Deb Perelman

Turing Award Recipient Discusses IBM, Then and Now

Frances E. Allen, a former math teacher who later went on to become IBMs first female fellow, this week became the first woman to receive the prestigious A.M. Turing Award. In an interview, Allen discusses her roots growing up on a farm, the role of women in technology and how shell spend her prize money. […]

Only Your Boss Hates March Madness

Can hardly wait the two weeks until March Madness kicks off? Your boss can. According to Websense, a San Diego based computer security company, the number of sports-related Web sites has grown 31 percent since March of last year, and the number of gambling Web sites has grown 56 percent, all of which leads to […]

Telecommuting’s Week and Weaknesses

Did you know this is Telecommuter Appreciation Week? In homage to the birthday of the telephone man himself, Alexander Graham Bell, on March 3, TAW runs from Feb. 25 to Mar. 3 this year and is designed to call attention to the “win-win” benefits that arise when workers commute–namely saved time, lower commuting expenses, reduced […]

Turing Award Anoints First Female Recipient

A woman has been named the honorary of the prestigious A.M. Turing Award, essentially the Nobel Prize of the computing industry, for the first time in its 41-year history. Given by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), which strives to advance computing as a science and a professions, the award is accompanied by a prize […]

Is Employer-Mandated Health Care Bad for Workers?

What American worker wouldn’t support a law that required each and every employer to provide health care for employees? Not many, most would argue; health care is painfully expensive without employers’ co-payments, and sometimes even with them. Yet, a study released Feb. 26 by two Harvard economists at the Employment Policies Institute might have people […]

The Coal-Job Growth Connection

Business energy costs and the pains of reducing them are probably not at the top of the mind of the average cubicle-dweller, but this could change if a clear connection is drawn between energy cost reduction and job growth, as in a study conducted by Management Information Systems, released Feb. 21. The study found that […]

A 40-Hour Work Week? How Quaint

“For many American knowledge workers, the 40-hour work week is as quaint a notion as the lunch hour,” said Tim Fitzpatrick, a Lexmark vice president, in response to his company’s findings that in the last five years, 61 percent of workers have added five hours to their 40-hour hour work weeks, and 8 percent work […]

Report: Offshoring to Have No Sudden Bad Effects

While offshore outsourcing is expected to affect wages and employment in developing countries, it wont have any sudden negative impact on developed countries economies, according to a report released Feb. 22 by the McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of the global management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company. The report “Sizing the Emerging Global Labor Market” attempts […]

Job Hunting Still Comes Down to Who You Know

Supporting the old adage that who you know often determines where you go, nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of managers said their company looked internally for job candidates before considering applicants from the outside, according to a survey released by Hudson, a staffing company, on Feb. 21. Yet, the survey makes it clear that this is […]

Word of Mouth: Full Employment

Federal Reserve Board Governor Susan Bies told an audience at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business this morning that the U.S. economy is “basically running at full employment.” Does this mean that the unemployment rate fell to zero percent over the long holiday weekend? Sadly, no. But it doesn’t mean that full employment isn’t its […]