Part of the problem is identifying the actual abusers of the visa-system applicable to skilled workers. The public debate in elections may make the biggest noise about undocumented immigrants, but there is behind-the-scenes discussion about the H1-B and L-1 system. This August, the USCIS will announce its decision on expanding the L-1 definition of "specialized knowledge". The L-1, the lesser-known brother of the H1-B, is a 3-year non-immigrant visa that is extendable for up to 5 years and can be reissued if the employee in question leaves the US and works for the sponsoring company for another year. People are eligible to apply for the L-1 if they have worked for a US company abroad or will be opening and running US-branch office for a foreign company (other cases apply, just not available off the top of my head) About a third of applications are rejected though, biased towards India. Abusers of the H1-B and L-1 system are the blue-chip, non-tech companies who use out-sourcing IT companies like Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro to cut costs in their tech departments. Talking about immigration reform is not so much about lack of incentive as it is about the emotions arising from the stories of Disney IT workers being fired and having to retrain their H1-B replacements who are getting paid lower wages. Another aspect not discussed is whether expanding the H1-B system perpetuates ageism in the Valley -- why not push out older workers at the expense of getting fresh foreign grads? No large change can happen when fear is present.
Part of the problem is identifying the actual abusers of the visa-system applicable to skilled workers, i.e. what makes someone "skilled" with "specialized knowledge". The public debate in elections may make the biggest noise about undocumented immigrants, but there is behind-the-scenes discussion about the H1-B and L-1 system. This August, the USCIS will announce its decision on expanding the L-1 definition of "specialized knowledge". The L-1 class, the lesser-known brother of the H1-B, is a 3-year non-immigrant visa that is extendable for up to 5 years (7 years for the L-1A) and can be reissued if the employee in question leaves the US and works for the sponsoring company for another year. People are eligible to apply for the L-1 if they have worked for a US company abroad or will be opening and running US-branch office for a foreign company (other cases apply, just not available off the top of my head. The L-1A is for execs and managers, the L1-B for specialized knowledge workers). No degree or education requirement is necessary for the L-1B by the way. No quota either, like with the H-1B. About a third of applications are rejected though, biased towards India. Abusers of the H1-B and L-1 system are the blue-chip, non-tech companies who use out-sourcing IT companies like Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro to cut costs in their tech departments. Talking about immigration reform is not so much about lack of incentive as it is about the emotions arising from the stories of Disney IT workers being fired and having to retrain their H1-B replacements who are getting paid lower wages. Another aspect not discussed is whether expanding the H1-B system perpetuates ageism in the Valley -- why not push out older workers at the expense of getting fresh foreign grads? No large change can happen when fear is present.
>>I'm thinking now either an external hard drive, or on a VPS I can just tunnel into.
Consider setting up an ElasticSearch cluster somewhere, like with AWS, which takes plugins for ElasticSearch. Once you've indexed your data with ES, then queries are pretty easy (JSON-based). This would also solve your other problem with data visualization. ElasticSearch has an analytics tool called Kibana. Pretty useful and doesn't require too much effort to set up or use. I'm using this setup for a sentiment analysis project myself.
You didn't mention the libraries in your NLP pipeline (guessing NLTK bc of the Python?), but if you're doing LSM compatibility, I'm guessing you might be interested in clustering or topic-modelling algorithms and such...Mahout integrates easily with ElasticSearch.
>>I'm thinking now either an external hard drive, or on a VPS I can just tunnel into.
Consider setting up an ElasticSearch cluster somewhere, like with AWS, which takes plugins for ElasticSearch. Once you've indexed your data with ES, then queries are pretty easy (JSON-based). This would also solve your other problem with data visualization. ElasticSearch has an analytics tool called Kibana. Pretty useful and doesn't require too much effort to set up or use. I'm using this setup for a sentiment analysis project myself.
You didn't mention the libraries in your NLP pipeline (guessing NLTK bc of the Python?), but if you're doing LSM compatibility, I'm guessing you might be interested in clustering or topic-modelling algorithms and such...Mahout integrates easily with ElasticSearch.
It would be cool to have an option to tap into Facebook or other social networks somehow, so that there would be a higher likelihood of meeting up with someone who was a friend of a friend (or further out) rather than a complete stranger. Plus, if people on Kikiverse were coming together for a bigger event, the event could be simultaneously posted on FB. Most of my friends in the 18-29 age range and the student groups on campus used FB for planning group outings.
I chose Tumblr over Posterous because of the elegant templates and the art/music tastes, so I agree here. If Posterous compares itself to Gmail for blogging, then Tumblr is like a public Evernote for scrapbooking. I'm not using it to promote my own ideas or build my professional "brand". Posterous seems as though it's trying to cater both to the computer illiterate and the time-crunched techie/professional who lives and dies by email to organize life a la GTD. For example, Tumblr has a quotations format separate from the text post option, more useful to me than the Google analytics tool that Posterous offers.
The downside is that Tumblr does have a greater share of Livejournal/teen angst, but I've carved out my niche of grad students, graphic designers, and classical music aficionados who upload great performances. The fact that TED Chris and John Maeda (President of RISD) use Posterous is tempting, but also makes it more businesslike.
I have yet to understand why I would want to email posts other than videos, as it's not particularly onerous to use bookmarklets. And Posting within Tumblr means my tags autocomplete, whereas Posterous has you write tags in your email subject line. Posting videos to Posterous is easier though, as Tumblr requires videos first to be hosted on Vimeo. Posterous might have another advantage as it is more useful to coordinate updates to a multitude of other sites, including Tumblr. But I screen different content on Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, and Tumblr, so I actually don't want the same things posting on all my sites.
I don't know the answer to your question, and it's not a particularly useful exercise to make a blanket judgement on whether judicial activism is undesirable in every case.
What I wanted to refute was your initial statement that a majority of Supreme Court justice leads to a clear interpretation of the law. What I meant by bringing up judicial activism is to say that one's opinion on judicial activism can influence how one views Supreme Court decisions. Dred Scott v. Sanford is an example of a majority Supreme Court decision, that in my opinion, was undesirable, despite its "fair" albeit narrow reading of the law.
I can't help add, and this will be the last rebuttal I make since we're not going to sway each other's opinion, and I do feel like I messed up by adding something political to HN:
As for foreign corporations, again, I want to emphasize, as I did previously, that free speech is not black/white of merely include them carte blanche or else our rights will be infringed upon. Free speech is not that simplistic although it is sacrosanct.
Why not overturn Morse v. Frederick then, which I believe had such free-speech loving justices as Alito and Scalia from the Citizens United ruling also in the majority of that case. In Morse v. Frederick, free speech could be limited by "important—indeed, perhaps compelling interests" (taken from Justice Roberts writing the decision for the majority). Granted, it limits only illegal drug-promoting student speech, but it is again another example where the justices limited free speech and justified it on grounds of public interest that did not include immediate violence. The kid could still hang his "bong hits 4 Jesus" sign on his private residence or yell it on the streets. Corporations before Citizens United could still runs ads, as could PACs and the corporate executives _individually_ donating them. They just couldn't use corporate treasury funds nor could they run the ads a certain number of days before the date of the election.
Therein, lies the question of what one considers best for public interest. Blue-collar wages of workers have remained stagnant over the last 30 years while white-collar and executive salaries have seen a nice rate of growth. The Chicago School of Economics elegant theories towards markets have not been substantiated by the uglier, noisier empirical evidence. Having studied psychological/behavioral economics and interned for a government official as well as interned with a non-profit lobbying group, I have a more skeptical view of the "well-informed" voter and the "public" servant. So this largely explains why I think differently than you do.
"As a Constitutional issue it's pretty clear to me and the majority of the Supremes" - that depends upon what kind of philosophy you take on approaching the role of the Supreme Court, activism to change policy versus narrow interpretation of the Constitution.
It's simplistic to say that Citizens United ruling is simply a matter of suppression vs. free speech, as Buckley v. Valeo has nuanced to what extent "money" constitutes speech. As Justice Stevens writes in his dissent, "At bottom, the Court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics."
Several people have cited examples of free speech and the press. The Citizens United ruling lifts restrictions of corporate spending in political ads during election campaigns with in-house corporate treasury funds, i.e. unfettered free speech at any time. Rather than looking at NYT Co v. Sullivan, look Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce's interpretation. http://www.moresoftmoneyhardlaw.com/updates/the_supreme_cour...
Excerpted:
"Austin’s critics aspire to dissolve all this complexity into a simplistic choice between speech and suppression. In attacking the "political support" language of Austin, they take it to be something strange, an import into the jurisprudence of a notion at odds with core First Amendment values. What they miss is its surprising ordinariness. The Austin case was getting at something important, even—one could say—basic to the mechanisms within the campaign finance laws for isolating the corruptive threat of aggregated group or associational spending."
I'm not arguing that corporations be denied their political speech via spending, which was outside of the case ruling anyway.
Free speech is controlled in very specific cases because of its potential injurious impacts - libel, safety, individuals versus entities, etc. What I take issue with is the extent of power given to special interest groups and lobbyists that override the interests of individual citizens. Is there a difference between groups of people coming together and pooling their money to form a PAC and group of people expressing political views of an entire corporation using corporation treasury funds?
And if you want to go into fringe, extreme positions: what about tax-paying subsidiaries in the US headed by groups of American citizens, but owned by foreign corporations? Should they not then be entitled to equal free speech in our elections?
In any case, it will be interesting to see what comes of the ruling, and thanks for highlighting those two cases.
You're right to say that Citizen United does not change how we view campaign finance as protected speech for humans. I definitely was wrong and unclear on that point, but I respectfully disagree about the implications of the Citizens United ruling: my point is that this ruling sets the stage for allowing undue power to corporations, both non-profit and for-profit. Corporations are not living beings with unalienable rights, so we should not have worried that limiting their speech would have implications for us human beings. For Scalia being such a conservative reader of the law, he certainly took a highly judicial activist position in this ruling.
excerpted from the article: In vivid contrast, the majority overruled a 19-year-old precedent (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce) that had lambasted the corporation, when it entered the political arena, because of ”the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s suport for the corporation’s political ideas.”
The problem with treating corporations as if they have a "right" to free speech and freedom of association is that they have a disproportionate amount of influence arising from their sheer size and aggregated wealth. We have other mechanisms to ensure that size and wealth do not override the voices of the small and poor in elections (look at how the Senate is constructed versus the House or how we have the electoral college to ensure that wealthier coastal states do not decide presidential elections).
And also, the fact that we grant any rights to corporations at all arises from a court stenographer's foot-note that later opened up loopholes for clever (although might I add shortsighted) lawyers in subsequent cases that eventually snowballed into granting rights to this nebulous entity. As Justice Stevens noted in his dissent to the Citizens United ruling, "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it.” And yet, we worried that limiting the financial power of corporations will potentially infringe upon OUR (human) 1st Amendment rights. That is the problem for me. We created the corporate entity like a machine to serve our purposes; it does not exist with unalienable rights as we human beings do.
Who donates the most to campaigns, 501(3)(c) non-profits and charities or Fortune 1000 corporations whose explicit purpose is to generate profits for stakeholders?
The funny thing with personhood conferral is that it was an obiter dictum (sort of non-binding comment made by the judges that is not part of the official decision) that was interpreted by the court stenographer in the 19th century Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (whose case was ruled in favor of Southern Pacific on a technicality rather than any explicit ruling on the personhood of corporations). So now with Thursday's Citizens United ruling, it will be interesting to see whether corporations will have to be federally chartered and thereby be revoked of constitutionally protected status or whether this case opens the door to potentially unfettered powers granted to corporations, now that campaign finance is protected "free" speech under the 1st Amendment.
Mea culpa, I didn't see that link. This article is not from the official Google blog. It adds screenshots of uploaded files and an interesting link to a rumored early description of the storage system, which makes me wonder where Google is heading with this storage system at only 1GB, since it's clear that others already offer much more storage.
Anyway, what is the usual habit for similar stories? should I delete this link to clean up HN?
Just wanted to highlight an interesting thought and see what people thought might be the current trends leading to a NUI:
"Altogether, the devices show Microsoft's vision for the future of computing, one that increasingly will rely on a host of natural user interfaces to let people abandon the keyboard in order to speak, point, touch and, eventually, think their commands."
I saw the iPhone dieting app, for example, that tries to skip the manual process of entering in caloric data by photo recognition.
I think of Twitter as a space to move large-scale messages to a broad public, rather than as a social net-working site. Twitter has proven effective in organizing political protests, encouraging feedback loops between companies and clients, and in allowing people to feel connected to celebrities (and whatever value that affords to people, although its economic value has been certainly proven by the brisk sales of tabloids). Perhaps the tag system allows people to connect with others who share similar ideas, but Wright is correct in saying that Twitter falls short of being email or IM in terms of meaningful communication. It's more of a "status" or information generating machine.
Maybe I have a limited view of Twitter, given that I have yet to figure out what it replaces in my life from email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr (microblog), WordPress, mobile, RSS feed manager, SMS, letters, and actually talking to friends in person or via another friend. A Nielsen wire report from April 2009 mentioned that 60% of new Twitter users fail to return each month, which averages out to about a 40% overall retention rate, whereas Myspace and Facebook are reportedly stable at around 70%.
Psychology research on the cognitive limits of stable relationships has generated an arbitrary Dunbar number of about 150 people, so Twitter followers/followees numbering in the 1000s seems suspect in terms of actual social ties. Average Twitter followers for each user has been reported at around 126, and Facebook is slightly higher, (not sure how those figures were calculated). But given that many Twitter users are celebrities, companies, or businesspeople, and Facebook celebrities/products tend to have fan pages rather than friend accounts, I think we need to see more descriptive statistics other than just the mean. Perhaps the problem here is one of defining and then agreeing upon which definition ought to constitute a "social network." Economics, psychology, marketing, and sociology all have contributed their version. But I still think Twitter is lacking in its delivery of service for the average user who isn't embroiled in business, celebrities, or political turmoil but is looking for a social networking space.
I'm more familiar with St. John's College, as I dreamed of attending had not the cost been so prohibitively high.
http://www.sjca.edu/
But the one-track curriculum is based off the trivium and quadrivium of medieval education, where you don't have electives but regardless, you get a well-rounded education because they're preparing you to think and inquire. So every student studies Greek, Latin, French, Western classical music, mathematics from the source (like Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia), physics from the source, chemistry, history, etc. No modern textbooks rehashing information, so theoretically, no passive learning. So this curriculum isn't really a straitjacket.
The one downside is that you're not getting a very multicultural or contemporary view, given that you're reading the Western canon largely pre-World War II. But it's not such a big problem if you again realize that the idea with this education is that you're being trained not in subjects but in the ability to go out and find what you don't know in the classroom on your own and to discuss these new ideas with other people.
Thank you for sharing your story! I wasn't actively discouraged like you, but my family also enforced rigid notions of what "proper girls" did. I'm so glad you're now doing what you love.
Thanks to everyone for sharing their stories! This is really great to read, and it's even better that there's no cookie-cutter way into programming. I guess I had too much of an attitude that this is like grad school in a basic science or a career as a classical violinist, where you pretty much have to have followed a certain track to get in and where it's better to have started as a young prodigy. The media reports heavily on the crackshot kids who develop their start-up at age 16, and I guess it skewed my perception. And even if you are one of those lucky kids who stumbled on something so fun at such a young age, it was really interesting to read all the different uses and sectors to which programming skills can be applied.