The ruling came after Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a worker in the city's legislative office in Albany earlier this year after he saw the man playing a game of solitaire on his computer.

In his decision, Spooner wrote: "It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work."

He added: "For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes."

Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri's computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites.

Google, not surprisingly, is one of the best-known exponents. Every Google employee can create a blog and contribute to internal wikis. Social technologies play an essential role in keeping the creative juices flowing and also help Google keep track of its rapidly growing numbers of ideas, projects and employees.

The laid-back atmosphere of the Googleplex might seem light years away from the dark-suited City of London. But Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DKW), the investment bank, is also a believer in the brave new world of wikis and blogs.

"We recognised early on that these tools would allow us to collaborate more effectively than existing technologies," says JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at DKW.

More than 450 DKW employees have internal blogs and the bank has built an internal wiki with more than 2,000 pages which is used by a quarter of its workforce. After just six months, the traffic on the wiki exceeds that on the entire DKW intranet. Rangaswami says one of the most popular uses for the wiki is to create meeting agendas, a task fraught with political pitfalls. "Using wikis is much more participative and non-threatening, as people can see what other people have suggested."

Dr. Anna Fels, a New York-based psychiatrist and author of "Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives," published in 2004, said that while women's access to education at all levels has improved, their second-class citizenship often kicks in when they hit work.

Alfia Muzio, 23, who graduated from Columbia University in New York last spring, said that entering the work force can be "exciting and full of promise."

But she also said it can be lonely and intimidating. "The men at my office are totally inappropriate," she said. "They say things of a sexual nature, commenting on appearance in an unwelcome way using 'honey' or 'sweetie' instead of names. It gets very uncomfortable. One guy actually just got fired for sexual harassment. That kind of stuff would have never happened in college."

According to Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions statistics, women filed 85 percent of all sexual harassment charges in 2004.

The aerospace industry is loaded with workers from the baby boom generation who watched man’s first steps on the moon on live television. The average worker is 48, and experts are calling the impending wave of retirements a gathering storm.

Thousands of technical jobs will need to be filled by children now in school, and students are steering away from math- and science-based careers.

Former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who was lauded during a symposium luncheon Wednesday, is so concerned about the problem that he has penned two books aimed at turning children's eyes skyward.

"They may not reach for the moon, but I'm sure they'll reach for something," said Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon in 1969.

While the majority of employers do not require a minimum GPA to apply, grades matter for students coming out of college looking for a job, said William Hill, assistant dean of placement at Monmouth.

Companies in some industries put more weight on grades than others, though, headhunters and university career counselors say. And so-so grades don't necessarily spell doom.

"Generally the larger and more competitive and high-profile the organization, the more they will like to see a higher GPA," said Richard L. White, director of career services at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Certain fields such as science, mathematics or computer sciences may also emphasize GPA more than industries like communication, Ceravolo said.

"If you want to enter the actuary field, the company may more likely look at your GPA as an indicator than say if you're an English major applying for a writing or editing job," she said. "But if you're an English major with a 4.0 and nothing on your resume, then that won't help either."

Without the safety net of providing a revenue stream to the state, firehouses and the professionals they contain represent a special set of budget and human resource problems for the coffers of government funding.

According to San Francisco Firefighters Union Chief Hanley, when the budget axe comes down, it can put the fire department under a dangerous strain. "When it comes to budget cuts, they [lawmakers] look at the Fire Department. When we lose five firefighters, we can't do our jobs, because the number of calls we respond to doesn't change with budget cuts."

Then there is the very real possibility facing these men and women when they go to work that they might never come home again. In 2005, 106 firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. 48 firefighters died of heart attacks and 26 were killed in vehicle crashes during the same year. It is a life-and-death job that takes its toll on those who are left behind to continue on.

But this doesn't stop them from going back to work and taking that chance, year after year. Nor budget cuts or the promise of fatal danger can hold back a firefighter who knows they are needed.