Archive for the 'Outsourced' Category
The Online Education Revolution Drifts Off Course
January 1st, 2014Via: NPR: But by all accounts, the San Jose experiment was a bust. Completion rates and grades were worse than for those who took traditional campus-style classes. And the students who did best weren’t the underserved students San Jose most wanted to reach. It wasn’t really proving to be cheaper, either, says Peter Hadreas, the […]
Japan’s Homeless Recruited for Murky Fukushima Clean-Up
December 30th, 2013Via: Reuters: Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn’t a social worker. He’s a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a […]
“The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers.”
December 27th, 2013Via: Truthdig: Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. […]
‘We Are Creating Walmarts of Higher Education’
December 27th, 2013Via: The Atlantic: Universities in South Dakota, Nebraska, and other states have cut the number of credits students need to graduate. A proposal in Florida would let online courses forgo the usual higher-education accreditation process. A California legislator introduced a measure that would have substituted online courses for some of the brick-and-mortar kind at public […]
Meet the Robot Telemarketer Who Denies She’s A Robot
December 13th, 2013Via: Time: The phone call came from a charming woman with a bright, engaging voice to the cell phone of a TIME Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer. She wanted to offer a deal on health insurance, but something was fishy. When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot […]
Intel Contractors Give Millions to Lawmakers Overseeing Government Surveillance
December 12th, 2013Via: Maplight: In response to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, the congressional committees in charge of overseeing the government’s intelligence operations have come to the defense of the surveillance and data collection programs, and the agencies that administer them. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate […]
By 2017 Nearly 45% of All New Servers Will Be Bought by Cloud Providers
December 9th, 2013Via: Computerworld: IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding, according to new data. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly […]
Rise of the Machines – USA
December 6th, 2013Via: Journeyman Pictures:
Google Working on Some Sort of Robotics Project
December 4th, 2013Via: New York Times: In an out-of-the-way Google office, two life-size humanoid robots hang suspended in a corner. If Amazon can imagine delivering books by drones, is it too much to think that Google might be planning to one day have one of the robots hop off an automated Google Car and race to your […]
“Lockup Quotas” Guarantee Profits for the U.S. Private Prison Industry
December 4th, 2013Via: In The Public Interest: Shar Habibi looks at the rise of “lockup quotas” in private prisons; quotas where states guarantee that prisons will be filled at rates of 90 percent or even higher. She argues that these quotas mean that even if communities realize their objective of lower crime rates, taxpayers will see no […]
