Careers & Education

Feb. 6 marked the first Stop Commuting Day in Barrie, Ont. A bedroom community about 100 kilometres north of Toronto, Barrie was chosen by SuiteWorks Inc. as the site of its first telework centre, a 2,200 square-foot, 120-seat facility that will offer Barrie's 31,500 commuters a local workplace alternative.

Two laid-off U.S. workers recently testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee that they were fired by IT companies and replaced with cheaper labour brought to the U.S. under a worker visa program designed to fill jobs needing special skills.

And you thought you were actually interviewing for a job

After a tragic incident, you almost always hear the same reactions from the neighbours. "He was a bit strange, but he was an amiable guy," one will say to the media. Or, "He looked average," says another, perhaps a resident in the same apartment building. "You'd say hi. He'd say hi. But he wasn't very outgoing."

Dr. Michael McIntyre is an industrial psychologist at the University of Tennessee's College of Business Administration, where he specializes in developing preemployment personality tests. To help companies screen potential employees for aggressive and antisocial tendencies, McIntyre has developed a tool called the Conditional Reasoning Test of Aggression (CRTA).

No company is completely impervious to troubled employees, but workplace violence experts agree that companies could be doing a much better job of weeding out the bad seeds.

The University of Alberta and researchers in Western Canada will be able to expand their grid computing efforts thanks to a recent agreement that will see computer firm Silicon Graphics Inc. and the Government of Alberta pump over $500,000 in cash and equipment into the school's grid projects.

Good news for India's programmers: more rupees all around.