The transition website released today a video of its Technology, Innovation and Government Reform (TIGR) team.  It’s a 4 minute video explaining the purpose of the team – improving the way government uses technology.  This is an important distinction.  The transition’s focus on technology has been much more on what could be called – borrowing the Brooksian phrase from science policy – technology for policy rather than policy for technology.  To be sure, the transition is focused on both, but you will need to look elsewhere to get a sense of how the Obama Administration will consider nanotechnology, clean energy technology, and other technologies, new or existing.  With the TIGR team (pronounced as Eeyore might, oddly enough), technology is a tool for better government as much, if not more, than it is for economic development or advancing other public goals.

Nature News notes an interesting development.  The journal RNA Biology will require authors submitting to a particular section to also submit Wikipedia pages that will summarize the work.  These pages will be peer reviewed by the journal prior to publication.  One such page is already online.  There is no explicit connection on that Wikipedia page between the page and the journal.  Perhaps that is to encourage other people to contribute to the page, which can be edited by anyone.  While some scholars have essentially opted out of the journal publishing system to put their work online, this is a step towards combining, or at least connecting, the two venues for academic publishing.  A question worth pursuing as this initiative moves forward is to track how often these pages are viewed, and what information can be derived about visitors to those pages.

As part of its continuing efforts to encourage and engage the public, the Obama-Biden transition team recently uploaded several documents it has received from interest groups to the transition website.  While readers may be particularly interested in the environmental and energy proposals submitted to the transition, the real distinction of this is that, in the words of the official memo, “all policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations will be publicly available for review and discussion on Change.gov.”  Science and technology advocacy groups have yet to weigh in. 

So, whatever your policy concern, you can see what documents have been sent to the incoming government (and by extension which organizations have contributed something).  You can also submit your own ideas – even rebuttals of whatever information has already been provided.  This is, of course, no guarantee that you’ll be listened to.  However, this is a process more open and transparent than those of the past.  Considering the videos made available of transition team meetings and responses to public comment, this process is vastly more open than in the past.

Some of the early reports of the disaster that happened in Mumbai was over Twitter, a social networking service that focuses on short (140 character) messages that can be updated to your network over phone or email.  Early photos could be found on the Flicker photo hosting service (the same was true for the London train bombings of 7/7).  By now it’s clear that Web 2.0 tools are being used to communicate quickly as things are happening, or in the case of one Berkeley student arrested in Egypt, to communicate things that would otherwise be drowned out by other things.

A question worth considering (for good or bad) is whether or not this traffic could be monitored in a way that maintains privacy while perhaps providing an early notification that something is happening and first responders and other relevant agencies need to be notified.  I recognize this opens a can (or more) of worms, given recent problems with warrantless surveillance.  Perhaps there can be some kind of generic message traffic analysis (maybe using the Twitter search function) for these kinds of messages paralleling traffic analysis in other media.  I offer no answers here, but feel confident in suggesting that new networking technologies will attract attention for monitoring purposes, even for tracking the flu.

For those researchers interested in working with large data sets and lacking the resources to build and/or maintain their own data infrastructures, some businesses are renting out their infrastructures.  Smaller universities and research centers can spend just for the time used.  A leader in this use of large data centers is Amazon, and they are now hosting public data sets for researchers and other interested groups to use through their hosting services (hat tip, NYT Bits Blog).  It’s an impressive list of data, including the Human Genome Project, Bureau of Labor Statistics data, U.S. Census information, and others.  You can also submit public data sets for posting.

As research will increasingly rely on large data sets, and the government is trying to put more and more data online, I think the ability for anyone to make use of the information should be encouraged.  I would like to see providers like Amazon explore ways to facilitate the use, research and examination of this data for as many people as practical.

The next administration appears to be fully embracing new technology for communications, continuing the habits employed to great success during the recent campaign.  Besides the transition website, which now has several news items as well as videos on transition activities, there will be weekly YouTube addresses by President-elect Obama.  Such addresses aren’t as new as they sound, as the President has given a weekly radio address for decades.  The addition of another media form for this material is both welcome and overdue.  And if the new administration is open to new uses of technology in its activity, I think it bodes well for the administration’s future engagement with technology policy.  The next test will be who the first Chief Technology Officer of the government will be and that position’s job description.

The campaign website is still active, but there is a legal barrier between political and governmental activities that prevents it from being used directly by the White House.  However, the Democratic National Committee will likely take advantage of its information and networking capacity.  But it is possible that change.gov is the precursor of an expanded whitehouse.gov, where press releases are the least of the public information made available to web browsers.  As there has been a struggle to make federal government activity easier to observe and review – both online and in print – I hope that the expanded web activity of the Executive Branch becomes a beachhead for spreading transparency and usability of government information.

Matthew Nisbet, a communications professor at American University and author of the Framing Science blog, noted recently a Policy Forum article in Science (subscription required) that showed something that is perhaps obvious, but bears emphasis.  The article described an experiment conducted at MIT where students with training in science or economics were given parts of the IPCC summary for policymakers on long term accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Approximately two-thirds of those students were unable to accurately recreate the emissions path necessary to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide.  You can read more of Nisbet’s assessment on his blog.

What I take from this is a need to recognize that the ability to communicate scientific results clearly and properly not only requires an appropriate frame, but the public often considered in studies of the effective communication of science should also include other scientists.  Yes, this is probably an example of cross-disciplinary disconnection, but increasing specialization has been happening in science for a long time.  While it may be tough to bridge the gaps, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the gaps exist.  Just because scientists, in general, may be able to think and act in similar ways does not always translate to understanding across fields.  So, the next time you’d like to try and frame some of your research to a public audience, see how a scientist from another field understands you (or doesn’t).

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday about the case of Dr. Ned Feder, an NIH employee who wrote to several publications suggesting that NIH grantees disclose payments they receive from medical companies.  The payments are rarely made public, either in articles published from the associated research or in grant applications.  Given that the results of this research will influence what products are prescribed or used, the conflict of interest – at least the potential for it – should be clear.

However, the NIH does not require disclosure of these payments, or of consulting arrangements between researchers and companies.  The latter usually has to be disclosed to the researchers’ home institutions, but that information remains confidential. Dr. Feder argued for strong public disclosure of any kind of financial relationships between researchers and medical companies as a condition of receiving grant money.  The NIH recently had to deal with incidents where researchers failed to disclose payments from pharmaceutical companies.  It has risen to the point where Senator Grassley has been investigating the matter.  Their response to Dr. Feder was to formally reprimand him, an action that was rescinded after protest.  While I can understand the need for an agency to present a consistent stand on matters of policy, their unwillingness to embrace this kind of open accesss is disappointing.  Dr. Feder is no longer with NIH, and works now for the Project on Government Oversight.

(more…)

The Personal Genome Project is looking for a few thousand people willing to contribute their genome to help make personal genome sequencing more accessible and affordable.  The Washington Post recently reported on the project, as did Wired.  I think collaborative experiments and research like this – which could engage with people who aren’t researchers just as easily as researchers – is a good thing and should be encouraged.  As the amount of data we can use to conduct research increases dramatically, collecting and analyzing it – at least in some disciplines – will benefit from the contributions of others – whether its spare cycles on their computer or individual data to help better understand population data.

The problem with the Post piece – which focused on the recent addition of several scientists personal genome data to the publicly available portion of the project – is that it glosses over the critical privacy concerns that must be part of any database that can be accessed by the public, especially those that contain medical information.  Contrary to what you might think from the article, people can participate in the program and limit the exposure of their personal genetic information.  Online does not automatically equal no privacy.  Arguments that suggest privacy no longer exists, or can no longer be preserved, are arguments from technological determinism – that there is nothing we can do about technology and its momentum. If that were true, the utility of technology policy would be next to nothing – something that doesn’t reflect reality.

While the National Academies is focused on advising the federal government, it is free to support other activities and advise other groups.  Part of their work includes their journal (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) a science museum, located around the corner from one of their buildings in Washington, D.C.  Public engagement and public communication of science are taken serious at the Academies.

Their science outreach has recently expanded to include the Science and Entertainment Exchange (hat tip, Framing Science), what appears to be a clearinghouse between scientists and the entertainment industry to make it easier from producers, writers and directors to connect with people to inform the science portrayed in their work.  It will launch with an afternoon event in Los Angeles next month, hosted by Seth McFarlane, with science notables including Rodney Brooks, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lisa Randall and J. Craig Ventner participating.

(more…)