Photo credit: House Democrats

Alan Grayson, the man, the myth, the fiery Democratic congressman from central Florida: over on Salon, I look at his fight to get a second term in the House, with an eye to what lessons the rest of the Democratic caucus might take from his successes.

Yesterday was fairly major day in the long story of the World Wide Web. The archives of FEED magazine were put back online, in their rightful place. Back in the mid-1990s, FEED was the embodiment of the crazy idea dreamt up by a few visionary folks, namely Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman, that posited that good writing both long form and in micro chunks could thrive online, including as a fodder for the new type of communities and new styles of collaboration made possible by the nascent web. It was, simply put, good stuff. The challenge for those of us who think that there's great, creative work to be done with words online is to not let FEED stand as a high water mark. Instead, FEED can be to us both inspiration and a competitive nudge. That's easier, of course, when you can lose many hours wading through its archives.

The top-notch folks over at the American Prospect were kind enough to give space to a profile I put together on Carl Malamud — activist, technologist, open government advocate, and one of the more interesting people I've come across in politics. Do give it a read, if you have an interest, and you might also pick up a print copy, a.k.a. this month's issue. I don't know the particulars, but I imagine it's good for folks if people actually buy the ink and paper version of the magazine.

The cleverer part of my part reminded that it's a good idea to post links here to pieces I've written elsewhere.

In that spirit, over on the American Prospect, you're invited to read an explainer-type piece on yesterday's DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision that more or less stripped the Federal Communications Commission's authority over broadband.

"Social Networks as Foreign Policy" was included in the New York Times Magazine's Year in Ideas issue for 2009, and for those of you whose ears I've bent about the topic, it's a nice encapsulation of an intriguing development. Also, there's a mention of that State Department trip to Mexico City I got a chance to go on, the one dedicated to exploring ways that Mexicans might possibly be better equipped to combat the terrible narco violence there.

One of the funniest things I've seen in quite a while. I must have watched it at least a dozen times so far. Here's the full four web video series featuring the morbid Swedish writer August Strindberg and his high-pitched little friend, Helium.

This probably should have been done sometime before 10:30 on Wednesday night, but better late than never. The good folks over at the American Prospect have invited me to guest blog on their blog TAPPED all week this week. Stop on by.

I did the Live from the Left Coast radio program last week, where we talked about the use of technology in political protests. I'll let you in on a secret. Host Angie Coiro has a nice way about her. She's passionate without being combative or demeaning. Imagine that.

Feel free to ignore my contributions to the program, but my fellow guest, John Harris from the Center for Democracy and Technology, had some great stuff on how other countries, namely China, have a habit of taking what the U.S. does as permission to silence their own protestors.

ABC Radio National — described to me as the NPR of Australia — had me on its "Future Tense" program to talk about the thinking behind digital diplomacy. Through the miracles of editing, I think it turned into a relatively painless primer on the ideas driving the application of technology to foreign policy. Enjoy.

When, this spring, Congress began actively considering a plan that had been floating around the House of Representatives for the far side of a decade, there was outcry from both the political right and the sustainable, local, small-bore food movement. In short, the proposal would focus the federal government's limited attention to food safety on ingredients that actually pose risks, with a underlying framework where, for the first time, food in this country is treated as if it has a history as it moves from the farm or factory to our stomachs, a history worth knowing and keeping written record of.

The conservative reaction against the measure is rooted a certain nervousness about government involvement in food's business side. But it isn't an anti-intervention reflex, at least not completely. Control over the food supply factors into more than a few theories about the point at which government control becomes objectionably repressive. Then there was the reaction from small farmers, foods, and advocates of the idea that agriculture should be able to thrive outside the industrial supply chain. That response was perhaps even more strongly negative. Their worry is that small agriculture just won't be able to bear up under anything other than government's lightest possible touch. Both angles, both threads of concern are honorable and respectable. But they are also ones that shouldn't, really, be triggered by what's actually in this bill (at least the House's version, which is the only that has pass thus far). That's the argument I explore for the good folks at Science Progress, in a new piece — one they actually let me start with an anecdote about astronauts:

Once you’ve made the decision to encase a few men in a metal pod and shoot the vessel into space, what you don’t want is to have something they eat make them sick. Astronauts in space already have suppressed immune systems, and the added complications of food poisoning and its attendant symptoms—dehydration, diarrhea—when both water and privacy are limited likely goes without saying. That’s why, in the late 1950s, just as NASA was embarking on the era of manned space flight, the agency went to its food supplier, Pillsbury, with a request: ensure that the food we’re feeding astronauts won’t have enough bacteria and other contaminants to make our astronauts sick. Pillsbury came through, crafting a science-based system that, for the first time, examined step-by-step how food was made, rather than the final product, with a focus on the riskiest ingredients and processes. By 1959, the problem of food-sickened astronauts was effectively kicked.

Back here on the ground, though, it’s still 1958.

Hope you'll give it a read. (Photo by snowriderguy under a Creative Commons licence.)

I'm not much of a science fiction fan. Somehow I missed out on that aspect of the geek formative experience. That said, I finished Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" this weekend, and it was just awesome. The parts were he predicts a social-capital driven future are prescient, no doubt. But the added bonus is that Doctorow is a great observer of the human animal. A taste:

Crowds were light until I got right up to Main Gate and the ticketing queues. Suppressing an initial instinct to dash for the farthest one, beating my ferrymates to what rule-of-thumb said would have the shortest wait, I stepped back and did a quick visual survey of the twenty kiosks and evaluated the queued-up huddle in front of each. Pre-Bitchun, I'd have been primarily interested in their ages, but that is less and less a measure of anything other than outlook, so instead I carefully examined their queuing styles, their dress, and more than anything, their burdens.

You can tell more about someone's ability to efficiently negotiate the complexities of a queue through what they carry than through any other means — if only more people realized it. The classic, of course, is the unladen citizen, a person naked of even a modest shoulderbag or marsupial pocket. To the layperson, such a specimen might be thought of as a sure bet for a fast transaction, but I'd done an informal study and come to the conclusion that these brave iconoclasts are often the flightiest of the lot, left smiling with bovine mystification, patting down their pockets in a fruitless search for a writing implement, a piece of ID, a keycard, a rabbit's foot, a rosary, a tuna sandwich.

No, for my money, I'll take what I call the Road Worrier anytime. Such a person is apt to be carefully slung with four or five carriers of one description or another, from bulging cargo pockets to clever military-grade strap-on pouches with biometrically keyed closures. The thing to watch for is the ergonomic consideration given to these conveyances: do they balance, are they slung for minimum interference and maximum ease of access? Someone who's given that much consideration to their gear is likely spending their time in line determining which bits and pieces they'll need when they reach its headwaters and is holding them at ready for fastest-possible processing.

This is a tricky call, since there are lookalike pretenders, gear-pigs who pack _everything_ because they lack the organizational smarts to figure out what they should pack — they're just as apt to be burdened with bags and pockets and pouches, but the telltale is the efficiency of that slinging. These pack mules will sag beneath their loads, juggling this and that while pushing overloose straps up on their shoulders.

The American Prospect is featuring a piece from yours truly, which I'm thrilled about. The subject is the State Department and 21st century statecraft. If you get a chance to take a few minutes to give it a read, I'd much appreciate it. Like most of what I write, this piece grew out of something provocative on the scene that caught my attention but that I didn't quite understand. In this case, it's the new emphasis by Hillary Clinton and her team on using technology to accomplish the State Department's mission. I got to spend a day hanging around the State Department last month, trying to make sense of it.

Around Foggy Bottom, they call the approach "21st century statecraft." You'll also hear it talked about in the foreign policy world as part of a smart power approach. It's an umbrella that covers everything from getting embassies on Facebook to keeping Twitter up and running during the post-election conflict in Iran to connecting women in Afghanistan to mobile banking networks. Some of it is straightforward. Some of it is unproven. Some of it might make you scratch your head and say "you know, that just might work."

But what I think I found out is that the the interesting context here is that, while much of this is the sort of pure development work that USAID has for the last fifty years, the driving vision for 21st century statecraft is about something more inherently strategic. It's about actively creating human-to-human connections that are themselves not political on their face, but that create the networks that can support political change. That's the hope, at least.

Again, I hope that you might take a few minutes to give it a read.

(I started writing this up for this here blog, and then decided to post it on HuffPo, but I wanted to drop a copy here too.)

So last night I devoted some free time to two of my great loves — open government data and food policy — and checked out the data on the rate of U.S. adoption of genetically-modified food crops in the United States that was released by U.S. Department of Agriculture earlier this month. Now, you can talk about the changing nature of the U.S. food supply until you're blue in the face. Or you can point to the numbers. And in this case, the USDA's new data on the U.S. adoption of genetically-modified food crops is so off the charts that there was little choice but to make a chart:

Wowza. The blue line represents soybeans. The red line is corn. What we're looking at is the growth in the percentage of all the acres of U.S. farmland used to raise the respective crops that is now used to grow what's known as Herbicide Tolerant, or HT, varieties. HT crops are designed in a lab to be resistant to chemical herbicide; the best-known HT brand are Monsanto's Roundup-Ready products. Sprayed on a non-modified plant, Roundup kills. But HT are engineered to be able to tolerate the herbicide, allowing for weed control through blanket-spraying of farm acres. For years, food advocates and food producers have been arguing over the merits and risks of HT crops. Monsanto, for example, has engaged in a long battle with food advocates over whether or not it should develop strains of genetically-engineered wheat.

But what's clear from the new USDA numbers is how quickly the U.S. food supply is changing, whether we eaters like it or not. The simple fact is that for many of us, the food we eat today is simply different than what we ate as kids. When I was a sophomore in high school back in 1996, for example, just 3% of farmland used to grow corn was given over to HT varieties of the crop. Today, 68% of U.S. farmland used to grow corn grows corn that is genetically engineered to be HT. The leap has been even greater for soybeans — from 7% in 1996 to a whopping 91% in 2009.

We might, as American eaters, still be having a healthy debate about whether we want to eat genetically-engineered corn, soybeans, and other foods. But the USDA data shows that our farmland is much farther along in making up its mind.

Two years ago, I gave a little talk at SXSW called "The Technologists' Agenda," basically making the case that Congress was on the cusp of going down a very bad road, and that those who understood tech should seize the moment to get engaged. Garrett Graff captured a bit of that talk in his book, "The First Campaign":

Nancy Scola is another Democratic technology expert and five-year veteran of Capitol Hill, who at the 2007 South by Southwest technology conference in Austin, Texas, pleaded to a room of laptop-wielding geeks for more experts in the new world to become politically active. "You can't really overstate how poorly understood technology is in Washington," she told them. She pointed to example of the 2006 Deleting Online Predators Act, whereby 410 House members voted to prohibit social-networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster from being used in libraries and schools so as to hinder the ability of child sex predators to gain access to them. It was a remarkably boneheaded bill that could have passed only in a body with no understanding of where the internet and online communications were headed.

Damn right I pleaded. Shamelessly, even. That seems like a long time ago ago. There are three open government sessions at SXSW today alone (including mine!). It's tough to imagine that a dopey thing like DOPA would pass now without considerable hue and cry and mobilization.

I've got a story in the latest issue of Seed magazine on the databases of DNA info companies like 23andMe are compiling. It's online, but it's in print too, so kindly run out and buy five copies — 'ppreciate it. At $6.95, it's kinda steep, but from just flipping through the rest of the issue it seems like there's a lot of great other content in there. Besides, the design is rather brilliant and worth the price of admission.

The value of 23andMe to individuals who want to know more about their own health or what they're genes indicate about them is still very much debatable. On a lot of things, the research just isn't there yet to give people a strong sense of what their DNA means for their lives. But the aggregation of a bunch of people's data — what 23andMe is up to — raises possibilities for research that has scientists and disease advocates (well, anti-disease advocates, I guess) pretty excited. Hope you'll give it a read.

I think the gist of this ad I just stumbled upon in a 1943 issue of the New Yorker is that they're trying to make you feel not guilty about buying a cozy new blanket during the war, but I honestly don't get it. Paging through the whole magazine, it's looking to me like the reading level of the ads back then is higher than it is in the text of the magazine today.

Playing around with the rather neat Show Us the Data, a Digg-ish new tool that's trying to come up with a consensus around which government docs folks would most like access to, I decided to put in a little plug for my Order 81 memos. My FOIA request for the documents has been pending at DOD for 19 months now. They're rather nice about it, but they tell me they're swamped with requests. They'd probably be more likely to bump me to the top of the queue if I had more than two votes, so feel free to show it a little love.

If you're curious why I might be so interested in finding out how Order 81 — which set up a seed patenting regime very similar to the one we have in the States — came to pass, you might want to give this a read.

I'll admit that the genesis of my first post on the Pop!Tech blog came from a curious URL. I saw it somewhere — Facebook, I think — and I thought, hmm, I wonder what something called Amend.org does, exactly? Turns out, it's this neat New York-based non-profit working in Ghana to solve one of world's worst public health menaces: traffic crashes. I know, right? Who knew that road crashes killed so very many people. The World Health Organization puts it at 1,049 people between the ages of 5 and 25 each and every day. It's not a sexy killer, but man, it's indeed a killer.

One of the things that I found most intriguing when I was researching the post I tried to capture in this bit:

For many of us, the swirling mass of traffic — cars, cattle, vans, chickens, vendors, mules, mopeds, and school children going every which way — is probably a defining images of time spent in developing places. But as Amend.org sees it, that street scene is a snap shot of a quickly-modernizing country whose infrastructure lags dangerously behind. Reading this in a high-income country? Then the next time you step out onto a city street, take a look around. You’ll notice that the esoteric field of traffic design is what's actually helping to keep us out of the grave. Sidewalks keep walkers a safe distance from delivery trucks. Stoplights rule over confusing intersections. Streetlights shine on the paths pedestrians are most likely to trod.

But it wasn't always that way in the U.S. It was government (yay, government!) that imposed a bit of order on the roads through LBJ's Highway Safety Act. Places like Ghana are modernizing without putting into action what we already know about how to bring death rates down on the roads.