Route Fifty: How To Rename a Place. “Louisiana’s Dead Negro Branch was renamed Alexander Branch, after a late local civil-rights leader. Mulatto Mountain, North Carolina, became Simone Mountain, honoring the great Black pianist and singer (and Old North State native) Nina Simone. The new names are the work of the Board on Geographic Names, a little-known federal body with the remarkable power to literally remake the map.”
The Verge: Most US government agencies are using facial recognition. “A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 19 of the 24 US government agencies surveyed are using facial recognition in some way, illustrating how commonplace the controversial technology has become within the federal government. The list of agencies includes agencies like the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that maintain in-house systems, alongside smaller agencies that use the system to control access to high-security locations.”
Washington Post: How CDC data problems put the U.S. behind on the delta variant. “When Pfizer representatives met with senior U.S. government health officials on July 12, they laid out why they thought booster shots would soon be necessary in the United States. Data from Israel showed the vaccine’s effectiveness waned over time, especially in older and immunocompromised people. But officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagreed, saying their own data showed something quite different, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Other senior health officials in the meeting were stunned. Why hadn’t the CDC looped other government officials on the data?”
FedTech Magazine: How Agencies Are Transitioning to Electronic Archives. “Federal agencies are nearing the end of a 10-year project to go paperless, and they’re about to begin the most challenging part of the process. By 2022, they must comply with a 2019 directive from the National Archives and Records Administration and the Office of Management and Budget that requires all permanent records to be ‘in an electronic format and with appropriate metadata.’”
