…what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics ”” anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people ”” people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day ”” more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer?

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When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza….

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The South Carolina baseball program permanently etched its name into the College World Series history book Tuesday night.

With a 5-2 victory over Florida behind the stellar pitching of junior left-hander Michael Roth, the Gamecocks won their second consecutive NCAA championship, becoming the sixth program to repeat as national title holders along with Texas, Southern Cal, Stanford, LSU and Oregon State.

“Like the (CWS) motto says, ”˜History happens here,’ and that’s what we did. We made some history,” Roth said.

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South Carolina’s incredible baseball season continued Monday with a game so unlikely that it made the Disney movie “Angels in the Outfield” seem plausible.

The Gamecocks won 2-1 in 11 innings over SEC rival Florida in Game 1 of the CWS championship series at TD Ameritrade Park to put themselves one victory from a second consecutive NCAA championship.

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I’ve been writing in this blog about living out our faith in the context of our work and academics. [Lesslie] Newbigin calls us to learn to do this from the starting point of God’s new creation in Christ which means we will view the world differently than from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment project. That was about objectivity, efficiency, calculations, technology, and cost benefit assessments that all too often has had the effect of marginalizing or oppressing actual people. As Christians, we know that pursuing those values alone can’t be the best way to operate.

Evelyn Lai, a May 2011 alumna from the Yale School of Nursing, gave the student commencement address to her class. In it, I think she models at least one dimension of what pursuing that profession from the perspective of God’s new creation is like. In so doing, she also sets an example that others of us can follow in our disciplines as well….

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The South Carolina baseball team keeps finding improbable ways to win games in the College World Series.

Thanks to two throwing errors by Virginia pitcher Cody Winiarski on consecutive bunts in the 13th inning, the Gamecocks won a dramatic 3-2 victory over top seed Virginia Friday night at TD Ameritrade Park to advance to the national championship series.

One season after defeating UCLA to win the NCAA title, the Gamecocks (53-14) will attempt to repeat against SEC rival Florida (53-17) in a best-of-three series that begins Monday at 8 p.m.

I went to bed after the bottom of the 11th–ugh. Read it all.

JAKARTA, Indonesia ”” The bang of a ceremonial gong opens festivities in a cavernous downtown office building here, where representatives from 56 U.S. colleges stand ready to peddle their wares.

The University of Cincinnati passes out pennants. At a booth for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, three young Indonesians talk up their alma mater. And U.S. Embassy officials tout the 95% approval rate in Indonesia for student visas.

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How About that University of South Carolina Baseball Team?

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…McIlroy definitely put an exclamation point on the topic when he strode to the No. 10 tee at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md. He had a nine-shot lead, disaster long left in his wake, but this marked the same spot in the tournament where McIlroy came unglued in the Masters last April. That 10th hole featured a drive McIlroy hooked so far left it landed in somebody’s yard. This No. 10 is a devilish par-3 that has swallowed unsuspecting players.

McIlroy stepped up and dropped his tee shot so gently uphill from the hole that it rolled teasingly toward the cup. It came to rest only inches from a hole in one, McIlroy grinning at it all the way…

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STUCK from Joe Ayala on Vimeo.

Goshen College will no longer play The Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events, school leaders announced, reversing last year’s decision to allow the use of the national anthem for the first time in the Mennonite college’s history.

Some Mennonites had criticized the anthem’s lyrics as glorifying war and offensive to the school’s pacifist traditions. Goshen’s Board of Directors said many felt the school’s “allegiance should be to Christ rather than to country.”

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More than $470 million in new money poured into major-college athletics programs last year, boosting spending on sports even as many of the parent universities struggled with budget reductions during tough economic times, a USA TODAY analysis has found.

Much of the rise in athletics revenue came from an escalation in money generated through multimedia rights deals, donations and ticket receipts, but schools also continued increasing their subsidies from student fees and institutional funds.

Altogether in 2010, about $2 billion in subsidies went to athletics at the 218 public schools that have been in the NCAA’s Division I over the past five years. Those subsidies grew by an inflation-adjusted 3% in 2010. They have grown by 28% since 2006 and account for $1 of every $3 spent on athletics.

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…I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the “Nicomachean Ethics” that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you “must have been brought up in good habits.” The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.

“Virtue,” Aristotle concludes, “makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.” If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.

I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

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The Anglican Church is making a radical bid for new recruits by holding Sunday services in a city cinema.

Evangelical Christian churches started the trend to hold services at movie theatres at Chadstone, Northland and Eastland.

And now a mainstream church is ”bringing the church to the people” by offering teenagers and young adults a Sunday morning choice – Hangover 2 or the word of God at Hoyts in Melbourne Central.

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Congratulations to them.

Perhaps it is because both my parents were teachers, but this is my favorite scene from the movie. Watch it all–KSH. (It ties in with the finale as those of you who know the movie well know; it can be found here).

The financial crisis and the slow recovery from it has obviously had a dramatic impact on the financial decisions made by American families. Many now have fewer financial resources and limited options. The pace and timing of their saving and investing life cycle has also been disrupted….

In addition, starting salaries for recent college graduates have also declined, which means that young Americans who are employed will have fewer resources for saving and investing than their predecessors. Young people are living with their parents longer, which helps conserve their limited resources but likely places a strain on their parents’ budgets.

Also troubling is research showing that many consumers who should be saving for retirement instead have been forced to take hardship withdrawals from their 401(k) plans….

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For more than 800 years, the University of Oxford has led the world in the study of the divine. For centuries, it has sat alongside Cambridge as the leading centre for the study of the Bible.

Now academics are considering a proposal to rebrand theology at Oxford as “religious studies” because of the growing demand from students who wish to study Islam, Hinduism and Judaism as well as Christianity.

The requirement to have an A level in religious studies to study religion at Oxford is also to be dropped.

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Secularism is moving slowly in America, but the story of religious belief and practice here looks even more complex if one takes a long view. More than 60% of Americans belong to some formal religious body today. In the late 18th century, that number was less than 10%.

Any intellectually serious program in secular studies will avoid triumphalism and deal with the complexity of secularism’s history. It will know that the recent history of Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is not the history of all humanity. It will also acknowledge that there is not merely one variety of secularism””some secularists have strong beliefs in paranormal phenomena, which disgusts other secularists. A serious program will also acknowledge that some of the best work on secularism has been done by Christians, foremost among them the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor.

A few years down the line, how can we know that secular studies at Pitzer is living up to its promise? One sign: If some of its students come in as devout atheists or agnostics and leave as religious believers.

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The individual stories are familiar. The chemistry major tending bar. The classics major answering phones. The Italian studies major sweeping aisles at Wal-Mart.

Now evidence is emerging that the damage wrought by the sour economy is more widespread than just a few careers led astray or postponed. Even for college graduates ”” the people who were most protected from the slings and arrows of recession ”” the outlook is rather bleak.

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.

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Irish society is not just suffering from the sex abuse scandal but from a failure to pass on the faith to the younger generation, said the archbishop of Dublin.

“We have to completely, radically change the way we pass on the faith,” Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told Catholic News Service May 16. “Our parishes are not places where evangelization and catechesis are taking place.”

The archbishop traveled to Washington to present the Order of Malta Inaugural Lecture, “Faith and Service: the Unbreakable Bond.” During his speech and in remarks to CNS beforehand, he spoke of the declining practice of the faith in Dublin — 18 percent of Catholics regularly attend Sunday Mass — and of the need to give young people responsibility in the parish to reinvigorate them.

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The brutal job market brought on by the recession has been hard on everyone, but especially devastating on the youngest members of the labor force.

About 60% of recent graduates have not been able to find a full-time job in their chosen profession, according to job placement firm Adecco.

And for those just entering the workplace, a bout of long-term unemployment can affect their career plans for years to come.

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The word “cafeteria” just doesn’t cut it. The Bear’s Den in the South 40 dorm complex at Washington University is really more like a collection of high-end mini-restaurants, serving everything from fresh seafood to vegetarian.

And like the student body it serves, the Bear’s Den has become increasingly diverse, a place that needs to please more palates and ideologies.

So, early this year, when the campus’ Muslim Student Association approached the school’s food service provider, Bon Appetit, and asked it to provide halal options ”” food prepared in accordance with Islamic law ”” the company agreed. In April, with the Student Union’s support, the Bear’s Den launched a halal food service, making Washington University the first school in the state to offer halal food, according to organizers.

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If you’re a 20-something or even younger, your economic future is at best clouded. Your taxes will almost certainly be higher than today’s; your public services (schools, police, sanitation, defense, scientific research) will almost certainly be lower. Paying for old people, covering rising health costs, repairing dilapidated roads and servicing government pensions and the huge federal debt will squeeze take-home pay. Is there any hope for economic gains?

Well, yes ”” and from a surprising source. Housing. Say what?…

housing’s troubles may have a silver lining. If you’re a homeowner, the steep fall in prices is calamitous. But if you’re a future buyer, it’s a godsend. What we’re seeing is a massive wealth transfer from today’s older homeowners to tomorrow’s younger homeowners.

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Read it all–rah.

Speaking to The Church of England Newspaper about his retirement, announced last October, the Rt Rev Michael Scott-Joynt said that more work needed be done in encouraging young men and women away from well-paid City jobs to roles which society really needs, such as being a priest, teacher or nurse.

In addition, the Bishop said that in looking back on his years in General Synod and in the House of Lords he said he regretted much of the arguing about gender and sexuality issues but believed he was there for a purpose to defend a conservative position.

He also said the Church of England should not “slither off” and become like the majority of the US Episcopal Church, which would be the end of the Church of England.

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The events of 9/11 and the subsequent decade ”” including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, worldwide terror alerts, increased security at airports ”” have affected everything from dreams to fears of those who were under 18 in 2001. In many ways, analysts say, it’s sculpted a more politically aware and socially active generation.

“You’ve heard how baby ducks imprint on whoever raises them? Social scientists believe there’s an imprinting effect on young people when they get closer to the age to get involved politically, sometime prior to 18,” says Thomas Sander, who studies civic engagement at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. “So the hypothesis was that 9/11 was kind of an imprinting moment where young people realized their fates were much more interconnected then we’d been led to believe … and that international affairs are much more consequential than they were for their parents.”

Bin Laden “became a symbol for my generation. … He symbolized loss and grief and hatred, and that’s how many of us defined this era,” says Eric Dinenberg, 28, a business school student from Paramus, N.J., who was a freshman at George Washington University in September 2001.

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As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture””an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized….

[Indeed]…the skepticism is spreading, even among foot soldiers on the academic front lines. In March, “Professor X,” an anonymous English instructor at two middling northeastern colleges, published In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, an expansion of an Atlantic essay arguing that college has been dangerously oversold and that it borders on immoral to ask America’s youth to incur heavy debt for an education for which millions are simply ill-equipped. Professor X’s book came out on the heels of a Harvard Graduate School of Education report that made much the same point. The old policy cri de coeur “college for all,” the report argues, has proved inadequate; rather than shunting everyone into four-year colleges, we should place greater emphasis on vocational programs, internships, and workplace learning. Then, last month, a front-page article in the Times delivered striking news: Student-loan debt in the U.S. is approaching the trillion-dollar mark, outpacing credit-card debt for the first time in history. With all that debt, more and more are asking, what are we buying?

The millions around the world who will be watching the royal wedding tomorrow may not notice the wording of the promises Kate Middleton and Prince William make to each other. As with every other couple, each will be asked first if they will “love, comfort, honour and protect”¦” their spouse. The answer to this is “I will”. It will not be “I do”. We take it for granted that the bride and groom love each other on their wedding day, so there is no need to ask them if they do. It is what follows that counts.

At the outset, the couple is asked to make a commitment, an act of will, for the future. Theirs is a resolution to love, comfort, honour and protect, whatever the circumstances. Someone joked that love is blind, but marriage is a real eye-opener. There are bound to be times in the future when the romance thermometer will barely register a reading; those who have said “I will” and meant it, know only too well that feelings can wobble and are untrustworthy tests of authenticity, anyway. Long-lasting marriages rely on mutual understanding and forbearance. Maturity discards rose-tinted spectacles in favour of seeing things as they really are.

Discovering the depth and enduring meaning of love is the goal and prize of every relationship.

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The nation’s college-bound students are increasingly looking for green ”” and no, that doesn’t mean just money.

Green means eco-friendly, and 69% of college applicants this year say having information about a college’s commitment to environmental issues would contribute to their decision to apply to or attend the school, according to a survey of 8,200 students by The Princeton Review. That’s up from 64% in 2008.

Academic reputation and financial aid still matter most, but “the environmental factor (is) definitely one of the things that makes a difference,” says Tucker Johnson, 19, of Harrison, Maine, who was offered admission to nine schools and must commit to one by May 1. Like other students nationwide, he is visiting campuses this month with a checklist of criteria. Among them: a sincere commitment to sustainability.

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