Beautiful B-2 Spirit and not-so-beautiful DoD testimony

Let's look at pictures first, before getting into the nitty gritty of U.S. Air Force project management.

Putting a B-2 through its paces at 90° North

This is a beautiful photo of a beautiful B-2 Spirit approaching the North Pole.

Testing B-2 performance at a
geomagnetic extreme point 

The US Air Force provides some details about this test flight:

A B-2 Spirit flies to the North Pole on October 27, 2011, on a test mission from Edwards Air Force Base, California. The polar flight helped ensure that the B-2 maintains its combat capability in all environments...

The North Pole's coordinates are 90° North latitude and 0° East or 0° West longitude, take your pick. (For the sake of notational accuracy, it is usually expressed as 90° North but disregard that for the moment.) Patience, please, as I am going somewhere with this.

Comfortable expedition to the North Pole
thanks to Russian icebreaker (2013)

So, 90°N 0°E is merely a "quarter" rotation of the Earth away from coordinates of  0°N 0°E according to the map projection of the World Geodetic System 1984. WGS84 is an often used global reference system for modeling the Earth. The U.S. Department of Defense and GPS (Global Positioning System) both use WGS84. 

Notably, the DoD developed GPS AND made it freely available to all in the early 1980s.

Null Island is L0L0

If one is doing geocoding with GPS and WGS84, the Library of Congress describes 0°N 0°E as 

"a curious blend of real and imaginary geography, of mathematical certainty and pure fantasy"

Performance improvement in state-funded healthcare for children

I noticed a job listing the other day, as "Director, Performance Improvement". It would likely be an intellectually satisfying and fulfilling employment opportunity. The job is a full-time, direct hire position with Health Services Advisory Group Inc. (which goes by the unfortunate acronym, HSAG and pronounced as H SAG), in Phoenix, Arizona.

My previous work in public health was with the Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs (OCSHCN), where I was an employee of the Department of Health Services of the State of Arizona (AZDHS).  My title was Statistical Research Chief, and I had a staff of two programmer analysts. 

OCSHCN and and its associated managed care program, the Childrens Rehabilitative Service (CRS), were in charge of most aspects of program management, including retroactive clinical assessments by nurses, as well as provider contracting decision-making. Arizona's Medicaid agency, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) provided billing support and auditor oversight.

In addition to performance evaluation and utilization management, I enjoyed a diverse range of duties that included epidemiological studies, PHI (Protected Health Information) security, pharma utilization, and provider payment (and beneficiary claim) fraud detection. However, the downside was that it was very difficult to work with the independence required to do performance and quality assessor for OCSHCN, while an employee of the program itself.

Programs funded by the U.S. HRSA Title V Block Grant for Women & Children