Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses.
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka--until I reported that inconvenient truth in this story. The ensuing uproar led to the Sri Lanka initiative's termination.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

In early 2001, an 11-year-old Kalama girl named Cassandra Ann Kennedy told police her dad raped her on at least three occasions. Her father, Thomas Edward Kennedy, denied the allegation, but he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison.
In January, Cassandra Kennedy, now 23, told Longview police she made it all up. So after serving more than nine years in prison, her father was released last week and the charges against him were dismissed.
"I did a horrible thing," Cassandra told detectives in January, according to a police report. "It's not OK to sit and be locked in this horrible place for something you didn't do. It's just not right."

Read more: http://tdn.com/news/local/local-girl-lied-about-rape-father-set-free/article_bf9cac36-7c7a-11e1-a9e4-001a4bcf887a.html#ixzz1qz9svG3H

U.S. officials were scrambling Sunday to contain the damage caused when an American soldier in Afghanistan wandered off base and allegedly gunned down more than a dozen villagers.

Sixteen Afghan civilians, including nine children, were shot dead in what witnesses described as a nighttime massacre on Sunday near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan, and one U.S. soldier was in custody.
While U.S. officials rushed to draw a line between the rogue shooting and the ongoing efforts of a U.S. force of around 90,000, the incident is sure to further inflame Afghan anger triggered when U.S. soldiers burned copies of the Koran at a NATO base.

Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So what sort of tricks do they use while they're under the pump, doing 12+ hour per day for weeks on end?

Below are some classic anecdotes and tips - many thanks to Brandon Sheffield who originally put together this article on Gamasutra. I have reposted a few of his stories and also added some more from newer sources. I have also linked on each story to the author's home page or blog wherever possible.

A few days after the New York Times’ (embarrassingly belated and deeply flawed) article on Apple’s Chinese production facilities reignited a national discussion about offshore outsourcing, President Obama was confronted during a Google+ “hang out” about why during a brutal unemployment crisis his administration continues to support expanding the H-1B visa program that allows tech companies to annually import thousands of low-wage engineers from abroad. In his stunning answer, the president first expresses bewilderment that any American high-tech engineer could be out of work, because he says that “what industry tells me is that they don’t have enough (domestic) highly skilled engineers” and that “the word that we’re getting is that somebody (a domestic engineer) in a high-tech field should be able to find something right away.” He then goes on to insist that the H-1B program is “reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in (a) particular field” and that it shouldn’t apply to industries where “there are a lot of highly skilled American workers” looking for a job because he says his administration is focused on “encourag(ing) more American engineers to be placed” in open positions.

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute paints a grim picture of state science standards across the United States. But it also reveals some intriguing details about exactly what’s going wrong with the way many American students are learning science.

Standards are the foundation upon which educators build curricula, write textbooks and train teachers– they often take the form of a list of facts and skills that students must master at each grade level. Each state is free to formulate its own standards, and numerous studies have found that high standards are a first step on the road to high student achievement. “A majority of the states’ standards remain mediocre to awful,” write the authors of the report. Only one state, California, plus the District of Columbia, earned straight A’s. Indiana, Massachusetts, South Carolina and Virginia each scored an A-, and a band of states in and around the northwest, including Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Nebraska, scored F’s. (For any New Yorkers reading this, our standards earned a respectable B+, plus the honor of having “some of the most elegant writing of any science standards document”).

What exactly is going wrong? The study’s lead authors identified four main factors: an undermining of evolution, vague goals, not enough guidance for teachers on how to integrate the history of science and the concept of scientific inquiry into their lessons, and not enough math instruction.

As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective — as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.

Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that). Musicians fulminated about radio stations playing their music for free, and some record labels made their acts sign waivers saying they would not appear on the radio. In the end, of course, radio became a huge revenue driver for music — although it did so in part because record labels and publishers pushed for licensing fees.

Essentially, the list of charges is that the near 1 million people who work for Foxconn (about 230,000 of whom produce products for Apple, the others assembling for Dell, HP, just about every electronics company in fact) have to work long hours for low pay in dangerous conditions.

Well, yes, they’re poor people living in a poor country. That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little. Yes, that is a harsh thing to say but then reality can indeed be harsh.

To show that it’s not just uncaring neoliberals like myself who say such things why not try reading Paul Krugman on the subject of sweatshops? Specifically, here, on what would happen if we were to try and stop the manufacturing being done in such poor places:

I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there already with more to come, and rather than have a bunch of separate discussions on a bunch of different social media platforms, I thought I would put some of my thoughts here.

"I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.

This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.

Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violin in order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world."