Home » Articles posted by James A Jacobs (Page 245)
Author Archives: James A Jacobs
The Future of the Internet III
Pew has the results of a new survey on the Future of the Internet. This is their third. See the story Internet Evolution: The Future of the Internet III (12/14/2008) with summaries, or the complete report: The Future of the Internet III, Janna Quitney Anderson, Elon University and Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project, December 14, 2008. (PDF, 138pp). And then visit the Imagining the Internet site:
The Elon University/Pew Internet Project site Imagining the Internet: A History and Forecast is a multi-section resource containing thousands of pages. It exposes future possibilities while simultaneously providing a peek back at the past. In it, you will find the words of thousands of people from every corner of the world, from today and from yesterday, making thousands of predictive pronouncements about the future of humankind.Experts can be notoriously inaccurate at predicting the future, but it is fascinating to read what people like Howard Rheingold, Susan Crawford, danah boyd, Seth Finkelstein, David Brin, and many more are thinking about. Continue reading
DoE Seeks to Limit Public Interest FOIA Disclosures
Steven Aftergood has the story here: DoE Seeks to Limit Public Interest FOIA Disclosures, Secrecy News, December 15, 2008.
"A proposed new Department of Energy regulation would eliminate the so-called 'public interest' balancing test that encourages DOE officials to release information under the Freedom of Information Act even when it is legally exempt from disclosure if doing so would serve the public interest.... In comments on the proposed regulation submitted by the Federation of American Scientists, we argued that 'there is a widespread and well-founded expectation that the incoming Obama Administration will rescind the Ashcroft FOIA policy and define a more forthcoming disclosure policy. In light of that probable scenario, I would urge DOE to cancel its proposed revision of [the public interest balancing test], or else to suspend action on it for six months while the new Administration prepares new government-wide FOIA guidance.'" Continue reading
Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion
Fed Refuses to Disclose Recipients of $2 Trillion (Update2), By Mark Pittman, Bloomberg, Dec. 12, 2008.
The Federal Reserve refused a request by Bloomberg News to disclose the recipients of more than $2 trillion of emergency loans from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral. Bloomberg filed suit Nov. 7 under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act requesting details about the terms of 11 Fed lending programs, most created during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The Fed responded Dec. 8, saying it’s allowed to withhold internal memos as well as information about trade secrets and commercial information. The institution confirmed that a records search found 231 pages of documents pertaining to some of the requests.Continue reading
An unpublished federal history of the U.S.-led reconstruction of Iraq
Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica and James Glanz, The New York Times, December 13, 2008. Also at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html
An unpublished, 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure. The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag — particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army — the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience. (PDF, 6.9Meg) The draft of a federal report by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Annotations are based on the review's findings. The draft was provided to reporters at The New York Times and ProPublica by two people outside the Inspector General's office who have read the draft. Continue reading
A guide to preservation
Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, has a new article on digital preservation worth reading:
- Berman, Francine. Got data?: a guide to data preservation in the information age. Communications of the ACM, 51, no. 12 (2008): 50-56. [subscription required]
Trend 4. Increasing commercialization of digital data storage and services. The 2006 introduction of Amazon Simple Storage Solutions (www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261) was a high-profile example of the trend toward commercialization of data storage and data services. Today, there is considerable activity in the private sector around data storage and services for the consumer; for example, we share and store digital photos through Flickr, employ Apple’s Time Capsule for regular personal computer backup, and use LexisNexis for online legal services. The commercialization of data storage and services contributes an important component of the data CI [cyberinfrastructure] environment needed to harness the potential of our information-rich world. However, private-sector storage and services are not the solution to all digital data needs. For some digital data considered to be “in the public interest” (such as census data, oficial records, critical scientiic data collections, and a variety of irreplaceable data), a greater level of trust, monitoring, replication, and accountability is required to minimize the likelihood of loss or damage and ensure the data will be there for a very long time. For such community data sets, stewardship by a trusted entity (such as libraries, archives, museums, universities, and institutional repositories), whose mission is the public good rather than profit, is generally required.Continue reading
Latest Comments