« May 24, 2004 | Main | May 27, 2004 »
May 25, 2004
Going Tactical
When human beings are faced with unfamiliar situations, their natural reaction is to revert to things they understand. In business, the unfamiliar causes us to stop thinking strategically and go into a tactical mode. Going tactical is a danger for CIOs who need to think strategically to achieve their objectives. Don't let the unfamiliar force you into tactical thinking. Rather force yourself to stay strategic, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you.
Of course, sometimes self-control alone isn't enough. In a crisis, our "flight or fight" tendencies take over and we sink into the fray. That's when peers need to step in give the situation context and provide clear thinking. When everyone reacts tactically, the results are often disastrous.
04:44 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Tracking Legislation with RSS
The Utah State Legislature has a bill tracker with an RSS feed. You create a customer list of bills to track and then subscribe to the RSS to get updates in your feed reader. The only thing I'd wish for is some way to browse bills, but this is functional. There's a second application for tracking committee actions. Very cool!
04:02 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DG.O 2004: Studying eVoting
Paul Herrnson discusses eVoting
|
Paul Herrnson, from the University of Maryland is speaking on his research into eVoting machines. Paul's work is interesting to me because he is evaluating actual voting machines. In order to get access, he's been pretty careful about his participation in eVoting debates.
Electronic voting prevents invalid ballots and provides instant election results. There are also disadvantages: digital divide issues, power failures, and trustworthiness. The most knowledgeable people are the least suspicious.
Do we want a paper record? It improves voter confidence, but adds cost and complexity. There are also accessibility issues with paper ballots.
There are ballot design variations. One theme is to organize the ballot by office. Another theme is to organize it by party row. There are also straight party mechanisms in some ballots.
The research objective was to develop general principals from laboratory test, field test, and natural experiments. They used three types of test: expert review, usability tests, and natural experiments.
Experts looked at the quality of ballots, instructions, help commands, ease of navigation, feedback on under and over voting, ease of inserting voting cards, and the adequacy of review mechanisms.
In usability tests, users try the machines while being video taped and talking aloud about their intentions. These are reviewed and compared with the actual results and users are also interviewed about their reaction.
In field test, users are timed reading the instructions, and their responses to voting machine actions are noted. A post-voting questionnaire is also given to some voters.
Natural experiments are used to access impact of the new voter interfaces and procedures on spoiled ballots, residual votes, roll-off, split-tickets, and turnout. They also analyze the impact of variations in technology, ballot formats, and procedures among states.
The anticipated accomplishments are comparative evaluations of voting machines, ballot designs, and combinations of machines and ballots. The study hopes to develop principals to guide the design of voting machines and ballot design.
02:44 PM | Recommend This | Print This
DG.O 2004: NSF Programs Related to Digital Government
NSF Program Manager Panel
|
This morning's keynote panel was on "New Directions in Digital Government Research." The panelists were Dr. Michael Pazzani, Division Director, IIS, NSF, Dr. Suzanne Iacono, Dr. Sylvia Spengler, and Dr. Miriam Heller.
Dr. Pazzani spoke on the NSF structure and how PIs should work with NSF. There is a web site that gives statistics and other information about grants that have been given. Over the last five years the number of proposals to the IIS Division has increased from 2000 per year to over 5000. Not good news for anyone hoping for NSF money. They competition is fierce.
NSF looks at two criteria: "What is the intellectual merit and quality of the proposed activity" and "What are the broader impacts of the proposed research?" This latter criterion has been subject to some questions from PIs. He adds some clarifying questions: "To what extent does this advance societal goals?" "How will the research impact society?"
Well-written proposals that address broader impacts that are both innovative and achievable are most likely to get funded.
Suzi Iacnon is the program manager for ITR. ITR is charged with research into issues in information technology. The idea is to fund large, long projects. ITR is in the last year of a five year program as an NSF priority area. This year's focus is "IT Research fo National Priorities." The focus is on tools, techniques, systems, methods, theories, and models for large-scale integrated, distributed systems. Interdisciplinary proposals are encouraged. ITR is aiming for a 10% success rate this year (past years have been over 20%) with an average of $1.25 Million over four years. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time you spend understanding and learning about NSF and success in getting grants. Visit NSF and talk to the program director.
Sylvia Spengler is program manager for Information Integration and Informatics. III is a new program. There are two parts. The first is the Science and Engineering Informatics (SEI). Proposals in this area require both a significant problem in science as well as a significant problem in computer science that can both be addressed by the research. Collaboration encouraged. The second part is Information Integration. This includes reconciling heterogeneous data formats, web semantics, decentralized data sharing, on-the-fly integration, and so on.
Miriam Heller is program manager for Human and Social Dynamics. HSD is a cross-disciplinary program in its first year. The goal is to "stimulate breakthroughs in social science that expand the frontiers of our understanding of complex human systems at multiple scales of temporal, spatial, and organizational dimension focusing on the dynamics of cause, behavior, and decision-making by exploiting and enriching multiple disciplines." Past the buzz-words, she mentions agents and emergent behavior as examples of the kinds of things they're interested in. This year's topical emphasis areas are agents of change, dynamics of human behavior, and decision making and risk. Proposals much include at least one of the areas.
SEGR (small grants for exploratory research) are encouraged for innovative, "wild and wooly" ideas. These projects are generally higher risk than standard projects.
10:22 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Volunteer Programmers
If you're a Karras supporter and are willing to do a little volunteer programming over the next week, let me know.