This article was originally published by FedInsider.
Imagine moving from a high-pressure, high-visibility federal job in the pressure cooker of Washington – to Hawaii. No more need to wear a suit and tie on humid, 99-degree Capitol summer days. Less bureaucracy, less regulation for procurement, faster new technology deployment. A dream job, no? Keep reading →
Craig Fugate has always been a man with a mission- and all the more so this week as the nation’s leading emergency responder, as the head of Federal Emergency Management Agency, tries to get 60 million people on the East Coast ready for Hurricane Irene. Keep reading →
While most of NASA is looking up to the stars, scientist
Goodman, 55, NASA’s go-to guy for natural disasters and hazards, is defying the stereotypes about the space agency. He’s always focused on the ground, coordinating the space agency’s response to earthbound catastrophes. NASA has been involved in earth research since the 1960s.
“We’re constantly imaging the earth. If a significant event occurs, that data can be processed and made available,” Goodman, an atmospheric scientist in NASA’s Earth Science Division, told AOL Government. “Our role is to provide spaceborne and airborne observations and data analyses that can assist in damage assessment and aid in the recovery.”
NASA is not chasing hurricanes, but is using its arsenal of 14 orbiting satellites to develop new technologies or to use current ones to better measure the characteristics of hurricanes and the conditions that produce them. The information is made available to front-line agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help them develop better forecasts.
Our role is to provide spaceborne and airborne observations and data analyses that can assist in damage assessment and aid in the recovery.
Hurricane warnings are already posted from Florida to Boston. The Category 3 hurricane is expected to touch down in North Carolina late Friday. The path of the storm is expected to be catastrophic. And a NASA satellite is on the job taking regular images of Irene as it barrels north from the Bahamas.
NASA’s satellites are often able to get better and different images than NOAA’s satellites, complementing, not duplicating, Goodman said. The space agency is constantly improving computing power efficiencies aboard satellites and improved optic technologies.
The satellites use a variety of different remote sensing techniques including visible, infrared, passive and active microwave, synthetic aperture radar and lidar (optical remote sensing technology) to take the images. They are never called pictures.
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite that is watching Irene uses an instrument known as the Precipitation Radar that can “see” through the clouds to measure the core of strongest hot towers of convection and updrafts.
As Hurricane Irene picked up steam this week in the Caribbean, the satellite began taking images of the storm on its regular north-south run of the Western Hemisphere. They pass over the same location only twice a day on its daily run, Goodman said.
The raw images are downloaded to tracking stations on the ground, analyzed, distributed to the proper agency and are available online, he said.
NASA works closely with several federal agencies, including the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NOAA, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to provide imagery and data analyses for use by first responders in any kind of a disaster.
“If we know there’s a particular area we want to focus on, we can command the satellite to take the images. In some cases, we may want to compare the post-disaster with a pre-disaster image,” he said.
NASA’s fiscal 2011 Earth Science budget is $1.8 billion for the operations of existing satellites, Earth science research and analyses, and the development, launch, and operations of new satellite and instruments.
It recently took images for a host of other disasters, including:
NASA is the eyes for international disasters, too. Recent images included the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake and the eruption of the Icelandic volcano that spewed ash across Europe, both in 2010.
NASA imaging is used regularly by scientists to predict future disasters. But that comes with a dose of caution.
“In predicting the future, we’re only slightly better than the economists,” Goodman said.
Judi Hasson is an award-winning journalist who writes about technology and all things government.
When Shawn Kingsberry became the Chief Technology Officer of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board in 2009, it had a blank slate – just a few good ideas and the urgency to create a terrific website.
So Kingsberry rolled up his sleeves and led the effort to create Recovery.gov, a site with bullet-proof security that attracted nearly one million visitors a month at its peak. It has become a model for disclosure and open government. Keep reading →
The federal government’s long road to cloud computing owes its beginnings in part to the ill-fated “Cash for Clunkers” program and the failure of the IT systems that were were supposed to support it, said Vivek Kundra in his first published reflections about his time as the nation’s first formally appointed federal chief information officer.
Kundra, who retired from the White House Office of Management and Budget on Aug. 12 to begin a fellowship at Harvard University, recalled his impressions arriving in America as an 11-year old son of immigrants, his career in public service, and much of the government’s dysfunctional IT programs he inherited and tried to fix over the past two and half years.
The Cash for Clunkers program proved to be a seminal moment for the young CIO:
“With the economy facing the worst recession since the Great Depression, one program – Cash for Clunkers – provided rebates to people who traded in older cars for new, more fuel-efficient ones. But just three days after its launch, the system for processing these rebates collapsed under the weight of an unexpectedly large wave of applications.
“Lacking the ability to scale rapidly, the system was overwhelmed. For a month, we rode a roller coaster of unplanned outages and service disruptions, leading to delays in processing rebates.
“One hot DC August night during the height of this mess, I emerged at 4 a.m. from the Department of Transportation after 14 straight hours working with the system architects and database engineers as they struggled to keep servers online and the site operational. As I wandered the streets of DC, I was frustrated that I couldn’t catch a cab, but I was even more frustrated that technology was complicating the lives of thousands of Americans. I knew that if Cash for Clunkers had used cloud services, the site would have easily been able to scale in response to the rising demand.
“That’s what drove home my belief that we had to move the government to the cloud.”
That decision ultimately led to Kundra’s office instituting a “Cloud First” policy, intended to prod federal agencies to accelerate “the safe and secure adoption of cloud computing” as well as take advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reduce the government’s costly reliance on legacy computing systems. His office later calculated that up to $20 billion worth of federal IT spending could be shifted to cloud-based solutions.
Kundra also restated his astonishment in discovering how many data centers the federal government operated:
“When I was Director of Infrastructure Technology in Arlington County, I knew down to the street address where each of our data center facilities was located and what was in them. Yet when I asked how many data centers the Federal Government had, nobody could give me the answer.
“It took agencies eight months to produce an initial inventory of their data centers. All told, the number of Federal data centers has more than quadrupled since 1998, from 432 to more than 2000. Yet on average, they are only 27 percent utilized. This means that 73 percent of our computing power is doing nothing for the American people. That’s why the Federal Government is actively shutting down 800 data centers by 2015. Already, 81 have been shut down and a total of 373 will be closed by the end of next year.
“A great example is right here in our backyard – the Department of Health and Human Services operates 175 data centers. They recently shut down one in Rockville, Maryland, that was approximately 15,000 square feet and cost taxpayers $1.2 million annually in electricity costs alone. It’s one of 12 they’re shutting down this year.”
Kundra also recalled his personal road to public service. Born in New Delhi, India, he lived in Tanzania until he was eleven, before his parents moved to the U.S. when Kundra was 11.
“I couldn’t speak English when I first arrived. I recall my first days at school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and seeing a couple of African American kids around my age. They reminded me of my friends in Tanzania, so I walked up to them and starting speaking in Swahili. I was promptly met by strange looks, so I started speaking even louder to make sure the beaten up. Not the warm welcome I was expecting!”
Prior to taking the U.S. CIO post, Kundra served as the chief technology officer in Mayor Fenty’s cabinet in Washington, DC; as the assistant secretary of Commerce and Technology in Governor Kaine’s cabinet in Virginia, and as the director of infrastructure in Arlington County.
The Government Accountability Office has identified a number of leading green IT practices used by federal, state, and local government and private-sector organizations that could save millions of dollars if implemented by additional agencies.
According to a GAO report released last week, several agencies have taken steps to implement federal green IT requirements but aren’t able to effectively measure the results of those efforts.
GAO recommended the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in conjunction with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, direct agencies to implement the leading practices as well as develop baselines for their green IT-related goals and, where possible, targets that measure energy or cost savings or other quantifiable benefits. Keep reading →
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s management style can be summed up in two words: Listen. Decide.
Listen, because he knows that there are many people in his department and outside of it who know a lot more about the technical transportation issues than he does. And decide, because, well, he’s got the title. Keep reading →
In the latest installment of his “On the Go” series, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood answers questions submitted by the public via Facebook, Twitter, and his blog.
His efforts to use social media are part of a management style that has also earned him a relatively high degree of clout in social media circles. Keep reading →
There are big jobs. Then there’s Chuck McGann’s job.
As the chief information security officer for the U.S. Postal Service, McGann is responsible for protecting the integrity of information and the information infrastructure used in operating one of the world’s largest enterprises. Keep reading →
The State Department’s public diplomacy mission is constantly evolving, seeking to reach foreign audiences in new and more creative ways. And for a variety of reasons, that has increasingly meant going mobile.
Recognizing the potential of the mobile Web to reach vast audiences that are not otherwise connected to the Internet, the department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) launched m.usembassy.gov that is finding a growing following with entirely new constituencies after a little more than a year. Keep reading →