If the supplied statistics are to be believed, only one-quarter of the 400,000 engineers graduated from India's universities and colleges are deemed employable, because they lack the people skills necessary to work well with other team members locally and around the world.

That's not my assessment, but rather the assertion of Dale Carnegie Training, the New York-based firm that is the legacy of the granddaddy of self-help authors. The firm says it's helping some engineers there to become the kind of job candidates people want. They're doing this, a news release states, at Bangalore's newly opened Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School.

"Technical proficiency and academic qualifications aren't enough to get a job," the announcement quotes Pallavi Jha, managing director of Walchand PeopleFirst, India's leading personal development organization. "To be employable, graduates need to meet the recruitment requirements of today's global corporations with presences
in Bangalore (corporations [such as] Sun Microsystems, IBM, Texas Instruments, and General Electric) and yet these skills aren't taught within India's formal education system."

According to the Carnegie firm, "The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School offers 16 weeks of intensive classroom instruction, followed by eight weeks of industry internship placement. The first class began in October 2007 and upon its completion, the school will impart 3,000 'newly employable' professionals in the information technology arena … professionals with world-class business skills and what they hope will someday be a six figure earning potential." (Presumably, that's
six figures in U.S. dollars.)

The announcement states "the goal of The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School is to instill in its trainees the 'soft' psychometric and behavioral skills they must acquire in order to move past the interview stage, such as a demonstrated ability to lead and engage team members as well as a demonstrated ability to build both internal and external business relationships."

According to Peter Handal, president, chairman and chief executive officer of Dale Carnegie Training, the firm "formulated ... [the] Finishing School's curriculum based on extensive research on Indian employability requirements as relayed by global IT industry leaders. With this knowledge, we designed the school to be interactive, experiential, and directed towards the development of skills necessary for corporate success in the global marketplace. In many ways, I guess you could say that The Walchand Dale Carnegie Finishing School is transforming Bangalore, India into a Silicon Valley-in-training."

Such training might be of benefit to other budding entrepreneurial islands around the world, perhaps.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

Identity theft, or any of its variants, is no fun, and I'm sitting here wondering how my debit card number got pinched, and why someone, somewhere, is trying to join Match.com, the online dating service, with that number. My upset is compounded by the fact that (a) I'm not looking for online romance and (b) neither is my wife of 25 years. (She told me so, and I believe her.)

My bank, which shall remain nameless in this case for obvious reasons, was of little help other than supplying a telephone number for Match.com's "international billing operation" in Dallas, Texas. That was good, except that on calling the number, one is greeted by an automated call director and is then asked to leave one's name and e-mail address for a response. A call to the firm's main billing department yielded a clerk who said they couldn't access the "international billing records" and insisted that "englishsupport.isupport.match.com" was an e-mail address. Not once, but three times, and this from someone at an
online company
, sports fans. A transfer to her supervisor got me the correct e-mail address. I dashed off a rather sharp e-mail, with a copy to the firm's media relations team (live people don't answer those phones, either) and a promise to blog about all of this.

It would seem the e-mail did the trick: Within 90 minutes, I received a call from a rather apologetic Match.com-er who explained that since the firm operates Web sites in 16 different languages, they can't keep a multilingual staff at the ready. Fair enough, I suppose, but I pressed "1" for "English" when calling. But I digress.

The gentleman who called said there was some apparent credit card fraud, they didn't know how it happened, and I should embark on the odyssey of getting a new debit card. Oh, and Match.com will reverse any charges on the cards and pending authorizations will drop off in a week to 10 days, maximum. (To their credit, Match.com apparently figured out this was a fraudulent use, although, apparently, not soon enough to stop the authorizations. UPDATE: I just logged on to the bank Web site and found not one, but two charges, which, a second call to the nice Match.com person revealed, have already been reversed. The whole affair, if you'll pardon that word, may cost me 92 cents in international transaction fees, though.)Woo-hoo. Switching cards is a major, major hassle that I could, frankly, live without.

I'm still not sure how my card number got out I'm pretty careful about these things; in fact, I believe I'm
very
careful. Yet thieves are more diligent and cunning than the rest of us, it seems, and as a result there is cause to worry. I'm adding "online security" to my to-do list of things to write about, and you'll see the answers in this space or

this one.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Match.com is in need of some customer-service enhancement. Perhaps their owners at

IAC/InterActive Corp.
in New York can get on the ball and make something happen. As I said to the Match.com-er, just imagine the reaction of a less tech-involved "victim," not to mention what they'd tell their friends, family, coworkers, the people at Dunkin' Donuts, and anywhere else. Bad buzz is anathema, even more so in the online world.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

Known as the "architect" behind two election wins by President George W. Bush and now a Fox News contributor, Karl Rove is, it seems, embarking on a new career: promoter of Apple Inc.'s MacBook Air, the ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-portable notebook computer, whose price starts at around $1,800.

Thanks to the folks at The Unofficial Apple Weblog and their post about MacBook Air computers being used on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" election night coverage, I found a link to this video clip from FNC, in which correspondent Brian Wilson (one of the very nice on-air types there) is chatting with Mr. Rove and others about Mr. Rove's new computer — "the coolest one on the set," Mr. Wilson said, or words to that effect.

Apparently, Robert Novak was having some tech problems with, presumably, a Windows-based PC. Our hearts go out to Mr. Novak, himself a very gracious gentleman, despite the sobriquet by which he is widely known.

In the video, we see that Mr. Rove, apparently, leaves the "dock" of program icons permanently "up." He may prefer that or may not know that by selecting "Dock" from the Apple menu, users can "turn hiding on," freeing up more screen real estate when using programs.

Then again, for someone who apparently has one of the best organized garage spaces in the metropolitan area, I suspect Mr. Rove, who organized two election campaigns quite well, has done the same for his new computer.

Of course, there's a slight political irony here: both Mr. Rove and Rush Limbaugh are Mac users, and the fellow both Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Rove opposed (in different spheres) in 2000, former Vice President Al Gore, is a member of Apple Inc.'s board of directors.

— Mark Kellner, The Washington Times

Anyone with an interest in history will welcome this news from the Library of Congress. The rest of us can start clearing out attics, perhaps:

More than 79,000 newly digitized newspaper pages, along with several new site features, have recently been added to the Chronicling America Web site. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 500,000 digitized newspaper pages, dating primarily from 1900 to 1910, and representing 61 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NDNP is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of public-domain U.S. newspapers with select digitization of historic pages, as well as information about newspapers from 1690 to the present. Supported by NEH's "We the People" program, this rich digital resource will continue to be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.

New features in Chronicling America include:


𔄤 "See All Available Newspapers" page — A list of all newspapers with pages available on the site.

𔄤 RSS feed and E-mail Update service — Users can subscribe to Real Simple Syndication (RSS) updates or e-mail delivery (see list under Topics/Newspapers and Journalism). Updates will include notices of added content and other points of interest.

𔄤 Newly available content includes pages from the Hopkinsville Kentuckian and Liberty, both published in Kentucky (and including coverage of the assassination of William Goebel in 1900, the only state governor ever to be killed in office); additions to The Times Dispatch (Richmond, Va.), New York Tribune (New York, N.Y.); Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City) and others.

Highlights of content available in Chronicling America include:

𔄤 News of original discovery of the historic "Waldseemuller Map" of 1507. (Here's more information about this map and the Library's acquisition.)

𔄤 The assassination of President McKinley in 1901

𔄤 The San Francisco earthquake of 1906

𔄤 The construction of the Panama Canal

Ultimately, during the next 20 years, NDNP will create a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 from all the states and U.S. territories. Also on the Web site, an accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information directs users to newspaper titles in all types of formats. The information in the directory was created through an earlier NEH initiative: the United States Newspaper Program. The Library of Congress is also digitizing and contributing to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership.

In all seriousness, this is valuable, important stuff that will help many people — students, scholars, historians, nonfiction writers, novelists and future "Jeopardy!" contestants. It's good to have it online, and one can only hope for more to be added to the archive.

— Mark A. Kellner, The Washington Times