Preparing to talk big data with chief data officers – Plus the 7 Gov Stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• Are hackers the biggest threat to government cybersecurity professionals? Insiders? And what can be done? Insights on a new survey from SolarWinds Chris LaPoint.

You can find all of our programs online: DorobekINSIDER.com and GovLoop Insights at http://insights.govloop.com.

But up front: Preparing to talk big data with chief data officers

There is so much talk about big data these days. On Wednesday on GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER LIVE, we are going to talk to some people at the front lines of big data — chief data officers.

In prepartaion for the discussion, in fact, I’ve been reading the book The Case for the Chief Data Officer: Recasting the C-Suite to Leverage Your Most Valuable Asset.

Among my guests on Wednesday include Jeanne Holm, the evangelist for Data.gov and Dianna Anderson, the chief data officer for the state of Colorado.

Among the topics I thought we would cover:

• defining big data

• does this really help government do its job better? (There was a fascinating post that came out of our GovLoop big data event about how Santa Cruz is using big data for predictive policing. On GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER, we had first spoken to Santa Cruz police back in 2012.)

• is there a connect between open data and big data?

• what do chief data officers think about big data?

• what is needed to make big data a reality?

• what is a data officer anyway?

What else should we be talking about?

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. NextGov: Federal Websites Avoid Heartbleed Risks, DHS Says – “The government’s main public websites are not at risk from the security vulnerability Heartbleed, the Homeland Security Department said Friday, although many of the sites — including HealthCare.gov — were built on systems that were susceptible. Officials declined to provide details on how sites hosted by compromised systems, such as Akamai Technologies and Apache servers, were immune from the possibility of hacks exploiting the Heartbleed bug. The National Security Council denied a Bloomberg News story Friday that the National Security Agency knew of and exploited the coding glitch.”

2. Federal News Radio: NASA Fixing Security Holes in Oversight of Foreign Nationals – “Under pressure from the agency’s congressional appropriators, led by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), NASA turned to the National Academy of Public Administration for an outside look at whether its security controls were adequate to prevent foreign nationals who have inside access from exfiltrating sensitive information.”

3. The Blade: Ohio Finds ‘Probably Connection’ Between Earthquakes in Mahoning County and Hydraulic Fracturing – “The Ohio Department of Natural Resources on Friday announced that recent earthquakes in Mahoning County were likely caused by hydraulic fracturing or fracking.”

4. GovExec: Uncle Sam Has Shrunk the Gender Pay Gap Over the Past 20 Years – “The federal government has narrowed the gender pay gap by 17 cents on the dollar among its employees over the past two decades, with women earning 87 cents for every dollar a man earned in 2012, according to a new study.”

5. NetworkWorld: IRS Misses XP Deadline, Pays Microsoft Millions for Patches – “When Microsoft terminated official support for Windows XP on April 8th, many organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another operating system. But not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers have been upgraded to Windows 7. They’ll now be forced to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Using Microsoft’s standard rate of $200 per PC, it’ll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer.”

6. Defense News: Lawmakers Says USAF Plans to Cut A-10 Flights and Training Are Illegal – “Two key senators say US Air Force plans to stop A-10 flights and training in October are against the law.”

7. GovExec: HHS Secretary to be Replaced by OMB Chief – “Kathleen Sebelius is resigning as Health and Human Services secretary in the wake of the disastrous HealthCare.gov launch, a senior administration official confirmed Thursday. President Obama will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the White House budget office, to lead HHS.”

DorobekINSIDER water-cooler fodder… yes, we’re trying to help you make your water-cooler time better too…

• Govies Search for Talent on Twitter [Government Technology]: Some government officials are finding Twitter a fast, cheap and easy method of advertising new job openings in their agencies.

• The Most Dangerous Word in Tech – innovation [The New York Times]: We see “innovation” almost as a force of nature, a relentless outcome by the work of tech entrepreneurs. In the process, several economists warn, we’re losing sight of social realities about innovation.

• Science Is Running Out of “Great” Things To Discover [Slashdot] John Horgan writes in National Geographic that scientists have become victims of their own success and that ‘further research may yield no more great revelations or revolutions, but only incremental, diminishing returns.’ The latest evidence is a ‘Correspondence’ published in the journal Nature that points out that it is taking longer and longer for scientists to receive Nobel Prizes for their work. The trend is strongest in physics. Prior to 1940, only 11 percent of physics prizes were awarded for work more than 20 years old but since 1985, the percentage has risen to 60 percent. If these trends continue, the Nature authors note, by the end of this century no one will live long enough to win a Nobel Prize, which cannot be awarded posthumously and suggest that the Nobel time lag ‘seems to confirm the common feeling of an increasing time needed to achieve new discoveries in basic natural sciences—a somewhat worrisome trend.’ One explanation for the time lag might be the nature of scientific discoveries in general—as we learn more it takes more time for new discoveries to prove themselves.