Should the IRS Hire Private Debt Collectors?
Painless Management Reforms?
Virginia Didn't Learn From the Shutdown
HUD Will Post Officials' Salaries Online
Will This Year's PMF Finalists Find Jobs?
Inside the Military’s New Office for Cyborgs
AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.
He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).
Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
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 ...
How Boston Police Could Examine Videos From the Boston Bombing
April 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
As investigators try to figure out what happened today during the bombings at the Boston Marathon, they'll turn to video taken at the scene of the explosions. In addition to any closed-circuit television cameras lining Boylston Street and its surroundings, The Bureau Chief of Public Information, Cheryl Fiandaca,called for members ...
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. ...
