I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend, and are ready to get back to work for the home stretch of the year. I had an interesting experience last Wednesday - my daughter came hoem from school and mentioned that her science teacher had emailed the class letting them know that presuming that the weather was clear, one could view the international space station followed by the undocked space shuttle atlantis cross the sky.

At 6:11 PM EST on Wednesday, I went outside with the kids and we stood out there with our heads looking almost straight up into the (somewhat cloudy) sky. The little ones kept pointing at airplanes, but all of a sudden we saw two bright objects appear, one following the other, sail across the WNW sky, then duck behind some clouds and disappear.

As a kid, I used to excitedly watch the launchings of the Apollo mission Saturn rockets, wondering whether the astronauts would reach their destination or even return alive. But with the multitude of space junk orbiting the earth, and with limited exposure to how incredible it really is to get big things off the ground and floating around the planet, today's children are somewhat immune to the wonder of space flight. Yet it is amazing that my daughter's science teacher can reintroduce that wonder by giving us the chance to experience it first hand, in our own front yeard.

Not really a surprise, and one that we discussed over at this blog note, but apparently the data reported regarding stimulus money spending is not immune to data flaws. This article over at cnn.com discusses some of the simple types of errors appearing in the jobs data, such as hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in Arizona's 52nd, 15th and 86th congressional districts, despite that sparse state's only having eight congressional districts.

I especially like dthe quote from Wisconsin representative Dave Obey: "Credibility counts in government, and stupid mistakes like this undermine it."

I am presenting a talk today in a web seminar at noon ET. The talk is on "Best Practices Using Core Data Services," and I will explore how we can organize our critical information management and business intelligence activities on top of key data principles for quality, availability, and enhancement!

I came across a few articles last week talking about easing the cost of compliance for small and medium companies for Sarbane Oxley.  This article from the New York Times comments that "the House Financial Services Committee moved to permanently exempt companies worth less than $75 million from the auditing provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act."

Despite its being touted as a measure to ease the financial burden, I have reservations about this for two reasons. First, eliminating the auditing provision essentially removes any capability to ensure investors that there are processes in place to verify that the financial data meets specified compliance criteria. In turn, this opens the door for noncompliance and places the burden on the shareholders to force the company to be honest about the company's finances.

Second, it eliminates the need to institute a key best practice for data quality management - transparent inspection and monitoring of enterprise data. As a data quality practitioner, I am disappointed that the government is stepping away from mandated data quality management and data governance.