Visas, Inc: Corporate Control and Policy Incoherence in the U.S. Temporary Foreign Labor System

This report provides the first comprehensive analysis of the many visas that employers use and misuse to bring foreign workers into the U.S. in every field, from low-wage jobs in agriculture and domestic work, to specialty occupations in health care, education or information technology. The system is vulnerable to misuse by employers who use foreign labor to undermine established wages and working conditions in the U.S. The result is that U.S. workers are losing out on opportunities, and foreign workers have almost no protection from exploitation, unpaid wages, unsafe conditions and even trafficking and other abuses

Generalized Boundaries from Multiple Image Interpretations

Boundary detection is essential for a variety of computer vision tasks such as segmentation and recognition. In this paper we propose a unified formulation and a novel algorithm that are applicable to the detection of different types of boundaries, such as intensity edges, occlusion boundaries or object category specific boundaries. Our formulation leads to a simple method with state-of-the-art performance and significantly lower computational cost than existing methods. We evaluate our algorithm on different types of boundaries, from low-level boundaries extracted in natural images, to occlusion boundaries obtained using motion cues and RGB-D cameras, to boundaries from soft-segmentation. We also propose a novel method for figure/ground soft-segmentation that can be used in conjunction with our boundary detection method and improve its accuracy at almost no extra computational cost