Office of Technology Assessment, United States Congress, science, technology, policy
By Katy Makeig | October 2001 | Geotimes
Katy Makeig was a Congressional Science Fellow working in the Office of Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ). In this article she describes the legislative effort to bring back OTA. She says, “Some of the most technologically complex issues that have ever faced lawmakers are now before a body — the Congress of the United States — where less than 5 percent of the members have any scientific or technical training.”
By Mark Hoofnagle | September 14, 2007 | Denialism blog
A post urging Congress to bring back the OTA.
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
American Chronicle | By Robert Baird | February 8, 2008
A 1978 OTA report is cited in this article about unnecessary medical procedures.
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?
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.