New York Homeless Survey

(New York City) Last night, volunteers spread out in teams through the city's boroughs to count homeless people. According to this report, results won't be available for several weeks as various analyses are completed. Interestingly,

For quality control, the city sent out 150 college students - some dressed as homeless people - to test the survey takers' diligence.

Kim Hopper, a Columbia University professor who has studied homelessness extensively, is coordinating the experiment and will later review how many of his students were found by the volunteers.

So it appears that college students are going to be hiding as homeless people and the survey takers will try to find them. I don't know if this makes sense to anybody else but it seems loony to me. The basis of correlating the finding of college kids with finding vagrants escapes me. A more logical control would be to search for rats because they inhabit the same digs as vagrants. I doubt you'll find the college kids with the rats despite how they're dressed.

Mention needs to be made that the outcome of the survey is predictable in at least one regard. The homeless advocacy groups will be outraged and spitting venom. Since they get paid based upon the number of homeless, they will naturally complain that the totals reflect a egregious undercount and the methodology was flawed.