Congress should reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment now

Now is the time for Congress to reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment.

Back in 1994, swelled with braggadocious pride at their electoral victory in November, House GOP members began their war on science and knowledge and facts by zeroing out the budget of their Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA as it was called, as part of their larger Contract with America.

OTA, created in 1972 to provide the Congress with unbiased assessments of technology and its impact on science and society, lived a peaceful life on Capitol Hill, studying subjects as varied as housing for the elderly, crop substitution strategies in Colombia and Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" proposals. Always a target of conservative ire, the agency was staffed by an unassuming, dedicated mix of scientists, social scientists and policy experts working under the radar of the brighter and hotter debates in Washington. OTA studies took about 18 months to complete and were viewed as the standard bearer for discussion on the topic, whatever the topic may be. The agency cost the tax-payers roughly $22 million a year to operate.

Newt Gingrich, bomb-thrower, agitator and hate merchant, decided that Congress would start its belt tightening by tightening its own belt. Because he couldn't touch the Congressional Research Service, a policy research arm of the Library of Congress, the only sacred cow he could slaughter was OTA. Gingrich's success in cutting OTA pointed out the magnitude of his larger failure. Gingrich backed down when faced with real opposition, but didn't slow down in face of a smaller opponent. In other words, Gingrich was a classic schoolyard bully. Sound familiar?

More importantly though, his actions were an early salvo in the continuing Republican assault on rationality, common sense, intellectual honesty, knowledge and science. By cutting OTA, he put blinders on the U.S. Congress, thereby denying policy makers deeper insight into the meaning and implications of new technology that continues to arrive faster and more furiously every day. 

OTA had a sister agency in the executive branch, the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Located at the White House, and headed up by the president's science advisor, OSTP still is tasked with providing thoughtful analysis for the president as he decides on policy direction in space exploration, energy and climate science, nanotechnology and our national labs, just to name a few. The horrifying recent reports that OSTP's Science Division now has exactly zero employees is a result of the simple fact that adults find it impossible to work for such a degraded man as Donald Trump. Conversely, a man as degraded as Donald Trump has no interest or understanding of what these adults do and therefore no motivation to attract talented people to fill these positions in his White House.

A first step to rectifying this situation is for Congress to reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment now, a bold move that would provide timely, thoughtful, peer-reviewed advice and insight on the most pressing issues of our day. For the right, this will have the added benefit of combatting the accusation that all Republicans are antediluvian flat-earthers and will offset the prevailing belief that rational discourse is the sole purview of the Democratic party. In the meantime, it will make us all safer, and it will help make America great again.

[Editor's note: Author worked at both OTA and OSTP in the 1990s.]

Friday Grab Bag: Iraqis rid ISIS; Trump is disgusting

With the Iraqi government declaring yesterday that Mosul will soon be free from ISIS and their self-proclaimed "caliphate" is dead, I think of the 14 years of suffering the Iraqi people have gone through since American president George W. Bush announced the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell famously intoned at the time the Pottery Barn Doctrine, "If you break it, you own it." I think that means that we, as Americans, own some significant portion of the tremendous pain the Iraqis have gone through.

In separate news, Donald Trump is simply a disgusting man.

Get a Chevy Volt for $95 per month

This just in, from Belmont Drives Electric ...

Dear neighbor,

We've received word of the lowest lease prices we've ever seen for new EVs. Quirk Chevy just announced special pricing good through 6pm on Friday, June 30th!

• Volt LT Plug-In Hybrid - $95 per month. Save nearly $1000 over the life of the lease compared to our previous lowest price! 
• Bolt LT All-Electric - $145 per month. Save nearly $1500 over the life of the lease compared to our previous lowest price!

Both vehicles have a $2,500 down payment matched by the MOR-EV rebate. Prices do not include sales tax, but include dealer fees. Premier versions of both vehicles are also available at heavily discounted prices.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Best,

Belmont Drives Electric

Two things I love about my new Chevy Volt

Here are two things that I love about my new Chevy Volt ...

• It uses no gas (well, almost no gas). I have driven the car over 1,000 miles now, and I have used only 1/2 tank of gas total! That is fabulous. 

• In Massachusetts, Chevy Volts qualify for a $2,500 cash rebate from the state! That is also fabulous. 

There is no reason not to get a Chevy Volt through Mass Energy's Drive Green program. To find out more about the program, click here: https://www.massenergy.org/drivegreen.

Two women

[Both photographs by Irving Penn, from the show Irving Penn: Centennial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]

The Copenhagen Wheel ... e-power comes to bicycles

The idea of adding electric power to wheeled motion is a hot topic these days, as people tackle ways of promoting carbon-free or carbon-light transit.  In the realm of the bicycle, this phenomenon is taking many different shapes as people want to move around quicker and cleaner, and an aging cohort of bikers may be seeking new ways of moving around on two wheels. 

Superpedestrian, a Cambridge startup, asked itself what this new bicycle might look like and they came up with something they call the Copenhagen Wheel, a bright red disk that sits in the rear hub and provides additional power and speed to the rider. 

The Wheel marries technologically advanced robotics to the very simple mechanical motion of pedaling, and after years or research, the company thinks they have found their sweet spot. Assaf Biderman, founder and CEO, described it this way in an interview earlier this year, “We set ourselves an ambitious goal: integrating with a rider’s body in a way that makes you feel naturally stronger. It took over three years of engineering, but I can finally say we made that dream a reality.”

Still, it took years to transform a good idea to workable product. From its earliest days as a spinoff of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, the first version of the Wheel, which appeared at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit (from where it gets its name), cost $330,000 to make and weighed 42 pounds. In the intervening years, designers put it on a diet, bringing its weight down to 17 pounds and its price down to $1,499. They also shortened its production time to four weeks. A measure of the company's current success is a doubling of their workforce in the last twelve months.

It's interesting to hear Austin Federa, a manager at Superpedestrian, emphasize that it is not a bicycle company, it’s a robotics company. The hub provides additional power by sensing what the rider is doing and reacting before the rider can perceive it. 

The company’s origins in the MIT lab play a big role in this. There, students and faculty alike reimagine the city and try to peer into the future about the ways it is changing. “That is just the way of thinking at the lab - to create a platform to study the city and how people are moving around it,” said Umberto Fugiglando, a graduate student looking at data retrieval in cars. Autonomous vehicles, he points out, are another example of a technology that will have huge implications not just not just for transit but also for parking and roadway allocation. That in turn will impact bicycle travel too.

Back at Superpedestrian, in a nondescript building on Hamilton Street,

 

a room full of engineers and product specialists is working to grow this company and get this technology on the street. 

Bikes are lined up, ready to go for a ride, and these bikes will haul. The Wheel will assist a rider up to 20 mph, (any faster, and the vehicle would have to get a license plate), and on a full charge, the battery can propel the bike 30 miles before it needs recharging. In addition, the Wheel is a data resource, talking to an app in your phone, and has different settings ranging from "Turbo," which offers strong acceleration, to "Exercise," which provides light resistance to help build cardio. While parts are sourced from different countries, the Wheels are assembled 30 miles away in Westford, Mass.

The potential applications of this new technology are many, though the company is in the early phases of building its brand. Its target consumer is an urban rider, but there are many others: bike-sharing companies, for one, like Hubway in Boston or Citibike in New York could add it as a component to their bikes, or police departments might find a use of bike patrol officers, giving them added range and speed as they move around a city. 

My initial ride was a thrill, and I hope to get back on a Copenhagen Wheel-ed bike soon, to see what it feels like over some distance.

To find out more about the Copenhagen Wheel, click HERE.

A short helicopter flight over Boston

I recently had the chance to take a short helicopter flight over downtown Boston. Here's a video I made of the trip.

Trump fails the D-Day test

In a fitting metaphor for everything that Donald Trump has accomplished in his first 130-some-odd days as president of the United States, yesterday was the 73rd anniversary of D-Day but it got nary a mention in our media-soaked environment.

D-Day has held revered status particularly among conservatives who view it as a time when America was unconditionally great. Nothing depicted that greatness better than Americans storming the beaches of Normandy to free a continent from a tyrannical regime. Indeed, Donald Trump tapped into this deep well of nostalgia when he ran in 2016. To emphasize his point, he sold cheap Chinese-made red caps to a segment of the American public, letting them believe that those days of glory would return under his guidance.

What the voters got instead was a president not even close to greatness or nostalgia. Donald Trump did not mention D-Day in any newsworthy way yesterday. He did not pause in any national way to draw our attention to the Greatest Generation. He did nothing significant to mark a day when America was an unconditional leader in world affairs.

Instead, Donald Trump spent June 6th battling against charges that he is corrupt, assailing his enemies and committing more fraud.

The day was consumed with speculation about what the fired FBI director would say in Thursday's testimony in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump wished him "good luck," as if luck was what James Comey needed in detailing the obstruction of justice charge against him. He then attacked the London mayor by misrepresenting his words, further leading his critics to question his mental stability. And finally, Trump undermined the legal argument his lawyers are making that his travel ban wasn't a travel ban, when he tweeted that it was.

In other words, Donald Trump didn't take the opportunity to mention anything about what made America great in the past, a past that he was going to bring back to our beleaguered country.

Instead, he reminded everyone what a small man he is. And how he is making America a very small country again.