Older Feds Aren't Playing to Their Strengths
Is It Too Hard to Fire Misbehaving Feds?
Americans Still Like the Postal Service
A Forced 4-Day Weekend for Many Feds
No More Tax-Cheating Feds, Senators Say
Video: The Daily Show on Apple's Taxes
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
The Future of Brick-and-Mortar Retailers? Turning Into Data Centers
May 24, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud. Data Center Knowledge reported today that Sears had created a new unit -- Ubiquity Critical Environments -- to look into repurposing its shuttered ...
NASA's 19-Gigapixel Filmstrip of the Earth from Russia to South Africa
May 21, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
NASA's Landsat satellites have been snapping pictures of the Earth from orbit since 1972. The most recent iteration of the project, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission, arrived at its orbital resting place on April 12, and shot thisseries of 56 images shortly thereafter. NASA stitched the pictures together into one ...
National Weather Service Warned About School Safety in Oklahoma City Region
May 21, 2013 Monday, the National Weather Service's Rick Smith posted a briefing to YouTube at 11:30am, which laid out a scenario for the day's weather events that was eerily precise. Specifically, he mentioned schools as an area of concern and highlighted the potential for an EF-4 tornado in the area south of ...
Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?
May 17, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these ...
What the Obama Campaign's Chief Data Scientist Is Up to Now
May 9, 2013 By all accounts, Rayid Ghani's data work for President Obama's reelection campaign was brilliant and unprecedented. Ghani probably could have written a ticket to work at any company in the world, or simply collected speaking fees for a few years telling companies how to harness the power of data like ...
Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA's Would-Be Cat Spy
May 9, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
You see, cats are sly and unpredictable. They can slip unnoticed from place to place, watching, listening, wryly judging, surveilling. So, why wouldn't the Central Intelligence Agency stick a microphone in a cat's ear and embed a radio transmitter in her body? Oh, but they would! In an excerpt from ...
The Hordes of Microbes Inside Your Body Are Your Friends
April 26, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
As tools for engineering life’s building blocks have proliferated in recent years, our definition of human life has become more expansive. For example,we are learning that the vast ecosystems of microbes inside our bodies are as integral to our health as our own tissues, affecting everything from our immune systems ...
NASA Announces the Discovery of the Most Interesting Planetary System Outside Our Own
April 18, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The Kepler Space Telescope has been in orbit looking for planets around other stars since 2009, and it's started to find some startlingly interesting solar systems out there. Today, the Kepler team announced the discovery of star system Kepler 62, a group of five planets circling a red star, two ...
Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism
April 18, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
If there's one thing we want to believe about the Boston bombing, it's that someone saw the perpetrator. Somewhere, inside an iPhone or on a memory chip, there's an image of the terrorist(s). The video would serve as evidence at a trial, and it would calm the queasy feeling that ...
The SSA Employee Behind All the Great Data on Baby Name Popularity
April 16, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Every year, the Social Security Administration releases its annual list of the most popular names in America. They've become a valuable source of data for researchers, as Ruth Graham brilliantly laid out in the Boston Globe this weekend. The best thing about name data is that it is the perfect ...
