Buda Rabblerouser -- Part 3

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Location: Buda, Texas, United States

Technologist, entrepreneur, writer, idealist, activist. A lot of things in our country and world are screwed up right now (government corruption is a prime example), and we can either just watch things get worse or tackle the problems head-on. We need to choose the latter path.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

The IG's Audit is a Real Hot Potato!

A friend and longtime contact in the intelligent transportation systems (ITS) field sent me a copy of an email message entitled A Message from ITS America's President and CEO that was sent to ITS America's members. ITS America is the primary trade association that represents many private and public sector organizations, including traffic data and traveler information companies. Way back in 1992 I developed the initial operating plan for this association, which was then called "IVHS America."

The message, from Scott Belcher, ITSA's new President and CEO, was seemingly a routine update ("Week That Was - February 4, 2008") of recent news in the ITS field. The following news item was provided in the report's "Misc" section:

I also want to make you aware of one of the latest announcements from the U.S. Department of Transportation. An audit of the Transportation Technology Innovation Demonstration (TTID) Program was launched last week. The TTID was designed to help ease traffic congestion in U.S. cities by assisting in the deployment of a transportation surveillance infrastructure and providing traffic data from sensors to government transportation agencies. The sensor information is also provided to the public to aid travelers and commercial highway users.

According to SAFETEA-LU, the TTID program should: build and integrate an infrastructure of measurement; provide commercial initiatives to generate revenues for reinvestment in the intelligent transportation infrastructure; and aggregate data into reports for distribution. The objectives of this audit are to assess: (1) whether the TTID has met the statutory goals of building a traffic measurement infrastructure, providing commercial revenue generation initiatives, and aggregating and reporting surveillance data; and (2) whether the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has met the competitive procurement requirements in Part II, which were intended to expand the number of firms providing surveillance services. For a copy of the memorandum, visit http://www.oig.dot.gov/StreamFile?file=/data/pdfdocs/TTID.pdf.


My guess is that Mr. Belcher saw this news item in their Industry & Member News section and thought, rightfully so, that it was important industry news that impacted many of ITS America's member organizations. So -- not knowing the sordid history of this controversial program -- he routinely included it in his weekly news update to members.

Then all hell apparently broke out! It's clear that Mr. Belcher found out how explosive the OIG's announcement is in short order. Just three minutes later Sabrina Quirarte, ITS America's Director of Communications, sent out a follow-on missive to those same recipients with a subject of Recall: A Message from ITS America's President and CEO and the terse message "Sabrina Quirarte would like to recall the message, "A Message from ITS America's President and CEO".

Apparently some email systems actually let messages be "recalled" that the senders didn't realize would get them in big trouble. Ironically, this follow-on message likely just brought the OIG's announcement to the attention of a whole lot of folks who might not have otherwise paid any attention to it. Oops!

I asked my friend to see if the latest weekly eBriefing on ITSA's website (available only to members) contained the same OIG announcement that was in Mr. Belcher's message, and he said that it didn't. The publicly viewable Industry & Member News web page likewise has no mention of the OIG's announcement, even though it is undoubtedly big news to many ITSA members.

So it appears clear that the controversial nature of this announcement caused ITSA to almost immediately try to recall his otherwise routine update. It would be very interesting to know exactly what transpired in the scant three minutes between the original emailing and the recall. In any case, the whole episode was undoubtedly quite embarrassing to ITS America and made ITS America's President look pretty foolish.

Rightfully so. It's very unfortunate if a trade association that exists to serve its members deliberately keeps vitally important news from those members. After all, this announcement is important news to a bunch of ITS America's members -- including traveler information companies than are unable to access data because of Traffic.com's monopoly, consulting companies, and state/local transportation agencies that already participate in the TTID program (or, like Minneapolis and No. New Jersey/New York) are being recruited to participate by Traffic.com and/or the USDOT).

Thankfully, this announcement is getting out through many other routes, including:

1. Via my posting on the NTOC's Talking Operations Forum that I moderated for many years. (Just this morning this announcement was also emailed to all the Forum's subscribers, which likely number around 1,000.)

2. In the online version of Federal Computing Week.

3. In a blog posting by the Project on Government Oversight, entitled "Hon, I'll Be Late for Dinner."

4. In a news item on the industry blog Traffictechnologytoday.com, which is the online relative to the popular Traffic Technology International magazine.

5. In the Sunlight Foundation's posting ("Inspector General launches probe of Traffic.com contracts") on their "Real-Time Investigations" blog.

Hot potato or not, the word is getting around.

Jerry

Monday, February 04, 2008

An Inconvenient Truth -- 36 Years Ago!

A few months ago, entirely by accident, I came across a 1972 book in a little old antique/curio store in downtown Buda that's owned by my friend and terrific artist (and former Univ. of Texas art instructor) Jeanette. It's entitled Only One Earth -- The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet, and it's written by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. This book predated Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, by a full 20 years.

I thought it might be interesting to see if such topics as "climate change" and "global warming" were even in our lexicon thirty five years ago, because I suspect that many people believe that Al Gore is the first to really figure out the whole global warming conundrum.

Only One Earth is fascinating to read, even if it is somewhat dated. Looking through the index you won't find the phrase "global warming" anywhere -- maybe Al really did coin that phrase. However, you will find an entry for "Climate, global interdependence and" that points you to Chapter 13, "The Shared Biosphere."

Let me quote a key excerpt from that chapter:

In the field of climate, the sun's radiations, the earth's emissions, the universal influence of the oceans, and the impact of the ice are unquestionably vast and beyond any direct influence on the part of man. But the balance between incoming and outgoing radiation, the interplay of forces which preserves the average global level of temperature appear to be so even, so precise, that only the slightest shift in the energy balance could disrupt the whole system. It takes only the smallest movement at its fulcrum to swing a seesaw out of horizontal. It may require only a small percentage of change in the planet's balance of energy to modify average temperatures by 2 degrees C. Downward, this is another ice age; upward, a return to an ice-free age. In either case, the effects are global and catastrophic.

Sound familiar? Remember, this comes from a book written 36 years ago! This chapter is literally filled with other observations and predictions that are extraordinarily prescient. The climate change issues we're talking about all the time now were known about a long time ago by a whole lot of people in a whole lot of countries.

The co-authors of this report, who worked with 152 consultants from 58 countries, give real meaning to the word "distinguished" (check out their bios on Wikipedia: Barbara Ward, Rene Dubos). Ms. Ward was a pioneer of the field of "sustainable development" and also a strong proponent of "Christian values." Mr. Dubos was a microbiologist, environmentalist, humanist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Amazon.com lists the paperback version of this book, but provides very little information about it. There's only one review, from 1998, with a heading of "Eco-disaster book which struck me as unduly pessimistic." The reviewer only gave the book two out of five stars. I wonder what rating and comment he would give the book today, ten years later?

I guess if you're not ready yet to believe that something is true -- even if it is true -- the natural tendency is to write it (and the messengers) off as either alarmist or overly pessimistic. On this topic, some self-entertaining blowhards may even go so far as to label the information bearers "environmental wackos."

One thing I've learned from my "amateur Zen master" Jeanette, however, is that if something really is true it will eventually be shown to be true. (As William Shakespear said in the Merchant of Venice, "Truth will out.") In this case we're talking about Mother Nature whom, as the old axiom goes, you just can't fool.

It's just too bad -- for all of us, including the ditto heads -- that we have to wait that long to collectively figure out what's really going on before we can apply our creativity and inventiveness to this potentially catastrophic challenge.

Jerry