Data at Center of Gun Purchasing, Requests Information on Supplier's Business Practices

Data Centers are the center of the data for companies.  WSJ has a post on Data being at the Center of evaluating gun purchases.

Jersey City has begun requiring gun companies that supply its police department with weapons to disclose more about their business practices, an effort that is being watched by law-enforcement agencies in other cities.

Gun-control advocates and firearms industry representatives said Jersey City is the first municipality in the nation to demand such information. Questions include how firms dispose of old weapons and comply with background-check laws, and whether they make semiautomatic rifles—often called assault weapons—for sale to civilians, according to bid documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

This is an interesting shift to try and change the gun industry.

Activists hope that public police departments can leverage their purchasing power to push gun manufacturers to invest in safer weapons and not sell to retailers that have track records of selling to criminals.

USA Secretary of Interior Chooses Lake Sammamish as 1 of 8 Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships

There is a new (in 2013) Secretary of Interior who is the ex CEO of REI, HQ in Seattle.  Sammamish Review covers the Secretary of Interior’s visit to Lake Sammamish to announce the Urban Wildlife Refuge Initiative.

The partnership will help connect people in the Seattle metro-area to the great outdoors and, in particular, efforts to restore kokanee salmon runs in the Lake Sammamish Watershed.
“Children have become increasingly disconnected from nature,” Jewell said. “The Lake Sammamish Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership seeks to reverse this trend by providing meaningful opportunities for urban residents in the region, especially young people, to get outdoors and engage in hands-on learning and conservation of kokanee salmon and its habitat.”

Below is a picture of Lake Sammamish looking to the South with Mt. Rainier in the background.  Where the little red rectangle is where I have lived for over 20 years.  Bald Eagles are regularly in trees.  Otters are in the lake eating crawfish.  And sometime in future hopefully more kokanee salmon.

NewImage

144,593 People Like Zuckerberg's Call to Obama to stop being a Threat to the Internet

Mark Zuckerberg has a post with 144,593 likes after 6 hours on Facebook.

I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.

So it's up to us -- all of us -- to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I'm committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

 
Like ·  · 6 hours ago via Paper · 

Wonder what would happen if you could wind back time to 3 years ago when President Obama sat next to Zuckerberge at a Silicon Valley dinner.  Can you imagine what Zuckerberg would say to Obama now?

A White House official described the meeting as "part of our ongoing dialogue with the business community on how we can work together to win the future, strengthen our economy, support entrepreneurship, increasing our exports, and get the American people back to work," noting prior to the event, "The President and the business leaders will discuss our shared goal of promoting American innovation, and discuss his commitment to new investments in research and development, education and clean energy."

See the photos below, followed by the guest list.


Image credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Improvement in Internet Trust, EU Commission VP Neelie Kroes speaks at Cebit, More Regulation Coming

The data center industry is largely unregulated, but with the maturing of any industry comes the eventual regulation as governments are concerned about public safety.

re/code has a post on EU Commission VP Neelie Kroes.

Neelie Kroes Calls Snowden Revelations a Wake-Up Call — “Let’s Not Snooze Through It”

March 10, 2014, 3:19 AM PDT

By Ina Fried

Ina Fried

ETHICS BIO

ARTICLES

 

European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said that Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying should serve as a wake-up call that there is a new reality that includes cyber spying and cyber warfare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snowden sent the wake up call to the public.  Most of the insiders aren’t surprised by what Snowden has shared.  It just wasn’t public knowledge.

She called on Europe’s political apparatus to create a strong directive around cyber security.

“Snowden gave us a wake up call; let’s not snooze through it,” Kroes said.

Can you see regulations coming?

Joining Kroes in a panel discussion, computer science professor Wendy Hall said that it makes sense that society is struggling to figure out what policies make sense, noting it took centuries to create social norms for the offline world.

“We’ve got to figure out how to live in the digital world in an open society,” Hall said.

The Three Rules of Obamacare's Trauma Team

Time has a an article on the Trauma Team that rescued Obamacare.

Monday, Mar. 10, 2014

Obama’s Trauma Team

By Steven Brill

 

Last Oct. 17—more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House chief of staff Denis McDonough came back from Baltimore rattled by what he had learned at the headquarters of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency in charge of the website.

McDonough and the President had convened almost daily meetings since the Oct. 1 launch of the website with those in charge—including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, CMS administrator Marilyn Tavenner and White House health-reform policy director Jeanne Lambrew. But they couldn’t seem to get what McDonough calls “actionable intel” about how and why the website was failing in front of a national audience of stunned supporters, delirious Republican opponents and ravenous reporters.

One excellent point are the three rules that most of us know work well for an effective team.  In this case it was the Trauma Team to make Obamacare work.

Dickerson quickly established the rules, which he posted on a wall just outside the control center.

Rule 1: “The war room and the meetings are for solving problems. There are plenty of other venues where people devote their creative energies to shifting blame.”

Rule 2: “The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accurate information, we have gone off the rails, and I would like to know about it.” (Explained Dickerson later: “If you can get the managers out of the way, the engineers will want to solve things.”)

Rule 3: “We need to stay focused on the most urgent issues, like things that will hurt us in the next 24—48 hours.”

Can you imagine the disruption of the chain in command?  An example is the executive Zients who chooses to use the Apollo 13 analogy.

Zients isn’t a techie himself. He’s a business executive, one of those people for whom control—achieved by lists, schedules, deadlines and incessant focus on his targeted data points—seems to be everything. He began an interview with me by reading from a script crowning the team’s 10-week rescue mission as the White House’s “Apollo 13 moment,” as if he needed to hype this dramatic success story. And he bristled because a question threatened not to make “the best use of the time” he had allotted. So for him, this Apollo 13 moment must have been frustrating—because in situations like this the guy in the suit is never in control.