States lurch toward health care reform

States are moving toward health care reform but not without significant challenges. Nearly every aspect of federal health care reform legislation has been politicized and yet federal deadlines loom large. Federal health care reform legislation created new and signficant requirements for states to comply with leading many states to launch court challenges claiming overreach andRead… Read more »

Back Away From the Pronouns!

While pronouns have their place in the work world, writers want to maintain precision with their e-mails and memos to avoid confusion. So while I will concur that using pronouns can avoid verboseness, here are two pronouns to use sparingly and the reasons why. 1. Be precise rather than use “it.” If your memo reads,Read… Read more »

Code Across America: A Week of Civic Innovation

From February 24 through March 4, hundreds of passionate citizens around the country will come together to “Code Across America” – to make their cities even better. In over a dozen cities, there will be hackathons to build civic apps, “brigades” to deploy existing ones, unconferences to plan for the year ahead, and meetups toRead… Read more »

GovBytes: Criminal Identification Improves in Western States

Several western states have come together to improve their integrated fingerprint databases for a better criminal identification system. The states which participate in the Western Identification Network (WIN), a nonprofit responsible for the program, include; Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The improved system will provide high-definition palm and fingerprint matching.Read… Read more »

Award Shows = Joke

Federal workers get beat up a lot. They haven’t had raises to keep up with inflation in two years, likely won’t get them for at least one more years, and Congress continually bashes feds. (It’s not fun when your bosses constantly critique you). However, this isn’t an “oh it’s so tough” post. Others, like stateRead… Read more »

The Homework Quandry

Whether you teach elementary school or graduate school, the effectiveness and purpose of homework has long been debated. Should you ask, most people would probably tell you that homework is important and promotes learning and mastery of course material and in fact, research can be cited to support this intuitive assertion. For example, a studyRead… Read more »

Bird Flu Research Details To Be Released

Despite fear that terrorists could the information to start epidemics, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced they would release the “full details” of experiments done last year by research teams, at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the virus known as H5N1, that made the deadlyRead… Read more »

How Critical Is Clarity on Government Projects?

Sometimes pronouncements get made and distributed in email format about a change in direction, etc. When this happens, I sometimes find that the person sending the message doesn’t have an understanding of the recipients. They have not put themselves in the “other person’s shoes”. Therefore, the message is confusing because key points are not addressed.Read… Read more »