Recently in the Government Category

Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)

These numbers are a bit sad.

So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?

Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that "calculator abuse."

He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 -- but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010. --Jake Tapper, ABC

Our decision to homeschool began when we moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with a five-year-old, and found there was no option for half-day kindergarten. We decided the move was stressful enough, and since school attendance wasn't mandatory until age 7, we decided to handle the afternoon naps, storytimes, and playing-with-blocks ourselves. As long as our kids continue to thrive, we'll continue to homeschool.

It's been more than two decades since Robert Fulghum published the oft-quoted (and oft-mocked) essay "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." The piece describes a bucolic world of wonder, a place for cookies and afternoon naps.

That world is long gone.

Earlier this year, the nonprofit advocacy group Alliance for Childhood, based just outside Washington, D.C., issued a report titled "Crisis in the Kindergarten: Why Children Need to Play in Schools," drawing from nine new studies of public school classrooms around the country. Kindergartners in the studies spent four to six times as much of the school day being drilled in literacy and math as they did playing.

Recess has been truncated or has disappeared entirely in some schools, a double whammy, since children are stressed out by the demands and also deprived of their major stress reliever. The report cites study after study showing increasing stress, aggression, and other behavior problems, and even breakdowns.

Roz Brezenoff taught kindergarten in the Boston Public Schools for 36 years, retiring five years ago. "I have heard stories of kids having what they call psychotic breakdowns in kindergarten, kids who are distressed because they are 'kindergarten failures' because they can't read and they can't write," she says.

To be sure, many children thrive in an academic environment, and some parents seek out institutions like the Edward Brooke Charter School in Roslindale, which bills itself as "unapologetically college preparatory." Teachers there assign nightly homework in kindergarten. But many children that age are not ready for that kind of work, and all are being held to new standards. --Patti Hartigan, Boston.com

Kanye West has tried to apologize twice, once on his blog and once on Jay Leno. He blew it both times. In each case he referred to having stolen Taylor's moment. West doesn't understand that what he did was wrong, threatening and self-centered. He simply acknowledged that his completely narcissistic behavior cut into another celebrity's moment of self-centeredness!

Ms. Williams, having nobody famous to whom to apologize, has yet to properly acknowledge the implications of threatening a line judge with bodily harm. Like Mr. West, Ms. Williams fails to understand that it doesn't matter how much pressure she was under, it's not about her! She was wrong and she should simply say that, apologize for it and shut up. The storm would pass and she would be forgiven. But that seems to be beyond her.

Apparently, it's beyond Joe Wilson also. He apologized to the President and he has no plans to apologize any more, not to his colleagues and not to anyone else. Like Kanye West, Wilson seems to think that his words caused a personal hurt to the President and he is willing to apologize for that, but not for anything else. --Brad Hirschfield

Last night I came across the text of the statement by Serena Williams, which a headline writer had identified as an "apology," but the statement begins by praising Serena for her passion, it repeats the claim that the judge's call was unfair, it confuses the concepts of "passion and emotion" and "foul-mouthed tantrum, and it imagines that the continued adoration of her "fans and supporters" -- rather than any change on her part -- will help her to "move forward and grow".

Last night everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don't agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me and as a result handled the situation poorly. I would like to thank my fans and supporters for understanding that I am human and I look forward to continuing the journey, both professionally and personally, with you all as I move forward and grow from this experience.  --Serena Williams Issues Apology Statement

Factual errors in live TV reports led to a security incident on the Potomac river today.

Erroneous live cable news reports on CNN and Fox had said that the Coast Guard was firing shots on the river. CNN reported the Coast Guard had fired 10 rounds at a suspicious boat, and showed vessels circling in the water -- near the bridge President Barack Obama's motorcade crossed on the way to a memorial at the Pentagon earlier Friday morning.

The Associated Press reported that an exercise was under way in the river and did not report that shots were fired.

In a statement released by the Coast Guard, officials said the problem arose when media reporters overheard radio calls made during the training exercise. --CBS

I didn't watch any of the footage, but I'd bet one of the reporters said the smoke was delicious.

U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It's a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised. --Wired

From the president's prepared remarks to school children, scheduled for tomorrow.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide. 

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. --Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov

Interesting that Obama mentions "articles in a newspaper," rather than "articles for a news website" or "articles for a RSS feed" or "articles for cranially-implanted holographic simulation networks."  But he does end with a reference to social networking.

Do you think the hand-washing reference is just a little bit... I don't know... pandering?  Is the President going out of his way to make Republicans look silly for opposing some Oval Office happytalk? 

If this were a Monday, I might have had my "News Writing" students watch it during class, since many of them are education majors (and a fair number of them admitted they were only in the class because their teaching certificate program requires the course).

This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation's school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to join me in watching the President deliver this address on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. It will be broadcast live on the White House website www.whitehouse.gov 12:00 noon eastern standard time.

OMG! The prez is in ur internet, killin ur freedomz!

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."--Declan McCullagh, C|Net

Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu.

In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu.  As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to control and ultimately defeat the virus.  As the pandemic intensifies, the player is given information about the history and science of epidemics through a series of newspaper articles and videos.  Eventually, if the player is successful, the game ends with a count of the number of people infected and killed over the pandemic's life span, and the money spent containing the virus.

I think the game succeeds in presenting players with a lot of information through the multimedia featured in the game, and by including hints in it, giving players incentive to absorb it.  Furthermore, it nicely illustrates the dangers of our highly connected world: there's nothing more jarring than fighting a virus raging in Central and North America only to glance at Europe and find the epidemic exploding half way across the globe.  However, the game does suffer from a few common pitfalls, and going over them might shed some light on some of the challenges with using games for education.

Colbert's tag line brought tears to my eyes. (Thanks for the suggestion, Kerry!)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nailed 'Em - Library Crime
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Tasers

The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers as in standardized testing. The Federal Government's landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, on the dismal state of public education, ushered in a new era of standardized assessment that has intensified since the passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act. "In schools today, they're teaching to the tests," says Tamara Thornton, a University of Buffalo professor and the author of a history of American handwriting. "If something isn't on a test, it's viewed as a luxury." --Clare Suddath, Time (via Annette Vee's Facebook posting)

Tom Wolfe (author of space program biography The Right Stuff (which incidentally was the movie I took my first-ever date to see back in 1983) ) describes how the Cold War derailed the grand adventure of space exploration. Shockingly, the decay started while the Apollo program was still underway.

[I]n October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's Spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late 30s ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists -- irreplaceable! -- there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert" ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

Talk about penny wise and pound foolish!

NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing.

Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them.

The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed -- magnetically erased -- and re-used to save money. --Reuters

So the tapes NASA recently released are restored from less-degraded copies.

The Facebook epic fail isn't just grist for the teen angst mill. It also affects the head of the British secret service. Via.

The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain's spying operations abroad.

But his wife's entries on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who their friends are and where they spend their holidays. -- Jason Lewis, Mail

This weekend, how can the kids and I spend our time better than playing:

• Political Machine 2008 (try explaining "special interest groups" to a seven-year-old)
• Liberty's Kids (1776, from the perspective of Ben Franklin's printing apprentice, among others)
  
• Sid Meier's Civil War Collection (sort of a stretch, I know, but the fate of the union was at stake)
• The Oregon Trail, 5th Edition (You have died of dysentery)

We don't own a copy, but we always try to rent the musical 1776.

The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades.

The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in archive footage--by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in the US.

However, it is the original magnetic tapes recorded back at the Parkes Observatory in Australia that contained the unadulterated and highest quality images.

To the later horror of researchers and scientists, it was those tapes that went missing.

But now, according to the Daily Express, the original high-quality recordings have been found. (It looks like NASA was planning to surprise the world a little closer to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.)

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means -- individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites -- were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists' access to events, the protesters have used Twitter's agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or "tag," each of their tweets with the same bit of type -- #IranElection -- so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth. -- Noam Cohen, New York Times

I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I'll start with the three I did see.

Surveillance of Power and the Power of Surveillance
Mike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point

Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of Hypertext
Mary Karcher

The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private Authority
Casey McArdle
Ball State University

While scanning the coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I found this interesting editorial, which questions the depiction of the student protesters as pro-democracy.

The truth is that the students in the square had only the haziest understanding of western-style democracy. To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist.

Such arguments may seem arcane two decades later. But, in my view, they are keenly relevant. The styling of Tiananmen as a pro-democracy movement helped to miscast the west's narrative on China's past and future.--James Kynge, Financial Times

To protect itself from millions of dollars worth of taxes, Proctor & Gamble UK tried to defend a lower court's ruling that a Pringle is not a potato chip.

At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one -- but when?-- Adam Cohen, New York Times

High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper - for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.

But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.-- David Simon, Hearing on the Future of Journalism, US Senate

The U.S. government could provide tax breaks for newspapers or allow them to operate as nonprofits to help the struggling business survive, Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday. -- Reuters

Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible. -- Thomas Ferarro, Reuters

Will struggling for-profit papers be able to compete with government-supported papers?  PBS and NPR do top-notch work, though the perceived liberal bias of NPR is one reason why conservative talk radio has flourished in the last decade.

Part of a list of jokes the president told at the Alfalfa Club Dinner. This set made me laugh.

"In just the first few weeks, I've had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry.

"I finally agreed to limit the number of people who could e-mail me. It's a very exclusive list. How exclusive? Everyone look at the person sitting on your left. Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my e-mail address." -- Barack Obama

The URL says it all.

www.whitehouse.gov/blog

It seems that a recent 'reply-all storm' at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users "reply-all" to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies asking to be taken off the errant list, but by the e-mail recall function, which generated further e-mail traffic. --Slashdot

Looks like this instance may represent a violation of #10 Show Respect and Restraint on the list of 10 e-mail tips (originally submitted by a student in my technical writing class back in 2000, and now one of the most popular pages on my website).

Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I...a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of Democracy 2 for you to practice with. There are no strings attached whatsoever, I won't publish your name anywhere unless you say I can, I'm not getting anything out of it other than the knowledge that just *maybe* I'm helping to make our current crop of politicians more prepared for the task ahead, especially with a global recession on the horizon. -- Positech Games (Via)

Journalism is changing. Watchdog journalism -- the perusal of thousands of pages of official records in search of anomalies and other signs of abuse and corruption -- is much harder to do than reporting on celebrity shenanigans or fashion trends. John Mecklin writes:

On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not pay anything like the whole freight for investigative reporting. But Hamilton thinks advances in computing can alter the economic equation, supplementing and, in some cases, even substituting for the slow, expensive and eccentric humans required to produce in-depth journalism as we've known it.

Already, complex algorithms -- programming often placed under the over-colorful umbrella of "artificial intelligence" -- are used to gather content for Web sites like Google News, which serves up a wide selection of journalism online, without much intervention from actual journalists. Hamilton sees a not-too-distant future in which that process would be extended, with algorithms mining information from multiple sources and using it to write parts of articles or even entire personalized news stories.

From another section in the same story:

Investigative reporters have long used computers to sort and search databases in pursuit of their stories. Investigative Reporters and Editors and its National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, for example, hold regular computer-assisted reporting training sessions around the country. And the country's major journalism schools all deal in some way with computer-enhanced journalism. The emerging academic/professional field of computational journalism, however, might be thought of as a step beyond computer-assisted reporting, an attempt to combine the fields of information technology and journalism and thereby respond to the enormous changes in information availability and quality wrought by the digital revolution