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DHS Announces $1.3 Billion in Preparedness Grants
The Department of Homeland Security announced more than $1.3 billion in allocations for seven preparedness grant programs to assist states, urban areas, tribal and territorial governments, non-profit agencies, and the private sector in strengthening the nation’s ability to prevent, protect, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters and other emergencies. Read More »
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DHS Releases Career Guidance For IT Professionals
Many experts have long concluded that the federal government lacks a clear career path for federal IT professionals, making it difficult for government to effectively compete for and retain these professionals. But the Homeland Security Department is hoping to change that... Read More »
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DHS Tries Monitoring Social Media For Signs Of Biological Attacks
The Homeland Security Department has commissioned Accenture to test technology that mines open social networks for indications of pandemics, according to the vendor. Read More »
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DHS-Developed Krona Software Powers Humanitarian Project
Software originally developed at the at the U. S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) to sequence DNA for biodefense is now being used by Microsoft to sequence mosquito DNA in the fight against disease. Developed by the NBACC’s National Bioforensic Analysis Center Genomics Team for bioforensics applications, Krona is a unique visualization tool that enables users to quickly analyze massive quantities of data – such as more than 100 million sequences of DNA in a single mosquito sample, according to Microsoft...
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Diagnosing the Online Health Exchange Debacle: "Proprietary" Software Needs a Dose of Open Source
As the problem-plagued roll-out of President Obama’s signature healthcare policy undergoes congressional scrutiny for the first time, we speak with Clay Johnson, a former Obama campaign innovation expert who founded Blue State Digital, the company that built Obama’s 2008 website. During a House panel on Thursday, lawmakers questioned executives of two of the lead contractors behind the website, healthcare.gov — CGI Federal and Quality Software Systems Incorporated — about the myriad of glitches and defects. Johnson says the new website is built with outdated and proprietary software. "When the government is building software like this, it ought to be built out in the open — built with a licensing system called open source so that the public truly owns it," Johnson says. He notes that "In 1996, Congress lobotomized itself by getting rid of its technology think tank called the Technology Assessment Office. So they’re writing bills where they don’t understand the technology required in their laws."
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Did Commercial Journals Use The NYT To Smear Open Access?
A story on the front page of the New York Times a few days ago cleverly smeared open access scholarly publishing as somehow responsible for the rise of low-quality, pseudo-academic conferences and OA journals. Read More »
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Did Facebook Miss A Massive Opportunity By Building A Walled Garden Instead Of A Truly Open Platform?
When Facebook launched its platform strategy in 2007, it seemed as though the social network wanted to create a kind of social operating system anyone could use and build on — but the reality has turned out to be something very different. Read More »
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Did Jon Stewart Foil the Pentagon's Health Records Plan?
I’m picking up strong signals that the Military Health System abruptly scrapped plans to upgrade its electronic health record -- the Armed Forces Health Longitudinal Technology Application, or AHLTA -- as senior Defense Department officials lean toward adopting the Veterans Affairs Department’s EHR -- the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, known as VistA. Read More »
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Did Politics Help Cause HealthCare.gov Failures?
There was the government shutdown, which drew to a close late Wednesday and was largely seen as a case of partisan politics hijacking the work of nonpartisan career employees. Then there was the troubled launch of the online health insurance marketplace, HealthCare.gov, which was largely seen as a failure of bureaucracy. Read More »
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Did Scientists Just Solve The Bee Collapse Mystery?
It's a hard-knock life, scouring the landscape for pollen to sustain a beehive. Alight upon the wrong field, and you might encounter fungicides, increasingly used on corn and soybean crops, and shown to harm honeybees at tiny levels. [...] Read More »
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Did The Tea Party Design The Obamacare Website?
Whether you support the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or not, one thing is clear - whoever designed and implemented the healthcare.org site must not be a big fan. In this day and age it is hard to believe the government could not build a scalable, elastic website that is in essence just one big form. But my "adventure" in trying to enroll has been an unmitigated disaster... Read More »
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Did You Know John Roberts Is Also Chief Justice Of The NSA’s Surveillance State?
The 11 FISA judges, chosen from throughout the federal bench for seven-year terms, are all appointed by the chief justice. In fact, every FISA judge currently serving was appointed by Roberts, who will continue making such appointments until he retires or dies. FISA judges don’t need confirmation — by Congress or anyone else... Read More »
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Digging Into The Open Source Geospatial Software And OpenGeo Suite 3.0
On October 2, OpenGeo released a major upgrade to the OpenGeo suite. The company expects users will be excited about enhancements in production and processing and a closer feature match to Esri’s ArcGIS Server. Rolando Peñate, OpenGeo’s product manager, answered our questions about open source geospatial software and the new release. Read More »
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Digital Access To Knowledge: Research Chat With Harvard’s Peter Suber
How much access is there to cutting-edge research online? The reality is that access to the world’s deepest knowledge — that produced by professional researchers — remains contested in the digital space. Read More »
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Digital Government Milestone Passes In Silence
The six-month milestone since the White House released its Digital Government Strategy has come and gone with little fanfare. Read More »
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