From HRSolutionsToday.com:

Companies looking for a way of checking on the immigration status of employees have a little known but effective program available at no cost that is being provided as part of the federal government’s homeland security agency.

Called the SAVE Program and administered by the Federal Citizen and Immigration Service, this offering is currently being used by more than 6,000 companies throughout the United States.

By signing up for the program, called Basic Point, companies can quickly check on the immigration status of new employees by typing in key information provided by applicants and receive an answer back quickly on the legal status of that individual.

Government Program Offers Easy, Free Method To Verify Immigration Status Of Potential Employees.

 

In a related offering, the US government and many states enable anyone to look for inmates of its prisons, past and current, using advanced searches. Friends Beyond the Wall (a prisoners network) offers a list of web resources; see for example, the State of Georgia’s Inmate Query.

PC World reviews 17 free and low-cost online storage services this month.

The new version of Windows Live Messenger allows users to share files with their contacts and is competing directly with Skype by partnering with Verizon to make calls to regular phones. And chats will soon be compatible with Yahoo! Messenger.

LanguageLine, a major international interpreting service, is now using Skype for interpreting assignments. For $2.99/minute US they will interpret in 150 languages.

Google Translator has added Arabic to English and English to Arabic as a beta service. They offer nine languages, most of which translate to and from English only. (German and French are the only non-English pairs.)

In a non-online launch, the National Federation of the Blind is coming out with Ray Kurzweil’s newest invention – a handheld scanner that reads text aloud. This will be another Kurzweil evolution for people with visual impairments.

And finally, neuroscience research is proposing that learning something new, particularly grasping a new concept, is associated with an opium-like ‘fix’. The buzz that we get from the new new thing really is an addiction. Imagine that!

John Lavis’s Program in Policy Decision-Making has  updated its web site to include new research on knowledge transfer.

A presentation on ‘Assessing provincial or national efforts to link research to action’, dated January 2006, contains many interesting points on promoting evidence-based policy.

Among them is a reference to the reader-friendly writing style of ‘graded entry’, in which there is a 1:3:25 ratio of content. A description is posted on the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation site:

Every report prepared for the foundation has the same guidelines: start with one page of main messages; follow that with a three-page executive summary; present your findings in no more than 25 pages of writing, in language a bright, educated, but not research-trained person would understand.

These are great guidelines, and are aimed at increasing the likelihood that research reports will lead to action.