A current article in the WSJ (unfortunately pay-protected) discusses the fact that "the [hiring] process has been slowing down as candidates go through more interviews, more screenings, more tests." A few key points from that article:
• "research ... shows that the rise [in hiring time] has occurred across industries, regions and firms of different sizes."
• "as the economy shifts to more-skilled and less-routine jobs, the hiring process will naturally get more complicated."
• "Since 2001, all the net job growth in the U.S economy has come from nonroutine jobs, [excluding] rules-based tasks, such as factory workers, forklift operators, bookkeepers or secretaries. Nonroutine jobs include occupations from janitors and home health aides to computer programming or financial analysis."
Credits-
Wall Street Journal: "Seen That Job Listing for a While? It’s No Coincidence"
By Josh Zumbrun
Updated June 18, 2015
Comments
By Josh Zumbrun from WSJ. Always leave it to the Linkster to come through for you !
Regards,
Ted
http://www.wsj.com/articles/seen-that-job-listing-for-a-while-its-no-coincidence-1434667304
Quantum computers A little bit, better
From the print edition: Science and technology The Economist
After decades languishing in the laboratory, quantum computers are attracting commercial interest
Harnessing that power is, nevertheless, hard. Quantum computers require special algorithms to exploit their special
characteristics. Such algorithms break problems into parts that, as they are run through the ensemble of qubits, sum up the
various probabilities of each qubit’s value to arrive at the most likely answer.
Quantum computers are not better than classical ones at everything. They will not, for example, download web pages any
faster or improve the graphics of computer games. But they would be able to handle problems of image and speech recognition,
and real-time language translation. They should also be well suited to the challenges of the big-data era, neatly extracting
wisdom from the screeds of messy information generated by sensors, medical records and stockmarkets. For the firm that
makes one, riches await.
The leading candidate at the moment, though, is to use a superconductor in which the qubit is either the direction of a
circulating current, or the presence or absence of an electric charge. Both Google and IBM are banking on this approach. It has
the advantage that superconducting qubits can be arranged on semiconductor chips of the sort used in existing computers..
Those backing photon qubits argue that their runner will be easy to commercialise, too. As one of their number, Jeremy
O’Brien of Bristol University, in England, observes, the computer industry is making more and more use of photons rather than
electrons in its conventional products. Quantum computing can take advantage of that—a fact that has not escaped HewlettPackard,
which is already expert in shuttling data encoded in light between data centres.
Jun 20th 2015 | From the print edition
http://www.economist.com/node/21654566/print
Or
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21654566-after-decades-languishing-laboratory-quantum-computers-are-attracting