Investigations by the Department of Labor Inspector General reveal widespread use of sole source grants sometimes without appropriate documentation. (report, pdf) The finger points at Emily Stover DeRocco, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training and her underlings at the Employment and Training Administration who granted about a quarter of a billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury under the High Growth Job Training Initiative. You may recognize the name High Growth Job Training Initiative since geospatial is among the areas targeted by the initiative.

The IG found that over the previous six years, DeRocco’s agency awarded 157 grants totaling $271 million under that program. Only 23 grants totaling $29 million were awarded competitively. Fully 87 percent of the funds were handed out without any competition.

Even worse, 90 percent of these non-competitive grants that the IG examined in detail (35 out of 39) were done in a manner that did not conform to proper procedures for awarding such grants. The IG identified 69 procedural errors ...

GITA's grant is among those with imcomplete documentation. I suggest nothing innapproriate was done at GITA; it did a great job of promoting not only that it got the grant, but documenting the milestones along the way.

A $235,500 grant to the Associate General Contractors (the trade association of the construction industry) was justified by an abstract which the IG found to be incomplete, as was the case with a $695,000 grant to the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (the trade group for infrastructure professionals), a $4,268,000 grant to the Home Builders Institute (an affiliate of the National Association of Home Builders), and a $1,877,000 grant to the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society.

De Rocco stated that she “strongly disagrees” with the report.

- American Progress

Well-known New England GIS guy Niels la Cour has left his role as Senior Planner in Amherst, Mass to join the staff at the University of Massachusetts as a physical planner taking on the update of the campus master plan. Good luck with the new job.

- Amherst Bulletin

When I started my graduate work at Penn State we told in no uncertain terms that part of the money that allowed us to be in the program came from the football program. I respected that, and we had a number of football players in the department. Now word of another football player turned geographer: Matt Schroeder who was a high school standout and record setter in Muscatine, IL and college superstar at St. Ambrose University. He received a bachelor of arts degree in business administration and now works at Intermap as a radar operator member of the aircrew on a Lear jet using IFSAR (synthetic apeture radar).

- Muscatine Journal

GovExec focusses on government efforts to rekindle the "analysts" of all sorts in defense, specifically by Mike Wertheimer assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. He's tapping into younger analysts to help. Among those profiled is one from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency:

Sean Wohltman, a 25-year-old counter-terrorism analyst with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, embodies the kind of optimistic disillusionment that Wertheimer wants to harness. Two years after defending his master's thesis in geographic information science at Virginia Tech University, Wohltman joined the government "following a call for patriotism," he said. He encountered "disappointment and disillusionment" in his first three months on the job, however.
As Wohltman explained to the Chicago conference, "When I first logged on to what I expected to be a terminal from 24's [counter-terrorist unit] command center, I was instead driven to my agency's home page, which flashed information about an upcoming picnic and links to fill out my health insurance. And not only that, it launched in Netscape." Those in the audience who laughed understood that Netscape is an obsolete Internet browser.

The annual meeting of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) is next week, so our editors consider the role of the Geographic Information Officer, GIO. Is it necessary? Will it have the visibility and authority necessary to compete for funding and to control the "fiefdoms" of state and local governments? How will we train such leaders? The podcast is 12 minutes long and was recorded on September 17, 2007.

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Five San Diego State University Professors in the geography department, along with colleagues at Harvard and George Washington University recieved a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue an ongoing exploration of urban health inequalities in Ghana: "Health, Poverty, and Place: Modeling Inequalities in Accra Using RS and GIS."

- SDSUniverse

In Connecticut a $7,450 state grant will put 20 students, ages 12 to 15, in the city's Seaside Park Summer Day Camp to map trees at Seaside and Beardsley parks next July. It's been called a "GIS Tree Mapping Boot Camp."

- Connecticut Post

Allan Doyle whose latest efforts have been with the MIT Museum's Museum Without Walls project has a new job: MIT Museum Director of Technology. We can only expect cool things...

Sean Phelan of Multimap fame tells his "How I made it" story to the Times. He was an entrepreneur at an early age, not a map fanatic. Some pearls of wisdom:

- Start on the cheap and in the early days spend as little money as possible.

- But also be on the lookout from day one for really good people to work with. Find really good people, motivate and retain them and give them the wherewithal to do their job. Really good people will want to join a start-up if they believe in it.

- In the early days don’t recruit people who are just like yourself. You want people whose strengths complement your weaknesses.