RQ: Pay Scales

This question has come up a few times in my inbox as well as on the various forums with a Foreign Service bent;

Where can I find the Foreign Service pay scale for 2011?

You can find the 2011 (and, in fact, 2012) Pay scales here (PDF):

Click to access 134927.pdf

But why does it say “2010 FOREIGN SERVICE (FS) SALARY TABLE” ?  Way back when the deficit argument was just starting to ramp up, someone decided that a 2-year freeze on federal employees’ pay (oh, except Congress) and the subsequent two billion dollars in savings would make a difference in a deficit that is running over one trillion dollars.

$2,000,000,000

$1,000,000,000,000

In other words the President looked under the couch cushions for loose change and happened to find a particularly shiny penny.

Be sure to check out past Reader Questions in the Archives.

reCaptcha Fail

I’m all for the crowdsourcing of print digitization, but it’s a small wonder this word wasn’t recognized by OCR.

(For those unfamiliar with the reCaptcha system, it crowdsources optical character recognition by asking users to type in a word that digital OCR does not recognize.  The unknown word is paired with a known “control” word.  Both words are assumed correct if the control word is correct, but the results of the unknown word are not considered correct until multiple people have entered the same thing.  More on reCaptcha here and here.)

I'm not up on my Greek.

Travel Warning: Central African Republic

Consular Affairs issued a Travel Warning for the Central African Republic yesterday.  It reads as follows:

Central African Republic

July 28, 2011

The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the risks of traveling to the Central African Republic (CAR), and recommends against all but essential travel outside the capital, Bangui. Travelers in the CAR should exercise extreme caution. This replaces the Travel Warning of January 14, 2011, to reflect the current security situation and the potential for spontaneous demonstrations.

Armed militia groups, bandits, and poachers present real dangers, and the Central African government is unable to guarantee the safety of visitors in most parts of the country. There have been repeated attacks on Central African and expatriate travelers in the countryside. Poachers and armed men also pose a threat to game hunters in northern and eastern CAR. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) poses a similar threat to hunters in eastern CAR.

Three Interesting Papers from WEIS 2011

The 10th annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2011) was held at George Mason University in June.  WEIS is “the leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on information security, combining expertise from the fields of economics, social science, business, law, policy and computer science” and almost never fails to produce interesting papers.  Here are the three I found most interesting and relevant to the average person.

Nevena Vratonjic, Julien Freudiger, Vincent Bindschaedler, and Jean-Pierre Hubaux of EPFL, Switzerland presented, “The Inconvenient Truth about Web Certificates” (PDF). 

Travel Warning: Colombia

Consular Affairs issued a Travel Warning for Colombia yesterday.  It reads as follows:

Colombia

July 22, 2011

The Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the dangers of travel to Colombia. Security in Colombia has improved significantly in recent years, including in tourist and business travel destinations like Cartagena and Bogota, but violence by narco-terrorist groups continues to affect some rural areas and large cities. This updates and replaces the Travel Warning for Colombia issued November 10, 2010 to update information on recent security incidents and terrorist activity.