Yesterday I was on a little field trip in in Vicksburg, Mississippi, invited by DHS Science & Technology’s Army Corp of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to witness the demonstration of their final levee plug prototype. To arm you with some random US trivia over the holidays, there are over 100,000 miles ofRead… Read more »
About 3 times per month my City Council in St. Petersburg meets to discuss and vote on local issues. Aside from knowing the name of my district representative, I generally have no idea what he’s voting on or if I should re-elect him. That’s a shame because (forgive the web-speak) he’s dealing with hyper-local issues:Read… Read more »
Think twice before joining an unsecured wireless network. It just became ridiculously easy to hijack confidential information from your agency and co-workers. If I was on the same open WiFi network as you – sitting outside your home, at your office (if you still didn’t put a password on your router), a Starbucks, an airport,Read… Read more »
I have a new guilty pleasure: ChaCha. In a nutshell, text any question you have to ChaCha (242-242) and a human on the other end will Google it and text you back the answer at no charge. While it’s great for folks without smartphones, it’s also addictive for those who do – knowing a realRead… Read more »
I’m intentionally blogging this part on Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT or body scans) separate today as it addresses an opinion on TSA practices, whereas the first portion offered a potential solution to the problem. Why body scans don’t worry me today: I believe it’s a fair tradeoff for added security. I respect that you mayRead… Read more »
Chris Bennett’s Crisis Blog (CB2) Part 1 of 2 on the TSA Debate The TSA pat-down situation is making national and GovLoop headlines this week as images of naked body scans and videos of screaming children being frisked circulate through millions of travelers and non-travelers alike. In today’s CB2 I’ll propose a partial solution toRead… Read more »
It’s always great when you discover something that’s not only fun but can make your job easier. Recently I became aware of a service named GroupMe that enables you to instantly define a group of friends or co-workers and text them all at once with a single number. To give it a try, I setRead… Read more »
Since not everyone is a fan of Facebook DC (you should be), I thought I’d repost this release about FB fans being a great predictor for election results. This hits home as after having a recent conversation with the online campaign manager for Charlie Crist at a fundraising event about how they need to stepRead… Read more »
Today’s CB2 will be brief, following a great time at the Philly GovUp last night. I came across a crisis-related article on CrunchGear last week that really piqued my interest: Which Cellphone Did The Yemeni Terrorists Use? If you’re not familiar with last Friday’s incident, explosive packages from Yemen arriving on air cargo planes wereRead… Read more »
I’m glad I extended my annual Halloween trip back home to Philly to make last night’s GovUp at R2L in Liberty 2. Driving through my old stomping grounds at Penn made me want to move back home, but temps in the 30s scared that thought off for now! What I loved about the Philly GovUp:Read… Read more »