In long-term, immigrants are good for U.S

Ref: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/08/95526/study-in-long-term-immigrants.html#ixzz0qI2GOnFt?storylink=addthis

Immigrant workers reduce job opportunities for native-born workers in the short run, but improve the economy after several years, thus making it easier for everybody to be hired, according to a study released Monday.

``Immigration may slightly reduce native employment and average income at first,'' according to the 26-page report The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion. ``In the long run, immigrants do not reduce native employment rates, but they do increase productivity and hence average income.''

The report, issued by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, based its conclusions on an analysis of U.S. Census data from 1960 to 2008. To assess long-term effects, the report's author looked at 48 years of state population and employment data. For the short term, they analyzed population surveys since 1994.

The report is one of the latest efforts by groups favoring immigration reform to show that foreign nationals in the U.S. work force help advance national interests.

As the debate over legalization of undocumented immigrants heats up in the aftermath of Arizona's high-profile immigration control law, one of the pivotal points centers on whether foreign workers help or harm U.S.-born workers.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/08/95526/study-in-long-term-immigrants.html#ixzz0r4hRcxe0

15 genius algorithms that aren't boring

Ref: https://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/100609-layer8-algorithm.html#slide13

1. All computer systems are not created equal. Some get to run way cooler applications than others. Here we take a look at 15 unique algorithms designed to prevent denial-of-service attacks, jam electronic signals, monitor your behavior and yes, tell you how bad your gout is.

2. Deny this: Auburn University researchers recently talked up their algorithm-based system for preventing those nasty denial-of-service (DoS)/distributed DoS attacks. Specifically, the researcher developed a new passive protocol called Identity-Based Privacy-Protected Access Control Filter (IPACF) – which they say can block threats to the gatekeeping computers, the Authentication Servers (AS), and let legitimate users with valid passwords to private resources.

3. Say what?: Language translation is a hot topic and the military researchers at DARPA are on top of it. The agency's Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program is designed to translate and distill foreign language material (television shows and newspapers) in near real-time, highlight the salient information, and store the results in a searchable database. GALE is making progress toward achieving this very ambitious goal by 2011. The agency is developing the System for Tactical Use program, a two-way speech translation system to convert spoken foreign language input to English output and vice versa.

4. I'll get that: OK, we don't think the algorithms for this particular system have been developed yet, but obviously the Air Force will build them. That's because it said this year that by 2047 or so technology onboard an unmanned aircraft will let it fly over a target and determine whether or not to unleash lethal weapons - without human intervention. According to the Air Force: "Increasingly humans will no longer be "in the loop" but rather "on the loop" - monitoring the execution of certain decisions. Simultaneously, advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input."

5. We're jammin': Electronically jamming everything from specific cell phones, satellites or any other communications device is the goal of a prototype system military scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency want to build. Known as the Precision Electronic Warfare (PREW), the goal of the technology and its algorithms will be able to surgically disable targets in small areas on demand without hindering or disabling friendly devices in the surrounding area. DARPA said it envisions two modes of operation for a PREW system: point-to-an-area and point-to-a-spot. The first would target very specific communications devices while the latter would disable an entire region.

6. How to find 3,148,379,694 mysterious congruent numbers: Recently a group of researchers from across the globe said they, through an algorithm for multiplying large numbers, have figured out congruent numbers up to a trillion. The problem, which was first posed more than a thousand years ago, concerns the areas of right-angled triangles. The difficult part is to determine which whole numbers can be the area of a right-angled triangle whose sides are whole numbers or fractions.

7. Big Brother lives: Researchers are looking to develop an intelligent image system that can monitor large areas, perhaps miles wide, identify potential threats based on the correlation of events and anomalies it detects, and issue timely alerts with few false alarms. DARPA's PerSEAS program is developing algorithms to associate these fragments of information in order to identify localized events. Within these localized events, algorithms that discover relationships and anomalies that are
indicative of suspicious behavior, match previously learned threat activity, or match user defined threat activity should also be incorporated.

8. The simple life: A team led by Yale University researchers successfully implemented simple algorithms using a quantum processor based on microwave solid-state technology -- similar to that found in computers and cell phones. The new processor is far from conventional, however, in that it uses the potent power of quantum mechanics to bring the dream of quantum computing a small but significant step closer to reality.

for more refer: https://www.networkworld.com/slideshows/2009/100609-layer8-algorithm.html#slide1