Monthly Archive for February, 2008

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New Reports from the U.K. Office of Science & Technology

hybridvigor.net | By Denise Caruso | February 8, 2008

“The U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) functions something like the late lamented U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, killed off by Newt Gingrich back in the ’90s. They regularly publish brief but fairly comprehensive, interdisciplinary reports with cross-sector relevance on trends in science and technology.”

POST recently published three POSTnotes entitled “Ecological Networks“, “Smart Metering of Electricity and Gas” and “Autism“. The first two POSTnotes for 2008 were on “smart” materials and systems, and synthetic biology.”

To read the whole post, click here

Assessing – Health

American Chronicle | By Robert Baird | February 8, 2008

A 1978 OTA report is cited in this article about unnecessary medical procedures.

Reading Notes on The Documentation of Congress

By John Wonderlich | January 27, 2008

The Open House Project works “to study how the House of Representatives currently integrates the Internet into its operations, and to suggest attainable reforms to promote public access to its work and members.” Click here for an analysis of a 1992 report on access to material produced for the House of Representatives. Apparently OTA had a partial program to allow citizen access to OTA reports. Anybody care to tell us more about how OTA reports were distributed to the public?

OTA legacy gets mentioned on armscontrolwonk

By Andy Grotto | January 14, 2008

Mr. Grotto reports here that the complete set of material contained on the OTA legacy CDs, as compiled by Bill Craeger et al., are now available in the government archives collection at North Texas University.

Depoliticizing Science: Bring Back the OTA

By Smug Baldy | July 6, 2007

A blog post in favor of bringing back the OTA. Some history about the agency is also sprinkled in among the commentary.

Technology Assessment – Yes; Office of Technology Assessment – Not Yet

By Richard Jones | July 5, 2007 | FYI: The AIP Bulletin of Science Policy News

During the FY 2008 budget process, legislation was proposed to appropriate money to the General Accountability Office (GAO) to perform technology assessment studies. This article describes the status of the funds in July 2007. (Postscript: In the end, this proposal died.)