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dcblogs writes:
In a speech Wednesday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) declared immigration reform dead. He chastised and baited Republicans in Congress for blocking reform, and declared that winning the White House without the support of a growing Hispanic population will become mathematically impossible. "The Republican Presidential nominee, whoever he or she may be, will enter the race with an electoral college deficit they cannot make up," said Gutierrez. If he's right, and comprehensive immigration reform is indeed dead, then so too is the tech industry's effort to raise the cap on H-1B visas. Immigration reform advocates have successfully blocked any effort to take up the immigration issue in piecemeal fashion, lest business support for comprehensive reform peel away. Next year may create an entirely new set of problems for tech. If the Republicans take control of the Senate, the tech industry will face this obstacle: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee could become its next chairman. He has been a consistent critic of the H-1B program through the years. "The H-1B program is so popular that it's now replacing the U.S. labor force," said Grassley, at one point.
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The U.S. Postal Service plans to spend up to $100,000 to investigate how it can utilize low cost sensors and related wireless technologies to improve the efficiency of its operations. The postal service already scans letters and parcels up to 11 times during processing, representing 1.7 trillion scans a year. It uses supercomputers to process that data. In theory, the postal service believes that everything it uses — mailboxes, vehicles, machines, or a letter carrier — could be equipped with a sensor to create what it terms the Internet of Postal Things. The Internet has not been kind to the postal service. Electronic delivery has upended the postal services business model. In 2003, it processed 49 billion pieces of single-piece first-class mail, but by 2013, that figured dropped to 22.6 billion pieces.
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dcblogs writes:
Diesel, a Labrador Retriever, appears to live in a perpetual state of glee. He is happy around people, loves attention and is unbothered by the electronics-packed vest he is wearing. The vest includes a microphone, camera, speakers, and motors that send vibrations, similar to that of a smartphone, to various parts of the dog's body. There's also an array of sensors that measure the dog's physiology: heart, respiration rates and muscle tension. The vest is also equipped with sensors that can detect gasses and radiation, and it has GPS and WiFi, to demonstrate its use in search and rescue. The technology and methods used to communicate with the dog, and send commands, is based on mathematical modeling by David Roberts, an assistant computer science professor at North Carolina State University. "Computers can take a lot of the human error out of the process of training and communicating with dogs," said Roberts. The system can help people understand their dog's behavior and emotional state, which can help reduce mistakes people make in training their pets.
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dcblogs writes:
This is the story of an IT worker who was replaced by a worker on an H-1B visa, one of a number of visa holders, mostly from India, who took jobs at this U.S. company. For purposes of this story, the worker has been given initials — A.B. Before they lost their jobs, A.B.'s co-workers decided to made a subtle and symbolic protest over what was happening: As the H-1B visa workers gradually took over the offices once occupied by U.S. workers, one employee brought in a bunch of small American flags on sticks. The flags were displayed, cubicle after cubicle, much like way flags are hung on homes in a residential neighborhoods on the 4th of July. They were visible to anyone walking down the hall. "That was the only thing that we could do," A.B. said. "We felt that we were making a statement. But to be honest, I don't think the Indian workers fully understood what was going on."
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dcblogs writes:
The San Francisco Bay Area and south to San Jose will soon have what may be the nation's first dedicated Internet of Things network. Sigfox, is a France-based firm that has already deployed such technology in France, hopes the have the system installed by the end of September. Its network is designed for short m-to-m messages and uses a low data rate of 100 bits per second, which gives it very long range over the unlicensed industrial, scientific and medical (ISM), radio bands in the sub-GHz frequencies. Therefore, base stations antennas, depending on whether they are being deployed in an urban core or in rural area, can be spread apart at distances ranging from several miles to tens of miles, if not more. In its various markets, Sigfox seeks out a network provider partner and uses its sites and towers and backhaul, but puts in its own antennas. Sigfox's technology also means that wearable tech can be connected without a smartphone or proximity to a WiFi network. For instance, a GPS-enabled watch may keep track of your running, but the data isn't mapped until a user connects it to a mobile device or PC. But a GPS watch with a Sigfox radio included will be able to send location data via a network so someone can track your run from home. Potential system competitors include U.K.-based Nuel's Weightless technology, and the Japanese-developed Wide Area Ubiquitous Network (WAUN). Analyst believe U.S. firms long-range, low-bandwidth technologies in development as well.
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dcblogs writes:
Computer science undergrad enrollments increased 13% last year, the sixth straight year of increases, according to the Computing Research Association. This trend began after the Wall Street collapse in 2008. The number of computer science graduates earning degrees from Ph.D.-granting institutions reached a low of 8,021 in 2007, down from 14,185 in the 2003-2004 academic year. The number of bachelor degrees awarded in computer science last year at these schools was 12,503. The number of computer science graduates will continue to increase. Computer science enrollments rose by nearly 30% in the 2011-12 academic year, and they increased 23% the year before that.
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dcblogs writes:
Dan Geer, the CISO of In-Q-Tel, says that embedded systems, microcontrollers, are "immortal" in the sense that they can continue to function for many years at an assigned task. "The longer lived these devices," said Geer, "the surer it will be that they will be hijacked within their lifetime." Embedded systems without a remote management interface "and thus out of reach, are a life form," and "as the purpose of life is to end, an embedded system without a remote management interface must be so designed to be certain to die no later than some fixed time."
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dcblogs writes:
John Holdren, who heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told a Senate committee Tuesday that China's R&D spending is growing by 20% to 25% a year, and will surpass U.S. R&D investment before 2022, an often-cited private sector estimate. The U.S., he said, is "in real danger" of being overtaken by China in R&D spending, he said. U.S R&D investments in 2011 was $429 billion, in that same year China spent $208 billion. President Obama, said Holdren, set a goal in 2009 of investing 3% of the nation's GDP in R&D, and the U.S. is near that level. But this analysis combines public and private sector R&D spending; when federal R&D spending is separated out, the picture is different. In a letter to the committee, MIT President Rafael Reif said that from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s, federally-funded R&D averaged approximately 1.5% of GDP; by 2011, however, funding had fallen to 0.8% of GDP. "This declining benchmark should be a flashing yellow light for the nation," he wrote.
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dcblogs writes:
There’s an IT professional who, at this moment, is training offshore replacements, the people who are taking over the work. This IT pro is also a good writer, and has penned a short explanation about what life is now like: “As Americans, we maintain our pride and dignity as we are forced to train our H-1B replacements. We struggle with the reality of having no jobs, but yet we train our replacements without prejudice and hold our heads up high because we are ingrained with a work ethic to do our very best."
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dcblogs writes:
The 75 students in the 2014 Master of Science in Analytics class at North Carolina State University received, in total, 246 job offers from 55 employers, valued at $22.5 million in salaries and bonuses, which is 24% higher than last year's combined offers. But the problem ahead is admissions. There may not be enough master’s programs in analytics to meet demand. NC State has received nearly 800 applications for 85 seats. Its acceptance rate is now at 12.5%. Northwestern University's Master of Science in Analytics received 600 applications for 30 openings its September class. That's an acceptance rate of 6%
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dcblogs writes:
Southern California Edison is preparing to offshore IT jobs, the second major U.S. utility in the last year to do so. It will be cutting its staff, but it hasn’t said by how much. The utility is using at least two offshore outsourcing firms, according to government records. SCE’s management culture may be particularly primed for firing its IT workers. Following a workplace shooting in SCE’s IT offices in 2011, the utility conducted an independent audit of its organizational and management culture. One observation in this report, which was completed a year later, was that "employees perceive managers to be more concerned about how they 'look' from above, and less concerned about how they are viewed by their subordinates. This fosters an unhealthy culture and climate by sending a message to employees that it is more important to focus on how things look from the top than how they actually are down below."
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dcblogs writes:
A study of New York City's tech workforce found that 44% of jobs in the city's "tech ecosystem," or 128,000 jobs, "are accessible" to people without a Bachelor's degree. This eco-system includes both tech specific jobs and those jobs supported by tech. For instance, a technology specific job that doesn't require a Bachelor's degree might be a computer user support specialist, earning $28.80 an hour, according to this study. Tech industry jobs that do not require a four-year degree and may only need on-the-job training include customer services representatives, at $18.50 an hour, telecom line installer, $37.60 an hour, and sales representatives, $33.60 an hour. The study did not look at "who is actually sitting in those jobs and whether people are under-employed," said Kate Wittels, a director at HR&A Advisors, a real-estate and economic-development consulting firm, and report author.. Many people in the "accessible" non-degree jobs may indeed have degrees. For instance. About 75% of the 25 employees who work at New York Computer Help in Manhattan have a Bachelor's degree. Of those with Bachelor's degrees, about half have IT-related degrees.
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dcblogs writes:
The U.S. today (April 1) began accepting H-1B visa applications for the next fiscal year, with heavy demand expected. The visas will likely all be claimed by end of this week, and a major share of the H-1B visas will go to firms that use visa holders to displace U.S. workers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data is very clear about who are the largest users of H-1B visas: Offshore outsourcing firms.The IT services firms among the top 20 H-1B users accounted for a little more than 50% of the annual base visa cap of 65,000. This is for initial visas approved in the 2013 fiscal year, not renewals. "The offshore outsourcing firms are once again getting the majority of the visas," said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "The program continues to promote the offshoring of high-wage American jobs."
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dcblogs writes:
Bill Gates and Alan Greenspan, in separate forums, offered outlooks and prescriptions for fixing jobs and income. Gates is concerned that graduates of U.S. secondary schools may not be able stay ahead of software automation. "These things are coming fast," said Gates, in an interview with the American Enterprise Institute "Twenty years from now labor demand for a lots of skill sets will be substantially lower, and I don't think people have that in their mental model." Meanwhile, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan believes one way to attack income inequity is to raise the H-1B cap. If the program were expanded, income wouldn't necessarily go down much, but it would go down enough to make an impact. Income inequality is a relative concept, he argued. People who are absolutely at the top of the scale in 1925, for instance, would be getting food stamps today, said Greenspan. "You don't have to necessarily bring up the bottom if you bring the top down."
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dcblogs writes:
The White House is urging tech workers, or "geeks," to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, and said having the coverage will give them the "freedom and security" to start their own businesses. "There is strong evidence that when affordable healthcare isn't exclusively tied to employment, in more instances people choose to start their own companies," wrote White House CTO Todd Park in a post to launch its #GeeksGetCovered campaign.Bruce Bachenheimer, a professor of management at Pace University and director of its Entrepreneurship Lab, said the effort is part of a broader appeal by the White House to get younger and healthier people to sign-up for Obamacare, and is in the same vein as President Obama's recent appearance on Between Two Ferns,
