California is finally admitting it has a problem. The lack of rainfall has been snowballing for years, but now average consumers will feel the pain directly through water rationing and utility prices.

Much of the focus has been on the first-ever water restrictions California Gov. Jerry Brown has mandated, particularly on his call for a 25% reduction in urban use. But it’s ridiculous to pretend we can solve this without tackling agriculture, which uses 80% of California’s surface and groundwater. 

April 20, 2015: CHICAGO—The Association for Corporate Growth® (ACG), the global organization focused on driving middle-market growth, selected new officers and directors to serve on the Global Board of Directors for 2015-2016. 

Richard Jaffe, partner at Duane Morris LLP and co-head of the firm’s nationally active Private Equity Practice Group, will serve as the 2015-2016 board chairman after serving as vice chairman. Mr. Jaffe succeeds the 2014-2015 Chairman, Doug Tatum, chairman of the Newport Board Group, who will become ACG’s Immediate Past Chairman.

"ACG has grown to a record-level of membership and programming," said Tatum. "Richard Jaffe and the next group of leaders will ensure that ACG will continue to meet and ACG member expectations."

The Delaware North Cos., a hospitality company whose customer-service representatives help people plan vacations at national parks, sometimes struggles these days to keep 80 or so seats filled at its call center in Fresno, Calif.—a city tied for the 9th-highest unemployment rate in the U.S.

The company has no shortage of job applicants. But finding the right candidates has gotten tougher since the company started using a customized assessment last year to see how applicants stack up against top call-center workers in such traits as friendliness, curiosity and the ability to multitask.

No one likes being jabbed with a needle. Some people can't stand it at all. According to research in the Journal of Family Practice, at least 20% of Americans have needle phobia, and as a result, many skip critical preventive procedures like vaccines and flu shots. That's a public-health problem.

But painful injections might soon be a thing of the past. Along with fellow students Andy Zhang and Mike Hua, 19-year-old Rice University computer science undergrad Greg Allison has invented the Comfortably Numb, a new device that makes getting an injection practically painless.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

If you clicked this story, then it’s highly likely that you do not love your job every day. According to a Gallup study from 2010-2012, 70% of Americans are not engaged with work. If you are one of them, then feeling excited, energized, and engaged with your day-to-day probably feels like a pipe dream, or a fantasy fit for a Disney movie.

I remember thinking the same thing. Hollywood is good at painting a picture of love that is based in fantasy. After all, how many romantic comedies end with the couple falling in love and walking into the horizon hand in hand? We believe our Prince Charming will come.

The Food and Drug Administration is making as much as $1 million in grant funding available for mining a large database of electronic health records to conduct postmarket surveillance of drug safety.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) will award a one-year grant by summer to a single bidder to develop “new analytic methodologies” to look for signs of pharmaceutical-related safety problems in the Mini-Sentinel Distributed Database, an FDA-funded pilot with access to 178 million medical records.

The Pentagon plans to open its first office in Silicon Valley and provide venture capital in an effort to tap commercial technology that can be used to develop more advanced weapons and intelligence systems.

Pentagon officials said the twin moves are part of a broader effort by the defense department to field technology more quickly and cheaply amid concerns that potential adversaries such as China are closing the gap or surpassing U.S. capabilities.

ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 22, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Ann Arbor SPARK recently launched a new video series designed to provide critical information and education to business owners. The SPARK-Ed series' first installment, launched in time to support startups going through its Entrepreneur Boot Camp program, is a four-part look at what entrepreneurs need to know about starting a business.

Featuring Bill Mayer, Ann Arbor SPARK vice president, entrepreneur services, this first installment of SPARK-Ed covers Starting a Business, Business Plan Basics, Perfect Pitch, and The Value of Entrepreneurship. Throughout the series, Mayer offers expert and tactical advice that entrepreneurs can use as they start and grow their business.

LONDON — A team of British cardiologists have said it's time to "bust the myth" that regular exercise tackles obesity.

The strongly-worded editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, published in the May edition of the journal, says you can't outrun a bad diet and that although regular exercise reduces the risk of developing a number of health issues such as heart disease, dementia, some cancers and type 2 diabetes, it doesn't promote weight loss.

When you look at your to-do list for the day, week, or month (or lists of projects and actions if you follow David Allen’s GTD distinction), do you feel a sense of clarity and direction? Or do you feel confused, overwhelmed, or frustrated?

If you feel overwhelmed, it may not just be the quantity of the work you plan to do. It may also be due to a lack of clarity about the work you plan to do.

Taking a little time to clean up your to-do list with one or more of the following steps can offer huge rewards in productive focus.

Too many customers have long felt distanced from many successful brands, seeing them as closed and mysterious environments, focused only on profits and killing competitors. They may not have noticed the wave of “open businesses,” spawned by the Internet and social media. These are responding to the demands of this new world for collaboration, trust, and transparency.

Every single minute of our modern lives is marked by a different creation that was probably unimaginable about a handful of years ago. How many of us really expected to have cars that spoke to us and told us where to go? Who would have thought one could print human organs that would be perfectly usable, even ten years ago? But the fact remains that it’s innovations like these that keep the wheels of the economy turning.

There is a shrine inside Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. At one edge of HP’s research building, two interconnected rooms with worn midcentury furniture, vacant for decades, are carefully preserved. From these offices, William Hewlett and David Packard led HP’s engineers to invent breakthrough products, like the 40-pound, typewriter-size programmable calculator launched in 1968.

Entrepreneur.com is one of my favorite resources and has been one of my daily reads for several years. In fact, I find it to be one of the most helpful sources of entrepreneurial content online, especially if you are looking for easy to digest, actionable content.  

Through my daily reading I often come across articles that I believe will benefit a wide demographic of entrepreneurs, so I decided to put together a list of articles that I believe should be read by everyone. Here are eight articles that you should bookmark right now and make time to read.

Admit it: you’ve thought of launching a crowdfunding campaign before. Especially when someone can raise $55,000 to make a potato salad. But it’s a lot easier said than done. And most campaigns — excluding the potato salad — take a lot of effort before the launch, during the campaign, and after (cross your fingers!) funding.

Before you launch your dream on a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, allow us to crush it slightly. Or at least bring you back down to earth. Here are the biggest misconceptions about crowdfunding from the crowdfunders themselves.

Accelerators are now an integral part of the startup ecosystem. For some, especially first-time founders, it is sort of becoming a checkbox item: go through an accelerator. Serial entrepreneurs, as a rule, would say they don't need to, because they already know what to do.

Some people say that accelerators are only good for the companies that haven't yet raised financing. They argue that if the company has raised capital, then it's too far along for an accelerator and wouldn't benefit from it.

If you can afford it, the ability to enjoy one's elderly years out of the office is ideal. But longer lifespans often mean that retiring at a more traditional age requires workers to save up larger nest eggs and spend dozens of years living on dwindling savings.

On April 13th, the Scale Up Milwaukee team presented their long-term plan for growth in the region with over 100 Milwaukee leaders convened for one of the Greater Milwaukee Committee’s members’ meetings. Dan Isenberg, thought and practice leader of Scale Up Milwaukee, presented the growth trajectory Scale Up Milwaukee will take and the impact it will have on the region’s economy. Scale Up Milwaukee is on track to impact more than $1 billion of economic activity in the Milwaukee region by 2020. This pro forma is conservative in that it only reflects the revenues and top line growth of the Scalerator participants, and does not include “spillovers” to other companies, impact on the supply chains of the Scalerator, additional investments, or other “ecosystem” impacts.

Image: http://scaleupmilwaukee.org

What can New Jersey — once the home of storied inventors like Thomas Edison and the Bell and Sarnoff labs — do to get its innovation mojo back?

That question held center stage at a forum of business and civic leaders in Newark last week that outlined a way to jump-start New Jersey's struggling economy by tapping into the traits that once made the state a thriving, innovation powerhouse.