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Submission + - Researchers warn that your political ideology may affect job offers (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Employees are discussing national politics in the workplace now more than ever, according to two new surveys. Politics has been on the rise since the 2016 election. But political leanings may be more than an office irritation. Managers tend to hire people of similar ideology, and doing so could create a hiring bias, according to researchers at Texas A&M. "It is becoming more common to learn and make inferences about an applicant's political ideology, particularly given information sources such as social media," said Andrew Johnson, assistant professor of management in the College of Business at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi. It's easy to separate those perceived as "different," he said. Hiring managers may not feel hiring this is wrong. There are employment discrimination protections for gender, race, religion and other characteristics. But political affiliations are not a protected class under the law.

Submission + - After payroll provider collapses, banks drain employee accounts (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: MyPayRollHR, a payroll processing provider with about 4,000 small to mid-sized business customers, suddenly closed late last week. In response, the banking system went haywire and began taking funds from employees at many of these firms. Previously deposited pay was removed from their personal banking accounts, or "reversed." Not once, but twice and there are reports that these withdrawals happened continuously. The checking account of one employee of an animal rescue facility was pinged for nearly $1 million. Her account shows a negative $999,193.75.

Submission + - Iran says it's building an AI supercomputer, despite sanctions (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran's minister of information and communication technology, tweeted out his country's plans to build a supercomputer for AI development. Jahromi said the new supercomputer, in an English translation from his Persian, "is due to launch next year: 100 times more powerful than previous ones, great!" Trade restrictions have not prevented Iran from acquiring what it needs. In 2007, for instance, Iran's Amirkabir University of Technology announced it had assembled a Linux-based system using 216 AMD Opteron cores. It even published photographs, since removed, of the system under assembly. Iran has announced supercomputer efforts in 2011 and 2014. It's unclear what Jahromi is benchmarking against when he characterized the forthcoming system as "100 times more powerful."

Submission + - U.S. to use exascale system to modernize its aging nuclear weapons (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The U.S. Dept. of Energy is buying a 1.5 exaflops supercomputer from Cray valued about $600 million to modernize its nuclear stockpile. China and Russia are building new nukes "as opposed to the United States, where we are not fielding or designing new nuclear weapons. We are actually extending the life of our current nuclear weapons systems," said Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, undersecretary for nuclear security at the DOE.

The exascale system, called El Capitan, is due in late 2022 and will allow DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, to simulate the interaction between the physics of the nuclear system and the engineering features of the delivery system, said Bill Goldstein, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This system will enable the U.S. to model these interactions in 3D. "We simply can't rely on two dimensional simulations — 3D is required," he said.

Submission + - Google age discrimination lawsuit may force it to change hiring and marketing (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Google recently settled an age discrimination lawsuit for $11 million requiring wide-ranging changes in its hiring practices. In the 2015 complaint, the Google age discrimination lawsuit alleged that the median age at Google was 29. That's in comparison to 42 for U.S. workers overall, according to U.S. government data. The lawsuit claimed Google favored people under 40 in its hiring. Lead plaintiff, a Ph.D. holding geophysicist, was invited to four interviews but never hired. Whether this court action is effective, and will actually change how Google operates, is a question that's up for debate. Google, as noted in the settlement, denies and continues to dispute that it intentionally discriminated against the plaintiff in the case and others who joined it. The firm said that it does not discriminate against applicants on any basis.

The court agreement requires Google to train employees and managers on age-based bias and create a subcommittee in its recruiting operations to focus on age diversity in its engineering positions. Google will have to ensure its marketing reflects age diversity, and departing employees will be surveyed about potential discrimination.

William Kerr, a business administration professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of Harvard's Managing the Future of Work initiative, said, generally, these types of court interventions "are as effective as top management wants them to be." In some settings, "the programs are purely for show and have no material consequence," Kerr said. And in other settings, "when coupled with strong management determination, they can be a sizable lever for change," he said.

Submission + - Colleges graduate 10,000 this year with masters in data science degrees (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The Master of Science in Analytics was created in North Carolina State University in 2006. Today, there are about 280 colleges and universities that offer a similar graduate degree and in total, they will produce about 10,000 analytics master graduates in 2019. "The demand is there, but the supply [of data scientists] is catching up quickly," said Michael Rappa, who founded the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University.

Graduates of these programs are typically called data scientists, a relatively new term that's often cited as one of the most in-demand occupations in the U.S. These programs aren't completely unique. Graduates with degrees in statistics, for instance, were forerunners of the shift to analytics. Despite the increase in graduates, the entry level salaries remain strong, typically beginning at $80K plus. Amazon recently cited data scientists as a second fastest internal growing occupations.

Submission + - China may soon have half the world's supercomputers (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: China may soon be home to half of the world's most powerful supercomputing systems. Ten years ago, China had 21 systems on the Top500 list of the world's largest supercomputing systems. It now has 219, according to the biannual listing, which was updated just this week. At its current pace of development, China may have half of the supercomputing systems on the this list by 2021. U.S. supercomputers make up 116 of the latest Top500. Despite being well behind China in total system count, the U.S. leads in overall performance, as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. The HPL benchmark is used to solve linear equations. The U.S. has about 38% of the aggregate list performance. China is in second, at nearly 30% of the performance total. But this performance metric has flip-flopped between China and the U.S., because it's heavily weighted by the largest systems. The U.S. owns the top two spots list, thanks to two IBM supercomputers at U.S. national laboratories. These systems, Summit and Sierra, alone, represent 15.6% of the HPL performance measure. How long will the U.S. maintain the performance lead? "It could be wiped out in the next list," said Jack Dongarra, one of the academics behind the Top500 list and director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. Dongarra developed the HPL benchmark.

Submission + - U.S. exascale computing, now at $2.8B, said critical to defense, industry (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's planned $1.3 billion acquisition of high performance computing maker Cray Inc. is likely to get attention at the highest levels of government. The latest planned generation of supercomputers, exascale, are so expensive that only the government can afford them. Exascale is a thousandfold increase in computing power from petascale, which was first reached in 2008. It can reach 1 quintillion — that's a one followed by 18 zeros — calculations per second. These systems are used to create large models of weather systems, and design and test virtually things like new drugs, airplanes and aircraft carriers. The U.S. is in a global race with China, Japan and Europe to build the most advanced systems. China and Japan have set 2020 for their systems. The U.S. has ordered two systems, both with Cray technology, at a cost of $1.1 billion. America's two exascale computing systems are due in 2021.

"National security requires the best computing available, and the loss of leadership in HPC will severely compromise our national security," the National Security Agency and Department of Energy wrote in a joint report, which was released at the end of 2016, just before then-President-elect Donald Trump took office. The report appeared after China produced the world's most powerful supercomputer using its own homegrown chip technology. The U.S. had previously warned about AI-enabled machines, using exascale technology, in warfare.

Submission + - As baby boomers exit, AR and VR used to capture expertise (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The worldwide market for AR and VR tools is expected to reach $20.4 billion this year — a 69% increase from 2018 spending of about $12 billion, according to IDC. The projection includes consumer spending, but a large majority of the total is by industries and services. Tom Mainelli, an analyst at IDC who studies the AR and VR tools market, said the need to transfer knowledge is "almost a crisis level" because of retirements. The learning curve is short, say user. Andrew McLellan, president of Environmental Education Associates, which certifies people for environmental cleanup jobs, recently started using VR to train NYC workers on mold abatement. The tool is immersive: "You get everything but the smell," said McLellan.

Submission + - Men writing code creates AI bias risk, says study (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: In a study released this week, the AI Now Institute at New York University pointed out that 80% of AI professors are men, and that AI research staffs at some of the most prominent technology companies in the United States are overwhelmingly male — with women making up just 15% of the staff at Facebook and 10% at Google. The representation of some minorities is even lower. The
paperis titled "Discriminating Systems" argues that he lack of diversity in AI development can't be separated from the AI bias problem present in algorithms and models. Both are "deeply intertwined." "Tackling the challenges of bias within technical systems requires addressing workforce diversity, and vice versa," the report said. AI systems can function "as systems of discrimination," acting as "classification technologies that differentiate,rank and categorize," the report noted. These system, which are used, for instance, to rank and sort job applicants can also discriminate against them.

Submission + - Before its reservation outage, Sabre told investors its uptime goal was 99.995% (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: This week's airline reservation system outage created long lines at airports. Sabre Corp., which runs the reservation system, isn't answering questions about it — even basic questions, such as its length of time. But it did tell investors last year that its uptime goal was 99.995%, which is equal to downtime of no more than about 26 minutes a year.

Submission + - Trump tries to restrain offshore outsourcing, with mixed results (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: President Donald Trump became a harsh critic of the H-1B visa program during his campaign for president and invited IT workers who had trained visa-holding replacements to speak at campaign rallies. But the administration's efforts to curb the use outsourcing or the use of visa for outsourcing, especially by offshore outsourcing firms isn't working. "We are continuing to see an upward trajectory in demand for IT services outsourcing," said David Rutchik, executive managing director at outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon. Indeed, some firms are carrying on as usual, one is Molina Healthcare, which serves Medicare and Medicaid clients. On the same day California posted a Molina WARN notice announcing 169 layoffs, it announced an agreement with Infosys to manage some IT services. Infosys remains one of the largest users of H-1B visas.

Submission + - Federal shutdown may send millennial workers to exits (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The federal government measures the “engagement” of its federal workforce once a year with a massive survey of 1.5 million employees. And what it has found is that most federal workers are very dedicated to their work. Its most recent survey, the 2018 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, asked employees if they are "willing to put in extra effort to get their job done," 96% of the survey takers responded affirmatively. Moreover, 91% agreed with the statement that they "look for ways to do their jobs better," and 90% "believe their work is important." But this job dedication is being tested by the U.S. government shutdown, and most at risk of leaving are Millennial-age workers. Less than 6% of federal employees are under the age of 30 and represent half of all people who leave an agency within the first two years.

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