IT's hiring time! Infy wants 31,000, Accenture 60,000

Dell: 8,800 jobs. Chrysler: 12,000 jobs. Bristol-Myers: 4,300 jobs

Companies are slashing payrolls left and right. But over at Accenture, an international consulting, technology and outsourcing company, managers plan to hire 60,000 new employees this year. That's a 34% increase in its staff. The outlook is similar at the Indian technology services company Infosys, which is looking for 31,000 employees internationally, a 35% growth in its workforce.

When an employer brings in so many new hires--Infosys welcomed 1,000 people one day in June 2006--getting them integrated into the company and its culture is a massive operation. It's especially important for global companies, since operations should be the same if you're in Bangalore or London.


The first problem: Finding that many qualified people. Infosys received 1.3 million résumés last year. "In peak seasons we receive around 6,000-10,000 resumes in a day," says Nandita Gurjar, vice president of human resources development at Infosys.

Despite that magnitude, managers say the percentage of qualified candidates is disappointing. The story is the same at German software company SAP, which needs to find 4,000 new employees for positions in programming, development, solution management, engineering and sales.

"In the last 16 quarters we reported double-digit growth and, as a result, we need to hire," says Claus Heinrich, SAP's head of global human resources. "But it's a challenge to find qualified people".

Infosys took matters into its own hands. The company created Campus Connect, a partnership with top Indian engineering schools to educate students according to company standards. "We needed to meet our growing demand for 'industry-ready' professionals," says Infosys' Gurjar. Infosys trains professors to teach industry-specific courses, offers seminars taught by Infosys employees, and sponsors events at tech competitions.

In developing countries, human resources is a hot field, since growth is occurring so rapidly. But the supply of candidates isn't keeping up with demand. So Accenture started HR Academy to boost the candidate pool. The company partnered with XLRI, a prominent Indian business school, to create classes that will produce a quality talent pool, which will then work for Accenture. The company is looking to replicate the program in other countries.

For applicants not in the Infosys program, the way in is daunting. Every recent college graduate who makes it past the first round of interviews undergoes a logical thinking test that can include analytical thinking, arithmetic, reasoning and written communication skills. Applicants also need to show that they can thrive in a variety of cultures.

To speed up the selection process many employers now have candidates take an online test or fill out a questionnaire to weed out completely unqualified applicants. In order for Steve Wynn's latest resort, Encore, to open in Las Vegas in December, the company needs to hire about 5,500 new employees. If it's anything like the chain's opening in Macau, China, 50,000 applications are expected.

To speed up the process, candidates fill out an application at Wynnjobs.com. Wynn then does "e-screening" to evaluate applicants' experience levels. Those without experience or the necessary licensing (for dealers) are tossed. Wynn also designed a series of online questions designed to knock out people who don't share the company's values. The next level of questions determines candidates' likelihood of success on the job.

"Making sure they stay here is really important," says Peter Early, Wynn's senior vice president of human resources. "More than anything though, it's important that we get the people who can uphold the high service standards here."

Once the initial pool is culled, candidates go to an audition, which is what the job interview is called. Since hotel and casino employees have so much interaction with customers, managers want people who deal well under pressure, interact positively with customers and can demonstrate that they can do the tasks their jobs require.

Hiring managers use software to rate candidates on their performance during a series of scenarios. For instance, a roulette dealer must go through several rolls of the dice while the hiring manager acts as the customer.

Infosys recently rolled out an online culling process of candidates. And while it might make HR's job easier, it takes half a day for job candidates.

Despite the technology, it's still a long process. That's why hiring managers want those selected to stay for the long term. The question is, how does an employer make thousands of new hires feel like part of a cohesive team?

Infosys and Accenture both have massive training facilities, and their programs are partly technical schools, partly team building exercises.

At Accenture, newly-hired consultants from all over the globe descend on St. Charles, Ill., for two weeks at the Q Center, a former women's college that was turned into a training facility. First, though, all employees are schooled in the Accenture way of doing things at the company's home office--everything from using the computer system to navigating the company.

Accenture's CEO William Green recently joked that lots of studying goes on at the Q Center during the day but that at night the real bonding begins with trips to the local bars.

Wynn's way of showing new hires its culture is through a program called Storytellers. In the employment office there will be photos of employees along with examples of their work that went above and beyond.

Early says the best example of this at the original Wynn Hotel is the staff of the restaurant Bartolotta. When they learned one of the diners recently returned from serving in Iraq, the entire staff chipped in to pay for the couple's dinner. Throughout the evening, each staff member, including the chef, stopped by the couple's table and thanked the serviceman for his efforts. They also baked a cake that said "Thank you."

"That's how we try to connect them to the aura and feeling of the place," says Early. "What gives the company its soul is the people who work here."

When roses won't do, e-mail a fragrance

April 8, 2008. After satisfying the senses of sight and sound through video streams and music downloads, NTT Communications aims to tap into the sense of smell with a new system that allows users to send fragrances from their cell phones.

A trial of the service will take place later this month during which users will be able to select and send certain fragrance recipes to an in-home unit that is responsible for concocting and releasing the various fragrances. Each holds 16 cartridges of base fragrances or essences that are mixed to produce the various scents in a similar way that a printer mixes inks to produce other colors.

Transforming the mood of a room with a new scent is quite easy with this technology.

The first step is to choose a scent from the multitude of fragrance recipes available through a site accessible by cell phone. Once chosen, the instructions on how to make the scent are then transmitted to the fragrance device through infrared from the phone, and from there the scent is quickly mixed and emitted.

If distance is an issue, the other option is to send the instructions to the device via an e-mail message. The message is intercepted by a home gateway unit that is connected to the home's broadband connection and sends the instructions to the fragrance device at home. Using this method, users can set the time and date of fragrance emission, so one can come home to the relaxing scent of lavender, for example.

There's even room for creating customized scents, which can be shared with other users through the fragrance "playlist" on the Web site.

The technology is not only limited to creating a pleasant-smelling workplace or home. NTT also sees it as a way to enhance multimedia content. For example, instead of just sending an image of a bouquet of roses to a friend, one can boost the experience by sending the fragrance as well.

NTT said it hopes the fragrance emitter will cost about 20,000 yen ($195 U.S.) when eventually launched commercially. Cartridge refills should cost about 1,600 yen, it said.

NTT Communications believes that fragrance is the next important medium for telecommunications, as more value is placed on high sensory information. Through a company sponsored Internet survey, NTT found that 56% of people polled use aromatherapy or believe that it has positive benefits.

"Aromatherapy can reduce stress and help you relax, and to be able to control smell implies one has the power to manipulate feelings as well," said Akira Sakaino of NTT Communications' net business division.

NTT has been developing this technology, which it calls "kaori tsushin," since 2004, and has collaborated with various outfits to test the service.

Applications have ranged from fragrance rooms in hotels in Tokyo and Osaka to aroma advertising through digital signage, where fragrances were made to match audiovisual content, located in pubs, parking lots and railway stations around Tokyo.

The fragrance communication mobile service test will take place from April 10 to 20 and involves 20 monitors who are tasked to give feedback on the service.

World's fastest internet connection 'used to dry laundry'

Last summer a 75-year-old woman from Karlstad became the envy of internet users worldwide.


Swedish firm offers legal alternative to internet piracy (12 Sep 07)
Sigbritt, 75, has world's fastest broadband (12 Jul 07)
Swedes 'most connected in Europe' (13 Nov 06)
With her blistering 40 gigabits per second connection, Sigbritt Löthberg had the world's fastest internet connection - many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user had experienced such a high speed.

So, after nine months with the ability to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds or access 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, how has Sigbritt's life changed?

Not much, according to Hafsteinn Jonsson, who is heading up the fibre network operation for Karlstad Stadsnät.

"She mostly used it to dry her laundry," he told The Local.

"It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm."

Sigbritt's son, Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg, was behind the project, which was intended to demonstrate how a low price, high capacity fibre line could be built over long distances. Löthberg has now taken the equipment up to Luleå, in the north of Sweden, for further testing.

"The project was a huge success," said Hafsteinn Jonsson, who explained that his department now measures its history in terms of 'Before Sigbritt and After Sigbritt'.

"Apart from the death of Ingmar Bergman, this was the biggest story to come out of Sweden in 2007. We used to get all these detailed questions about what we're working on - now we just mention Sigbritt and everybody understands."

The secret behind the ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.

Sigbritt may have been denied her world-beating internet link but she still has an admirable 10 gigabits per second connection. And there may be another surprise in store for her.

"We're considering giving her a 100 gigabits per second connection in the summer," said Hafsteinn Jonsson.

"Then she'll be able to dry all her neighbours' laundry too."

'World Wide Web of cancer research' exploits human genome map

In June 2000, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair unveiled what amounted to a "rough draft" of the deciphered human genome, a milestone in the effort to crack the complex genetic code that shapes human development.
The work of the mapping of the human genome, whose completion was announced in April 2003, was heavily dependent on advanced computing for the data-intensive task of mapping the sequence of 3 billion base gene pairs.
Ironically, getting that genetic data into the hands of biomedical researchers has created another major computer quandary: the need for even more advanced systems that can keep up with an increasing number of disease subcategories being discovered through genetic research.

The National Cancer Institute took on that issue in 2003 by launching what it called the largest IT project in the history of biomedical research. The NCI created what is, in essence, a World Wide Web of cancer research.

The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, promises to help researchers, physicians and patients across the country to better share more-detailed information about diseases and thus speed the development of new drugs and treatments for them.

The government-funded effort costs about $20 million a year, the NCI said.
To date, 42 of the institute's 63 national cancer centers are either linked to the caBIG grid or are installing the necessary infrastructure to participate. Many are already building applications that can be shared by members of the grid.

The need for wider data sharing became obvious as genetics research found more subcategories of cancers that would require specific treatment methods.

Traditionally, cancer researchers focused on studying a relatively small number of disease categories, such as lung cancer, breast cancer or colon cancer. But as the genome work expanded, many disease subtypes were discovered within those categories, and each may require a different treatment.

Cancer researchers quickly saw the need to assemble as much information as possible to help in the development of new disease-specific treatment options. So, to broaden the number of data sources, the NCI has begun expanding the grid to include the community hospitals and physicians that treat 80% of U.S. cancer patients.

Interoperability

Project backers said that researchers decided early on to focus on improving interoperability rather than forcing research organizations to standardize on expensive new IT systems and software.

To accomplish that, the developers used the Globus Toolkit, a set of open-source tools for building grid systems and applications that run on top of Web services that are open for anyone with a node on the system. The Globus tools are distributed by the Globus Alliance.
Developers also created a collection of tools that serve up semantic descriptions of vocabulary and data so that both humans and machines can interpret data from dissimilar systems. And a common security model was built to allow research centers to run caBIG as a distributed infrastructure that lets each participant create individual policies to determine who can author or access data.
In addition, Ken Beutow, director of NCI's Center for Bioinformatics, said the NCI has set up "workspaces" -- groups of people that meet regularly to discuss specific domains of work, such as tissue banks and pathology tools. The workspace groups provided input on building the common vocabularies and data elements, he noted.
Robert Annechiarico, director of cancer center information systems at Duke University, which has already helped build applications for the grid, said that creating the common data elements is particularly important for academic researchers. "Academic medical centers are a community of fiefdoms bound together by a common parking problem," he explained

Researchers at Duke contributed to the development of two caBIG applications, the Cancer Central Clinical Database and the Cancer Central Clinical Participant Registry.
The latter application, a Web-based tool for managing clinical trial data across multiple cancer centers, can provide researchers with access to records about patients suffering from one of the new subcategories of cancer.
"Where I might see five patients a year with a particular disease, now I can see 50," Annechiarico said.
Duke is using the former application in a $6.8 million research project, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Breast Cancer Research Program, to study how genomic profiling can be used to guide treatment plans for women with newly diagnosed breast cancer, he added.
In addition to expanding access to specific data sets, caBIG can increase the safety of clinical trials for patients, noted Warren Kibbe, director of bioinformatics at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University in Evanston Ill.
For example, he said, development of a caBIG clinical trial management application would allow researchers to determine the adverse effects of a single medication used in multiple clinical trials. "That is one example of how caBIG is starting to touch patients in a way that hasn't been possible," Kibbe added.
The open-source Patient Study Calendar application now in development at the center will be used for patients in clinical trials, he noted. Among other things, the application will be able to tell patients how much medication to take and when.
The single application could define patient management parameters, eliminating some of the problems that result when doctors with different types of training -- a surgeon versus an oncologist, for example -- interpret rules differently, Kibbe said.
Implementing caBIG has not been without challenges, according to an NCI-commissioned review of the project that was released late last year.
The report found that over the life of the effort -- from 2003-2007 -- developers have not focused enough on the needs of end users and have too often released buggy products.
Beutow said the report prompted the NCI to "redouble" its efforts to provide better technical support to users. The agency now sends updates on the program to user e-mail lists, has created Web sites with caBIG information and launched a telephone help line to provide technical support to users.

Long Road Ahead

At the same time, the caBIG program is in the midst of an expansion to add links to the grid and its 40-plus applications to community health care providers. To date, 1 have signed up to join the program.
And national cancer centers in the U.K. are in the process of building an infrastructure to become "caBIG-enabled," Beutow added.
He urged that health care organizations use caBIG and other IT resources to further extend biomedical research, following the lead of the financial services industry and the Department of Defense.
Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that projects like caBIG are critical to science but still have a long way to go.
"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how we can cooperate and share data," Lichtenfeld said. Taking advantage of the "explosion of information" generated by genomic research is going to take a tremendous amount of infrastructure development -- and time, he added.

"I am 61 years old, [and] I would hope we are able to see some of this connectivity before I am gone from this earth," he noted. "It is going to take us another generation until we see the type of applications where we can put it directly into affecting patient care."
Nonetheless, the NCI's parent organization, the National Institutes of Health, is already holding up caBIG as a model for sharing research and treatment data associated with other illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease.
"This change in medicine is revolutionary," said NCI's Beutow. "We have the capacity now to look and see how an individual might respond to a particular therapeutic approach."
David Steffen, director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, noted that his organization is now working under caBIG's auspices to find a way to use the grid to share cardiovascular disease research data.
Steffen said he envisions a time where this type of technology could evolve to support some of the genetic advances shown in the 1997 science fiction film Gattaca, in which DNA analysis at birth could predict the likelihood of disease.
"The goal is to look at this [genetic] sequence and say, 'Aha, you have this combination of genes which predisposes you to heart disease,'" Steffen noted. "It won't be much longer before we'll be able to routinely do that at birth. [The caBIG grid] is going to have complete, unexpected and very dramatic impacts on the pace of medical research."
CaBIG is also has working with President George W. Bush's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, which oversees the development of electronic health records, to ensure that the EHRs can include details about a person's genetic makeup.

Comcast, BitTorrent to work together on network management

March 27, 2008 ,Comcast Corp., which has been under fire for slowing some BitTorrent Inc. traffic, will work with the peer-to-peer (P2P) vendor to come up with better ways to address media downloads and network management, the companies announced Thursday.
Several consumer and digital rights groups have used Comcast's network-throttling actions to argue for the need for U.S. Net neutrality regulations. The Associated Press reported in October that Comcast was blocking some BitTorrent traffic, and the cable-modem service provider has defended its practice of sometimes slowing P2P traffic during peak network use.

Comcast, the largest cable-modem service provider in the U.S., also said it will migrate to a network management technique that is protocol-agnostic by the end of the year.
Comcast will reconfigure network management ச்ய்ச்டேம்ஸ்

"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends," Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "We have been discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust and publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results."

But BitTorrent also acknowledged that Internet service providers may need to manage their networks, especially during peak traffic. "While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially," Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "Recognizing that the Web is richer and more bandwidth-intensive than it has been historically, we are pleased that Comcast understands these changing traffic patterns and wants to collaborate with us to migrate to techniques that the Internet community will find to be more transparent."

Comcast and BitTorrent have been talking with each other, but they will also work with the broader Internet community to address traffic management issues, the companies said in a news release. The companies said they will work with the Internet Engineering Task Force on a new distribution architecture for delivering high-bandwidth media. BitTorrent also said it will work to optimize its software for the new architecture.

Kevin Martin, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, has called for an investigation into Comcast's network management practices. But the companies said there's no need for government intervention.

The two companies "can serve consumers best by working together, along with the broader ISP and Internet community," Doug Walker, CEO of BitTorrent, said in a statement.
Free Press still says FCC needs to take அச்டின்

Free Press, a media reform group that has been critical of Comcast's network management, said the agreement doesn't change "the urgent need for the FCC to take action."

"This deal is the direct result of public pressure -- and the threat of FCC action -- against Comcast," Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, said in an e-mail. "But with Comcast's history of broken promises and record of deception, we can't just take their word that the Internet is now in safe hands. The issue of Net neutrality is bigger than Comcast and BitTorrent."

The agreement doesn't protect other P2P companies or other "innovative" applications and services, and it doesn't prevent other ISPs from blocking or slowing Internet traffic, Ammori said.

Mozilla fixes 10 Firefox flaws, half seen as 'critical'

But Thunderbird patches are delayed for 'several weeks'

March 26,2008 Mozilla Corp. yesterday patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked "critical," in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to Version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging Inc. spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.
Mozilla's six advisories spelled out five Firefox bugs marked "critical," three tagged "high" and one each "moderate" and "low."

"There's a little bit here to interest most everyone," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "The bulletins claim no favor in the many types of vulnerabilities typically associated with browsers."

Among the critical flaws were a pair that could be exploited to crash the browser or its JavaScript engine, and perhaps do more. "Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort, at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," Mozilla wrote in Advisory 2008-15.
Mozilla also patched potential identity leaks, spoofing bugs and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in 2.0.0.13. But the fix that caught Storms' eye was detailed by 2008-18, a fix for LiveConnect, a feature that harks back to Firefox's predecessor, Netscape Navigator. LiveConnect lets Java applets call a Web page's embedded JavaScript, or JavaScript access the Java runtime libraries, and it is used by both Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari 3 browser.
"Sun has updated the Java Runtime Environment with a fix for this problem. Mozilla has also added a fix to LiveConnect to protect users who don't have the latest version of Java," Mozilla said in the advisory.

"Here we have Firefox putting out a mitigation step for a bug in Java," said Storms. "It's a welcome addition when one vendor can help out another."

All 10 vulnerabilities were also patched by the SeaMonkey Project, a separate open-source initiative that develops a multifunction browser suite.

The Thunderbird e-mail client, meanwhile, is affected by the five critical flaws listed in 2008-14 and 2008-15. "Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail," read the first of the two bulletins. "This is not the default setting, and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail."

A release date for Thunderbird 2.0.0.13 to fix the flaws has not been set. According to David Ascher, the head of Mozilla Messaging, the e-mailer's update will follow Firefox's by "several weeks."

In a post to his blog last week, Ascher cited several reasons why a simultaneous release of Thunderbird and Firefox updates was impossible. "Some of those resource contentions are due to not enough automation for the Thunderbird release process, and some of it is the consequence of not enough people with the right training," he said.

Ascher defended the lag by noting that while JavaScript is turned on by default in Firefox, it is not in Thunderbird. "We could delay releasing Firefox until Thunderbird was ready, in the interest of mitigating the risk of someone using knowledge from the Firefox release to try and attack Thunderbird users," said Ascher. "But that would mean leaving over 150 million users vulnerable. So, applying the correct math, we release Firefox security updates as soon as possible, and Thunderbird security updates as soon as possible."