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Saturday, May 21, 2011

Smartphone app lets workers track wages (AP) : Technet

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Smartphone app lets workers track wages (AP) : Technet

Smartphone app lets workers track wages (AP)

Posted: 21 May 2011 08:49 PM PDT

By SAM HANANEL, Associated Press Sam Hananel, Associated Press – 30 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Workers who don't trust the boss to keep track of their wages can now do it themselves with a new smartphone application from the Department of Labor. But employers worry that the time sheet app, along with other new initiatives, could encourage even more wage and hour lawsuits.

The app, called DOL-Timesheet, lets workers calculate regular work hours, break time and overtime pay to create their own wage records. Department officials say the information could prove valuable in a dispute over pay or during a government investigation when an employer has failed to keep accurate records.

"This app will help empower workers to understand and stand up for their rights when employers have denied their hard-earned pay," Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said.

The app is the latest example of the Obama administration's push for more aggressive enforcement of wage and hour laws. The agency has hired about 300 more investigators to probe complaints of unpaid work time, lack of overtime pay and minimum wage violations.

Last year, the agency began a "Bridge to Justice" program that, for the first time, helps connect aggrieved workers with private lawyers if the department's Wage and Hour Division is too busy to handle a complaint.

As a result, legal experts say, wage and hour compliance has become a leading concern for employers as the new policies help drive up litigation over unpaid wages, also known as wage theft.

"The government is focusing on it like never before," said Gerald Maatman, an employer-side labor lawyer based in Chicago. "I think the mantra is kind of, `All enforcement, all the time, 24/7.'"

Workers brought a record number of wage and hour suits against employers last year, according to an analysis of court filings by Maatman's firm, Seyfarth Shaw. Nearly 6,800 such suits were filed in 2010, about 700 more than the previous year. Most were collective or class actions.

"The concern is that the Department of Labor is putting a lot more attention into this area and employers, at the same time, are putting more hours, more money and more work into auditing and complying with wage and hour laws," Maatman said. "It's turning into somewhat of a full-time job."

The stepped up enforcement is a change from the Bush administration, when some critics accused President George W. Bush's labor secretary, Elaine Chao, of favoring businesses and weakening job safety and enforcement efforts.

While employers are not surprised about increased enforcement, they have questioned some tactics, such as a program that gives workers a toll-free number to contact an attorney referral service run by the American Bar Association.

The Wage and Hour Division gets more than 35,000 calls a year for help and doesn't have the resources to deal with every claim. For those it can't help, it now refers them to the toll-free hot line, where they can be referred to a lawyer who specializes in wage and hour disputes.

Michael Kun, a management-side employment lawyer in Los Angeles, calls the program "a gift to plaintiff's lawyers."

"A DOL investigator has no incentive to pursue a meritless claim," Kun said. "A plaintiff's lawyer has some incentive to do that to get some sort of nuisance value."

Patricia Smith, the Labor Department's top lawyer, says the criticism has taken her by surprise. Before the Bridge to Justice program, the department simply told workers they had a private right of action.

"This just gives them a little more information if they want to exercise it, to go to an attorney that's qualified, as opposed to calling the guy who has advertisements on television at midnight," Smith said.

Nancy Leppink, who heads the Wage and Hour Division, says the office is just doing the job it's supposed to do, which is going after employers who cheat workers out of their hard-earned wages.

"To the extent we have employers who are not complying with the law, we have an obligation to look for all of the opportunities we can to change that behavior," Leppink said.

That includes the department's "We can help" advertising campaign last year, designed to educate employees in the food service, hospitality, apparel, manufacturing and construction industries about their legal rights under federal wage and hour laws.

Wage theft is especially prevalent among immigrant workers who don't speak English or hesitate to challenge their boss for fear of jeopardizing immigration status, labor officials say.

Earlier this year, for example, the department recovered $1.8 million in back wages for nearly 400 workers at the Houston-based Hong Kong Market grocery chain. Investigators found some employees worked as many as 70 hours a week, but were paid less than the minimum wage and denied overtime pay. Labor officials said the company deliberately misled investigators by falsifying payroll records.

The new smart phone app is expected to help low wage immigrant workers, many of whom can't afford a computer, but keep cell phones as a lifeline to family back home.

The app is currently available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but the agency is exploring versions for use on other devices, including Blackberry and Android smartphones.

___

Online:

Labor Department's Hour and Wage Division: http://www.dol.gov/whd/

Seyfarth Shaw law firm: http://www.wagehourlitigation.com/

Loopt Integrates Groupon Now Deals Into App (Mashable)

Posted: 20 May 2011 07:32 PM PDT

Christina Warren Christina Warren – Fri May 20, 10:32 pm ET

Location-based social network Loopt has partnered with deal-of-the-day juggernaut Groupon to integrate the new Groupon Now deals into Loopt's mobile app. Groupon Now launched Friday in Chicago, offering denizens of the Windy City tons of local $1 deals. The idea behind Groupon Now is to offer users real-time offers based on their location.

[More from Mashable: The 10 Hottest Private Companies in Tech [REPORT]]

Businesses can use Groupon Now deals to target customers in their immediate area and can craft deals tailored to specific conditions -- getting more customers on a slow day, selling some food before it spoils -- rather than just making a typical, one-time offer.

That strategy is perfectly suited for Loopt, which launched its Loopt Reward Alerts at SXSW 2011. Loopt Rewards Alerts are designed to give users a real-time notification of deals taking place in their area.

[More from Mashable: To Counter Groupon & LivingSocial, Travelzoo Does TV [VIDEO]]

Staring Friday, Loopt users in Chicago can also be alerted to Groupon Now deals taking place nearby. Deals will be added to the place pages in Loopt and will be visible when browsing through nearby locations. If Reward Alerts are enabled within Loopt (under the settings menu), users will get daily, location-specific Groupon Now deal alerts.

Groupon has alerts and deal markets built into its official Groupon apps for Android, iOS and the web, but the integration with Loopt is a nice touch. For Loopt, it adds a sense of utility to the program and makes it more of a one-stop shop for deals, location-based networking and finding places close by.

As Groupon Now launches in more cities, it will be interesting to see if Loopt or other location-based networks can leverage these deals to add more value to the checkin.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Sarkozy enlists tech A-list for Web economy forum (Reuters)

Posted: 21 May 2011 04:32 PM PDT

By Leila Abboud and Georgina Prodhan Leila Abboud And Georgina Prodhan – Sat May 21, 7:32 pm ET

PARIS (Reuters) – When the Internet world's titans alight in Paris next week for a two-day forum hosted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, two often clashing views on the digital world will be on display.

One, typically espoused by new companies like Google Inc or Amazon.com Inc challenging the status quo, favours a hands-off regulatory approach and favorable tax and labor rules to ensure the Internet remains a key growth engine.

The other, more common in Europe, tends to be more concerned about the excesses of the Internet and has been more willing to impose regulation on everything from privacy to copyright issues to protect entrenched interests.

"The future of the Internet is being decided by businesses that are just trying to protect themselves from the potential of the Internet," says Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig, a campaigner for less regulation in fields like copyright.

"These tend to be the businesses with the most political influence," adds Lessig, who will join Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Eric Schmidt, News Corp's Rupert Murdoch and a host of other technology leaders in Paris.

The United States, with its flourishing Internet hub in Silicon Valley, is the envy of many entrepreneurs in Europe who feel hampered by a lack of angel investors, unhelpful regulation in areas like stock options -- and a lack of like-minded people.

And the fact that the event is being hosted by Sarkozy, a figure seen with trepidation by many techies for his strict anti-piracy stance and proposal to tax global Internet companies, is a sign of those divisions.

"Regulating the Internet to correct its excesses and abuses that come about in the total absence of rules -- this is a moral imperative!" Sarkozy said in a speech at the Vatican in 2010.

THREE STRIKES

Sarkozy is probably best known in the online world for passing a law that calls for Internet access to be cut off to people caught pirating copyrighted works three times.

He cast this as a necessity to prevent the Internet from killing off traditional artists, authors, and musicians.

"Internet is a new frontier, a territory to conquer. But it cannot be a Wild West, a lawless place, where people are allowed to pillage artistic works with no limits," he said at the time.

One source close to the French presidency of the G8 said the United States was initially reticent about putting Internet policy on the agenda, fearing it would be a repeat of the fight over banking sector reform that took place among G20 nations after the financial crisis.

At that time, France and Germany argued that financial markets needed stricter oversight, while the United States and United Kingdom resisted some proposals that they felt would crimp growth.

"Nicolas Sarkozy convinced Barack Obama when they met in January in Washington," said the source, adding that assurances were given that the same approach wouldn't be taken this time.

Sarkozy's tone may be tempered now by the powerful role the Internet has since played in the tumultuous changes sweeping the Middle East -- a region with which France has a complex relationship because of its colonial past.

Social websites like Facebook and Twitter gained respect in new quarters as they enabled revolutions from Tunisia to Egypt, and their young founders stood up to pressure to turn in details of users to the authorities.

The Obama administration recognized this new reality in its recent "International Strategy for Cyberspace," an attempt to define the future of the Internet in the face of competing models such as that promoted by China, which practices greater control.

Obama, who has repeatedly underscored the centrality of Internet freedom to U.S. foreign policy, laid out the goal of ensuring that the Internet remains an open global system that both fosters innovation and economic growth while strengthening security and free expression.

ECONOMIC POTENTIAL

The e-G8 talks on May 24-25 will focus on how to harness the economic potential of the Internet and foster innovation, while protecting intellectual property rights online.

Some of the tech heavyweights will present the conclusions of the forum to the world leaders attending the G8 meeting on May 27-28 in the French seaside resort of Deauville.

But many tech types wonder what the purpose of the event really is and worry it will pave the way for more regulation.

Jon von Tetzchner, a co-founder of Norwegian Web browser Opera, said the Internet poses complicated questions on everything from competition law to privacy.

"It's not just a simple question of just regulating more," he said in an interview.

Von Teschner, who was invited to the e-G8 but cannot attend, said he hoped the forum would address privacy issues to help people protect their private data and surfing habits, as well as ways to preserve the essentially open nature of the Web.

Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen, who will moderate a panel on the Internet and economic growth featuring Google's Schmidt and eBay Inc CEO John Donahoe, said he was not sure what the forum would be able to accomplish in two days.

But he told Reuters he relished the chance to tackle an important set of issues, in particular how to build a thriving digital economy in Europe.

"Basically, for me, this is the G8, so it's not about a bunch of technology people speaking a strange language," he said. "This is about talking about the importance of building a digital economy."

(Editing by Richard Chang)

'Jeopardy!'-winning computer delving into medicine (AP)

Posted: 21 May 2011 02:09 PM PDT

By JIM FITZGERALD, Associated Press Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press – Sat May 21, 5:09 pm ET

YORKTOWN, N.Y. – Some guy in his pajamas, home sick with bronchitis and complaining online about it, could soon be contributing to a digital collection of medical information designed to help speed diagnoses and treatments.

A doctor who is helping to prepare IBM's Watson computer system for work as a medical tool says such blog entries may be included in Watson's database.

Watson is best known for handily defeating the world's best "Jeopardy!" players on TV earlier this year. IBM says Watson, with its ability to understand plain language, can digest questions about a person's symptoms and medical history and quickly suggest diagnoses and treatments.

The company is still perhaps two years from marketing a medical Watson, and it says no prices have been established. But it envisions several uses, including a doctor simply speaking into a handheld device to get answers at a patient's bedside.

Watson won't be the first such product on the medical market, however, and one rival company says it isn't impressed.

At a recent demonstration for The Associated Press, Watson was gradually given information about a fictional patient with an eye problem. As more clues were unveiled — blurred vision, family history of arthritis, Connecticut residence — Watson's suggested diagnoses evolved from uveitis to Behcet's disease to Lyme disease. It gave the final diagnosis a 73 percent confidence rating.

"You do get eye problems in Lyme disease but it's not common," Dr. Herbert Chase said. "You can't fool Watson."

For "Jeopardy!" Watson was fed encyclopedias, dictionaries, books, news, and movie scripts. For health care, it's on a diet of medical textbooks and journals. It could also link to the electronic health records that the federal government wants hospitals to maintain. Medical students are peppering it with sample questions to help train it.

Chase, a Columbia University medical school professor, says anecdotal information — such as personal blogs from medical websites — may also be included.

"What people say about their treatment ... it's not to be ignored just because it's anecdotal," Chase said. "We certainly listen when our patients talk to us, and that's anecdotal."

Chase and other experts say cramming Watson with the latest medical information will help with a major problem in modern health care: information overload.

"For at least 30 years it's been clear that it's not possible for us to know everything," he said. "Every day, doctors have questions they can't find the answers to. Even if you sit down at a search engine, it's so labor intensive and it takes so long to find answers."

Carl Kesselman, director of the Health Informatics Center at the University of Southern California, says the "deluge of information" is a significant problem.

"Advances in medicine are increasing rapidly: genomics, specialized drugs, off-label uses, increasingly finer-grained classifications of disease," said Kesselman, who is not involved with the Watson project. "The ability to ask `Jeopardy!'-style questions and get that kind of information retrieval, to sort through all the stuff out there and point you to the latest literature, would be of potentially huge value."

Michael Yuan, chief scientist at Ringful Health, a medical consulting company in Austin, Texas, that has worked with IBM, cited a 1999 study of 103 doctors that found they fielded more than 1,100 questions a day, of which 64 percent were never answered.

"That's a huge potential for people to make mistakes," he said. "Watson is the type of solution that can really reduce that."

In "Jeopardy!" Watson was asked for one correct answer, whether it was answering questions about Sir Christopher Wren, the Lion of Nimrud or the Church Lady from "Saturday Night Live."

But in its medical guise, when presented a set of symptoms, Watson offers several possible diagnoses, ranked in order of its confidence.

"In medicine, we don't want one answer, we want a list of options," Chase said.

Kesselman said having options might help doctors accept a computer's findings.

"Will a physician ever blindly accept a diagnosis coming out of a computer? I don't think that will happen anytime soon," he said.

Chase said seeing more than one choice might also help doctors move away from what he called "anchoring," or getting too attached to a diagnosis.

"If a person has a 95 percent chance of having disease X, there's still a one-in-20 chance that they have something else," he said. "We often forget what's in that 5 percent. But Watson won't."

The treatment application works much like the diagnosis application. In the demonstration, Watson first suggested the antibiotic doxycycline for treating Lyme disease, then switched to cefuroxime when told the patient was pregnant and allergic to penicillin.

Chase said Watson will know the latest treatment guidelines — which are complex and often updated — "and can see if they're not being met."

"You have to match the right treatment with each unique patient," Chase said. "You can't treat everybody with high blood pressure the same way — a 75-year-old man with prostate cancer who felt dizzy last week and a 32-year-old woman."

Yuan said Watson's influence will depend on "how widely it is adopted."

"You have to wonder if a hospital is going to plunk down a couple of million dollars," he said.

IBM's Dan Pelino, general manager for global health care, said clients won't have to buy a complete Watson system. He said possible future uses include:

• Allowing a doctor to connect to Watson's database by speaking into a hand-held device, using speech-recognition technology and cloud computing;

• Serving as a repository for the most advanced research in cancer or other fields;

• Providing an always-available second opinion.

"You can imagine someone asking Watson a question on an iPad as they're walking down the hall," Chase said. "It might get updates like a GPS."

An existing private medical database known as Isabel is already used by some multi-hospital health systems. Co-founder Jason Maude of Isabel Healthcare said that from what he's heard about IBM's plans for Watson, "It's kind of what we've had for about 10 years."

An online demonstration of Isabel showed similarities to the Watson model — symptoms are entered, and the computer searches through a database for a possible diagnosis. Maude, who named Isabel for a daughter who escaped a serious misdiagnosis as a child, says Isabel's database has been "tuned and honed" over time.

He said prices for using Isabel range from a few thousand dollars a year for a family practice to as much as $400,000 for a health system.

Pelino said Watson is much faster and Chase said Watson is better at understanding non-medical terms.

"Watson knows that `difficulty swallowing' is `dysphagia,'" he said.

Isabel has been used at the Orlando Health hospital network in Florida since last fall, and "has had its successes," said Dr. Jay Falk, chief academic medical officer. He said less experienced doctors use it under the guidance of senior clinicians "who can make some judgments about the likelihood of what's given on the list of diagnoses."

"There's no question that there's a need for a tool that will help in this regard," Falk said. "Whether Isabel itself is the answer is unclear." Overall, he said, "We're enjoying learning with it."

IBM said Watson can answer some medical questions in the same few moments it took on "Jeopardy!" Yuan noted studies have shown that "If it takes more than two minutes, it won't get used."

As on "Jeopardy!" — where Watson identified Toronto as a U.S. city and Picasso as an art period — the computer occasionally bungles a medical question.

"I think once we were asking what type of drug we should use and the answer was a person's name," Chase said. "In fairness, I think it was a person associated with the drug."

And of course there are things Watson cannot do. It won't know a patient's appetite for risk, for example, or feelings about end-of-life treatment.

"That's why you have to emphasize that the decisions aren't coming from the computer, they're coming from the patient," Chase said.

Chase's suggestion that medical blogs be included may have something to do with his own medical history.

Several years ago, fighting a cholesterol problem, he took Lipitor and was soon plagued with insomnia. He suspected a connection but found nothing in textbooks or journals.

"I go to the blogosphere, and it was like, `You moron, don't take Lipitor before you go to bed because you'll never sleep again!'

"Now it's five years later, and if you Google Lipitor and insomnia, it's all over the place," Chase said.

Modder Discovers Android's 'Gingerbread' on His 'Honeycomb' Tablet (PC Magazine)

Posted: 21 May 2011 05:57 AM PDT

Sara Yin - PC Magazine Sara Yin - Pc Magazine – Sat May 21, 8:57 am ET

Does Google's mobile Android 2.3 operating system, aka Gingerbread, lie beneath its tablet-only Android 3.0 os, aka Honeycomb?

A modder by the name of Graffix0214 has discovered a way to unlock the Gingerbread user interface on his Dell Streak 7 tablet, which runs Honeycomb, by simply changing the system's pixel settings.

Using the app "LCDDensity for Root," he changed the LCD pixel density setting from 160 to above 170, then rebooted. The tablet then displayed a Gingerbread login interface. You can revert back to Honeycomb by simply changing the pixel density back to 160, he said. Check out his demonstration in the video below.

"It's safe to say that Honeycomb wasn't built from the ground up. Looks like it was taken from Gingerbread," Graphix0214 concluded.

Perhaps Android 4.0, codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich," which isn't expected until the fourth quarter, is already in place. At Mobile World Congress in February, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that Ice Cream Sandwich will combine elements of Gingerbread and Honeycomb:

"The two of them – notice that starts with a G and the next one starts with an H. You can imagine the follow-on will start with an I and it will be named after a dessert and it will combine capabilities of both the G and the H release," Schmidt said.

Watch Graphix0214 unlock Gingerbread on a Honeycomb-based Dell Streak 7:

Stitcher CEO on the evolution of podcasting and his company’s Android success (Appolicious)

Posted: 21 May 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Best Celebrity Twitter Pictures (The Daily Beast)

Posted: 21 May 2011 06:51 PM PDT

Questions and answers with Opinionaided CEO Dan Kurani (Appolicious)

Posted: 21 May 2011 10:00 AM PDT

Apple probes blast at Chinese plant (Reuters)

Posted: 21 May 2011 07:45 PM PDT

By Poornima Gupta Poornima Gupta – 1 hr 33 mins ago

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc (AAPL.O) is investigating an explosion that killed two people, injured 16 and forced a production halt at a Foxconn Technology Group factory in China said to produce the popular iPad 2.

Foxconn, whose flagship unit is Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industries (2317.TW) group and Apple's main manufacturing partner, said in a statement the explosion happened at about 7 pm local time (1100 GMT) on May 20.

"Production has been suspended at the site of the explosion until the completion of the investigation," Foxconn said in a statement.

"The safety of our employees is our highest priority and we will do whatever is required to determine and address the cause of this tragic accident."

It did not name the affected plant or say what it made, but China's official Xinhua News Agency said it was the Hongfujin Precision Electronics plant in a high-tech industrial zone west of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.

Hon Hai spokesman Edmund Ding said the company is still evaluating losses. He could not say whether group founder and chairman Terry Gou had gone to the site.

IPAD AFFECTED

Apple shares closed down 1.56 percent at $335.22 on the Nasdaq, which saw a broad sell-off on euro-zone debt worries.

The explosion could affect the supply of iPads and investors were watching closely. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said the company was assessing the situation.

"We are deeply saddened by the tragedy at the Foxconn plant in Chengdu and our hearts go out to the victims and their families," he said. "We are working closely with Foxconn to understand what caused this terrible event."

Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White said the factory makes a lot of iPads because some production had been shifted to the facility from factories in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

Apple's iPad 2 commands 80 percent of the burgeoning tablet market in which Motorola Inc (MMI.N) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) also compete.

Apple sold 4.69 million iPads last quarter and is scrambling to meet staggering demand for the mobile device, but is heavily backlogged. Executives had expected production to ramp up during the present quarter to meet demand.

The plant explosion is the latest setback for Foxconn, the world's largest contract manufacturer.

The company made headlines last year after reports emerged about poor working conditions at factories in southern China, which critics say may have helped drive several employees to suicide.

The company pledged to improve employee welfare.

Facing higher wages in the southern China manufacturing belt, the scene of labor disputes last year, some Taiwanese manufacturers have opted to shift some operations to the country's interior, where costs are lower.

Foxconn also has plants in North America and Mexico, as well as in European countries, including Slovakia and Poland.

(Additional reporting by Clare Jim in Taipei; Editing by Edwin Chan, Lisa Von Ahn, Richard Chang and Andre Grenon; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

Apple Mac Sales Surge in Enterprise Market (PC Magazine)

Posted: 21 May 2011 08:04 AM PDT

Sara Yin - PC Magazine Sara Yin - Pc Magazine – Sat May 21, 11:04 am ET

There's no doubt that the Apple iPad is emerging as a business tool, but do Apple Macs finally have a shot at taking over the business PC market as well?

On Friday, analyst Charlie Wolf from Needham & Company reported that Mac sales to enterprise users surged 66 percent in the first quarter of the year, "significantly outpacing" growth in the rest of the enterprise PC market, which grew 4.5 percent, Wolf wrote in a note obtained by AppleInsider.

Broken down, according to AI, most of the growth occurred in the "very large business" category. Mac shipments grew 94.7 percent in the "very large business" category, 75.5 percent with "large businesses," 58.1 percent with "medium businesses," and 90.4 percent with "small businesses" category, according to AppleInsider. Furthermore Mac sales to government departments grew 155.6 percent.

Sure, Apple's business PC base is very low, at three percent (still its highest rate ever according to IDC), so clearly Apple has more room to grow in the lucrative enterprise space than most of its competitors. But while consumers lap up Apple's tablets and computers, Apple has quietly strengthened its offerings to the enterprise world—Microsoft and Research in Motion's bread and butter—in recent months:

In March Apple updated iOS 4.3.1, fixing glitches in its enterprise Web services. Apple also unveiled a specialized support plan for small businesses, called Joint Venture. Meanwhile back in January, Apple reportedly hired a new global security director, David Rice, to focus on enterprise security surrounding the iPhone and iPad. And last October, Apple reportedly struck a deal with Unisys to market its products to business and government customers. Also read why long-time Apple analyst Tim Bajaran interpreted Steve Jobs' position during his iPad 2 keynote as a sign that Apple was getting serious about enterprise.

For more, see "The iPad Has Business Potential" and our picks of the "Best iPad Business Apps."
at 9:47 PM

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