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Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog

  • A New Era for United States Cooperation with CERN

    Posted by Jo Handelsman and Saul Gonzalez on May 7, 2015 at 5:19 PM EDT

    Question: What do the Higgs boson and the World Wide Web have in common? Answer: Not much, except that both trace their origins to the world’s leading particle physics organization: the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN), located near Geneva, Switzerland.  Today, at a brief ceremony led by OSTP Associate Director for Science Jo Handelsman, the United States signed an agreement for renewed cooperation with this prominent institution.

    From left: Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, OSTP Associate Director for Science Jo Handelsman, CERN Director-General Rolf-Dieter Heuer, and National Science Foundation Director France Córdova. (Photo credit: Ken Shipp/DOE)

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  • Connecting America’s Communities with Actionable Climate Science

    Posted by Tamara Dickinson on May 6, 2015 at 3:27 PM EDT

    A year ago today, hundreds of the country’s top climate scientists confirmed that climate change is affecting every region across America in the third U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) – the most comprehensive scientific report on domestic climate change impacts ever generated. Since then, communities, localities, and states have continued to use scientific information from the NCA and elsewhere to inform action and make resilience-related decisions on the ground.

    Today, in an effort to shine a light on the extraordinary work being done at the regional level and to better understand and address local scale climate-change impacts, President Obama’s Science Advisor John Holdren spent the day with community leaders, scientists, and students at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln (UNL), where researchers are conducting cutting-edge work to develop and deploy actionable climate science.

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  • Taking Daughters and Sons to Work on STEM

    Posted by Jo Handelsman and Ellen Stofan on May 6, 2015 at 10:32 AM EDT

    The halls of workplaces across the country were a little rowdier than usual a couple of weeks ago, when an estimated 3.5 million employers participated in “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day.” This year, President Obama encouraged employers to expand their programs to youth who are typically unable to participate – including foster youth, youth who may be at higher risk of dropping out of school, or youth who may not have a parent with a job that allows them to bring their children to work.

    Employers from both the public and private sectors stepped up in response to the President’s call to action. Here at the White House, we marked our 10th year of participation in “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day” by welcoming over 200 young attendees, aged 8-12, for a day of learning, including a variety of STEM-focused activity stations and an exciting Q&A session with the First Lady. The attendees included children of staff working throughout the Executive Office of the President (EOP), as well as kids from the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington and the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency who were each paired up with a White House senior staff member for a portion of the day.

    OSTP Associate Director for Science Jo Handelsman talks with mentee Kayla, age 9, about what it’s like being a scientist at the White House.

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  • Building a Nation of Makers

    Posted by Tom Kalil and Roberto Rodriguez on May 4, 2015 at 3:34 PM EDT

    Last year, on June 18, President Obama hosted the first-ever White House Maker Faire and challenged “every company, every college, every community, every citizen [to] join us as we lift up makers and builders and doers across the country.” On June 12-18, 2015, the White House will celebrate a Week of Making, including a National Maker Faire in Washington D.C.

    All over America, makers young and old are using 21st-century tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, and open-source electronics to design and build things that are personally meaningful to them. Today, we are challenging a broad range of stakeholders – including school leaders, K-12 teachers, skilled volunteers, and companies – to ensure that all of our children have access to these opportunities.

    The Obama Administration believes that making can also play an important role in education and life-long learning. Making can motivate and inspire young people to excel in STEM subjects and prepare students for careers in design, advanced manufacturing, and entrepreneurship. Making can help students acquire 21st-century skills such as teamwork and problem-solving, and address the “summer learning loss” faced by disadvantaged students without access to enrichment activities outside of school.

    Making also has the potential to increase student engagement, which is critical for academic success. Survey data reveals that two-thirds of high school students report being bored every day. We can and must do better, and in 2011, a team of 15 teens from a low-income school in West Philly showed us what’s possible when learning becomes fun and inspiring instead of boring. To compete for the $10 million Automotive X Prize, the West Philly team built a 160 mpg hybrid kit car, which has outperformed other fuel-efficient cars built by professional engineers and graduate students from Ivy League universities. In a region with a high school drop-out rate of over 50 percent, every single member of the team graduated.

    The Administration is committed to doing its part. For example, the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Department of Education’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers are teaming up to bring making and tinkering activities to 25 communities in California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The Corporation for National and Community Service and companies have partnered with the Maker Education Initiative to bring exciting educational opportunities to over 143,000 youth and families in 24 states.

    But we will need what President Obama calls an “all hands on deck” effort to broaden student participation in making, tinkering and invention. For example:

    • Companies could sponsor one or more makerspaces, encourage their employees to serve as mentors for young makers by participating in programs such as US2020, and provide students with access to challenging, real-world problems.
    • School superintendents and principals could allocate space for making and other innovation activities like Elizabeth Forward Middle School’s “Dream Factory” and makerspaces at the Albermarle Country Public Schools, empower teachers and students to play a leadership role, and develop a strategy for engaging parents, makers, and STEM professionals who are excited about pitching in.
    • Teachers, educational researchers, and makers could collaborate to develop hands-on projects that motivate students to master challenging academic content, electronic portfolios that allow students to share their work, and “badges” that are recognized by employers and college admission officers as an indicator of topic mastery.
    • A philanthropist or foundation could play the same role that Andrew Carnegie played in supporting the construction of over 1,600 libraries in the United States, with a focus on makerspaces in schools and after-school programs in low-income communities.
    • An information technology company could create an online map of all of the public and private schools that would allow school leaders to signal their interest in participating in making. Such a tool would help grassroots communities of parents, engineers, and local employers come together to target resources and support to these schools.
    • Researchers and entrepreneurs could develop affordable and accessible tools and kits that provide on-ramps to making.

    Although the new technology that is fueling the maker movement gets a lot of attention, more important are the values, dispositions and skills that making fosters, such as creativity, imagination, problem-solving, perseverance, self-efficacy, teamwork, and “hard fun.” As Steve Jobs observed, describing the impact that having access to a Heathkit (a do-it-yourself electronics kit) had on him, “Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one's environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.”

    If you want to get involved, tell a story, or share an idea, please send us a note at maker@ostp.gov. Working together, we can create a nation of makers and a brighter future for our children.

    Tom Kalil is the Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

    Roberto Rodriguez is the Deputy Assistant for the President for Education Policy. 

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  • NOAA’s Data Heads for the Clouds

    Posted by Maia Hansen and Alan Steremberg on May 4, 2015 at 11:53 AM EDT

    OSTP - NOAA Data

    The VIIRS satellite sensor alone currently produces over 2 terabytes of data daily, and the launch of the next-generation GOES-R satellite in 2016 promises to add another 3.5 terabytes each day. (Photo by NASA/NOAA)

    If you ask the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about big data, they will give you some big numbers. Over 20 terabytes per day of observational data are produced by their satellite systems alone, and then there’s the the massive weather and climate models from the bureau’s 1.5 petaflops of computing power, incoming observations from a network of hundreds of buoys, and live streaming video from the research vessel Okeanos Explorer.

    NOAA is America’s environmental intelligence agency, and its mission -- to protect life and property, provide the information communities need to become resilient to severe weather- and climate-related events, and conserve and protect national resources -- requires a great deal of number crunching.

    The sharing of knowledge and information with others is also part of NOAA’s mission, and it has long been a leader and supporter of government open data efforts. As an agency within the Department of Commerce, NOAA appreciates the importance of private industry and economic growth, and is proud that its data already helps to support vital markets such as the commercial weather, aviation, and insurance industries. Expanding data access even further could create new markets, spur economic growth, and create jobs; research by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that open data could add more than $3 trillion in total value annually to the education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, healthcare, and consumer finance sectors worldwide.

    However, the effort and cost involved in distributing tens of terabytes of data daily is staggering, and so the agency has been seeking innovative ways to increase its data’s availability without exhausting its own resources in the process. In early 2014, NOAA reached out to the private sector through a Request for Information to enlist help in making data available to the public in a rapid, scalable, and inexpensive manner. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with over 70 responses to the initial RFI and over 200 companies represented at a subsequent Industry Day last October. It was clear that industry saw great untapped economic potential in making NOAA’s environmental data more accessible, and that this economic potential could far outweigh the data distribution costs.

    Amongst all of the support and enthusiasm, though, there were still a great many open questions about the specifics of the implementation and the business model, which questions could not be answered without further input and innovation from industry. Reaching out to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers mentioned most frequently by RFI respondents, NOAA suggested a joint experiment: If the IaaS providers could help to position NOAA’s data next to their own high performance computing, analytic, and storage services, would the rest of the private sector take advantage of that positioning to run algorithms, perform research, and create inventions? Might the revenue gained from new products, infrastructure services, and analytics be so great that it could help cover the cost of the original data dissemination, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem?

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  • Statement by OSTP Director John P. Holdren on House-Proposed Funding Cuts to NASA's Critical Earth Science and Space Technology Programs

    Posted by Becky Fried on May 1, 2015 at 9:47 AM EDT

    On May 1, 2015, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Dr. John P. Holdren issued the following statement on proposed funding cuts to NASA's critical Earth science and space technology programs:

    "If enacted, the NASA authorization bill headed to the House floor later this month would do serious damage to the Nation’s space program, as well as to Earth-observation and Earth-science programs essential for predicting, preparing for, and minimizing the damage from disasters both natural and human-induced.

    The bill’s cuts to space-technology development would not only risk continued U.S leadership in the space industry, but would also impede progress on precisely those technologies—on-orbit refueling, advanced space propulsion, radiation protection in deep space, and more—needed to make crewed missions to deep space a reality. In the absence of robust investments to bring these technologies into being, the goal of sending U.S. astronauts to Mars in the 2030s could be in jeopardy.

    The House bill would also gut the NASA “mission to planet Earth”—the satellite observations and related research that provide key measurements and insights relevant to forecasting and tracking hurricanes, fighting wildfires, observing the state of the world’s farms and forests, mapping the extent of droughts, measuring the stocks of groundwater, and monitoring the likelihood of landslides. The draconian cuts in the House bill would also delay advances in our ability to research and prepare for volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis and blind us to changes in the Earth’s oceans and ice sheets that can be discerned only from space.

    NASA’s mission to observe, understand, and explore the solar system and the cosmos beyond has long been matched in importance by its mission to use the unrivaled vantage point of Earth orbit for looking downward, to better understand the only home that humanity currently has. It is difficult to understand why, at this time of U.S. leadership in both the outward-facing and inward-facing facets of NASA’s operations in space, the Congress would want to undermine that leadership and sacrifice the panoply of benefits it brings to the Nation." 

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