The surface of the Dead Sea, already 424 meters below sea level, is falling by a meter a year. Jordanians to the east, Israelis to the west, and Syrians and Lebanese to the north are pumping so much freshwater from the Jordan River that almost none reaches the sea any more. Israel and Jordan are also siphoning water from the lake to extract valuable minerals, hastening the decline.

Photojournalist Eitan Haddok has traveled from Paris to the Middle East many times to document the sea's retreat, as scientists try to understand the repercussions. Here are some additional Haddok images and insights to consider.

Sweden handled the latest financial crisis better than most nations. Its growth rate is among the OECD's highest, the budget deficit should become a surplus in 2011, and unemployment is declining to 5%. What does the Swedish example show us, and what lies ahead? Sweden combined fiscal prudence with labor activism. The economy would have fared even better had labor and innovation policies meshed.

Politicians have started to discuss innovation as a job creator. This is logical. Innovation is the main driver of economic growth. But are countries organized to do anything about it? We think not.

The contemporary industrial landscape is characterised by strong, international competition. Governments have for quite some time focused on how investments in research and development (R&D) may enable their economies to become more knowledge-based and better positioned in this global division of labour. But the link between input in the form of R&D and output in the form of value creation is not a straightforward one. The universities, higher education institutions and research institutes of individual countries can only be the best within a limited number of areas. At the same time, modern products and production processes are becoming increasingly complex, and incorporate technologies from many such domains. In our efforts to stimulate industrial creativity, we are forced to recognise that much of the technological basis for this creativity will come from foreign research communities, and materialise as new products or production processes by way of collaboration with customers and suppliers located abroad. In the words of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, we have entered an era of 'global open innovation'.

Engaged in a fierce battle on last night’s Chopped All-Stars, chef Aarón Sanchez quipped, “When brilliance happens, you don’t ask where it came from, you just kind of go with it, ride the wave.”

It didn’t matter that he was referring to making whipped cream out of chickpeas; he might just as well have been talking about the next high-tech innovation or big business idea.

If you watch enough Food Network shows like Iron Chef or Worst Cooks in America, a picture of what greatness is all about begins to emerge. No, I’m not talking about great chefs making great food. I’m talking about great leaders.

Over the last five years, I have taught more than 300 really smart students. One of the smartest, at the Masters of Engineering Management program at Duke University, was Viva Leigh Miller, a black woman. She had the ambition of moving to Silicon Valley after she graduated last year. I expected she would become a hotshot CEO.

But Viva couldn’t get a job in the Valley—despite introductions that I gave her to leading venture capitalists. I have never understood why. During my tech days, I would have hired Viva in a heartbeat. She had the determination, drive, and education that all tech companies look for.

It raised a red flag in my mind.

The University of Waterloo, located in Ontario, Canada, announced Tuesday that it received a $1 million donation from 23-year-old alum and tech entrepreneur Ted Livingston. The money was given to help fund VeloCity, the University's residence-based program for student entrepreneurs. Livingston, who is the founder of mobile messaging app Kik, has a special connection to VeloCity, having founded Kik (then called Unsynced) while living in the residence in the winter term of 2009. Livingston studied mechatronics engineering at Waterloo from 2005 to 2009.

Over the years, there have been numerous articles musing on what the office of the future would look like, but how have those past predictions matched up to reality today?

Back in 1975, BusinessWeek published “an in-depth analysis of how word processing will reshape the corporate office.” In the article, industry experts were divided over whether they would be able “to call up documents” from their files on-screen and connect electronic terminals to each other or if this vision of the future was, in fact, “scare talk.” One of the biggest concerns raised was how word processing would change the traditional secretary-executive relationship.

The European Research Centre (ERF) Proof of concept provides additional funding to ERC grant holders to establish proof of concept, identify a development path and an Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) strategy for ideas arising from an ERC-funded project. The objective is to provide funds to enable ERC-funded ideas to be brought to a pre-demonstration stage where potential commercialisation opportunities have been identified.

Innovations can be commercialised through licenses to a new or existing company or through a venture funded start-up, depending on the nature of the invention/idea, its potential markets, the inventor's plans for future involvement in the commercialisation, etc.

In the 1970s the economist E. F. Schumacher set the scene for environmental sustainability with Small is Beautiful. But small is not beautiful for entrepreneurs: small is a stigma. Small connotes self-employment and stagnation, which is not only different from entrepreneurship; it is fundamentally its opposite. In the words of Abhi Shah, an award-winning entrepreneur from Ahmedabad: “Thing big! Thinking small is a crime!”

Entrepreneurship vs. self-employment. A century ago, with his third-grade education and as a WWI veteran, my immigrant grandfather became a wallpaper hanger in Philadelphia. He eventually owned a wallpaper store, but he never imagined becoming a Wal-(Paper)-Mart. He did not respond to or create opportunities to grow; to the contrary, for his children he wanted respectable, salaried jobs. Not self-employment.

The Economist's Vijay Vaitheeswaran sits down for a chin wag with the Obama administration's Aneesh Chopra at our "Innovation: Entrepreneurship for a disruptive world" event. Provocateurs Daniel Isenberg of Babson Global and Vivek Wadhwa of the University of California make a walk-on appearance to challenge the White House's efforts in stimulating entrepreneurship.

ON college campuses, the annual race for summer internships, many of them unpaid, is well under way. But instead of steering students toward the best opportunities and encouraging them to value their work, many institutions of higher learning are complicit in helping companies skirt a nebulous area of labor law.

Colleges and universities have become cheerleaders and enablers of the unpaid internship boom, failing to inform young people of their rights or protect them from the miserly calculus of employers. In hundreds of interviews with interns over the past three years, I found dejected students resigned to working unpaid for summers, semesters and even entire academic years — and, increasingly, to paying for the privilege.

Middle managers and marketing folks dealing with business-to-business companies that are still delaying their social media programs – pay attention! We’ve reviewed our share of social media books here, but this is the first one targeted specifically to B2B applications. This is a book I received from the publisher, but I would have purchased on my own because of my extensive involvement in the B2B marketing space.

Authors Paul Gillin(@pgillin) and Eric Schwartzman have written what I’ll call a foundation book for B2B social media marketing, Social Media to the Business Customer: Listen to Your B2B Market, Generate Major Account Leads and Build Client Relationships.

Of late there has been a growing buzz in the early stage investments space – lots of seed stage funds, incubators and entrepreneur mentoring platforms have come up – which is definitely a very encouraging sign.

An interesting innovation in this area is the advent of crowd funding platforms for startups, which – simply put – allow the crowd (people like you and me) to participate in the early stage funding process. (You can give GrowVC a whirl in case you haven’t already – a global platform that connects entrepreneurs with funders and mentors. Another similar example is AngelList. In a way, SecondMarket also allows one to get a piece of the pie of private unlisted firms, although it is more of secondary sale)

I bet that title got your attention. Now on to the serious stuff. Here's the next question/request which came up in regards to blog topics:

From a purely selfish standpoint, I'd like to hear about your views on bootstrapping vs. VC. I know it goes against your business model :-) but it must tickle you that to some, the sign of success is funding and not a successful business.

This is a good one. I love talking about this. It's kind of funny that the majority of people coming to me are obviously looking to raise venture capital and don't have this discussion with me. Yet, after getting to know people or having had worked with them, we end up having just the conversation mentioned above....usually over a beer. The question is always asked: "So, as a VC, would you go out and raise money from a VC?"

Martin Hinoul, Richard Bendis, Dr. Mario Thomas, Doug Robertson

Ontario Centres of Excellence's (OCE's) Centre for Commercialization of Research (CCR) recently hosted a gathering of some of the world's brightest minds from academia, government and industry in a bit to better capitalize on the commercialization potential of publicly funded research and enhance the state of innovation in Canada and around the world.

This inaugural meeting of The International Commercialization Alliance was held on Marth 30th and 31st in Ottowa, bringing together experts from 18 countries.  The group examined exemplary practices in the commercialization of research outcomes internationally and focused on continuous global collaborations among its members by signing a formal declaration of intent.

Since its founding in 2002, the Russian Technology Transfer Network (RTTN) has worked with the global business and research community to tap into the scientific and technological advances made in R&D centers and universities across Russia. Based in Obninsk in the Kaluga Region, RTTN is an association of over 70 Russian innovation centers from more than 30 regions of Russia and the CIS that aggregates information on R&D offerings in Russia and neighboring states and serves as an entry point for potential industry partners and investors. Given Russia’s vast territory, its potential language barriers and information gaps between Russian regional and foreign entities, RTTN’s work is a critical element to developing the country’s national innovation infrastructure.

A few nonprofit groups have recently announced plans to wind down, not over financial problems but because their missions are nearly finished.

Most notable, perhaps, is Malaria No More, a popular nonprofit that supplies bed nets in malaria zones. Its goal is to end deaths from malaria, a target it sees fast approaching.

The charity has announced plans to close in 2015, but it is keeping its options open in the unlikely event that advances against malaria are reversed.

At a startup it’s painfully hard to make time for recruiting. Any time not spent advancing the product feels like a distant secondary priority. However, getting the right team in place is the most important thing you can do to make your startup successful.

Your first few hires set the tone for your culture. What’s more, it’s often said that A-level hires get you more top quality hires in the long run. You don’t just need to make time for recruiting — you have to be great at it.

What follows are my tips and tricks for finding and closing all-star hires on a startup budget.

There’s no denying that an incubator rebirth is taking place, thanks in large measure to Y Combinator.

Y Combinator clones are everywhere. Several dozen of them already exist and insiders expect more than 100 such incubators will be operating nationwide before long. And they’re busy churning out plenty of startups. This past week, AngelPad held a demo day for its startups to pitch VCs, its second demo day in less than six months.

On April 7, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups Accelerator is holding two demo day sessions at its event.