Circuit Writer Version 6.9

by Jim Scheef

This is another month where there is just too much stuff to write about and not nearly enough time to do it justice.

The Economy, Immigration and H-1B Visas

As you may recall, H-1B visas are awarded from a pool of applicants who apply thru the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services website. Last year when the lottery system was started, the entire allotment of 65,000 applicants with undergraduate degrees was filled the first day. eWeek reports (tinyurl.com/cqvu4m) that this year only half of that allotment has been requested more than a week after the process opened on April 1. Demand for the 20,000 slots for people with advanced degrees is faster with almost all of those filled by the date of the article. The drop in demand is attributed to the economy. (Gosh, ya think?) Regardless of the numbers, do such guest workers depress salaries for engineering and computer science graduates in the U.S.? I suspect this debate will abate for the next year while the economy and the job market remain depressed. My question is why are we allowing any H-1B visas at all while we are in this recession?

The New York Times published a series of about immigration and one of the articles offers positions on H-1Bs from six people including several academics. As you would expect, the opinions range to both extremes. Where everyone agrees is that the program is broken and must be revised. One of the essays is entitled “Training Your Own Replacement” and could be taken from the experiences of several DACS members. I urge you to read the article and another at eWeek Careers (http://tinyurl.com/cluac4).

The current H-1B program is bad for U.S. workers and even worse for the foreign-born guest workers who want to become permanent U.S. residents. Who wins? Well, the employers, of course, in many ways the program amounts to indentured servitude against which U.S. workers cannot compete.

Healthcare and Medical Records Systems

If there is one initiative of the Obama Administration started during the campaign that has always made sense to me, it is the “reform of the healthcare industry." However, those five words are so all encompassing that few can even agree on what they mean. Besides, that topic is way beyond the scope of this column even when I stretch things a bit. What does fit is a mention of medical records systems. President Obama’s budget and proposed programs count on large savings from new and expanded information technology in the healthcare industry.

The first article to read is “Dossia Versus the Healthcare Monster” from CIO Insight Magazine (http://tinyurl.com/de6qjf). Dossia is a nonprofit consortium organized by a group of large companies that intends to provide electronic records to the employees of the member companies. Whether you think having your health records in “the cloud” is a good idea or not, the system is already available to some Walmart employees. Other companies will follow if the pilot is successful. I think the concept of having access to my medical records on the Web is a great idea. If the Dossia article leaves your thirsting for more, take a look at “Interoperability Comes to Healthcare” (http://tinyurl.com/dmnfvh) and “Sun Software Key to Electronic Medical Records Network” (http://tinyurl.com/d8asr7), both from eWeek.

The Dossia system sounds like competition for the Microsoft HealthVault. Launched in October 2007, to some fanfare, I signed up for HealthVault as soon as I learned about it (dacs.org/archive/0806/feature2.htm). Unfortunately I still have nothing in my “vault” – maybe someday… To learn about Microsoft HealthVault, I suggest that you use your favorite search engine and follow what looks interesting from there. There is much information that explains the concept but nothing about the actual implementation.

Windows Desktop Search and Office 2007

Last, a short note about my personal computing. I finally upgraded to Office 2007. First I tried Outlook 2007 on another machine and it is great. I like integration with OneNote 2007 so I decided to install them on my main computer. During the install I misunderstood the installation program and installed the rest of Office Enterprise by mistake. Don’t laugh, it isn’t funny. Well, I’m starting to get used to the user interface in Word and Excel although the consumption of screen real estate is egregious and unnecessary. That ribbon menu makes Office 2007 impossible to use on a machine with restricted screen size like a netbook. Once I started using Outlook 2007 regularly, it kept telling me to install Windows Search 4.0 (http://tinyurl.com/yod25k). I have resisted any global search products out of fear of reduced performance, but I left my machine running overnite so the indexing process could complete at full speed.

Now I wonder why I waited so long! It is amazing how quickly I can find things – like that column with the reference to HealthVault. I would have clicked and poked for some time to find that article, but Desktop Search found it as quickly as I could type (which is less than lightning, but way faster than poking). This new search (well, new to me) may be the best part of my Office Experience.

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