This week Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel re-created their keynote conversation for a special all-virtual edition of the Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference North America. ZDNet reports: While COVID-19 has slowed down many technologies, while speeding up other tech developments, it hasn't affected Linux development much at all. "None of my co-developers have been hugely impacted either. I was worried for a while because one of our developers was offline for a month or two.... [But,] it turned out that it was just RSI [repetitive strain injury], and RSI is kind of an occupational hazard to deal with." He added. "One of the things that is so interesting about the Linux community is how much it has always been email-based and remote, how rarely we get together in person...."

Torvalds trusts this new build. Indeed, he ran his end of the videoconference from his new developer machine running the first release candidate of 5.8.

Thinking of his new AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor-powered developer desktop, Torvalds later added that, although he had been concerned about its fan noise it actually works well for him. Torvalds moved to this new homebrew computer because he needed the speed. "My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be." That's important because Torvalds "strives to do about 20 to 30 [pull requests] a day, which is above my limit, ... [but] in order to do that, [he needs] a lot of computing power.

According to Business Insider, Amazon-owned Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map. From the report: The heat map is powered by an elaborate scoring system, which assigns a rating to each of Whole Foods' 510 stores based on the likelihood that their employees might form or join a union. The stores' individual risk scores are calculated from more than two dozen metrics, including employee "loyalty," turnover, and racial diversity; "tipline" calls to human resources; proximity to a union office; and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The map also tracks local economic and demographic factors such as the unemployment rate in a store's location and the percentage of families in the area living below the poverty line.

The stores' scores on each metric are fed into the heat map, which is a geographic illustration of the United States peppered with red spots to indicate high-risk Whole Foods stores. The heat map reveals how Whole Foods is using technology and data to help manage its vast workforce of more than 95,000 employees. It also provides a rare look into corporate labor-tracking activities, a common practice among large companies but one rarely discussed publicly. In a statement provided to Business Insider, the company said an "overwhelming majority" of its employees prefer a "direct relationship" with the company over union representation. "Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to decide whether union representation is right for them," the company said. "We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship with Whole Foods Market and its leadership, where Team Members have open lines of communication and every individual is empowered to share feedback directly with their team leaders, is best."

"Our open-door communication policy allows us to understand and quickly respond to the needs of our workforce, while recognizing, rewarding, and supporting the goals of every member of our team," the statement continued. "At Whole Foods Market, we're committed to treating all of our Team Members fairly, creating a safe, inclusive, and empowering working environment, and providing our Team Members with career advancement opportunities, great benefits, and competitive compensation, including an industry-leading starting minimum wage of $15/hour."

Speaking with journalists after winning his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi had other things on his mind. When asked what he thought writers should be demanding in the next round of discussions with producers, Waititi put Apple's controversial laptop keyboards on blast. A report adds: "Apple needs to fix those keyboards," he said. "They are impossible to write on -- they've gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs. Because PC keyboards, the bounce-back for your fingers is way better. Hands up who still uses a PC? You know what I'm talking about. It's a way better keyboard. Those Apple keyboards are horrendous." "I've got some shoulder problems," Waititi continued. "I've got OOS [Occupational Overuse Syndrome, a term used in New Zealand for RSI] -- I don't know what you call it over here, this sort of thing here (gestures to arm), that tendon which goes down your forearm down into the thumb? You know what I'm talking about, if you guys are ever writing. And what happens is you open the laptop and you're like this (makes uncomfortable hunched-over-laptop pose) -- we've just got to fix those keyboards. The WGA needs to step in and actually do something." Tech columnist John Gruber adds: I've been saying for years now that Apple has done severe reputational harm to the MacBook brand, which effectively is the Mac brand for most people, especially writers. Yes, there's a new keyboard with scissor-switch mechanisms in the 16-inch MacBook Pro. It's a pleasure to type on. But we're still months away from the rest of the MacBook lineup being updated to use that new keyboard. And that's a presumption on my part, that all MacBooks will get the new keyboard sooner rather than later. It certainly wouldn't make any sense if they didn't -- but the whole butterfly-switch saga has never made any sense.

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: Some hospitals are ditching the ritual of covering reproductive organs and fetuses during imaging exams after prominent medical and scientific groups have said it's a feel-good measure that can impair the quality of diagnostic tests and sometimes inadvertently increase a patient's radiation exposure. The about-face is intended to improve care, but it will require a major effort to reassure regulators, health care workers and the public that it's better not to shield.

Lead shields are difficult to position accurately, so they often miss the target area they are supposed to protect. Even when in the right place, they can inadvertently obscure areas of the body a doctor needs to see -- the location of a swallowed object, say -- resulting in a need to repeat the imaging process, according to the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, which represents physicists who work in hospitals. Shields can also cause automatic exposure controls on an X-ray machine to increase radiation to all parts of the body being examined in an effort to "see through" the lead. Moreover, shielding doesn't protect against the greatest radiation effect: "scatter," which occurs when radiation ricochets inside the body, including under the shield, and eventually deposits its energy in tissues. "In April, the physicists' association recommended that shielding of patients be 'discontinued as routine practice,'" the report adds. "Its statement was endorsed by several groups, including the American College of Radiology and the Image Gently Alliance, which promotes safe pediatric imaging. However, experts continue to recommend that health care workers in the imaging area protect themselves with leaded barriers as a matter of occupational safety."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking. A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study's conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently.

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place. [...] [The draft] shows that the administration intends to widen its scope, not narrow it. The previous version of the regulation would have applied only to a certain type of research, "dose-response" studies in which levels of toxicity are studied in animals or humans. The new proposal would require access to the raw data for virtually every study that the E.P.A. considers. "E.P.A. is proposing a broader applicability," the new regulation states, saying that open data should not be limited to certain types of studies. Most significantly, the new proposal would apply retroactively. A separate internal E.P.A. memo viewed by The New York Times shows that the agency had considered, but ultimately rejected, an option that might have allowed foundational studies like Harvard's Six Cities study to continue to be used. Harvard's Six Cities study is a 1993 project that "definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths" and is "currently the foundation of the nation's air-quality laws," the report says.

"When gathering data for their research, known as the Six Cities study, scientists signed confidentiality agreements to track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 people in six cities. They combined that personal data with home air-quality data to study the link between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality. But the fossil fuel industry and some Republican lawmakers have long criticized the analysis and a similar study by the American Cancer Society, saying the underlying data sets of both were never made public, preventing independent analysis of the conclusions."

Rashes, blisters, and hair loss have all been reported. So has vomiting, migraines, and shortness of breath. All of these -- and more -- are symptoms reported by flight attendants after their airlines got new uniforms. But no one knows why. From a report: Delta is the latest airline to have flight attendants report health issues possibly related to their uniforms, and employees at the airline filed a lawsuit in May against the manufacturer, Lands' End. But flight attendants have been battling health issues that have appeared after an airline instituted new uniforms for years. And for years, airlines have said their uniforms are safe. Meanwhile, flight attendants and others are working to discover the cause of their symptoms and the identity and total number of chemicals present in their uniforms, all of which can be difficult to ascertain. Until the cause can be identified -- or until airlines start listening to employees and moving quickly after their complaints -- it's likely employees will continue to face symptoms. And it's likely that flight attendants will keep heading to court, where they've historically needed to go to get policy changed by their employers.

The problem was first reported after employees at Alaska Airlines got new uniforms toward the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011. Flight attendants began to report rashes and eye irritation, and documented hives, blisters, and scaly patches, according to a 2012 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) report looking into the issue. In 2013, flight attendants at Alaska Airlines filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the uniforms, Twin Hill, and the airline recalled the uniforms in 2014. In October 2016, Twin Hill won the lawsuit, with the court claiming there was no reliable evidence the injuries were caused by the uniforms.

The "blue light" in LED lighting can damage the eye's retina and disturb natural sleep rhythms, France's government-run health watchdog said this week. From a report: New findings confirm earlier concerns that "exposure to an intense and powerful [LED] light is 'photo-toxic' and can lead to irreversible loss of retinal cells and diminished sharpness of vision," the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety (ANSES) warned in a statement. The agency recommended in a 400-page report that the maximum limit for acute exposure be revised, even if such levels are rarely met in home or work environments.

The report distinguished between acute exposure of high-intensity LED light, and "chronic exposure" to lower intensity sources. While less dangerous, even chronic exposure can "accelerate the ageing of retinal tissue, contributing to a decline in visual acuity and certain degenerative diseases such as age-related macular degeneration," the agency concluded. Long-lasting, energy efficient and inexpensive, light-emitting diode (LED) technology has gobbled up half of the general lighting market in a decade, and will top 60 percent by the end of next year, according to industry projections.

McGruber writes: In Scientific American, Ralph Nader writes about the decades of struggles by conscientious engineers -- whether employees or consultants -- who strive to balance professional ethics with occupational survival. Nader writes: "[T]oday's engineers are working in an improved environment for taking their conscience to work. Yet much more remains to be done to safeguard the ability of engineers to speak truth to the powers-that-be. For starters, the word whistle-blower -- once popularly meant to describe a snitch or a disgruntled employee -- now describes an ethical person willing to put his or her job on the line in order to expose corrupt, illegal, fraudulent and harmful activities. Indeed, in the aftermath of recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the media routinely and positively refers to disclosures by 'Boeing whistle-blowers.' Congressional investigating committees and federal agencies have called for whistle-blowers to come forward and shed light on corporate misdeeds and governmental agency lapses. To put it mildly, this was not always the case." "We need more public interest engineering advocacy groups and initiatives to open up new frontiers of excellence and service as well as to support engineers inside the corporate framework," adds Nader. "We need more engineers who embody the three principles of any profession -- independence, scholarly pursuits, and commitment to public service. Those are the vital ethical pillars to helping engineers withstand the great pressures to place commercial priorities over their engineering integrity and limit harm to the public."

dcblogs writes: Last summer, MIT ran a pilot program creating verifiable, tamper-proof "digital diplomas" for a small number of graduates. But they don't know how the pilot turned out, and there's a lot of experimentation underway. Eventually, all your credentials -- resume, employment history, occupational licenses, diplomas -- may be in a blockchain. The use of blockchain enabled digital credentials is growing. This could speed employment verification, and make lying on resumes harder.
The article points out that while a number of universities are exploring blockchain, MIT "has not heard of a case where a student's digital diploma was either consumed or accepted by an employer," although "Many certificates were verified..."

"MIT's pilot illustrates the state of blockchain in HR. It is in a beta, proof-of-concept, experimental phase. Blockchain verification is currently not a practical option for employers and recruiters."

"Automation taking jobs is only one symptom of a larger problem," argues an anonymous Slashdot reader, sharing a link to this excerpt from Steven Brill's new book Tailspin, which seeks to identify "the people and forces behind America's fifty-year fall -- and those fighting to reverse it." The excerpt has this intriguing title: "How Baby Boomers Broke America." As my generation of achievers graduated from elite universities and moved into the professional world, their personal successes often had serious societal consequences. They upended corporate America and Wall Street with inventions in law and finance that created an economy built on deals that moved assets around instead of building new ones. They created exotic, and risky, financial instruments, including derivatives and credit default swaps, that produced sugar highs of immediate profits but separated those taking the risk from those who would bear the consequences. They organized hedge funds that turned owning stock into a minute-by-minute bet rather than a long-term investment... Regulatory agencies were overwhelmed by battalions of lawyers who brilliantly weaponized the bedrock American value of due process so that, for example, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule protecting workers from a deadly chemical could be challenged and delayed for more than a decade and end up being hundreds of pages long. Lawyers then contested the meaning of every clause while racking up fees of hundreds of dollars per hour from clients who were saving millions of dollars on every clause they could water down...

As government was disabled from delivering on vital issues, the protected were able to protect themselves still more. For them, it was all about building their own moats. Their money, their power, their lobbyists, their lawyers, their drive overwhelmed the institutions that were supposed to hold them accountable -- government agencies, Congress, the courts... That, rather than a split between Democrats and Republicans, is the real polarization that has broken America since the 1960s. It's the protected vs. the unprotected, the common good vs. maximizing and protecting the elite winners' winnings... [I]n a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in their success or challenge their primacy.
Brill argues that the unprotected need things like "a realistic shot at justice in the courts," writing that instead "the First Amendment became a tool for the wealthy to put a thumb on the scales of democracy." And he shares these statistics about the rest of America today:

• For adults in their 30s, the chance of earning more than their parents dropped to 50% from 90% just two generations earlier.

• In 2017, household debt had grown higher than the peak reached in 2008 before the crash, with student and automobile loans staking growing claims on family paychecks.

• Although the U.S. remains the world's richest country, it has the third-highest poverty rate among the 35 nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development...

Has he identified the source of a societal malaise? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

And is Brill's thesis correct? Did baby boomers break America?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Metro: Researchers in the Netherlands claim that a "physical activity paradox" exists, where exercise may only be good for you if it's done outside of your job. Manual laborers may be physically active all day but that doesn't actually help them. In fact, the research claims that it might actually increase their risk of dying early. "While we know leisure-time physical activity is good for you, we found that occupational physical activity has an 18% increased risk of early mortality for men," says Pieter Coenen, public health researcher at UV University medical centre in Amsterdam. "These men are dying earlier than those who are not physically active in their occupation."

He says that it's all down to the type of exercise you do in your spare time, versus occupational physical activity. When you choose to exercise, you can take rest periods when you want -- something that often may not be available to you if you're working on a building site (for example). The research combined results from 17 studies, dated between 1960 and 2010 -- looking at data on almost 200,000 people. The study has been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior pediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children's finger muscles from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say. "Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago," said Sally Payne, the head pediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. "Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not be able to hold it because they don't have the fundamental movement skills. "To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers,. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills." Payne said the nature of play had changed. "It's easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they're not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil."

This year, two security reporters and one researcher will fight for their professional lives in court. Steve Ragan, senior staff writer at tech news site CSO, and Dan Goodin, security editor at Ars Technica, were last year named defendants in two separate lawsuits. The cases are different, but they have a common theme: they are being sued by the companies covered in articles they wrote. From a report: Although lawsuits targeting reporters, particularly on the security beat, are rare, legal threats are an occupational hazard that reporters are all too aware of -- from companies threatening to call an editor to demand a correction -- or else -- to a full-blown lawsuit. But the inevitable aftermath is a "chilling effect." White-hat hackers and security researchers hesitate to report vulnerabilities and weaknesses to technology firms for fear of facing legal retribution. With nation state attackers targeting elections and critical national security infrastructure on a near-daily basis, security research is needed more than ever.

Occupational licensing -- the practice of regulating who can do what jobs -- has been on the rise for decades. In 1950 one in 20 employed Americans required a licence to work. By 2017 that had risen to more than one in five. From a report: The trend partly reflects an economic shift towards service industries, in which licences are more common. But it has also been driven by a growing number of professions successfully lobbying state governments to make it harder to enter their industries. Most studies find that licensing requirements raise wages in a profession by around 10%, probably by making it harder for competitors to set up shop.

Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.

[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: New studies from the National Institutes of Health -- specifically the National Toxicology Program -- find that cell phone radiation is potentially linked with certain forms of cancer, but they're far from conclusive. The results are complex and the studies have yet to be peer-reviewed, but some of the findings are clearly important enough to warrant public discussion. An early, partial version of this study teasing these effects appeared in 2016, but these are the full (draft) reports complete with data. Both papers note that "studies published to date have not demonstrated consistently increased incidences of tumors at any site associate with exposure to cell phone RFR [radio frequency radiation] in rats or mice." But the researchers felt that "based on the designs of the existing studies, it is difficult to definitively conclude that these negative results clearly indicate that cell phone RFR is not carcinogenic."

The studies exposed mice and rats to both 900 MHz and 1900 Mhz wavelength radio waves (each frequency being its own experiment) for about 9 hours per day, at various strengths ranging from 1 to 10 watts per kilogram. For comparison, the general limit the FCC imposes for exposure is 0.08 W/kg; the absolute maximum allowed, for the extremities of people with occupational exposures, is 20 W/kg for no longer than 6 minutes. So they were really blasting these mice. The rodents were examined for various health effects after various durations, from 28 days to 2 years. At 1900 MHz: Equivocal evidence of carcinogenicity in lung, liver and other organ tissues in both male and female mice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: The World Health Organization is poised to classify "gaming disorder" as a mental health problem in its 2018 update of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Gaming disorder could be diagnosed if a person's video game habit "is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning," according a tentative draft of WHO's 11th update to the ICD. Licensed marriage and family therapist Paula-Jo Husack said common symptoms for children and adults include social isolation, trouble transitioning from one thought to another, reduction in empathy, loss of appetite and loss of sensory perception. The WHO said those symptoms generally need to persist for at least a year before doctors diagnose a case of gaming disorder, but added that a diagnosis could be made sooner if symptoms are severe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNNMoney: The McKinsey Global Institute cautions that as many as 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation. The work most at risk of automation includes physical jobs in predictable environments, such as operating machinery or preparing fast food. Data collection and processing is also in the crosshairs, with implications for mortgage origination, paralegals, accounts and back-office processing. To remain viable, workers must embrace retraining in different fields. But governments and companies will need to help smooth what could be a rocky transition.

Despite the looming challenges, the report revealed how workers can move forward. While the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s eliminated some jobs, it created many more roles. Workers who are willing to develop new skills should be able to find new jobs. The authors don't expect automation will displace jobs involving managing people, social interactions or applying expertise. Gardeners, plumbers, child and elder-care workers are among those facing less risk from automation. The report says that 39 million to 73 million jobs in the U.S. could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations. Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced.

Slashdot reader cdreimer shared an article from the New York Times: Idaho achieved a notable distinction last year: It became one of the hardest places in America for someone to quit a job for a better one. The state did this by making it easier for companies to enforce noncompete agreements, which prevent employees from leaving their company for a competitor... The result was a bill that shifted the burden from companies to employees, who must now prove they have "no ability to adversely affect the employer's legitimate business interests." The bar for that is so high that Brian Kane, an assistant chief deputy in the Idaho attorney general's office, wrote that this would be "difficult if not impossible" for an employee to do...

For the most part, states have been moving toward making it easier for people to switch teams... The most extreme end of the spectrum is California, which prohibits noncompete agreements entirely. Economists say this was a crucial factor behind Silicon Valley's rise, because it made it easier for people to start and staff new businesses. But as states like Utah and Massachusetts have tried to move closer to this approach, legislators have run into mature companies trying to hold onto their best employees... A recent survey showed that one in five American workers is bound by a noncompete clause. They cover workers up and down the economic spectrum, from executives to hairdressers.
Two economists tell the newspaper that since 2000, U.S. workers have changed their jobs less and less, which is sometimes blamed on strict employment contracts as well as the occupational licensing laws which affect a third of America's workforce. The Times reports that noncompete clauses ultimately end up keeping workers' salaries lower, "because most people get raises when they switch jobs."

theodp writes: Two weeks ago, as the nation's schools 'taught kids to program' with an Hour of Code, Microsoft and others celebrated a 6-year lobbying effort that culminated in the passage of legislation that made Computer Science a core K-12 subject, which the software giant said "will advance some of the goals outlined in Microsoft's National Talent Strategy." But on Tuesday, Computerworld reported that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has put somewhat of a buzzkill on the learn-to-code party, saying IT jobs will grow 12% over the next decade, although computer programmers will see an 8% decline. "Computer programming can be done from anywhere in the world, so companies sometimes hire programmers in countries where wages are lower," explained the government. The silver lining is that software developers, the largest occupational group in IT, will increase by 17% or 186,600, over this period. The nomenclature here is a little muddy, since "programmers" and "software developers" are often used interchangeably. Here's how they're distinguished in this article: "Programmers are focused on coding and implementing requirements, and that’s why they may be more susceptible to offshoring, in contrast to software developers who may be more engaged with the business, analyzing needs and collaborating with multiple parties."

dcblogs writes: An occupation long associated with innovation, electrical and electronics engineering, has stopped growing, according to the U.S. government. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in an update of its occupational outlook released Friday, said that the number of people employed as electrical and electronics engineers is now at 316,000, and will remain mostly unchanged for the next decade. The government put the 10-year job outlook for electronic and electrical engineers at "0% — little or no change." The IEEE-USA said the BLS estimates "are probably correct."