Virtual Classroom Is Expected to Save 1.6 Million Taxpayer Dollars
Training personnel on one or two new acquisition procedures is relatively easy. Communicating 125 critical acquisition messages to audiences all around the world, in a timely manner, is a challenge. So it's not difficult to feel the synergism of the Lightening Bolt # 9 Virtual Classroom Integrated Product Team, a group of creative U.S. Air Force employees, who accepted this challenge, and by doing so expect to save the Federal Government 1.6 million dollars over the next year. The team also won Vice President Gore's Hammer Award for their achievement.

Technology Means a New, More Secure Passport
We know. You don't like your picture on your driver's license or your passport. However, good or bad picture, here's a passport picture that can't be altered by thieves and thugs. The State Department has introduced a new U.S. passport featuring a digitized photograph and data page. The new passport also contains a number of anti-counterfeiting features in the data page, including security film with a multi-colored multiple diffraction-grating image, similar to a hologram, to protect both the digital photo and the personal data. Microline printing (in the form of wavy lines) is being added behind the photograph to serve as another deterrent to counterfeiting. Production of the existing version of the passport will be phased out gradually. By late 1999, all domestic passport agencies will be equipped to produce the new passport.

Federal Computer Week:
Visiting Naval Observatory Page Is Time Well Spent
"To synchronize your watch to 'official' U.S. time, visit the home page of the Time Service Department at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., said Federal Computer Week's Bob Brewin. "The utilitarian home page offers the current time, but click through to the pages within, and you will enter a World Wide Web site that delights with facts about the inexorable ticking of the clocks that too often rule people's lives."

Thanks to a Battery-Operated Insulin Pump with Computer Chips, Oklahoma Pilot Can Fly Again
After learning the "great news" that Federal Aviation Administration approval of a new diabetic pilot rule was imminent, Michael Bilcik from Yukon, OK, dusted off his flying skills with a flight instructor. Bilcik wears an insulin pump. The device has a reservoir filled with insulin, a small battery-operated pump, and computer chips that allow him to control exactly how much insulin the pump delivers. It's all contained in a plastic case about the size of a pager.

Better Than the Lottery: How to Find Your Lost Pension
"No one told me I had a pension. I am glad to know that there is a government agency like the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation that took the time to look for me and give me my pension." This was the reaction of Ms. Carol Carson, Atlanta, GA., to the news that PBGC was holding a pension for her from her former employer in New York.