Lowest Paying Employers of H-1B Computer Workers

Lowest Paying Employers of H-1B Computer Workers FY 2004

Minimum of 100 H-1B Workers Requested on Labor Condition Applications

16 Mind-Blowing Microphotographs of Living Things

If you ever played with a starter microscope set as a kid, you may have felt the amazement of creating a miniature world simply by placing a drab little speck of matter under its objective lens. That same sense of wonder surely drove the winners of the 2006 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition, an annual contest for the best microphotographs of living (or once living) things. The Olympus Corporation recruited a panel of microscopists to judge each entry on its scientific contribution, aesthetic quality and technical excellence—not just who could present the gnarliest looking bug head. Bear that in mind as you view the 10 finalists, announced last December, along with our picks for the most interesting honorable mentions.

Price of Next Big Thing in Physics: $6.7 Billion

At a news conference in Beijing, an international consortium of physicists released the first detailed design of what they believe will be the Next Big Thing in physics: a machine 20 miles long that will slam together electrons and their evil-twin opposites, positrons, to produce fireballs of energy recreating conditions when the universe was only a trillionth of a second old.

It would cost about $6.7 billion and 13,000 person-years of labor to build the machine, the group reported. And that does not include the cafeteria and parking.

“The good thing is that we have developed a design that can address the challenging physics goals and meet the technical requirements, and we have worked very hard to cost-optimize it, yet it (not surprisingly) does remain expensive,” Barry Barish, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and chair of the design team, which includes 60 scientists from around the world, said in an email interview before the announcement.

It's A Low, Low, Low, Low-Rate World

Money is cheap. And some experts say it could stay that way for years. That's creating opportunity—and brand new risks.

In some ways, it's the 1990s all over again. Back then, the info-tech boom created an unexpected boost in productivity that persists today. Now it looks like something analogous has hit the global financial markets. A combination of globalization, innovation, and good old-fashioned competition among markets has made it easier and cheaper to raise and deploy money. Borrowers now can draw funds from around the globe. And derivatives let financial institutions and traders manage their risks with mind-blowing precision. With Chicago, London, New York, and Frankfurt all jostling to be the world market leader, exchanges and financial institutions have an incentive to be cheaper, faster, more innovative.

How to Underpay H-1B Workers

The Method

Companies who wish to import H-1B workers are required to file a Labor Condition Application (LCA) with the Department of Labor showing that they are, in fact, paying the H-1B workers according to the law. Keep in mind is that the law only allows the Department of Labor to ensure that the LCA form is filled out correctly. The Department of Labor does not validate the prevailing wage.

Attached below is an LCA filed by HCL for some of the H-1B replacements at BofA/Exult. The salary for the H-1B workers is $39,184, about half of what the people they replaced made. So how can HCL claim they are paying the prevailing wage?

The first step used here in the wage depression process is to call the H-1B workers generic "systems analysts". So instead of using the
higher-than-average wage for the specialized skills of Oracle and PeopleSoft, the employer uses the wage for systems analysts as a whole.

The LCA says that the employer used OES (The Bureau of Labor Statistics "Occupational Employment Survey") to get the prevailing wage. OES put the mean salary for "systems analysts" in Charlotte, NC at $60,150, a figure significantly greater than what the H-1B workers were
paid.

The Department of Labor provides an additional service to assist employers to depress wages in their on-line LCA system. There, employers can get a prevailing wage for Level 1 ("Beginning level employees") workers and Level 2 ("Fully competent employees") workers, which in this example are $41,246 and $69,618 respectively. So now the employer claims the H-1B workers are "Beginning level employees" and uses the lower wage as the prevailing wage.

The law only requires H-1B workers to be paid within 95% of the prevailing wage. The employer takes 95% of $41,246 and comes up with a wage of $39,184. Thus, the company is paying the H-1B workers about half of what the workers they replaced made.

Even if the law is not being violated, note that HCL is paying these supposedly "highly-skilled" and "best and brightest" employees the lowest wage it can possibly get away with, right down to the last dollar.

Indian outsourcers file the most applications for temporary H-1B visas

Data for the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, show that 7 of the top 10 applicants for H-1B visas are Indian companies. Giants Infosys Technologies (INFY) and Wipro (WIT) took the top two spots, with 22,600 and 19,400 applications, respectively. The company with the third most applications is Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH), which is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its operations in India. All three companies provide services to U.S. companies from India, including technology support and back-office processing.

The only other U.S. companies among the top 10 are the accounting and consulting firm Deloitte & Touche and consultancy Accenture (ACN). They rank seventh and ninth, with 8,000 and 7,000 applications, respectively.

Helping small companies share BIG files

My pet project, called Fileshifter, is secure file-manager targeted at small companied needing to transfer big files to and from clients and coworkers. This one-man creation written in PHP using Cake has unique features such as: drag-n-drop uploads and no maximum file-size (7GB DVD image is the largest uploaded to date). Without CakePHP it would not exist.

But you really want Guillaume and only Guillaume.

You want to hire a new programmer and you have the perfect candidate in mind, your old college roommate, Guillaume Portes. Unfortunately you can't just go out and offer him the job. That would get you in trouble with your corporate HR policies which require that you first create a job description, advertise the position, interview and rate candidates and choose the most qualified person. So much paperwork! But you really want Guillaume and only Guillaume.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/7/6948

Video Server

I have a wireless Linux fileserver that automatically scans all binary newsgroups for rotating keywords of my choice (while I’m at work), then downloads found DVD images onto its homemade RAID-array, after which it wirelessly shoots combined video to my new 42″ tube and audio to the Soundblaster X-Fi-driven 7.1 surround sound speaker rig. I control the server with a wireless mouse and a small LCD display. I do not own a DVD player.

Verizon Spends Half-Billion to Connect U.S. and China

Verizon this week announced a major project that would connect the U.S. and China together for the first time through a high-speed fiber optic line. The project is designed to provide more bandwidth between the two major countries, especially when network communications is so critical to businesses and consumers these days.

The new 11,000-mile fiber line will cross the Pacific Ocean and co-exist with a current system that has reached its limits. According to Verizon, the new line will have more than 60-times the bandwidth capacity of the current system allowing as much as 62-million simultaneous high-quality phone conversations. Network users will also benefit from the new line's incredible bandwidth. Verizon said that individual customers will be able to transfer data at a blistering speed of 10-gigabits per second or higher.

Called the Trans-Pacific Express (TPE), initial capacity will be roughly 1.28-terabits per second, with a designed capacity that's upgradeable to 5.12-terabits. Verizon's vice president of operations and technology Fred Briggs said "our leadership in this project builds on our important existing relationships in China, further recognizes the emergence of China as a diverse communications hub for Asia, and reflects our company's commitment to help U.S. and other global companies compete worldwide."

According to the original press release: The cable will have a landing point provided by Verizon Business at Nedonna Beach, Ore., on the U.S. West Coast and will land on the China mainland at Qingdao and Chongming. TPE will also have landings in Tanshui, Taiwan, and Keoje, South Korea.

The project is headed up mainly by Verizon which is investing roughly $500-million USD into the project. Verizon's partners include China Telecom, China Netcom, China Unicom and several other companies in Korea and Taiwan. Surrounding countries will also benefit from the new fiber line. The TPE is slated to start construction in roughly three months and is expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2008

Google and the Third Age of Computing

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment. Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.

Health Care Blog

POLICY: Why Is Fixing American Health Care So Difficult?

Almost all the problems with the American health care system boil down to two questions. How do we create a system that ensures that all citizens, and perhaps residents, have access to health insurance? And how do we contain the huge cost increases?

Of course, behind these questions lies the question of how to reform the nation's largest industry that serves and richly rewards many powerful interests. Continue.

POLICY: Health insurance 101

PHARMA: Drug Prices here and there

There's no question that in the US big pharma and its employees colleagues at USTR are on the attack over "low drug prices" in other countries, with the assumption that the US consumer is subsidizing R&D here and therefore allowing foreigners to get the benefit of new drugs without paying their fair share. Late last year I spent some futile time (aided by Derek Lowe who writes the excellent In the Pipeline blog) trying to get at the issue of whether this is true, and whether drug profit margins abroad are so low that they wouldn't support said R&D. Of course the alternative is that drug prices are too high in the US (or at least higher than they need to be to attract investment in pharma R&D). It's a common estimate that pharma companies make about 60-70% of their profits in the US. It's also well known that net margins in the pharma industry are the highest of any major sector at roughly 17%, compared to the next highest, financial services at 14% and way above any other manufacturing industry, including software.

You don't see software companies complaining about their need for government to ensure high prices to promote R&D, although monopolies by technology standards work equally well for one well known company. Pharma companies will argue the they only have limited time to make money, as patent expiration takes away their monopoly position and essentially forces them to start again from scratch, but in any other business, competitors will also come into the market using lower prices as their wedge in. (And to be fair to big Pharma they are by no means alone in looking to regulation or tariffs to protect them--which is why American car companies concentrate on minivans and SUVs, as there's a 25% tax on foreign "light trucks"). Pharma companies also must essentially give away the fruit of their research to generic companies. So the whole issue is very complex.

PHARMA: Drug Prices here and there

Cellphone giants unveil mobile Linux foundation

Six of the world's largest telecommunications companies have officially launched a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a common mobile Linux software platform. Founded by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone, the LiMo Foundation is inviting membership and participation from application and middleware developers.

Exchange replacement

First thing first, why in the hell are you running KDE on a server, and more important, why are you running an X server on one at all?

A huge number of people that got stuck with Exchange servers want to get rid of them. That's why these articles keep coming up.

What you meant was that you need the address book and directory services. Scheduling tends to be done by secretaries, and forms/IMAP folder sharing is generally not needed. Now if you say you *want* scheduling, etc, then fine, there are a number of quality products from which you can choose. If you define "what you need" to be the exact feature set of Exchange, then it isn't surprising that you think you need it. You can implement everything that Exchange/Outlook does with other software, cheaper, with more reliability, and on less hardware.

1. As for AD management software... let's see. You bought Windows Server because it's easy to use and admin, Exchange because it's easy to admin, and are using AD because it's easy to admin. So to do it right, you have to buy third party software? Sounds more like somebody screwed up their research and choose a bad solution based on broken assumptions. You have to do basically the same thing on any platform, so that's not a good reason to choose one over another. The UNIX solutions are much more reliable than Exchange, too, and less expensive. They also provide all the same functionality. Unless you go out of your way to ignore the solutions that work, anyway.

2. That's because Windows' does not provide functionality such as LVM. An application can also lock a file and prevent any app with any access level from even reading it. Exchange also keeps quite a lot open and locked when it doesn't need to. If the app was written well, it wouldn't be a problem. However, your backup explaination is an excellent example of why Windows is a huge pain in the ass.

3. BS, that is a perfectly valid comparison; backing up email is backing up email. If the application is written properly, the database will be fine. Exchange isn't written well, so it has problems. That software doesn't even provide a way to do a backup without either getting third party software or shutting Exchange down. Also, your VSS stuff is essentially the *exact same thing* as LVM snapshots. Why would your way work when LVM wouldn't? If the database is inconsistent, then it's inconsistent either way.

So what you're saying is that Windows/Exchange is better because it requires more jumping through hoops, buying more random software, and more dealing with random BS like bad data formats and bad storage techniques?

The best investment advice you'll never get

Solli took one look at my unkempt collection of mut­ual funds and said, “You’re being robbed here.” He pointed to funds I had purchased from or through Putnam, Merrill Lynch, Dreyfus, and—yes—Charles Schwab (which referred me to Aperio) and asked, “Do you know that you’re paying these guys to do essentially nothing?” He carefully explained the many ingenious ways fund managers, brokers, and advisers had found to chip away at investors’ returns. Turns out that I, like more than 90 million other suckers who have put close to $9 trillion into mutual funds, was paying annual fees, commissions, and transaction costs well in excess of 2 percent a year on most of my mutual funds (see “What Are the Fees?” page 75). “Do you know what that adds up to?” Solli asked. “At the end of every 36 years, you will only have made half of what you could have, through no fault of your own. And these are fees you needn’t pay, and won’t, if you switch to index funds.”

If Solli is an industry gadfly, Geddes, a modest, unassuming son of a United Church of Christ minister, is its chainsaw massacrer. “We work in the most overcompensated industry in the country,” Geddes admitted before the water was served, “and indexing threatens the revenue flow from managed funds to brokerage houses. That’s why you’ve been kept in the dark about it. This truly is the great secret shame of our business.

Most people who study the poor ...

'Most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes'

How did you go around winning the confidence of the people there?

Most reporters and academics spend a few weeks or, if they are lucky, a few months, getting information and data. I spent over a decade. Many people who write about these communities are armchair critics full of false assumptions. They are not ready to get out of the hallowed halls of Ivy League institutions.

Some of them assumed that people in these depressed areas had no family values, no respect for law, and no higher aspirations. But I would soon come to question those assumptions. And because I went directly into the neglected communities with an open mind, I was able to discover many things.

My visits not only enabled people to gain confidence in me, but it also helped me to see many sides of my informants. I was able to see them grow over time. That I stayed around to watch them make mistakes and pick themselves up engendered their confidence in me -- most people who study the poor are only interested in watching them make mistakes.

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

Street Fight

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: city workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, power and -- in a surprising twist -- race. Both Booker and James are African-American Democrats, but when the mayor accuses the Ivy League educated Booker of not being "really black" it forces voters to examine both how we define race in this country. "We tell our children to get educated," one Newarker says, "and when they do, we call them white. What kind of a message does that send?"

From CoryBooker.com

Newark is a city of limitless strength and unbounded potential. It is a city of hope and promise. Newark is a city of accomplishment and a city of struggle. Newark's people, like the bricks from our Brick City nickname, are strong, resilient, enduring, and when we come together there is nothing we cannot create or achieve.

We are a people committed to strong, safe neighborhoods, to thriving schools and abundant economic opportunity. We are a city that rejoices and luxuriates in the arts and culture and have a history of setting the very rhythm for an entire nation. We are a city that boasts of great universities, houses of worship that span back decades and centuries, parks designed by America's greatest urban landscape designers and a transportation system that literally connects the globe.

Newark is a great American city. It is representative of America's success and her continuing efforts to make real the promise of this nation to everyone. Within Newark's borders lie many of America's greatest stories, some of her most courageous activists and some of her most sobering challenges. The future of our country will be defined here --by the children in our schools, the young men and women entering the workforce and by how our community meets the challenges before us. The future is now.

Street Fight tells a gripping story of the underbelly of democracy where elections are not about spin-doctors, media consultants, or photo ops. In Newark, we discover, elections are won and lost in the streets.

How spicy foods can kill cancers

Something that I've always known intuitively.. Thanks to Sridhar for pointing this.

Scientists have discovered the key to the ability of spicy foods to kill cancer cells.

They found capsaicin, an ingredient of jalapeno peppers, triggers cancer cell death by attacking mitochondria - the cells' energy-generating boiler rooms.

The research raises the possibility that other cancer drugs could be developed to target mitochondria.

The Nottingham University study features in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

The study showed that the family of molecules to which capsaicin belongs, the vanilloids, bind to proteins in the cancer cell mitochondria to trigger apoptosis, or cell death, without harming surrounding healthy cells.

I think it is also anti-genotoxic.

Vegetarian diet

Assuming humans can survive on a vegetarian diet, the best argument for doing so isn't what is ethical or what we were designed for. Every time you move up a link in the food chain, only 10% of the energy of the prey is absorbed by the predator (the rest is lost as heat). So, a cow gets 10% of the grass' energy, and by eating the cow we get only 1% of the grass' energy. Eating a bird who eats bugs who eat plants, we're only getting .1% of the plant energy. Vegetarianism would be an easy way to create an abundance of food for the entire population.

I would appreciate it if you mentioned this, because this argument is rarely brought up (and I know no one else will read this comment). Thanks for the entertaining blog.

No study will ever prove or disprove the meat contention. The random, unaccountable differences between individual humans make strict science and human nutrition mutually exclusive fields.

In order for a study to say anything conclusive, the scientists would have to do something like grow 100 genetically identical clones, and then make sure each one got exactly equal amounts and types of water, sleep, stress, excercise, exposure to illness etc etc etc. Feeding half of this group a carefully controlled omnivorous diet and the other half a carefully controlled vegetarian diet with identical levels of macro and micronutrients for 12 months and then measuring their resultant "health" would be somewhere APPROACHING scientific.

Present nutritional studies typically do not have this level of rigour. Now my declatation of bias: I really like meat. Therefore I eat it.

For all the discussion on teeth, I saw a lecture on skull bones once.

From it, I learned that human teeth are:
-Not like dogs - some of their teeth are for gripping, some for chopping up bones to get at the marrow, and some for ripping flesh
-Not like cats, large or small - their teeth are mostly for ripping and slicing flesh
-Not exactly like baboons - males have huge canines for fighting other males
-Not like horses - front teeth for tearing and back teeth for grinding with a gap in between
-Not like rodents - front teeth for gnawing, always growing

-A lot like bears and pigs - people have mistaken their skulls for the skulls archaic skeletons because of the similarities between the teeth

Bears and pigs eat a lot of the same things that humans like to eat, basically everything. In fact, a certain grizzly bear in Yellowstone really liked an entire case of beer he found in a camp and was nicely drunk at the camp when they found him. But then again, when I think of bears eating meat, I think of them clawing at salmon...

3. High-protein (meat) diets equate very closely (i.e., a one-to-one correlation) with aggression, conquest, etc., not to mention getting more of your agrarian neighbors' babes than your typical agrarians get of your babes

As I have stated, if there is a conclusive study that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that vegetarianism is a superior diet, with enough nutritional benefits to justify the switch, then I will switch without skepticism. But no such study has been produced, and what is available currently seems to be rather primitive.