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IT Worker’s Lawsuit Accuses Tata of Discrimination

dcblogs writes An IT worker is accusing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of discriminating against American workers and favoring “South Asians” in hiring and promotion. It’s backing up its complaint, in part, with numbers. The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, claims that 95% of the 14, 000 people Tata employs in the U.S. are South Asian or mostly Indian. It says this practice has created a “grossly disproportionate workforce.” India-based Tata achieves its “discriminatory goals” in at least three ways, the lawsuit alleges. First, the company hires large numbers of H-1B workers. Over from 2011 to 2013, Tata sponsored nearly 21, 000 new H-1B visas, all primarily Indian workers, according to the lawsuit’s count. Second, when Tata hires locally, “such persons are still disproportionately South Asian, ” and, third, for the “relatively few non-South Asians workers that Tata hires, ” it disfavors them in placement, promotion and termination decisions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IT Worker’s Lawsuit Accuses Tata of Discrimination

Etsy’s massive IPO puts big money behind small sellers

Selling handmade stuff on the internet is big business, and Etsy’s IPO shows just that. The online marketplace completed its initial public offering today, raising over $270 million towards a total valuation of more than $3.5 billion — not too shabby for a company that’s not yet profitable. If you’re not familiar, Etsy offers folks who deal in “handmade goods, vintage items and craft supplies” a place to sell their goods online. Sure, the site takes a cut , and it generates revenue from ads, shipping and payment processing . What’s more, it has attracted 1.4 million active sellers and 19.8 million active buyers (as of Decemeber) in its 10 years handling those sales. The company was clear about its history of losses when it first announced plans to go public, admitting that it may never turn a profit. However, as the popularity of handmade and unique wares continues to grow, eager sellers are likely to opt for the site’s community as a means for promotion as much as its e-commerce tools. It’s also poised to make a big splash in mobile, recently hiring one of Pandora’s top executives to lead that charge. [Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images] Filed under: Internet Comments Source: CNBC

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Etsy’s massive IPO puts big money behind small sellers

This camera is powered by its own photos

No, you haven’t stumbled across an internet video from 1997 — that’s the output of one of the cleverest cameras you’ll see in a while. Columbia University researchers have developed a self-powered camera whose pixels both record light and turn it into electricity. The trick is the use of photodiodes (which are common in both cameras and solar panels) that are permanently set to collect energy, not simply conduct it. As you can see from the blurry, goofy animation above, the existing technology won’t compete with the camera in your phone, let alone a pro DSLR . Columbia’s prototype captures just 1, 200 black-and-white pixels, and it needs a lot of light just to keep running. Even so, it’s promising. If scientists can refine the technology to work at multi-megapixel levels, you could see cameras that last a long time on battery, and might not need a battery at all. Filed under: Cameras , Science Comments Via: EurekAlert Source: Columbia University

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This camera is powered by its own photos

Now Android devices can understand your chickenscratch

Tired of typing on your tablet? Sick of speaking to your phone? Well, if you’ve got Android 4.0.3 or higher, you are in luck because Google Handwriting Input for Android has just hit the Play Store. This utility app supports both printed and cursive writing styles, understands 82 languages and can even decipher hand-drawn emojis. What’s more, it doesn’t require you to use a stylus — though for languages not based on the Roman alphabet (like Japanese, Korean or Hindi), a writing implement definitely helps . I just downloaded this to a Nexus 6 and it understood my scrawlings reasonably well. The only issue of immediate concern is the warning that Google will be saving all of the input text — including any passwords and credit card numbers — so take care with what you write. Filed under: Handhelds , Tablets , Internet , Google Comments Via: The Next Web , The Verge Source: Google Play , Google Dev Blog

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Now Android devices can understand your chickenscratch

Car safety system monitors your body language to prevent accidents

Many collision avoidance systems watch out for other cars or pedestrians to keep you safe. But this new one called Brains4Cars being developed by Cornell and Stanford University researchers adds a camera that monitors you (or the driver’s, if it’s someone else) body language, as well. The computer that’s watching you on cam can detect your face and head movements to find cues on whether you’re turning or changing lanes. With data from a radar and another camera keeping an eye on the environment, the system can warn you if it’s too dangerous to turn. For instance, if you’re turning left, the left side of the steering wheel or seat can vibrate as a warning — the researchers believe sound and visual signals could be incorporated into the system, as well. In addition, the system can also pull GPS info and issue a notification if you’ve taken the wrong turn, or if you’re driving the wrong way down a one-way street. To develop the system’s algorithm, the researchers recorded 10 people’s driving activities for two months. They then used the data to analyze a separate set of driving videos. The result? Their algorithm was able to predict the driver’s actions 3.53 seconds in advance and got it right 77.4 percent of the time. Obviously, it’s nowhere near perfect yet — shadows seem to confuse the system’s face detector, and it can’t predict turns when the driver doesn’t move his head to peek at incoming traffic. The researchers are working on it, though, and are also looking to add more features including tactile sensors on the steering wheel and brake pedal, as well as infrared sensors. They’re also considering the ability to detect whether you’re looking at a phone or smartwatch to warn you against texting and driving at the same time. Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Cornell , Brains4cars

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Car safety system monitors your body language to prevent accidents

Leather-Core Plywood!

The “living hinge” you see molded into clamshell packaging has always been the domain of plastic; metal and wood don’t like the repetitive stress of bending. But Bavarian fabrication firm Ackermann  has worked out a way to do a living hinge in plywood. The trick is to laminate a sheet of synthetic leather into the center of the veneer stack. With miters precisely cut just shy of the leather layer, it yields a tough, hardware-free hinge. The leather can also be laminated to the outside of a material like MDF. Larger corner radii can be achieved by inserting a tube. As for what the practical applications are, Ackermann isn’t saying; the techniques were either developed as contract work for a client—”We provide services for craftsmen, trade fair and interior construction industries [ranging] from the simple milling of an individual component to the serial production of entire objects, ” they write—or out of pure experimentation. The company has some 120 employees and 14 apprentices, with traditional carpenters, designers, CNC operators and fabrication technicians all working side by side to master various materials. “I enjoy nothing more than the discovery of new techniques, ” says Manfred Weid, Manager of Technical Operations. “With permanent development we stay in proximity to the pulse of the times.”

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Leather-Core Plywood!

Amazon’s Giving Away 26 Premium Android Apps and Games For Free

Amazon’s running another one of their signature Android app giveaways , highlighted this time around by the likes of Plants vs. Zombies , Wolfram|Alpha , Runtastic PRO , and Osmos HD . If you own an Android device, take a minute to check out the full list and download anything you might want before the deal ends. [ Amazon Appstore ] Read more…

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Amazon’s Giving Away 26 Premium Android Apps and Games For Free

LA’s school board would like all of that iPad money back now, please

Look up the word bungled in a dictionary, and you’ll find the definition of the word, so if you want to see what it looks like in practice, head to L.A.. The state’s problematic program to get iPads into the hands of low-income students has backfired so spectacularly the school district is now looking for a complete refund. According to the L.A. Times , the state’s education board has been having secret meetings with lawyers and has already told Apple and Pearson that it won’t accept or pay for future deliveries of tablets and software. The $1.3 program has attracted plenty of controversy, and even the FBI has been called in to investigate if a dodgy deal had been made. The paper has also dished the dirt on an internal report from March made by program director Bernadette Lucas. She found that only two out of the 69 schools in the program used the software created by education partner Pearson. The company draws plenty of fire, and is accused of not producing enough content and giving little thought to students whose first language wasn’t English. Apple and Pearson may be the most notable names on the district’s shit list, but similarly nasty letters have also been sent to Lenovo and Arey Jones for similar projects. The paper’s report ends by saying that the school districts are hopeful that affordable and useful technology will make its way into education, but until that point, officials have just authorized the purchase of new mathematics textbooks. Filed under: Tablets , Apple , Lenovo Comments Source: L.A. Times

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LA’s school board would like all of that iPad money back now, please

Edit Office Documents From Inside the Dropbox Website

To continue to compete with the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive and iCloud, Dropbox really needs an online office suite to call its own—so it’s borrowed Microsoft’s. You can now edit any .docx, .xlsx or .pptx file from right inside the Dropbox web interface, with no extra software required, and here’s how to go about it. Read more…

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Edit Office Documents From Inside the Dropbox Website