Why does NASA JSC PAO have staff in Saudi Arabia?
Keith’s note: Why does NASA JSC PAO have staff in Saudi Arabia? Are there that many NASA employees attending the ASE event such that they need a PAO handler?
@amikokauderer Chilling out, maxin’ and relaxin’ with a couple new dinner friends. @ The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh http://instagr.am/p/RqUdSrpEOw/
Earth’s Astronauts Meet, earlier post
Keith’s update: Correction/update: @amikokauderer says she is “not on the job” – but she is listed as accompanying Scott Kelly, an active U.S. astronaut according to ASE.
Keith’s update: According to ASE: “Amiko is here as Scott’s guest. Scott is here as the official NASA active astronaut representative; although he is on official orders, all (flights, hotels, meals, everything) of his and Amiko’s expenses have been picked up by our Saudi hosts (all expenses for all attendees have been picked up by the hosts). She is here purely as a private citizen and Scott’s guest.”
Keith’s note: I wonder if the opportunity to get an all expenses paid trip to Saudi Arabia was offered to other NASA JSC employees instead of just sending a PAO employee.
i guess i’m just an “old geezer” but i really don’t like texts like that … your tax dollars at “work” … sigh
I am not concerned about that tweet in terms of tax dollars as three tweets before where it says: “@amikokauderer
Business class virgin. About to be ruined. I can just tell. http://instagr.am/p/RlTbKwpED9“
My hope here is this is a personal trip (or funded by the Saudi government?) and not US taxpayer trip, particularly considering the deep budget cuts effecting travel for civil servants.
Ah the dangers of social media
Amiko is supposedly some kind of social media expert.
Yeah I saw that after I posted and went to the actual tweet 🙂 The basic tenet of social media is to lay it all out there I guess. Facebook has let it be known it prefers everyone make everything public. Google+ doesn’t let you use a pseudonym. This doesn’t always make sense though. What if you value privacy a bit but still want some of the usefulness of those services? You have to be pretty careful. It’s obviously good for those social media entities for everything to be public but worlds definitely collide. Professional Amiko and private Amiko collided here and things were misinterpreted. Do you want the future of your career to be affected by what someone might judge from a photo on your facebook that was only intended for certain people? The more internet presence you have, the more likely there is something negative about you or from you out there that can be used or something benign that can be misconstrued in the impersonal nature of the internet. I probably sound like a tin-foiler but I don’t consider myself one. Things like social media background checks are real.
She uses that Twitter account for work purposes. She has nearly 2,000 followers including lots of news media. Tick tock.
Yeah, work purposes and personal purposes. At least with Twitter, she could make accounts with different names so she might want to try that and separate her friends from her work followers. Probably what I’d do. Don’t want to brag about living it up for work related stuff to news media followers.
That made me think of the account ownership thing also. If someone has a promotional account and leaves the company and goes to another… can the company claim ownership and keep the account and followers, or does the individual keep the followers and get to bring them to the new company?
Amiko has been “dating” Scott Kelly for several years, and riding along with him on various trips that are questionable. Not quite sure how she qualified for a job at NASA but if you saw the way she set up NASA the day Endeavour flew over Houston when Mark Kelly called in, you have to wonder why they allow her to be an on air commentator.
So, is NASA paying her a salary while she rides along?
Believable –esp. considering NASA’s utter disregard for taxpayer dollars annually by sending over a dozen ‘civil servants’ to Paris ‘committee meetings’ (wherein most of NASA staff rife with their small minded government employee mentalities (apologies to any in gov’t who don’t inhibit progress) poo-poo any innovative ideas from other committee members (which, suppose in committee land is fairly common) and then again a dozen or more to the IAC (Prague 2010, Capetown 2011, Naples Italy 2012, Beijing 2013…). Why? WHAT do they accomplish? Not sure they are held to ANY “accomplishments”. Taxpayers should be outraged and demand to know WHAT their list of objectives are in such attendance and then be briefed as to the deliverables that resulted. Otherwise this is pure slush.