Student Employment Gap in US for the Class of 2012

My company, Millennial Branding, partnered with Experience, Inc. to release a study  of 225 US employers called the Student Employment Gap. The study reveals information about employer skill requirements and sources of hire for the class of 2012. The findings were released this morning and I spoke to Jennifer Floren, the founder and CEO of Experience, Inc., about her impressions of them. Jennifer is also the author of The Innovation Generation, a speaker, and is on the board of Jobs for the Future. Experience, Inc.’s network consists of 3,800 universities, 100,000 employers, and over 8 million students and alumni.

What is your overall impression of the internship/entry-level job market? 

Generally, I believe the internship and entry-level markets are heating up in many ways.  More and more employers are realizing that they’re about to face a labor shortage as their Baby Boomer workforce retires, and the competition for up-and-coming talent is becoming stronger.  That said, there is still a significant difference between what employers need and what college students are prepared to contribute.  For entry-level talent that can demonstrate a go-getter attitude, strong communication skills, independent thinking and teamwork, there are many exciting options out there.

Based on the study, what skills do employers look for when hiring recent graduates?

It’s clear based on the data that employers truly value the so-called “soft skills”, such as analytical thinking and communication ability.  I think this speaks to the fact that specific on-the-job skills change, and they change more quickly these days than ever before.  As a result, employers are looking for raw material — talent that they can work with and develop, people who can adapt to changes over time.

Why do you think that employers are still using job boards over social networking sites when recruiting?

Employers use what works.  Although more and more hiring is happening on social networks, employers still want to make sure they are casting a wide net to access talent everywhere possible.  As the world has become more online and social in general, the talent pool has become more fragmented — there are so many sites and channels and platforms and communities being used these days that employers need to publish their opportunities in more venues to make sure they’re seen.

What stood out to you the most in the study?

To me, the most interesting thing about the study was the apparent communication disconnect between employers and entry-level talent.  Employers say they need soft skills… yet entry-level candidates often do not understand which classes are relevant for which career paths, or how to express their soft skills in ways employers understand and appreciate.  Employers say that relevant coursework is highly valuable, yet they rarely communicate their messages to younger students — so how are students supposed to know which courses to take?  If the message of what employers need isn’t getting to a younger audience, then our talent pipeline isn’t going to be well-prepared when it comes time to enter the working world!

What are your top three pieces of advice for college seniors right now?

My top three pieces of advice are simple:  get involved, build relationships, and find inspiration.  Getting involved can include building your resume with internships are — but ANY form of experience is what employers are looking for (it doesn’t have to be an official “internship” per se).  When considering entry-level talent, employers look at your past experiences for demonstration of your ambition, your interests, your skills and aptitudes, etc.  Class projects, student government, volunteering, even being active within your church or family — any experience can showcase how you can contribute to an employer…so get out there and get involved!  Second, build relationships.

All hiring is personal — and whether you meet your future hiring manager or a mentor who can help make introductions that get you in the door, ‘who you know’ can make a big difference.  Introduce yourself and stay connected — relationships make a big difference.  And finally, find inspiration.  Loving what you do will give you the passion to be successful, resilient, persistent and optimistic — and finding what brings you true passion is a process.  So try things out, explore!  Youth is a time of discovery, and no one expects you to have all the answers yet — use your time to sample different organizations, areas of study, types of jobs or projects – you’ll hone in on what really gets you excited, and loving what you do is the ultimate success!

By Dan Schawbel, Forbes Contributor  Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm.  He is also the #1 international bestselling author of Me 2.0 and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. Subscribe to his updates at Facebook.com/DanSchawbel.
 
Related posts:
American mounting student loans a 'debt bomb' waiting to explode! Inside America’s Student Loan Bubble!
American Student Loan Debt: $1 Trillion and Counting
America, a "Generation of Sissies"
A "great haircut" for U.S. growth 

Dog attacks humans, it’s the owner, not the breed!

Ferocious debates notwithstanding, there are studies to show that almost every breed has been involved in fatal dog bites, and dogs that bite humans were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained.

IN a kopitiam in Subang Jaya, Selangor, two 30-something women were snarling at each other over dogs.

A woman, whose bark was probably (hopefully) worse than her bite, insisted that pit bulls should be banned in Malaysia while her canine-loving friend argued otherwise.

Both were in a ferocious discussion about a death in their neighbourhood.

And I thought: “Who let the dogs out?” 

On Tuesday morning, a 74-year-old man was mauled by a miniature bull terrier cross while jogging about 1km from his house in Subang Jaya.

The dog attacked Yip Sun Wah for almost four minutes, biting his neck and almost tearing of his left ear.

The Star reported that the owner, a 25-year-old accountant, bought the animal three months ago after her house was robbed.

Eavesdropping, I pretended to be fascinated with the condensation on my glass of iced white Ipoh coffee.

The woman whose bark was hopefully worse than her bite went on and on about how “fierce” dogs (i.e. Akita, Neapolitan Mastiff, American Bulldog, Dogo Argentino, Fila Brasileiro, Japanese Tosa and American Pit bull) were “killers on the loose”.

She supported the knee-jerk decision (in my opinion) by MPSJ (Subang Jaya Municipal Council) to immediately ban these dogs – classified as under the “big” category as predisposed to aggressive or dangerous behaviour.

Her friend, whose expression was that of a terrified Chihuahua, snarled back, calling the woman Mussolini for supporting a fascist move.

The dog-hating woman and MPSJ, I thought, were barking up the wrong tree.

I wanted to interject in the “dogfight”. But I didn’t as I was afriad the two rabid women would maul me.

Instead, I fired up my iPad to find an article which I read in the New Yorker, a weekly magazine, about a few years back that a violent dog was a reflection of its owner and not its breed.

It was written by the clever Malcolm Gladwell who has authored bestselling non-fiction books such as The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

A quick search on www.new yorker.com produced Gladwell’s article titled Troublemakers: What Pit Bulls Can Teach Us About Profiling, published on Feb 6, 2006.

Gladwell argued that the notion of a pit-bull menace rested on unstable generalisation.

Quoting Randall Lockwood, one of the United States’ leading dog bite experts, he wrote that Lockwood had seen virtually every breed involved in fatal dog bites.

“... including Pomeranians and everything else, except a beagle or a basset hound,” Lockwood said. “And there’s always one or two deaths attributable to malamutes or huskies, although you never hear people clamouring for a ban on those breeds.”

Gladwell also quoted a study that found dogs that bite humans were 2.8 times as likely to be chained as unchained.

“About 20% of the dogs involved in fatalities were chained at the time, and had a history of long-term chaining,” said Lockwood.

“Now, are they chained because they are aggressive or aggressive because they are chained? It’s a bit of both.

“These are animals that have not had an opportunity to become socialised to people. They don’t necessarily even know that children are small human beings. They tend to see them as prey.”

Gladwell continued: “The strongest connection of all, though, is between the trait of dog viciousness and certain kinds of dog owners. In about a quarter of fatal dog-bite cases, the dog owners were previously involved in illegal fighting.

“The dogs that bite people are, in many cases, socially isolated because their owners are socially isolated, and they are vicious because they have owners who want a vicious dog.

“The junk-yard German shepherd – which looks as if it would rip your throat out – and the German shepherd guide dog are the same breed. But they are not the same dog, because they have owners with different intentions.”

Lockwood said: “A fatal dog attack is not just a dog bite by a big or aggressive dog. It is usually a perfect storm of bad human-canine interactions – the wrong dog, the wrong background, the wrong history in the hands of the wrong person in the wrong environmental situation.”

If you think I’m a die-hard dog lover, I’m not.

When I was a 12-year-old, a dog (owned by a Catholic convent running Stella Maris primary school in Tanjung Aru, Sabah) bit the back of my left knee.

It was a local breed.

ONE MAN'S MEAT By PHILIP GOLINGAI

Related posts:

American Pit Bull Kills Jogger !
Pit bull Terrier, a restricted breed; Time to regulate pet shops!

The Great Malaysian Robbery?

PRESS ANNOUCEMENT BY SUARAM - EVERY MALAYSIAN MUST LISTEN TO THIS: 

 French prosecutors: Najib sought US$1bil for Perimekar

French public prosecutors probing shoddy deals in French-Malaysian arms deals found evidence that then-defence minister Najib Abdul Razak had sought US$1 billion (RM3 billion) for local company Perimekar from French shipmaker DCN's subsidiary DCNI.

According to prosecution papers revealed by NGO Suaram today, a fax shows that Najib had asked for the amount for Perimekar as a condition for a meeting with him on July 14, 2001.

The fax,dated June 1, 2001 was from Francois Dupont, the Malaysian representative for private company Thales Asia International, to one D Arnaud.

The document, one of 153 shown to Suaram, was seized by French police from the office of Henri Gide, an officer with Thales.

However, no copy of the fax was provided to media at the press conference today as Suaram said it is not allowed to take the documents out of France.

Instead, the NGO, which is pursuing a civil complaint against state-owned DCN for allegedly paying 114 million euros in defence kickbacks to Perimekar, provided media with notes from its French interpreter.

According to the notes, Dupont had in the fax detailed out the chronology of visits and future actions during a visit to Malaysia, including details of “negotiation meetings with the Ministry of Defence and the management members of Perimekar”.

“(In the negotiations) two contract proposals would be mentioned (from DCNI to Perimekar as well as between Perimekar and the Malaysian government).

“(Dupont) finally indicated a meeting with Datuk Seri Najib in France on July 14, 2001 with the condition that DCNI offers a maximum sum of US$1 billion for Perimekar’s stay (in France),” it reads.

Malaysia purchased two Scorpene class submarines in 2002.

Perimekar is owned by Najib’s associate Abdul Razak Baginda, who was acquitted on a charge of abetting in the murder of Mongolian translator Altantuuyaa Shariibuu, without his defence being called.

Razak Baginda’s company paid 360,000 euros

According to Suaram, another document obtained by the prosecutors revealed that Terasasi Sdn Bhd, a company owned by Abdul Razak and his father, was also linked to the scandal.

Suaram's interpreter noted that prosecutors had on Aug 22, 2011, obtained an invoice faxed to Terasasi Sdn Bhd on Sept 19, 2004, to the then-chief executive officer of Thales, Bernard Baiocco, for the purpose of “success fees”.

The invoice states that 359,450 euros (RM1.43 million) was to be paid into a bank in Petaling Jaya, while a handwritten note on the fax reads:

“Razak demande si ce SF peut etre pris en compte assez vite. Le Support Fee suit avec un rapport (Razak is asking whether the SF can be paid into the account quite urgently. The support fee follows with a report.)”

However, Suaram director Cynthia Gabriel said the prosecutors were still trying to determine whether the ‘Razak’ stated in the note refers to Najib or Abdul Razak.

‘The Great Malaysian Robbery’

Referring to the case as “the Great Malaysian Robbery”, Gabriel said the prosecutors also found “a slew of companies” had been formed to muddy the money trail.

“More retro-commissions have surfaced, allowing the misuse of bodies such as a pilgrimage fund (Lembaga Tabung Haji) and the military pension fund (Lembaga Tabung Angkatan Tentera).

“The Malaysian and French people have clearly been misled, cheated and robbed of their monies through blatant corruption and mismanagement of funds in the name of national safety and security,” Gabriel (right) said.

As such, Suaram demanded that the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission open investigation papers on these new revelations and for the Malaysian government to cooperate with the French inquiry.

It also demands that the Defence Ministry lists out to Parliament the companies involved in the procurement process involving DCN and the commissions paid.

Source: Malaysiakini - Malaysiakini

Chinese Physicists Smash Distance Record For Teleportation

The ability to teleport photons through 100 kilometres of free space opens the way for satellite-based quantum communications, say researchers
 

Teleportation is the extraordinary ability to transfer objects from one location to another without travelling through the intervening space.

The idea is not that the physical object is teleported but the information that describes it. This can then be applied to a similar object in a new location which effectively takes on the new identity.

And it is by no means science fiction. Physicists have been teleporting photons since 1997 and the technique is now standard in optics laboratories all over the world.

The phenomenon that makes this possible is known as quantum entanglement,  the deep and mysterious link that occurs when two quantum objects share the same existence and yet are separated in space.

Teleportation turns out to be extremely useful. Because teleported information does not travel through the intervening space, it cannot be secretly accessed by an eavesdropper.

For that reason, teleportation is the enabling technology behind quantum cryptography, a way of sending information with close-to-perfect secrecy.

Unfortunately, entangled photons are fragile objects. They cannot travel further than a kilometre or so down optical fibres because the photons end up interacting with the glass breaking the entanglement. That severely limits quantum cryptography's usefulness.

However, physicists have had more success teleporting photons through the atmosphere. In 2010, a Chinese team announced that it had teleported single photons over a distance of 16 kilometres. Handy but not exactly Earth-shattering.

Now the same team says it has smashed this record. Juan Yin at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, and a bunch of mates say they have teleported entangled photons over a distance of 97 kilometres across a lake in China.

That's an impressive feat for several reasons. The trick these guys have perfected is to find a way to use a 1.3 Watt laser and some fancy optics to beam the light and receive it.

Inevitably photons get lost and entanglement is destroyed in such a process. Imperfections in the optics and air turbulence account for some of these losses but the biggest problem is beam widening (they did the experiment at an altitude of about 4000 metres). Since the beam spreads out as it travels, many of the photons simply miss the target altogether.

So the most important advance these guys have made is to develop a steering mechanism using a guide laser that keeps the beam precisely on target. As a result, they were able to teleport more than 1100 photons in 4 hours over a distance of 97 kilometres.

That's interesting because it's the same channel attenuation that you'd have to cope with when beaming photons to a satellite with, say, 20 centimetre optics orbiting at about 500 kilometres. "The successful quantum teleportation over such channel losses in combination with our high-frequency and high-accuracy [aiming] technique show the feasibility of satellite-based ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation," say Juan and co.

So these guys clearly have their eye on the possibility of satellite-based quantum cryptography which would provide ultra secure communications around the world. That's in stark contrast to the few kilometres that are possible with commercial quantum cryptography gear.

Of course, data rates are likely to be slow and the rapidly emerging technology of quantum repeaters will extend the reach of ground-based quantum cryptography so that it could reach around the world, in principle at least.

But a perfect, satellite-based security system might be a useful piece of kit to have on the roof of an embassy or distributed among the armed forces.

Something for western security experts to think about.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1205.2024: Teleporting Independent Qubits Through A 97 Km Free-Space Channel

Newscribe : get free news in real time 

Related posts:
Quantum Rainbow Photon Gun Unveiled
Quantum strategy offers game-winning advantages ...
IBM Scalable Quantum Computing
IBM takes giant step to faster, quantum computers
Can The Human Brain See Quantum Images?
A quantum connection between light and motion
Quantum criticality': Ultracold experiments heat up ...
Quantum Computing Thrives on Chaos

Politics and religion a bad mix !

People who go to places of worship are united in their faith and never for a particular political party or politician.

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has landed himself in a controversy by declaring his support for same-sex marriage. The US President has obviously taken into account the political impact of his move ahead of the US presidential election.

He must have done his maths and worked out the number of votes he could win and lose as a result of his stand. Obama is no angel. He is a politician and his only concern is to get himself re-elected.

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week, a Gallup Poll Survey showed that 50% of Americans supported gay marriage while 48% opposed it. What Obama hopes to do from his announcement is to win over the younger voters who are more open to this subject. His rival, Republican’s Mitt Romney, has come under attack from the Obama camp for being out of touch with his anti-gay marriage stand.

Obama also believes that blacks will still stick with him even though opposition against gay marriage among black church-goers is the highest among all the racial groups in the US. He retains the black votes and wins extra votes from the white liberals, and he knows he’s into his second term.

But I do not think it is necessary for Obama to invoke his Christian faith as well as Scripture in his defence of gay marriage.

He is not only the first American president to reaffirm same-sex marriage but must also be the first one to quote from the Bible to justify his decision. In this instance, he quoted Matthew 7:12, known as the Golden Rule from Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount.

The Sermon On The Mount is a collection of sayings and teachings of Jesus that emphasises moral teaching in the Gospel of Matthew. The Sermon is the longest piece of teaching from Jesus in the New Testament.

In a nutshell, the Golden Rule states that one should treat others the way one wants to be treated. My Bible states the Golden Rule paragraph as: “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”

What Obama has done, like many politicians and their supporters including those in Malaysia, is to read selectively a passage or chapter from a holy book to back their political arguments – political expediency, in other words.

Worse still, some Obama supporters have written about or appeared on TV to point out how some figures in the Bible were polygamists or adulterers while conveniently leaving out the parts that these people eventually repented and found God. They can get away with this because most of us feel inadequate to take on a debate on theology.

Holy books are supposed to be read as a whole, not as a chapter or two, to enable us to have a complete understanding.

Obama, for example, has even implied that the Apostle Paul’s objection to homosexuality in the Bible “is less than transparent” and perhaps even at odds with Jesus. I am not sure if Obama, whose campaign theme is Change, is planning to change the Scripture.

In Malaysia, we are used to reading and hearing PAS leaders – politicians masquerading as theologians – quoting from the Quran to justify their political positions. Umno leaders are often criticised as “pharaohs” from the Age of Ignorance – kejahilan – before the age of Islam.

But now there is a trend among some Malaysian church leaders and Christian-based writers, who support Pakatan Rakyat, to quote from Scripture to justify the need to vote against the government in the coming general election.

This is done during Sunday sermons and via email, and those who are uncomfortable with this religious push are being made to feel guilty or not in sync with the rest of the church. Likewise, nobody wants to listen to a priest or pastor on a Sunday heaping praises on the Barisan Nasional or telling us about the coalition’s transformation plans. We will leave that to the Prime Minister and Datuk Seri Idris Jala.

Politics and religion should not be mixed. People who go to places of worship are united in their faith and never for a particular political party or politician. That’s why we are in a democracy and that’s why we have elections – the right to differ and the right to choose.

The lesson to learn from the Obama controversy is this – the first time around, he was a fresh personality and people around the US wanted change. They were fed up with anything conventional and mainstream. Obama represented hope and ideals.

But the fact is, he is not a Saviour. He is just another self-serving politician who will do anything for self-preservation.

First, it was same-sex civil union. Now it’s same-sex marriage and once that’s legal, same-sex couples would have the constitutional rights to adopt babies from orphanages, and churches will break the law if they reject performing wedding rites for them.

Well, that’s change for you from Obama.

On The Beat  By WONG CHUN WAI\

Related posts:
Practise 'Addin', a Malaysian way of life? PAS Vows Hudud for Malaysia!
Politics, Religion don't mix!
Don't let the sun go down on our rights; those mess up politics ...
Malaysian Chinese at a Political Crossroads forum ...
Speaking up for religious tolerance 
Is the Two-Party-Sytem becoming a Two-Race-System ... 
Get set for Malaysian politics of the young!