57418247
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dcblogs writes:
President Barack Obama's fiscal 2015 budget plan would increase federal R&D spending by 1.2% over this year, if Congress approves. The Computing Research Association, in a blog post, called the budget request "underwhelming for science." John Holdren, White House senior adviser on science and technology policy, said that research spending on science and technology "is doing better than might have been expected" given budget constraints. But Holdren added that the U.S. is getting more R&D competition. "It is true that China, for example, has been increasing its investments at a very high rate and is now sitting at about half the investment of the United States," said Holdren. "That gap will narrow further if China continues to boost its investments in that way."
57162137
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dcblogs writes:
IBM is laying off U.S. employees this week as part of a $1B restructuring, and is apparently trying keep the exact number of cuts secret. The Alliance@IBM, the main source of layoff information at IBM, says the company has stopped including in its resource action documents, given to cut employees, the number of employees selected for a job cut. The union calls it a “disturbing development.” Meanwhile, two days prior to the layoffs, NY Gov. Cuomo announced that it reached a new minimum staffing level agreement with IBM to "maintain 3,100 high-tech jobs in the Hudson Valley and surrounding areas.” The governor’s office did not say how many IBM jobs are now there, but others put estimate it at around 7,000. Lee Conrad, a national coordinator for the Alliance, said the governor's announcement raises some questions for workers and the region. "Yes, you're trying to protect 3,100 jobs but what about the other 3,900 jobs?" The Alliance estimates that anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 U.S. workers could be impacted by the latest round of layoffs. IBM says it has more than 3,000 open positions in the U.S., and says the cuts are part of a "rebalancing" as it shifts investments into new areas of technology, such as cognitive computing.
56851641
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dcblogs writes:
California is facing its worst drought in more than 100 years, and one with no end in sight. But it is offering Silicon Valley opportunities. In one project, the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland used customized usage reports developed by WaterSmart Software that report a customer's water use against average use for similar sized households. It uses a form of peer pressure to change behavior. A just concluded year-long pilot showed a 5% reduction in water usage. The utility said the reporting system could "go a long way" toward helping the state meet its goal of a reducing water usage by 20% per capita statewide. In other tech related activities, the organizer of a water-tech focused hackathon, Hack the Drought is hoping this effort leads to new water conserving approaches. Overall, water tech supporters are working to bring more investor attention to this market. Imagine H2O, a non-profit, holds annual water tech contests and then helps with access to venture funding. The effort is focused on "trying to address the market failure in the water sector," Scott Bryan, the chief operating officer of Imagine H2O.
56374405
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dcblogs writes:
The personal history of Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO, may draw him into the immigration debate over visas. His background, born in Hyderabad, earning advanced degrees in the U.S., exemplifies the type of STEM expertise that Microsoft's cites for visa liberalization. Microsoft has long argued that U.S. schools do not produce enough computer science grads. Said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, "We have imported people, in part, because when we started the 1980s, we didn't have the capacity in our higher education institutions to produce the degrees that would be needed to take these new jobs." But Microsoft's assertions of a skills shortage have long been disputed. "Microsoft's lobbyists and executives have played the leading role in misinforming the public and policymakers about how the H-1B and L-1 visa programs are used in practice," says Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. What is certain is that Indian community in Silicon Valley is "bursting with pride" over Microsoft's new CEO, reports the LA Times.
56157415
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dcblogs writes:
President Barack Obama urged Congress to increase federal research funding or risk the U.S. technology lead to China and Europe. "This is an edge America cannot surrender," said Obama, in his State of the Union speech. The National Science Foundation budget bill approved this month by Congress set aside $7.1 billion, well below the president's request. The approved budget is only about 2.4% over FY 2012 spending, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). When inflation if factored, it represents a real-dollar decline of 3% from 2012. Overall, defense R&D spending will decline by $8.4 billion, or 11.2%, from fiscal year 2012 levels, according to the AAAS. On the same day the Obama delivered his speech, the Pentagon was warning lawmakers, at a hearing, about China. "From the perspective of technological superiority, the Department of Defense is being challenged in ways I have not seen for many years," said Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense.
56037331
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dcblogs writes:
Detroit, a city in bankruptcy and dealing with a shrinking population, hopes to turn itself around with the help of 50,000 employment-based green cards. In exchange for the visa, an immigrant would be required to "live and work" in Detroit for an undetermined length of time. The visas would be made available under the EB-2 visa category, a visa for advanced degree professionals or those deemed with "exceptional ability" in the sciences, arts and business. The proposal was made by Michigan's governor, Rick Snyder. Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at Economic Policy Institute, said Snyder would have more credibility on the issue if he were doing more to help workers in Detroit. In 2011, the state cut jobless benefits by six weeks to 20. "I also think the federal government should be offering people in the U.S. some money and land in Detroit if they'll move there," said Costa, or "just offer it to people across the country who have advanced degrees."
55828283
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dcblogs writes:
The employer with the most IT job postings last year was Amazon.com, with 16,146 ads, exceeding most other IT firms by a wide margin, according to a report by trade group CompTIA using data from Burning Glass Technologies in Boston, which analyzes online job postings from approximately 32,000 jobs sites. The runners-up in 2013 U.S. job postings were Accenture, at 14,240 and Deloitte, at 13,077 job ads. Best Buy posted 10,725 IT job ads, ahead of IBM at 10,221. Best Buy's hiring was attributed to its computer support business.
55546907
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dcblogs writes:
Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year. The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation. There are 300,000 people working as electrical engineers, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. In 2002, there were 385,000 electrical engineers in the U.S. Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, called the electrical engineering employment trend "truly disturbing," and said, "just like America's manufacturing has been hollowed out by offshoring and globalization, it appears that electrical and electronics engineering is heading that way."
55090419
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dcblogs writes:
With Moore's Law the technology industry has been coasting along on steady, predictable performance gains. But stability and predictability are also the ingredients of complacency and inertia. At this stage, Moore's Law may be more analogous to golden handcuffs than to innovation. With its end, systems makers and governments are being challenged to come up with new materials and architectures. The European Commission has written of a need for "radical innovation in many computing technologies." The U.S. National Science Foundation, in a recent budget request, said technologies such as carbon nantube digital circuits to molecular-based approaches including biologically inspired systems will likely be needed. The slowdown in Moore's Law, has already hit HPC and Marc Snir, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, outlined, in a series of slides, the proplem of going below 7nm on chips, and the lack of alternative technologies.
54818287
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dcblogs writes:
U.S. government contracts often require bidders to have achieved some level of Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level. CMMI arose some 25 years ago via the backing of the Department of Defense and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. It operated as a federally funded research and development center until a year ago, when CMMI's product responsibility was shifted to a private, profit-making LLC, the CMMI Institute. The Institute is now owned by Carnegie Mellon. Given that the CMMI Institute is now a self-supporting firm, any requirement that companies be certified by it — and spend the money needed to do so — raises a natural question. "Why is the government mandating that you support a for-profit company?" said Henry Friedman, the CEO of IR Technologies, a company that develops logistics defense related software and uses CMMI. The value of a certification is subject to debate. To what extent does a CMMI certification determine a successful project outcome? CGI Federal, the lead contractor at Healthcare.gov, is a veritable black belt in software development. In 2012, it achieved the highest possible Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level for development certification, only the 10th company in the U.S. to do so.
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dcblogs writes:
This year may be remembered for its striking number of reports and warning of calamitous events. The National Intelligence Council released its Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report that included a number of dire possibilities ahead, including the prospect of a catastrophic solar storm, on par with the 1859 Carrington Event. Historical records suggest a return period of 50 years for a repeat of the Quebec-level storm that knocked out the power for 6 million in 1989, and 150 years for very extreme storms, such as the Carrington Event, according to Lloyd's, in a report this year. Scientists at the Idaho National Laboratory recently demonstrated in tests that "geomagnetic disturbances have the power to disrupt and possibly destroy electrical transformers, the backbone of our nation's utility grid." This was also the year the average daily level of CO2 reached a concentration above 400 parts per million. In a recent National Academies report this year, "Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change: Anticipating Surprises," scientists recommend creation of a global early warning system to alert mankind to abrupt climate changes. A recent paper in Nature, Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human response time, said financial trading systems are driving transaction times down to the speed of light, and "the quickest that someone can notice potential danger and physically react, is approximately 1 second."
54633735
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dcblogs writes:
The tech industry is seeing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%. A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization's IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts.
54199603
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dcblogs writes:
Cloud adopters face serious risk in the next two years because of the strong possibility that their provider will be acquired or forced out of business, according to Gartner.The research firm is predicting a major consolidation in cloud services and estimates that about 25% of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won't be around by 2015. "One in four vendors will be gone for whatever reason — acquisition, bankruptcy," said William Maurer, a Gartner analyst. Most of the time, the changes will come through acquisition. There is pressure on providers to cut costs, but Maurer is advising enterprise users to be gentle with their vendors. "You need to make to make sure that your service providers are successful," said Maurer. "Give them a chance to make a reasonable return on their investments, give them a chance to make some money."
54120247
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dcblogs writes:
Goldman Sachs, a major player in one of the most risk adverse industries, embraces commodity approaches, open systems and platforms, and ultimately perhaps, the public cloud. Goldman Sachs has 36,000 employees. About 10,000 of those — more than 25% of the workforce — work, effectively, in technology. Of those tech workers, about 6,000 are developers. The investment bank's systems utilize, in total, about 500,000 compute cores. It believes commodity systems offer better protection against risk. Commodity systems allow for rapid change, said Donald Duet, global co-chief operating officer of the Goldman Sachs technology division. "Having more agility, having more ability to make changes rapidly, having more ability to move quickly, is a great risk mitigator," he said.
53987067
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dcblogs writes:
IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift is slowing the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. The increased use of SaaS is a major reason for the market shift, but so is virtualization to increase server capacity. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well, along with the purchase of denser servers capable of handling larger loads. The increased use of cloud-based providers is roiling the server market, and is expected to help send server revenue down 3.5% this year, according to IDC.
