Web Archives

Courtesy of the Atlantic Wire, here's video of Michelle Obama officially joining the Twitterverse:

While perhaps not critical to the protection of life and property, the economic stimulus-tracking website Recovery.gov is exempt from the government shutdown. The site, which will be updated later this month, is funded through 2009 Recovery Act appropriations -- not the annual agency appropriations that Congress is debating today. A media release from the site's overseer, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Oversight Board, states:

In the event of a government shutdown, the Recovery Board will continue its regular operations because the agency is funded from an appropriation that continues to remain available until September 30, 2011. The government shutdown will not affect the ongoing recipient reporting for the first quarter of 2011, which is scheduled to continue until April 14. Data from those recipient reports will be posted on Recovery.gov on April 30.

The Defense Department organization charged with cyber combat is reinforcing military networks by moving much of DoD's computing to a space many civilian agencies view as insecure - the cloud. Cloud computing is the practice of storing and accessing applications in a shared online environment, instead of on in-house servers.

U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander told lawmakers on Wednesday the following:

"The idea is to reduce vulnerabilities inherent in the current architecture and to exploit the advantages of cloud computing and thin-client networks, moving the programs and the data that users need away from the thousands of desktops we now use--up to a centralized configuration that will give us wider availability of applications and data combined with tighter control over accesses and vulnerabilities and more timely mitigation of the latter."

The White House has been pressing agencies to outsource information technology services to the Web as a way of phasing out the federal government's more than 2,000 expensive, energy-sucking data centers. But many federal managers are fearful of losing their data in the cloud. What happens in the event of an online outage or if the communal, off-site servers storing their programs are hacked?

Alexander's explanation as to why the cloud will offer Defense good defense:

"This architecture would seem at first glance to be vulnerable to insider threats -- indeed, no system that human beings use can be made immune to abuse -- but we are convinced the controls and tools that will be built into the cloud will ensure that people cannot see any data beyond what they need for their jobs and will be swiftly identified if they make unauthorized attempts to access data."

Insurance companies are preparing for the economic fallout of the tsunami rippling through the Pacific by generating risk models based on ground motion data feeds from the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The second responders are actually the insurance industries" said Simon Thompson, director of commercial solutions at map software firm Esri. He already is fielding phone calls from financial sector clients asking for maps of possible damage to facilities so they can predict the cost of the magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake that hit early Friday morning.

His team is pulling from government data feeds that track the intensity of the seismic activity to illustrate potentially hit structures along the California coast, hotels in Hawaii and ships in the Pacific. Other data sources Esri is harnessing to help the private sector are USGS shake maps, which are close-to-live maps of ground motion and shaking intensity.

"When you look at the shake maps you look at the type of impact that will have on buildings," Thompson said. For example, one company that insures a Hilton hotel in Hawaii is estimating the cost of possible damage to a private lagoon on the establishment's property.

Another commercial mapmaker, Google, is pinpointing for the general public locations, where the tsunami is headed based on estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration.

Editor's note: There have been multiple estimates of the earthquake's magnitude. The USGS estimated the earthquake's magnitude at 9.0.

It just doesn't feel like 1994 was this long ago:

The National Archives and Records Administration just opened a door to what the agency expects will become a sort of time capsule containing U.S. historical materials that future generations will be able to access irrespective of innovations in technology.

A prototype of Online Public Access, which launched Monday, lets average citizens, as well as scholars, gain more comprehensive information on holdings that already are online, including card catalogs, digital representations of some records and multimedia from the agency's homepage, Archives.gov. Results for keyword searches play up the article images to appeal to eyes more familiar with social media layouts, like Facebook pages.

Each query retrieves a list of relevant records, archival data about the records identified, the source of the data and the physical or Internet location where the records are viewable. Next year, the site will offer a tool that allows users to zoom in and pan across the online materials, say NARA officials. In the future, people will have the ability to tag records with context based on personal knowledge -- as well as access audio, visuals and personal papers from presidential library collections, agency officials add.

The Archives does not have the resources to post all of America's artifacts. NARA's holdings include papers that would encircle the Earth more than 57 times; about 93,000 movies; more than 5.5 million maps, charts and architectural drawings; roughly 207,000 sound and video recordings; about 18 million aerial photographs; nearly 35 million still pictures and posters; and more than 3.5 billion electronic records.

But the agency is working on a project -- dubbed the Electronic Records Archives -- aimed at digitizing all records in a way that will make them accessible to the public even if the Internet no longer exists.

White House officials earlier this month announced a plan to accelerate the $994.9 million ERA program. The government has spent $425.2 million on the concept since 2002, but hardly any agencies are using the system, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said.

As of this month, 16 agencies are depositing electronic records at the Archives via ERA software, according to the latest status report. Under the expedited schedule, ERA will be the default conduit for transferring records by July 2011 and mandatory for agencies in 2012, the Archives says.

Video game consoles are now more than just for fun. An Air Force supercomputer, built from off-the-shelf components, includes 1,716 PlayStation 3 game consoles.

The machine, known as the Condor Cluster, is estimated to be one of the greenest computers in the world. And if that wasn't enough, it also is the 35th or 36th fastest computer in the world, said Mark Barnell, director of high performance computing and the Condor Cluster project at the Air Force Research Laboratory, reported Government Computer News.

One of the main reasons to use PS3 processors was cost. Condor cost about $2 million to build, compared to $50 million to $80 million for a similar supercomputer, the Air Force said in a news release.

The computer also can read 20 pages of information per second, which makes it about 50,000 times faster than the average laptop, CNET reported.

Initial tasks for the machine, located in Rome, N.Y., include neuromorphic artificial intelligence research, in which programmers will teach the computer to read symbols, letters, words and sentences so it can fill in human gaps and correct human errors, CNET reported.

The Government Printing Office and Google are now selling books together. GPO has teamed up with the Web giant to offer federal government titles in an e-book format for the first time.

The nearly 100 titles available now on Google's recently launched eBookstore include: the appendix for the Budget of the United States, Fiscal Year 2011; Remembering the Space Age; and Borden's Dream, a history of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, according to a GPO news release.

Google scanned and converted all the books for free, so the sale "didn't cost GPO or the taxpayers any money," said Davita Vance-Cooks, GPO's publication and information sales managing director, in a prepared statement.

It's also a good deal for readers. As reported by The Washington Post, a print copy of the 2011 budget is $77, while an e-book is $9.99. A PDF version, however, is free.

GPO will continue to add new titles, including the 2012 budget and the first volume of President Obama's public papers.

Google's eBooks is compatible with Android phones, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Web browsers and many other eReaders, including the Nook and Sony. One notable exception is Amazon's Kindle.

Dreamforce, which bills itself as the "cloud computing event of the year," has lined up quite a keynote speaker for the conference, which takes place in San Francisco next month: former President Bill Clinton.

But while Clinton may be speaking about the cloud, he doesn't want the people he's addressing to be in it while he's talking. ReadWrite Cloud reports that a public relations firm representing Salesforce.com, which is putting on the event, has sent out the following message about Clinton's participation:

"PLEASE NOTE: President Clinton's representatives have mandated that there be absolutely no reporting during his session. That includes live blogging, Tweeting, Facebook posting or use of any other social media. We understand the inconvenience this may present, but greatly appreciate your compliance. Thank you."

What's not clear is how the former president's team could enforce such a ban at an event filled with tech-savvy people.

(Hat tip: Los Angeles Times)

Last month, OMB said Performance.gov, the Obama administration's website containing data on agencies' progress toward meeting their high-priority goals, would make its public debut this fall. (Agencies already are using the site internally, uploading data on their efforts.)

Today, at a Government Executive Leadership Briefing, Shelley Metzenbaum, associate director for performance and personnel management at OMB, said the site wasn't ready for its public debut quite yet, but that it would be unveiled in the "not-too-distant future."

"You need to give us some time to kick the tires and see if the car will run and roll where we want it to run," Metzenbaum said.