In “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again,” NPR correspondent Jon Hamilton highlights the work of Neuroscientist Earl Miller who says that you are NOT. You’re simply switching focus between tasks very quickly. While Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo from McGill University says that you CAN multitask, but to what end, he doesn’t yet know.

Of course, the real debate of merit, in my life, is the one that happens between my mother and I. She swears by multitasking and I think it’s a villain. Regardless of who is right or wrong, there are moments when it pays to completely disconnect. If we can multi-task, then we can’t multi-task all the time. And there is a real benefit to moments of complete focus. I call it “building a fire.”

Assuming no one would demotivate their team intentionally, then why do we see it happen so often? I believe it’s because too many entrepreneurs and leaders are so self-centered that they really don’t see what impact their actions have on others. What these leaders need to do is spend more time eliminating their own demotivating habits, rather than delivering more motivation.

Maybe it because there are plenty of tips, seminars, and books on the motivation side of the equation, starting with the basic Motivating Employees for Dummies, and so few resources on elements of demotivation. To learn about ways that your team is demotivated, most leaders would need to look no further than feedback from their own team, indicating you do the following:

In the wake of the Facebook IPO, something funny has happened to the world of startups.  Suddenly, startups feel very boring. VCs and entrepreneurs say they feel it too. "I do feel a bit like that, but then again that could also just be the startups I'm happening to see," one investor said.

1. "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin

2. "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller

3. "If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless." - Darryl F. Zanuck

4. "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." - Henry Ford

5. "Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up." - Oliver Wendell Holmes

US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park announced the first class of “Presidential Innovation Fellows” today. Selected from an applicant pool of nearly 700 innovators from across the country, the 18  “Fellows” have agreed to spend six months in Washington to work on five high-impact projects aimed at supporting entrepreneurs, small businesses and the economy, while significantly improving how the Federal Government serves the American people.

“The Presidential Innovation Fellows program leverages the ingenuity of leading problem solvers from across America together with federal innovators to tackle projects that aim to fuel job creation, save taxpayers money and improve the lives of Americans in tangible ways,” Park said. “These private sector innovators bring their entrepreneurial expertise to the table that has helped jump-start high-tech companies, increase efficiency and public engagement, and redefine how technology is used in business."

People interested in establishing start-up should focus on execution of ideas instead of coming up with them, software engineer Joe Ziegler said in a talk before would-be Filipino technopreneurs.   “What you’re gonna find in the start-up market is, it is heavy on ideas but it’s light on execution,” said Ziegler, himself a founder of several start-ups  and counts pioneering browser Netscape among his clients.   “I have bad news for you, your idea is not unique. This is the bad news. Your ability to execute on that idea is what is gonna get you your money,” he added.

When Jay Ducote, a husky Louisiana food blogger, entrepreneur and radio personality, received a $1,000 grant last May from local microfunding venture 225 Fund, he knew already what he was going to spend it on: extra hard drives.

Ducote, a 2011 MasterChef competitor, had been creating an Internet TV series about his quest to become healthier while still making a living as a food and drink writer, and he had run into a problem. The high-definition digital footage his filmmaker was shooting took up a huge amount of hard-drive space. The money from 225 Fund allowed him to buy the extra space he needed.

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC recently published #FixYoungAmerica: How to Rebuild Our Economy and Put Young Americans Back to Work (for Good), a book of 30+ proven solutions to help end youth unemployment.

1. Take Readers Behind-the-Scenes

Even in a “dry, boring old industry,” your blog readers will be fascinated to see the hidden, behind-the-scenes vantage point of the company. Incorporate photos or video to enhance plain text blog posts, and use a variety of writers to bring in diverse perspectives from the team. And of course, post regularly to keep your audience engaged.

My colleague Jonathan Rothwell already reviewed economist Enrico Moretti’s wonderful book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” but I wanted to jump in to highlight one particularly important point among the many Moretti makes. This concerns the matter of why everyone--including those of us worried about the fortunes of lower-income workers--should care about the innovation agenda we have made so much of here at the Metropolitan Policy Program.

On this issue, Moretti speaks pretty insistently to those who remain skeptical about the benefits the high-tech, high-pay innovation economy confers on the rest of society. Put simply, he says that not only do innovative industries bring “good jobs” and high salaries to the communities where they cluster but that their impact is “much deeper” than their direct effect.

We know about the top party schools and the best schools for sports. But which college or University is the most technologically advanced in the U.S.?

Unigo, an online resource for college information, polled students at hundreds of colleges across the country and came up with the top 10 Wired Campuses list — as well as some interesting findings.

Drew Tarvin of Humor That Works believes that bringing humor into the workplace increases productivity. Also: Funny people make more money.

Stop taking yourself so seriously. Seriously. Drew Tarvin runs Humor That Works, a website and consultancy dedicated to the idea that bringing a little levity to your workplace can only increase your bottom line. He left his job at Proctor and Gamble at the end of June to go it full-time as a humor/business guru. A self-published book is forthcoming in the fall. We spoke with Tarvin to trade quips and witty repartee, all while sustaining a higher-than-average level of productivity.

One of the more heart-warming stories to zoom around the Internet lately involves a young man, his dying grandmother, and a bowl of clam chowder from Panera Bread. It's a little story that offers big lessons about service, brands, and the human side of business — a story that underscores why efficiency should never come at the expense of humanity.

The story, as told in AdWeek, goes like this: Brandon Cook, from Wilton, New Hampshire, was visiting his grandmother in the hospital. Terribly ill with cancer, she complained to her grandson that she desperately wanted a bowl of soup, and that the hospital's soup was inedible (she used saltier language). If only she could get a bowl of her favorite clam chowder from Panera Bread! Trouble was, Panera only sells clam chowder on Friday. So Brandon called the nearby Panera and talked to store manager Suzanne Fortier. Not only did Sue make clam chowder specially for Brandon's grandmother, she included a box of cookies as a gift from the staff.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Indiegogo founder and chief executive Adam Chapnick shared six secrets of success for raising money at GROW 2012.

And they work, he says, whether you’re crowdsourcing or dealing with venture capitalists.

Indiegogo, along with Kickstarter, leads the crowdfunding revolution. Chapnick bills it as the place to “raise money from anyone for anything from anywhere.”

At a time when the University of Utah is tapping the philanthropic community to fund scholarships and buildings for research, academics, athletics and cultural amenities, the school this week added another request: funding for technology commercialization.

Money donated to a new Gateway Crimson Innovation Fund will help push university inventions, such as medical devices and treatments, drugs, energy technologies and software, into the marketplace.

The geography of high-tech startups and venture capital appears to be changing, according to new data from the National Venture Capital Association reported yesterday in USA Today. The data charts the total number of high-tech startups, the number receiving venture capital investment and the dollar value of that investment for the ten largest high-tech regions in 2011.

StartX functions a little bit differently than other accelerator programs in Silicon Valley.

A Stanford affiliated nonprofit, the accelerator provides student entrepreneurs with housing, office space, cash stipends, advice, and mentorship — much like storied Y Combinator (“YC”) program, except its entrepreneurs won’t need to hand off a piece of their company. In contrast, YC takes an average equity stake of 6 percent.

Today, StartX received a $800,000 boost from the Kaufmann Foundation to bring its model to campuses and cities in other parts of the country. The money will develop its curriculum and program and “identify a model for replication,” according to the Wendy Torrance, the foundation’s director of entrepreneurship.

Every entrepreneur who breaks away from the pack deals with doubts and setbacks. And every company that succeeds has to tweak its business plan along the way — sometimes completely reversing course.

While there's no single secret to success, a big key in attaining it is knowing exactly when to pivot. And successful entrepreneurs recognize these "ah ha!" moments when they encounter them. (More: Building a Great Start-Up Culture.)

Sometimes those moments are obvious, while other times it's a subtle sign that most would miss.

It's now much faster and easier to search for federal laboratory inventions that are available for transfer to business partners. Welcome to the available technologies search page. From this page you can locate a particular type of technology from the nationwide system of federal labs and research centers.

By Johns Hopkins Medicine, (RxPG) Johns Hopkins scientists have developed a reliable method to turn the clock back on blood cells, restoring them to a primitive stem cell state from which they can then develop into any other type of cell in the body.

The work, described in the Aug. 8 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS), is Chapter Two in an ongoing effort to efficiently and consistently convert adult blood cells into stem cells that are highly qualified for clinical and research use in place of human embryonic stem cells, says Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

“In the months before a U.S. Presidential election, the quality of political discourse hits new lows,” Renee DiResta writes, pointing to the facile blue-state/red-state characterizations tumbling around the news cycle these days. “So I started wondering, how do Americans really think about ‘those people’ in other states?”

With that, DiResta, an associate at the seed-stage investment firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, developed an interactive infographic that uses a simple web tool to reveal the most common stereotypes for each state. DiResta plugged “Why is (state) so” into Google, let autocomplete’s algorithms work their magic, then plotted the top hits on a map of the United States. “It seemed like an ideal question to get at popular assumptions, since ‘Why is (state) so X?’ presupposes that X is true,” she writes.