Amity University professors have come up with a novel test to help you find the right career path.
It’s a pretty simple test with just 4 questions. The questions deal with traits of the person and help determine your career path by giving the end result as traits and alternatives for career and courses.
Here is the link to the test.
The riffs on nationalities go something like this: The Chinese do not invent anything; they only copy. Italians design beautiful shoes, but who ever heard of a Tuscan computer programmer? Russians dominate chess yet cannot seem to engineer a children’s toy. Germans excel when they control all variables — of a high-performance automobile. The French routinely lead in technologies that require large government subsidies. The Japanese so yearn for acceptance that individuals won’t promote a new idea without the approval of their peers.
If I have offended anyone, I will not apologize. I am recycling crass stereotypes about national traits in the service of a better understanding of how innovation works.
Talk of national identity rarely comes up in public, but privately many people — from academia to venture capital firms — take for granted that the contours of a career in technology are often shaped by the national origin of the technologist.
“Though the reasons can differ a fair amount, national origin does correlate with the innovativeness of the people of a country,” says Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University.
When a train set a new land speed record this month by reaching an astonishing 357 miles an hour, there was no mystery about where the train’s designers lived or the speed test took place.
France.
“The French government has always been very good at making things where government support is critical,” like trains, nuclear power plants and airplanes, Mr. Mokyr says. “But the French are not terribly good at creating Googles or Microsofts, where private action is central.”
The French engineering company, Alstom, after all, is the world market leader in high-speed trains. But a well-informed person would be hard-pressed to name a leading French information technology company.
Indeed, many of France’s best computer brains work in Silicon Valley. These Franco-geeks, who number in the thousands, even have two associations, Silicon French and DBF.
“The French business system is constraining for individuals while supportive of scientists and engineers working on large, rigid systems that actually benefit from top-down decisions and slow change,” says Jean-Louis Gassée, a former Apple executive who helped organize DBF and is a partner at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, Calif.
Comprehending innovation through the prism of national identity has its risks. In the 1970s, many people dismissed the Japanese as mere imitators and failed to see how the knowledge gained from copying would lead to path-breaking technologies. The success of Toyota, Sony and Japan’s vibrant animation industry provide cautionary tales for those who might dismiss entire nationalities as copycats or only as consumers of advanced innovations.
Nations can and do change, sometimes by smart planning, sometimes by serendipity. Finland, home to the mobile phone powerhouse Nokia, was an agricultural country 50 years ago. So was Ireland, now home to thriving clusters in electronics and pharmaceuticals. Ireland’s investment recruitment agency is now crowing about the virtues of “the Irish mind” in a series of print ads. The most popular ad, using a drawing of the Irish rock star Bono, declares: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to innovate, without being directed.”
Friends of Israel’s top engineering school, Technion, are paying for a similar series of ads, which appear periodically on the Op-Ed page of this newspaper. “The brainpower of its people” is “Israel’s only natural resource,” one ad declares.
Mr. Mokyr notes that “these ads pertain to highly trained people.” He adds: “It’s not that the people of one country are inherently smarter than those of others. But some nations invest more in education, or are more efficient in producing skilled people.”
Why this is so has been debated endlessly by economists since Adam Smith, the 18th-century author of “The Wealth of Nations.”
There is little debate, however, that small countries are freer these days than large ones to boast about the supposed talents of their people. That is partly because larger countries can inspire fear or may have a history of invading others. Irish chauvinism seems benign, yet some people may regard praising the genius of “the German mind,” for instance, as objectionable, given the history of German aggression in World War II.
Some countries are too big and diverse for easy generalizations. Talk of “the American mind” makes no sense because “the U.S. is so multicultural,” says Andreas Bechtolsheim, a native of Germany and a prominent computer designer in Silicon Valley.
While migration and the flow of knowledge across borders have led to a flattening of the world, different technological strengths remain associated with different nations. So nations bent on becoming more innovative in other fields must confront their own collective strengths — and weaknesses.
And that means taking stereotypes seriously, while not being imprisoned by them.
Consider China, the fastest-growing economy. “Chinese technologists are highly sensitive to their reputation as imitators, and they are trying to find areas where they can break through,” says Carlos Genardini, an American who is chief executive of Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks, an innovation incubator.
“Building the designs of others is a hard habit to break,” Mr. Genardini says. Sometimes success is the enemy. “The Chinese make a good living from making the products of others,” he adds. “Why change?”
One reason is political pressure. This month, the United States said it would ask the World Trade Organization to compel the Chinese government to do more to reduce, if not eliminate, factories devoted to churning out copies of American movies and other products.
Self-interest ultimately ought to persuade the Chinese that creativity trumps copying. That is because profits and industrial leadership often go to the companies and countries that create distinct technological systems. Think Intel’s microprocessor family and Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Or France’s high-speed trains.
THINKING ahead, China’s technologists talk openly about “a second modernization” and the importance of creativity. Yet China’s creative potential is limited by the hegemony of an authoritarian Communist Party, which recently showed its muscle by issuing new warnings against Chinese use of the Internet for suspect social and political purposes. Despite exhortations to be more original, Chinese people “feel widespread fears of stepping out of the box,” says Justin O’Connor, a professor of “cultural industries” at the University of Leeds in Britain who is studying China’s recent experience.
China, of course, was the world’s leading technological power — 500 years ago. The grand sweep of history engenders humility and hope. National traits are fluid. Always shaped by unpredictable experience, these traits are subject to design and redesign. Just as technologists invent great products, countries invent, and reinvent, people.
Hey, I’m no relationship guru (I write about tech, for goodness’ sake). So when my single friends ask me about the best places to meet men in San Francisco, I draw a blank. As much as I’d like to help them meet a Silicon Valley man—which is what they’re really after—I can’t, because I don’t know many single men or where they hang out.I’m married, and my friends know that. But I guess deep down they hope I can introduce them to a few smart guys, because you know, I’m in the “tech field.” If I didn’t know better, I’d tell them to just go online, since that’s where the tech guys are. But a Cosmopolitan article says the best place to meet smart guys is at the Apple store.
Yes, the Apple store! Who would’ve thought?
Those so-called experts in sex, love, and dating advice say most guys are natural gadget lovers, and the vibe at the Apple store is “conducive to man meeting.” The article goes on to suggest single women should enroll in a free workshop, check their email while at the store, or just stop by to survey the store’s “good-looking merchandise.” I guess that puts male “Geniuses” at an advantage.
Another place to meet smart guys? A Fortune 500 or tech company. Apparently, 75% of the technology and banking workforce are men, so I guess single women’s chances improve when they work at one of these places. Cosmo also says that according to a survey by Vault.com, 22% of people met their spouses or significant others on the job. And while you’re at it, Cosmo also suggests you join the Super Bowl pool after you land the job at one of these companies, because you know, that’s what guys do.
Ah, now I remember why I stopped reading Cosmo 10 years ago.
Source:
The Best Places to Meet a Guy (Cosmo)
In 1996, the European Space Agency watched in horror as the maiden flight of the Ariane 5 rocket automatically self-destructed 39 seconds into its flight. In 2001, NASA (in conjunction with the European Space Agency) was forced to admit that their $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter had instead become Mars Surface Debris. The link (other than the ESCA) is that both of these catastrophes were caused by software failures, and both were projects developed by some of the most rigorous programming method practitioners known to the industry.
Most software development projects follow a standard pattern for testing: Programmers develop code, which is checked into a common repository. At regularly scheduled intervals, and during major releases, the Quality Assurance department builds the application and tests it (sometimes manually, sometimes using automated scripts).
Let’s compare software development to another kind of authorship: writing a novel. An author, upon finishing a draft of a novel, will send it to the editor for review. The editor (and probably a team of reviewers) read the novel to make sure it makes sense, has no major flaws, and is fun to read. This is the acceptance testing phase for the novel; it takes the reviewers a long time to read the draft, and they are focused on large issues of plot and structure.
It is possible that during the writing of the novel, the author has been shipping individual chapters to the editor for review. In this case, there is a shorter interval between the writing and the reviewing. It takes less time to read a single chapter than a whole novel, and the issues reported are much more specific, although still focused on issues of structure and plot. This is a kind of module testing.
Enter the spellchecker.
Writing a novel using a modern word processor, authors get immediate feedback on their spelling and grammar. Hundreds of minor mistakes are corrected the moment they are made. They won’t catch everything, but they don’t have to. The resulting manuscript is so much cleaner by the time it gets to the reviewers that they can focus their energies on the things that can’t be caught by a spellchecker. The resulting product is that much stronger.
The spellchecker is for the author a kind of unit testing. Unit testing is the act of writing test code to verify your own production code. Unit testing is done by the programmer, and the immediate benefit is to the programmer. Each individual unit of functionality (method) is tested, in isolation where possible, to make sure that the individual building blocks of your application are solid. By limiting the amount of functionality being tested, and controlling the environment in which it is tested, you can verify the code itself while minimizing the unpredictable effects of context.
Perhaps more importantly, unit testing offers the shortest feedback cycle between writing code and finding out if you wrote it incorrectly. Bugs are always easiest to fix when the code is fresh. Waiting until end-of-cycle testing gives you an opportunity to forget why and how you wrote a specific unit of functionality.
Tools:
NUnit, an open source unit testing framework for .NET, and provides a group of test running applications and tools for reporting the results. Since most unit testing is done using a standardized framework like NUnit, the tests can be run automatically by an integration tool (such as NAnt or make) and results sent to the team members. NUnit, and the Unit allow you to write test code in the same language as your production code, and they each provide a collection of test runners, applications which automate the process of running the tests and reporting on the results. VSNUnit is an open-source add-in for Visual Studio .NET developed by the author that provides instant, automated testing and feedback
Java is a highly portable computer programming language. “Portable” is a term used to describe programs that can be run in many different computing environments and on many different “platforms” (MS Windows, Apple’s Mac OS, Solaris, and Linux are all examples of “platforms”)
It is Java’s portability that makes it such an intriguing technology. To give you an example of how this portability relates to real world features and benefits, let’s say you have a program that is written in Java such as a web browser. Normally, with a web browser application, the user is bound to the settings for the browser application and the configuration of the machine that they are using it on. So, at the office, the machine on Joe User’s desktop has one set of bookmarks, plug ins, security setting, etc. Joe’s machine at home will most likely have a different set of bookmarks, plug ins and settings. Now, let’s say Joe want to have a more consistent experience with the computers that he uses everyday. Joe could install a Java-based browser on removable writable media (such as a floppy diskette, pen drive, zip disk or CDRW) and carry his browser with him (with all the settings, bookmarks and plug ins in tow as well!)
Java is not only portable, but it is also widely known, and does not need to be interpreted (like PHP, Java script and some other and other languages). Java also does not have to be compiled on the machine it will be run on. Java can be compiled once and run in its binary form on many systems. Although there are other languages out there that are extremely portable, there are few that could stand up to Java’s “compile once, run everywhere” functionality. Java is truly a useful and feature rich programming language and is used to program many software programs on the market today.
The more you work, the more you get done, right? Well, I’d like to encourage you to take the “Four-Day Challenge.”
The problem
If you’re like most people, you’ve got too much to do and not enough time to do it. The e-mail inbox is always overflowing and the list of to-dos never ends. You always feel that twinge of guilt because you’re never spending quite enough time on what you should be. What’s even more frustrating is that the more you work, the more it seems there is to do. Argh!
So here’s the challenge: work fewer hours.
How to make it happen
So working less sounds great, but how does it work in the real world? It will depend on two main things:
Whether or not you are self-employed
If you sell products or services
If you work for yourself
When you’re self-employed, you have complete control over your schedule. You can decide what days you work and how long you work each day. Gill and I work Monday to Thursday from 9 AM to 6 PM. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, as long as you limit your work week.
If you work for someone else
If you have a normal 9-to-5 job, you might be thinking “Well that’s great for you Ryan. You can control your work week. My boss will fire me if I propose working a four-day week!” And you’re probably right.
However, you can take the challenge in many different ways. Instead of getting into work early and finishing late, tell yourself that you have exactly eight hours to finish all your work for the day. Set a mental barrier at the end of the day and know that you will shut down your computer and pack your bags exactly at five o’clock.
When you tell yourself that you’ve only got a limited amount of time to do a huge amount of things, you’ll find it helps you focus and work faster.
Products vs. services
Working a four-day week is much harder if you run a service-based company. For instance, design companies will have to really work hard to keep a four-day week, simply because clients will expect you to be in the office five days a week.
If this is you, I’d like you to ask yourself this question: “Does my job facilitate my life, or does my life facilitate my job?” I believe it should be the former. Yes, you will lose a few clients who expect you to be available at a moments notice, but in the bigger picture, does that matter?
A possible solution to this problem is moving to a four-day week gradually. Maybe start working a four-day week just once a month. Then gradually increase this to twice a month. Eventually, you’ll have worked your way up to the entire month and (hopefully) your clients will be used to the idea.
Has it worked for us?
The proof is in the pudding, right? It’s easy for me to say that Carson Systems works a four-day week, but what actually takes place every week?
It’s harder than we thought
What we found is that we were extremely tempted to work on Fridays. We love what we do, and on top of that, there’s a heck of a lot of stuff that needs to be done. Not having that extra day to get things done actually felt a bit stressful at first.
In the first couple of weeks, we ended up working a bit on Friday, and even a little on Sunday. Hmmmm…clearly we needed to get a bit more serious about implementing this whole four-day work week stuff.
Week three and onwards, I’m happy to report, we successfully worked a four-day week. The trick was shifting our mental perception of how long the working week was.
Thursday is the new Friday
It took awhile to see Thursday like it was Friday. What we realized is that Thursdays became very busy, because we had to finish everything for the week that hadn’t been done yet.
We would look at our to-do lists and realize there was still a huge amount of things to be done. Yikes. So the result is that Thursdays can be a bit hectic. Friday would’ve been hectic anyway though, so why not get the work done one day early?
Sometimes you can’t get it all done
Now that we’ve been working a four-day week for three months, we’ve realized that we can’t always get the same amount of work done. Let’s face it, there are only so many hours in the day, and if you work fewer days, you will inevitably not get as much done.
But in the larger scheme of things, does that really matter? Will we lie on our death bed and say “Damn, I wish I would’ve got more done at work?” I doubt it.
So how’re the results?
Once we trained ourselves to stick to the four-day work week, the benefits were absolutely amazing. It was like someone had added another Saturday to our week! On Fridays, we sleep in, fire up the coffee around 9 or 10AM and then relax around the house or head into town to a coffee shop. It really is amazing.
We have more peace. More time to think. More time to enjoy life. It’s fabulous.
Practical tips
If you want to take the challenge, you’ll find you need to be extremely efficient when you’re working. Here are some tips to help you out:
Avoid using instant messaging: It’s a constant source of distraction.
Only check your e-mail twice a day: The surest way to waste time is the ol’ Send and Receive button.
Stick to what matters: Take care of the most important stuff first. Don’t waste time on low-priority stuff. (In fact, delete the low priority stuff from your to-do list. It’s not going to get done anyway!).
Ask for alone time: If you need uninterrupted time to get something done, politely notify your co-workers that you’ll be unavailable for a couple of hours.
Limit blog-reading time: Set a time limit on your blog reading. If you don’t get through all your blogs in that amount of time, hit the trusty “Mark All as Read” button and move on.
Make lists: Write a “to do” list for each day (on paper if you can bear to tear yourself away from Outlook). Put the time-sensitive stuff at the top and be realistic. Choose three time-intensive things to do and five quick things to do. Make sure you finish all of them before you leave in the evening.
Restrict meetings: If you can, restrict the amount of meetings you call, or are involved in. Meetings drag on and can eat into your day. Instead aim for one or two meetings per week and plan them carefully to ensure you cover all important topics and keep on track.
Why it matters
So why is it important to work less? What’s the big deal?
The reason is that when you work less, it gives you more time to experience life and think; you can use the extra time to not only spend with people you love, take up hobbies, or invest in causes you believe in, but also to have ideas. Some of our best ideas have come while driving, gardening, reading, or painting on the weekend.
But what if your job is something you enjoy? What’s the harm in working hard and long at it? Well, I can fully identify with this. I absolutely love running Carson Systems. It’s fun, challenging, rewarding and profitable. I often find it hard to work less because I love what I do.
Here’s the problem though: When I’m old, I won’t wish that I spent more time building web apps or organizing events. Spending time with people I loved or helping people is what will really have mattered to me. Working less gives you the time to do it and also rejuvenates the brain cells so that you can come back to your work with a fresh outlook. Variety is key.
Challenge the system
What this article is really about is encouraging you to challenge what society tells you to do. Is it written in stone somewhere that “Thou Shalt Work a 40 Hour Week”?
As the implications of globalization have come into IT business, the idea of what a company should be has changed. Not long ago they were institutions—buildings and factories with workers who drove to work in the morning and punched out at night.
Business models have become much more customer oriented since those days. It’s not about your company or your staff, or even your product—your business is about your customers and what they want. This shift in focus has led to many companies experimenting with different structures in order to discover how to meet their customer’s needs at the lowest cost and for the highest profit.
One of the most effective ways of doing so is outsourcing. Companies define their core competencies and then look to outside contractors to meet their other needs. System development, coding, call centre, printing, human resources—for every business function, there are other businesses that specialize in providing it. Microsoft now employs between 4,000 and 5,750 temporary and contract workers.
Benefits of Outsourcing
Outsourcing allows businesses to focus on their distinctive core competencies, the specialties that the business is based on and that help it achieve competitive advantage.
Because they are working within their specialties, companies that provide outsourced services can often work on a project in a faster, more efficient and more sustained way than an in house team could.
Outsourcing allows businesses to better asses future costs because the company providing the outsourced services must clearly estimate and propose costs.
Drawbacks of Outsourcing
Managers have much less control over products and services once they have been outsourced—you are placing trust in another company to meet your businesses needs.
Communication between your company and the contractor can be difficult. By transferring a function to a contractor you lose the ability to directly communicate your company’s goals and values.
Outsourcing can result in the loss of in-house and local jobs due to its ability to lower costs and improve efficiencies. This can, in turn, make your company dependant on contractors to survive.
How to Outsource Effectively Make sure that you have a contact person with your contractor that you can easily communicate with and who will be accountable to you.
Have the service or product you want outsourced as clearly defined as possible before you hand it over to contractors.
Make certain that you can draw from a pool of qualified contractors so that if you have problems with one you can find others to provide the services you need.
Mark, speaks about what possibly can be the end result of chasing a spam site or buying from a spammer. There is no single day when I open my mail account, where in I do not see spam mails… Find Top quality replica luxury watches, Massive Price Reduction, Broad Assortment Generics, Candy for the kids, Pharmacy’s , these are some of the mail subject you see very often.
Security Advisor, Mark takes you on an interesting World tour, while trying to find the earrings he ordered from one of the spammers.
Read the rest of the Operation Green Dot - Following the spam.
The bottom line? Buying from a spam site just isn’t worth the risk, no matter how good the deal seems.
The young entrepreneurs may seem to be in love with it, but a bit of bother for old entrepreneurs. There seems to be a generation gap over the investment options. But now it seems quite possible.
Youngsters are lapping up on technology as an investment option because it’s a matter of prestige for them, well an iPhone can do a ton of cool stuffs just like any other palm device… They feel that they want to be in par with their counterparts in possessing latest technology equipments. They obtain satisfaction irrespective of what old entrepreneurs say. Though it does sounds unusual, it is something which most of the young entrepreneurs do. This is not a new trend.
The technology products which are mostly preferred include wireless and mobile devices. More than half of the respondents consider it as a necessity for their business growth, no matter what other say. The least preferred technology gadgets include notebooks, PC’s and software’s, the survey stated. One third of respondents depended on the internet access for their business, and in such cases it makes it more reasonable to posses, the latest technical advantage which will take their business to the next level!!
