Blog

I really feel like that combination of little, easy motor skills and clicking combined with feeling a little less bored for a minute is completely addictive to people. When the main way we communicate with each other is through all these things — and I’m not saying, “Don’t use Facebook, don’t use Twitter.” What I am saying is, if you’re not mindful about the amount of your attention that goes to thinking about and consuming those things, you’re not going to be making good stuff, either for that medium or elsewhere. That’s what I got kind of hung up on, when I finally realized that all I was doing was eating and producing potato chips all day long.

—Merlin Mann on becoming overwhelmed by useless online information

WASHINGTON–Former federal prosecutor Tony Valukas, now chairman of the Chicago based law firm Jenner & Block– and the Examiner in the Lehman Bros. Bankruptcy, is testifying Tuesday in front of the House Committee on Financial Services.

The hearing will focus on the Valukas report: “Public Policy Issues Raised by the Report of the Lehman Bankruptcy Examiner.”

Testimony starts at 10 a.m. Chicago time; links for Valukas hearing: C-SPAN and House TV.

Oh the irony! Internet Explorer’s XSS filter, which was designed to prevent cross-site scripting attacks, can be exploited to carry out attacks that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

XSS or cross-site scripting is a type of vulnerability that allows malicious attackers to inject client-side script into web pages. A successful XSS attack can even allow the attacker to gain unrestricted access to the user’s personal profile and other sensitive information.

The IE8 XSS Filter vulnerability affects almost every website that lets users create profiles. Google.com, Wikipedia.org and Twitter.com are some of the high profile sites, which are affected by this attack.

According to Jerry Bryant, a spokesman for Microsoft’s security response team, most of the problems were fixed in the MS10-002 security patch, which was issued earlier this year. MS10-018 cumulative security update for Internet Explorer made further changes to the XSS filter to reduce the security implications. However, not all of the issues have been fixed. Some websites like Google have begun to proactively disable the XSS filter. Until the issue is completely taken care of by Microsoft, regular Internet Explorer users may be better served by switching to an alternate browser.

Don’t miss these Related Posts:

• Microsoft Finally Fixes Internet Explorer Zero-Day Flaw – Patches 9 Other Vulnerabilities Along With It
• Critical Cross-Site Scripting Vulnerability Hits Twitter
• Microsoft Releases Workaround For Internet Explorer 0-Day Vulnerability
• Things Just Got Worse For Internet Explorer Users: Unpatched Exploit Code Released
• Stop Using Internet Explorer Right Now

Join Techie Buzz on Your Favorite Social Networking Sites

• Become a Techie Buzz fan on Facebook
• Follow Techie Buzz on Twitter

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released its plan for improving the agency’s transparency as part of the Obama administration’s Open Government Directive (OGD). The EPA was an early proponent of the new openness agenda, with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson calling for the agency to operate "as if it were in a fishbowl." The agency’s new Open Government Plan documents numerous ongoing and future actions that should continue the agency’s advance toward transparency and accountability.

<!–break–>

The Dec. 8, 2009, OGD instructed federal agencies to create, among other things, "a public roadmap" detailing how each agency will incorporate the principles of openness laid out in President Obama’s Jan. 21, 2009, transparency memo. Each plan is required to address how the agency will improve transparency, public participation, and collaboration with the public and other governmental offices. Additionally, each plan must include at least one "flagship initiative" that describes a specific initiative being implemented to advance the openness principles.

The EPA Open Government Plan chronicles numerous openness actions the agency had taken prior to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) release of the directive. The agency plan also lays out many additional actions planned for the next several months. Throughout the document, EPA affirms its intent to instill an agency-wide culture of openness and learn from these early actions, identify what works, and spread the best practices throughout the agency. Overall, the plan depicts an agency that is making transparency a true core value of its operations and supports this assertion with numerous examples and laudable plans for future community engagement.

Flagship Initiative

EPA has chosen to undertake as its flagship initiative a broad set of actions under the theme of community engagement. According to the plan, EPA chose this theme because of its "wide applicability – potentially influencing nearly every part of the Agency." The components of the initiative include plans to push out to the public information about environmental impacts to urban waterways; air and water test results; the pollution permitting process; and the rulemaking process. Two additional projects will use new technology to create mobile phone applications that provide human health advisories and product information. An agency work group will identify ways to inform and engage communities that lack electronic access to information, as well.

EPA’s approach to the flagship initiative is multifaceted, covering several agency programs, reaching different types of audiences, and addressing several aspects of agency operations. This is a prudent approach that should provide the agency with ample case studies with which to identify what works and what does not and why. It should also allow EPA to scale up the successful strategies across the agency.

OpenEPA Online Forum

In February 2010, EPA, in accordance with OMB instructions, launched a website, OpenEPA, an online forum designed to gather comments and ideas from the public on what should be included in the agency’s plan. EPA, as well as many other agencies, has decided not to close the forum now that the plan is released. Rather, the agency is keeping the forum open and will report on its progress in implementing the ideas on a quarterly basis. To date, the forum has received more than 200 ideas from the public.

The online forum channeled a large amount of public input to the agency, giving staff much to work with as they move ahead with greater transparency. One reason the forum functions as well as it does is the active involvement of the forum moderator. The moderator works to ensure postings are relevant to the agency’s open government activities and answers basic questions. The moderator can also serve the useful purpose of pushing information about the agency’s work out to the public, directing them to the new open government actions, data sets, and tools, and communicating what progress has been made so far. Such back-and-forth communication is crucial to building public trust in the forum. Including comments and responses from additional agency staff and senior officials may also improve the forum’s standing as a reliable tool for public engagement.

The agency plans to add to the OpenEPA website a section that asks the public to share innovative ways EPA data are being used. The posts will then be ranked by the public.

Measuring Success

The EPA is hoping to gather public comment on ways to judge how well its transparency initiatives are working. The agency’s Open Government Plan includes some ideas on what metrics may be used to evaluate the initiatives, such as the number of electronic town hall meetings, number of data sets and tools published, and the number of opportunities for public input on EPA actions. EPA recognizes that the criteria for measuring success will evolve as the initiatives advance. Many of the openness initiatives have never been tried before, and the tools for evaluating the implementation of government openness are neither fully developed nor tested.

Collaboration

EPA has included a number of ongoing and planned actions to expand its collaborations with other governmental offices and the public. One such action is the EPA’s work with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to link datasets for facilities that are regulated by each of the agencies. Such connections will help the public see a broader picture of the environmental, economic, and social performance of companies.

Other collaborations include a wiki for watershed managers to share best practices and learn about grant opportunities; a new mobile phone application that provides threat information to emergency responders; and a project with regulators in Massachusetts that provides real-time air quality data.

Access to Experts

The EPA has long been criticized for limiting the public’s access to program staff, especially program scientists with the expertise to comment in depth on pressing issues, such as the hazards of specific toxic chemicals or the impacts of climate change. The agency’s public affairs office has been regarded as an obstacle to journalists and other members of the public getting the information needed to ensure accountability.

The EPA’s plan does not adequately address the degree of openness warranted to agency scientists. According to the advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the Open Government Plans "would not have prevented even the most flagrant examples of censorship of scientists during the previous administration." UCS’s criticism, which is not limited to EPA, further notes that "many federal scientists are still not protected by policies that would allow them to speak freely with the public and the press." The idea receiving the most votes on EPA’s forum calls for the development of a media policy that ensures EPA scientists can share their expertise with the public and not fear retaliation by their supervisors or political staff at the agency.

The EPA’s plan only proposes to develop a "formal network of EPA staff experts to connect and respond to public inquiries." Otherwise, there is no mention of an agency-wide communications policy that would provide greater access to staff scientists and encourage the freer exchange of ideas between staff scientists and the public.

Other Potential Weaknesses

The agency’s plan also does not mention how EPA will address the widely acknowledged problem of excessive trade secrets. Businesses submitting information to EPA frequently choose to hide all or part of the information under the label "confidential business information," which prompts the agency to conceal the data from the public. This privilege is overused by industry to inappropriately hide data, such as health risks from industrial products, from the public. Although EPA has taken important recent steps to address this, the agency should devise a plan to comprehend the scale of the problem and correct it.

Additionally, the agency recognizes the importance of informing stakeholders about its open government projects, but the plan’s strategy for disseminating information about the openness actions is sparse. The initiatives in the plan must be publicized throughout the agency, including regional offices, to state and local governments, and to the public, especially to those citizens who may not already have experience using EPA tools or participating in EPA programs. Many noteworthy initiatives either have commenced or are planned for the near future. Their success depends to a large degree on how well the abundant stakeholders become familiar with them. The EPA’s plan for the wide adoption of openness principles relies largely on the 2003 Public Involvement Policy. The addition of plans for more specific actions that mesh the 2003 policy with the 2010 Open Government Plan could prove useful.

EPA plans to review its Open Government Plan every six months, making revisions as necessary, which is far more frequently than the every two years called for by OMB. The public is encouraged to comment at www.epa.gov/open.

Photo in teaser by flickr user seagers, used under a Creative Commons license.

Emerging markets will continue to outpace the developed world in 2010, leading to global economic growth of 3.7%, says Nouriel Roubini, the New York University professor also known as Dr. Doom for correctly predicting the 2008 financial crisis. 

In his latest economic outlook, Mr. Roubini said Asian countries excluding Japan will grow 8.2% this year, while Latin America expand at a rate of 4.3%. 

Advanced economies, meanwhile, will grow just 2% in 2010, he said, with the U.S. and Eurozone expanding 2.8% and 0.9%, respectively.

David Pett

It was dubbed a “once in a lifetime opportunity” by UKAirshowReview, and I’ve got to agree—these photos of 13 Tiger Moth planes flying over Gatwick airport, with commercial planes grounded below due to volcanic ash, are amazing. More »

With the Region IV Championships starting Wednesday for the Track and Field teams, let’s take a look at Harper’s athletes in this preview from Head Coach Renee Zellner.

Mel Gibson’s Russian ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva confirmed the couple’s split at her first public appearance since the breakup was revealed.

Grigorieva, a 39-year-old Moscow-born singer, gave birth to the married Oscar-winner’s daughter Lucia last October — only to be unceremoniously dumped last week. Oksana spoke briefly about the split during a press conference to announce a concert for the Give A Life charity in Moscow on Monday.

“I can tell you that we have split up, suddenly and recently, unfortunately, I cannot give you the reason. But you will find out everything quite soon. Here is the official version: We split up by mutual consent and we will raise our daughter together. She is currently with my mother in my Los Angeles home.”

Oksana also confirmed that she is having a hammer-and-sickle tattoo – which Mel, 54, suggested for her – removed from her ankle.

Harper’s Men’s and Women’s track teams competed against 25 schools this past weekend at Illinois Benedictine College, with the Men placing 7th overall.

Individual highlights include:

According to a “trusted source” reporting to Engadget Mobile, AT&T is slated to get the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 in fiscal week 30 of 2010, which would coincide with the late July/early August release date.  Of course, things are always subject to change (AT&T has dropped Sony Ericsson devices in the past) – and in the wireless world, releases can change on a last minute basis.

While it’s a rumor in the finest sense of the word, an 850/1900 MHz 3G version of the X10 does in fact exist in the wild (the one that we reviewed was one of them), so it’s entirely possible.  Add that to the fact that AT&T is building out its Android options, and it sounds reasonable to me.  Let’s hear from you – does the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 interest you, or are you holding out for another Android device?  Sound off in the comments!

Via Engadget Mobile

Could the Samsung Galaxy S, brilliant screen and all, follow in the Nexus One’s footsteps and launch on all 4 major US Carriers? That’s what Forbes is reporting. According to Broadpoint.AmTech analyst Mark McKechnie the Galaxy S will be on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, & T-Mobile "sometime later this year". If true, that’s a huge move by Samsung because nearly all of US mobile phone subscribers will have a chance to use, and thus be wowed, by the Galaxy S.

Remember, the Galaxy S is a phone that is ridiculously fast and has the most beautiful of screens (if you need a reminder, check our hands-on). And though it’s as ‘flagship’ a device you can get, Samsung still needs to stack the odds to compete with the Evos and Incredibles of the Android world. Having all 4 carriers on their side is certainly one way to do it.

I find this story interesting for both the technological perspective and the political perspective. Let’s get the political perspective out of the way first. This is an article that has been circulated by the Associated Press.

It was picked up and published by Iran’s Tehran Times online newspaper. The article itself is about how a group of Israeli scientists have developed a method for storing hydrogen fuel using small glass filaments. I may be naïve, but in my mind this shows that scientific knowledge is not constrained by political boundaries.

Now, let’s move on to the technological perspective. A group of Israeli scientists working for C.En Ltd. in Geneva, Switzerland have developed a method to use glass filaments the size of a human hair to store H2.

According to the article, “These 370 glass capillaries are bundled into a glass tube called a capillary array, about the width of a drinking straw. The scientists say 11,000 such arrays will fuel a car for 400 kilometers (240 miles), take less than half the space and weight of tanks currently installed in the few hydrogen cars now available.”

One of the problems of using metal hydride tanks for storing hydrogen fuel has always been the weight. Adding weight to the vehicle not only wears down the vehicle more quickly but takes away from its power and range. Lighter tanks mean more power, range and less wear and tear on hydrogen cars.

Yesterday I talked about researchers using magnesium nanoparticles to store hydrogen and today its glass filaments. Just by the shear numbers of scientists and researchers attacking the hydrogen storage problem from different angles, we cannot help but to have a breakthrough in hydrogen tank technology sooner rather than later.

The final book club installment is still percolating, don’t worry. I’ve been traveling like a crazy person, which has pushed blogging into the background. In the meantime, here are a couple of interviews elsewhere in the infosphere.

First is a New York Times interview with me. It’s very short, but we cover a lot of ground — science education, time travel, entropy, the movies, and my love life. Such plenitude of topics in a tiny piece will necessarily lead to compression, and Jerry Coyne is already complaining that I give short shrift to the complicated reality of aging — and he’s right!

Second and more fun, in Wired I am on the other side of the interviewer’s table, talking to Lost creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. How cool is that? That was a great time, as we chatted excitedly about time, narrative, wormholes, fate and determinism, the role of science in television, and so on. These guys have given an incredible amount of thought into their show at every level — the characters, the mythology, and what it all means. And they wanted to ask me questions about cosmology and how scientists think, which I’m always happy to talk about. I got hooked on the show only after participating in Lost University, but now Tuesdays at 9:00 p.m. is the high point of my week. Only a few more episodes to go — which means that people who haven’t seen it can finally order the complete DVD selection, which is really the way to see it. (Just note that Season Three drags a bit, especially near the beginning.)

So simple, and so incredibly delicious.  Roasting at high heat brings out the natural sweetness in cauliflower, and the sweetness is balanced by salty Kalamata olives.  A great rustic dish that’s equally good as an appetizer or side.

I remember hating cauliflower as a kid because the school cafeteria always boiled the life out of them, and when they’re boiled that long, they stink.  Literally.  So I’d given up cooked cauliflower and opted instead to always eat cauliflower raw, usually with hummus or other dip.

The first time I tried roasted cauliflower as an adult, I couldn’t believe my senses.  It didn’t SMELL like the nasty cauliflower of my youth.  It certainly didn’t TASTE like dead veggie.  And thus my opinion of cauliflower was changed overnight.

I think roasting has become one of my favorite ways to cook, ever since becoming a mom.  It’s fast, it imparts great flavor to foods, adds terrific color, and best of all, is hands-free.  Meaning I can let something cook away in the oven while I tend to my active toddlers.

I happened to have some extra Kalamata olives on hand and decide to toss them in with the cauliflower.  I think they really pair nicely together, and the olives added enough saltiness such that I didn’t need to add salt.  If you skip the olives, sprinkle lightly with salt, or add some grated Parmesan after roasting.

Roasted Cauliflower with Olives Recipe

1 (12 oz) pkg Cauliflower Florets, or 4 cups cauliflower cut into florets
4 tsp olive oil
1/2 tsp 21 Seasoning Salute, or your favorite seasoning
1/2 cup olives, about a dozen

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Toss cauliflower with olive oil to coat evenly.  Sprinkle on 21 Seasoning Salute and stir evenly.  Mix in olives.
3. Place seasoned cauliflower on a baking sheet, spreading evenly in a single layer.  Roast for 20 minutes, flipping halfway through baking time to roast evenly.  Cauliflower will be crisp-tender.  If you prefer softer cauliflower, continue roasting for an additional 10 minutes.
4. Remove from heat and serve.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Hands-off cooking time: 20 minutes
Serves 6

A record-setting Fifth Avenue rent this week adds to the narrative that both New York City and luxury are back. Japanese clothier Uniqlo has reportedly signed the fattest retail lease contract Manhattan’s priciest street has ever seen. The company will pay $300 million over 15 years. Is the recession over for Fifth Avenue?

Bloomberg reports:

“It’s just another reinforcement that retailers have to have a Fifth Avenue presence,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of retail leasing, marketing and sales for Manhattan- based Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. “Fifth is going to be their face to the world.”

The deal will be the highest aggregate amount paid to lease retail space in New York City, beating Gucci Group NV’s $16.5 million in annual rent for about 45,000 square feet at Trump Tower three blocks north, Mendelson said.

The Uniqlo contract weighs in at $20 million per year — significantly more than Gucci’s rent. The Japanese retailer has a significant global presence, though is little known in the U.S. To be sure, this Fifth Avenue store hopes to change that.

So why is Uniqlo paying such a high price for a presence in the U.S. just as the nation begins to come out of a deep recession? Because it must believe the recovery is well underway for both Manhattan and luxury. That looks like a smart bet.

Much of New York City’s recent success has to do with the Wall Street bailout, which left its economy in better shape than it would have otherwise been. New York City’s labor market has been improving significantly in 2010. From February through March, the city saw its number of unemployed decline by over 15,000 residents. That might not sound like much, but it’s more than any other major city listed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ state report. The city also saw its unemployment rate decline from 10.4% in January to 10.0% in March. That puts its rate lower than that in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, DC, and Miami.

Its residential real estate market has also largely recovered. The Uniqlo contract signals that commercial real estate might be making a comeback as well. Retailers may again be willing to pay up for Manhattan store fronts.

For luxury, the downturn also could be over. Bubble-driven recessions often end with the wealthy recovering first. That’s what we’re seeing here. The millionaire’s club increased its ranks last year. Asset prices, especially the stock market, are improving. That benefits the rich more than the low- and middle-classes. So it should really come as no surprise that luxury retailers are eager to capitalize on the wealthy’s rebound. And where better than the on the U.S.’s best known street for luxury in what may be the nation’s fastest recovering city?

Jobs are so 20th century. The future is part-time.

Whatever you want to call it — contracting, contingent labor, part-time work, gigs, freelance — independent work is on the rise. While the government does a poor job at consistently counting the self- and marginally-employed workforce, the available evidence all points to booming trend. According to various polls, almost a third of the labor force participates in freelancing, independent or part-time work.

Today the Times reports that the recession is adding to the appeal of working contract-to-contract without being tied down to a cubicle. Rather than destroying the old work model, the downturn is accelerating the transformation already underway, as white-collar workers grasp for hours, whether or not they come with benefits:

In just one snapshot of what is going on, the number of people who
describe themselves as self-employed but working less than 35 hours a
week because they cannot find full-time work has more than doubled
since the recession began, reaching 1.2 million in December 2009,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics … As the economy continues its halting recovery and employers’ confidence
remains shaky, economists believe that it is likely that the ranks of
these kinds of workers will continue to grow.

If this sounds like a positive development to you, then congratulations, because you are almost certainly very young! Twentysomethings might embrace a job market that lets them mix and match jobs to make a career. Older Americans with families and dependents would prefer positions with a little more support. The freelance market has grown in the last decade into something like a skyscraper built on string and haystacks: a lot of workers with zero foundation.

Independent workers rarely qualify for unemployment insurance, health insurance, or wage theft laws. So when freelancers go out on their own, they are, rather literally, out on their own. In economy where the marginally attached are truly marginal, perhaps that’s a government failure one can ignore. But as the gigs go mainstream, policymakers will have to think about counting and providing for this shadow labor market. Even intrepid independent workers need a net when they fall.

Of the $38.6 billion worth of contracts and grants obligated to Iraq and Afghanistan during fiscal year 2008 and the first half of fiscal year 2009 by the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State (State), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), roughly $1 billion went to contractors to help administer some of the contracts and grants. A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report finds that DOD, State, and USAID often enter into these administration contracts haphazardly without checking for potential conflicts of interest or ensuring adequate oversight.

<!–break–>

The government’s extensive reliance on contractors throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is nothing new. DOD, State, and USAID have used contractors for everything from reconstruction efforts to providing security for government officials, all with mixed success. As this most recent GAO report shows, sometimes the government even turns to contractors to help with administering other contracts and grants. This can include "on-site monitoring of other contractors’ activities, supporting contracting or program offices on contract-related matters, and awarding or administering grants."

Clearly, conflicts of interest could arise, as government decisions on contract and grant administration, which represent "the government’s primary mechanism for assessing whether it is getting the expected products or services from contractors or whether grantees are performing in accordance with grant programs," might be "inappropriately influenced by, rather than independent from," a contractor’s actions.

GAO found that these three agencies lacked any sort of overarching strategy in deciding when to use contractors to support contract and grant administration. It turns out that more often than not, "individual contracting or program offices within the agencies" made the decision "on a case-by-case basis." Moreover, contracting officials within DOD, State, and USAID often chose to outsource administration functions because they lacked a sufficient number of government personnel or in-house expertise to oversee the contract or grant.

Because none of the three agencies has a strategic workforce plan that incorporates how, when, or why they should outsource the administration of a contract or grant, GAO also found that DOD, State, and USAID often did not do enough to mitigate conflicts of interest or oversight risks. Although the three agencies "generally complied" with statutory and policy guidelines, they often did not utilize their broad discretionary powers to limit these risks as much as they could.

One example cited in the GAO report is illuminating:

Joint Contracting Command – Iraq/Afghanistan (JCC-I/A) awarded a $1 million contract to support the Armed Contractor Oversight Directorate in Afghanistan. The contractor, which itself was a private security contractor, was assigned a number of responsibilities related to oversight of private security contractors…[N]o clauses were included in the solicitation or contract that precluded the contractor from bidding on other contracts. After the support contract had been awarded and performance begun, the support contractor competed for and won a separate contract to provide armed guard services in Afghanistan.

Eventually, JCC-I/A counsel became aware of the situation – that a contractor would be responsible for its own oversight – and canceled the administration support contract, but the event sheds light on the lack of effort by the agencies to prevent conflicts of interest.

The other problem that GAO found with DOD, State, and USAID not employing a strategic workforce plan that reflects the outsourcing of contract and grant administration was a lack of sensitivity to contractors performing tasks closely related to inherently governmental functions. Without adequate oversight, administering contracts or grants can inappropriately influence the "government’s control over and accountability for decisions that may be based, in part, on contractor work." Not only can performing those functions present a conflict of interest for a contractor, but the government can easily lose control of critical decision making processes, as well.

GAO also found that the three agencies have made improvements to their lackluster policies on outsourcing administration duties. DOD is currently working on policies to better address both organizational and personal conflicts of interest for contractors. DOD acknowledged that the Army’s contracting workforce is 55 percent of what it was in the mid-1990s, while the amount of work outsourced has jumped from $11 billion to $165 billion. On April 19, DOD told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that it would hire more contracting specialists and increase training for those overseeing contracts. State is examining a better policy on organizational conflicts, and USAID already has a decent system for addressing a contractor’s personal conflicts. But the bigger question seems to be whether the government can ever adequately control accountability and oversight risks when outsourcing functions like this.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy is currently reviewing a change to the inherently governmental policy. Good government groups like OMB Watch would like to see tasks so closely related to inherently governmental functions like contract and grant administration in-sourced by default, if not completely removed from the list of tasks the government can outsource. It seems that the government only perpetuates its inability to in-source a function by continuing to outsource it. Moreover, there is too fine a line between performing an inherently governmental action and one that is only closely associated. Bringing contract and grant administration under the "inherently governmental" umbrella would bring much-needed oversight to government contracting.

If you’ve seen a teenager in the last two years, then you’ve seen a teenager texting. Seriously, I can’t think of a situation in the last couple of years where I saw a teenager without a cell phone. The teenagers in my extended family send text messages seemingly all day long, every day. Now the Pew Internet and American Life project has released a pretty comprehensive analysis of teen texting behavior.

According to the report, 88% of teenagers with cell phones are texters. “Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month.” I usually send less than 100 texts per month, so these kids are really texting!

Most of the report confirms my anecdotal observations, but there’s some interesting nuance in the findings. Girls text more than boys, and a quarter of teens have made or received a phone call during class. The most surprising item, to me, was that “Teens whose parents limit their texting are also less likely to report being passengers in cars where the driver texted behind the wheel or used the phone in a dangerous manner while driving.”

It always amazes me to watch teens text. The back-and-forth aspect of texting makes certain kinds of conversation more fun (say, flirting); but it’s so inconvenient for any kind of meaningful dialog. I don’t understand why the kids are willing to string out a conversation across minutes and hours, and dozens of texts, when a simple phone call of the same content would last less then five minutes. I guess I’m getting old…

We got our first good look at Microsoft’s upcoming smart feature phones — the KIN ONE and KIN TWO — a week back. While the company let us man-handle the phones, Microsoft was quiet about the actual specs. But Microsoft Germany apparently thought that was silly and just released all the technical info on the two phones via its Facebook Fan Page. How nice.

KIN ONE

• QWERTY Slider
• 2.6-inch TFT QVGA 320×240 capacitive touchscreen
• 5 MP CMOS camera with anti-shake function, auto focus, and dual LED flash
• Mono speaker
• 256MB DDR RAM
• 4GB flash memory
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
• USB 2.0
• WLAN 802.11 b/g
• 1240 mAh battery

KIN TWO

• QWERTY Slider
• 3,4-inch TFT QVGA 480×320 capacitive touchscreen
• 8 MP CMOS camera with anti-shake function, auto focus, and dual LED flash
• Stereo speaker
• 256MB DDR RAM
• 8GB flash memory
• Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
• USB 2.0
• WLAN 802.11 b/g
• GPS
• FM Radio
• Accelerometer
• 1390 mAh battery

Now all we need is the cost of the phone and which data plan Verizon is going to require.
[via the unwired]