"Give me a firm place to stand and I will move the earth."

- - Archimedes (287-212 BC)

While the economic downturn has brought layoffs and uncertainty to many technology sectors, prospects remain bright for Web professionals. In an environment where companies are relying increasingly on their websites to sell products and services, such professionals are reporting no scarcity of work. The field has become increasingly specialized. In the past, companies hired HTML coders and Web designers to help them carry out their on-line strategies. Today, companies need designers who understand Web 2.0 fundamentals, and usability experts capable of designing wire-frames and prototypes, and communicating with software engineers. Of the employers and recruiters surveyed, 27% said they planned to hire Web professionals this year. 21% said they weren't sure of their hiring plans, and only 7% said they planned layoffs in this area. While the expectations of employers and employees were aligned when it came to pay and benefits, the survey uncovered gaps when it came to training and flexible hours. Because the field is changing so rapidly, training and certification are extremely important for Web professionals.

Back in the day, those who wrote software applications in the business space were called programmers. It was simple to understand what the work was at a particular level. But over time, the title evolved to Programmer Analysts I, II, or III. Today we have software developers, engineers, and fairly recently, architects. Software architect is one of those new titles we see today in the corporate spacea symbolic renaming of systems engineering skills. The point is, regardless of title, the role of a software engineer is what it has always been: systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable.

Manju Singh, P Bhanu Prasad and Pawan Kapur in their paper, "Object-Oriented Designing and Implementation of a System for Mushroom Cultivation", have elaborated the use of some of the object-oriented facilities such as different modes of inheritance and function calls in the application, along with a brief description of the system for mushroom cultivation.

In the second article, "A New ISODATA Algorithm", S Sampath and V S Vaidyanathan have developed a new ISODATA algorithm that makes use of coefficient of variation in the cluster formation process.

N Balaji, N Ramaraj, M Sridhar and R Sai Giridhar in their paper, "Distribution of Jobs and Evaluation Factors of Computational Grid Systems with Mac OS", have described the grid formed by them, the applications tested, the factors used and finally the results in the form of graphs.

B Tirimula Rao, K Venkat Rao, G Kiran Swathi, G Pruthvi Shanthi and J Sree Durga in their paper, "A Novel Approach to Image Edge Enhancement Using Smoothing Filters", have proposed a new idea for edge enhancement using smoothing techniques.

Sunil Kumar Kashyap, Birendra Kumar Sharma and Amitabh Banerjee in their paper, "A New Theory of Cryptography on Discrete Logarithm Problem Under Definite Integral Calculus", have introduced cryptography in the theory of discrete logarithm problem under the definite integral calculus in the multiplicative group of the finite field. This is the first work in the cryptographic field, they claimed, where they found the mathematical relationship between the discreteness and continuous mathematics.

In the sixth article, "Experiments on Clustering and Multi-Document Summarization", Maruthamuthu, Maheedharan, Kirubakaran and Shanmugasundaram Hariharan have proposed a novel framework for clustering the documents that are domain-independent. The paper also investigates the optimal threshold that can cluster the documents effectively.

Samar Sen Sarma, Saptarshi Naskar, Krishnendu Basuli and Raju Halder in their Research Note, "The Obscure History of Graph", have tried to show how graphs have served science in many ways during the two centuries that they have been in existence. Rather than looking for a single graphical method, they advise, we need to recognize the enormous flexibility that this new scientific tool has given us and the great ingenuity of those engineers and scientists who use it.

- - CRK Prasad
Consulting Editor