Phil Baumann’s Posterous

Hundreds, if not thousands, of lobbyists are likely to be ejected from federal advisory panels as part of a little-noticed initiative by the Obama administration to curb K Street's influence in Washington, according to White House officials and lobbying experts.

The new policy -- issued with little fanfare this fall by the White House ethics counsel -- may turn out to be the most far-reaching lobbying rule change so far from President Obama, who also has sought to restrict the ability of lobbyists to get jobs in his administration and to negotiate over stimulus contracts.

The initiative is aimed at a system of advisory committees so vast that federal officials don't have exact numbers for its size; the most recent estimates tally nearly 1,000 panels with total membership exceeding 60,000 people.

I don’t know. The mainstream media is doing a wonderful job sensationalizing this case, presenting it without skepticism. Some outlets are doing a good job of discussing the relevant issues – but they don’t have the information to have a meaningful discussion of this particular case. Details are tantalizing but thin.

The case is that of Rom Houben. The story was broke, as far as I can tell, by the Mail Online – yes, that is a huge red flag. It does not make the story wrong, it just doesn’t instill in me confidence in the reporting.

A graduate student with the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and seismologists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) are developing a system for tracking earthquakes using Twitter.

The Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED) system provides the locations of people who felt the earthquake within a minute of the earthquake's detection by the USGS and provides short, firsthand accounts of its effects

Hi, my name is Johnny. I’m here to tell you about a social networking site so good, Facebook bought the people who designed it.

What is that service you ask? It’s called FriendFeed.

That’s right, you may have heard of us before. We have been called a rival to Twitter or Facebook etc but that’s not really the point of the site. We are a central hub, an aggregator, a Twitter client, a RSS catcher, podcasting client, photo sharing service and discussion platform… The most important part? It’s a community.

My guest, Josh Kosman, predicts that we're on the verge of the next great credit crisis, not because of credit cards or student loans. The credit crisis he's predicting is from the actions of private equity firms. These are firms that buy companies, with the help of huge loans, and typically try to resell the companies or take them public before the loans come due. The companies that have been bought and sold are then often left with the debt. Kosman explores how private equity firms manage to make big profits while nearly destroying some of the companies they buy and sell in his new book, "The Buyout of America.

I just finished watching a live stream of a speech President Obama gave at the White House, pledging more support for science education in this country.

Woohoo!

[Edited to add: the speech transcript is now online, complete with Mythbusters shout-out.]

Science, technology, engineering, and math — STEM — education has been struggling for years. This new effort, called Educate to Innovate, is "…designed to energize and excite America’s students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

Physical or emotional abuse during childhood could speed up the body's ageing process, US research suggests.

A team from Brown University focused on telomeres, the protective caps on the chromosomes that keep a cell's DNA stable but shorten with age.

They found the telomeres of 31 people who had reported abuse as children tended to shorten more rapidly, speeding up cells' ageing process.

So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.