What do you say we start this discussion with some facts?

I know, I know, that’s not the way we do things anymore. Economics is common sense after all. Wage hikes cause unemployment. Unions are job killers. Companies are job creators. Tax breaks for the few trickle down to the many as wages. Inequality makes people work harder.

It’s a narrative that has informed our economic polices for the past 25 years. Unfortunately for its proselytizers, the facts tell a different story.

Image: (Paul Lachine illustration) 

Not so long ago, professional success meant decades of dedication to a single company, culminating with the ultimate symbol of a distinguished career – a gold watch. Today, it has become common for people to switch jobs more frequently over the course of their career. In fact, on average, people change companies approximately every five years. As changing companies is common among today’s professionals, shifting careers from one industry to another is also happening more frequently. The portability of professional skills from industry to industry means that people now have more options to switch industries without having to restart their careers from square one.

President Obama’s settled the score on this one: It’s precision medicine. Not personalized medicine.

The life sciences community has been throwing around both terms, but there’s actually a keen distinction between the two.

Personalized medicine’s origins coincide with the wrapping up of the Human Genome Project, and denote a sort of tailored-t0-you panacea – it’s all about the individual’s genetic profile.

Precision medicine, on the other hand, casts a wider net. It’s hones in on certain populations, finding the genetic threads that interweave certain patients and develops treatments that are applicable to entire groups.

Canada unveiled an investor pilot program on 28th January called the Immigrant Investor Venture Capital designed to induce millionaires to bring their money, create businesses and jobs for Canadians. To be eligible, an immigrant investor will have to prove his net worth to be atleast $10 million and be prepared to make a non-guaranteed investment of $2 million over 15 years. This investment will be in a fund managed principally by BDC Capital, the investment arm of the Business Development Bank of Canada. The government will accept no more than 500 applications of which 60 will be given permanent resident visas.

Given intense competition for the world's best engineering talent, can your company really afford to lock up its code behind proprietary licenses? Sure, if you're in the business of selling software, giving it all away may not make sense. But the vast majority of companies don't sell software, and should be contributing a heck of a lot more as open source. 

Image: http://readwrite.com

Since the dawn of the jet age, military planners and industrialists have grouped the fighters borne forth from their iron loins into generations. Borrowing the term from biology, each generation is grouped by a series of improvements that make the successor distinct from the predecessor. Now, as the fifth generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter slowly eases its way into American military service, and the fourth generation A-10s and F-16s that preceded it are phased out, the Pentagon is looking further into the future, ready to start the long and pricey conception of a sixth generation.

Image: Boeing Concept For 6th Generation Fighter Boeing Image

What’s your scarcest resource at work?

Most people answer, without hesitation, that it’s time. It certainly is finite, but I would argue that time isn’t actually your scarcest resource. After all, everyone has the same amount of time, and yet individual differences in productivity can be enormous.

A better answer might be your attention — your personal capacity to attend to the right things for the right amount of time. As Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon first suggested 40 years ago, when information is plentiful, attention becomes the scarce resource.

I think we can all agree that it’s very important to connect with other people throughout life. This allows us to:

• Make new friends 
• Discover more opportunities 
• Develop business relationships 
• Become more successful 
• Learn more about ourselves and our lives

Typically, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, the approach most people take is horrible.

Commonly with networking, people use this old fashioned method of going into every interaction with the intention of seeing what they can get out of someone else.

I truly believe that sometimes to get back in touch, you need to get away.

I closed out 2014 in a rut, feeling lost with many things in my personal life and professional life.

Then we turned the calendar to 2015, and I kicked off the year by heading to Belize with Under30Experiences. It was a phenomenal trip, and I came back oozing with clarity.

Belize revived me, jazzed me, and straight up gave me that feeling again that I’m in sync with everything.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — When the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots kick off the NFL’s championship game Sunday, friends, family, and coworkers will gather across the country and the world to watch. But for one big group, while the game will be real, the gathering will be entirely virtual.

Welcome to the Super Bowl party, Oculus Rift edition.

Image: A 2D representation of the space where AltspaceVR will host a global Super Bowl party for Oculus Rift users on Sunday. Image Credit: AltspaceVR

Roche has become the latest pharmaceutical company to join the connected health party at Qualcomm Life — in this case to do remote patient monitoring. The goal of the strategic collaboration is to generate big data insights on patients’ condition to reduce complications from chronic conditions, according to a company statement.

Vaccinations are obviously a hot topic for debate – it’s exhausting. But with the recent measles outbreak at Disneyland, it’s even more clear that this is getting just a bit ridiculous.

Parents really want to know who’s vaccinated and who’s not. And families in some states should be a little more concerned than others, according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control.

Here are the 9 states with the lowest number of vaccinated kids – in no particular order (they are all kind of close).

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Euronext is looking into whether crowdfunding platforms could help provide finance to companies that are too small to list on its markets, as it pushes ahead with efforts to support small and medium-sized enterprises.

The first network analysis of the entire body of European Community legislation reveals the pattern of links between laws and their resilience to change.

One of the more fascinating areas of science that has emerged in recent years is the study of networks and their application to everyday life. It turns out that many important properties of our world are governed by networks with very specific properties.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

The view from Mike Steep’s office on Palo Alto’s Coyote Hill is one of the greatest in Silicon Valley.

Beyond the black and rosewood office furniture, the two large computer monitors, and three Indonesian artifacts to ward off evil spirits, Steep looks out onto a panorama stretching from Redwood City to Santa Clara. This is the historic Silicon Valley, the birthplace of Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Atari, Netscape and Google. This is the home of innovations that have shaped the modern world. So is Steep’s employer: Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, where personal computing and key computer- networking technologies were invented, and where he is senior vice president of global business operations.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in some of today' most talked-about startups, including Slack, Buzzfeed, and Instacart.

Andreessen Horowitz has its finger on the pulse of what's happening in tech. Over on the firm' website, its investors have shared 16 trends and themes they're excited about this year. It' a sort of State of the Union for what' happening in tech.

Image: credit: Microsoft | YouTube

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? A thinker or a feeler? All these things make up your personality type – and have a huge effect on what career path is right for you.

An infographic created by Truity Psychometrics, a provider of online personality and career assessments, matches personality types to the careers that best suit them. The infographic breaks down 16 different four-letter personality types that dissect how different people make decisions and understand the world.

It's a great time to start a company — just look at the data. The number of seed rounds in United States companies has multiplied ten times in six years, growing from 200 per year to more than 2,200 in 2013. The capital available to seed companies has tripled. We're seeing a variety of new ways to fund an early stage startup, and an increase in the number of people investing to get these companies off the ground.

Peter Liu, a 26-year-old senior associate at Pritzker Group Venture Capital, moved to Chicago three years ago to pursue a career investing in startups. The former New York City-based banker said he quickly realized that Chicago offered plenty of events for entrepreneurs to meet and learn but none for those new to the venture capital community.

Image: Peter Liu of Pritzker Group Venture Capital (formerly New World Ventures) (SWCTechPartners / YouTube)

Corporations are increasingly backing startups, setting a record for venture capital with $5.4 billion invested in 775 deals in 2014, the most since 2000, according to newly released data from the National Venture Capital Association. Nearly 18% of all venture deals in 2014 had participation from corporations and they accounted for 11% of total venture dollars invested, the greatest percentage seen since 2000.