Msit Voice February, 2009

Vol : 1 Edtion : 3 February 2009

VOICE Men might be from Mars and women from Venus, but both require employability skills on corporate planet!!! In the recent times, employability skills have shot into prominence. The student community has certainly become aware of a variety of skill sets like technical skills, domain skills; soft skills that are required to be mastered before they venture into job market, but employability skills have become more important than ever in today’s business scenario. Competition in business terrain today is acutely fierce; growing more global professionals faster than competition is the mantra. The global work force today requires relevant and contextual knowledge which must be aligned with rapidly changing technologies, competitive shifts and changing demographics. The knowledge economy faces severe dearth of talents. A global executive survey in Nov 2007 reported by McKinsey Quarterly indicates that the top most industry trend affecting business is the intensification of competition for talent. With the demand for professionals spirally rising, world-wide pockets of talent deficiency and surpluses shall become the prime mover for business growth and success. The increasing workforce imbalance and their consequential impact on businesses, especially in the context of off-shore adaptation has been reported by NASSCOM and BCG Analysis, IDC. According to their prediction by 2015, while India, Pakistan, Mexico, Indonesia, Philippines show pockets of surpluses talent US, China, UK would face talent deficiency. But the moot question is ‘Is this talent employable?’ Its deploy-ability to business projects and services is a matter of concern. Industry may scream hoarse that the products from academia are woefully short of business expectations, that itself is a changing moving target, adapting freshers from colleges into business need focused learning facilitation to bridge the skill gaps and create talent that can be billable to projects. Numerous skill-gaps surveys have been undertaken and reported worldwide. While percentages may vary, indications and trends suggest critical deficiencies of academic produce in areas of: •

Domain Orientation

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Problem Solving & Analytical Abilities

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Cross-cultural etiquette & Communication

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Collaborative Efforts

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Life Skills & Positive attitude

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Left-Brained Focus: Creativity in other words

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Learning to learn, Learning to enjoy

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Quality consciousness

NASSCOM-CRISIL study predicted that employment avenues in India would rise to 9-10 million by FY200809. Woefully, only about 25% among the existing engineering students and 10-15% of general graduates are employable (McKinsey report 2005). Exhibit 1.1depicts the percent employability of professionals from various sectors across the globe. In the wake of the recent global meltdown and economic crisis, industry today requires an employable workforce as against a trainable workforce. In the long term, efforts must be made by academia-industry combine, to reduce fresher training in industry, for example in ITES, from a current average of 16 weeks to 1 week. The need of the hour is intensify and focus collaboration between industry and academia to bridge the skill gap and improve the quality and competencies of the workforce. It is not qualification alone that translates into employability; whilst qualification may constitute 40%, it is skills and attitude that constitute the remaining 60% of attributes for employable resource are necessary ingredients to transform the talent at college campuses into effective global professional leaders of tomorrow. -- Padmaja N

Not So Happy Prince Some days he was the bug. Some days he was the windshield. Today he finally knows which side his bread is buttered. With the recent tests between India and Australia creating the entire hullabaloo he presented a perfect appetizer before the start of of his final series - his declaration to finally retire from the game. He displayed the same qualities in the press conference that had once garnered him all the attention at the start of his career - exquisite timing and perfect placement. 4 years after his innocuous international debut at the Brisbane Cricket Ground, the Lord’s was where he began scripting a glorious career, albeit a dappled one, with a confident display of strokes. For a really long period the cricketing world had witnessed few of the most fluent and dominant shots through the offside. After winning 4 man-of-the-match awards at the Toronto Skating, Cricket and Curling Club against Pakistan there was a point when he seemed insuperable. Numbers were not lying too. He was the quickest to cross 7000, 8000 and 9000 runs in ODIs. Considering that he played in the same era as Sachin Tendulkar did these records were by no means meant to be sneezed at. He had a keen eye to spot balls that could be hit over mid-on and mid-wicket for huge sixes. His power combined with his flawless footwork made them look very easy. It was this shot making ability that made his ODI partnership with Sachin Tendulkar very destructive for they both were adept at changing gears when necessary. Together they demolished all records previously held by the legendary West Indian opening pair Gordon Greenidge and Desmond Haynes. But he was human. Although it took some time, turns out that he too had a chink in his armor. His vulnerability against short-pitched balls was a boon to bowlers from South Africa and Australia. Australians specially exploited this weakness in both forms of the game while South Africa conceded runs, in ODIs, at an average of 50.5 in stark contrast to his test average of 33.82 In the year 2000 he ascended to captaincy. He saw many a famous victory as a leader. In him India found a stalwart who bloomed with aggression guiding the team by wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was India’s most successful captain in the ODIs and tests until Rahul Dravid came along to fill his boots and dethroned him from the former. His most noteworthy achievement in the driver’s seat is undoubtedly steering the Indian cricket team into the World Cup 2003 finals.During this campaign he amassed 465 runs but his individual success was not largely recognized due to his 3 centuries, against minnows Kenya and Namibia, which ironically helped him equal Mark Waugh’s record of 3 centuries in a single world cup edition. Winning tests on foreign soil was never India’s forte. After the series victory against Bangladesh in 2000-2001 Indians seemed to be playing better away from the country than on home soil. It was his aggression that instilled in Team India a sense of self-belief and confidence. Controversy never got tired of his company. His notorious shirt removing act, in reply to Flintoff’s similar antics in India, purportedly spoiled the sanctity of Lord’s at the end of the Natwest Series 2002. So be it. The Lord’s needed some cleaning anyway. His altercation with Greg Chappell made him the butt of all jokes. His personal decline in the game during captaincy shows that cricket is still a game that carries with it more mental onus than physical. After an interlude he was again brought back in the Indian team but being constantly under the scanner of the selectors must have pulled the last straw. Enough was enough and he decided to call it quits Throughout his career he has been in the news for wrong reasons. He has always been shadowed by the controversies surrounding him. With careful observation on his cricketing life it would not be hard to notice that he has excelled in more than few aspects of this demanding game. When the man wants to end his story the least we could do is thank him for what he has done to Indian cricket than cursorily dismissing his wonderful contributions. Love him or hate him. You cannot ignore Sourav ChandidasGanguly. — VN Kalyan Prakash Dasika Ph: 9000010891

Demi-Godism or God’s VIP’s? The oldest and the most impractical school of thought is “All are equal in the eyes of God”. But at times this thought really troubles me if it is merely on paper and not in practice. In the early days depending on their caste and sect, people were either allowed or not allowed to enter the temples; this process has been done away with in the process of civilization. Now a new problem has arisen that is the problem of separate or VIP access to god. In the present day, people praying to god have increased manifold in order to overcome the trials and tribulations of life, so all the temples are thronging with people waiting in long queues to pray to god, some are taking the shortest and easiest route to pray by having special access to enter the sanctum directly. This is a practice which can be compared to the untouchability in earlier days and has to be eradicated because every religion preaches equality before God and there are no exceptions, even the kings were equal to the common man in the early days but nowadays if a person has power or if he knows someone who has power then they have a direct entrance, they are buying their way to god through power instead they should buy their way to god through faith and devotion then only will God recognize true devotion and faith, after all the inner character shines only in times of difficulty. People like politicians, public servants have been elected by the people and work for the people not for their own selfish reasons and by having this special or separate access they are further increasing the woes of common man who do not have all these special privileges. They might say that they have no time or that they might have very important work to do, if this is their answer then they should question themselves and think that god is present everywhere and they should visit only at their leisure and stop behaving like they are somebody special because without power they are even less than a hard working common man who does his job and has faith and true devotion coupled with dedication. —Krishna Chaitanya MSIT (I Year) JNTU. The Need for Software Engineering study Computers have been used for commercial purposes for the past fifty years. Initially, they were very slow and lacked sophistication. The computational power had increased ever since, while their prices have reduced drastically. These improvements resulted in the breakthrough of several new technologies. Hence, the more powerful a computer is the more complex programs it can run. Thus, with every aspect of improvement in the computers, software engineers have been tasked to solve larger and more complex problems and that too in cost-effective and efficient ways. Software engineers have admirably coped with this challenge by using their past experiences with a spice of innovation. All those past experiences and good programming skills have been systematically organized into a body of knowledge. This knowledge forms the foundation of Software Engineering principles. Hence, the discipline of Software Engineering deals with systematic and cost-effective software development approaches which were an offspring of lessons learnt from mistakes. One can view Software Engineering as an engineering approach to develop software. After all, an engineer is the person who makes things work. For instance, the early programmers used an exploratory programming style. In this approach, every programmer evolves his own software development techniques solely guided by his intuition, whims, and fancies. This style is the common technique normally adopted by all students who do not have exposure to Software Engineering principles. This exploratory programming style can be compared as an art—since, art is mostly guided by intuition. In modern software industry, programmers make use of esoteric knowledge. This style of software development can be compared to Craft which slowly emerged as a Software Engineering discipline.

The difference between Art, Craft and Engineering is shown in the figure below: Source: Fundamentals o f Software Engineering by Rajib Mall, Chapter 1, Section 1.1.1, Evolution of an Art to an Engineering Discipline Programs are developed by individuals for their personal use. They are, therefore, small in size and have limited functionality. Consider a scenario where a group of five people, with different skill sets have to write a program of sufficient complexity. Each person comes up with his way of approach. At any point of time, there arises a chance for conflicts between team members. There is nothing as wrong or faulty approach by anyone. All the persons have a solution for the problem. But, the optimum solution has to be chosen, keeping in view that it should be simple to understand and easy to reuse. Hence, the thought process of each team member has to be aligned with the other, such that the task can be done at the earliest, with quality. The study of Software Engineering helps in not only enhancing one’s program writing skills, but more than that. It stretches its wings to the unnoticed areas like quality assurance, team morale development etc. Software products, unlike programs cater multiple users and have a wider scope. They have good user-interface, proper users’ manuals, and good documentation support. Also, document writing doesn’t mean the use of excellent verbal skills. Each document must be consistent with the other and it should realize the target system being developed. Hence, a software product is systematically designed, carefully implemented, and thoroughly tested. In addition to program code, a software product contains the documents like Requirements specification document, the Design document, the Test document etc. Also, a software product is too large to be developed by an individual. It is developed by a group of individuals working in a team. By adopting a systematic development methodology, it would be easy for the individuals to interface each other’s work, produce a coherent set of documents etc. The exploratory development approach suffers when the program size increases. There would be an exponential growth in the perceived complexity and difficulty with the program size, if it has to be developed without decomposing it. Consequently, the time and effort required to develop a software product also grows exponentially. A major emphasis of every software design technique concerns how to effectively decompose a large program into manageable parts. Handling complexity in software development problems is the central theme of the Software Engineering discipline. Also, one would learn the techniques of software specification, user-interface development, testing, project management and so forth. Hence, the adherence to Software Engineering principles helps a person to achieve higher productivity at the same time enabling him/her to produce better quality programs. For this reason, Software Engineering is also referred as Systematic Exploratory Programming. —— S.A. Raghavendra Rao MSIT(II Year)

ICON : Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama was the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 3, 2005 until his resignation on November 16, 2008, following his election to the presidency. He was sworn into office on January 20, 2009 in an inaugural ceremony at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Mr. Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He worked as a community organizer, and practiced as a civil rights attorney in Chicago before serving three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. He also taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Obama was elected to the Senate in November 2004. Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. On February 10, 2007, Mr. Obama announced his candidacy for President of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois. The choice of the announcement site was symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic “House Divided” speech in 1858. Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain in the general election with 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173 and became the first African American to be elected President of the United States. In his victory speech, delivered before a crowd of hundreds of thousands of his supporters in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama proclaimed that “change has come to America”. With his black Kenyan father and white American mother, his upbringing in Honolulu and Jakarta, and his Ivy League education, Obama’s early life experiences differ markedly from those of African-American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in the civil rights movement. Echoing the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy, Obama acknowledged his youthful image in an October 2007 campaign speech, saying: “I wouldn’t be here if, time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation. A popular catch phrase distilled the concept: “Rosa (Rosa Parks) sat so Martin (Martin Luther King Jr.) could walk; Martin walked so Obama could run; Obama is running so our children can fly. With his mantra of change, Mr. Obama’s election has ushered in a change and a new hope of “Yes We Can”. The world will never be the same again……………..

AnandaSwarup MSIT IIIT (I Year)

Origin Of Words What is the origin of the word President? Why does America have a president, while Great Britain has a prime minister and Russia has a premier? What is the difference and how did it all get started? What happened to all the kings and queens who used to rule the world? And where did the word president come from? Dictionaries tell us that the word president originated from the Latin praesident-, praesidens, based on the present participle of praesidEre. Thus, a president is an official who presides over a body of people. That body could be a club or it could be a nation. The president occupies the role of authority over the body.

1. In the business world, a president is the chief office of an organization, like a corporation or institution.

2. In politics, a president is most often an elected official who presides over a republic, or a nation governed by the people. 3. In biblical times, when God selected the nation of Israel to be His chosen nation, His desire was for them to be a theocracy, governed by God’s law and then came the king who is later called the President. 4. The word president can also have a personal application, as in who presides over your life? Abet From the ancient sport of bear baiting, the English language has taken a violent word and applied it to men rather than to animals. Abet goes far back to an old Teutonic origin that conjures up a picture of hardy men going to the chase with their packs of hunting dogs. Bite English verb bite appeared long ago in a Low German derivative betan, meaning “to cause to bite”, “to make bite”; as, to make dogs bite the bear, and so to send them out to hunt the bear. —Anil MSIT (II Year)

Traditional Day, January 26 MSIT08 IIIT

Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web Past: The Dawn of an Age : The internet itself began as an attempt of the U.S. military to develop electronic networks back in the middle of the last century, but the foundations of the web as we know it were laid down in the late 1980s, when Tim Berners-Lee started work on the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The first web page appeared shortly thereafter, in August 1991, hosted on the first web server, which was located at the CERN scientific laboratory, on the border between France and Switzerland. It should be noted that before the World Wide Web, there already was a vast amount of communication and data transfer going on, but that was done using media like Usenet and FTP. Eventually, during the 1990s, the World Wide Web opened to the layman. This was due mostly to two developments: first, companies started to connect homes and offices to the net, and, second, networks and software evolved to a degree that allowed people to get online without too much hassle. In the next few years Graphic browsers improved and the introduction of CSS made better-looking and more complex pages possible. Another important development was that monitor resolutions went inexorably up, which was both a chance and a challenge for web designers: they were able to create larger, more captivating designs, but in the same time they had to plan for multiple monitor sizes — a designer’s dilemma, that is with us to this day. Multiple online publications appeared, and every self-respecting company and media outlet showed up online. In order to draw visitors. It is during that time when professional web design was born as a distinct profession; previously, in the early 1990s, web programmers were also the designers. Initially WebPages were static, and resembled online brochures. That quickly changed with JavaScript and Flash, as interactivity and multimedia made their way into web design. Server-side technologies, both proprietary and open source, lead to the separation of design and content, and the ability to store and visualize vast amounts of information on the web. Internet advertising, web hosting, and online stores quickly took off. Present Day: Web 2.0 : Web 2.0 was born in 2004. For years before the term was coined, the internet was divided into the precious few who had the technical skills to support a web page and publish online, and the vast majority that could only watch the gurus does their magic. Truth be told, the internet’s potential for collaboration and widespread user participation existed before Web 2.0 came along; thus, Web 2.0 is as much a matter of the right mindset as it is of technology. It is often stated that Slashdot was already Web 2.0 back in the 1990s. However, the fact that online collaboration has gone through the roof during the last couple of years is indisputable. One needs to look at sites like Orkut, Face book and MySpace to see just how much people love their online communities. Web 2.0 is user-submitted and moderated content; it is pastel colors, RSS, and Ajax applications; Web 2.0 is in Google Maps, India Maps, Blogs and many more. The bottom line is that a simple catch phrase, together with an accumulated momentum of improved user practices and technology, rekindled the interest in the World Wide Web, and today it is popular as never before. The Future: A Ubiquitous Medium for Work and Play :What does the future hold? With the advance of technologies and the growth of the user base, the World Wide Web is becoming an ever more critical component of today’s society. The enforcing of web standards and the improvement in technologies will lead to an even more accessible internet — in fact, it is possible that incompatibility issues will diminish drastically. As a rule, every new edition of the popular browsers gets them closer to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendations, and Google Chrome, Opera is already almost there. The rising popularity of mobile devices and RFID will bring the World Wide Web into the real world. Everything we do will be recorded somewhere online. The opposite trend is also evident: if World of War craft and Second Life are any indication, more people will transfer parts of their personal and business lives into virtual worlds, made possible by the web. Subsequently, government regulation of the internet will be an increasingly hot topic in the coming years.In the coming years, we are likely to see web applications that are equal in capabilities to those available on the desktop. The distinction between the personal PC and the internet will blur, but are not likely to disappear completely. The advances in software and the availability of various electronic devices will mean that everyone will be able to create vast amounts of content and share it online with the click of a button. This flood of people’s memories online will mean that further advances in search algorithms will be needed. --Phanindra