Archive for the ‘Free Software’ Category
Free Lunches at Work? The Tax Man Wants a Bite
In Silicon Valley, the employee perks are the stuff of legend. Parents-to-be at Facebook are given a bonus to help with expenses and extensive maternity and paternity leave. Software company Evernote will pay to have their employees apartments cleaned twice every month. And Google perhaps the most generous when it comes to fringe benefits lavishes its employees with freeconciergeservice and a cafeteria chock full ofgourmetfood. While these benefits are partially a product of the intense competition for qualified tech workers, they may also be a way for companies to simply increase compensation without giving the tax man a cut. And according to an article in yesterdaysWall Street Journal, theIRS is taking notice:
There is growing controversy among tax experts about how to treat these coveted freebies. The Internal Revenue Service also has been focusing on the topic, according to attorneys who practice in the area, examining whether the free food is a fringe benefit on which employees should pay additional tax.
The Journal report describes the conundrum the IRS faces when deciding how hard it should try to collect taxes on these fringe benefits. On the one hand, its not fair for cash compensation to be taxed while perks like free food arent. At the same time, taxing fringe benefits isnt as simple as taxing cash compensation, and the law allows for exceptions, like when workers are stationed in remote locations where purchasing lunch isnt feasible.
(MORE: Apps and Sites That Make Filing Taxes Easier)
It makes sense that the IRS would be looking into these practices at this time, as fringe benefits are a growing component of employee compensation overall. According to a recentUSA Todaystudy, employee-paid benefits now account for 19.7% of total compensation, up from 16.6% in 2000 and less than 10% in the 1960s. One key driver of this phenomenon is the rising cost of health care. As health care costs have risen, many workers have received a larger percentage of their compensation as health care benefits.
But there has been a cultural shift as well at least in the technology sector which is encouraging firms to increase workplace perks. In October the New York Times ran an article on the perks increasingly offered by Silicon Valley, which argued that firms are doling out more and more fringe perks so that employees can spend more time thinking about work and less about nonworkresponsibilities. The idea is that if your employer pays for your home to be cleaned or takes care of your child-care needs, youll come across fewer of the work-life balance problems that plague corporate America today. The goal is to achieve less work-life balance and more work-life integration. Life-work balance is a nonsense term, Andrew Sinkov, 31, a vice president of marketing at Evernote, told theTimes.The idea that I have to segment work and life is based on some archaic lunar-calendar thing.
So it may be that the increasing value of benefits paid to employees really is just a way for employers to get more out of their workers than a way to avoid paying tax. But the IRS isnt going to just forgo this lost revenue. According to theJournalreport, the feds are considering cracking down on companies that are giving out fringe benefits without withholding taxes. The result would be firms having to increasingly list benefits on workers W2s and higher tax bills for employees at the end of the year.
(MORE: Your Burning Tax Season FAQs, Answered)
Of course, if the IRS does really start to crack down hard on this sort of practice, one could imagine many employees bristling at paying taxes on noncash benefits. TheJournalreport says when this has happened in the past, employers have ensured their employees dont lose out by giving them extra pay to cover their larger tax bills.
But this surely isnt a solution to the problem on a large scale because its just an inefficient use of funds from the employers perspective. Essentially these firms are paying employees income tax for them, just to ensure that those employees eat lunch in the company cafeteria or take advantage of free child care. For some companies that really want their workers to be on campus for long hours each day, this strategy may make sense. But in the face of a widespread effort by the government to collect taxes on noncase compensation, it will much easier for firms to just offer their workers higher salaries and fewer benefits.
Open-source cancer diagnosis
"We're trying to encourage people to improve their practice"
The open source model is not just a way to share free code.
Good software encapsulates expertise and experience, allowing the user to perform some action better than they could before. An open source software project can, therefore, be a way to share and build knowledge.
The Free Diagnostic Pathology Software Project is proof of this principle. The project offers free access to improved workflows and reporting practices for analysing cancer cells, developed by the NHS, through an open licence.
That could lead to a measurable improvement in the cost and effectiveness of cancer diagnosis, all around the world.
The project did not start out with such an altruistic goal in mind, however. Indeed, it was not even an IT project at first.
It began with an initiative, instigated by the NHS Improvements body, to modernise pathology testing by applying the principles of Lean and Six Sigma, that emerged from high tech manufacturing.
"Our processes aren't that different from industries such as car manufacturing or aerospace," says Dr Fred Mayall, consultant histopathologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, where the project began. "We have a relatively complex, technology-based process that has a very low tolerance for error."
The idea was to look at the workflow within the pathology lab and identify areas for improvement.
"We didn't set out to change our software, some of which dated back to the 1980s," recalls Mayall. "But every time we tried to change the process, someone would say, 'You can't do that because the computer won't let you'."
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Open-source cancer diagnosis
Free software award for wrestling a Python
In 2001 when Fernando Prez was still a graduate student in particle physics, he kept bumping into walls with a popular programming language he was using called Python, as he tried to analyze an elusive theoretical phenomenon known as the quantum vacuum.
Fernando Prez developed IPython, an interactive computing environment.
He didnt know it then, but the intellectual chafing he was experiencing was about to launch him on a decade of tweaking, innovating, experimenting, integrating, testing and updating of a new computing tool the very tool he needed to propel his research forward.
He started the IPython project on the side, as he describes it, by making small tweaks to his Python setup. This afternoon hack is now an interactive computing environment that allows a programmer or researcher to run experiments and get results in real-time, and to display data in a dizzying range of ways.
One new component turns IPython into the computing equivalent of a scientists lab notebook a computational notebook environment in which scientists worldwide now crank out novel computer code and run itimmediately in their notebook environment.
They can embed into the notebook anything that a browser can show including video, sound, interactive diagrams, even YouTube presentations. All of this can then be organized, displayed and published seamlessly in one file that can be easily shared and viewed online.
Its power and versatility make IPython a potent educational tool, and one that supports collaboration internationally. The computing environment is now continually refined and expanded upon by hundreds of contributors, and is used by scientists in all disciplines and around the world in their everyday work.
IPython has transformed the way developers and scientists work and collaborate, says Prezs colleague, Josh Bloom, a professor of astronomy at Berkeley.
In recognition of the empowering research, publication and teaching toolkit he created, Prez was presented in late March with the Free Software Foundations 2012 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, presented once a year for a great contribution to the progress and development of free software.
It is exciting to see the proud Open Source software tradition at Berkeley, which began with BSD or Berkeley Unix in the 70s and continued through Spice, Ingres, NOW, and so many great projects, lives on in IPython, enabling research and industry throughout the world, said David Culler, Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
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Free software award for wrestling a Python
BeYourOwnAgent Website Demo – Video
BeYourOwnAgent Website Demo
A demonstration video of the beta BeYourOwnAgent website. A website that will help landlords to manage their own properties easily and saving them money.
By: Robert Fraser
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BeYourOwnAgent Website Demo - Video