Monday, January 20, 2003

State of the Judiciary The Utah Courts System has a new website.  Right now, I'm listening to the State of the Judiciary speech by Chief Justice Christine Durham.  She is the first woman to serve as Utah's Chief Justice.  The courts had to eliminate their electronic monitoring system this year due to budget cuts. 2:59:53 PM

EnviroMapper EPA continues to impress with their EnviroMapper application.  You can access a map by zip code or address that has all of the associated water dischargers, superfund sites, hazardous waste sites, toxic releases, air emissions, and BRS generators for the given area.  It is very dynamic with the ability to drill down to various point-source data.  Here's a nice online poster of drinking water protection.  Here is their strategic plan for homeland security which focuses on actions to (1) understand and utilize the best scientific information and technologies for water security; (2) support assessment of utilities’ vulnerabilities to possible attack; (3) take action to improve security; and (4) respond effectively and efficiently in the event that an incident occurs. Phil Windley discusses sensornets on his weblog, something I've been interested in for several years.  A lot of the data he's talking about is already available in realtime on the internet.  For example, here is realtime streamflow data for Utah maintained by USGS.  Near real-time seismic data is maintained by the University of Utah here.  Now, as far as it being available in some readily usable or combinable format such as XML, I don't know.  Some data was removed in September 2001 in the interest of national security.  2:51:48 PM

Geotags I finally added geotags to my site today.  Looks like D. Mitchell's Random Thoughts blog is about the closest weblog around that's using geotags (other than Windley).  Looking through his prior posts, I found this great blogging tool resource. 1:39:22 PM

Identity Theft to Triple in 2003 The Aberdeen Group is projecting that identity theft will triple in 2003 to over $24 billion.  They are expecting that reported security incidents will exceed 200,000, with unreported incidents skyrocketing to 15.9 million (how do they get that number if they're unreported) in 2003.  And spam will climb to 50% of office network email.  Read the rest of their 2003 projections.  Nothing unexpected here.  I've been watching these trends for some time. 1:21:17 PM

Listen In Today is the first day of the legislative session.  Listen in to general session activities as follows: Utah Senate Utah House of Representatives KSL radio is also on the hill providing regular updates of legislative activities and interviews with senate and house members.  Listen to their feed live as well.  We will broadcast the Governor's 2003 State of the State address live tomorrow. In addition, KSL, the Deseret News, and the Salt Lake Tribune have sites dedicated to the legislative session. Morning quote from Senate President Al Mansell: "Great accomplishment comes from the need to make changes, and we have great need." Here's a good article on the challenges of filling positions in state government. 12:08:20 PM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.