November 2011

IT Spending: Elections and Electronics

Information technology isn't entirely non-partisan, Shawn McCarthy, research director for IDC Government Insights, said. Administration-to-administration changes are only at the margins though and, because most IT budgeting is done in multi-year cycles, it can take a year or more for those minor shifts to show up. Federal spending on IT is projected to grow about 3 percent during fiscal 2012 after a dip of about 2 percent of actual spending during fiscal 2011, McCarthy said. Overall federal IT spending is and will remain remarkably stable despite the severe budget crunch across the rest of government, McCarthy said. That spending will continue to shift, though, from in-house systems to investments in cloud storage and other cross-agency initiatives, he said.

GPS companies clash with LightSquared, each other at public meeting

Global Positioning System companies remain split on the best way to contend with LightSquared.

Representatives from three GPS-based companies spoke alongside LightSquared Executive Vice President Martin Harriman during the two-hour panel discussion, which was part of a National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board meeting in Alexandria (VA). LightSquared wants to develop a nationwide network of 40,000 cell towers that would provide broadband access across rural America, but opponents claim the network would interfere with existing GPS receivers. "We love LightSquared," said Javad Ashjaee, chief executive officer of Javad GNSS, which manufactures GPS receivers. Ashjaee presented his own findings showing that LightSquared's towers could coexist with and even complement high-precision GPS operators. Ashjaee said LightSquared's filtering creates a strong "fence" that separates its signal from his company's receivers. "No signal analyzer can do as good as this," he stated. Javad maintains that interference problems stem from the fact that most manufacturers didn't pay enough attention to other devices operating in frequencies near the GPS bands, or develop adequate protective filters in the antenna section of their devices. To prove his point, Ashjaee brought several dozen boxes of his company's receivers, inviting any interested parties to perform their own tests. But others at the meeting disagreed.

Social media for emergency managers can't start when the emergency does

Developing emergency managers' capacity to benefit from social media requires more than simply training them to monitor Facebook pages and to adopt new technology to separate sound from noise in the cacophonous Twitter feed following a disaster, experts said.

To use social media effectively during emergencies, officials also must have in place a social community so that affected people know where to turn when they're out of water, trapped in their homes, or don't have information about where to find shelter, experts said during a panel discussion sponsored by the Wilson Center think tank's Science and Technology Innovation Program. As things stand, panelists said, emergency managers' adoption of social media is scattershot across the country and while the public often rushes to Facebook and Twitter during emergencies, police, firefighters and other responders are unprepared to deal with this situation. According to a recent American Red Cross survey, for example, more than one-third of respondents said they expected help to arrive in less than one hour if they posted a request to an emergency response agency on Facebook or Twitter. Yet many police stations and regional emergency response agencies don't actively monitor their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

Sen Coburn: Computerized patient records will bring on hackers

Sen Tom Coburn (R-OK) -- ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Privacy, Technology and the Law Subcommittee -- is warning that the nation's transition to electronic patient records will lure cyber intruders and should be reconsidered.

The federal government is spending nearly $20 billion in economic stimulus funds to move doctors from paper to digital records for storing health information. With privacy and money at stake, a Senate Judiciary Committee panel met Wednesday afternoon to review the current rubric for protecting health information in a wired society. Backers of electronic health records say the technology has the potential to improve treatment, lower costs and advance research. Critics of recent implementations, including Sen Coburn say e-patient records are ripe for hacking. At the hearing, Sen Coburn, a practicing obstetrician, referenced the exploits of Chinese cyber attackers to illustrate the vulnerability of digital versus paper information. "There are always going to be people who will go around" computer security to obtain sensitive information, he said. "Just ask our Defense Department with China right now. Ask our private companies with China right now -- the hacking that's going on. The very sophisticated people, they've got to get into my office to get it, when it's on a piece of paper."

Marketing Misfires Trigger More ‘Text Spam’ Lawsuits

Text messages are an irresistible marketing opportunity for brands to connect with their customers. But some text campaigns are tripping over a federal law, leaving companies with a nasty legal bill instead of new sales.

In a federal class action suit filed last week in Oakland, a California man accused a PR firm of sending an unsolicited quit smoking message to his cell phone. He said the firm, PHD, broke the Telemarketing and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and should be penalized at least $5 million. The Oakland case appears to be one of at least a dozen such lawsuits filed in recent years against companies. According to experts, there are two types of “text spamming.” The first is conducted by rogue companies who purchase lists of cell phone numbers from third parties and then blast them to consumers via SMS websites. The second type of spamming arises when respectable companies blunder in their marketing campaigns by failing to respect the terms of the TCPA.

Bloggers Debate Cain and Kardashian

The sexual harassment allegations lodged against presidential candidate Herman Cain animated social media last week as many bloggers came to the candidate's defense. While some criticized Cain's response to the charges, most of the conversation came from conservatives who condemned the press. For the week of October 31 to November 4, the 2012 campaign and specifically Cain's scandal was the No. 2 subject on blogs, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The subject also received significant coverage in the traditional media last week as multiple women accused Cain of sexually suggestive behavior during the time he was the head of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. According to a PEJ special report and campaign update, the tone of Cain's coverage in the mainstream press was distinctly negative as the allegations surfaced, and Cain received more attention in a single week than any Republican candidate so far in the 2012 race. The only subject to receive more attention in the blogosphere last week than Cain was the news that celebrity and tabloid star Kim Kardashian had filed for divorce from her basketball playing husband Kris Humphries after only 72 days of marriage. The August 20 wedding was broadcast on E! television and received the highest ratings ever for a program on that channel.

Limits to broadband diffusion?

The National Telecommunications Information Administration just published the findings from its latest survey about Internet use within US households. In case you missed it, here is a summary: broadband adoption among US households went up, but not by much. Actually, that is not entirely fair. Viewed at short intervals, broadband adoption will appear to be a slow moving process. However, a little stepping back from the short run headlines reveals good news and bad news in this report. That is the point of this post.

For dial-up Internet users, the two biggest reasons for not using broadband are expense and availability. Both of those should get better over time, albeit slowly. There is still hope for more converts. For people who don’t currently use the Net at all, the first and third biggest reasons for non-use are “don’t need it, not interested” and “No computer/computer inadequate.” Why is that bad news? Simply stated, this is the population that will fuel most of the future growth. Yet, neither of those reasons for not adopting will go away easily. Both issues defy resolution, either through good marketing campaigns from private providers, or with any reasonable policy intervention. Finally, the second most common reason for non-adoption — too expensive — will eventually be overcome, but it too is likely to be slowly overcome, as already noted. In short, new adopters will be hard to come by.

Tech industry's diversity problem starts in college -- and earlier

"The pipeline problem." That's the catch-all phrase that keeps coming up in discussions of diversity in Silicon Valley.

Tech companies say they'd love to hire more women and minorities, but that too few qualified candidates are graduating with technical degrees. That leaves them choosing from an applicant pool that is largely white, male and Asian. According to the Computing Research Association (CRA), the 2010 undergrad class was more than 66% white and nearly 15% Asian, a group which includes those of Indian descent. Hispanics accounted for 5.6% of the year's computer and information science undergrad degrees, and blacks obtained 4.2% of them. Both of those minorities were outnumbered by non-U.S. residents, who made up 7.6% of 2010's undergrad computer scientists from American universities. Perhaps the most surprising figure from last year's undergrad class: Only 13.4% were women.

Software developers offered new round of scholarships to study journalism

A pioneering program to bring software developers into journalism will be expanded under a new grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to Northwestern University.

The three-year, $250,000 grant will enable Medill to provide scholarships to at least six people with computer science backgrounds to earn a master’s degree in journalism. The grant supplements a $639,000 grant that has allowed nine computer programmers to earn Medill master’s degrees since 2008. Under the new grant, scholarship winners will be encouraged to develop a curriculum tailored to their interests, meeting the requirements of Medill’s MSJ degree while also incorporating advanced course work in computer science. Scholarship winners will also have the opportunity to work in the Knight News Innovation Laboratory and Medill’s new Watchdog/Accountability Initiative. The Knight Lab, a joint project of Northwestern’s journalism and engineering schools, is developing innovative technologies to be used by journalists and publishers in Chicago and beyond. The Watchdog/Accountability Initiative specializes in investigative reporting on systemic flaws in government and public institutions. Under the new grant, Medill will build partnerships with media companies who are interested in hiring journalists with computer programming expertise. Media partners will be asked to provide financial aid to supplement Knight’s scholarship funding, and also offer paid internships for the scholarship winners.

Mobile users want privacy, but they do little to protect it

While large numbers of consumers are angry about security measures taken by custodians of their online data, three out of every four of them don't even take minimal measures to protect themselves from incursions on their privacy, according to AdaptiveMobile, a mobile security firm based in London. 75 percent of mobile users don't bother to read the terms and conditions of mobile applications. Many of those apps, like Angry Birds, access physical location information about their users as a condition of their use. Yet 69 percent of the 1,024 consumers surveyed found collection of such data unacceptable.

Benton

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