Rick Green 200

AM signals: H-1B visa bill, traffic jams, ‘design thinking’

Nov. 16, 2015

Senators Chuck Grassley (R., IA) and Dick Durbin (D., IL) have introduced a bill that would strengthen requirements that U.S. employers hire U.S. citizens before holders of H-1B visas. The Wall Street Journal reports that firms that employ more than 50 people would be barred from hiring new workers on H-1B visas if more than half their workforce is already on H-1B or L-1 visas.

In-flight Wi-Fi service can be expected to improve as service-provider GoGo moves to a two-antenna-array implementation to transmit and receive in the Ku-band. Justin Bachman at BloombergBusiness was one of several reporters to try out the new service, called 2Ku, on a test flight last week. The new service offers top speeds of 70 Mb/s, vs 9.8 Mb/s for previous technologies.

IBM is employing “design thinking”—instead of coming up with a product idea and trying to sell it, the company will try to identify users’ needs as a starting point, through “iteration cycles,” “lateral thinking,” “user journeys,” and “empathy maps.” Steve Lohr in The New York Times writes, “To the uninitiated, the canons of design thinking can sound mushy and self-evident. But across corporate America, there is a rising enthusiasm for design thinking not only to develop products but to guide strategy and shape decisions of all kinds.”

Chipmakers are benefiting from the craze for stuffing cars with electronics, reports David Manners at ElectronicsWeekly.com. He cites IC Insights figures predicting a 6.7% CAGR for automotive ICs between 2014 and 2019, with automotive ICs representing 8.1% of a total $358.7 billion total IC market in 2019.

Researchers at the Huawei Technology have developed a quick-charging lithium-ion battery said to recharge ten times faster than conventional Li-ion models. Aaron Turpen at gizmag has the story on a demonstration of new batteries at the 56th Battery Symposium in Japan last week.

Google’s Waze—the traffic-management app that tries to direct drivers around traffic jams—sometimes funnels freeway traffic onto residential side streets. Residents of Cody Road in suburban Los Angeles are not happy and are fighting back, reports The Wall Street Journal. Some are leaving their mobile devices with the Waze app activated, in the hopes that Waze will get the impression that traffic on the street is at a standstill.

AM signals will return following NIDays Boston.

About the Author

Rick Nelson | Contributing Editor

Rick is currently Contributing Technical Editor. He was Executive Editor for EE in 2011-2018. Previously he served on several publications, including EDN and Vision Systems Design, and has received awards for signed editorials from the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He began as a design engineer at General Electric and Litton Industries and earned a BSEE degree from Penn State.

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