Leslie Linthicum, in the Journal’s Up Front column on Sunday, used the large soapbox to tell everyone, in paragraphs of 140 characters or less, that she doesn’t like Twitter.

In 140 characters, you can update your Twitter followers on your mood, what you’re doing at work that day or what you’re having for lunch.
Let’s try it and see how it goes: I’m OK, not great. I’m writing a column about Twitter. And I’m having provolone on whole wheat. With mayo.

Do you find that interesting? I doubt it. I don’t either, and it’s happening to me. Could it wait until later? Couldn’t we skip it entirely?

She also mentions that her colleague and co-worker John Fleck has his own Twitter account. She tells readers to “Tweet Journal science writer John Fleck about something. HE WILL LOVE YOU FOR IT.”

For his part, Fleck tweeted, “I loved Leslie’s column. She’s been teasing me about twittering for ages.”

Like many other states, New Mexico is home to its own fusion center, as the Independent noted in a lengthy story published in August.

The federal assessment of the nation’s fusion centers — which borrows heavily from earlier reports by such internal watchdogs as the Congressional Research Service (CRS) and General Accountability Office (GAO) — lists a few privacy, transparency and oversight concerns about the fusion centers. Those concerns include:

• Privacy: The report concludes that “…frequent and serious privacy violations will erode public confidence in the important purposes of the Initiative.” DHS adopts CRS and GAO recommendations that fusion centers step up their privacy training, establish privacy committees to work with local advocates, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and make their policies available to the public.

• Oversight: Concerns are raised about who’s in charge and who’s watch-dogging the intelligence-gathering. As the report’s authors note, the GAO found “confusing lines of authority and the absence of clear rules as a concern in its report, as well. Nearly ten percent of the fusion centers interviewed by GAO were concerned about the lack of guidance on privacy while sharing or storing information.”

• Military-private sector collaboration: One area that is sure to get civil libertarians up in arms is the conflation of businesses and intelligence-gathering, as evidenced by the firestorm set off by the Bush administration’s secret wiretapping program involving communications giant AT&T and other firms. The DHS report says that the perceptions that fusion centers have access to vast amounts of private-sector data is “largely unfounded.”

• Data Mining: The report states that the term “data mining” isn’t well understood by the public, which raises concerns about protecting the privacy of personal information collected by the fusion centers and distributed throughout the intelligence food chain. Yet DHS acknowledges that it doesn’t have any 2008 data from the centers to analyze for compliance with federal privacy rules.

• Excessive secrecy: The department recognizes that its veiled activities are “responsible for the mischaracterization of fusion centers as mini-spy agencies or akin to the FBI’s discredited — and
long abandoned — COINTELPRO program.” To counter that perception, it encourages the local fusion centers to make public its privacy policies and legal authority to collect and compile clandestine data — an admirable goal that, by DHS’ own admission, still hasn’t been implemented a decade after the first fusion center was established.

The report notes:

Of course, general fears of excessive secrecy are best allayed by fully implementing the Transparency principle. As this PIA [Privacy Impact Assessment] repeats a number of times, fusion centers are encouraged to publish their privacy compliance documentation, including an individualized PIA; establish a privacy committee to interact with their local privacy advocacy communities; and to listen to and address concerns whenever possible.

• Inaccurate or incomplete information: The report “acknowledges that the more widely information is shared, the greater the possibility that incorrect or incomplete information will have negative consequences for individuals. But to guard against this, the agency is issuing “guidance that fusion centers (a) establish accuracy procedures to help prevent, identify, and correct errors in PII [personal individual information]; and (b) provide error notice to the privacy official of the source agency; adopt and implement policies and procedures for the merger of information, investigation, and correction/deletion/non-use of erroneous or deficient information, and retain PII only as long as it is relevant and timely, closely tracking requirements under” the federal privacy act.

But the report appears to downplay the potential for the misuse of information when the authors note that although increasing protection against such occurrences “is a significant challenge for a broad network of fusion centers, it must be noted that fusion centers are already practiced in regularly reviewing and purging incorrect or stale information held in their Federally-funded criminal intelligence systems,” in compliance with federal regulations.

• Mission Creep: Lastly, the assessment agrees with a CRS conclusion that the fusion centers have gravitated far beyond their initial counterterrorism missions and now include a broader spectrum of crimes as well as a seemingly limitless “all-hazards” scope. The CRS report continues that there is no one model for how state-based fusion centers should be structured and that they must rely on their own patchwork of state privacy and transparency laws since DHS has no jurisdiction in the new missions.

Illustration by Keith Lewis

ALBUQUERQUE — For a look back on 2008 from an environmental perspective, I made an extremely unscientific poll of green leaders who were unlucky enough to get caught by my phone calls this week as they were stuck in the office, walking through shopping malls, dealing with screaming children or merely trying to have a nice breakfast at the coffee shop that I call my office.

I asked all of these people to talk about what they thought were the biggest environmental stories of the year. They mentioned Tax Increment Development Districts, the proposed Desert Rock power plant, river otters, the destruction wrought by all-terrain vehicles in national forests and a new law allowing concealed weapons in national parks. But mostly they wanted to talk politics. Like everyone else, environmentalists were consumed by the 2008 elections and the sea change coming to the Legislature, Congress and the White House.

Here’s their choices for the top environmental story of the year.

The 2008 Elections

Sandy Buffett, executive director of Conservation Voters of New Mexico

“The big winner in the 2008 elections was New Mexico’s air, land and water. There was some coattail effect from Obama in November, but not in the June primaries. The candidates we supported won by talking to voters about clean energy and ensuring we’re not compromising public health, clean water and air. So to now have new friends and champions who understand why we need to protect the resources and special places that make New Mexico great means we can move beyond defense against industry lobbyists and hopefully move toward making positive change. [For example,] in the legislative session there will be a green jobs bill and there will be an attempt to reform the TIDD policies to close the loopholes that allow greenfield sprawl developers to grab subsidies intended for infill development.”

Buh-bye Bush!

Jim Baca, New Mexico Natural Resource Trustee and a director of The Wilderness Society

“There’s no question, Bush leaving office is the biggest story of the year. Electing people like Barack Obama, Tom Udall, Martin Heinrich — that’s big news for the environment. … And we’ll get rid of people like [Vice President Dick] Cheney, who wanted to start drilling in the Valle Vidal. With this election we’ve done a complete reversal of how we’re going to approach these problems. Obama is not a guy who understands western public lands issues, so his appointments will be very important. [Secretary of the Interior nominee Ken] Salazar is neutral — not good or bad — but he’s experienced.

“The next important picks will be for jobs that are not Cabinet-level: the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Minerals Management Service. They’re really important, but they don’t get any attention. We’ll know how good Obama’s administration will be [when they're announced]. At the very least I think they’ll stop the bleeding.”

The Economic Crisis

Joanie Quinn, education and marketing coordinator at the New Mexico Organic Commodity Commission

“I think the biggest story of the year has been the effect of what I insist on calling the economic ‘depression’ on efforts to mitigate climate change. To me, that’s the big one. We can either look at this as an opportunity to really start moving in directions that will support carbon reductions as we fight our way out of the economic crisis, or we can be blinded by the crisis and fall into business as usual.”

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Eric Jantz, staff attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center

“Definitely the Santa Fe ordinance for oil and gas development in the Galisteo Basin. That’s huge because it’s one of the first times there’s been a grassroots democratic movement to get government to really regulate the oil and gas industry. The industry has historically had a lot of dispensations from the federal and state government. The Santa Fe County ordinance is one of the first, and best, where a community has said, ‘Look, we’re not necessarily opposed to energy development but we want to do it on our terms.’ The ordinance sets out a long-term plan for oil and gas development in Santa Fe County, rather than the piecemeal development that’s happened in most of the West. It lays out a plan and process for oil and gas developers to follow. It also takes measures to protect public health and safety, and that’s coming more and more to light as oil and gas production expands to communities where people are living. It’s a model for other areas in the state and in the country and it’s easily translatable to other kinds of resource development, like coal mining and uranium mining.”

New Hope for Endangered Species

Nicole Rosmarino, wildlife program director at Wild Earth Guardians

“There really is no more important issue in endangered species than whether you give protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) or not. Now we can see the tangible results of [politicization at the Fish and Wildlife Service]: for more than two years no new species were listed. We have 300 species that are awaiting protection and we’ve seen proposals but we’ve seen no new listings. The Bush administration was able to be very successful at accomplishing one of its main goals, which was to fundamentally obstruct ESA enforcement. A void of leadership at the Department of the Interior enabled people to ravage science and deny endangered species protection. Officials were actually competing to take credit for reversing protections on Gunnison’s prairie dog!

[Secretary of the Interior nominee Ken] Salazar will have to clean house. We hope that the next director of Fish and Wildlife does not come from within because that agency is absolutely contaminated. We need an outsider to come in and reform the service. Politics can’t interfere with listing decisions.”

This just in from Gov. Bill Richardson’s press office: Virgin Galactic has signed a 20-year lease agreement with New Mexico.

That’s a big step toward Richardson’s repeatedly stated hopes for a spaceport in southern New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic’s world headquarters will be established in New Mexico, and its operations will be located at New Mexico’s Spaceport America, the nation’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

“The signing of this agreement is a momentous day for our state and has cemented New Mexico as the home of commercial space travel,” Richardson said. “I want to thank Virgin Galactic for partnering with us to create a whole new industry that is going to transform the economy of Southern New Mexico — creating thousands of jobs, generating money for education, boosting tourism and attracting other companies and economic opportunities to the area.”

The signing of the lease agreement comes just days after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a launch license to the New Mexico Spaceport Authority. The lease agreement with an anchor tenant was the final requirement set by the New Mexico Legislature to release the next level of funding for Spaceport America, and it has cleared the way for construction to begin early next year, the news release says.

John Fleck of the Albuquerque Journal has a very interesting story about authors of a forthcoming book positing the theory that a Los Alamos scientist helped the Soviets build a hydrogen bomb.

It seems the Rail Runner commuter train may become a boon for Santa Fe’s shopping district, the New Mexican reports. And outgoing U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., tells Michael Coleman of the Journal that she is seriously weighing a run for governor in 2010.

So it should come as no surprise that there is a parallel move among physicians and other health professionals to digitize medical records, a change that proponents say portends a trend toward better diagnoses and a reduction in health care costs.

Like much of the nation, New Mexico is home to the shift, with the state estimating that 10 percent to 15 percent of the state’s 4,000 physicians already use electronic records. And in all likelihood the number will increase, particularly with President-elect Barack Obama’s talk of codifying the trend, proponents say. Obama has tied the idea of electronic medical records to his economic recovery plan.

But with changes in how medicine is practiced, there are also unresolved questions, in particular as they relate to privacy, says Bob Mayer, the chief information officer at the New Mexico Department of Health.

And Mayer and others hope that state lawmakers will pass a law during the upcoming legislative session to plug what he says are gaps in privacy protection. It’s not an easy sell, as supporters found out in 2008 when they twice pushed for the bill but were denied.

“What we were trying to do is fill those gaps to protect the consumer,” says Sen.-elect Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, who sponsored a bill in the regular and special 2008 legislative sessions when he was in the House.

Most medical records fall under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a Clinton-era law outlining a consumer’s privacy rights in regard to medical information. It establishes who does and does not have access to your medical records.

But as more and more records are digitized in New Mexico and across the country, there is a debate among professionals and policy makers whether HIPAA covers all the newly digitized information. For example, Mayer says, Microsoft is storing protected medical information, and Microsoft is not a covered entity under HIPPA.

“Right now we have electronic medical records in the state. We have nothing on the books to lay out how those things should be managed,” says Mayer. “What we and many other states have begun to do is look at building privacy protections into state laws.”

The 2008 versions of the bill would have extended to electronic records the privacy protections in the federal law that already apply to paper medical records. The bills also would have created an audit log to ensure that authorities could track how an inadvertent disclosure of a consumer’s medical records occurred, Wirth says.

Under the proposal, the audit log would have shown the identity of the person who accessed the information as well as the identity of the person whose information was obtained and the date that the disclosure occurred.

It also would have filled those gaps in privacy protection as technology has outstripped the legal framework, Wirth says.

While supporters say a transition to electronic records would save money over the long term, opponents, including some physicians, have argued that the transition to electronic records would be costly, requiring physicians to spring for programs that run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Beyond the debate over money, proponents of digitized medical records predict that the use of electronic records over the long term will lead to more evidence-based care because digital records are more interactive than paper records. For example, the New York Times notes in a recent article: “A paper record is a passive, historical document. An electronic health record can be a vibrant tool that reminds and advises doctors.”

The Times goes on:

“It can hold information on a patient’s visits, treatments and conditions, going back years, even decades. It can be summoned with a mouse click, not hidden in a file drawer in a remote location and thus useless in medical emergencies.”

Despite its failure twice in 2008, the electronic medical records act has come close to passage.

After dying in the 2008 regular session, a similar piece of legislation came close to clearing the Legislature during the August special session. The House and Senate each passed separate electronic medical record bills. They both went to a conference committee –- a group of lawmakers impaneled to reconcile differences between House and Senate versions of the competing bills. The conference committee agreed to changes. The House passed the conference committee report, but the Senate did not, meaning the bill was left stranded, Wirth says.

Of course, just because legislation has come close before doesn’t guarantee passage. Legislatures, it has been said, are better at killing legislation than producing it. A quick survey of past legislative sessions reveals that the New Mexico Legislature –- like state legislatures elsewhere — is a graveyard where most legislation goes to die.

The last 60-day session, in 2007, produced more than 3,000 bills, including memorials and resolutions, but only 368 were signed by the governor and enacted into law, according to the Legislative Council Service.

Likewise, the 30-day 2008 regular session produced nearly 1,500 bills when factoring in resolutions and memorials, but fewer than 100 were signed and enacted into law by Gov. Bill Richardson.

But local media have also been using Twitter to reach out to readers, as shown in the flurry of “tweets” that followed the recent appointment of Gov. Bill Richardson to Barack Obama’s cabinet.

A number of New Mexico print and broadcast outlets have jumped on the Twitter wagon. The Albuquerque Journal has a Twitter feed (ABQJournal), as does KOAT, and KRQE has one, though it’s only been updated once since Election Day.

Local radio reporter and blogger Peter St. Cyr began using Twitter as a tool several weeks ago and says the service’s trademark 140-character limit per tweet is anything but limiting.

“Radio reporters are the best writers in the world,” St. Cyr said. In radio, he says, reporters are used to fitting a lot of information in a small amount of space.

He finds several ways to use Twitter, he added: “You can do a headline of a story, or you can do a little part of one story.”

St. Cyr, who Twitters at radio_news, cited as an example the announcement that University of New Mexico football head coach Rocky Long was resigning. A simple tweet at 5:11 p.m. on Nov. 17 said, “Rocky Long quits after 11 years. AD says ‘it’s a sad day.’”

He also uses it to add “color” to certain stories. After the announcement of Bill Richardson as Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of commerce, St. Cyr tweeted:

DJIA up 40pts since start of Richardson news conf

St. Cyr uses Twitterberry on his Blackberry to send tweets from events. In the past, he said, the fastest way to cover breaking news was to call up the radio station and interrupt live programming. Now his breaking news from Twitter appears immediately on his blog, What’s the Word.

But for St. Cyr, tweeting is also a way to get to know people. For instance, he says, he didn’t know John Fleck, science writer for The Albuquerque Journal, was a birdwatcher until he started following Fleck’s Twitter feed.

When not remarking on roadrunners and ruby-crowned kinglets seen in his yard, Fleck (jfleck) uses Twitter to highlight stories he writes for the Journal as well as his blog, Inkstain.

He learned about Twitter when researching “all kinds of social media,” he says, and his interest has endured because of the “minimalism” of the 140-character updates. And, he adds, “it allows you to have the same conversations that you would have in a room — only around the country and the world.”

During the snowstorm last week, New Mexico Twitter users tagged their posts with #NMSnow (I have to admit, I initiated that particular “hashtag,” as it is called) to report on the effects of the blizzard throughout the state. Fleck joined in as did a few others. After the snowstorm that never materialized later in the week, Fleck began the tag #ABQNotSnow.

Of course, those of us in the so-called new media have also been taking advantage of the service. The local progressive blog Democracy for New Mexico has a Twitter account to broadcast its latest posts as well as comments by users on recent developments.

And the New Mexico Independent has a feed to keep readers keyed into its latest stories and blog posts.

Barbara Wold, who writes Democracy for New Mexico, says the service “is great for keeping up to the minute on news from a variety of traditional and new media sources and spotting breaking news as it happens.”

Wold also uses her RSS feed to post headlines and links to her new blog posts on Twitter. But she notes that the service is not just — or perhaps not even primarily — for work.

“Reading the often snarky and clever personal Twitters are the icing on the cake,” Wold says.

The Canada Lynx is cute! And can kill a deer. Photo by Josh More

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it has begun the process of offering endangered species protection to the Canada lynx, a big furry cat that is protected in other states. As NMI has noted, the animal was reintroduced to Colorado 1999, and since then, approximately 60 of the cats have wandered into northern New Mexico. At least 14 have been killed.

The service was required to make a determination on the lynx as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of several environmental groups, including WildEarth Guardians.

“This is stage one, when they say ‘This has sufficient merits for us to consider it and we’ll take 12 months to mull it over further.’ If they issue a positive finding in 12 months then they will change the listing status for the lynx in New Mexico,” says Rob Edward, carnivore recovery director for WildEarth Guardians.

Why did WildEarth Guardians have to sue the federal agency to protect the lynx? “Well, the short answer is that we’ve been working for the last eight years under the Bush administration, which had no interest in doing much of anything for endangered species.”

The longer answer, Edward says, is that “The Fish and Wildlife Service is functioning under political pressure or simple budget pressure and they have to push back on things that they don’t have the budget or political cover for.” Like protecting the big furry lynx.

While Edward is hopeful that conditions for endangered species will improve in an Obama administration, he is less than pleased about Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, Obama’s nominee for Department of the Interior.

“We’re going to have to take a wait-and-see approach at this point. … [Obama] could have done much better than [Salazar],” Edward says. WildEarth Guardians and other groups had pushed for the nomination of Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, a progressive member of the House Natural Resources Committee and the chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands.

“We certainly hope that Secretary Salazar will be much more of a friend to endangered species… than his voting record and actions would indicate,” Edward says.

While you wait to see what kind of Secretary Salazar will make, if confirmed by the Senate, you can amuse yourselves with this neat-o chart of lynx distribution in the West. Lotsa dots in New Mexico!

Lynx have been moving into northern New Mexico since 1999.

President Bush’s appointees at environmental and health regulatory agencies have let ideology trump scientific and statistical analysis, critics allege. His picks for top posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have faced a steady stream of complaints from Democrats, public interest groups and scientists themselves.

Obama has signaled throughout the campaign season and during the transition that he plans to break from the Bush mold. In appointing Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary on Monday, Obama said, “His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action.”

In response to a series of question from a grassroots organization called ScienceDebate2008, Obama, the presidential candidate, vowed to “restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

The group, whose members included Chu, is dedicated to raising awareness of science and technology policy issues.

Obama’s emphasis is understandable Examples of unscientific decision-making over the last eight years have not been hard to find.

EPA has lost several lawsuits because it has poorly controlled mercury, smog and other pollutants and refused to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s third EPA chief, has ignored EPA scientists and, last year, he blocked California from enacting its own greenhouse gas motor vehicle emission standards. The state has sued EPA in federal court.

In 2007, the White House came under fire for editing a CDC report on the effect global warming would have on public health.

James Holsinger, Bush’s second-term nominee to become surgeon general, was blocked by the Senate because of a position paper he wrote for the United Methodist Church that he wrote arguing that male homosexuality was unnatural and unhealthy. “When the complementarity of the sexes is breached,” he wrote in 1990 “injuries and diseases may occur.”

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

Democrats have criticized the FDA under Bush for everything from salmonella outbreaks to lack of oversight of drug companies. Earlier this year, when FDA officials told Congress that Bush’s budget was sufficient even though Democrats were offering more money, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) let FDA chief Andrew von Eschenbach have it.

“[Y]ou’re not the first fella I’ve had to skin for not doing his job and coming up here and defending an indefensible situation,” Dingell said. “I want to maintain my respect for you but I can’t maintain my respect for you if you keep toe dancing around the hard facts that curse you with the inability to do your job because you don’t have resources.”

So far among the science-oriented agencies, only a new EPA administrator has been chosen. On Monday, Obama announced he’d like the job to go to Lisa Jackson, chief of staff for New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and the state’s former top environmental official.

Jackson and the rest of Obama’s environmental team won wide praise among scientists and liberal bloggers for the pick.

“Today’s appointments suggest a new dawn for America’s role as a leader in research and innovation to address the world’s great challenges,” wrote Shawn Lawrence Otto, the CEO of ScienceDebate2008, a grassroots group that tried to inject discussion of science policy in the election. “We were founded by scientist-statesmen, their voice is what has always made us great, and frankly, it’s good to see it back in the policy process,” he wrote.

Some advocates want Obama to elevate his science advisor, the appointee who will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to cabinet rank much like the national security advisor. In past administrations, this position has gone to physicists, and whether Obama departs from that mold remains to be seen.

“Having that person at place at the table will signal to the public that science is back in the process rather than sidelined and that’s been a theme that Obama has sounded during the campaign,” Mary Woolley, the president of Research America, a research advocacy group, said.

Centers for Disease Control
The Washington Post reported last month that Obama is unlikely to keep Julie Gerberding, the embattled CDC chief. Several names have been floated to take Gerberding’s place.

They include Jeffrey Koplan, a member of Obama’s transition team charged with reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services; Bill Corr, the executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids; and Nicole Lurie, a public health expert at the RAND Corporation. Corr has worked on Capitol Hill and served as chief of staff at HHS. Lurie served as the deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS from 1998 to 2001.

For science advocates, the most important criterion for the next CDC chief is that he or she restore intellectual rigor to the policy-making process and insert the agency into the administration’s internal debates about how to combat climate change.

“We need CDC to become engaged in the federal climate science program,” said Rick Piltz, the founder of Climate Science Watch. “They’ve never been a player as it pertains to how public health is affected by climate change. [CDC needs] a focused program of research and assessment.”

Food and Drug Administration

Last week, a leading House Democrat encouraged Obama to clean house at the FDA.

“The current FDA senior management blocked clinical trials, drove dedicated medical professionals out of the agency, and lined their pockets with outrageous bonuses,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote to Obama last week. “A new Commissioner or Interim Commissioner must bring the Agency back to the forefront of science, integrity, and transparency.”

During the campaign, Obama vowed to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. Giving the FDA new authority to regulate tobacco would vastly expand its power. While Stupak severely criticized Bush’s FDA chief, von Eschenbach, a spokesman from Stupak’s office said he had not pressed Obama to nominate anyone in particular.

The candidate’s FDA administrators, according to news reports, include Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steve Nissen and Joshua Sharfstein, the chief of Baltimore’s publichealth department.

Another possibility is Harold Varmus, the former National Institute of Health director and a Nobel Prize winner. He is now the CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and a member of the Obama transition team.

The biggest challenge for the next FDA administrator “is regaining the public’s trust,” said Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter who is now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Weiss says that FDA has lost the public’s confidence during the past several years after drug related scandals and food safety crises.

One avenue Obama could take, Wisee suggested, is to depart from the tradition that the FDA chief is a medical doctor.

“Obama could break that mold with someone who doesn’t have a conventional background that might be more relevant to the modern FDA,” Weiss said, adding that a candidate might have expertise in the law or food safety issues.

Surgeon General

The surgeon general spot is rife with potential for missteps. President Ronald Reagan’s appointee, C. Everett Koop, was controversial among liberals at first for his views on homosexuality but eventually won their grudging respect and alienated some on the right for waging war on HIV-AIDS and smoking. President Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, whose off-hand comment about masturbation drew heaps of criticism from Capitol Hill and forced her resignation.

Under the Bush administration, the surgeon general has been relegated to a bit player in public health debates, especially in Bush’s second term. Not only does the office not have a permanent occupant, but former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a heart surgeon by training, became the White House’s chief health advisor.

The office can elevate its stature in an Obama administration depending on who is appointed to the job, but Woolley would like to see more resources directed to the nation’s top doctor.

“The new surgeon general [should be] equipped with a real office rather than just an assistant or two and an office [to have a] bigger impact,” she said.

In an interview with Fox Sports, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, joked about naming Dr. J, the basketball star Julius Erving, as surgeon general. Obama is more likely to consider the Emanuel household for a highly qualified candidate for one of the government’s public health posts.

Emmanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the nation’s leading bio-ethicists, is an oft-mentioned candidate for a presidential appointment.

Another possibility is that a “Friend of Barack”, or FOB, could end up as the nation’s next surgeon general. Eric Whitaker was a graduate student at Harvard’s public health school when Obama attended the law school. Whitaker became the chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health and worked at the University of Chicago’s Hospital with Michelle Obama.

So far, Whitaker has let it be known that he wants to serve in the administration, but not just yet.

Another Chicagoan under consideration, according to the Chicago Tribune is, Dr. Gail Rosseau, Rosseau is chief of surgery at the Neurologic and Orthopedic Institute of Chicago and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical Center.

Obama has plenty of allies in the scientific community, but political appointments requiring a background in science and medicine are among the toughest to fill.

“Among the biggest burdens with appointments in these fields are federal salaries. Many scientists are not personally wealthy and have to take pay cuts to work in government,” Cal Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College who is an expert in the appointment process, said.

Scientists are also less likely to go to Washington because of “the risk or fear of falling behind as basic science moves steadily forward,” he said.

But because these agencies have been under political and budgetary constraints for the past eight years, Mackenzie also said that the chance to turn the agencies around and be a part of the Obama administration could attract enough competent candidates to provide Obama with a choice.

In his fourth annual Pogie Awards, David Pogue listed some cool tech ideas from this year — not necessarily the best products. “In fact,” Pogue writes, “sometimes they’re terrific ideas wasted on dumb products.” So what are these great tech ideas?

The first idea on the list of the awards is something timely for the Christmas season — “frustration-free packaging” from Amazon.

You know how so many products come in clear hard plastic packages, impossible to open without a flamethrower and the Jaws of Life? Everybody complains about them, but nobody does anything about it.

Until now. Amazon.com figured: “Hold on a sec — those are anti-shoplifting packages. But we don’t have a shoplifting problem — we’re mail order!”

The annual Christmas tradition of searching for a hacksaw to open up the plastic packaging may soon be a thing of the past. Unless you buy that iPod at Best Buy. Pogue does note, however, that the frustration-free packaging is only on a small number of products currently. But that could change by the time Santa Claus comes to your house in 2009.

Another one is timely for iPhone owners who live in cold climes. The Freehands gloves solve the problem of texting with gloves on — by a flip-back tip on the thumb and index finger that allows you to text or send that e-mail from your BlackBerry with ease.

Or as Pogue writes, “Tap away, get your text message out, then flip the tips back on before you get BlackBerry frostbite.”

And to charge those BlackBerries and iPhones, Pogue cites the mini-USB charging jacks that now can be used to charge your portable device from your computer. My BlackBerry is charging via one right now. “It’s the dawn of the universal, fully interchangeable power cord,” Pogue declares.

A pretty good year for technology ideas if Pogue’s list is any indication.