Vivek Kundra at the Announcement for the “Applications for Democracy” Technology Contest Winners

Although the mainstream media pretty much glossed over it (because covering our country’s IT infrastructure is too complex for them), I was eager to hear all about President Obama’s choice of federal Chief Information Officer, but even this Whitehouse Press Release was thin on details:

Vivek Kundra will bring a depth of experience in the technology arena and a commitment to lowering the cost of government operations to this position. I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations. As Chief Information Officer, he will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible.

It appears there was some surprise at the Kundra pick, as many assumed he would be Obama’s choice for the new position of Chief Technology Officer. After spending some time learning about Kundra’s accomplishments, Kundra seems like the perfect pick for CIO. As Washington DC’s CTO, Kundra made a wealth of useful data freely available online in a variety of formats complete with RSS feeds.

Kundra also came up with Apps for Democracy, a competition that invited developers to program applications that weave the District’s data into useful information services. The two winning programs Carpool Mashup Matchmaker and DC Bikes, Your Guide to Biking in DC, would have cost millions in taxpayer dollars for Washington DC to build in-house, but through Kundra’s initiative, they were built for a tiny fraction of that. As Kundra explains the success of harnessing emergent phenomena, “You have Darwinian innovation in the consumer space, and that fundamentally lowered our operating costs.”

Vivek Kundra’s IT for Government philosophy is part of his efforts to build a Digital Public Square. This concept is synchronous with the concept of democratizing government data. That is, the government should simply give us all the raw data and leave it to citizens to extrapolate information from it. Don’t just give us a graph of world warming trends or tablespoons of temperature data, give us the whole shebang*.

How will this play out in the federal government? Soon America will be getting a another domain name to add to the list of new URLs President Obama’s been adding to our online resources, data.gov. This site will offer a very different solution than President Bush’s National Information Exchange Model, which focuses on federal agencies making data available to each other, Kundra’s website should simply dump as much data as possible produced by all federal agencies in its rawest form, with tags, search capabilities, and RSS feeds.

Wired magazine has set up a wiki for brainstorming the best practices data.gov should implement, outlining the data already out there and examples of sites that serve as working models of what to strive for.

This is a very exciting initiative. Data itself is not information, but I am certain that once this ocean of data is freely available to American citizens, the IT geeks of the world will discover the information within it.

* Not really the whole shebang. See here, here, here, and here for the whole shebang.

Note: Watch this space for positions to open in the federal government hiring to work on this project.

The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. – Thomas Huxley

The recent news of scientists identifying the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II’s missing children, confirms they were executed in 1918 and ends nearly a century of fanciful stories and speculation about the possibility of his youngest daughter, Anastasia, escaping the rest of the family’s fate. A woman in Charlottesville claiming to be Anastasia was really just crazy, and the imaginative, lovable 1997 Don Bluth film romanticizing her life is now overcome with this grim reality.

Nicholas II with his wife, four daughters and son (1910)

Science has a long, distinguished history of taking beautiful ideas and smashing them to bits. Take, for instance, Zeno’s Paradox, which states that in order for a person to walk from point A to point B, they must cross point C, halfway between them, and point D, halfway between A and C, and point E, halfway between A and D, on and on until a person must cross an infinite number of points to get to B. How are we able to travel through space if we must cross an chasm of infinity to go anywhere?

Zeno’s Paradox

More than 2,000 years after the question was posed, calculus solved it. As the points a person must cross approaches infinity, the distances between them grows infinitely small; thus, an entire school of philosophical thought was rendered irrelevant.

As are so many other seemingly profound questions. Nature or Nurture? It’s both. The plasticity is innate, and the innateness is dynamic. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? They co-evolved. Next question. Did Adam and Eve have navals? Mitochondrial Eve did. Now shut up and sit down.

This slaying of fanciful ideas makes science out as a villain of sorts, crushing the dreams and aspirations of great thinkers. This characteristic of science contributes to the Two Cultures Divide between the sciences and the humanities, where the scientist stereotype finds the humanities stereotype ungrounded in reality and the humanities stereotype finds the scientist stereotype cold and unimaginative. Science always seems to be telling the humanities people what isn’t possible.

But that’s just the stereo type. The reality is that science has expanded our horizons, opened more doors of possibility than it has close. One need only compare science fiction literature to fantasy to see that this is true. Science has shown us the edge of the Universe, given us vitual worlds, extended our lifespans and our horizons. When we abandon our fanciful notions, science rewards us with more inspiring visions.

“Wow. If I’d only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today… provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars.” – Jon Stewart

Thank the Cosmos for The Daily Show. I’ve been meaning to sit down and quantify just how incredibly wrong all those idiots like Jim Cramer, Rick Santelli, and the Fast Money Team are on economic matters, but Jon Stewart’s team has summed it up much more entertainingly than I would have, however possibly a little more anecdotally.

The best part of the clip starts at 02:49:

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Economists got no Science.… Economists got no Science… Economists got no science…

In his lecture, The Humble Programmer Dijkstra argues that programming is the only activity in which humans have to master nine orders of magnitude of difference between the lowest level of detail and the highest:

Hierarchical systems seem to have the property that something considered as an undivided entity on one level, is considered as a composite object on the next lower level of greater detail; as a result the natural grain of space or time that is applicable at each level decreases by an order of magnitude when we shift our attention from one level to the next lower one. We understand walls in terms of bricks, bricks in terms of crystals, crystals in terms of molecules etc. As a result the number of levels that can be distinguished meaningfully in a hierarchical system is kind of proportional to the logarithm of the ratio between the largest and the smallest grain, and therefore, unless this ratio is very large, we cannot expect many levels. In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 10¹⁰ or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artefacts are both possible and necessary.

A computer programmer codes to the microsecond of processing time it takes for a line of code to execute, and to the hours of processing time an entire program may take to accomplish its task. In fact, in today’s world of computing, with applications like SETI@home and concepts like cloud computing we are talking about an even greater scope than Dijkstra imagined in his 1972 lecture.

Freedom Located atop the dome of the United States Capitol Building Sculptor:Thomas Crawford Credit: dbking

Last year, in attending my brother’s spiritual wedding, I had the opportunity to experience an all-night hug-fest celebrating Amma the “Hugging Mother,” a Hindu spiritual leader, who travels the world hugging thousands of people a night and doing charity work. Despite being an atheist, I did take the opportunity to receive a darshan, a blessing and a hug, from Amma, as well as accepting a personal mantra from her.

The idea behind the mantra is that it is a sentence, in Indian, that is chanted to oneself during the day or in times of meditation. I won’t share my personal mantra because that will cause it to lose its power (Apparently this will happen even if you don’t believe in it), so instead I offer the Buddhist mantra:

In the interest of entertaining a thought without accepting it, I practiced my mantra, reciting it in my head and aloud for periods of time, seeing what it was like. And you know what? It was incredibly relaxing. The chant instilled me with a sense of peacefulness. It quieted my mind, clearing it of the clutter and distractions. I haven’t tested this yet, but I bet it lowered my blood pressure too.

There was nothing special about the mantra, nothing magical that instilled this sense of peace. It was the repetitive act, the chanting itself, that worked these physiological effects on me. So rather than practice religious chants that were mostly meaningless to me, I tried chanting one of my favorite science slogans, “Knowledge is power.”

…in Latin of course. Latin is the Sanskrit of science and Enlightenment ideals. Chanting this ancient phrase in Latin brought the same sense of tranquility and relaxation as the mantra Amma had bestowed, but it also brought the additional benefit of reinforcing an important ideal.

Ockham’s Razor, the rule of simplicity in Scientific Hypotheses, can be stated in Latin three different ways, giving us the option to choose the one we like to chant best:

There’s also the classic, “I think, therefore I am,” and the variation, “I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”

Or go with a summation of the first law of thermodynamics with, “There’s no free lunch.”

Or Kant’s Enlightenment battle cry, “Dare to know!”

Or the predecessor to Newton’s famous demure, “Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Or you can roll your own with an online translation tool, converting your favorite science quote to Latin as your personal mantra. Here’s my favorite Carl Sagan quote and slogan for this blog:

Or you can go with something a little bit closer to home; after all, some of the greatest thoughts of the Enlightenment originated right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Happy Chanting… for Science!

My favorite part of President Obama’s Address to the Joint Session of Congress last week:

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.

Just a quick post to get the remaining miscellaneous photos from the NEMO Science Center online. There was elecricity, engineering, and water-power exhibits, as well as various displays that didn’t fit into any particular category, like how the center’s roof had some displays that were architectural, but not exactly science-focused.

In the below photo, Vicky is reflecting light from a mirror to solar panels on the bottoms of suspended cardboard planes to power their propellers and make them fly.

Vicky Powering Solar Planes to Fly

See the complete flickr set here.