Canadian Scholarship Trust builds self-service portal (Nov. 12)
I write to correct an error in Neil Sutton’s recent ITBusiness.ca article, Canadian Scholarship Trust builds self-service portal.
In his article, Mr. Sutton includes York University in a list of universities that “”have expressed an interest in becoming a part of the service portal project. . . .””ÊThis is simply not true.Ê
I take it from the article that Gaby Andari, CSTF’s CIO, was the source of this information.Ê If this is the case, then Mr. Sutton has been misinformed.Ê As a matter of fact, in response to CSTF’s invitation to take part in their pilot project, I wrote to Mr. Peter Lewis, CSTF’s Vice-President of Plan Administration on February 26, 2003, notifying him that York University would not take part in the project.
Given this error, I can only wonder about the accuracy of CSTF’s claim that “”about a dozen universities”” have an interest in this project.
Louis R. Ariano
University Registrar
York University
Re: Hire learning (Oct. 28)
I liked your article but, I am one of those people who is finding it really difficult to get re-employed. Even though I am an old “”dinosaur”” mainframe programmer who used Cobol and Fortran, I have also been an operating system assembler programmer. And, while I am over 50, I have many tricks and gems of knowledge gained from my 30 years in the business that can still be applied, even though the network topology and hardware configurations have changed.
The sad part is, finding a paying job is the occupation that I am least skilled at. Once I am part of a company, I find ways to help them improve their operations. But I am very modest about it, and find it hard to give concrete examples that “”blow my horn.””
In spite of the extensive advice available on the Internet on how to improve my presentation, and my attempts to apply it to my circumstances, the unemployment continues.
Len Beecroft
Systems analyst
Red Deer, Alta.
Re: High Maintenance (Oct. 17)
Add the notion of convergence and it gets worse. When will someone’s Palm ignite a fire at a gas station?
Claude Bond
Re: Markham goes from in line to online (Oct. 12)
The Internet/electronic voting article is interesting, but what was the error rate? Were there false positives and false negatives in the vote? Was there a manual backup to the electronic voting so that the counts could be verified?
How do we know that the vote as electronically reported was correctly reflecting what the individuals who voted actually did? How is the electronic vote audited?
None of this was covered in the article, and it is the main problem observed in the U.S. with electronic voting. I believe that for a vote just had in Florida, they are referring to the issues/errors as Electronic Hanging Chad! While it is good to say it went well, we do not know that it really did, or that the vote was correctly documented and recorded.
R.S. (Bob) Heuman
Re: Markham goes from in line to online (Oct. 12)
Just curious, what happens if the system glitches? Since there is no real paper trail (unless Internet users do a Print Screen), how does one do a re-count?
Bea Sodero
Re: Markham goes from in line to online (Oct. 12)
You should also check out the folks at CanVote, who provided online and telephone voting for a number of municipalities east of Ottawa.
Dale Heins
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