Last week I read about a research team at Harvard led by George Church that encoded Church’s next book into the molecules of DNA. As the write-up in the Harvard Medical School web page, said:
“Although George Church’s next book doesn’t hit the shelves until Oct. 2, it has already passed an enviable benchmark: 70 billion copies-roughly triple the sum of the top 100 books of all time.” Keep reading →
FORTUNE — The global economy has arranged itself around a short list of dominant cities, the endpoints for movement of all kinds: goods, people, money, and, increasingly, packets of digital information. These packets — some trillion bytes a second — travel primarily as light through fiber-optic cable. E-mails, images, streaming movies, and money: millions and millions every millisecond.
We take it for granted that the Internet, as much as any city, has a physical reality. Tracing the movement of a packet of information throughout this geography of fiber-optic cables and data centers casts the global economy in a different light. Keep reading →
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski today called upon the nation’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to “take concrete steps” to improve Internet security for consumers and critical infrastructure, warning that a failure to do so could slow broadband adoption and threaten the nation’s economy.
With more than $8 trillion exchanged electronically every year, Genachowski warned that sophisticated hackers are gaining the expertise to “shut down the Internet…shut down our economy [and] compromise our growth engine.” Keep reading →
COMMENTARY – Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hell bent on implementing the recommendations of President Barack Obama’s Cyberspace Policy Review, in which the administration argued for a greater role for the Department of Homeland Security in securing the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber attack.
And to prove how serious and misguided they are, some of these lawmakers like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are about to introduce legislation that arguably will hurt innovation and jobs, and which may actually grant the DHS extraordinary regulatory powers that extend to the Internet. Keep reading →
This is one in a series of articles highlighting Breaking Gov’s best stories of the past year. As we reflected on our 2011 coverage of innovation, technology and management amongst the federal agencies and workforce, this was among the stories that stood out as delivering key insight into the top issues facing today’s government community.
Breaking Gov is proud to have focused on innovation and innovators in the government space and, in doing so, accumulating many celebrity-level contributors since launch. The list includes more than 40 government industry experts as well as Internet co-creator Vint Cerf. In Cerf’s piece, he argues that discontent, the ability to fail, and the environment where managers can say “yes” are among the key ingredients for leaders to foster innovation in government. Keep reading →
COMMENTARY:
It is always a pleasure to attend the Executive Leadership Conference (ELC) in Williamsburg, VA, sponsored by ACT-IAC, and this year has been no exception. It gives me the opportunity to mingle with many people I have gotten to know and enjoy interacting with over the years; to enjoy the interesting historical settings of Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown; and of course, and to learn about new issues.
One of those opportunities was Sunday evening’s keynote speech by Scott Klososky, a founder of a number of companies, and currently an Advisory Board Member, for Critical Technologies. Klososky’s talk highlighted a few technology issues facing the federal government and associated conversations. Keep reading →