Today, the President's Council on Bioethics officially is dead.
For those who want the evidence, it is in what President Obama has not said today in his Executive Order that continues a number of councils and groups: the President's Council on Bioethics did not make the cut.
Back in the spring, we knew this was going to happen. In the beginning of summer (mid-June) there was a little spectacle as the members themselves apparently were notified their services were no longer necessary.
Now, today, it is official. Here is how you can tell.
The original Executive Order 13237 created the council in 2001. After a council or group is created, it has to be renewed. The renewal date is specified in the original order. Each President has more or less followed the same process for this. They often renew a whole slew of them at once, for a period of two years (unless otherwise stated). The Bioethics council was renewed every two years. The last renewal came as part of Executive Order 13446 of September 28th, 2007. It stipulated an end date of September 30th, 2009.
Today, President Obama signed a renewal order for a whole bunch of the other councils and groups that weer in that 2007 update order.... EXCEPT the council.
There you go, an explicit description, of its death.
If you'd like to go hunt around in Executive Order Archives and convince yourself, here is the link where you can start.
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/wbush-subjects.html#B
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Education is your training for battle
I woke up at 6:00am. That is what my track teammates and I did most days, as we needed to get a run in before heading to class. I came back from my run, showered in my apartment on Pace St., grabbed a power bar and some Gatorade (breakfast of champions), and plodded over to the bus-stop on Alexander Ave. It was sunny, but not especially hot.
I stood next to a young woman, who said to me ‘did you hear about the airliner accident in New York City?’ I respond that I had not, but that something in my gut tells me it has something to do with the problems in the middle –east. She looks at me befuddled, and our conversation sort of putters out. This had been an area of great interest for me, middle eastern affairs, and I’d just been reading about the problems in Jerusalem. This interest led me to taking a class called ‘Muslim World’ the next semester with a then-new faculty member Ibrahim Moosa. What happened next is why I took his course.
I arrived at the West Campus bus stop without thinking too much of what she’d said. I wander over to Alpine Bagels, thinking I’ll grab some orange juice on my way to class. I walk in to a mass of people standing silent and packed in so tightly you could not see the tables or chairs, all you could see was the tops of heads all the way down the room. The radio was off, and everyone was fixated on the small 20” televisions mounted on the walls in the far corners of the room. The sound was cranked all the way up to the point where it was crackly and too loud for the miniscule speakers embedded within the front face of the television.
I could feel the blockages in the throats of every human being in the room. I made my way through the crowd down towards the TV. I stared. The second plane hit. The shrill in the room and the physical vibration of the West Union building shook me so thoroughly that I’ve rarely felt comfortable there since. The foundations of many were cracked, a piece of their souls fabric torn, and the visceral emotions revealed themselves from the depths of every person there all at once.
Within an instance, people were frantically calling on cell phones, crying, looking around desperately for someone to talk to. In a room full of people, everyone looked at each other as if they were totally alone. The mixture of sorrow, confusion, anger, and fear paralyzed most of the people in that room for some portion of the first ten minutes after the ghastly images had seared themselves into our minds.
This was my 9/11 experience at Duke. I was 21 years old, and I stood in a jam-packed room with hundreds of others and witnessed it – live on TV.
I am now 29 years old, and about to finish my graduate degrees here at Duke. When I think back to that day, and to the remainder of my undergraduate tenure at Duke, I am proud of how I responded to it. The next semester I took a class on Islam. I took that course because I was unwilling to participate in a discussion without being informed.
The enduring lesson of 9/11 for me as an undergraduate was simple. Education is your training for the battle you decide to fight during your lifetime. Choose your weapon carefully, learn how to use it effectively, and take up a good fight to make our country and our world a better place for civil societies to flourish.
I stood next to a young woman, who said to me ‘did you hear about the airliner accident in New York City?’ I respond that I had not, but that something in my gut tells me it has something to do with the problems in the middle –east. She looks at me befuddled, and our conversation sort of putters out. This had been an area of great interest for me, middle eastern affairs, and I’d just been reading about the problems in Jerusalem. This interest led me to taking a class called ‘Muslim World’ the next semester with a then-new faculty member Ibrahim Moosa. What happened next is why I took his course.
I arrived at the West Campus bus stop without thinking too much of what she’d said. I wander over to Alpine Bagels, thinking I’ll grab some orange juice on my way to class. I walk in to a mass of people standing silent and packed in so tightly you could not see the tables or chairs, all you could see was the tops of heads all the way down the room. The radio was off, and everyone was fixated on the small 20” televisions mounted on the walls in the far corners of the room. The sound was cranked all the way up to the point where it was crackly and too loud for the miniscule speakers embedded within the front face of the television.
I could feel the blockages in the throats of every human being in the room. I made my way through the crowd down towards the TV. I stared. The second plane hit. The shrill in the room and the physical vibration of the West Union building shook me so thoroughly that I’ve rarely felt comfortable there since. The foundations of many were cracked, a piece of their souls fabric torn, and the visceral emotions revealed themselves from the depths of every person there all at once.
Within an instance, people were frantically calling on cell phones, crying, looking around desperately for someone to talk to. In a room full of people, everyone looked at each other as if they were totally alone. The mixture of sorrow, confusion, anger, and fear paralyzed most of the people in that room for some portion of the first ten minutes after the ghastly images had seared themselves into our minds.
This was my 9/11 experience at Duke. I was 21 years old, and I stood in a jam-packed room with hundreds of others and witnessed it – live on TV.
I am now 29 years old, and about to finish my graduate degrees here at Duke. When I think back to that day, and to the remainder of my undergraduate tenure at Duke, I am proud of how I responded to it. The next semester I took a class on Islam. I took that course because I was unwilling to participate in a discussion without being informed.
The enduring lesson of 9/11 for me as an undergraduate was simple. Education is your training for the battle you decide to fight during your lifetime. Choose your weapon carefully, learn how to use it effectively, and take up a good fight to make our country and our world a better place for civil societies to flourish.
Friday, September 4, 2009
In Dual Use Work: Help From The Scientific Community May or May Not Be On the Way... It's Classified!
One thing I've learned through many annoying meetings is that when it comes to dual-use research, getting independent outside advice on agendas for science and ways to promote research, improve safety, and continue to provide high quality security for the public is hard. Here is a couple of reasons why...
1. If you want someone to review the research and provide advice, most of the time those outside people don't have the clearance to look at the necessary details to provide any kind of insights.
2. If someone wants to hide what they've done to avoid scrutiny, they can get it classified.
Classifying scientific information builds a brick wall which grinds to a halt advances in dual-use research. It also stymies research oversight - since many people with the necessary clearances have had those clearances sponsored by groups that have a vested interest in the continuation of that research (like a govt agency performing it, or a company who has contracts to perform the research).
This, overall, reduces the ability to provide clearly unbiased and independent analysis and advice on dual-use research and other research that is classified.
1. If you want someone to review the research and provide advice, most of the time those outside people don't have the clearance to look at the necessary details to provide any kind of insights.
2. If someone wants to hide what they've done to avoid scrutiny, they can get it classified.
Classifying scientific information builds a brick wall which grinds to a halt advances in dual-use research. It also stymies research oversight - since many people with the necessary clearances have had those clearances sponsored by groups that have a vested interest in the continuation of that research (like a govt agency performing it, or a company who has contracts to perform the research).
This, overall, reduces the ability to provide clearly unbiased and independent analysis and advice on dual-use research and other research that is classified.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
GMail Addiction & The Worlds Most Massive Sentiment Dataset
Today, September 1st, 2009, GMail had another epic crash. It remained open for IMAP/POP access, but it was down for the web-interface for a couple of hours.
This brings to mind a two pretty major questions...
1. How dependent are people on GMAIL?
I'm not sure you really want to know the answer to this question. The bottom line is that GMail is too big to fail. That's right. If we had a massive problem with it, and somehow (impossibly) google was in financial dire straights; we'd be forced to bail out google and protect GMail at all costs.
Think about how many people use it for their main source of email. It can send and receive as if it is a multitude of other email accounts. It has very large storage abilities, and it's incredibly accessible from just about anywhere with a superb level of stability (this intermittment outage blip being actually very rare).
1.1 Personal Email Accounts
A large number of people use GMail as their personal email account. You know, the account you give your friends that is 'non-work.' So that you can stay in touch. It is that permanent account lots of us use that is not going to become extinct when you leave your school or employer.
People keep schedules and notes on it, personal letters and correspondence of all variety. For the digital age, it is a glimpse into your own world and an extension of your brain. It has flexibility for the user to organize it however you want. Make labels for different things. I have 40+ labels in my account. They range from labels that are associated with projects, like 'DiVE' that is for all emails associated with the virtual reality facility I have a collaborative project going with, to 'Rebecca' which automatically sorts and labels all emails from my older sister.
GMail is one of my most trusted personal assistants. It contains a huge amount of institutional memory for me. If I don't remember the house code for the alarm at my friends place when I stay over, I go directly into GMail on my iPhone and find it in that email from 3 years ago that I have saved. Thankfully, trusty GMail never fails to find that email, otherwise I'd get arrested!
1.2 Business Accounts
There are a huge number of small businesses, non-profits, and other groups that use GMail for their work. Google has a way of doing this that is less costly and highly efficient. If GMail were to go down, the impact on businesses and productivity is a complete unknown. This is incredibly significant. Knowing how big of an effect this would be is crucial to understanding how a system like GMail could have ripple effects if something were to happen to it.
This would have a particularly dramatic effect on small businesses, and other local venues that don't have large scale deployments of email servers and fat contracts with IT companies to manage and service these systems. The little guy gets a lot of bang for their buck from GMail, and its that huge diaspora of little guys that have a noticeable impact on our economy. If they get an interruption, we all are in trouble.
1.3 The Mobile User
Let's slice this a different way. The huge increase in the number of smartphone users over the last 10 years also means that many more people check email on their mobile phones. GMail happens to be particularly adept at this, with sleek applications that work on almost every phone out there.
If you rely on GMail on the go, for business or personal, and it goes out; you could be left in the middle of nowhere or without knowledge of what you're going to do next. Waiting to hear back on that tentative meeting at 4:30pm with your boss? Anxiously hoping that you're new girlfriend will be free tonight to go out to dinner at the new Mexican place? GONE. Now what?
2 Why is GMail still a invite only (I've been told it's not 'really' beta anymore)?
A great deal of this part is going to be my own opinion and speculation. There it is, there's the disclaimer.
2.1 Invite Only (quasi-Beta) = Legally Not As Accountable
The subheading here might make you think I'm taking a potshot at google. I'm not. If you're constantly adding new features and would rather not have to spend an insane amount of money on your legal department, make it more exclusive. Check out the labs section for GMail. They're always adding new slick features that they are testing out.
Also, think about this major outage today, and take into consideration the large and unknown userbase of folks who take advantage of GMail capabilities for real work. Do you want them all screaming and yelling and going to court with google whenever there is a service interruption? It would cripple google, and would destroy GMail. Yep, it would destroy the thing that people are so dependent on.
2.2 Sentiment Data
The little known gem of GMail and of google is the sentiment data they have. It could be the motherlode of the google treasure chest. The only other folks with anywhere near this amount of sentiment data is Facebook.
Mining sentiment data is lucrative and has purposes for a large number of groups that you might not expect. Imagine if you are an advertising firm and you'd like to know what the 10 most used phrases are in emails? The folks at google could track that down for you. Then, you could use some combination of them in your next advertisement for Sprint or At&t ... and people would think you're company was pretty on top of things.
In a more warm & fuzzy way, sentiment data could be used for scholarly research and to help create histories. Knowing what were the common things people talked about, or the origination and mapping of phrases that emerge in language and in intercultural settings is an incredibly powerful thing to start tackling.
It is in the interest of google to protect this sentiment data. Because GMail has become so widespread; the data is the most mature and important of any that this world has seen.
The Bottom Line
I hope I've at least shed some light here and made you realize just how widespread and dependent people are on GMail. I also think that to a certain extent, the possibility of GMail crashing has large, and relatively unknown, impacts on productivity and economics. Also, there is a real strong desire by google to protect GMail by keeping it beta, and carefully guarding the motherlode of sentiment data.
What still needs to be done, however, is the following:
1. There needs to be a way for each individual user to backup (read: save on your own machine) the entirety of your GMail account. This means all the data, the metadata associated with it, the files, and the settings for your GMail account. This could avoid possibly disastrous problems going forward.
2. The impacts of service interruption on the economy and other systems needs to be studied. It is not in the best interest of anyone to have this little knowledge about all the places that could be impacted by outages like today. It is an unlikely and many would argue pessimistic strategy to study this. I disagree. It is important to do a reasonable set of modeling and planning to avoid major problems when service interruptions occur. Google themselves do this, and they were able to put the system back up within a few hours. However, since it is an integral and impacting part of the lives of so many people; there needs to be a much better understanding of its presence and impact should something happen so that partnerships and better planning can be put in place to avoid more serious problems.
3. There needs to be some better understanding of what the sentiment data is used for, and more discussions about how to use it in positive and constructive ways - like the example for historical uses. What we don't want is there to be some shadowy use of it that is never discussed. That brings up all kinds of questions and problems that can be adequately avoided by some clear decisions and communication up-front.
This brings to mind a two pretty major questions...
1. How dependent are people on GMAIL?
I'm not sure you really want to know the answer to this question. The bottom line is that GMail is too big to fail. That's right. If we had a massive problem with it, and somehow (impossibly) google was in financial dire straights; we'd be forced to bail out google and protect GMail at all costs.
Think about how many people use it for their main source of email. It can send and receive as if it is a multitude of other email accounts. It has very large storage abilities, and it's incredibly accessible from just about anywhere with a superb level of stability (this intermittment outage blip being actually very rare).
1.1 Personal Email Accounts
A large number of people use GMail as their personal email account. You know, the account you give your friends that is 'non-work.' So that you can stay in touch. It is that permanent account lots of us use that is not going to become extinct when you leave your school or employer.
People keep schedules and notes on it, personal letters and correspondence of all variety. For the digital age, it is a glimpse into your own world and an extension of your brain. It has flexibility for the user to organize it however you want. Make labels for different things. I have 40+ labels in my account. They range from labels that are associated with projects, like 'DiVE' that is for all emails associated with the virtual reality facility I have a collaborative project going with, to 'Rebecca' which automatically sorts and labels all emails from my older sister.
GMail is one of my most trusted personal assistants. It contains a huge amount of institutional memory for me. If I don't remember the house code for the alarm at my friends place when I stay over, I go directly into GMail on my iPhone and find it in that email from 3 years ago that I have saved. Thankfully, trusty GMail never fails to find that email, otherwise I'd get arrested!
1.2 Business Accounts
There are a huge number of small businesses, non-profits, and other groups that use GMail for their work. Google has a way of doing this that is less costly and highly efficient. If GMail were to go down, the impact on businesses and productivity is a complete unknown. This is incredibly significant. Knowing how big of an effect this would be is crucial to understanding how a system like GMail could have ripple effects if something were to happen to it.
This would have a particularly dramatic effect on small businesses, and other local venues that don't have large scale deployments of email servers and fat contracts with IT companies to manage and service these systems. The little guy gets a lot of bang for their buck from GMail, and its that huge diaspora of little guys that have a noticeable impact on our economy. If they get an interruption, we all are in trouble.
1.3 The Mobile User
Let's slice this a different way. The huge increase in the number of smartphone users over the last 10 years also means that many more people check email on their mobile phones. GMail happens to be particularly adept at this, with sleek applications that work on almost every phone out there.
If you rely on GMail on the go, for business or personal, and it goes out; you could be left in the middle of nowhere or without knowledge of what you're going to do next. Waiting to hear back on that tentative meeting at 4:30pm with your boss? Anxiously hoping that you're new girlfriend will be free tonight to go out to dinner at the new Mexican place? GONE. Now what?
2 Why is GMail still a invite only (I've been told it's not 'really' beta anymore)?
A great deal of this part is going to be my own opinion and speculation. There it is, there's the disclaimer.
2.1 Invite Only (quasi-Beta) = Legally Not As Accountable
The subheading here might make you think I'm taking a potshot at google. I'm not. If you're constantly adding new features and would rather not have to spend an insane amount of money on your legal department, make it more exclusive. Check out the labs section for GMail. They're always adding new slick features that they are testing out.
Also, think about this major outage today, and take into consideration the large and unknown userbase of folks who take advantage of GMail capabilities for real work. Do you want them all screaming and yelling and going to court with google whenever there is a service interruption? It would cripple google, and would destroy GMail. Yep, it would destroy the thing that people are so dependent on.
2.2 Sentiment Data
The little known gem of GMail and of google is the sentiment data they have. It could be the motherlode of the google treasure chest. The only other folks with anywhere near this amount of sentiment data is Facebook.
Mining sentiment data is lucrative and has purposes for a large number of groups that you might not expect. Imagine if you are an advertising firm and you'd like to know what the 10 most used phrases are in emails? The folks at google could track that down for you. Then, you could use some combination of them in your next advertisement for Sprint or At&t ... and people would think you're company was pretty on top of things.
In a more warm & fuzzy way, sentiment data could be used for scholarly research and to help create histories. Knowing what were the common things people talked about, or the origination and mapping of phrases that emerge in language and in intercultural settings is an incredibly powerful thing to start tackling.
It is in the interest of google to protect this sentiment data. Because GMail has become so widespread; the data is the most mature and important of any that this world has seen.
The Bottom Line
I hope I've at least shed some light here and made you realize just how widespread and dependent people are on GMail. I also think that to a certain extent, the possibility of GMail crashing has large, and relatively unknown, impacts on productivity and economics. Also, there is a real strong desire by google to protect GMail by keeping it beta, and carefully guarding the motherlode of sentiment data.
What still needs to be done, however, is the following:
1. There needs to be a way for each individual user to backup (read: save on your own machine) the entirety of your GMail account. This means all the data, the metadata associated with it, the files, and the settings for your GMail account. This could avoid possibly disastrous problems going forward.
2. The impacts of service interruption on the economy and other systems needs to be studied. It is not in the best interest of anyone to have this little knowledge about all the places that could be impacted by outages like today. It is an unlikely and many would argue pessimistic strategy to study this. I disagree. It is important to do a reasonable set of modeling and planning to avoid major problems when service interruptions occur. Google themselves do this, and they were able to put the system back up within a few hours. However, since it is an integral and impacting part of the lives of so many people; there needs to be a much better understanding of its presence and impact should something happen so that partnerships and better planning can be put in place to avoid more serious problems.
3. There needs to be some better understanding of what the sentiment data is used for, and more discussions about how to use it in positive and constructive ways - like the example for historical uses. What we don't want is there to be some shadowy use of it that is never discussed. That brings up all kinds of questions and problems that can be adequately avoided by some clear decisions and communication up-front.
Monday, August 31, 2009
OTA (Oh That Again!)
I've waited long enough. The time has come to tell you how OTA and the oderous shadow it casts hurts science policy.
I keep stumbling across an old guard in the science policy world that constantly looks back in a nostalgic way about the Office of Technology Assessment that was part of the legislative branch of our government. Here are a few valid gripes I have with some of the prevailing attitudes and actions of the more nostalgic of these people. I'll keep the AAAS fellowship clique out of this post, as they deserve their own post at some point.
1. If OTA was that amazing, why did it get killed?
This is usually met with some set of very weak explanations about members that wanted to kill it, or the Republicans being evil, or any other lame political and flimsy excuse. If the old guard really wants to think through this with a critical eye, they may want to look at another group in the legislative branch that was created in modern times and managed to thrive - The Congressional Budget Office (CBO). There is a great Kennedy School of Government Case about Alice Rivlin and the creation of CBO. Even as a scientist, I can tell you who Alice Rivlin is. That should be a start- CBO had real leadership and I don't think OTA did.
2. People are not automatically great because they worked for or were affiliated with OTA.
Perhaps the most obnoxious to the next generation of scientists and people who care about the interaction between science and society is this assumption. It presumes that anyone after OTA are automatically not as professional as OTA. This is the smug assumption that disenfranchises the next generation from the future. It smacks of cronyism and downplays the merits of good talent.
I liken this to the silly assumption that someone who worked for a member of Congress is automatically informed on all subjects of substance that are important to the nation. It is just flat out wrong.
3. Why talk about the past when you're failing to develop the next generation.
Perhaps the most saddening thing about the science policy community is how they treat their young. It's a cannibalistic community where it cannot afford to be one. Scientists that attempt to bridge the gap to science policy are often chastised for doing so. It is frowned upon for graduate students to become interested in or involved in this type of work. The bottom line is that it is hard enough for the current generation of developing scientists to engage science policy without the community failing to embrace them. The numbers are small enough, and the task is daunting enough that more collegiality is a mandate.
This is where the politics seems to eclipse the needs. Many of the old guard feel marginalized and mistreated. This has been brooding for so long within some people that they jump at the chance they get to do something about it and behave like a bull in a china shop.
I have one strong word of advice for the old guard on this point. Do not destroy the next generation of leaders and professionals. Be responsible and be a good steward. LIFT AS YOU CLIMB.
4. Why recreate it if you have no great ideas on how to make it better (and not get killed this time)?
I've heard from more than a few of the old guard that OTA should come back. There are arguments for it, especially in terms of some of the work it did. However, none of the people I have talked to seem to really have anything to say about what to change. This goes back to my first point, where if you are naive enough to believe that it was killed for no good reason, then you also believe nothing needs to change. There is so much wrong with this simple-minded approach that I could not possibly write it all here.
If you want to recreate OTA or something that serves a similar function, figure out what was wrong with the last incarnation of it and produce some innovative proposals that fix it. I've heard very little in this (read: crickets).
Summary:
In order... from these four points, my message on what to do is very simple.
1. Focus on leadership and figure out who the leaders are and should be
2. Evaluate and elevate people based on metrics that are useful and inclusive.
3. Refocus efforts on the future and not the past by investing in the next generation.
4. Create new innovative solutions and institutions that solve the problems of the past.
I keep stumbling across an old guard in the science policy world that constantly looks back in a nostalgic way about the Office of Technology Assessment that was part of the legislative branch of our government. Here are a few valid gripes I have with some of the prevailing attitudes and actions of the more nostalgic of these people. I'll keep the AAAS fellowship clique out of this post, as they deserve their own post at some point.
1. If OTA was that amazing, why did it get killed?
This is usually met with some set of very weak explanations about members that wanted to kill it, or the Republicans being evil, or any other lame political and flimsy excuse. If the old guard really wants to think through this with a critical eye, they may want to look at another group in the legislative branch that was created in modern times and managed to thrive - The Congressional Budget Office (CBO). There is a great Kennedy School of Government Case about Alice Rivlin and the creation of CBO. Even as a scientist, I can tell you who Alice Rivlin is. That should be a start- CBO had real leadership and I don't think OTA did.
2. People are not automatically great because they worked for or were affiliated with OTA.
Perhaps the most obnoxious to the next generation of scientists and people who care about the interaction between science and society is this assumption. It presumes that anyone after OTA are automatically not as professional as OTA. This is the smug assumption that disenfranchises the next generation from the future. It smacks of cronyism and downplays the merits of good talent.
I liken this to the silly assumption that someone who worked for a member of Congress is automatically informed on all subjects of substance that are important to the nation. It is just flat out wrong.
3. Why talk about the past when you're failing to develop the next generation.
Perhaps the most saddening thing about the science policy community is how they treat their young. It's a cannibalistic community where it cannot afford to be one. Scientists that attempt to bridge the gap to science policy are often chastised for doing so. It is frowned upon for graduate students to become interested in or involved in this type of work. The bottom line is that it is hard enough for the current generation of developing scientists to engage science policy without the community failing to embrace them. The numbers are small enough, and the task is daunting enough that more collegiality is a mandate.
This is where the politics seems to eclipse the needs. Many of the old guard feel marginalized and mistreated. This has been brooding for so long within some people that they jump at the chance they get to do something about it and behave like a bull in a china shop.
I have one strong word of advice for the old guard on this point. Do not destroy the next generation of leaders and professionals. Be responsible and be a good steward. LIFT AS YOU CLIMB.
4. Why recreate it if you have no great ideas on how to make it better (and not get killed this time)?
I've heard from more than a few of the old guard that OTA should come back. There are arguments for it, especially in terms of some of the work it did. However, none of the people I have talked to seem to really have anything to say about what to change. This goes back to my first point, where if you are naive enough to believe that it was killed for no good reason, then you also believe nothing needs to change. There is so much wrong with this simple-minded approach that I could not possibly write it all here.
If you want to recreate OTA or something that serves a similar function, figure out what was wrong with the last incarnation of it and produce some innovative proposals that fix it. I've heard very little in this (read: crickets).
Summary:
In order... from these four points, my message on what to do is very simple.
1. Focus on leadership and figure out who the leaders are and should be
2. Evaluate and elevate people based on metrics that are useful and inclusive.
3. Refocus efforts on the future and not the past by investing in the next generation.
4. Create new innovative solutions and institutions that solve the problems of the past.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Voice Over IP: Not Perfect In Emergencies
In Durham, NC. a man died in a fire on August 17th at his home in Northern Durham. Eleven days later on August 28th, a 911 call-center operator was fired for how she handled the emergency call from a neighbor reporting the fire.
The firing was reported as justified because the operator failed to keep the person calling on the phone long enough to resolve the confusion over the address where the fire was occurring. It is entirely unclear if the miscommunication made a difference in whether the mans life could have been saved.
Interestingly, and indeed the most unfortunate is that the neighbor who called in the fire was calling from a VOIP phone. The neighbor was using Vonage, and the address was not recognized in the 911 call center. This is a technology problem. It is one that is needless, and it is something worth fussing about.
There is a system for ensuring that VOIP phones are recognized by 911 call centers. In fact, in Durham anyone can call the non-emergency line and have their line tested. Vonage themselves boasts their commitment to making sure that the phones are hooked up correctly and recognized. Well, this was one of those few instances where it didn't work.
The call center has now filed a complaint with the FCC against Vonage. Little good it does filing a complaint considering the significance of the outcome. The bottom line is that this is a story about two things.
1. A cautionary tale about VOIP and advanced technology not being able to jive with our most fundamental and important of emergency systems
2. A call for some reform in our FCC regulations to do something about getting these new technologies that come into being so fast, into the fold with existing systems across the country.
Marvin Jacobs, the man who died in that fire on August 17th... he'd want to know that we did something about this...
URL to Herald-Sun story
http://www.heraldsun.com/pages/full_story/push?article-911+operator+fired+after+fatal+blaze%20&id=3343733-911+operator+fired+after+fatal+blaze&instance=homefirstleft
The firing was reported as justified because the operator failed to keep the person calling on the phone long enough to resolve the confusion over the address where the fire was occurring. It is entirely unclear if the miscommunication made a difference in whether the mans life could have been saved.
Interestingly, and indeed the most unfortunate is that the neighbor who called in the fire was calling from a VOIP phone. The neighbor was using Vonage, and the address was not recognized in the 911 call center. This is a technology problem. It is one that is needless, and it is something worth fussing about.
There is a system for ensuring that VOIP phones are recognized by 911 call centers. In fact, in Durham anyone can call the non-emergency line and have their line tested. Vonage themselves boasts their commitment to making sure that the phones are hooked up correctly and recognized. Well, this was one of those few instances where it didn't work.
The call center has now filed a complaint with the FCC against Vonage. Little good it does filing a complaint considering the significance of the outcome. The bottom line is that this is a story about two things.
1. A cautionary tale about VOIP and advanced technology not being able to jive with our most fundamental and important of emergency systems
2. A call for some reform in our FCC regulations to do something about getting these new technologies that come into being so fast, into the fold with existing systems across the country.
Marvin Jacobs, the man who died in that fire on August 17th... he'd want to know that we did something about this...
URL to Herald-Sun story
http://www.heraldsun.com/pages/full_story/push?article-911+operator+fired+after+fatal+blaze%20&id=3343733-911+operator+fired+after+fatal+blaze&instance=homefirstleft
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
US Federal Water Policy - A New Wave Is Coming
In an effort to exercise a part of my brain that was expanded greatly during some work in the summer of 2008 in Washington, I'm going to run-on a bit about US Federal Water Policy. This way, it won't be quite as rusty and I won't forget everything I learned :)
BACKGROUND
US Federal Water policy seems to center around a few things, in my opinion, that are the basis for this discussion.
WHY THIS MATTERS
This was a big deal. The reason it was a big deal is because it is calling to revise the system which members of Congress have figured out and manipulated to their advantage since its last revision in 1983 under Ronald Reagan. The P&G is the third rail of US water policy.
Under Reagan, the P&G was overly focused on National Economic Development (NED). Functionally, this meant that environmental quality, and public safety (amongst other things) were not treated in a manner that created a balanced decision process for proposing, planning, and executing water projects. Before this goes too far in the other direction, it is important that we do what we need to for economic development. However, without having a balanced way to approach it could leave us destroying things in the name of economic development that maybe we really ought not to have done.
Also, under the NED focused old rules, many important projects got marginalized and didn't make it to the top of the pile. A prime example is the Louisiana Coastal Protection & Restoration project (LACPR). This is the famed project that could have mitigated some of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Due to myriad factors of how members of Congress watch their own back, and the focus only on economic development - the project never happened. A funny sidenote, the blowup of Sen. Boxer from California was at Brigadier General Walsh who was in a hearing talking about that project.
THOUGHTS ON PRINCIPLES
Last September (Sep 12, 2008), a first draft of updated principles was published in the Federal Register. A hotly contested and stakeholder driven effort within the executive branch, this was a long-awaited beginning to what will likely be a multiple year process that will need all hands on deck. I was pleased to have been involved with that first draft and with some great people that worked tirelessly to get the ball rolling.
I will not go into the internal details of why some things exist in that draft or identify who did what. What I will do, however, is relate a few bigger-picture principles that I believe are emblematic of what we SHOULD do for US water policy...
The following are much more global principles
THAT'S ALL WELL AND GOOD... BUT...
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Guess what, these principles didn't exist before. It was too esoteric and was not principle based in the past. Outlining the basic assumptions of what should be accomplished in water resource planning sets the stage to do the planning itself properly.
The previous lists are the boundaries and maxims that have to be abided by and kept in mind for any planner for a water resource project. They also should be what is kept in mind for each step in the process and in the decision-making step at the end. It's a lesson in common sense and promoting sound and informed judgement. Not a bad thing to enshrine in the government somewhere when you get a chance...
BACKGROUND
US Federal Water policy seems to center around a few things, in my opinion, that are the basis for this discussion.
- Water projects are used as a particularized benefit for members of Congress. This is described in the canonical description of Congress by Mayhew way back in the day.
- The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE , Corps) has districts that more or less overlap reasonably well with one or a few Congressional districts, making them a target for projects that members of Congress can get some credit for and drum up support in their district
- The Corps is in charge of more of our domestic water and water related land resources than any other group. Other groups do have projects similar to what the Corps does (like Bureau of Reclamation), but the Corps is the elephant who has primary stewardship of US water.
- Budgetarily, the Civil Works (Corps budget) does not compete with other portions of the Army budget or other National Security budgets.
WHY THIS MATTERS
This was a big deal. The reason it was a big deal is because it is calling to revise the system which members of Congress have figured out and manipulated to their advantage since its last revision in 1983 under Ronald Reagan. The P&G is the third rail of US water policy.
Under Reagan, the P&G was overly focused on National Economic Development (NED). Functionally, this meant that environmental quality, and public safety (amongst other things) were not treated in a manner that created a balanced decision process for proposing, planning, and executing water projects. Before this goes too far in the other direction, it is important that we do what we need to for economic development. However, without having a balanced way to approach it could leave us destroying things in the name of economic development that maybe we really ought not to have done.
Also, under the NED focused old rules, many important projects got marginalized and didn't make it to the top of the pile. A prime example is the Louisiana Coastal Protection & Restoration project (LACPR). This is the famed project that could have mitigated some of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Due to myriad factors of how members of Congress watch their own back, and the focus only on economic development - the project never happened. A funny sidenote, the blowup of Sen. Boxer from California was at Brigadier General Walsh who was in a hearing talking about that project.
THOUGHTS ON PRINCIPLES
Last September (Sep 12, 2008), a first draft of updated principles was published in the Federal Register. A hotly contested and stakeholder driven effort within the executive branch, this was a long-awaited beginning to what will likely be a multiple year process that will need all hands on deck. I was pleased to have been involved with that first draft and with some great people that worked tirelessly to get the ball rolling.
I will not go into the internal details of why some things exist in that draft or identify who did what. What I will do, however, is relate a few bigger-picture principles that I believe are emblematic of what we SHOULD do for US water policy...
The following are much more global principles
- All the planning and implementation should be done using the same standard. It should not matter what agency you are or where in the government you are, if you're doing a water or land related water resources project, it should be done uniformly. This isn't cookie cutter, but the planning process should be followed the same way in different places (don't worry, its flexible enough to meet all the different needs).
- We should care about ecosystem functions and services. This means specifically accounting for them.
- We should be much wiser about floodplains and flood-prone areas. This means more thought should be given to how we use those areas, whether or not we build something there, and whether we are willing to create other policies that impact these areas.
- We should care about economic development and at the same time care about the restoration and preservation of ecosystem functions. This upweights the ecosystem with respect to economic tradeoffs to go back against the sole-economic-model.
- Our water planning is best accomplished thinking about scales of whole watersheds. Since water tends to flow in a watershed system unit, any project should reflect that.
- There should be explicit accounting of effects on ecosystem functions. This means first trying to avoid impacts, then if it is unavoidable mitigating the effects. Accounting for all of this during planning and so an informed decision can be made is crucial.
- Make sure that public safety is incorporated into the planning process in an appropriate manner. It is not true that it should trump everything, but its a component we need to care about.
- Make sure that best practices, up-to-date and sound analytical techniques, tools, and high quality data are used throughout the process. This is where taking advantage of expertise, wherever it is found (academia, elsewhere in government, ngo's etc.) becomes crucial. Good inputs get good outputs.
- Make sure that the plans have enough detail. Roughly speaking, the detail ought to be in line with the scale and scope of what is being proposed.
- Make sure that full cost accounting is used. Look for the costs and benefits and display them in monetary units when possible, or other units when monetary is not possible. There are many cases in which you cannot (and sometimes indeed should not) monetize something. We ought to make sure we account for things even if they are not monetized, and we cannot automatically allow monetized things to trump non-monetized ones.
- Improve and ensure transparency of the planning process. The best planning is open and involved planning. Sure it can be contested and can get heated, but it's better to use the sunshine to disinfect something than to go behind closed doors.
- Make planning a more collaborative process. It is tough to plan things that effect many people (like water resources that affect EVERYONE). Working with other agencies and stakeholders is critical to getting many trained eyes on a plan and adding needed value to a planning process.
THAT'S ALL WELL AND GOOD... BUT...
Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Guess what, these principles didn't exist before. It was too esoteric and was not principle based in the past. Outlining the basic assumptions of what should be accomplished in water resource planning sets the stage to do the planning itself properly.
The previous lists are the boundaries and maxims that have to be abided by and kept in mind for any planner for a water resource project. They also should be what is kept in mind for each step in the process and in the decision-making step at the end. It's a lesson in common sense and promoting sound and informed judgement. Not a bad thing to enshrine in the government somewhere when you get a chance...
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