YOU bought the plane tickets, booked the hotel and rented the car. But have you packed the right credit card?

As credit card companies vie for a favored position in customers’ wallets, they’re pitching new travel enticements, from waiving foreign transaction fees that can add up to 3 percent to your purchases abroad to picking up fees for checked baggage. Earlier this month, for example, American Express did away with the 2.7 percent foreign transaction fees on international purchases for Platinum Card holders, and added two new travel benefits — Priority Pass Select airport lounge access in more than 300 cities worldwide and free membership to Global Entry, which offers expedited security clearance for pre-approved travelers entering the United States.

Stephen Daze can't understand why teaching young people about starting and owning a business isn't a bigger priority in Ottawa's schools. We want our children to grow up to be self-sufficient, independent and ready for the challenges of tomorrow's economy. And studies show many kids are interested in owning their own business. So shouldn't they learn about entrepreneurship in the classroom?

"Other places get it," says Daze, OCRI's executive director for entrepreneurship and talent.

"They teach entrepreneurship as a life skill."

In Canada, he says, business isn't really part of the curriculum, apart from a bit of talk in economics class about the role of big industry. But the majority of jobs being created today are in small and medium-sized companies, not giant manufacturers. For some reason, we aren't introducing students to the intricacies of small business.

The exponentially increasing amount of digital information, along with new challenges in storing valuable data and massive datasets, are changing the architecture of today’s newest supercomputers as well as how researchers will use them to accelerate scientific discovery, said Michael Norman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

In a presentation during the 3rd Annual La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit this week, Norman said that the amount of digital data generated just by instruments such as DNA sequencers, cameras, telescopes, and MRIs is now doubling every 18 months.

Face reality. As an entrepreneur, you should assume none of your customers is like you, yet I find that most entrepreneurs assume just the opposite. Customers don’t have your technical base, the passion, and interest in your solution. In fact, even if they did, they couldn’t find you in the clutter. An underrated portion of every startup effort must be about communication and marketing.

By habit, people market to customers like themselves, because they know what they like and need. The challenge is attracting customers not like you, since that isn’t so intuitive. Kelly McDonald, who runs a top ad agency, takes on this challenge in “How to Market to People Not Like You.”

Many states have begun calling for tests of student creativity. Massachusetts has already mandated such tests, and the Governor of California has demanded similar tests for his state's students. (1) The only reason to test for creativity in schools is to teach it and to determine how well it is being taught. But can creativity be taught? Can creative outcomes be mandated in the classroom? We don't think so....

Whoa! Did we just say creativity can't be taught?! Yes, we did!

How can we write a blog about creativity and not believe that it can be taught?

It used to be so easy to define what a book was: a collection of printed pages bound inside a cover (hard or soft) that you could place on a shelf in your library, or in a store. Now, there are e-books, and blogs that turn into books, and long pieces of journalism that are somewhere between magazine articles and short books — like the recent opus written by author John Krakauer, published through a new service called Byliner — and a whole series of ongoing attempts to reimagine the entire industry of writing and selling books. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity.

If you’re an early stage venture capitalist or angel investor there is no time like the present to declare a bubble, say valuations are out of control and predict the demise of the tech industry in the very near future. Since they’re in the business of buying low and selling high, any angle that suggests that the buy price should be even lower sounds great to them.

If there’s any evidence of said bubble all the press will eat it up. Mostly because they were out buying Internet stocks in 2000 instead of doing their jobs and reporting on the fairly obvious signals that the Nasdaq was about to implode. They won’t get caught with their pants down and their hand out again. Declare a bubble early and declare it often.

Thanks to the revolutions happening in the Middle East, our leaders have been touting social media as the new force for democracy. President Obama went out of his way to schmooze Facebook employees this week. He told them that when it comes to solving the challenges our country faces and to precipitating changes in the rest of the world, they were “at the cutting edge of what’s happening”.

It’s great that Silicon Valley is getting all this love and affection. But could this attention end up killing the golden goose? Think about it: if you are an evil dictator, looking for an excuse to block Facebook and Twitter, what better propaganda weapon than a picture of President Obama getting chummy with Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I know that the U.S. government didn’t invent Facebook or even figure out how to use it until recently; and that it doesn’t control Facebook’s policies. But don’t those pictures and video clips tell a different story?

For years New York state has had the makings of a strong biotechnology cluster. It graduates the nation’s fourth-highest number of bioscience majors (9,630 in the 2008 academic year). Its academic institutions spend some $2.7 billion on bio R&D, more than any state except California.

New York is also second only to California in its number of clinical trials (3,267 last year). In terms of life science employment, a report issued April 12 by the research arm of the Business Council of New York State put the Empire State in fourth place with 10,320 jobs across seven categories that included scientists but not administrative and support staff. The report analyzed seven reportedly peer biomanufacturing states. California came in at number one by a large margin with 41,200, followed by Pennsylvania (15,920) and Massachusetts (15,300).

The just less than two million or so views for Eric Whitacre’s original Virtual Choir (2010) on YouTube are respectable but perhaps not necessarily overly impressive. In an online world where Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” YouTube video has more than 30 million views (and oddly the audio-only version has over 57 million views), it might seem that a couple million views for a music video is really not that big a deal. What makes the Virtual Choir pretty amazing though is that its members contributed to the project virtually - 243 tracks representing 185 different voices from 12 countries. The choir never actually got together, but managed to sing together. The song was “Lux Aurumque”. Have a listen.

The effort behind the original Virtual Choir was pretty impressive. But Eric Whitacre, with the help of a few thousand contributors from throughout the world, are looking to top it. On Thursday April 7, 2011 Virtual Choir 2.0 premieres at the Paley Center for Media in New York. A talk by Eric Whitacre will be followed by the unveiling of the Virtual Choir 2.0 video - which represents 2051 videos from 58 countries. The choir never actually got together, but managed to sing together. The song is “Sleep”.

01 / NYU

For opening up a second campus in Abu Dhabi. There, NYU is shepherding the most successful and ambitious attempt yet to export overseas a full-fledged American liberal arts university.

02 / LinkedIn >>

For developing LinkedIn's Career Explorer, which offers users career path recommendations that are tailored to their interests and based on the real paths of professionals with similar profiles. CEO Reid Hoffman is also actively involved in the national conversations surrounding the future of education, and envisions his company as a

In the last month or so, I’ve noticed an irritating trend in the startup world: After adding my email to a launch page, I get asked to submit a few of my friends’ email addresses in exchange for a higher place in line or earlier access. This has happened at least twice when I’ve checked out a startup after meeting an entrepreneur, and two or three times after I’ve spoken with a friend about a cool company and gone to check it out. I find it annoying, but it’s a trend that has blossomed, mostly because it appears to work.

Damian Kimmelman, founder and CEO of DueDil, a financial information startup that’s shutting down its social invite program as it opens up its beta to more people, said the company saw its invite pool swell by a third thanks to folks sharing email addresses of their friends. But most important was the psychological effect Kimmelman felt it has on the invitees. In an IM conversation, he said it helps prioritize users when you can only let a few people into a beta at one time and he added, “[A]lso you are a free service, but you kinda want people to value the service from day 1.”

What makes an entrepreneur tick?

We have argued that the image of the visionary entrepreneur who builds an empire from the seed of a brilliant and fully formed idea is mostly myth.

At the same time, the loose and flexible ideas of an entrepreneur should not be constrained by a business plan.

Given these insights, we believe entrepreneurs need to leverage customers and partners to solve the financing paradox, and to embrace both positive and negative surprises.

As states across the country consider their budget proposals for the coming year, they continue to face a daunting fiscal challenge. The worst recession since the 1930s has caused the steepest decline in state tax receipts on record. State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 11 percent below pre-recession levels,[1] while the need for state-funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.

To date, some 44 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2012, which begins July 1, 2011 in most states. These come on top of the large shortfalls that states closed in fiscal years 2009 through 2011. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs.

The tools of nanobiotechnology have wide-ranging commercial impact on fields that include pharma, medtech, textiles, agriculture, consumer products and many more. There are many hotbeds of nanobiotech innovation, and North Carolina has emerged as a leader in nanobiotech research, development and commercialization.

North Carolina's rich resources include world-class university research centers, significant emerging and established industry players, and an environment that proactively nurtures entrepreneurial ventures. The rapidly growing NC nanobiotech cluster allows for collaborations with opinion leaders, resource-sharing within a strong supportive infrastructure, momentum that drives commercial impact and improvement of human health through better medical products. The top five reasons North Carolina is a major nanobiotech hub include: a rich support infrastructure in North Carolina, momentum, commercial impact, impact on diagnosing and treating diseases, and world-renowned hotbed of key thought leaders. These reasons are detailed below.

As the developed world continues its slow climb out of the financial crisis, policymakers and companies increasingly look to research universities to generate new ideas and to contribute to innovation and economic development. Academic entrepreneurship—the formation of companies based on intellectual property generated by faculty members—is of particular interest given the publicized success of companies such as Lycos from Carnegie Mellon University and Silicon Graphics and Genentech from Stanford.

The recent and rapid growth of spinoffs is promising. According to the Association of University Technology Managers, the number of companies spun out of universities in the U.S. more than doubled between 1996 and 2005—from 200 to nearly 450. Research shows that these companies are not only more likely to attract venture capital and have an initial public offering, but, compared to non-university startups, they also have a higher propensity to survive over time. Consequently, numerous universities have created incubators, venture funds, and other programs to encourage spinoff establishment and growth.

The Iowa-based Raptor Resource Project works to foster population growth among threatened bird populations throughout the midwest. They manage 23 nests, educate others in nest-site management, and — best of all for those living far from the wilderness — maintain several webcams at their sites. You can follow several families online, including falcons, owls and osprey.

Obesity is at an epidemic stage in America. It's slowly killing a huge number of people and it's costing tons of money. Consider this, an obese patient costs $443 more dollars per inpatient visit than a person at a healthy weight. In total, that costs the country billions a year. Many people and programs have considered different ways to lower the obesity rate, from championing exercise to surgical procedures. It turns out, it's not the obese we need to target, it's their moms.

Do you belong to the one-half of the population that frequently uses dietary supplements with the hope that it might be good for you?

Well, according to a study published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, there seems to be an interesting asymmetrical relationship between the frequency of dietary supplement use and the health status of individuals. Wen-Bin Chiou of National Sun Yat-Sen University decided to test if frequent use of dietary supplements had ironic consequences for subsequent health-related behaviors after observing a colleague chose an unhealthy meal over an organic meal simply because the colleague had taken a multivitamin earlier in the day.