Home » Posts tagged 'EPA' (Page 6)

Tag Archives: EPA

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

EPA upgrades to Web 2.0

EPA upgrades to Web 2.0, By Kathleen Hickey, GCN, 09/09/08.

The Environmental Protection Agency launched a redesigned Web site today that features Web 2.0 tools. EPA officials said they made the new site more interactive and task-oriented to fulfill the needs of the public and federal, state and local agencies. The new site features a blog, social bookmarking tools, Really Simple Syndication feeds, videos and podcasts about EPA activities. The site also includes links to information about protecting the environment and improving energy efficiency, recycling and pollution prevention.
Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Big Data, Environmental Data

The Journal Nature has a special issue about "Big Data" with articles by Clifford Lynch, Cory Doctorow, and others. The whole issue is worth reading and is freely available online for a short time.

Coping with floods of data is now one of science's biggest challenges. In this Nature Special, we assess the need to complement smart science with smart searching; look at what the next Google will be; talk to the pioneering biologists who are trying to use wiki-type web pages to manage and interpret data; and recall that the first mass data crunchers were not computers, but the remarkable women of Harvard's Observatory.
In the area of government information, David Goldston, the former chief of staff of the House Committee on Science, writes about environmental data. He notes that there is no set of environmental indicators that is regularly updated -- something akin to economic statistics -- and that a report by the Heinz Center on the State of the Nation's Ecosystems (www.heinzcenter.org/ecosystems) is chock-full of lists of subject and geographical areas for which few if any data exist. He calls attention to the The Data Quality Act, which "has been anathema to environmental groups, which have seen it as a way to stymie regulation. And it has been primarily invoked by corporations questioning studies that raise alarms about their products." (The act is less than half a page in a public law of more seven hundred pages (Public Law 106-554 Sec. 515; Statutes at Large volume 114, pages 2763A-153 to 2763A-154, available online as plain text and as pdf). He also says that, "Even when instrumentation is regularly funded, as some kinds of satellites are, money is often lacking to maintain the data or to make them sufficiently accessible or digestible." Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Multimedia at EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency has consolidated its Web 2.0 multimedia (video, photos, audio, podcasts) at Multimedia Center, US EPA. The current featured video is an interview with with US EPA Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock, discussing the Greenversations blog. It is worth watching (only about 5 minutes) as an enthusiastic view of the possibilities of better citizen communications with government. Unfortunately, the EPA, as far as I can tell, has not provided a way to bookmark videos or download them for preservation and has settled on the "standard" of Flash video, rather than open source video formats. (See Feds set sights on small screen, By Wade-Hahn Chan, FCW, August 11, 2008). Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Bush administration devalues life. EPA regulations no longer necessary

No this isn't a news item from [w:The Onion]! It's Stephen Colbert's latest Wørd segment. In it, Colbert finds much to celebrate that our individual monetary value (IMV) as derived by government actuaries has declined by almost a million dollars -- a 12% drop in five years. And Colbert rightly points out that with IMV dropping, the cost of environmental regulations is higher than their benefits which causes IMV to drop even more in a "circle of life -- minus the life!"

If the video doesn't load here, you can also get it over at Crooks and Liars! Continue reading

Continue Reading →

EPA Tagging Results – Ready and Promising

Our report on our experiment in using del.icio.us to tag EPA documents originally harvested by GPO is now completed and available for your review and comment at http://freegovinfo.info/node/1825. For more information about this project, including a list of tags assigned to documents by project participants, please see http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging. Our thanks to the project participants! Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Latest Posts

Latest Comments

Blogroll

Archives

Meta

Archives

Powered by WordPress / Academica WordPress Theme by WPZOOM