The struggles of middle-class American families and growing income inequality have risen to the top of the national agenda. A new Stateline analysis shows that in all 50 states, the percentage of “middle-class” households—those making between 67 percent and 200 percent of the state’s median income—shrunk between 2000 and 2013. The change occurred even as the median income in most states declined, when adjusted for inflation. In most states, the growing percentage of households paying 30 percent (the federal standard for housing affordability) or more of their income on housing illustrates that it is increasingly difficult for many American families to make ends meet. Hover over states for details.

The Japanese crowd sits hushed and somber as the character on stage turns away from his co-star, an actress seated on the floor in front of a small table. He lowers his head, then turns to face the audience with a look that is both blank and inscrutable, yet somehow conveys a profound sense of alarm. Something here is very wrong.

Image: Courtesy Softbank Pepper, Japan's first affordable social robot, goes on sale in February. It can read emotions and will be a platform for new apps.

Every entrepreneur with a new technology tells me that his innovation will be industry-disrupting, meaning that it will render the existing technology obsolete, and create a new market. Yet truly disruptive innovations, like the smartphone from Apple AAPL -0.62% and the rise of the Internet, are very rare, and are generally unpredicted. So why would any investor ever believe any of these claims?

Niklas Östberg's startup has raised so many rounds of funding that he has almost lost track.

"I think officially we're probably on Series, oh, did we do H maybe?" says Östberg, cofounder and CEO of Delivery Hero, an online food-ordering service. Series H turns out to be the right answer. Delivery Hero periodically receives what Östberg calls "small" investments of $5 million to $20 million from individual investors. It gets hard to remember which round an investor joined.

Ernst & Young LLP and Innovation Works, Inc. are pleased to present our third annual review of investment trends and highlights for the Pittsburgh region’s technology sector. This report reviews the investment activity from 2010 to 2014 in our region and analyzes the companies attracting capital and the funding sources that support their growth. This includes venture capital firms (VCs), angel investors (angels), corporate/strategic investors, seed funds, accelerators, public offerings, and other sources of funding. Highlights of this year’s report include:

Firms are increasingly using statistical analysis to find out which employees are more likely to leave, and using this information to improve personnel management and target employees for interventions to make staying more worthwhile. Firms do this because replacing employees who leave can be very expensive, making the analysis and the responses cheap in comparison. It says a lot that Wal-Mart, a firm known to be careful about its expenses, is investing in such analysis. It is probably less surprising that Credit Suisse does so, given the importance of keeping staff in banking, or that some human-resource analytics firms do, given that they can use these results to keep their own staff and sell the methods to client firms.

WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A newly released independent study, commissioned by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), documents the significant impact academia-industry technology transfer makes to the U.S. economy.

The report, entitled, “The Economic Contribution of University/Nonprofit Inventions in the United States: 1996- 2013,” estimates that, during this 18-year time period, academia-industry patent licensing bolstered U.S. gross industry output by up to $1.18 trillion, U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by up to $518 billion, and supported up to 3,824,000 U.S. jobs.

Leaders are providing less explicit direction to their employees these days, and relying more on coaching as a leadership tool, as organizations become flatter and more dependent on knowledge work. But many people also manage teams that span locations and time zones, which means they must do at least some of their coaching virtually.

While most of my coaching with clients and MBA students at Stanford is conducted face-to-face in the Bay Area, over the last decade I’ve worked with people across the U.S. and internationally, from Brazil to London to South Africa. Here are some guidelines for virtual coaching that I’ve found useful.

When the economy tanks as it did in the last recession, that’s a strong signal that things have to change, and it’s hard to miss. But most of us in business have to deal most of the time with weak signals, or change that is happening in a far more subtle way. These changes can be cultural, like the increasing need to be social, spawning Facebook and a hundred others, or technological, like the explosion of mobile devices around the world.

This answer originally appeared on Quora as an answer to the question, "What is the best way to deal with a VC who became very 'annoying' after investing and taking a board seat, and adds more problems than solutions for a startup?" 

Examples of this annoying behavior include "disagrees with the founders on everything without offering alternatives....Always changes his mind, never offers valid alternatives or relevant insights, doesn't understand the market, seems to just want to create issues instead of helping."

The answer is reprinted here with the permission of its author, Jason Lemkin.

Well, first, sorry it's too late.  You chose poorly — if you had choices.  If you didn't have choices, then, it's just a shotgun marriage you have to live with.

Having said that, this "shoot from the hip" and "add excessive unsolicited advice" is relatively common in certain VCs.

Thanks to a "severe" geomagnetic storm, the Northern and Southern Lights were seen on March 17 and 18 in parts of the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, among other areas.

If you weren't able to view one of Mother Nature's most beautiful spectacles, you're still in luck, since other people brought their cameras. Watch the video above to get a taste of the Northern Lights.

We have self-driving cars, knowledgeable digital assistants, and software capable of putting names to faces as well as any expert. Google recently announced that it had developed software capable of learning—entirely without human help—how to play several classic Atari computer games with skill far beyond that of even the most callus-thumbed human player.+

But do these displays of machine aptitude represent genuine intelligence? For decades artificial-intelligence experts have struggled to find a practical way to answer the question.1

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/

Global innovation has become a three-horse race. Three countries—the US, Japan and China—accounted for over 60% of patent applications in 2014, according to a report released by the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) today.

Image: http://qz.com

China’s economy has entered a new normal phase, shifting gears from high-speed economic growth to a medium-to-high speed. Weakened production will slow demand for labor and employment. During an economic adjustment and digestive period for stimulus policies, the infrastructure of labor supply and demand will adjust to address excess capacity, eliminating backward production capacity and promoting energy conservation and emissions reductions. This will inevitably lead to the short-term pain of structural unemployment and an increasing number of issues within the labor market.

The six initial startups of the new Global Insurance Accelerator arrived in Des Moines in mid-February amid arctic chills, and they have since been immersed in a near-dizzying schedule of back-to-back meetings with potential mentors. During this first month of engagement, the six startup teams will refine concepts and receive feedback from experts as they prepare to pitch their solutions to potential partners and investors in late May.  

It's all of the road trip and none of the driving — at least, not by a human.

An autonomous car, developed by Michigan-based Delphi Automotive, will begin a 3,500-mile trip across the U.S. on March 22. Beginning in San Francisco, the car is expected to arrive in New York about a week later.

"We're going to learn a lot out of this," Jeff Owens, Delphi's chief technology officer, told The Associated Press.

Image: http://mashable.com

Sherlock Holmes has captivated readers for more than 100 years with his eccentric personality, logical reasoning, and ability to make connections that others cannot. The fictional detective has gotten even more attention in the past few years, thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of the famous sleuth, BBC’s mini-series starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and CBS’ “Elementary.”

These portrayals offer a peek into Holmes’ infinitely innovative mind by showing animated words, sounds, and pictures lighting up and linking like a web as he makes his mental connections.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com

How do taxes in your state compare nationally? This convenient pocket-size booklet compares the 50 states on many different measures of taxing and spending, including individual and corporate income tax rates, business tax climates, excise taxes, tax burdens and state spending.

The Founding Fathers of the United States considered intellectual property so important that they gave it a special place in the Constitution: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

The framers of the U.S. Constitution were not wrong. Patents did serve an important purpose during the days when technology advances happened over decades or centuries. In today’s era of exponentially advancing technologies, however, patents have become the greatest inhibitor to innovation and are holding the United States back. The only way of staying ahead is to out-innovate a competitor; speed to market and constant reinvention are critical. Patents do the reverse; they create disincentives to innovate and slow down innovators by allowing technology laggards and extortionists to sue them.

Welcome to the fourth annual Inside Higher Ed academic bracket for the National Collegiate Athletic Association women's basketball tournament. With this bracket, how teams perform in the classroom is what determines the victor.  Here's how it works: to determine the winners, we first look to the Academic Progress Rate, the N.C.A.A.'s multiyear measure of a team's classroom performance. When two teams tie, we turn to the N.C.A.A.'s Graduation Success Rate, which measures the proportion of athletes on track to graduate within six years.

Image: https://www.insidehighered.com