Loyalty?

Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

As a manager through this boom and bust who was around for the previous boom and bust, I’ve had to lay off (the polite term for fire) dozens of employees. There are many strategies to learn how to deal with this – the one I find most effective is depersonalizing the terms used. Employee becomes a resource – firing becomes “let go” or downsized.

Some of these are no-brainers, the employee that sits in the corner not doing anything or is in a position that they cannot succeed at whose only reaction to being let go is relief. Some of these are the social lifeblood of the company – long term employees whose only fault that they are not current is that they’ve been too busy for some many years just “getting it done”. It’s this last group that is always the hardest to make it through the exit interview (more feel good lexicon).
Is it a wonder that “sorry – it’s just business” sounds so hollow and has resulted in a workforce that largely has no allegiance except to themselves. A great majority of companies like to expound on the reality that they are all just a large, extended family -- if you accept the incongruity that like the Inuit, our company puts our family out on ice flows when the going gets tough.

In today’s marketplace, our employees are all networked together. Is it a wonder that with all those publically available profiles, employee poaching is not going on or that employees are targeting employers that they want to work with? Like the early BBS’s of the early internet – if the information is available more lasting connections can be made but with that comes the danger of empowering our employees to make better decisions.

The quickest job decision I ever made was over MSN. An old contact reached out, read what I was doing since I worked with them and offered me a job on the spot.

While anecdotal studies point to people spending more time at jobs that last only a short time – research from Burgess and Rees show a different landscape with only a small change in average job duration values taken from the 70’s and 90’s. In fact, the trend that was most apparent was in weakening markets (’79-’83), average job length seems to increase.

So is loyalty to our employers gone? No – it’s just changed. Gone are the days of a single job and a single employer for life. Enter the new reality which places employee and employer on a level playing field with both looking for that elusive loyalty.

Browser Penetration

Browser stats have been updated for February here. As a breakdown IE7 is losing ground to IE8 (.2 percent up and down) while Firefox continues to grab marketshare - mostly at the expense of Opera (trending downward).

When will the day come when we can stop supporting IE6? For the Norwegians it seems that now is the time as several large properties are actively telling users to upgrade.

Why does Nicotine bind in the brain but not muscle?

Nicotine should kills us quicker than smoking a pack a day for 20 years. The fact is, it binds to receptors in the brain but not to those same receptors in muscle tissue which would cause immediate and lethal muscle contractions. Caltech has found that there is a small change in the acetylene receptor in our muscle tissue that doesn't allow this to happen.

Study gives more proof that intelligence is largely inherited

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience Feb. 18, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Genes appear to influence intelligence by determining how well nerve axons are encased in myelin — the fatty sheath of "insulation" that coats our axons and allows for fast signaling bursts in our brains. The thicker the myelin, the faster the nerve impulses.

Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP)

Giving a new dimension to the internet, the Indian research arm of the US-based IT giant IBM has developed a technology that will allow users to talk to the web and create voice sites using mobile phones.

SQA Methodologies

In large, complex applications, such as operating systems, it is practically impossible to iron out every single bug before releasing it both from a difficulty point of view and due to time constraints. Different software applications require different approaches when it comes to testing, but some of the most common tasks in software QA include:

• PPQA audits: Process and Product Quality Assurance is the activity of ensuring that the process and work product conform to the agreed upon process.
• Validation testing: Validation testing is the act of entering data that the tester knows to be erroneous into an application. For instance, typing "Hello" into an edit box that is expecting to receive a numeric entry.
• Data comparison: Comparing the output of an application with specific parameters to a previously created set of data with the same parameters that is known to be accurate.
• Stress testing: A stress test is when the software is used as heavily as possible for a period of time to see whether it copes with high levels of load. Often used for server software that will have multiple users connected to it simultaneously. Also known as Destruction testing. Fault injection is especially useful for any software system with exposed interfaces, e.g., protocol implementations.
• Conformance testing: Confirms that the software implementation complies with established standards.
• Load testing: Establishes the maximum amount of traffic that a target can accept.
• Usability testing: Confirms that the software solution is "user-friendly" enough.
• Robustness testing: Software systems are presented with invalid or unexpected inputs to determine whether they have robust error-handling or input validation. Such systems pass the test(s) if they can tolerate a wide variety of invalid or unexpected inputs across the entire protocol interface specification.

The unexpected is a key to human learning

The human brain's sensitivity to unexpected outcomes plays a fundamental role in the ability to adapt and learn new behaviors, according to a new study by a team of psychologists and neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania.

Using a computer-based card game and microelectrodes to observe neuronal activity of the brain, the Penn study, published this week in the journal Science, suggests that neurons in the human substantia nigra, or SN, play a central role in reward-based learning, modulating learning based on the discrepancy between the expected and the realized outcome.