Life of a Student at Tufts University
My February Resolution will continue to be my March one, with an emphasis on better food consumption.
I still hope to do the One Hundred Push Ups challenge.
As to why I’ve been sparse on my blogging – I’ve come to realize that both doing things (the work of a student) and writing about those things, regularly, is difficult.
What are your recent goals?
A friend of mine is involved with a hilarious group at NYU, and I’m a huge fan of their latest song, “Spr Pkn (Super Poke)”. It makes a statement about Facebook and its culture, but really, it’s just super well done.
Warning: Note Safe for Work.
It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.
~ President Barack Obama, last night.
Back in August I published a post about my dealings with the technical support at CyberPower. It was an angry rant about a faulty product and sloppy technical support.
Prompted by a reader (thanks Kevin!), I have an update.
After several Mac OS X updates and more troubleshooting, I returned the UPS for a full refund. CyberPower was very fast in issuing the refund and I’m pleased.
I do maintain, however, that the knowledge of the technical representative about the Macintosh was very limited. In the end, it all worked out.
I’m a little behind on the Monthly Resolutions project, I admit. It’s eight days into the month and I’m just now updating on my progress. Also, I slipped up a little bit last month by choosing a goal that was only feasible while at home.
This month, my goal is to put a focus on fitness in my life. It’s something I’ve been neglecting terribly – very terribly. I’m going to start small by establishing a daily routine to get back in shape, but hope to move onto the one hundred push ups project later this month or perhaps in early March.
I’m very serious about this goal and am confident I can pull it off. We shall see…
This is a post I wrote for a course I’m taking at Tufts this semester called Digital Democracy. I’ll do a blog post about my second semester at Tufts very soon, I promise!
…
One of then-Senator Barack Obama’s promises on the campaign trail was to increase government transparency across the board. His transition team and the inaugural committee acknowledged that promise by publishing information and soliciting feedback on Change.gov andPIC2009.org, respectively.
On January 20, an open government geek’s greatest dream came true – the launch of the new WhiteHouse.gov, complete with an executive Memorandum with the subject “Transparency and Open Government“. More technically-minded users jumped for joy at the mostly symbolic gesture of a greatly simplified robots.txt file for the new site compared to that of the Bush administration. For those that don’t know, robots.txt is a de-facto standard for opting directories and pages out of a search engine; all major search engines obey robots.txt at this time. By excluding fewer files from search engines, the site is theoretically more open.
Already, these accomplishments are fading into prolog. It’s time to look into the promise and challenges of continuing towards this goal of transparency.
Ars Technia, a premiere technology news blog, has recently been testing the waters of blogging about technology, transparency, and policy in the new administration. In a veryrevealing piece published today, Julian Sanchez moves past the idealism and excitement of Open Government and explores the expectations of open government advocates. Although I couldn’t possibly cover this topic more comprehensively than Julian did, I’m compelled to comment on what I considered the most compelling portion of the article.
Julian wrote:
While he joined the general chorus of praise for Obama’s new Freedom of Information Act directive, Sohn also hoped the government would continue its progress toward “affirmative disclosure”—putting information online automatically, without waiting for a FOIA request. That, he noted, is a bigger task than it might appear, since it means every government employee who creates any sort of document would need to write with an eye toward future disclosure, which would entail (for instance) marking private or personal information that might be included in a strictly internal document, but should be redacted before public release.
When getting caught up in the promise of transparency and its eventual societal benefits, it’s easy to think that President Obama can flip some switch and the executive branch will suddenly be open. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Although a United States Senator at the time, Mr. Obama campaigned as a “Washington outsider” who would bring “change” to the government. It seems that, at least for achieving the goal of transparency, change is an institutional and cultural paradigm shift. It’s going to take a lot of work, and maybe time, before we see any real progress.
The piece ends:
So take heed, watchdogs: A spiffy new website and a presidential smartphone are good signs, but they’re posted at the side of a very long road.
On the flip side of technology and its influence on the new administration, talk from the President about Open Government encourages the public to hold him to his other promises. The most prominent example of this in the last week is Politifact’s Obameter, a website tracking whether the President is following up on the 500+ promises he made during the course of his campaign. A milestone this week was President Obama outright breaking his first promise.
Hopefully the flow of information will be two-way in the White House. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, sites like this can keep Obama to task if the right people are reading.