90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Over 120 Science Journal Papers Pulled for Being Total Gibberish

If you ever find yourself scratching your head over the complicated articles in science and math journals,

don't feel too bad about yourself. Because there's a chance that whatever you're attempting to read is actually 100 percent, Grade A, peer-reviewed bullshit.

Earlier this week, Nature revealed that scientific journal publishers Springer and IEEE are both removing over 120 published papers after discovering that every single one is nothing more than fancy-sounding gibberish. The fairly egregious oversight was discovered by French computer scientist Cyril Labbé, who's spent the past two years cataloguing the collection of computer-generated drivel.

How could something like this possibly get past publishers? Part of the genius of the computer-generated scam is that, at least to the untrained eye, the papers sound like they could be plausible. For instance, one of the papers published as a proceeding from a 2013 engineering conference in China (which supposedly reviews all potential articles "for merits and contents") is titled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce." Vague, sure, but it's certainly not absurd. Then comes the abstract:

In recent years, much research has been devoted to the construction of public-private key pairs; on the other hand, few have synthesized the visualization of the producer-consumer problem. Given the current status of efficient archetypes, leading analysts famously desires the emulation of congestion control, which embodies the key principles of hardware and architecture. In our research, we concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact.
Nothing but big, fancy words in absolutely absurd orders. Interestingly, the entire reason the papers exist in the first place is because of an MIT-made program called SCIgen, a piece of software created in 2005 for the sole purpose of proving that conferences constantly accept nonsensical papers. And, of course, "to maximize amusement." Anyone can download it and use it, so no one is quite sure exactly who is behind the gibberish discovered thus far—and real scientists names are used as the supposed "authors."

Sixteen of the papers were published by Springer while over 100 of the bizarre culprits were put out by the IEEE, and since all papers are supposedly peer-reviewed, the publishers are having a hard time explaining exactly how this happened. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with collecting more publishing fees, nor sir.[Nature]

Lois Lerner is the tip of the iceberg. Obama and his cronies have filled every crevice of government with these strident ideologues, who believe that whatever they do in order to project Obama's vision of America and protect him from the law is their most noble purpose in life.

The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance Intercepts. They Lied.

For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn't have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spent months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were "incidental" collections from bystanders.

So was all of this worth it? The Post's review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:

Among the most valuable contents—which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations—are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

…If Snowden's sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 "transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year's collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden's sample, the office's figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.

The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, the NSA plainly stretches to the limit—and probably beyond—the rules for defining who is and isn't a US person. Click the link for more.

1Naturally, the NSA has an explanation:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about "raw" intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.

"We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic…" Litt said. "Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”

Silly intelligence committee members. They should have specifically asked about access to processed content.

Jesus. If someone in Congress isn't seriously pissed off about this obvious evasion, they might as well just hang up their oversight spurs and disband.

How To Change Your Status..

Armed militias planning to take over US border to thwart illegal immigrants

As militias vow to protect the Texas border from illegal immigrants, Gov. Rick Perry (R-Texas) said he believes the president has an ulterior motive for not moving quickly to prevent the overwhelming numbers of immigrants crossing the border.

Between January 1 and June 15, 2014, more than 52,000 unaccompanied alien children have been apprehended after crossing the Mexican border into the US, according to Customs and Border Patrol. The children are mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Including adults, over 181,000 undocumented immigrants who are “other than Mexicans,” or OTMs, have been apprehended along the southwest border in that time period. The majority of illegal aliens are coming through the Rio Grande Valley in southwest Texas.

As the United States struggles to deal with a huge wave of undocumented minors, the government is currently planning to convert an empty, 55,000-square foot warehouse in McAllen, Texas into an immigration processing center, located about one mile away from the Rio Grande Valley border patrol station. Meanwhile, the Army base in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was designated as a third military base to house children illegally and will initially house 600 children before bumping up its capacity to 1,200. Over the last few months, similar housing facilities have been created in California and Texas.

With the overwhelming influx of undocumented minors, most of whom have not been vaccinated against infectious diseases like measles, there is fear of potential epidemics. According to the Daily Mail, a rabies outbreak has already been reported by Border Patrol, and officials in Texas are beginning to worry that other infections could spread as well. In Rio Grande, at least, the children are not being screened for diseases.

Enter the Texas and national militias to save the day, the groups say. Over the weekend, a call went out from a coalition of “Patriots” to help with a citizen militia operation called “Secure Our Border – Laredo” to defend private property in the Laredo area and other Texas locations from “drug cartels and from gangs, particularly the MS-13 gangs,” a spokeswoman for the group, Denice Freeman, told The Monitor.

A similar alert went out in mid-June on FreeRepublic.com. “All Texas & National Militia Available Please Converge Immediately Status GO: Mission close down Laredo Crossing for starters ((All need to be closed)) Operation complete when border fence is in place and secure,” the alert said.

Tim Brown at Freedom Outpost calls the current humanitarian crisis an “invasion” that needs to be stopped by the militias.

“This sounds totally American and Constitutional to me. After all, it is constitutional militia, not National Guard or DHS, which are supposed to repel invasions. However, some elected representatives just don't understand the Constitution,” he wrote in a blog post.

During a conference call among militia groups after the first alert went out, one of the call leaders said there are 500 of their troops currently deployed on the Arizona/Mexico border, and as well as “boots on the ground” in CBP’s Laredo sector, Breitbart reported. A state representative, Steve Toth, was also on the call and said that Texas Department of Public Safety Director, Colonel Steve McCraw “is not looking for anyone to show up on the border to help DPS or the Guard. If you would like to join the Guard we would love to have you but don't show up on the border to help it will only cause confusion and lead to someone getting hurt."

While the state’s governor has not asked for help from militias, he hasn’t thrown his support behind the federal government’s handling of the crisis, either. He has been extremely critical of President Barack Obama’s reaction to the lack of border control in Texas.
-read more

Infosys Executive Chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy reacts to a shareholders comment
during the company's 32th Annual General Meeting in Bangalore, India. In 2013
Infosys was accused of bringing thousands of foreign workers to the United States
using incorrect visas, but denied any allegations as part of the settlement reached with a $
34 million settlement in Texas.

Kelly Parker was thrilled when she landed her dream job in 2012 providing tech support for Harley-Davidson's Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plants. The divorced mother of three hoped it was the beginning of a new career with the motorcycle company.

The dream didn't last long. Parker claims she was laid off one year later after she trained her replacement, a newly arrived worker from India. Now she has joined a federal lawsuit alleging the global staffing firm that ran Harley-Davidson's tech support discriminated against American workers — in part by replacing them with temporary workers from South Asia.

The firm, India-based Infosys Ltd., denies wrongdoing and contends, as many companies do, that it has faced a shortage of talent and specialized skill sets in the U.S. Like other firms, Infosys wants Congress to allow even more of these temporary workers.

But amid calls for expanding the nation's so-called H-1B visa program, there is growing pushback from Americans who argue the program has been hijacked by staffing companies that import cheaper, lower-level workers to replace more expensive U.S. employees — or keep them from getting hired in the first place.

"It's getting pretty frustrating when you can't compete on salary for a skilled job," said Rich Hajinlian, a veteran computer programmer from the Boston area. "You hear references all the time that these big companies ... can't find skilled workers. I am a skilled worker."

Hajinlian, 56, who develops his own web applications on the side, said he applied for a job in April through a headhunter and that the potential client appeared interested, scheduling a longer interview. Then, said Hajinlian, the headhunter called back and said the client had gone with an H-1B worker whose annual salary was about $10,000 less.

"I didn't even get a chance to negotiate down," he said.

The H-1B program allows employers to temporarily hire workers in specialty occupations. The government issues up to 85,000 H-1B visas to businesses every year, and recipients can stay up to six years. Although no one tracks exactly how many H-1B holders are in the U.S., experts estimate there are at least 600,000 at any one time. Skilled guest workers can also come in on other types of visas.

An immigration bill passed in the U.S. Senate last year would have increased the number of annually available H-1B visas to 180,000 while raising fees and increasing oversight, although language was removed that would have required all companies to consider qualified U.S. workers before foreign workers are hired.

The House never acted on the measure. With immigration reform considered dead this year in Congress, President Barack Obama last week declared he will use executive actions to address some changes. It is not known whether the H-1B program will be on the agenda.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is among the high-profile executives pushing for more H-1Bs. The argument has long been that there aren't enough qualified American workers to fill certain jobs, especially in science, engineering and technology. Advocates also assert that some visa holders will stay and become entrepreneurs.

Critics say there is no across-the-board shortage of American tech workers, and that if there were, wages would be rising rapidly. Instead, wage gains for software developers have been modest, while wages have fallen for programmers.

The liberal Economic Policy Institute reported last year that only half of U.S. college graduates in science, engineering and technology found jobs in those fields and that at least one third of IT jobs were going to foreign guest workers.

The top users of H-1B visas aren't even tech companies like Google and Facebook. Eight of the 10 biggest H1-B users last year were outsourcing firms that hire out thousands of mostly lower- and mid-level tech workers to corporate clients, according to an analysis of federal data by Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology. The top 10 firms accounted for about a third of the H-1Bs allotted last year.

The debate over whether foreign workers are taking jobs isn't new, but for years it centered on low-wage sectors like agriculture and construction. The high-skilled visas have thrust a new sector of American workers into the fray: the middle class.

Last month, three tech advocacy groups launched a labor boycott against Infosys, IBM and the global staffing and consulting company ManpowerGroup, citing a "pattern of excluding U.S. workers from job openings on U.S soil."

They say Manpower, for example, last year posted U.S. job openings in India but not in the United States.

"We have a shortage in the industry all right — a shortage of fair and ethical recruiting and hiring," said Donna Conroy, director of Bright Future Jobs, a group of tech professionals fighting to end what it calls "discriminatory hiring that is blocking us ... from competing for jobs we are qualified to do."

"U.S. workers should have the freedom to compete first for job openings," Conroy said.

Infosys spokesman Paul de Lara responded that the firm encourages "diversity recruitment," while spokesman Doug Shelton said IBM considers all qualified candidates "without regard to citizenship and immigration status." Manpower issued a statement saying it "adopts the highest ethical standards and complies with all applicable laws and regulations when hiring individuals."

Much of the backlash against the H-1B and other visa programs can be traced to whistleblower Jay Palmer, a former Infosys employee. In 2011, Palmer supplied federal investigators with information that helped lead to Infosys paying a record $34 million settlement last year. Prosecutors had accused the company of circumventing the law by bringing in lower-paid workers on short-term executive business visas instead of using H-1B visas.

Last year, IBM paid $44,000 to the U.S. Justice Department to settle allegations its job postings expressed a preference for foreign workers. And a September trial is set against executives at the staffing company Dibon Solutions, accused of illegally bringing in foreign workers on H-1B visas without having jobs for them — a practice known as "benching."

In court papers, Parker claims that she was given positive reviews by supervisors, including at Infosys, which she maintains oversaw her work and the decision to let her go. The only complaint: Her desk was messy and she'd once been late.

Neither Parker nor other workers involved in similar lawsuits and contacted by The Associated Press would discuss their cases.

Parker's attorney, Dan Kotchen, noted that the case centers on discrimination based on national origin but said that "hiring visa workers is part of how they obtain their discriminatory objectives."

Infosys is seeking a dismissal, in part on grounds that it never hired or fired Parker. Parker was hired by a different subcontractor and kept on, initially, after Infosys began working with Harley-Davidson.

A company spokeswoman said Infosys has about 17,000 employees in the U.S., about 25 percent U.S. hires. In filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it has more than 22,000 employees with valid temporary work visas, some not in the U.S.

Stanford University Law School fellow Vivek Wadwha, a startup adviser, said firms are so starved for talent they are buying up other companies to obtain skilled employees. If there's a bias against Americans, he said, it's an age bias based on the fact that older workers may not have the latest skills. More than 70 percent of H-1B petitions approved in 2012 were for workers between the ages of 25 and 34.

"If workers don't constantly retrain themselves, their skills become obsolete," he said.

Norm Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California, Davis, agreed that age plays into it — not because older workers are less skilled but because they typically require higher pay. Temporary workers also tend to be cheaper because they don't require long-term health care for dependents and aren't around long enough to get significant raises, he said.

Because they can be deported if they lose their jobs, these employees are often loath to complain about working conditions. And even half the standard systems analyst salary in the U.S. is above what an H-1B holder would earn back home.

Such circumstances concern Americans searching for work in a still recovering economy.

Jennifer Wedel of Fort Worth, Texas, publicly challenged Obama on the