An anonymous reader writes: Contract workers at Google’s office in Pittsburgh have just announced their intention to unionize. 66 percent of the eligible contractors at a company called HCL America Inc., signed cards seeking union representation, according to the United Steel Workers union. With the help of the Pittsburgh Association of Technical Professions (PATP), they’re asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for a vote on union representation. The PATP is a project sponsored by the union aimed at "helping Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania workers in high-tech fields organize and bargain collectively.”
“Workers at HCL deserve far more than they have received in terms of compensation, transparency and consideration, and it has gone on like this for much too long,” HCL worker Renata Nelson said in a press release. “While on-site management tries to do what they can, where they can, their hands are often tied by arbitrary corporate policy.” The vote for union representation is an important step, necessary to empower a union to exclusively represent employees and negotiate on their behalf for a collective bargaining agreement. The move also represents an important step in the small but growing movement to unionize Silicon Valley’s workforce. The press release explains that HCL's 90 employees "work side-by-side with those of the giant corporation for far less compensation and few, if any, of the perks."
An anonymous reader writes: Foxit Software, the company behind the Foxit PDF reader app, said today that hackers breached its servers and have made off with some user information. ZDNet learned of the breach from a Foxit customer who shared a copy of the email the company is sending out to affected users, asking them to choose new passwords when logging in the next time.
According to this email, the security breach impacted the company's website, and, namely, information stored in the My Account section. Foxit web accounts are how the company manages its existing customers and is where users can access trial software, download purchased products, and access order histories. Foxit said hackers managed to access MyAccount data such as email addresses, passwords, real names, phone numbers, company names, and IP addresses from which users logged into their accounts. Due to the presence of IP addresses in the data hackers managed to access, this is believed to be a breach of Foxit's backend infrastructure, rather than a credential stuffing attack.
An anonymous reader writes: Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had been briefed on a plan to create an agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA. Among other initiatives, this new agency would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.” The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a “sensor suite” to flag mental changes that make violence more likely. According to the Post, the HARPA proposal was discussed with senior White House officials as early as June 2017, but has “gained momentum” after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The latest version of the plan, reportedly submitted to the Trump administration this month, outlined the biometric project called “SAFE HOME,” an acronym for “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.” A source told the newspaper that every time HARPA has been discussed in the White House “even up to the presidential level, it’s been very well-received.”
A copy of the plan obtained by the Post characterizes HARPA as pursuing “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence” and claims that “a multi-modality solution, along with real-time data analytics, is needed to achieve such an accurate diagnosis.” That’s a lot of vague buzzwords, but the general idea is clear: collect a wealth of personal data in order to flag mental status changes in individuals and determine whether those changes can predict mass violence. It’s an approach that strikes George David Annas, deputy director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program at SUNY Upstate Medical University, as ridiculous. “The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?”
schwit1 writes: Among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there's a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent "extreme self-citations and 'citation farms' (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other's papers)," explain the authors of the new study, led by physician turned meta-researcher John Ioannidis from Stanford University.
Ioannidis helps to run Stanford's meta-research innovation centre, called Metrics, which looks at identifying and solving systemic problems in scientific research.
One of those problems, Ioannidis says, is how self-citations compromise the reliability of citation metrics as a whole, especially at the hands of extreme self-citers and their associated clusters.
"I think that self-citation farms are far more common than we believe," Ioannidis told Nature. "Those with greater than 25 percent self-citation are not necessarily engaging in unethical behaviour, but closer scrutiny may be needed." Link to Original Source