Tangherlini Tapped to Stay On at GSA
Video: Stephen Colbert on the Census Bureau
Lawmaker: Don't Furlough Weather Service Now
Making Government 'Simpler'
OK Senators Leery of Unfunded Tornado Relief
Boldly Go Where No Fed's Gone Before
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Cell Networks Use Much More Energy Than Data Centers
April 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
For years, people have talked about the electricity consumption of data centers. Some people want to believe, somehow, that Googling is energy intensive. But it's not. Thanks to Koomey's Corollary to Moore's Law, computation has been getting more energy efficient: The number of computations per kilowatt-hour of electricity usage has ...
Emerging Infectious Diseases, Better Public Health Outcomes, and Zombies
April 5, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Perhaps the public's obsession with zombies can be refracted from horror movies and towards health issues, suggests a new paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The hope is that zombies can do for public health awareness what they did for Jane Austen: tack on some zombies and suddenly boring ...
The True Story of the Government Programs That Tried to Build an Atomic Heart
March 22, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
In 1967, the National Heart Institute and the Atomic Energy Agency began a ten-year effort to develop an artificial heart powered by plutonium-238. The atomic hearts would have pumped human blood with the energy provided by the radioactive decay of that isotope. The effort failed thanks to technical challenges, intra-governmental ...
The Best Intelligence Is Cyborg Intelligence
March 12, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
A quick pointer to today's A1 New York Times story on a phenomenon we've been following on this blog for the past year: as algorithmic entities explode across the web, humans remain central to their operation. Automation only goes so far and for all Watson's Jeopardy wins, there are still ...
Here Comes the Parade of Computing Interfaces That Want to Replace the Touchscreen
February 27, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The interfaces are coming! Over the next six months or so, we're going to see an explosion of new ways of interacting with computers, televisions, and mobile devices. Many of them are radical departures from the way things have been done, which is exciting. I'll run several down in this ...
How Much YouTube Do Employees Really Watch at Work?
February 25, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The number of YouTube videos employees watch is not exactly the kind of number tracked by corporate analysts or released by companies. Suffice to say, on the evidence of being a human being in the white-collar workforce, I have long been sure that the number of YouTube videos watched on ...
How Big Data Can Catch Oxycontin Abusers and Bad Docs
February 22, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Prescription drug overdose deaths are up. "Diversion" of drugs for recreational use costs the health care system $72.5 billion a year, according to National Drug Intelligence Center report. And yet there are obviously literally billions of legitimate prescriptions that help sick people, which come through our nation's pharmacies. How do ...
Video: Russian Meteor Was the Biggest in a Century
February 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The meteor we all saw streaking across YouTube from Russian dashboard cameras was the largest in a century, a scientist who studied the event told Nature's Geoff Brumfiel. That would make it the biggest rock to hit the Earth since 1908's Tunguska wiped out a big old patch of Siberia. ...
And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men
February 13, 2013 A couple of weeks ago, Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted this: At first, snuffling through a head cold, I wrote several snarky responses -- e.g. " 'Success is never accidental,' said all multimillionaire white men." -- but never tweeted them. Because I've seen a lot of successful people ...
Walter Cronkite Demonstrates the Home of the Future in 1967
February 13, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Sometimes, I take the remote control and the hardware and software it controls for granted. Increasingly complex television choices have overtaxed our television user interfaces. We ask too much of the humble remote, and so it disappoints for simple tasks like searching for a movie on cable. But things could ...
