Last week the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) introduced a new tool for individuals in the United States to check their own employment eligibility status. This new "Self Check" application is part of the ongoing roll-out of the E-Verify program, which aims to help employers check the employment status of new employees.

This tool will become useful to verify if government records are up-to-date. This is especially important for foreign-born workers, whose employment status may change with transitions between various immigrations statuses.

Employment eligibility verification

E-Verify is an Internet-based program run by the United States government that compares information from an employee's Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9 to data from U.S. government records. If the information matches, that employee is eligible to work in the United States.

The program was established in 1997 but a government mandate for all federal government agencies to use it per October 2007 significantly increased usage. E-Verify is not without controversy and concerns about privacy and data accuracy have been raised.

From the press release: "E-Verify Self Check, a partnership between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA), is the first online E-Verify program offered directly to workers and job seekers. The gives users the opportunity to submit corrections of any inaccuracies in their DHS and SSA records before applying for jobs."

Initially the E-Verify Self Check service is only available to users who maintain an address and are physically located in Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Mississippi, Virginia or the District of Columbia. In the coming months USCIS will continue to expand the E-Verify Self Check service.

https://selfcheck.uscis.gov/

Our correspondent Noor Speckens visited Vandaag, a restaurant in New York City, to explore how Dutch it is; here is her report.

If you go to Restaurant Vandaag and expect to find the comfort food you remember from your childhood in the Netherlands, you will be sorely disappointed.

Vandaag, as per its website, advertises itself as a restaurant offering Northern European cuisine and "explorations focusing on Denmark and Holland."

Aside from the short list of smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches), I cannot speak for the Danish part of this equation, except that it might confuse geographically-challenged Americans even more ("So, you’re Dutch? Are you from Copenhagen?"). The Dutch part, however, was lacking in the familiar Dutch staples, such as kroketten, puree or even patat friet. I guess there was no point in trying to compete with the Belgian snackbar "Pommes Frites" a few doors up the avenue. However, there were bitterballen to be had as a starter.

A lack of true Dutch dishes

Although the restaurant professes its preference for cooking with local and seasonal ingredients from the Hudson Valley, none of the solid winter dishes that comprise the bulk of Dutch cooking were on the menu. I was hoping for stamppot, haché or even a simple gehaktbal. Pea soup (erwtensoep) was listed, although "embellished" with "ham hock (OK), octopus (really?), matignon (we’ll have to look that one up), and chili oil (why?)", it probably cannot be called snert anymore.

Come to think of it, the only vaguely Dutch dishes were the "Vandaag Burger" topped with Gouda cheese and maybe the Hete Bliksem ("crisp fingerlings, bacon, apple, stroop syrup"). The rest of the entrees seemed pretentious and contrived such as for example "Red Russian kale with green strawberries, sweet onion, caraway", or "Albacore tuna with rutabaga, pomegranate and rye berries". The portions were small and not cheap.

Good selection of drinks

As for the cocktails, beers and other beverages: there were genever cocktails and aquavit cocktails, as well as various rather obscure Dutch and Belgian beers, (Danish) mead, which isn’t to say that they were bad. I had a glass of De Schelde Hop-Ruiter ale.

The restaurant’s interior is pleasantly modern, a bit stark perhaps, with clean lines; the floor is polyurethane-coated concrete, the tables, chairs and benches are made of blond wood. There are no tablecloths, upholstery, curtains anywhere to muffle the sound, which made for a rather echo-ey, noisy space.

The servers were American, the bartendress was Danish maybe, but none of them had the slightest idea what you were saying when you asked for one of the few items on the menu with the proper Dutch pronunciation or seemed to be aware of the fact that you were speaking Dutch and they were working in a restaurant with a Dutch name. All in all, eating at Vandaag was a bit of an alienating experience for someone looking for a Dutch experience.

Vandaag is located on the North-West corner of East 6th Street and 2nd Avenue in the East Village, 103 2nd Avenue, New York, NY 10003. Open for lunch and dinner.

http://www.vandaagnyc.com

Over the years I've become an avid reader of the New York Times. I don't always agree with their commentary, but their reporting and analysis are excellent and I've come to read it several times a day.

I always wondered why they made all their news available for free. After all, other major newspapers such as The Economist and the Financial Times have had paywalls for years. We had a subscription to the New York Times in the past but a newspaper made out of paper is very inefficient -- reading it on the phone is so much more practical.

I ran into the "soft limit" of the Times within 4 days of the new month, both on my browser and my BlackBerry. It's a valuable news source to us, so as of this morning we're subscribed.

It's strange to see how easy it is to circumvent the paywall (using NoScript in your browser in sufficient); I suppose they assume most casual readers won't go to that length. Still, sending the whole article but overlapping it with a CSS popup is trivially easy to get around.

Dutch-American soccer player Earnie Stewart was elected to the National Soccer Hall of Fame on Tuesday along with three-time World Cup veterans Eddie Pope and Cobi Jones.

Stewart, who was born in Veghel, the Netherlands, was a regular midfielder for the U.S. national team from 1990s until his retirement in 2005. He played 101 full international games for the United States with the first against Portugal in 1990 and the last against Grenada in June of 2004. He played in 3 World Cups for the USA and he scored the game-winner in a 2-1 victory over Colombia that sent the Americans into the round of 16 at the 1994 World Cup in the United States.

His 111 goals as a professional in the Netherlands makes him the highest-scoring American in international club play. In 2001 he was named U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year. Stewart was born to an American father and a Dutch mother and holds dual citizenship.

Stewart is currently back in the Netherlands, where he is the Director of Football for soccer club AZ in Alkmaar.

The Dutch Ambassador to the United States, Renée Jones-Bos, spoke yesterday at UNC's School of Law in Chapel Hill, NC.

A visit to the Tarheel state

The event was part of a two-day visit to North Carolina. On Monday she was in Greenville, NC at Dutch pharmaceutical company DSM, which has nearly 1,200 employees in the state. Says Jones-Bos: "Over 22,000 American jobs in North Carolina are supported by Dutch-American trade and investment. In fact, the Netherlands is the 6th largest foreign investor in the state."

Human rights and international law

The ambassador's speech was introduced by Jack Boger, Dean of the UNC School of Law: "This a great opportunity for students because it’s clear that the world is becoming more international", he said.

In her speech ambassador Jones-Bos explained the position of the Netherlands on human rights and international law. Prior to her appointment to Washington, Ms. Jones-Bos served as Ambassador-at-Large for Human Rights, and she is clearly passionate about the topic. The ambassador mentioned the historic ties between USA and the Netherlands that date back 400 years.

About 35 students and faculty attended the meeting. The UNC School of Law has an exchange program with Radboud University in Nijmegen. Several students from the Netherlands were in attendance.

In the Q&A session students asked several questions about the Netherlands and international law, for example about the experiences of the Netherlands in hosting the International Criminal Court.

After the visit to UNC Ms Jones-Bos attended a performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater at the Carolina Performing Arts Center, the only eastern United States performance of this renowned Dance Group.

About 35 students and faculty attended the session.

The ambassador spoke about human rights and international law.

Renée Jones-Bos, Dutch Ambassador to the United States, Jack Boger, Dean of the UNC School of Law, Suzanne de Groot, First Secretary Economic Affairs of the Embassy, Gerard ter Wee, honorary consul of the Netherlands to North Carolina and several students of the UNC School of Law.

Yesterday evening we went to the opening reception of a photo exhibition in Cary, NC. The exhibition was with works by Saskia Leary and Laura Holley.

Saskia, who was born in the Netherlands, started photographing after her retirement. This exhibition was about spring flowers and the Keukenhof in the Netherlands. Saskia has been to Sofia, Bulgaria and took several nice photo's there also -- yesterday we saw one of them in a restaurant nearby.

We met up with Petra at the exhibition --it was nice to see her-- and when we went for dinner in the evening we saw several other people we know. A small world.

Today I read 'Uncovering Spoken Phrases in Encrypted Voice over IP Conversations', a very interesting article from the December 2010 issue of ACM Transaction on Information and System Security. (Read the full PDF version here).

The paper details a gap in the security of VBR compressed encrypted VoIP streams. The authors had earlier found that it is possible to determine the language that is spoken on such a VoIP call, based on packet lengths. Now they have expanded their research and show that it's possible to detect entire spoken phrases during a VoIP call. On average, their method achieved recall of 50% and precision of 51% for a wide variety of phrases spoken by a diverse collection of speakers (some phrases are easier to detect than others; the recall various from 0% to 98%, depending on length of the phrase and the speaker).

In other words: they can detect fairly well if a certain phrase is being used in a conversation, even though the VoIP conversation is encrypted!

Fundamentally, this is possible because VoIP packets are compressed using variable bit-rate compression and not typically "padded". Longer phonemes (such as vowels) correspond with longer packets, shorter phonemes (such as fricatives like 's', 'sh' or 'th') use shorter packets -- using sophisticated statistical analysis they can detect whole phrases.

A solution would be to add padding to VoIP packets, but that increases the bandwidth that is needed. Not only does padding increase the bandwidth because of padding itself, but it also negates a big benefit of VBR compression when dealing with quiet periods in a conversation, when one party is listening to another.

A fun read, quite accessible.

Correspondent Yolanda Gerritsen saw a preview of the U.S. premiere of Winter in Wartime (Oorlogswinter), after the book by Dutch author Jan Terlouw.

The final months of the German occupation in a small Dutch village are the backdrop to the events in the movie Winter in Wartime. A wonderful film by director Martin Koolhoven, Winter in Wartime is both a thrilling action movie and a coming-of-age story for the main character, young Michiel van Beusekom, the son of the mayor of this small village, which is located close to Zwolle in the Eastern part of the Netherlands. It’s mainly through his eyes that we see the events evolve in the course of the movie.

In the opening scene Michiel watches through an opening in the frost on his bedroom window how a burning plane leaves fiery traces in the night sky. When Michiel and his best friend find the wreckage of this British plane the next day and retrieve a few mementos, the Germans discover them. The chase through the woods is a thrilling adventure, all just fun and games for the boys, as they escape from the bad guys and make their way home.

Michiel is annoyed by how his father, the mayor, deals with the Germans. He feels his father is not tough enough and makes too many compromises with the enemy. So he looks up to his uncle Ben, a member of the underground resistance and a real hero in his eyes. Michiel would like to help the underground resistance, but his uncle Ben sternly warns him to never get involved.

When Dirk, his neighbor, asks him to deliver a letter to the blacksmith in case he shouldn’t return from an attack on a German ammunition depot, he finally feels taken seriously and is excited to be involved in something important.
But before he has a chance to deliver the letter, Michiel can only watch as the Germans drag the blacksmith from his shop and shoot him in the street. He is on his own now and it dawns on him that his adventure may be more than he bargained for.

The letter contains a map of a location in the woods. When Michiel investigates, he finds Jack, the English pilot who has survived the crash, but who is injured. A member of the resistance was to take him across the river to a contact in Zwolle. Jack swears him to secrecy and Michiel has to figure out how to keep him alive and get him to Zwolle.

In the ensuing events, Michiel learns the hard way that people around him are not what they seem and that war is not child’s play, but a deadly serious business. In the course of his heroic attempts to get Jack to safety, Michiel is confronted with unbearable personal losses that change him forever. When Jack finally manages to cross the bridge over the IJssel River to Zwolle, 14-year old Michiel has learned life lessons that have made him wise beyond his years.

Winter in Wartime is a fast-paced movie, filled with many unexpected twists and turns that keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Young Martijn Lakemeier, who had never done any serious acting before, heads an excellent cast. Director Martin Koolhoven lets the story unfold through the events as witnessed and experienced by Michiel as he valiantly tries to live up to the responsibility he inadvertently stumbled into.

The movie can now be seen in New York City and Los Angeles and in other cities from March 25th; see their website for a complete list. Highly recommended.

Winter in Wartime
Directed by Martin Koolhoven
http://www.sonyclassics.com/winterinwartime