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
iPhone 5? Yawn. What will the 'phone' of 2022 look like?
September 14, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The near-term future of phones is fairly well-established. The iPhone 5 was released yesterday and its similarity to every Apple phone since 2007 serves as a reminder that our current mobile devices have been sitting on the same plateau for years. Reflecting on Apple's recent product launches, author and professor ...
Moondoggle: The forgotten opposition to the Apollo Program
September 12, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Today, we recall the speech John F. Kennedy made 50 years ago as the beginning of a glorious and inexorable process in which the nation united behind the goal of a manned lunar landing even as the presidency swapped between parties. Time has tidied things up. Polls both by USA ...
How Google builds its maps—and what it means for the future of everything
September 7, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Behind every Google Map, there is a much more complex map that's the key to your queries but hidden from your view. The deep map contains the logic of places: their no-left-turns and freeway on-ramps, speed limits and traffic conditions. This is the data that you're drawing from when you ...
Apple spikes drone-tracking app
August 30, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Danger Room reports that an app that reports drone strikes to your phone has been rejected from Apple's store for various reasons that seem to boil down to this one: Apple doesn't like it. The student-designed app simply presents existing media accounts of strikes in our open-secret war. It plots ...
Curiosity Rover busts out the telephoto lens
August 28, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
In the latest of NASA's stunning images from Mars, the Jet Propulsion Lab team released this photograph of the "layered buttes" at the base of Mt. Sharp, the Curiosity rover's eventual target terrain. The image was taken with the 100-millimeter Mastcam, and white balanced for how the rocks would look ...
Curiosity scientists select random rock on Mars to shoot with laser
August 20, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Meet the most boring rock in the world. It's probably basalt, an igneous rock, which makes it like many, many other rocks and pebbles all over the world. What makes it interesting is that the world in question is Mars, and this random little piece of stone happens to be ...
Video: Where the Mars Curiosity Rover is headed next
August 10, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
So far, most of the excitement about the Curiosity rover has sprung from its precise landing and its first surroundings, the floor of the Gale Crater. But the rover is meant to rove, and rove it will. Today, in a press briefing, Dawn Sumner, a UC Davis geologist on the ...
To model the simplest microbe in the world, you need 128 computers
July 24, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Mycoplasma genitalium has one of the smallest genomes of any free-living organism in the world, clocking in at a mere 525 genes. That's a fraction of the size of even another bacterium like E. coli, which has 4,288 genes. M. genitalium's diminutive genome made it the first target for Stanford ...
Mitt Romney's algorithmic campaign
July 20, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
Sasha Issenberg has a fascinating exploration of the analytical approach at the heart of the Romney campaign. All campaigns use a lot of data these days, but the Romney team is drawing on a new, rich dataset: President Obama's appearances and ad buys themselves. Every detail of Obama's campaigning is ...
Government agency recruits via the source code of its web page
July 10, 2012
FROM NEXTGOV
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is looking for a few good technology and design fellows to help them out. Where might they find ideal candidates? Perhaps in the pool of people who go to their website AND want to see the code behind the page. So, they inserted an advertisement ...
