He is a new kind of whistle-blower: one made for the digital age. Those before him (like Daniel Ellsberg) were limited in the ways they could go public with their information. But in founding WikiLeaks.org, Julian Assange gave himself the freedom to publish virtually anything he wants, whether it's the true nature of Iraqi prisoner abuse, the double role Pakistan plays in Afghanistan or the personal e-mails of Sarah Palin. Assange's site, which he started four years ago, has made public a trove of secret and classified documents — close to 500,000 pages on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone. But in the process, governments he has targeted (like the U.S.'s) claim he has put the lives of informants and soldiers in jeopardy. Warranted or not, Assange is convinced that the governments and intelligence agencies he is unmasking are watching his every move, and as a result, he finds himself in virtual exile in Europe.

Venture capital investment in Silicon Valley continues to decrease overall even as angel investors rush into high-value investments in tech stars like Twitter and Facebook, according to a study released today of capital raised in the third quarter.

The Fenwick & West Venture Capital Barometer analyzed the valuations and terms of venture financings for 107 Silicon Valley-based technology and life science companies that reported raising capital during the third quarter.

It found that while liquidity, usually in the form of mergers and acquisitions and initial public offerings, has been improving, the overall amount of venture investing is continuing its recent decline as potential investors wait for a more sustainable VC model to appear.

Ah, November. Leaves are turning, nights get longer and the dreaded performance reviews loom. No manager enjoys doing them– not only is it tough giving people formal feedback at the best of times, but there’s all that HR paperwork and process to go along with it. It’s bad enough when you can call someone into your office to have this chat. How much more uncomfortable and weird is it when the person is on the other side of the country.

Daniel Debow knows both sides of this challenge. Currently,he’s co-CEO of Rypple. They make software that makes tracking feedback and employee discussions less onerous. He’s not a fan of performance reviews, but has some interesting thoughts on how to make them less painful for all concerned.

NEW YORK -- New York state is beginning to take the threat of sea level rise attributed to climate change seriously as a new government prepares to settle in next year.

Starting Monday, state officials in Albany will gather with members of the public to discuss a recently released 93-page report that recommends major changes to development planning and conservation along coastlines from the tip of Long Island all way up the Hudson River Valley.

Any reforms to come from the process, starting next week, would affect about 62 percent of New York state's population, the proportion estimated to reside now in areas that could be hard hit as rising land and ocean temperatures raise average sea levels around the globe.

The year 2005 was devastating for coral, with unusually warm waters in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea causing one of the worst bleaching events on record. Researchers who monitored the event have now catalogued the full extent of the disaster — and they warn that 2010 is shaping up to be even worse.

Mark Eakin, coordinator of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch programme based in Silver Springs, Maryland, and his colleagues performed an extensive coral survey to record the effects of unseasonally high temperatures on reefs in 2005. The project involved more than 250 collaborators from 22 countries, and compared satellite data with field surveys to determine how heat stress affected the coral in different places.

Which angel investors in Boston have the biggest wings? Check out this blog post by ChubbyBrain, a New York-based provider of Web-based information tools for entrepreneurs, which rounds up some of the individuals who have done the most deal-making in the Boston area.

The post lists 10 individual Boston-area investors who tech entrepreneurs looking for funding might want to keep their eyes on. It directly links to their Twitter handles, as well as detailed biographies and lists of investments the angels have made. After Chubby already rounded up some of the most stalk-worthy investors in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, this post helps dispel the perception that Boston doesn’t have the vibrant community of individual investors that its West Coast counterpart does.

The culture of innovation can mean many things. Most obviously it can refer to how a company creates an innovative culture, which is different from being in an innovation culture. I want to look at how innovative cultures intersect, and how important this is for what companies can achieve. The two concepts I want to introduce are: positive and negative equity in innovation cultures. How do you create the former and shed the latter?

I heard a brilliant thing recently concerning making mistakes in a relationship. The person I heard it from described it as “the 5 to 1 rule.”

“When you screw up, recognize that you need to do five good things for every one bad thing. So, when I do something that makes my wife mad at me - or which she considers “wrong”, I consciously focus on making sure that I do the next five things right.”

I think this simple rule can be applied to all relationships, not just the one with your spouse or significant other. As humans, we make plenty of mistakes and have plenty of failures. We also do plenty of things that annoy, distress, and anger people around us. Sometimes we realize it; sometimes we don’t.

In a downtown office loft, the staff of Caoz is immersed in the making of ‘Thor: The Edda Chronicles – Iceland’s first full-length 3D animation film, adopted from old tales of the Nordic God of Thunder. Caoz is perhaps not what you would expect of a movie studio. In fact, it is not so much a studio, as it is a computer cluster. One of the largest one in Iceland at that.

“We are a high-tech company, really. Every frame in the movie contains 10mb of data,” explains Managing Director Hilmar Sigurðsson. “There are 250.000 frames in the 3-D version of the movie, and behind every frame, there is probably twenty times that amount of data. So we need considerable processing power.”

If, at some point between 2000 and this year, you had a bright idea and needed some venture capital to turn it into money, you'd have stood the best chance if you were into biotechnology, lived in Cape Town, regularly played golf with business types, and didn't need too large a sum of money.

From next year much of that will probably remain true, except that you should have better luck in the energy sector – and your idea had better be very good indeed, or you had better be looking for an even smaller amount of money.

Complaints about the lack of available venture capital in South Africa and the rapacious deals demanded by those with the funds are perennial, and not unfounded. But a detailed survey of the industry over the last decade, under the auspices of the SA Venture Capital Association, has brought some hard numbers to the debate that show a situation both better and worse than common wisdom would have it.

With venture capital waning as a source of start-up funds for small business, a new type of financier has stepped into the gap – the “super angel.”

These investors have deep pockets and a willingness to provide material support and professional knowledge to start-ups or new companies with good business ideas. They operate on a smaller scale than traditional venture capitalists, but on a larger scale than the more traditional “angels,” who usually invest in a handful of companies.

As millions of U.S. travelers get ready for the busiest flying day of the year, scientists still can't agree over whether the dose of radiation delivered by so-called backscatter machines is significantly higher than the government says. This is despite months of public debate between the White House, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and independent scientists.

Full-body scanners have been installed at many U.S. airports. The machines use either low-energy, millimeter wavelength radiation, which is harmless, or X-rays, which can potentially be hazardous. X-rays can ionize atoms or molecules, which can lead to cancerous changes in cells. Even if the government has significantly underestimated the dose of radiation delivered by an X-ray scanner, it is likely to be relatively small.

Search the Internet, and you'll find hundreds of applications designed to help you collaborate with other people more effectively. But examine your own habits, and you'll most likely find that you use just one piece of software for that purpose: an e-mail client.

You're not alone. A recent Forrester Research study found that 83 percent of business users typically send e-mail attachments to colleagues rather than using collaboration software. According to a recent survey by technology consulting company People-OnTheGo, the average information worker spends 3.3 hours a day dealing with e-mail, and 65 percent of such workers have their e-mail client open all the time.

Mai Perkins remembers attending a concert at Central Park SummerStage with Cassanda Wilson, partly because of an observation the jazz singer made about Perkins’ new city. “She made a comment that I thought was so applicable to the city’s diversity. She said, ‘California has landscape, New York has people-scape!’” It was a sentiment that the native Angeleno could relate to.

Perkins is no different from the millions who migrate across the country for school or for a new job. She moved to Washington DC over ten years ago to attend Howard University and ended up in New York City to pursue her career as a writer.

It’s not just our waistlines that get bigger around the holidays – so do our trash cans and energy bills. Think of all the wrapping paper, plastic bags, packaging and decorations that businesses use around the holiday season.

It’s the perfect time to try and cut down on some of that environmental toll.

Here are several ways businesses can mix environmental sustainability into the holiday spirit:

1. Use 100 percent post-consumer wrapping paper. If you wrap gifts for customers or clients, at least use 100 percent post-consumer wrapping paper imprinted with soy-based or other organic inks. Post-consumer paper is recycled waste paper, meaning trees weren’t cut down to make the wrapping paper. Another idea for small retailers: Put customers’ purchases in decorative recycled-paper gift bags that can be reused.

Mid-level or even top executives who “grew up” in large companies often look with envy at startups, and dream of how easy it must be running a small organization, where you can see the whole picture and it appears you have total control. In reality, very few executives or professional stars from large corporations thrive in the early-stage startup environment.

The job of a big-company executive is very different from the job of a small-company executive. The culture is different, the skills required are different, and the experience from one may be the exact opposite of what you need for the other. Michael Fertik, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, summarized the key differences for people trying to survive the transition:

• Forget influence- and empire-building. Establishing and wielding influence may help you move resources in your direction in a large business. Similarly, acquiring a larger footprint of direct reports is often a sign of success at large businesses. These instincts kill you in a small company, where requiring more resources is a negative.