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Back in 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) embarked on an ambitious plan to map the human genome (HGP). The project had a number of technical questions it hoped to solve, but the basic premise was to glean greater insight into human DNA. While the federal government was the key driver in the project, it was very much a public-private partnership in that [...]
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Sound cybersecurity policy in the United States drifted off course late last month with passage and approval of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (Continuing Resolution). While we all, of course, support continued funding for our government, the tech industry was none too thrilled with a provision tucked in the resolution that bars several U.S. government [...]
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Almost 10 years ago, members of the technology industry joined with colleagues from U.S. EPA, the business and government purchasing community, and environmental non-profits to develop a consistent way to measure sustainability attributes of computers and monitors. The results of that work were twofold: the IEEE 1680 standard, which established product criteria, and the related EPEAT program, which [...]
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Faced with growing pressures both to cut costs and to meet increasingly stringent sustainability goals, federal agencies are turning to information and communications technologies (ICT) as one means of helping them cope with this new reality. NextGov, a leading news site geared towards federal technology decision makers, will be featuring the case studies we developed with support from DESSC highlighting [...]
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Dateline Geneva: We have just concluded a very productive set of meetings with roughly 20 WTO delegations here this week to press for expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Our U.S. industry group, comprised of seven business associations and a number representatives from tech companies, delivered two key messages. First, we stated unequivocally that these talks need to be completed [...]
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The American story is littered with tales of displaced workers. These workers, often through no fault of their own, were left by the wayside as the economy’s defining characteristics evolved. An innovation-driven, dynamic economy could change a worker’s skillset from incomparable to incompatible overnight. That is the harsh lesson of our history as the country moved from an agrarian to an industrialized [...]
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This post originally appeared on the ACEEE Blog. While there is disagreement among politicians about the role of government spending and government regulations to spur cost-effective energy efficiency investments, politicians of all political stripes agree that knocking down market barriers that keep Americans from saving money is a worthy task. Within this context, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient [...]
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Two weeks ago, instead of experiencing the D.C. snow storm that never came, I was in California attending the Green Grid Forum 2013. For those of you who don't know about it, The Green Grid (TGG) is an open industry consortium of end users, policy makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies that works to improve the resource efficiency of data centers. With more than 175 [...]
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Last summer the U.S. EPA and ITI jointly convened a road-mapping workshop on the ENERGY STAR program. Both groups recognize the unique nature of information and communication technologies (ICT) -- their complexity, their rapid evolution, their global nature, and their interplay with so many other products in the emerging “network of things.” And, consequently, we both saw value in co-hosting an [...]
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Dateline Geneva: It is somehow fitting that as the 83rd Geneva Motor Show wraps up here today, an event that celebrates the latest and greatest in innovations in automobile form and technology, trade negotiators from around the world are descending on this town for yet another round of talks to expand the WTO's Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Since last May, ITA members have been gathering [...]
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