  Same error again.  It went away after a few seconds, so I tried RMPrepUSB instead of Bootice.  Here, the steps were numbered.  In step 3, I changed Boot Options to XP.  I went looking for the manual and, in WinSetupFromUSB\files\tools, I found RMPrepUSB.pdf.  (There didn’t seem to be a manual there for Bootice.)  This PDF said that I would have to indicate files to be copied to the USB drive here, in step 5, if I wanted the drive to be bootable.  But what files?  I wasn’t sure, so I just went with this part.  (I noticed RMPrepUSB offered an image “File to USB” button.  From the readme PDF, it seemed this would be useful only if you already had an ISO or other image containing everything that would be needed to boot a USB drive as distinct from a CD.  I didn’t have that, so I didn’t use this.)  Then I clicked on 6, Prepare Drive.  Something went wrong at this point, probably in my choices or in another program I was running.  The system nearly froze, and I had to use Ctrl-Alt-Delete to shut down this program and another one.  I tried WinSetupFromUSB > Bootice again.  It registered the drive as formatted in FAT32, so I went to the PBR button and clicked Install / Config > OK > Return.  Next, Process MBR > Grub for DOS > Install/Configure > Save to Disk.  It said something about installing GRLDR and menu.lst to the root of any partition.  After a search and a look at several websites, I still didn’t know what or where GRLDR was, or which menu.lst to install.  Finally I found a guide on how to use WinSetupFromUSB.  This guide was unfortunately somewhat outdated.  I followed its advice in a modified sense:  I copied the entire WinXP installation CD to a new folder on drive C, and indicated that in step 5 in RMPrepUSB.  Then I clicked step 6, the Prepare Drive button, along with the other OK buttons etc. needed to get it underway.  It spent maybe a half-hour copying the contents of the WinXP installation CD to the USB drive.

When it was done, I clicked Exit and ejected the USB drive.  Before ejecting, I noticed that the contents of the drive appeared identical to those of a WinXP CD; but during the process, I had noticed a brief reference to the possibility that two partitions were being created on the jump drive, and that maybe one of them was hidden.  Maybe this would be the boot partition, and it would make it so that the jump drive really would function like a boot CD.  Maybe.  About this time, I also realized that this might have been a partly wasted effort, insofar as the cheap USB drive had not been a star performer so far; I just hadn't wanted to wipe out that hard-won Diesel drive until I thought I might have a better alternative.

At this point, I used one of the foregoing processes to make a SanDisk Cruzer 4GB flash drive bootable.  I did not record which process; it was late and I went to bed while it was underway.  A day or two passed before I got back to this project.  I booted the laptop with the SanDisk, hit Esc and then F9, and saw that I did have the SanDisk as a boot option.  It did start booting.  It went through "Starting BartPE" and showed the WinXP startup screen, but then collapsed into a BSOD.

I went back to the approach that had worked with the Diesel USB.  This time, it occurred to me, I might not need to go through the long process of copying I386 to the jump drive.  That would be necessary for a situation where a CD drive was not available; but in this situation I did have a drive that would (I hoped) read the I386 file from the WinXP installation CD.  It took only a minute or so for UltraISO to make the Diesel bootable.  When that was done, I closed UltraISO, ejected the Diesel, inserted it into the laptop, put the WinXP CD in the laptop's CD drive, booted the laptop, and did the Esc-F9 sequence on startup.  This time, unfortunately, the Diesel didn't work either; another BSOD.  I thought maybe the problem was that the machine didn't even want to see the WinXP CD, so I tried again, booting the Diesel, without the WinXP CD in the drive, but no:  BSOD again.

At this point, I abandoned this bootable USB approach.  The Diesel USB had worked the first time, to the point of giving me a command prompt.  It might work again, if I kept playing with it.  But by now I had come up with some other possible approaches, so I returned to the effort described in a separate post.