53899499
submission
dcblogs writes:
The National Research Council is recommending creation of an early warning system for abrupt climate change. Unlike like a hurricane warning system that's issued days in advance, or a tornado alert that arrives minutes ahead of impact, the climate change system would warn about events that could happen in a few years or a few decades but have consequences that last far longer than those of any storm. It says that abrupt climate has already begun, especially in the loss of sea ice. The report broadly calls the climate change threats "dragons," borrowing from the phase, "Here be dragons," that appears on a globe from the time of Christopher Columbus. The dragons are a "metaphor for unknown threats." The report recommends development of an "Abrupt Change Early Warning System" (ACEWS). Such a system would require significant computing power. "Computation resources, while increasing, still remain an obstacle for climate-scale high-resolutions simulations," the report said.
53881127
submission
dcblogs writes:
China overtook Japan in IT spending this year to become the world's second largest IT market, according to market research firm IDC. The U.S. remains the largest IT market in the world, still more than three times the size of China. China's overall IT spending is projected to hit $204 billion in 2014, versus $686 billion in the U.S. In 2013, China's IT spending will total $179 billion, beating Japan's $173 billion by $5 billion.
53845911
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dcblogs writes:
Internet security firm Symantec says it has discovered a new Linux worm that "appears to be engineered to target the Internet of Things." No attacks have yet been found in the wild, it reported. But as Alfred Hitchcock once said, "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it." The worm discovered by Symantec attacks an old PHP vulnerability that was patched last year, and targets a small subset of Internet of Things devices, such as Linux-based home routers, set-top boxes, security cameras and industrial control systems.
53242141
submission
dcblogs writes:
In the global race to build the next generation of supercomputers — exascale — there is no guarantee the U.S. will finish first. But the stakes are high for the U.S. tech industry. Today, U.S. firms — Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, in particular — dominate the global high performance computing (HPC) market. On the Top 500 list, the worldwide ranking of the most powerful supercomputers, HP now has 39% of the systems, IBM, 33%, and Cray, nearly 10%. That lopsided U.S. marketshare does not sit well with other countries, which are busy building their own chips, interconnects and their own high-tech industries in the push for exascale. Europe and China are deep into effort to build exascale machines, and now so is Japan. Kimihiko Hirao, director of the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science of Japan, said Japan is prepping a system for 2020. Asked whether he sees the push to exascale as a race between nations, Hirao said yes. Will Japan try to win that race? "I hope so," he said. "We are rather confident," said Hirao, arguing that Japan has the technology and the people to achieve the goal. Jack Dongarra, a professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee and one of the academic leaders of the Top 500 supercomputing list, said Japan is serious and on target to deliver a system by 2020. Citing Japan's previous accomplishments in supercomputing, Dongarra said that "when the Japanese put down a plan to deliver a machine, they deliver the machine."
53116329
submission
dcblogs writes:
At this year's supercomputing conference, SC13, there is worry that supercomputing faces a performance plateau unless a disruptive processing tech emerges. "We have reached the end of the technological era" of CMOS, said William Gropp, chairman of the SC13 conference and a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Gropp likened the supercomputer development terrain today to the advent of CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), the foundation of today's standard semiconductor technology. The arrival of CMOS was disruptive, but it fostered an expansive age of computing. The problem is "we don't have a technology that is ready to be adopted as a replacement for CMOS," said Gropp. "We don't have anything at the level of maturity that allows you to bet your company on." Peter Beckman, a top computer scientist at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, and head of an international exascale software effort, said large supercomputer system prices have topped off at about $100 million "so performance gains are not going to come from getting more expensive machines, because these are already incredibly expensive and powerful. So unless the technology really has some breakthroughs, we are imagining a slowing down."
53024557
submission
dcblogs writes:
The prospect of a big jump in the H-1B temporary work visas is worrisome to some academics, who say it will have consequences for students. Karen Panetta, a professor of electrical engineering at Tufts University, says a master's degree is the new bachelor degree in the employment market, and it is increasing the financial burdens on students. The cost of tuition in the U.S. "is so unrealistically prohibitive," what you are finding "is a class shift," said Panetta. These students will face increasing competition from lower-wage H-1B workers if the federal cap on visas rises — and Panetta doesn't believe people see the connection between student debt and H-1B workers. "We can't solve the problem unless we have all the parameters and variables of the equation," she said.
52988215
submission
dcblogs writes:
One year ago this month, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $120 million plan to develop a technology capable of radically extending battery life. "We want to change the game, basically," said George Crabtree, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a physics professor who is leading the effort. The goal is to develop a battery that can deliver five times the performance, measured in energy density, that's also five times cheaper, and do it in five years. They are looking at three research areas. Researchers are considering replacing the lithium with magnesium that has two charges, or aluminum, which has three charges. Another approach investigates replacing the intercalation step with a true chemical reaction. A third approach is the use of liquids to replace crystalline anodes and cathodes, which opens up more space for working ions.
52730181
submission
dcblogs writes:
U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of "War Room" notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren't showing data, servers didn't have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn't enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications. According to one note: "Donna's comp time approver is furloughed."
52661159
submission
dcblogs writes:
U.S. officials say the Healthcare.gov website is improving for its users, and in a press briefing Friday, Jeffrey Zients, the White House official in charge of ensuring the site gets fixed, touted the improvements so far: "The current page response times are now less than one second — or "1,000 milliseconds." But the only way to know for sure is to put their claims to an independent test, and that's exactly what was done by SmartBear. The Healthcare.gov homepage is loading quickly, ranging from 1.5 seconds to 4 seconds, according to this test, conducted during the workday Monday. The average time for the homepage was 3.04 seconds. Healthcare.gov was compared to a dozen other healthcare-related sites, which were also tested on Monday by SmartBear. It ranked well, placing fourth in this list. The Mayo Clinic was at the top with load times under a second, and the AARP was last, at well past 10 seconds. But once testing drilled past the homepage to interior pages, performance issues arose. Notably, there was an approximately 1.5-hour period during Monday's test when users were unable to fill out an enrollment application. The White House blamed the problem on load balancing.
52490363
submission
dcblogs writes:
The U.S. alleges that offshore outsourcing giant Infosys violated visa laws to increase its profits, reduce visa expenses and avoid tax liabilities, in a settlement announced Wednesday. But the allegations, and the evidence the government says it has to back them up, will remain just that, allegations. Instead of pursuing a court case, the U.S. will accept a $34 million settlement payment from Infosys. This settlement is a fraction of Infosys' 2012 revenues of $6.99 billion. Infosys, which applies for thousands of H-1B visas every year, "unlawfully" supplemented its workforce with B-1 visa workers, according to the U.S. complaint. Infosys wrote letters to U.S. officials with "false representations regarding the true purpose" of a B-1 worker's activities. Infosys says that "only .02% of the days Infosys employees worked on U.S. projects in 2012 were performed by B-1 visa holders." But this date, 2012, was after the government probe began in 2011. Infosys has not disclosed the size of its U.S. workforce, or the percentage of its workforce on visas.
52315139
submission
dcblogs writes:
The problems at Healthcare.gov may qualify as a black swan event, something that's difficult to predict and is disruptive. The disruptive consequences have been severe enough to prompt President Obama to express dissatisfaction with the site, and his administration faces the risk that the site problems may force it to adjust the deadlines of its signature policy project. A U.S. House hearing Thursday offered no assurances that the site will be fixed soon. Healthcare.gov's 55 contractors had only two weeks to conduct end-to-end testing prior to launch. Months of testing were needed, said contractors at this hearing. Approximately one out of six IT projects face exploding costs, according to Alexander Budzier, a researcher at the Said Business School at the University of Oxford. Budzier and Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford's business school, have gathered data from 4,300 worldwide IT projects in the private and public sectors whose typical costs range between $1 million and $10 million. IT projects perform worse than physical projects, such as large dam construction, where one-in-ten may see cost blow-outs, said Budzier. In IT, 18% of projects turn into outliers that "really run out control, and that's a usually high rate," he said. Other studies also point to high IT failure rates. A Gartner study put large IT project ($1M and above) failure rates at 28%. Standish Group says 41% of IT projects above $10M are failures. A 150% or more cost overrun could put Healthcare.gov in the black swan category.
52174961
submission
dcblogs writes:
President Barack Obama said Monday that there is "no excuse" for the problems at Healthcare.gov. But a majority of large IT projects fail to meet deadlines, are over budget and don't make their users happy. Such is the case with Healthcare.gov. The Standish Group has a database of some 50,000 development projects. Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were "challenged," meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn't meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures — they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch. "They didn't have a chance in hell," said Jim Johnson, founder and chairman of Standish, of Healthcare.gov. "There was no way they were going to get this right — they only had a 6% chance," he said.
51961209
submission
dcblogs writes:
In a better time, circa 1998, Cypress Semiconductor founder and CEO T.J. Rodgers gave a provocative speech, titled: "Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington D.C." This speech is still important to understanding the conflict that tech leaders have with Congress, and their relative silence during the shutdown. "The metric that differentiates Silicon Valley from Washington does not fall along conventional political lines: Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal, right versus left," Rogers said. "It falls between freedom and control. It is a metric that separates individual freedom to speak from tap-ready telephones; local reinvestment of profit from taxes that go to Washington; encryption to protect privacy from government eavesdropping; success in the marketplace from government subsidies; and a free, untaxed Internet from a regulated, overtaxed Internet."
51708875
submission
dcblogs writes:
Gartner says new technologies are decreasing jobs. In the industrial revolution — and revolutions since — there was an invigoration of jobs. For instance, assembly lines for cars led to a vast infrastructure that could support mass production giving rise to everything from car dealers to road building and utility expansion into new suburban areas. But the "digital industrial revolution" is not following the same path. "What we're seeing is a decline in the overall number of people required to do a job," said Daryl Plummer, a Gartner analyst at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo. Plummer points to a company like Kodak, which once employed 130,000, versus Instagram's 13. The analyst believes social unrest movements, similar to Occupy Wall Street, will emerge again by 2014 as the job creation problem deepens.
51401191
submission
dcblogs writes:
The arrival of Obamacare may make it easier for some employees to quit their full-time jobs to launch tech start-ups, work as a freelance consultant or pursue some other solo career path. Most tech start-up founders are older and need health insurance. The average age of people who create a tech start-up is 39, and not 20-something," said Bruce Bachenheimer, who heads Pace University's Entrepreneurship Lab. Entrepreneurs are willing to take on risks, but health care is not a manageable risk, he said. "There is a big difference between mortgaging your house on something you can control, and risking going bankrupt by an illness because of something you can't control," said Bachenheimer. Donna Harris, the co-founder of the 1776 incubation platform in Washington, believes the healthcare law will encourage more start-ups. "You have to know that there are millions of Americans who might be fantastic and highly successful entrepreneurs who are not pursuing that path because of how healthcare is structured," said Harris
