Thanks to NASA's Tim Tyson for setting the record straight. I admit I've been as guilty as anyone in propagating the urban myth that Tang (Bill Gates' boyhood drink of choice) was developed by NASA as part of the space program. No, says Tyson, Tang was invented by a Florida university. (Gee, I bet tax-paying orange growers loved seeing a tax-supported university develop an alternative to fresh orange juice.)
Tyson wasn't singling me out, however. He was on the road touting NASA's Southeast Technology Transfer Alliance, a program that helps private business leverage public technology. Among recent NASA spin-offs are lightweight wheelchairs made from aerospace composite materials, and highly symmetrical golf balls designed using the same software that analyzes space-shuttle air flows. Granted, these and other available projects are in the mechanical and physical sciences, but NASA still has a ton of software available, ranging from expert systems to component libraries.
If you're looking for a new business idea, or already have a concept but need readily available technology to implement it, the Southeast Technology Transfer Alliance is a good place to start. Additionally, NASA offers counseling to help get your idea off the ground. Call 1-800-USA-NASA for more information. Better yet, check out the program's home page at http://techtran.msfc.nasa.gov.
Maybe the Internal Revenue Service, which seems to be having a hard time with technology, ought to dial NASA's toll-free number. About the time our tax dollars were due, Secretary of Understatement Robert Rubin admitted that, after spending $4 billion, the IRS's $20-billion computer-modernization program is "badly off the track." In particular, the IRS is having difficulty networking its officesa trick other organizations seemed to have mastered years ago. Right now, the IRS stores data on magnetic tapes and moves them around the country in trucks. (I guess you could say that Sneaker-net has evolved into Goodyear-net.) About all the IRS has for our $4 billion is a 6000-page document saying how things are "supposed" to work. That doesn't compute even on IRS computers.
The IRS also quashed its plans to launch "Cyberfile," an electronic tax-return-filing system for the World Wide Web. Among other problems, the IRS's system had serious security flaws, jeopardizing the confidentiality of taxpayer information. The General Accounting Office also found contractual and financial-management problems with the Cyberfile program. This on the heels of the news that electronic filings this year totalled 13 million, down from 16 million in 1994.
Realizing that the government has demonstrated that it is technologically challenged, I was surprised to hear that Vice President Al Gore wants to throw even more data at federal computers. In a recent speech before the National Association of Broadcasters, Gore suggested that television stations provide government Web sites with information about the amount and type of programming they air. Currently, stations are required to collect the data, but it isn't generally accessible. With the information posted on the Web, concerned parents could check a home page to find out what kind of programs their kids are watching in the other room.
What's ironic about Gore's proposal is that, according to a survey conducted earlier this year for the Emerging Technologies Research Group, people who spend time surfing the Internet do so at the expense of watching televisionin other words, more Net surfing leads to less channel surfing. Maybe the solution to the problem of children watching too much TV is to make the Internet as accessible as Channel 5.
There's a simpler solution, howeverjust turn the dad-burned thing off.
Tomfoolery as it relates to bureaucracy and computers doesn't stop at the national level. The county controller in Reading, Pennsylvania, for instance, recently complained to county commissioners about having to type on a typewriter because her computer was old and hadn't worked for two years. "If we had a computer," Judith Kraines said, "letters would go out faster." Three days later, she announced that the problem had been solved-it turns out the computer hadn't been plugged into an electrical outlet. When plugged in, the PC worked fine.
Judith is clearly ready for the big time. She knows how to spend taxpayer money and doesn't have a good grasp of computer technology. I'd say an executive management position at the IRS is in the offing.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief