As the FY 05 appropriations process demonstrated, the current organization of congressional appropriations subcommittees (and thus, appropriations bills) is a mess that puts science agencies at a disadvantage in the competition for federal dollars. The current structure is a mish-mash of jurisdictions that forces agencies that have little or nothing to do with each other […]
This article I spotted today in Government Computer News on former Director of DHS’ National Cybersecurity Division Amit Yoran’s thoughts about DHS’ niche in federal cybersecurity efforts reminded me that I hadn’t provided an update on what I thought was a very interesting meeting of PITAC’s Subcommittee on Cybersecurity R&D a week ago last Friday. […]
Thanks to Moshe Vardi for the head’s up about this Op-Ed from Joseph S. Nye in today’s New York Times concerning the decline in foreign student enrollment in American universities, due in large part to the nightmare that is the current U.S. visa process. It jives well with the Fareed Zakaria piece I linked to […]
Stumbled upon this interesting article from the UK’s Guardian detailing the recognition growing in the EU about the need for an agency similar to the US’ National Science Foundation as a way to help the union “radically improve its knowledge economy.” The article describes a European commission report earlier this month that noted U.S. R&D […]
The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee met “virtually” today to hear an update on the efforts of the panel’s subcommittee on computational science. Dan Reed, who does just about everything at the University of North Carolina (Chancellor’s Eminient Professor, Vice-Chancellor for IT and CIO, and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute — not to mention […]
Computer Scientists David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Barbara Simons, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach have joined forces at evoting-experts.com to post news and commentary on e-voting issues (just in time for election day). The site has only been up a day or two and already has some good commentary on reports of […]
CompTIA, the Computing Technology Industry Association, recently put a series of technology policy questions to both Sen. John Kerry and President George W. Bush, who apparently, to their credit, actually answered the questions. I don’t want to descend too far into the mire of dissecting the answers, but I wanted to highlight two that are […]
Heather Green has a great piece in this week’s issue of Business Week on the chilling effect of copyright legislation on research. Here’s a snippet: Scientists like to probe the unknown and pioneer useful technologies. But in the spring of 2001, Edward W. Felten discovered that such efforts aren’t always welcome. A computer scientist at […]
Thanks to David Padgham (and USACM’s spiffy new blog) for pointing out this Wired story with the latest on sputtering talks to reach a compromise on the Induce Act. It appears the tech community and the entertainment industry are still far apart on consensus language for the bill — originally designed to create a new […]
Wired reports that the Senate could enable, as part of it’s National Intelligence Reform Act, work on a system “that would let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases that hold billions of records on Americans.” The proposed network is based on the Markle Foundation Task Force’s December […]
