The Vast Majority of IRS Employees Aren't Corrupt
GSA Mishandled Executive Bonuses
EIG 2013 as Told by Your Tweets
Infographic: Nominee Limbo
Will You Be Furloughed?
Boldly Go Where No Fed's Gone Before
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Video: A computational model of the human heart
January 3, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The heart is a beautiful pump. While lacking the poetry of most odes to the heart, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center's project, Alya Red, pays homage to the organ by trying to model it. The task of simulating the way electrical impulses make the heart muscles contract to pump blood takes ...
Helping intelligence agencies better predict the future
December 12, 2012 We would like to know what the future is going to be like, so we can prepare for it. I'm not talking about building a time machine to secure the winning Powerball number ahead of time, but rather creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen. Supposedly, this ...
The year in tech, 2012
December 11, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Technology changes year to year, phone to phone, quarter to quarter. Here at The Atlantic, we like to focus on how those changes happen, the ideas that animate them, the people that execute them, the users who transform them. The last year saw massive change in this broad definition of ...
The next niche market for solar? Drones—yes, drones
November 21, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The idea that solar is a nice, soft technology that only liberals could love reaches back into the 1970s. It was there that the counterculture adopted solar energy as an alternative to the fossil fuels that dominated (and still dominate) the American energy mix. Solar became a symbol that Reaganites ...
When the nerds go marching in
November 16, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data ...
Data doesn't belong to the Democrats
November 7, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
One of the leading narratives of the 2012 campaign is that data trumped all. Nate Silver! The polling was dead on! The blowhard pundits were wrong! The Obama campaign's Internet money machine got people to give lots of money over the summer with George Clooney-dinner enticements tailor made for West ...
Google's Street View sherpas tackle the Grand Canyon
October 24, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
We're all familiar with the Google Street View cars at this point (and their Nokia cousins). They go buzzing around cities capturing data from the physical world. But there are places they cannot go, places that Google would really like to have imagery of, for example, say, the Grand Canyon. ...
The forgotten mapmaker: Nokia has better maps than Apple and maybe even Google
October 4, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Apple's maps are bad. Even Tim Cook knows this and apologized for them. Google's maps are good, thanks to years of work, massive computing resources, and thousands of people handcorrecting map data. But there are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. ...
Happy birthday, NASA! Here's what might have happened if you were never born
October 1, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a popular new technology in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a government agency. And this was the problem with space travel. On this day in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration opened for business a mere two ...
'We're literally watching the Internet be rebuilt'
September 20, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
What is the Internet? It used to be simple. If you were a regular Internet user, you used a modem to commandeer your telephone line and you called into a service provider. Once connected, you'd enter the Netscape address and Netscape's servers would send you information over the network of ...
