Economic :: 4 Tips to Beat the Budget Heat

It’s August and the air conditioning just stopped working. You’re sweating profusely, your kids are screaming and you have no idea how to fix it. It costs $500 to repair, $1,000 for a basic new one and $5,000 for the deluxe version. What do you do?

You haven’t gotten a raise in three years, you just added $1,000 in monthly day-care costs and your car is making noises. Sound familiar? 

Many Americans face this situation daily, and local governments face the equivalent with their budgets — existing infrastructure needs repair; new projects and requirements keep growing; and revenue is flat to decreasing.

So what do you do? One answer is to use the strategies of personal finance.

Think of your personal buying habits. In life, sometimes your budget shrinks — you lose your job, change to a lower-paying industry or add a new expense. But you make changes — you take fewer vacations, buy generic products, delay purchases and shop at Target instead of Nordstrom. You may seek out independent job opportunities and focus on optimizing what you already own, such as refashioning old clothes and rediscovering hidden gems in your closet, instead of buying new clothes. In addition, you become smarter about new purchases; you get more quotes and really understand what’s needed when getting something repaired.

So why don’t we do the same in government? As agencies are met with flat and shrinking budgets, they should take an individual budgetary approach and optimize how they are buying and using resources:

1. Maximize what you already own

Just like going through your closet and finding some great clothes you bought and forgot, do the same by going through your inventory. With most software licenses, you already have access to amazing things that you probably aren’t using. Many of these licenses could be combined to create new solutions.

2. Get more quotes

 When money is tight, you wouldn’t buy a new air conditioner for your home based on one quote, right? Governments also should get multiple quotes and promote their RFPs instead of merely posting them. Work with vendors like Onvia and Deltek to ensure your local procurement is distributed nationally. Make sure the best candidates know about your RFP and encourage them to apply. And just like you would negotiate when buying an air conditioner, negotiate with applicants.

3. Reduce the barriers

 If you asked five air conditioner repairmen to fill out 20 different forms to win your business, guess what — no one would do it. Part of the reason it is hard to get into government procurement is that it’s expensive. Each state and local government has different rules and regulations, and meeting them costs lots of money. Each requirement also adds more cost — companies spend thousands of dollars just for potential to win the business. If we reduce the barriers to requirements, it allows contractors to offer lower prices and more competition.

4. Prioritize 

When the budget is tight at home, priorities are necessary. That vacation to Disney World gets pushed to next year as the air conditioner becomes the priority. The same is true with local government — agencies must prioritize the nice-to-haves versus the essentials. Also, look for replacements — downscale the Disney World trip to a local amusement park. The large enterprise system may be met with a nimbler, simpler service.

As funds shrink, government should embrace the same budgeting techniques we use at home — when the budget is low, you make changes. You stretch each dollar, maximize what you already own and look for sales. And sometimes you still buy a new air conditioner because it’s worth the long-term investment.

Technology :: Hackathon Aims to Clear the Air

In late April, more than 200 data scientists from more than 10 cities around the world spent 24 hours in London designing solutions to help improve the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Air Quality Index.

People who suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases use the index to avoid dangerous levels of attack-triggering outdoor air pollutants, and the hackathon’s goal was to help build local early warning systems to accurately predict dangerous levels of pollutants on an hourly basis.

“We wanted to use open data, but more than that, we wanted data that was meaningful in terms of social change or influence,” said Carlos Somohano, a data scientist for Data Science London (DSL), about the choice to use an environmental data set from Cook County, Ill.

 

 

The Data Science Hackathon was created and hosted by DSL and Data Science Global in collaboration with Kaggle, a platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions. The activities were part of Big Data Week, a series of community led events and hackathons involving big data.

David Chudzicki, data scientist for Kaggle, said Chicago’s thriving data science and machine learning community was involved in the event from early on. “Cook County is making a big drive toward open gov data,” he said, “so the collaboration with them providing the data set occurred quite naturally as we were searching for a good problem for the hackathon.”

24-Hour Turnaround

If the hackathon can contribute to positive health-care outcomes, then the event will prove more than worthwhile, said Chris Roche, regional director for Greenplum, a division of EMC, which sponsored the event. “What I like about the hackathon and the data science community is the accelerated innovation that they create.” 

On the whole, the competition led to some great insights into the problem and started people looking at this type of data, Chudzicki said. Cash prizes totaling 3,000 pounds (approximately $4,700) were awarded between a global winner and a London-based winner.

The winning solutions were submitted and ranked through Kaggle’s competition platform that provided real-time leader boards, allowing participants to continuously keep track of their scores. 

Though the top winner, Ben Hamner, was ineligible for any prize money as a Kaggle-employed data scientist, his solution is notable in that he claims to have barely glanced at the domain before training the model — meaning he could devise a winning solution without knowing anything about the actual issues going on in Cook County. To him, he was working with truly random data.

“I was surprised that domain insight wasn’t necessary to win the hackathon,” Hamner said. “Key insights have been crucial in many of our longer-running competitions.”

While it’s too early to know what his solution could mean for Cook County, the EPA and citizens who follow the Air Quality Index, the solution is now undergoing a period of thorough exploration and development. 

Melbourne’s James Petterson won the global first prize and, like Hamner, spent little time looking at the data itself. He said he was surprised to achieve such a high-quality result without having spent time trying to understand the data set. 

“If you’re a data scientist, let the data talk,” said DSL’s Somohamo. “You don’t have to be a domain expert. The competition proves that a good data scientist doesn’t have to know the domain context to achieve results.”

The code for both winning models discussed above, as well as that of the local London winner, has been made publicly available by Kaggle and Data Science London, meaning it’s accessible to anyone who wants to explore it and continue working on it. Development may well continue outside the expected channels.

Currently, predictive models drafted at the hackathon are being reviewed to determine their relevance at the local, state, U.S. EPA and National Weather Service levels. “We’re looking at who is most appropriate to use this,” said Cook County CIO Greg Wass. “Once these solutions are refined, they may go up the chain. We’ll see how far we get with this thing.”

Raising Awareness

“One of our missions is to promote awareness of data science and the dissemination of data science knowledge,” Somohano said. “It’s a new thing here in the UK, but in the U.S., it’s already getting quite trendy.” 

The best way to raise awareness and involve local and international data science communities was through a hackathon, determined Somohano and his DSL partner Stewart Townsend.

“The concept of a ‘hackathon’ has deep roots in Silicon Valley as an event that combines innovation and competition in a very short, intense period of time,” Chudzicki said. “While the term ‘hacker’ has negative connotations from being used to describe computer security crackers, the meaning in the community is someone who delights in solving problems and building new things.”

The EPA data set was chosen because air pollution affects people regardless of their location, even if the specific data used in the competition was sourced from one U.S. city.

“We worked in partnership with Big Data Chicago to make this happen and to share our environmental data sets,” said Cook County Deputy Director of New Media Sebastian James.

“We were asked if we could get the specific data about air quality to the event organizers. They needed a big data set to work with, something that served a public need and was very topical.”

As Data Science Global organizes and promotes future events, DSL’s Somohano said that other subject matter and data of high relevance to government — such as health care — will be the objective. 

Health-care provision is one of the major concerns of governments worldwide, said Greenplum’s Roche. “Serious respiratory disease affects over 700 million people globally and chronic disease accounts for over 80 percent of all primary care consultations.”

Technology :: Spectrum: Smart Pavement, A Cure for Filthy Phones

A Cure for Filthy Phones

Seventy-five percent of people use their phone in the bathroom, so it’s no wonder that researchers found the following:

• 16% of phones had E. coli (commonly found in fecal material)
• 82% of phones had other harmful bacteria  

The invention to clean up the mess: PhoneSoap, which uses ultraviolet C (UV-C) light to reportedly kill 99 percent of those germs. Users simply put the phone in the device for three to five minutes. UV-C light is safe and used in the health-care industry to sanitize materials, the manufacturer says. PhoneSoap retails for $40, and was developed using seed money from crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Source: InformationWeek

Smart Pavement

Cities seeking smarter infrastructure might want to follow Madrid’s use of iPavement: Wi-Fi paving stones that deliver free Internet. What makes these calcium carbonate stones intelligent is that each contains a 5 GB microprocessor chip, mesh network and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth connectivity. The wireless walkways are powered by underground cables, and are more affordable than building out a Wi-Fi network, since they can be interspersed and easily replaced. The technology comes with its own operating system, apps and a real-time alert system. Source: Wired

Spray-on Power

Researchers at Rice University have developed a spray-on lithium-ion battery that one day could be purchased at a local home improvement store. The rechargeable batteries are flexible and have been tested on various surfaces. In one experiment, nine ceramic tiles that were spray-painted with the battery lit up 40 LED lights. One drawback: Spraying currently must be done in an oxygen-free environment.  Source: Yahoo

Technology Trade

Meet Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s new CEO. She’s a Google alum with more than 13 years of tech experience under her belt. Mayer’s projects include Google Maps, Google Doodle curation, Zagat and many more.

This Wiki Writes Itself

Wikipedia has become the digital destination for millions of people seeking information. But the site doesn’t write itself, which is the kind of wiki the Pentagon needed. Enter Raytheon BBN Technologies, which built a prototype system that gathers news from 40 websites in English, Chinese and Arabic, with more on the horizon, and provides analysts with useful summaries of global news and events, and profiles of people in near real time.

Technology :: Shoring Up Cybersecurity

Network World just released its list of the “biggest security snafus of 2012 — so far.” That list confirms what you probably already knew: It’s been a tough year for the folks who safeguard sensitive and valuable information.

In the public sector, health and Medicaid data for nearly 800,000 people was stolen from a Utah Department of Technology Services server in March. In May, hacktivist group Anonymous released 1.7 GB of data stolen from a U.S. Justice Department server. And in June, the University of Nebraska said a data breach exposed more than 654,000 files of personal information.

Cybersecurity is on my mind for two reasons. First, as I write this, I’m returning from a trip to the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a 2-year-old nonprofit that tracks cybercrime activity and shares threat information and best practices with state and local governments. The CIS is led by Will Pelgrin, former director of cybersecurity and critical infrastructure for New York state. Pelgrin led cybersecurity efforts in New York for nearly 10 years, and founded the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a cybersecurity information sharing and monitoring group that includes all 50 states.

 

Pelgrin’s shift to nonprofit status was driven at least partly by the desire to boost collaboration and information sharing among government and private companies. He says cross-agency and intergovernmental collaboration is easier now that the CIS is seen as a neutral third party.

Security pros like Pelgrin say we’ll never block 100 percent of cyberattacks. But teamwork and information sharing among private industry, government agencies, security firms and law enforcement can reduce the odds of serious trouble.

That brings me to the second reason I’m writing about cybercrime: For several years, Congress has struggled to pass legislation to strengthen cybersecurity standards and improve sharing of threat information between sectors. It’s currently crunch time for one such measure, the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which observers say must clear the U.S. Senate in August to become law this year. 

The bill came under fire from Republicans wary of imposing new regulations on U.S. businesses and from privacy advocates who fear the measure would let companies hand over users’ personal information to the feds without permission. Some Republican senators created a competing bill focused on information sharing, but with fewer regulations.

As of late July, the issue was unresolved — but it demands resolution. Privacy rights must be respected, and businesses can’t be overburdened. But protecting information and critical infrastructure from cybercrooks is vital to the nation’s future. Maybe the CIS offers some ideas for information sharing and cyber-readiness we can all live with.