As the season of Thanksgiving approaches, Americans may be unaware of the role that agricultural technology plays in making their family meal possible. Thanks to remarkable innovations in agriculture over the past century, each acre of farm land now supports two and a half more Thanksgiving feasts than it did just 50 years ago.

But many Americans may also be unaware that failed harvests in Russia have again sent world food prices soaring. Or that the fertilizer used to grow the food on their table is helping to wipe out marine ecosystems in our streams and estuaries. Or that the carbon-rich topsoil that is vital for many crops is being depleted at an astonishing rate. They even may not know that climate change threatens to intensify regional drought and flooding, risking global food shortages, or that the resulting price fluctuations will exacerbate chronic hunger, potentially leading to civil unrest and instability.

Indeed, while agricultural innovations have made it possible for 6 billion humans to live comfortably on the same land that once supported only 1.5 billion, many challenges remain to ensuring our global food system continues to support our society in a sustainable way.

We used to complain about all the useless back-to-back meetings and being copied on hundreds of unnecessary emails. Now we long for those days. We used to say there’s no such thing as over-communication. Now we’d do anything to make it stop.

Communication is out of control and it’s taking all the fun - and productivity - out of work.

Don’t get me wrong, communication is as important to business success and organizational effectiveness as it used to be. There’s just too much of it. For whatever reason, the old problem of protecting domains by limiting the flow of information has morphed into a new problem of hyper-collaboration where everybody’s included in everything.

PitchBook has published its 4Q 2010 Private Equity Presentation Deck. Please feel free to utilize these slides for conferences, board meetings and other PE-related presentations. The slides were all sourced from the PitchBook Platform and cover trends in private equity fundraising, investment, and exits. For this 4Q deck we have also added new slides covering PE and VC fund returns.

Click Here to Download The PE Presentation Deck - 6.5MB

Steve from Openmedia.ca sez, "As result of a recent decision by Canada's telcom regulator, the CRTC, Bell Canada and other big telecom companies can now freely force Internet usage-based billing on YOU and indie ISPs. This means we're looking at a future where Internet providers will charge per byte, the way they do with smart phones. If we allow this to happen Canadians will have no choice but to pay more for less Internet. This will crush innovative services, Canada's digital competitiveness, and your wallet. Canadians should sign the Stop The Meter petition!"

When it comes to companies concerned with managing their brand image online, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has some advice: "Make stuff that doesn't suck."

"More than ever before, people like to talk about stuff that sucks," Wales told Fast Company following a recent talk at the Digital Hollywood conference in New York City. "There's nothing to be done about it, except making a better product."

Wales attended the conference to introduce his own better product: Wiki 2.0, the latest set of collaborative publishing tools for his for-profit venture Wikia. The site, essentially Wikipedia-without-limits, receives roughly 36 million monthly visitors, and now offers a slew of new and improved social features, from polls and top 10 lists to video content and achievement badges.

Now that electric cars have hit the mainstream, it raises the question, what about other forms of transportation running on electricity? Specifically, will we ever see electric planes flying over the horizon?

Believe it or not, they’re already here. The battery-powered Yuneec E430 two-seater is currently in production (you can fly away with one for less than a hundred grand). And the Antares 20E sailplane has electric propulsion that can take it to 10,000 feet.

So you’ve scored an introduction to a Venture Capitalist and need to pull together a pitch deck that conveys the dire investability of your revolutionary, billion-dollar idea.

You’re in luck, because Friday I got some insider tips from VCs at the annual MIT VC conference. The tips below are compiled from a panel featuring Kent Bennett (Bessmer Venture Partners), Sunil Dhaliwal (Battery Ventures), Matthew Witheiler (Flybridge), and Jack Young (QUALCOMM Ventures).

The Canadian venture capital world is suffering from a terrible hangover in the wake of the collapse of many labour-sponsored funds in Canada. Many of the funds, which offered federal and provincial tax credits to investors, have posted dismal returns. The worst was VenGrowth, which registered negative returns on all of its 18 series. Unitholders of these funds haven't made a dime even though the managers stand to earn a ridiculous termination fee of $13-million (for just five of the funds) if the failing funds are absorbed by Covington Capital.

It's bad enough that investors lost hundreds of millions, but adding insult to injury is the fact VenGrowth Investment Management Inc. and other LSFs, have given the VC industry a black eye that will take years to heal. For venture capital players fundraising now, VenGrowth's bad returns and fee grab are a publicity nightmare. Many institutional investors have told general partners such as Peter van der Velden, president and chief executive of Lumira Capital, they won't invest another dime into the VC space until all the money that's been locked in the LSF funds, has been flushed out of the market. And that could be five years or more.

Technology might not be advanced enough yet to let people read someone else's mind, but researchers are at least inching closer to helping people to read and control their own. In a study presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, scientists used a combination of brain-scanning and feedback techniques to train subjects to move a cursor up and down with their thoughts. The subjects could perform this task after just five minutes of training.

The scientists hope to use this information to help addicts learn to control their own brain states and, consequently, their cravings.

The most common comment in this long and complicated MBA Mondays series on Employee Equity is the question of how much equity should you grant when you make a hire. I am going to try to address that question in this post.

First, a caveat. For your first key hires, three, five, maybe as much as ten, you will probably not be able to use any kind of formula. Getting someone to join your dream before it is much of anything is an art not a science. And the amount of equity you need to grant to accomplish these hires is also an art and most certainly not a science. However, a rule of thumb for those first few hires is that you will be granting them in terms of points of equity (ie 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%). To be clear, these are hires we are talking about, not co-founders. Co-founders are an entirely different discussion and I am not talking about them in this post.

Once you have assembled a core team that is operating the business, you need to move from art to science in terms of granting employee equity. And most importantly you need to move away from points of equity to the dollar value of equity. Giving out equity in terms of points is very expensive and you need to move away from it as soon as it is reasonable to do so.

A Colorado man has created what he feels is a product that can help people that do not want to bare all to full body scanners reports 6 KFDM News.

Pads made of metals, can be placed inside a bra or for men, the fig leaf design has the same flexible properties providing the kind of protection some flyers want.

It’s airport scanners that led to the creation of Rocky Flats Gear.

Inventor Jeff Buske insists his product is not about politics, but all about protecting the health of your body from radiation.

Or if you’re like some travelers, there are some things others don’t need to see.

Buske, who is an engineer, says hiding something from TSA screeners behind the special metals in the fig leaf, is not possible.

If you are looking for the perfect present for an Apple super fan, we have some good news and some bad news.

The good news: Just in time for the holidays, M.I.C. Gadget started selling a very realistic Steve Jobs "action figure," with customizable speech bubbles for $80.

The bad news: After selling 300, M.I.C. is all sold out. If you want one, you'll have to lobby them to make more, or hit up eBay and hope for the best.

Your small business relies on a professional and consistent look and feel. But how do you achieve this when you don’t have the resources to have an in-house marketing design team? Print design, Web design and advertising copy – all of this can be quite complicated. Outsourced designers are a great way to bring in design expertise when you need it… but managing creative professionals has its own set of unique challenges.

Can you remember what life was like before the Internet? I can ... but barely. I remember sending my first e-mail, and putting the entire message in the subject line, not knowing how it worked; the person to whom I was responding kindly phoned me up to explain it to me. I remember using Gopher, burrowing down through files and folders to see what was there. I recall a friend telling me about a new development that he thought would change everything, and it did; he was describing the World Wide Web and the browser that opened the door to just about everything.

Twenty years later, it's hard to imagine going through a day in the library without the Internet. Remember how involved it was to search through years' worth of abstracts, flipping from the index to the numbered entries? Remember how tiny the print was in the ISI citation indexes? For younger librarians, these are uphill-through-the-snow stories, but trust me: it was tough.

Michael Dell shares his thoughts on the newly developing collaborative structure(s) of organizations and the affects on business and society. The world’s organizations will soon be managed by a new generation that has grown up in an ever-changing technological age where one learns and excels by sharing information.

One of the keys to maximizing the productivity of your team, as well as yourself, is motivation. It has been estimated that the average team member at any given time works at less than 50% of his capacity. Thus mastering the art of employee motivation could double your chances of success over the average competitor.

While there are many books written on this subject, most entrepreneurs I know simply assume that their own vision, motivation, and drive will be adopted and maintained by partners and employees, based on a one-hour inspirational talk by the founder or business leader, supplemented a reasonable salary, and a dose of fear for good measure.

What’s the most important big task on your schedule today?

And the most urgent?

Are they the same thing?

If so, then you’ll have no problem deciding what to do first. But if not, then you’re faced with a dilemma:

Should you do the more-important-but-less-urgent task first, at the risk of missing your deadline?

Or should you do the urgent thing first, at the risk of sidelining your most important work?

In the moment, most of us will tend to do the urgent task first, no matter that it’s less important than the other one. And in the moment, there’s probably no great harm done – after all, if it’s important enough to get on your schedule, then presumably Bad Things Will Happen if you don’t do it on time.

Creativity is difficult to define and can be even harder to activate on command. With deadlines to meet and projects to complete, this can sometimes be problematic and it’s easy to become frustrated and discouraged. However, there are numerous ways of overcoming creative block. If you’re someone who needs creative inspiration in a hurry, one of these seven techniques may help to ameliorate your situation.

Poets have a unique and inspiring perspective on the world and can even make the mundane seem romantic. This kind of “outside the box” thinking can be useful for any creative endeavor. While reading, be particularly aware of the way in which many poets combine seemingly unrelated or even opposing ideas. These kinds of juxtapositions are the stuff of major creative innovation.