Before climate change and, in this part of the country, global warming, the Hudson River would freeze over solid, from Rockland to Westchester. An eighty-year old friend told stories of walking across it, skating over it, and sledding into it. He also said “friends” of his would drive their cars right off of River Road onto the frozen river, to ostensibly hone their “winter driving” abilities. That was sixty years ago. There are no fun and games at this river crossing anymore. The Tappan Zee handles over 150,000 cars per day, deals with an average of three accidents per day, and is operating well over capacity, though the Thruway...

Managing $3.8 trillion in expenses ($3,800,000,000,000) are 2 million Federal employees across 1,900 departments. Believers in small government -gasp- at numbers like that. But read another way, that’s 2 million people who could steer the world’s largest government budget in a better direction from the inside, giving new credence to “working with the system to change the system.” In 2003, seeing a need and opportunity for serving the people better, a vibrant community of Federal employees created Young Government Leaders, acknowledging the importance of being young and the opportunity for government employees to be leaders in their...

How do you prepare someone for a world they’ve never seen? Put them in it. War games have been around for thousands of years. Only for the past 50 have they been able to do it digitally. While at USC, about five years ago, I was fortunate to see cutting-edge virtual reality research, both at the Integrated Media Systems Center and under Mark Bolas, now at the Institute for Creative Technology, and I was fascinated. I’d been simulating the world, too, since the day I first had Legos, which then went digital in the mid-90s with SimCity, Marathon, and Total Annihilation on my family’s (ostensibly) Power Macintosh 6100/60 and my friend’s...

In my post on putting students first again alluded to the failure of top-down test-driven K12 education to create workers for the modern digital age. A new distraction has entered the fray, and it started as an experiment to see if you can boil down a person’s performance to a single number (hint: you can’t). The Department of Education just released the results of former education chancellor Joel Klein’s teacher rating experiment. The UFT went on the defensive for a few reasons, not the least of which is that the results of this experiment were always intended to be private because they are, obviously, experimental. Unfortunately for...

Instead of choosing one of the thousands of questions from more intelligent viewers, CNN’s John King chose the most simple-minded, doltish question I’ve ever heard asked of an American presidential candidate: “Define yourself using one word, and one word only. – Andra H.” Just as it’s absurdly ridiculous to summarize a presidential candidate’s platform, personality, and expertise in a single word, it’s absurd to think that our technology can capture who we are as people. And most of us already know it does not. I do work for a company that uses interaction and collaboration expertise to make corporate meetings and events...