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An Anonymous Coward writes with an article from the Economic Policy Institue:

The outsourcing companies involved in the Southern California Edison (SCE) scandal I wrote about last week—where U.S. workers were replaced with H-1B guestworkers—are Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. These two India-based IT firms specialize in outsourcing and offshoring, are major publicly traded companies with a combined market value of about $115 billion, and are the top two H-1B employers in the United States. In Fiscal Year (FY) 2013, Infosys ranked first with 6,269 H-1B petitions approved by the government, and Tata ranked second with 6,193. As with the SCE scandal, these leading offshore outsourcing firms use the H-1B program to replace American workers and to facilitate the offshoring of American jobs. Because of this, it’s likely that Americans lost more than 12,000 jobs to H-1B workers in just one year. FY13 H-1B data I’ve analyzed, acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveals new details about how firms like Infosys and Tata are using the H-1B non-immigrant visa program. Spoiler alert: they don’t use the H-1B visa as a way to alleviate a shortage of STEM-educated U.S. workers; they use it primarily to cut labor costs. But the other main arguments proffered to support an expansion of the H-1B program are easily debunked with even a cursory look at the H-1B data.

tonyPick writes:

Privacy International have launched a campaign to file a complaint against the British intelligence agency GCHQ for illegally spying, and are looking for people to sign up and find out if they were spied upon:

A FAQ covers the motivations and details requested, and it's worth noting that this does not apply to the UK exclusively:

Originally spotted at Hackernews.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

Apparently some people mistook Request For Comment to mean the same as it does for Internet RFCs, a settled matter. Not so much in our case; it meant exactly as it said. The proof is in the pudding though. Given the legitimate concerns of gamification of karma scores leading to lower quality comments raised by some users in regards to our RFC: Reworking Karma post, we agree and the idea has been scrapped.

It wasn't a difficult decision and we would have posted this the next day but there were a lot of very interesting ideas in the comments that we decided to work in to another RFC. Keep in mind these won't necessarily all go in at once even if everyone loves them all. Here's the list.

1. Karma minimum to downmod
2. Downmods cost the moderator karma, except the Spam mod
3. Touché gets its missing accent
4. Spam mods not to cost mod points but limiting it to 5/day
5. The triumphant return of Overrated
6. No karma hits for someone moderated Overrated/Underrated
7. Require comments to be otherwise moderated before you can Overrated/Underrated them
8. Organize moderation drop-down list
9. Separate Spam in the drop-down list with a spacer
10. Automated mod-bombing detection and manual resolution
11. Add an Incorrect moderation that must be accompanied by a correction

Details below the fold.

Subsentient writes with an article from BBC News:

HTC is to release a virtual reality headset as part of a tie-up with Valve, a leading PC video games publisher.

The HTC Vive will be paired with wireless controllers and tracking technology to let wearers explore computer-generated environments by walking round their rooms.

A test version of the kit will go on sale to developers shortly, followed by a public edition later this year.

It will compete with Facebook's Oculus Rift and Sony's Morpheus VR headsets.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

VLC, the popular cross-platform media player, has recently gained support for logging to the journal of the widely used systemd init system.

This work was committed to VLC's git repo by Rémi Denis-Courmont. Thanks to his efforts and the widespread adoption of systemd by the major Linux distributions, VLC users on such systems will have yet another convenient logging option available for use.

Lennart Poettering's New "systemd-import" Tool: Pull and Update Container Images from the Internet

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Lennart Poettering, the creator of the widely used systemd init system, has announced the new "systemd-import" tool that he has developed.

He describes its capabilities:

"systemd-import" can pull and update container images from the Internet, in the format and via the APIs of today's best known Linux container solution. This lightweight tool downloads the images, converts them into btrfs subvolumes/snapshots and makes them available as simple directory trees in /var/lib/container/, like any other container tree, which you then can boot with "systemd-nspawn".

This is done without any heavyweight dependencies. As Lennart explains,

All this with only a bit of C code, as part of the systemd suite. No new dependencies. No Go, no Python, no other runtime.

As systemd is already the preferred init system of most major Linux distributions today, this functionality should soon be available for Linux system administrators to use instead of existing containerization technologies like Docker.

I've got something real special for you guys today. Jonathan Pater, better known to most people as CowboyNeal, has agreed to do an interview with us. Given the source, we're going to do this in the "Slashdot-style" (for want of a better term) where you can post your questions below, we'll select our favorites and pass them on to him. Though he is quite busy, we've got the CowboyNeal account reserved for him just in case, so if you see it posting, know that's the real deal.

I'd also like to thank mrcoolbp for getting in contact with CowboyNeal, and recommend everyone thank him for helping setting up this opportunity. Now, let's get those questions going folks!

Note: Feel free to ask multiple questions, but please: only one question per post.

fatuous looser writes:

Meet Ro-Bow, purportedly a "mechatronic" sculpture. That’s what Seth Goldstein built. He calls it a ‘kinetic sculpture’, but there more than enough electronics and mechatronics to keep even the most discerning tinkerer interested.

There are three main parts of Seth’s violin-playing kinetic sculpture. The first is a bow carriage that draws the bow across the strings using an electromagnet to press the bow against the strings. The individual strings are fingered with four rubber disks, and a tilting mechanism rotates the violin so the desired string is always underneath the bow and mechanical fingers.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Google's search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page. "A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy," says the team (arxiv.org/abs/1502.03519v1). The score they compute for each page is its Knowledge-Based Trust score.

The software works by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html

tonyPick writes:

Following the recent tragic death of Leonard Nimoy mic.com is reporting a renewed interest in "Spocking" Canadian five dollar bills.

As it turns out, the late Nimoy resembles former Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919), whose profile just so happens to grace the Canadian five-dollar banknote. It didn't take long for Canadians to discover that with just a few strokes of a pen, the bill suddenly becomes a tribute to Spock

There is additional background at Quartz which notes that:

"gewg_" writes:

El Reg reports:

Austrian scientists have used a technique dubbed "bionic reconstruction" to connect a robot hand to grafted human nerves, enabling true mind-controlled prosthetics for the first time.

[...]Its creator, Oskar Aszmann, Head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for the Restoration of Limb Functions at the MedUni Vienna's Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery [...] performed the surgery on three local volunteers who had hands that were crippled due to damage to the brachial plexus, the bundle of nerves that connect the spine to the arms and hand. A few residual nerves remained, but not enough for any useful control, only generating a few nanovolts, he reported in a research paper published by The Lancet. (Requires 6 cookies)

The team grafted muscle from the [subjects'] thighs onto their arms, to boost the nerve fibers present along the length of the arm and amplify their signals, and then let it heal. The patents then spent nine months learning to control the new muscles and interconnected nerves using an arm-mounted sensor pack.

[...][Each of the] three men had [his hand] cut off in an elective operation.

[...]Three months after the surgery[,] all three patients had significant success with the new hands and mobility tests reported nearly two-thirds the function of a normal hand.

Hugh Pickens writes:

Eric Mack reports at Cnet that a team of researchers at Cornell University, inspired by the book "World War Z" by Max Brooks, have used statistical-mechanics to model how an actual zombie outbreak might unfold and determined the best long-term strategy for surviving the walking dead: Head for the hills. Specifically, you should probably get familiar now with the general location of Glacier National Park so that when it all goes down, you can start heading in that direction. The project started with differential equations to model a fully connected population, then moved on to lattice-based models, and ended with a full US-scale simulation of an outbreak across the continental US. "At their heart, the simulations are akin to modelling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in--human," says Alex Alemi, "infected, zombie, or dead zombie--with approximately 300 million people."

Alemi believes cities would succumb to the zombie scourge quickly, but the infection rate would slow down significantly in more sparsely populated areas and could take months to reach places like the Northern Rockies and Glacier National Park. "Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down--there are fewer humans to bite, so you start creating zombies at a slower rate," Alemi says. Once you hit Montana and Idaho, you might as well keep heading farther north into the Canadian Rockies and all the way up to Alaska where data analysis shows you're most likely to survive the zombie apocalypse. The state with the lowest survival rate? - New Jersey. Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The Los Angeles Times is running an article describing the challenges faced by Asian Americans as they apply for acceptance to top colleges.

The article describes the impact that their race and ethnicity has on their SAT scores:

Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth.

She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.

A core tenet of the American philosophy, even from before the days of the Founding Fathers, is that through hard work and excellence one should be able to obtain success in life. But is this ideal even possible when certain underachieving groups are given artificial advantages, while those with the most merit are artificially held back?

DECbot writes:

The Ars reports of an interesting study published in Nature about a possible link between food emulsifiers and inflammatory disorders.

Emulsifiers are used in processed foods, drugs, vitamins, vaccines, soaps, and cosmetics. They hold ingredients that generally don't like to be together, like oil and water, in a stable union. They are found in everyday products ranging from mouthwash to ice cream to salad dressing and barbecue sauce.

When emulsifiers first came into vogue, they were classified by the government as GRAS—"generally regarded as safe"—because in animal studies designed to detect acute toxicity and/or carcinogenic properties, they exhibited neither. But their consumption in the Western world has risen dramatically over the late twentieth century, largely in tandem with inflammatory disorders like colitis and metabolic syndrome, a collective suite of obesity-associated diseases. That connection has prompted more refined safety studies on emulsifiers and other food additives.

Although further work is obviously needed to assess the effects of emulsifiers on human health, the authors suggest that emulsifiers may have contributed to the enormous increase in inflammatory bowel disease and metabolic syndrome that has occurred over the last half century. However, the researchers note that "this hypothesis does not dispute the commonly held assumption that excess caloric consumption is a predominant factor driving the metabolic syndrome epidemic."

Maybe it's not entirely our fault that we've been eating everything in sight; by messing with our microbiome, the emulsifiers made us do it.

Original found in Nature, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/nature14232. Of course, correlation is not causation, but the results do suggest there is link between gut health, inflammatory disorders, and what's in the food we eat.

frojack writes:

Battery technology advances seem to come every other month, all of them seem to be the proverbial 5 years away. But by and large, these developments are simply nibbling around the edges of current battery technology, making minor improvements.

ArsTechnica reports that at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, scientists explain that what is needed to make battery technology suitable for use in motor vehicles and grid storage is to triple capacity, AND cut price by nearly 70%. This would require raising the energy density of batteries from its present 200 W-hr/kg to about 600 W-hr/kg.

The way forward is to step out side the familiar battery chemistry we've been working with.

Electrodes play a key role in batteries in that they're where charge carriers—lithium in today's batteries—are held. Their ability to store lithium therefore becomes a key determinant of the storage density of a battery. Right now, carbon electrodes require six atoms of carbon for each lithium atom stored. Elements further down that column in the periodic table, like silicon and germanium, however, have a more complicated electronic structure, which can interact with more lithium atoms. As a result, you can store 4.4 lithium atoms for each silicon atom—a significant boost in capacity.

The article goes on to explain the issues with silicon. Lithium atoms cause silicon to expand, damaging the battery. Using, amorphous silicon beads and a polymer they've achieved 360 W-hr/kg version working in the lab. Still far short of the goal.

Jumping beyond silicon, the scientists explored Lithium-sulfur batteries, which have a theoretical capacity of 2,500 W-hr/kg. This would be an ideal material for electrodes, because it is cheap and plentiful. The article explains the struggle to get sulfur to remain where its needed. It has a nasty habit of forming polysulfides that can leak away from the electrode and undergo reactions elsewhere in the battery. A couple of different approaches to solving the wandering sulfur problem appear to be promising, yielding batteries in the lab that exhibit charge-discharge cycle counts comparable with today's lithium technology.

Are they ready for market yet? Of course not. In fact the researchers aren't even sure these chemistries are the right approach. Costs of production may still be too high. But the results are good enough to demonstrate that the major jumps in battery energy density are possible, and we may be able to blow right by the the goal of tripling energy density.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Two former high-level managers at Microsoft have sued the company, claiming their terminations were in retaliation for raising questions about a well-connected subordinate's expense reports. The subordinate, who is not named in the complaint, allegedly submitted expenses in excess of $22,000 while entertaining Microsoft business partners at South Korean "hostesses bars".

The complaint (embedded in the GeekWire story) provides details. Eric Engstrom and Ted Stockwell both worked for Microsoft throughout the 1990's (the complaint credits Engstrom as being one of the three inventors of the DirectX API), left the company in 1998 or 1999, and returned in 2008 to work in Microsoft's Online Services Division, which was headed by Qi Lu. Engstrom was hired to lead Bing Mobile Program Management; Engstrom hired Stockwell to run a new organization called Bing Mobile International.

Engstrom and Stockwell allegedly created the blueprint for the "Bing as a Platform" (BaaP) initiative within Microsoft in 2010. Shortly thereafter, the unnamed employee ("John Doe") was loaned to Stockwell's fledgling organization by Harry Shum, EVP of Technology and Research; Doe was known to have personal connections to an important Microsoft business partner in Korea. John Doe's expense reports from Korea were submitted to Stockwell for approval.

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