Technology

NASA held a Green Aviation Summit this week at its Ames Research Center to discuss ways to make air travel more efficient and environmentally friendly. “As the world travels even more, we’re going to have a very serious global warming issue, as well as lots of other environmental impacts of …

The White House has launched the new Challenge.gov, an online platform provided by the General Services Administration that allows federal agencies to post contests aimed at increasing public involvement with the government. As part of President Barack Obama’s call for an open government, agencies were called upon to leverage challenges …

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday introduced four new application programming interfaces that make FCC data available as web services, and unveiled a community website for “citizen developers” that provides code and tools for using the data sets. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the APIs and website at the Gov 2.0 …

NASA has unveiled NASA App HD, a new mobile application for the iPad providing videos, stories and NASA information all in one place. The application is free and a smaller-screen version can also be downloaded for the iPhone and iPod touch. The customizable application contains launch information and countdown clocks, …

The U.S. market for ambulatory electronic health records will double from $1.3 billion in 2009 to an estimated $2.6 billion in 2012, according to a study published this month by Frost & Sullivan. The report said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Medicare and Medicaid EHR …

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday launched an innovative performance management system called FDA-TRACK to monitor more than 100 program offices. The system is designed in line with the President Barack Obama’s commitment to transparency, public participation, and collaboration in the government. FDA-TRACK measures data from key performance measures established …

In a move signaling the pervasiveness of social media, the Department of Defense has recently allowed service members to use social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter at work. While DoD monitors individuals’ use, it is also using them to ensure consistency in organizations’ online footprint. The new policy requires …

The Department of Defense’s first-ever director of media affairs and social media czar has left the Pentagon, Wired reports. Price B. Floyd, who is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University, was tapped last year by DoD Secretary Robert M. Gates to improve the way the department communicates …

Technology is becoming one of the fastest-growing career fields, with computer-related jobs topping the list and engineering evolving into a promising field for government contractors, according to the Department of Labor. “In the information technology sector, we have seen a significant growth in information security,” Edward Wilde, director of talent …

While green IT has been a hot topic in the last few years, real progress has been slow, and the industry is highly unlikely to reduce its carbon emissions by 2020, according to a new survey. Sponsored by Fujitsu, the “Green IT: The Global Benchmark” surveyed more than 600 CIOs …