A Worker Dialogue: Improving Health Safety and Security at DOE

During the summer of 2010, the Department of Energy Office of Health, Safety and Security (HSS) partnered with the National Academy of Public Administration to host an online dialogue to solicit ideas from front line union workers at DOE sites on how to improve worker safety across the DOE complex. Based on the results of the Dialogue, an expert Panel of the National Academy identified several themes that emerged from workers' suggestions and offered recommendations for HSS in following up on the issues raised as well as continuing to build its capacity for employee engagement.Key FindingsBased specifically on the Dialogue results, the Panel recommended HSS further investigate several issues and claims discussed by workers as well as assess the current state of reporting processes in DOE to determine if changes are necessary. In addition, the Dialogue revealed many knowledge gaps among workers regarding the substance of worker health and safety regulations in DOE, which should prompt HSS to consider expanding efforts to educate workers about these regulations.The Panel also issued several recommendations for HSS to build its capacity to engage union workers. These recommendations included considering alternate channels of reaching front-line workers and continuing engagement with workers by articulating and undertaking concrete next steps with the input received

Government by Contract: Considering a Public Service Ethics to Match the Reality of the Blended Public Work Force

The Iraq War brought to public attention the reality that much of the basic work of government is done by contractors, and that the government\u27s ability to account for its contractors cannot be taken for granted. What, for example, if the rules that protect us against official abuse are not applied to those who, in fact, increasingly do the government\u27s work? What if, for example, the presumption that officials have the capacity to oversee contractors runs against the reality that they do not and, indeed, that the work of contractor management is itself often contracted out? What should we do then? First, we can abandon the premises of mid-20th century contract reform. Second, we can hope that current attention will permit us to \u27muddle through.\u27 Finally, there is the possibility that we can begin to think of approaches\u27new tools, if not entirely new visions\u27to employ if the presumption of regularity cannot be assumed. In this Article, Dan Guttman discusses one such tool

Rates of Mutation and Host Transmission for an Escherichia coli Clone over 3 Years

Although over 50 complete Escherichia coli/Shigella genome sequences are available, it is only for closely related strains, for example the O55:H7 and O157:H7 clones of E. coli, that we can assign differences to individual evolutionary events along specific lineages. Here we sequence the genomes of 14 isolates of a uropathogenic E. coli clone that persisted for 3 years within a household, including a dog, causing a urinary tract infection (UTI) in the dog after 2 years. The 20 mutations observed fit a single tree that allows us to estimate the mutation rate to be about 1.1 per genome per year, with minimal evidence for adaptive change, including in relation to the UTI episode. The host data also imply at least 6 host transfer events over the 3 years, with 2 lineages present over much of that period. To our knowledge, these are the first direct measurements for a clone in a well-defined host community that includes rates of mutation and host transmission. There is a concentration of non-synonymous mutations associated with 2 transfers to the dog, suggesting some selection pressure from the change of host. However, there are no changes to which we can attribute the UTI event in the dog, which suggests that this occurrence after 2 years of the clone being in the household may have been due to chance, or some unknown change in the host or environment. The ability of a UTI strain to persist for 2 years and also to transfer readily within a household has implications for epidemiology, diagnosis, and clinical intervention

Government by Contract: The White House Needs Capacity to Account for the Legacy of 20th Century Reform

The perspective explores the increasing roles that contractors play in policy implementation, from drafting rules, plans, and budgets, to writing statutorily-required reports to Congress. The author identifies the increasing problem of contractors\u27as opposed to elected officials\u27making such implementations, fearing that contractors lack accountability to the public

Meeting Cyber Age Needs for Governance in a Changing Global Order

The advent of the cyber age has created a world in which digital systems, operating on their own and interacting with more conventional material or physical systems, have become an increasingly prominent feature of the landscape of human affairs. This development, affecting every aspect of human life, has generated a class of increasingly critical needs for governance that are difficult to address effectively within the confines of the current global order in which sovereign states compete to maximize their influence in the absence of any overarching public authority. These needs include concerns associated with the management of powerful digital technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, blockchain technology, the internet of things, and big data) as well as problems relating to the use of these technologies by many actors to exercise influence from the level of the individual (e.g., identity theft) to the level of international society (e.g., foreign interventions in national electoral systems). The challenge of meeting these needs prompts an analysis of processes leading to change in the prevailing global order, energized at least in part by the growing role of the digital systems of the cyber age. Our analysis includes both Western perspectives highlighting changes in the identity and behavior of key actors and Chinese perspectives emphasizing the spread of social narratives embedded in the concepts of tianxia and gongsheng. While it is premature to make explicit predictions, we conclude with some observations about the most important trends to watch regarding efforts to meet cyber age needs for governance, and we note the connections between these developments and the overarching challenge of fulfilling the suite of goals commonly associated with the idea of sustainable development