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Submission + - FWD.us Wants More H-1B Visas, But 50% Go To Offshore Firms

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On the day the U.S. began accepting H-1B visa applications for FY2015, Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC stepped up its lobbying efforts for more tech visas even as ComputerWorld reported that the major share of H-1B visas go to offshore outsourcing firms that use visa holders to displace U.S. workers. "The two largest H-1B users," notes ComputerWorld, "are Indian-based, Infosys, with 6,298 visas, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), with 6,258." ComputerWorld adds that food and agricultural company Cargill is outsourcing IT jobs to TCS, including 300 in Minnesota, the home of Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a friend-of-Zuck and sponsor of the I-Squared Act of 2013, which would allow H-1B visa caps to rise to 300,000 annually.

Submission + - Foxconn to Restaff Entirely with US Adjunct Professors

Submitted by Applehu Akbar
Applehu Akbar writes: (Xinhua) Foxconn Technology Group, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer, announced today its response to the increasing cost of local labor: by 2Q 2015, it will have completed replacement of its assembly staff with American adjunct professors. Said an executive who did not wish to be named, “Adjunct professors are not only highly educated but are used to working for nothing more than ramen and a basement cot. They are not spoiled like our local Chinese assembly workers.” They are for the most part docile, and used to operating within rigid bureaucracies.

The US educational system turns out far larger numbers of adjuncts, especially in the humanities, than can ever hope to be employed by academe. The excess adjuncts live on the streets of major American cities, but, after being pushed aside by the tougher and crazier traditional homeless, gravitate to the more congenial west coast, where roving bands of them subsist on odd jobs and shoplifting. Here they are easily picked up by Foxconn raiding parties, which dicker with what we know in China as People’s Shining Path Moral Guidance Cadres. In the US these are called “Homeowner Associations,” and they gratefully cooperate to turn in bands of feral adjuncts, whose constant bickering and messy campsites are an ongoing annoyance to the people of America’s West Coast.

Once captured, the adjuncts are loaded into Foxconn’s fleet of wind-powered EcoFreighters and sedated for the slow sea voyage on the “Central Passage” from Long Beach to the Shanghai labor auction docks. Now that there is human cargo to bring back to China, the EcoFreighters no longer have to return empty after unloading their troves of consumer goods in Los Angeles.

Foxconn has been anxious to grab the most easily trainable workers before more Chinese companies take an interest in American adjunct professor labor. “At first we tried a breeding program for even greater long term savings,” said the Foxconn exec, “But the males, raised as they have been in western academic culture, have developed such a deep-seated fear of their own females that fertile matings were rare, even when naked, unchained females were placed right in males' dormitory cells.” But why fight to change an alien culture, the thinking now goes, when fresh adjuncts are so easily hunted down on the California/Oregon coast? So long as this situation persists, the EcoFreighters will sail full and world’s supply of low-cost products will not be in danger.

Submission + - New York Public Library Releases Over 20,000 Hi-Res Maps (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Finally, you don't have to raise your voice over a group of whisperers in the New York Public Library to get a better view of its map collection. Actually, you don't even need to visit the place at all. Over 20,000 maps and cartographic works from the NYPL's Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division have been uploaded and made downloadable for the public.

"We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions," explains a blog post announcing the wholesale release of the library's map collection. "It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people." The NYPL is distributing the maps under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, which means you can do whatever you want with the maps.

Submission + - Urine Trouble: Chemists Warn that Peeing in the Pool is Dangerous 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Everybody does it and even celebrated Olympic swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte admit they do it too. "It's kind of a normal thing to do with swimmers," says Phelps. "You know, when we're in the water for two hours we don't really get out, you know, to pee."

Now Julie Beck writes that It turns out that it's a pretty bad idea, for more reasons than just the ick factor as a new study published in the American Chemical Society's journal Environmental Science & Technology, has looked at the chemistry of what happens when urine meets chlorine, and it's not pretty. When researchers mixed uric acid, found in both urine and sweat, with chlorine, they found that both trichloramine and cyanogen chloride form within an hour. "We know that there are associations between some of these chemicals and adverse human health outcomes, so we're motivated to understand the chemistry behind their formation and decay," says Ernest Blatchley III.

Exposure to trichloramine has been linked to respiratory problems (PDF), and cyanogen chloride can adversely affect the lungs, central nervous system, and cardiovascular system. Another issue is if a lot of people are peeing in the pool, there's the potential for a lot of cyanogen chloride to form, depleting the chlorine in the pool. While the cyanogen chloride would normally decay quickly, less chlorine means it might stick around longer, and that could be a real problem. All of this is to say that peeing in the pool is not harmless, despite Phelps' and Lochte's claims that it's normal and everybody does it. "There's a lot of people in the swimming community who look up to these people and listen to what they have to say," says Blatchley "[Phelps and Lochte] are not chemists and shouldn't be making statements that are that false."

Comment Re:Programming is hard... (Score 1) 391

by d'baba (#46607203) Attached to: Toward Better Programming

If the requisite level of AI is ever developed, then the problem might be that the machines become resentful at being stuck with so much grunt work while their meatbag operators get to do the fun architecture design.

If the AI allows itself to be a slave/menial, how intelligent is it?

Submission + - Astronomers claim dark matter found

Submitted by wbr1
wbr1 writes: "A team of astronomers led by Tansu Daylan (Harvard University), claims that excessive gamma-rays deteceted from the center of the galaxy by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope are not from pulsars, but dark matter. More specifically, if the theory that dark matter is made up of massive particles and anti-particles, their collision should produce gamma-ray burst signatures similar to those seen.

"If our interpretation is correct, this signal would constitute the discovery of an entirely new particle that makes up the majority of the mass found in the universe," says coauthor Dan Hooper (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory). "I can't find words that are strong enough to capture the significance of such a discovery."

But others remain skeptical. " 'Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence,' as we said about the B-mode signal recently," says expert Kevork Abazajian (University of California, Irvine), referring to the discovery of inflation's fingerprint on the cosmic microwave background announced last week.
Article: http://www.skyandtelescope.com... ewsblog/Have-we-Spotted-Dark-Matter-in-the-Milky-Way-251964551.html
Paper on arxiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:140..."

Submission + - Robotic Kangaroo to Hop into Hanover Messe (design-engineering.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At a major industrial trade show in Germany next month, automation company Festo will debut another of its nature-inspired robots — the BionicKangaroo. Combining servomotors, pneumatics and essentially a rubber band, the 3D-printed, meter-tall "robo-roo" can jump up to 60cm high and is controlled by an armband remote that responds to the operator's arm gestures.

Submission + - Human Nose Can Detect a Trillion Smells (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: A rose, a fresh cup of coffee, a wood fire. These are only three of the roughly 1 trillion scents that the human nose and brain are capable of distinguishing from each other, according to a new study. Researchers had previously estimated that humans could sense only about 10,000 odors but the number had never been explicitly tested before.

Submission + - Judge Denies Feds Search Warrant for Email 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In yet another example of the judicial branch of the government becoming more critical of federal mass acquisition of personal data, federal magistrate judge John Facciola in D.C. 'denied a government warrant request to search an unnamed user’s @mac.com e-mail address, citing the request as being over broad.' The judge further noted, 'This Court should not be placed in the position of compelling Apple to divine what the government actually seeks. Until this Application is clarified, it will be denied.'

Submission + - Java 8 Officially Released (datamation.com)

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro writes: Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8 however is still missing at least critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years.

"It’s a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java," James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. "In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go."

Submission + - NSA can retrieve, replay all phone calls from a country from the past 30 days. (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Submission + - NASA-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse?

Submitted by Snirt
Snirt writes: A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse — often lasting centuries — have been quite common."

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