Government

Stanford University Professor of civil and environmental engineering, Anne Kiremidjian, compares the 7.0 magnitude earthquake to a nuclear bomb. She also goes into more detail about why the earthquake flattened so many buildings from an engineering standpoint.

I work for Acquia, an open source startup, that provides commercial support for Drupal, a widely popular social publishing CMS platform. As I mentioned before, Google believes that the future will be built on open systems, especially open source software and open information. The new Open Government Directive follows in those beliefs and has recently set out a mandate for agencies to open their websites, provide data in more accessible, open formats, and ultimately increase transparency and citizen participation.

President Obama announced Friday that it's administration will award $2.3 billion dollars through the Recovery Act Advanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credits to clean energy developers to enable over $7 billion in new manufacturing projects. The tax credits are in part of expedite clean technology advancement, but also to spur job creation through over 180 projects that could create tens of thousands of new jobs. “Building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future,” said President Obama. “The Recovery Act awards I am announcing today will help close the clean energy gap that has grown between America and other nations while creating good jobs, reducing our carbon emissions and increasing our energy security.”

TechCrunch reported today that stealth startup, C3, has raised $26 million dollars and now has Condoleeza Rice on their advisory board. C3 will be focused on Energy and Emissions Management - mostly likely in the business of providing corporations with carbon cap-and-trade management systems. The company is founded by Thomas Siebel, who sold his last company Siebel Systems to Oracle for $5.7 billion. Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham is also on board. What's so interesting about C3 and Energy and Emissions Management systems?

Problems are usually easier to solve when you can see them visually. Understanding of the data is even more important if you're figuring out how trends correlate to triggers and underlying variables. Perhaps this is why it's so difficult for us to enact solutions, on a personal and group level, to thwart plaguing issues such as world hunger, deforestation, poverty, and pollution amongst others. After stumbling across the topic of data visualization, I'm convinced that open data initiatives and open source web technologies will play a critical role to track and solve local and international issues.

Obama's new open government directive marks a turning point geared towards bringing government and citizens closer together. The new Obama administration mandate pushes U.S. government agencies to be more transparent by providing information in "open formats" online. Data has always been available to the public by request under the Freedom of Information Act. However, few people know and request the data because its usually an arduous processes, difficult to request and retrieve, and not particularly user friendly for building web applications.