The Software Developer Labor Market

With the economy today you don’t hear much of a desperate need for programmers. But Dr. Norman Matloff, Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis, testimony to Congress (Presented April 21, 1998; updated December 9, 2002) on Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage is full of lots of interesting information (for current and past job markets).

The industry says that it will need H-1B visas temporarily, until more programmers can be trained. Is this true?

No, it’s false and dishonest… The industry has been using this “temporary need” stall tactic for years, ever since the H-1B law was enacted in 1990. In the early- and mid-1990s, for example, the industry kept saying that H-1Bs wouldn’t be needed after the laid-off defense programmers and engineers were retrained, but never carried out its promise. It hired those laid off in low-level jobs such as technician (which is all the retraining programs prepared them for), and hired H-1Bs for the programming and engineering work.

Unlike Dr. Matloff, and many readers of this blog, I am actually not a big opponent of H-1B visas. I believe we benefit more by allowing tech savy workers to work in the USA than we lose. I understand people fear jobs are being taken away, but I don’t believe it. I believe one of the reasons we maintain such a strong programming position is due to encouraging people to come to the USA to program.

I also do believe, there are abuses, under the current law, of companies playing games to say no-one can be found in the USA with the proper skills. And I believe those apposed to H-1B visas make reasonable arguments and this testimony is a good presentation of those arguments.

This obsession with specific skills is unwarranted. What counts is general programming talent – hiring smart people – not experience with specific software technologies.

Very true.

What developers should do.

Suppose you are currently using programming language X, but you see that X is beginning to go out of fashion, and a new language (or OS or platform, etc.) Y is just beginning to come on the scene. The term “just beginning” is crucial here; it means that Y is so new that there almost no one has work experience in it yet. At that point you should ask your current employer to assign you to a project which uses Y, and let you learn Y on the job. If your employer is not willing to do this, or does not have a project using Y, then find another employer who uses both X and Y, and thus who will be willing to hire you on the basis of your experience with X alone, since very few people have experience with Y yet.

Good advice.

Build Your Own Tabletop Interactive Multi-touch Computer

This is a fantastic Do-It_Yourself (DIY) engineering story. Very interesting, definitely go read the whole article: Build Your Own Multitouch Surface Computer

First, some acknowledgments are in order. Virtually all the techniques used to create this table were discovered at the Natural User Interface Group website, which serves as a sort of repository for information in the multitouch hobbyist community.
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In order for our setup to work, we needed a camera that senses infrared light, but not visible light. It sounds expensive, but you’d be surprised. In this section, we’ll show you how we created an IR camera with excellent resolution and frame-rate for only $35—the price of one PlayStation 3 Eye camera. “But that’s not an IR camera,” you say? We’ll show you how to fix that.

As it turns out, most cameras are able to sense infrared light. If you want to see first-hand proof that this is the case, try this simple experiment: First, find a cheap digital camera. Most cell phone cameras are perfect for this. Next, point it at the front of your TV’s remote control. Then, while watching the camera’s display, press the buttons on the remote. You’ll see a bluish-white light that is invisible to the naked eye. That’s the infrared light used by the remote to control the TV.
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Like the computer, the projector we used for the build was something we scavenged up. The major concern for a projector to use in this kind of system is throw distance—the ratio between projection distance and image size. Short-throw projectors, which are sold by all the major projector brands, work the best for this kind of project, because they can be set up at the bottom of the cabinet and aimed directly at the surface. Unfortunately, they also tend to be more expensive.

Ever thrifty, we went with a projector we could use for free: an older home-theater projector borrowed from a friend. Because of the longer throw distance on this model, we had to mount the projector near the top of the cabinet, facing down, and use a mirror to reflect the image up onto the screen. For this we ordered a front-side mirror (a mirror with the reflective surface on the front of the glass, rather than behind it) to eliminate any potential “ghosting” problems, caused by dual reflections from the front and back of the glass in an ordinary mirror.

What is on the Other Side of Earth?

Do you ever wonder what is on the exact opposite side of Earth? This website uses Google Maps to let you see: Antipodes Map. It also makes clear how much of the earth is covered in oceans. The entire continental USA is opposite ocean. Hawaii is opposite Botswana and Namibia. Hong Kong is opposite Argentina. Singapore opposite Ecuador. India, Ireland, Turkey, France and Egypt are among the many countries that opposite oceans. Madrid is opposite New Zealand.

Why Toddlers Don’t Do What They’re Told

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

“I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings,” said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different.”
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“If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective,” Munakata said. “What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don’t do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like ‘I know you don’t want to take your coat now, but when you’re standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.”

Using Virus to Build Batteries

MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. We have posted about similar things previously, for example: Virus-Assembled Batteries – Using Viruses to Construct Electrodes and Biological Molecular Motors. New virus-built battery could power cars, electronic devices

Gerbrand Ceder of materials science and Associate Professor Michael Strano of chemical engineering, genetically engineered viruses that first coat themselves with iron phosphate, then grab hold of carbon nanotubes to create a network of highly conductive material.

Because the viruses recognize and bind specifically to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), each iron phosphate nanowire can be electrically “wired” to conducting carbon nanotube networks. Electrons can travel along the carbon nanotube networks, percolating throughout the electrodes to the iron phosphate and transferring energy in a very short time. The viruses are a common bacteriophage, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans.

The team found that incorporating carbon nanotubes increases the cathode’s conductivity without adding too much weight to the battery. In lab tests, batteries with the new cathode material could be charged and discharged at least 100 times without losing any capacitance. That is fewer charge cycles than currently available lithium-ion batteries, but “we expect them to be able to go much longer,” Belcher said.

This is another great example of university research attempting to find potentially valuable solutions to societies needs. See other posts on using virus for productive purposes.

Google Server Hardware Design

Ben Jai, Google Server Platform Architect, discusses the Google server hardware design. Google has designed their own servers since the beginning and shared details this week on that design. As we have written previously Google has focused a great deal on improving power efficiency.

Google uncloaks once-secret server

Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.
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Efficiency is another financial factor. Large UPSs can reach 92 to 95 percent efficiency, meaning that a large amount of power is squandered. The server-mounted batteries do better, Jai said: “We were able to measure our actual usage to greater than 99.9 percent efficiency.”

Robot Independently Applies the Scientific Method

Robot achieves scientific first by Clive Cookson

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.
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Adam is the result of a five-year collaboration between computer scientists and biologists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities.

The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software. Although they did not intervene directly in Adam’s experiments, they did stand by to fix technical glitches, add chemicals and remove waste.
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“Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.” In the new experiments, Adam and Eve will work together to devise and carry out tests on thousands of chemical compounds to discover antimalarial drugs.

Very cool.

Many Bird Species Declining In USA

photo of a Rusty blackbird, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Report Warns Many Bird Species Declining In U.S.

“The rusty blackbird is a great example of what the ‘State of the Birds‘ is really trying to get at. Somewhere between 75 and 90 percent of population has been lost within the last 40 years,” says Ziolkowski. “The biggest factor is probably loss of wetland habitat. Most populations of birds are really declining now primarily because of rampant development and urban sprawl.”

The report includes some good news about birds that were on the brink of extinction but have rebounded because of conservation efforts, including the Laysan duck and the wild turkey. But it also says many bird species are in trouble — including birds that live on the oceans, in grasslands, in deserts, in the Arctic, on the coasts, in wetlands and in forests.

Development, agriculture, energy production, pollution, invasive species and climate change all put birds at risk.
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The report shows that many other birds are in trouble. Half of the birds that migrate along on the coasts are declining, and so are many seabirds and lots of the birds that live in grasslands and in deserts.

And despite Hawaii’s reputation for rich flora and fauna, more bird species are vulnerable to extinction there than any place else.

E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants

This is a great webcast on E.O Wilson‘s career studying ants and animal behavior from NOVA.

Not only is the scientific knowledge very interesting it again shows that challenging conventional wisdom, while part of the scientific method, does not mean it is an easy process for those pioneers. From his web site:

In 1971 Wilson published his second major synthesis, The Insect Societies, which formulated the existing knowledge of the behavior of ants, social bees, social wasps, and termites, on a foundation of population biology. In it he introduced the concept of a new discipline of sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of social behavior in all kinds of organisms. In 1975 he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which extended the subject to vertebrates and united it more closely to evolutionary biology. The foundational discoveries of sociobiology are generally recognized to be the analysis of animal communication and division of labor, in which Wilson played a principal role, and the genetic theory of the origin of social behavior, which he helped to promote and apply in his 1971 and 1975 syntheses. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis was later ranked in a poll of the officers and fellows of the international Animal Behaviour Society as the most important book on animal behavior of all time, and is regarded today as the founding text of sociobiology and its offshoot, evolutionary psychology.

Related: Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration
by Bert HÃ¶lldobler and Edward O. Wilson – Huge Ant Nest – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria – Royal Ant Genes – posts on ants – Encyclopedia of Life

Robot with Biological Brain

The Living Robot by Joe Kloc

Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
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At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened. “This is a specific type of learning, called Hebbian learning,” says Warwick, “where, by doing something habitually, you get better at doing it.”
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“It’s fun just looking at it as a robot life form, but I think it may also contribute to a better understanding of how our brain works,” he says. Studying the ways in which his robot learns and stores memories in its brain may provide new insights into neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.