After much thought, NOAA has released their new purchase card policies. Here is one of the highlights from the document:
“A funding document for each transaction must be in the card holder’s file (i.e. e-mail with funds availability approval or other document executed by the appropriate individual with funds commitment authority)”
My favorite response to this announcement (there have been several) has been the following:
“Please confirm that a funding document (e-mail) is now required for each transaction. For example, we have many field deployed technicians that maintain our facility infrastructure. Are you now telling us in order to purchase a $2.69 tube of caulk from Home Depot to seal a leaky window, the card holder must check excess property and other agency stock before they go to Home Depot? Next, they must call or e-mail the SRH Budget Officer, ask if funding is available, then receive another e-mail stating funds are available, write a fair and reasonable pricing justification, and then file each of these e-mails in a folder for the next seven years? And, if they need to go back to Home Depot for a second $2.69 tube of caulk, they must repeat the approval process and filing requirements?”
The crazy thing is the response appears to be correct. I wonder what the final cost for a tube of caulk runs Uncle Sam? Perhaps this is the real reason the government has $500 toilet seats on its books.
Posted by hackshaven on 29 Jun 2007 at 9:53 am under noaa | 1 Comment
Certain federal agencies that will remain nameless haven’t had the best luck in the press over the last couple years due to the unfortunate conception that their science is controlled by politics. In my mind, this is partly due to applying traditional PR models to a little understood web 2.0 society.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure this presentation went over like a lead balloon, but what better way to illustrate the point than sharing the slides with the rest of the world?
While not as recognized as the DOD or IRS, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is yet another fine U.S. government agency. Thankfully, they don’t collect taxes on virtual profits or monitor virtual gambling habits. Instead, they are more interested in understanding the *real* Earth and fostering an environmentally literate society.
That said, on occasions this distinction seems lost on the public as is evident from these types of communications:
[0:29] Jayne Mannonen: You are begging for government in a game?
[0:29] Jayne Mannonen: I guess it is better to advocate government in a game than in real life.
[0:29] Jayne Mannonen: just stay in this game, don’t get into real politics
After replying to Jayne, it became clear this person wasn’t interested in having a conversation. In fact, by writing this blog I am probably encouraging trolling. However, what better introduction to an informal poll conducted on NOAA’s island starting May 1st.
The question was asked, “Would you like to see NOAA expand its efforts in virtual worlds?” Over the course of the last 45 days 324 visitors responded with 94.1% saying “yes!” While by no means the final scientific answer, it should give agencies hope that people view virtual world technologies seriously and a reasonable use of taxpayer dollars.
Apparently, Jayne is in the minority. However, I should point out she didn’t exercise her right to vote.
As a tip of the hat to Prokofy Neva’s recent “FIC 2.0” list I noticed an interesting trend in some of the metrics Maya Realities is analyzing. The graph below shows how many times a visitor comes to a sim. A sharp upward turn near the left indicates a developer group or a dedicated group of regular visitors. In other words, a sim’s personal “fetted inner core.” Sadly, I don’t think Prokofy made Midnight City’s list.
If you care about the performance of the Second Life grid please lend your support to Cristiano Midnight’s Open Letter to Linden Lab. As Second Life and other virtual world platforms become business critical applications, these basic issues will need to be addressed.
Someone needs to build a virtual panorama camera head like the one described here:
Figure 1: Peace River Studios PixOrb camera head
The tools are now available to accurately control a virtual camera angle to the point where you could reconstruct a quicktime VR file composed of virtual snapshots.
Why would you want to do this? Right now virtual worlds face an entrance barrier. People hear about something exciting, but then realize they need to download software, sign up for an account, and literally learn how to fly. Tools like DTV allow export of virtual ventures to the unbelieving masses. They also allow for a greater number of visitors by taking advantage of traditional 2-D web infrastructure. A virtual quicktime VR generator would be another tool for such an arsenal.
While we are at it, why not a streaming quicktime VR setup that would update every time the virtual camera mount had enough photos to cycle the image? It would be like being in a virtual world without ever logging in to the environment.
Hypothetical situation: You fire up your web browser and surf over to Google. You’re looking for information about the University of Colorado and may even attend in the coming year. Pulling up CU’s site you select the option to visit their virtual campus and fire up the standard Second Life plugin. You appear in the middle of the campus clearly labeled as a prospective student. You are greeted by a student who offers to take you on a tour and assist in answering questions about the university. Poor guy, I hope they pay him well or at least give him extra credit for his class load.
You attend a virtual physics lecture and experience the consequences of getting too close to a black hole. Quantum mechanics never seemed so exciting! Next you attend a showing of Romeo and Juliet put on by the drama department. Finally you visit Norlin Library where you learn about the history of the university in one of the many holodecks.
How soon before universities put these types of tools into wide use?
Hypothetical situation: You come home after a hard day of work to find your deadbeat husband glued to the couch doing a grand total of zero. He hasn’t done a thing to help you, the house, or or relationship for as long as you can remember. Fed up with the situation and realizing you can do so much better, you snap.
Right click, about land, reclaim land. Right click, eject from land. Bye bye deadbeat. Right click, groups, eject from group. You visit the Second Life marriage web site and pay the 25 lindens to get rid of this bad excuse for a human being. Nevermind that your husband built your virtual house with his virtual hands and then deeded it to the two of you.
How long will it be before there is enough money in virtual worlds that a virtual marriage will require real life lawyers to sort out the mess left by lost love?
Hypothetical Situation: You visit PayPal’s virtual office and visit with a friendly bank teller who helps you with the day’s financial issue. You are at ease, you’ve talked with this particular avatar many times before and feel safe in the farmilliar and comfortable virtual surroundings. After verifying your identity she fixes your problem and you are on your merry way.
…Until you check your balance later that day. Zero?!? What happened? You quickly teleport back to the landmark and find to your horror PayPal’s offices have vanished. In fact this wasn’t PayPal’s office at all but a complex ruse reminisent of the old email phishing scams.
As more and more businesses comes to virtual worlds we need to start asking ourselves how we prove that the avatar you are doing business with is in fact an employee of the company in question. Proof must exist that the office you sit in is in fact an offical branch of the organization.
I visited a fantastic build today. A virtual capitol hill that had replicas of the hall of congress, the whitehouse, and the washington memorial. Rumor has it that recently there was even an anti-war protest. It looks and feels a lot like a trip to downtown DC. However, to the best of my knowledge there is no offical governmental sponsor.
Figure 1: Virtual Hall of Congress
What happens when branding of one organization is replicated in a different virtual space? What happens when an avatar sees a political protest or even material that leans politically to the left or right and thinks it is sponsored by the government? In the future, what happens when we walk into a bank office only to have it vanish the next moment?
Is anyone out there working on the technology to solve these questions?
