A $293,871 Department of Transportation contract went to Scientex Corp. to develop an Older Driver handbook to help highway designers plan senior-friendly highways for aging baby boomers. Recommendations include putting larger lettering on road signs and painting brighter lines on pavement.
Almost $224,000 went to an Alabama printing company to print an 820-page Social Skills Training Manual for Job Corps participants.
Nearly $9.6 million went to a Washington public-relations firm from the Treasury Department for a public-education campaign on the availability of government benefits via electronic transfer.
$145,000 went to a California lithographer to print Social Security and You, a teacher's guide for communicating the benefits of the
program to presumably innumerate youngsters.
The Department of Education awarded $973,243 to Mathtech, an educational consulting firm, to study whether ethnic diversity on campus enhances the learning experiences of students.
The Army awarded a $999,000 grant to study "elasto-dynamic locomotion in meso-scale robotic insects" and the Navy awarded $70,000 to develop a system for "detection, tracking and monitoring of human combinations in urban environments."
The USDA awarded $88,625 to a Washington public-relations firm to develop point-of-purchase displays raising public awareness of the poultry-grading system, even though nothing less than Grade A or AA eggs are sold in most stores, and such grades are largely aesthetic anyway.
The USDA awarded $12,800 to a Florida firm to transport 128,000 pounds of medfly pupae to Tampa from Miami, where they arrived by air transport from a medfly breeding facility in Guatemala. In Tampa, the pests are hatched, irradiated until sterile, flash-frozen, then dropped from aircraft over orange groves where they are thawed, revive, and mate fruitlessly with other medflies. All of which raises the question: Why not fly them directly to Tampa?
