September 2010

A look at the federal government's flimsy and fitful crackdown on news outlets and experts that fob off public relations drivel as news.

The public has gotten pitch-drunk from relentless salesmanship, on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and even their favorite sitcoms and reality shows. TV news producers have to fill airtime with staffs a fraction the size they were just a few years ago. Federal regulators speak loudly but carry a small stick -- seldom invoking regulations that let them punish television outlets that don't disclose paid promotions. A couple of public interest outfits demonstrated more than four years ago how dozens of TV stations flimflammed the public by presenting video news releases from advertisers as if they were unbiased expert testimonials, but complaints brought by the Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press, a partner public interest group, have not been resolved, at least as far as anyone knows. It is hard to tell exactly what the Federal Communications Commission has done on the matter. Eric Bash, associate bureau chief in the FCC's Enforcement Bureau, said he assumed the fail-to-disclose complaints could be pending. But rules prohibit discussing ongoing investigations. And the rules might also preclude discussing complaints that had been tossed out.

The only antidote might be bringing more attention to broadcasters who produce fake news. The audience has had its fill of this sub rosa salesman, hasn't it? Or has the news just sunk to meet our increasingly low expectations?

It's a romantic notion, the magic of teaching, but magic always has a dark side. Trusting teachers too much also has its perils. For every good teacher who is too creative to survive in the era of "no child left behind," there's probably another tenacious, horrid teacher who might be dethroned only because of unquestionably bad outcomes on objective tests. So we face a quandary: How do we use the technologies of computation, statistics and networking to shed light -- without killing the magic?

This is more than a practical question. It goes to the heart of what we are after as humans. A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education -- in the broadest sense -- does what genes can't do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

The Obama administration will cancel a $200 million information technology project at the Department of Justice and scale back another at Interior as part of an ongoing review.

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced the cancellation of DOJ's Litigation Case Management System during an address to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council on Sept 20. He said the project was years behind schedule and well over the original cost estimate of $128 million. "Initiated in 2006, this project would have cost an additional $193 million to complete, twice the original estimate," CIO Kundra said. "Our actions to date are the initial steps in making the federal government work better for the American people and send a clear message that we are no longer willing to throw good money after bad money."

The project was intended to provide a department-wide system to track cases, but the government has achieved little return despite having invested $64 million to date. Instead Justice will update systems for each office individually. The main contractor for the system is Computer Sciences.