Everyone loves saving money, especially the US government. But could it really be as simple as switching fonts? Last week the media was awash with the story of 14-year-old student Suvir Mirchandani, who claimed that if the United States Government switched from using Times New Roman to Garamond on printed documents, it could save as much as $400 million.

The Pennsylvania student first began considering this idea while watching his school hand out multiple leaflets and trying to discern a way to save on the cost of ink when printing them. Then it was a natural leap to apply the same theory to not just his school, but the nation. Mirchandani posits that, due to the fact that Garamond is about 25% lighter and thinner than Times New Roman, it could save the US government $136 million in printing costs, and an additional $234 million could be saved if state governments also enacted this policy.

“Ink is two times more expensive than French perfume by volume.” – Suvir Mirchandani, in an interview with CNN.

But just how accurate is this estimate? Since Mirchandani’s theory has received international attention, it has been called into question by several typographers and design experts.

According to one article by John Brownlee, the major flaw in Mirchandani’s research is that he measured Garamond at the wrong size—understandable, given that font measurement can be incredibly confusing.

As Brownlee puts it in his article, “There is no guarantee that when you print out a font at 12-points that the letters will be 12-points tall. Only the line which the letters will be printed on will be 12-points tall.” If we were to switch to 12-point Garamond instead of Times New Roman, then, we would actually be sacrificing readability, as Garamond is the equivalent of a 10-point font rendered on a 12-point line. If the size were increased to improve readability, inevitably the cost of printing would increase to be comparable to the cost of printing Times New Roman.

Other issues brought to light regarding Mirchandani’s study have been the lack of specificity regarding which version of Garamond he used (though logical assumption points to the Monotype version of Garamond typically bundled with Microsoft operating systems) and the antiquity of the study he referenced in his claim regarding the cost of printer ink.

Mirchandani assumes that the ink for inkjet printers and the toner for laser printers (commonly used by government institutions) cost the same amount, when in reality toner is about half as expensive. Also, as noted by the aforementioned article by Mr. Brownlee, many US documents are still printed on a printing press, for which the price of printing is calculated not by ink used, but by the complexity of the page’s layout, and it is unlikely it costs as much as the $4,285 per liter assumed by Mirchandani.

Whilst it’s encouraging to see young minds so interested in the practical application of typography, the lesson we really learnt here, is that the only real way to save on printing costs is to go paperless.

Featured image/thumbnail, print image via Shutterstock.

Glober Font Family with 18 Weights – only $19!

The symposium "Discovery and Innovation: UMB's Commitment to Health Informatics and Bioimaging" will update the research and practice community on gains made in university health informatics, both here at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and other national exemplars.

• Time: May 5, 2014, 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
• Location: University of Maryland, Baltimore, Southern Management Corporation Campus Center, 621 West Lombard Street Room 349

Speakers Include

Paul Harris Director, Office of Research Informatics Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

Owen White, PhD Director, Center for Health Informatics and Bioimaging (CHIB) and Associate Director, Institute for Genome Sciences University of Maryland School of Medicine

Amitabh Varshney, PhD Director, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies University of Maryland, College Park

Mia Levy, MD, PhD Director, Cancer Clinical Informatics Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center

Kathleen Tracy, PhD Associate Director, CHIB and Director, Clinical Translational Research and Informatics Center University of Maryland School of Medicine

Get a first glimpse of UMB's Research HARBOR (Helping Advance Research By Organizing Resources), our interactive web portal to support research and innovation.

REGISTER NOW!

Our PhD students Ahmad Alaiad and Dari AlHuwail presented their work at the Poster Contest organized by the Information Systems Department at UMBC. The committee selected both students for the #1 place in the poster competition.

Tweet tweet… the birdie just got let out of the cage

Last week  the U.S. was busted yet again for a naughty coverta operation. This time it wasn’t Eric Snowden but the Associated Press who did the busting.

And the bustee was  ZunZuneo, a Cuban Twitter like service designed to promote free information sharing (and, oh, secretly incite a little political unrest along the way). 

ZunZuneo was backed by USAID, an American government aid organization. The team from USAID was using allegedly using ZunZuneo to collect information about suspected dissenters in order to “target outreach.” 

The service was a huge success, growing to about 40,000 subscribers, until the money dwindled off. USAID realized they were paying huge text messaging fees to the Cuban telecommunications monopoly and decided to call it quits to avoid a scandal. Looks like they got one anyways!

An article from the New Yorker explains another part of the problem here:

The case presents another troubling issue: ZunZuneo was being run through a private operator, a firm called Mobile Accord, that had won a financial contract from the U.S. government. This is consistent with a growing pattern in recent years, in which implementation of the most sensitive aspects of American security policy is increasingly handed over to contractors who are working for money, not necessarily for philosophical or even patriotic reasons.

The details of the story show that the project got slightly out of hand for USAID, growing more than expected thanks to Mobile Accord.

In the end, no one seems to be apologizing. The White House deemed that the operation was not “covert”  and was rather a “development assistance program.”

Whatever it was, it was pretty shady.

Is providing Twitter to Cubans is considered a form of “aid,” or a form of spying? 

Michael T. Abrams, MPH, a senior research analyst at The Hilltop Institute, co-authored two articles published in the April 2014 issue of Psychiatric Services. The articles are both based on a study of low-income young adults (aged 18-26) discharged from an inpatient psychiatric event, a marker for serious mental distress.

Identifying Young Adults at Risk of Medicaid Enrollment Lapses After Inpatient Mental Health Treatment discusses a study that identified antecedents to Medicaid enrollment lapses in the year following discharge. Such lapses are undesirable because they suggest absence of medical attention that is especially indicated in the wake of an inpatient psychiatric stay.

Medicaid Lapses and Low-Income Young Adults’ Receipt of Outpatient Mental Health Care after an Inpatient Stay discusses a second study that estimated the impacts of Medicaid enrollment disruptions on access to mental health services in the same year following inpatient discharge. That study found that Medicaid disruptions correlated with reduced outpatient mental health service utilization and lower medication possession ratios. Jointly, these articles offer information to policymakers and others regarding the reasons and the potentially negative health care consequences of insurance discontinuities for young adults with substantial, albeit emerging, mental health needs. Such young adults represent an important subset of persons who should gain broader access to medical care coverage via the Affordable Care Act.