Whether we’re conscious of it or not, every management decision is motivated by a desire to find universal answers to very specific questions. People who succeed in organizations tend to be pragmatic problem solvers. They have to be, because of the myriad challenges they face. How to grow the enterprise. How to get work done. How to find customers. How to be themselves in the workplace. And so on. Because there are no easy answers to these complex problems, they test the answers by starting a company, launching a project, or making a move. As they succeed and fail, the most attentive of them learn from the results. The history of business is thus the story of entrepreneurs, executives, leaders, and employees, lurching from one experimental answer to another. They gain expertise and acumen, and profits and revenues, and, along the way, add to the theory of management.

A World Health Organization (WHO) group declared on Monday that processed meat, such as hot dogs and bacon, causes cancer and red meat may as well.

The determination was made by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is the arm of the WHO that gives recommendations based on cancer risk. The group, which included 22 scientists from 10 countries, evaluated the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat based on available research.

Image: http://time.com

Applying for accelerator programs can easily drain one’s time and energy. But the resources, connections and mentorships they offer can make all the difference between a company that stalls—and one that succeeds.

The application process may seem daunting; still, over 100 startups have graduated from edtech accelerators. We asked several entrepreneurs who have been through the fire—along with a couple investors who run the programs—for their advice on building a strong application. The following is a summary of tips from Tim Brady (co-founder of Imagine K12), Bart Epstein (CEO at Jefferson Education Accelerator), Aaron Feuer (co-founder and CEO of Panorama Education), Grant Hosford (co-founder and CEO of codeSpark), Nitesh Goel (co-founder of Padlet) and Kate Whiting (co-founder and CEO of Educents).

This past summer I was a member of 500 Startups, one of the top accelerator programs in the world.  For those who aren’t familiar with 500 Startups or other accelerators (like Y Combinator or Tech Stars,) it’s helpful to understand how these organizations function to fund Silicon Valley startups and technology innovation across the globe.

Think of a venture capitalist.  A company gives the venture capitalist equity in the form of convertible notes or shares, and in return the VC gives the company cash.  An accelerator functions in a similar fashion, yet with more variables to trade off.

Damn, it feels good to be a data scientist.

Glassdoor, the website you use to glean feedback about a prospective employer, released its 25 Best Jobs for Work-Life Balance study today, and tech jobs comprise more than half of it.

Data scientists reported the highest work-life balance rating in a list that included SEO managers, UX designers, digital marketing managers, Web designers and developers, software engineers and data analysts.

Boston's startup scene has given birth to several startup accelerator programs over the years, ranging from MassChallenge to Techstars. Now, a new kind of program is debuting — one that's focused on helping consumer-focused product companies launch and run successful crowdfunding campaigns. Boston-based Fortify Accelerator, co-founded by Boston entrepreneur and crowdfunding consultant Trevor Collins, is an eight-week intensive program aimed at helping companies run crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Tilt.

Trends are always changing and ecommerce trends are no different. While this is a great thing, it also presents a challenge.

Changing technology can improve and impress, which is why ecommerce store owners need to constantly be on their toes, and keep their eyes and ears open for what’s in the pipeline and figure out how it can help them better their products and services.

Image: http://ventureburn.com

In response to an audience question, Khan Academy Founder and Executive Director Sal Khan shares his thoughts on the future of a university education. Besides earning a college degree, Khan envisions universities requiring students to come away with a portfolio of work and a reputation for actively contributing to a community.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Panelists Christina Smolke, Steve Jurvetson, and Astro Teller discuss the importance for individuals and teams to blend process learning, domain expertise, and life experience to create desired impact in the world, in conversation with Stanford Engineering Dean Persis Drell.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Stewart Butterfield takes exception to the practice of companies hiring only candidates with degrees from elite universities. "The confluence of factors that have to come into play in order for something to be successful is tremendous," says the co-founder of Slack and Flickr, in conversation with Andrew Braccia of Accel Partners.

In a rare face-to-face conversation with President Barack Obama recently, I referenced some of the positive yet unintended consequences unleashed by his effort to align U.S. Government agencies around the notion of “starting up” America. Four years after the White House launched the Startup America project, more than 60 nations have emulated the effort in different ways. One of them is the Netherlands.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

If you’re young and a fan of Entrepreneur.com, chances are you don’t see yourself “climbing” the corporate ladder for the next 40 years. But, before you start changing the world and celebrating your first IPO, here are a few things you should know --starting with the biggest mistake most young entrepreneurs make.

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes, sizes, ages and can be from anywhere. They, as far as I know, do not wear a uniform or carry membership cards for an entrepreneurship club. If you passed one on the street or sat next to one in a restaurant, you’d likely not even know.

So what makes someone an entrepreneur?

Building a business from the ground up can be exhilarating and rewarding. But the experience can also be remarkably frustrating and painful. To be sure, the startup game is not for everyone.

For people who are used to lots of structure at work and enjoy a stable work/life balance, becoming an entrepreneur provides a crash course in a different kind of job experience. Indeed, entrepreneurship offers a variety of potent lessons, including what it's like to work long hours, how to maintain focus amid multiple opportunities and pitfalls and ways to overcome risk aversion.

ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, Oct. 27, 2015  – Relevant Health, a health technology startup accelerator in the Washington, DC metro area, welcomes its inaugural class. The selected startups come to Relevant Health from its backyard of Bethesda and Rockville, as well as Washington, DC, Baltimore, New York City, and Latvia. This week, the cohort of startups embarks on a five-month program that involves an intensive product development focus, enabling them to improve their skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product.

"Relevant Health chose candidates who have a vision and business model for a product that promises significant positive impacts in the health sector,” stated Rich Bendis, BioHealth Innovation President and CEO. “A cohort of companies building wearable devices, consumer-facing health apps, and provider-facing healthcare platforms is a strong representation of the innovation occurring in the health marketplace."

For students going off to college, their dorms become their home away from home — sometimes for four or more years. So it's important to many students to make sure that their college dorms are pleasant places to live.

School-rankings website Niche created a list of the best college dorms through a combination of student surveys about the quality of the dorms, the cost of housing at each school, housing capacity, and student-housing crime rates. We included quotes from some of the students surveyed by Niche who noted what they love about on-campus housing.

Image: Facebook/FloridaGulfCoastUniversity

Your toaster will soon talk to your toothbrush and your bathroom scale. They will all have a direct line to your car and to the health sensors in your smartphone. I have no idea what they will think of us or what they will gossip about, but our devices will be soon be sharing information about us — with each other and with the companies that make or support them.

Free tasty food, brightly coloured bicycles and high salaries are well-known hallmarks of the Googleplex—Google’s famed headquarters in Mountain View, California. But it was not these perks that led cardiologist Jessica Mega to pause her thriving academic career at Harvard Medical School to become the chief medical officer of the company’s life-sciences team. She was lured by the ambitions of the effort, soon to be incorporated under Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Nurtured by Google’s expertise in data analytics and engineering, the biology team is expected to create miniaturized electronic devices and to use these and other means to collect and analyse more health data, more continuously, than is possible today.

Image: The south side of the Googleplex. Coolcaesar/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

In a rare face-to-face conversation with President Barack Obama recently, I referenced some of the positive yet unintended consequences unleashed by his effort to align U.S. Government agencies around the notion of “starting up” America. Four years after the White House launched the Startup America project, more than 60 nations have emulated the effort in different ways. One of them is the Netherlands.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

Doctors have just discovered a previously unknown relationship between the long-term recovery of spinal cord injury victims and high blood pressure during their initial surgeries. This may seem like a small bit of medical news—though it will have immediate clinical implications—but what's important is how it was discovered in the first place.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com