The White House has literally bootrapped its way into the history books. When U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Chief Technology Officer Todd Park unveiled a new federal government digital strategy Wednesday, it was perhaps the first time an executive initiative was released in its entirety in a web-friendly format, rather than the standard .pdf file, a format government often relies on to publish information. For the alpha geeks paying attention, the most notable footnote about the release was that the White House leveraged Twitter’s popular open source user interface toolkit Bootstrap to publish the document. Bootstrap, developed by Twitter and made freely available to the public at the social sharing site GitHub, offers a complete package of HTML grid-based, fluid and fixed-width templates, ... Continue reading →
Rich Addicks for The Wall Street Journal The Battlefort: Brothers Noah and Jacob take a break from engineering with some recreational gun play near their cardboard-box stronghold. Like a lot of boys, Jacob and Noah Budnitz like to build things. And they like to take things apart. First it was Bristle Blocks, then Tinkertoys. They went through Legos—lots of Legos. But now, Jacob, age 10, and Noah, age 8, have graduated to other types of building materials: Doorknobs, alarm clocks and telephones. Plastic bottles and cardboard boxes. Scotch tape. Duct tape. Keys without locks, locks without keys. One thing they don't use? Directions. When the boys use imagination and whatever they find at hand to create something, their mother, Tina Budnitz, calls it tinkering. Their ... Continue reading →
Readers' Comments How to Take American Health Care From Worst to FirstBack to Article » By BILLY BEANE, NEWT GINGRICH and JOHN KERRY Baseball’s numbers-crunchers now routinely use statistics to put better teams on the field for less money. Our health care system needs a similar revolution. Comments are no longer being accepted. Continue reading →
