FedWire: Responsive design, STEM, and capturing space
FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.
Toward a national plan for observing our Earth.
New tool unveiled by DOT and HUD.
A look at STEM education.
Energy.gov is now responsive.
Odierno: Sequestration would make even one major operation difficult.
NASA teams with AWS.
Energizing base camps of the future.
Capturing space:
NASA teams with AWS to share space research
Data produced by the NASA Earth Exchange at the NASA Advanced Supercomputer Facility at the agency’s Ames Research Center shows climate change projections. (Image: NASA Earth Exchange)NASA and Amazon Web Services are partnering up to make more of the space agency’s research and data available to research and educational users. A large collection of NASA climate and Earth science satellite data will be put in the AWS cloud, a major win for the geoscience community.
“NASA continues to support and provide open public access to research data, and this collaboration is entirely consistent with that objective,” NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said in a statement. “Earth science research is important to every person on the planet, and we welcome contributions from all researchers in improving our understanding of Earth and its climate.”
The service includes certain NASA satellite and global change data sets such as precipitation, temperature and forest cover. It will also include data-processing tools from NASA Earth Exchange, a research platform of NASA’s Advanced Supercomputer Facility in Moffett Field, Calif.
“We are excited to grow an ecosystem of researchers and developers who can help us solve important environmental research problems,” said Rama Nemani, principal scientist for the NEX project at Ames. “Our goal is that people can easily gain access to and use a multitude of data analysis services quickly through AWS to add knowledge and open source tools for others’ benefit.”
NASA’s partnership with AWS is another example of government leveraging cloud technology to give users worldwide access to data sets and research they can use independently. This cloud allows research and application users to gain access to an integrated Earth science computational and data management system, according to the release.
“By bringing these NASA public data assets into the AWS cloud, we help NASA engage a larger community for global change impact modeling and analysis as well as data sciences innovation in general,” said Jamie Kinney, AWS senior manager for scientific computing. “Together, NASA and AWS are delivering faster time to science and taking the complexity out of accessing this important climate data.”
So far, NASA has uploaded terabytes of data from three satellite and computer modeling data sets to the AWS platform and expects to upload more in the future. One of the data sets provides high-resolution climate change projects for 48 of 50 states, another offers a global view of Earth’s surface every one to two days. The U.S. Geological survey’s Landsat data record provides the longest existing continuous space-based record of Earth’s land, according to the release.
This latest move by NASA is an effort to continue keeping up with the administration’s open data executive order, and the agency hopes the availability of this data will encourage entrepreneurship, innovation and further scientific research.
GSA’s Kathy Conrad on government’s use of open source
Kathy Conrad, principal deputy associate administrator at the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies within the General Services Administration, discusses with FedScoopTV how the government is leveraging open source.
Internet Security Alliance to propose beta testing cybersecurity framework
The Internet Security Alliance is calling on the Obama administration to take a lesson from the botched rollout of the federal health care website and establish a “beta-testing phase” for the voluntary cybersecurity framework currently under development by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
“We have already seen in the health care website debacle the results of stringently adhering to artificially determined deadlines and not doing adequate testing,” said ISA President Larry Clinton. “We are simply proposing the federal government do what any private sector entity would do before it goes to a full launch of a new product or service — you run a beta test with selected target audiences and generate data to refine the product before you go to full deployment.”
NIST released a preliminary framework in October and plans to hold one more public discussion workshop to gather input before issuing the final version in February.
A key element in President Barack Obama’s executive order on cybersecurity, issued earlier this year, the goal of the framework is to establish a set of best practices that can be customized to various critical infrastructure sectors and adapted by both large and small organizations while providing a consistent approach to cybersecurity.
But ISA argues the administration’s plan to push for full-scale adoption of the final framework in February could lead to problems for small and mid-size companies that do not have the same depth of experience and resources larger infrastructure operators have. And because the framework is voluntary, ISA fears companies that find it difficult to implement certain guidelines will simply ignore the framework altogether.
“Early adopters of the framework are most likely to be organizations with economy of scope and scale atypical of the rest of industry or are responding to high-level political motives,” Clinton said in a statement. “Attempting to generalize their experience to companies who do not have this background can be invalid and misleading.”
As an alternative, ISA is proposing what it calls “a more scientific process” in which a “stratified sample of representative target [critical infrastructure] companies” would test-drive implementing the best practices proposed by the framework, according to briefing slides obtained by FedScoop that Clinton plans to present Tuesday to a conference on Technology and Homeland security in Boston sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
“DHS would work with the organizations on implementation, track the issues and costs and deploy the incentives provided to manage the costs,” Clinton said. “If we can reliably report this data of cost effectiveness to the community, we will have a much better chance to encourage voluntary participation of framework techniques on a sustainable basis.”
“Come Feb. 14, we should initiate the first phase of implementation — beta testing,” states a slide in Clinton’s presentation. “This is what any sophisticated company would do with a new product roll out. Our critical infrastructure deserves no less.”
FedWire: Veterans Day edition
FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.
Tangherlini on Veterans Day.
Space station crew lands with Olympic torch.
We the Geeks: “Don’t be bored, make something.”
Veterans Day tributes from the White House.
Army’s DESCENT technology.
Air Force Week in photos.
Obama honors veterans:
Veterans History Project:
http://youtu.be/94uxV-AHPZM
Red Hat’s Paul Smith on open source trends
Paul Smith, vice president and general manager of public sector operations at Red Hat, discusses in this FedScoopTV interview some of the trends in open source.
FAA issues roadmap, seeks data use assurances for commercial drones
Predator B drone, operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (Photo: CBP)The Federal Aviation Administration Nov. 7 released the first roadmap for integrating civilian owned and operated unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, into the national airspace system, and said it would be seeking details on how operators plan to use any data collected by those drones.
The roadmap outlines current and future policies, regulations, technologies and procedures that will be required as commercial deployments of drones increases and FAA moves to foster the integration of UAS into the next-generation aviation system, known as NextGen.
“Government and industry face significant challenges as unmanned aircraft move into the aviation mainstream,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “This roadmap is an important step forward that will help stakeholders understand the operational goals and safety issues we need to consider when planning for the future of our airspace.”
“Our FAA forecast estimates that we can expect 7,500 small unmanned aircraft in our national airspace in the next five years, provided the regulations are in place to handle them,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. “Right now, almost all of the unmanned aircraft operations we approve for public use and research purposes are on a case by case basis.”
To date, FAA has authorized the limited use of unmanned aircraft for missions deemed important to the public interest. These include firefighting, disaster relief, search and rescue, law enforcement, border patrol, military training, and testing and evaluation. About 80 law enforcement agencies operate unmanned aircraft now under special certificates of authorization, according to Huerta. Universities also use unmanned aircraft for research into weather, agriculture and industrial uses.
Huerta said FAA plans by the end of the year to choose six test sites for civil unmanned aircraft. The test sites will provide information to help FAA develop policies and procedures to ensure safe, responsible and transparent integration.
In conjunction with the roadmap for integration, FAA also released the privacy policy that will apply to the UAS test sites. The policy requires operators to comply with all local, state and federal laws concerning privacy and civil liberties.
“We’re requiring the test site operators to create a privacy policy that is available to the public,” Huerta said. “And they must require anyone operating unmanned aircraft at the test sites to have a written plan for how they will use and retain any test data acquired. On a broader level, agencies across the government are coming together to work on privacy issues that may arise with the increasing use of unmanned aircraft beyond these test sites.”
Billions in revenue lost in government shutdown
The United States took a major economic hit from the 2.5 week government shutdown, including a loss of $4.5 billion in lost productivity and worker benefit compensation, according to a report issued Nov. 7 by the Office of Management and Budget.
In a press call Thursday, OMB Director Sylvia Burwell explained to reporters the direct and indirect impacts the government shutdown had on the economy, programs, services and the workforce.
“We tried to do two things as much as possible; we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible and correct analytically and specifically as possible,” Burwell said of the process of going through shutdown data.
A major cost measured in the report was the pay for furloughed feds, meaning the amount paid to furloughed employees for work and services that could not be performed. The report estimated the total cost of pay for furloughed feds during the shutdown is roughly $2 billion. However, total compensation cost when including benefits is about 30 percent more, around $2.5 billion.
The report estimated 6.6 million federal working days were lost, most notably 1.6 million from the Defense Department.
The number of job creation opportunities was severely affected by the shutdown, according to the report. Several projects were held up in production; for example, the Bureau of Land Management was unable to process roughly 200 drilling permits, delaying energy development and thus employment opportunities in several states.
Small businesses suffered when the Small Business Administration was unable to handle $140 million worth of applications for small business loans. Small businesses contracting with the federal government, especially with the Defense Department, also took a hit. Contracts dropped by almost one-third, and spending saw a 40 percent reduction.
“Now the one thing that came out of the shutdown was a greater appreciation of what the government did,” Burwell said. “People did understand things in their daily lives that were interrupted, whether they were economic or personal interruptions.”
The National Park Service lost a total of $7 million in revenue, and the Smithsonian lost roughly $4 million during the shutdown.
“The shutdown jeopardized both the income stability of federal employees and their ability to focus on important agency missions,” the report said.
About 40 percent of the federal workforce was furloughed during the shutdown.
The instability of federal work undermined the government’s competitive advantage in gaining and retaining accomplished employees, the report said.
FedWire: Shutdown cost, VA claims backlog and GDP estimate
FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.
VA meets mental health executive order hiring goal.
The impact and cost of the government shutdown.
Advance estimate of GDP for Q3 2013.
AT&T Government Solutions names new VP for technology.
VA backlog of disability claims cut by 34 percent since March.
Labor secretary cites progress in veterans’ hiring programs.
West Wing Week:
FedWire: Controlling DOD staff costs, Operation Deep Freeze and meteoroid data
FedWire is FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community. Send your links and videos to tips@fedscoop.com.
The latest update on healthcare.gov.
More action needed to achieve IT savings.
Senate committee passes DATA Act.
NASA and researchers get important data from meteoroid impact.
Hagel: DOD must control spiking staff costs.
NIST’s new atomic clock design uses cold atoms.
Empowering innovators to reach for the sun.
White House press secretary breaks down ENDA:
Operation Deep Freeze kicks off:
http://youtu.be/P6vyDYsE8cs