Dolphins are probably the most iconic and best loved species of the marine world. Their playful nature and high intelligence have endeared them to people for eons. But our love of dolphins might not be enough to save them from extinction brought on by overfishing, pollution, climate change and other environmental affronts perpetrated by humans.

The nonprofit International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which maintains a worldwide “Red List” of at-risk wildlife species, considers 36 of the world’s 40 different dolphin species to be in trouble. Yes, specific events can cause problems for dolphins—researchers believe that the deaths of 300 dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico over the last year can be blamed on the BP oil spill there. But more widespread and constant forms of pollution—such as run-off of agricultural and industrial chemicals into rivers that drain into coastal areas of the ocean where dolphins spend much of their time—are having a more lasting negative effect on dolphins by poisoning them and causing reproductive problems.

A new Brookings Institution report provides an unprecedented glimpse into the lack of potential for transit to make a more meaningful contribution to mobility in the nation's metropolitan areas. The report, entitled Missed Opportunity: Transit and Jobs in Metropolitan America, provides estimates of the percentage of jobs that can be accessed by transit in 45, 60 or 90 minutes, one-way, by residents of the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. The report is unusual in not evaluating the performance of metropolitan transit systems, but rather, as co-author Alan Berube put it, "what they are capable of." Moreover, the Brookings access indicators go well beyond analyses that presume having a bus or rail stop nearby is enough, missing the point the availability of transit does not mean that it can take you where you need to go in a reasonable period of time.

Adding fuel to the fiery debate over immigration policy, a study released Tuesday shows that top science achievers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly the children of immigrants.

The study, conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy, found that 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition -- also known as the "Junior Nobel Prize" -- were the children of immigrants even though only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born.

According to the report, children of immigrant parents have been increasingly dominant in the fields of math and science. In 2004, for example, researchers found that 60 percent of the top science students in the U.S. and 65 percent of the top math students were born to immigrant families. Findings were based upon data from the Intel Science Talent Search and the 2004 U.S. Math Olympiad.

These days, it seems like there’s a new incubator for just about every pair of 19-year-olds working on a mobile-payment startup.

But long before there was a Y Combinator or a 500 Startups, there was SRI International: the old school, non-profit research and development organization that’s had a hand in the creation of everything from Disneyland to the Internet. Started by Stanford University in 1946 as a way to drum up enterprise in the sleepy Bay Area, SRI is best known for churning out a smorgasbord of inventions like Technicolor (for which it won an Academy Award in 1959), to the first computer mouse, created there in 1968.

Mature mobile markets like the U.S.,Western Europe, Japan and South Korea continue to generate the big dollars for the mobile industry, but the future growth is coming from new telecom economies: China, India, Brazil and the African continent. Thanks to a vast customer base, operators with operations in these countries are starting to dominate the top tier of the mobile world and change the telecom hierarchy.

Data collected by Wireless Intelligence — the research arm of GSMA, a trade organization — shows that at the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, China Mobile was the largest mobile phone company in the world with 584 million connections, followed by Vodafone with 353 million connections, America Movil with 225 million connections, Telefonica Group with 220.2 million connections, and Bharti Airtel Group with 199.6 million connections. Verizon Wireless had 102.2 million connections, while AT&T had 95.5 million connections. It’s likely just a matter of time before more of the upstarts overtake the established giants in terms of revenues as well.

Corporate IT is about to face a surge in demand for innovation, but is it ready? In the first quarter of 2011, 20% of S&P 500 companies reported that their revenue exceeded prerecession peaks. Many more will reach this milestone before the end of 2011. When this happens, the brakes come off capital spending. In fact, that elite 20% grew capital spending up to 65% faster than the rest.

With greater capital spending comes more appetite for innovation, and at most companies IT is expected to play a full part. But despite all the hype about IT innovation and the CIO as "Chief Innovation Officer," the reality is that corporate IT's ability to innovate has atrophied. In many organizations, years of cost cutting, standardization, and simplification came at the expense of innovation. Deploying ERP, consolidating data centers, or completing an outsourcing deal are difficult and worthwhile but rarely innovative.

Every startup fears that one angry and unfair customer who can jeopardize the business by a SCREAMING post on Ripoff Report, Yelp, or one of the hundreds of other consumer complaint and review sites on the Internet. Most entrepreneurs don’t even know how to keep track of what people are saying about them on the web, much less how to respond or remove it.

Web reputation management, both business and personal, has become a top priority requirement. On the personal side, these items can kill your career, as I discussed in a prior article “Google Yourself to See How Other People See You.” Luckily, the basic principles for reputation management are the same for both business and personal environments:

• Your reputation is your responsibility. The first step is to recognize that you alone are responsible for managing the reputation of your business and your life. Doing nothing, or counting on more laws, is not an answer. Due to First Amendment rights, offensive content, once entered, is often untouchable, and the sources are immune from liability.

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Editor’s note: Adeo Ressi, is the founder of The Founder Institute and TheFunded.com In this guest post he argues against ageism when it comes to to entrepreneurs. Ressi is 39.

The recent articles proclaiming that 25 is the peak age for entrepreneurship deserve a considered and factual response. The demographic and racial profiling that has plagued venture capital and tech entrepreneurship has a new friend—ageism. This has to stop.

Anecdotal Evidence:

It does not take but one minute to look around the world and prove any thesis of a peak tech founder age incorrect. There are countless entrepreneurs over the age of 30, including Reid Hoffman (age 35 in 2002), Evan Williams of Twitter (age 35 in 2007), Mark Pincus of Zynga (age 41 in 2007), Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (age 54 in 2005), among many others.

If you spend much time with Web entrepreneurs or investors these days, it quickly becomes clear that "pivot" is the hottest term in Silicon Valley. It signifies a young company's shifting of focus, and everyone has an opinion about whether it's something start-ups should be doing or not.

The answer, it seems, is yes. And as long as it's done at the right pace, it can even be an extremely lucrative and important step. In fact, young Web outfits that pivot once or twice can raise two-and-a-half times as much money, see 3.6 times the user growth, and are half as likely to scale too soon than start-ups that either never pivot or that do so more than twice.

That was one of the major conclusions of the initial report of the Startup Genome project, an initiative put together by a group of Silicon Valley investors that aims to identify the DNA of successful Internet start-ups and the teams and investors that build them.

Entrepreneurship is often thought of as an art, a skill you hone over time – but is there a science to it too? That’s what The Startup Genome Report, a new in-depth study, set out to discover.

Based on information submitted by over 650 Internet startups, the report sets out clear stages of a startup’s development and identifies distinct types of companies. The project aims to make this data available widely in order to increase the success rate of startups and accelerate pace of innovation around the world. Cracking the startup ‘genetic code’

The Startup Genome Report is the work of three men – Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Max Marmer and Ron Berman – who set out to ‘crack the code’ behind success or failure amongst Internet startups. The team is also responsible for the Blackbox accelerator and the Blackbox Mansion, which we recently profiled as a “Playboy mansion for geeks“. So, what prompted this new, in-depth study? “Max and I came together in December to find a scalable way to accelerate startups,” explains Herrmann. “We were inspired by the global explosion of entrepreneurship and its positive impact.”

New York City likes to think of itself as the center of the universe for everything. That’s almost true when it comes to science and technology education and research; the city’s reputation is much overstated when it comes to its effort to translate all of that activity into a community of successful businesses based on biotech and other science and technology fields.

The city’s $1.3 billion in NIH-funded research places it second to the Boston region, a respectable showing, as is its concentration of research universities focused on science and engineering. Also respectable is Columbia University’s fifth-place standing among 149 universities in the number of startups launched in FY 2009, according to the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM’s) U.S. Licensing Activity Survey Summary.

Columbia’s 13 startups account for most of the 20 generated by NYC schools on AUTM’s list: New York University had five; Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, had two. By comparison, the University of California (UC) alone had 47, followed by the University of Texas system (22), the University of Utah (19), and MIT and CalTech (18 each).

Determining a valuation for a pre-revenue company is a difficult process. A Harvard VC formula does not make sense at this stage as available P/E ratios essentially compare apples to oranges, cash flow projections are too untrustworthy to use a DCF method, and there is no such thing as a true market comp. Investors must rely on qualitative factors in connection to valuation formulas to determine how much they think the thing is worth. Some qualitative factors include:

• Is the product proven in the market?
• How great can the product become based on market size and need?
• What is the competitive landscape and easy of entry into this market?
• How proven is the management team and what are their past successes in this market?
• What are the projected cash flows and expected return to investors?
• What is the company’s IP position?

Ventureland

Place: Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park

What makes it special: If the venture capital industry needed a disguise, it found the perfect one in the drab, plain-vanilla office buildings that line Sand Hill Road. Who would suspect that some of the most influential players in technology reside in such uninspiring digs?

And yet this is the most important financial district in the U.S. outside Wall Street. The area skews heavily toward males, whose preferred garb is slacks and a sports coat, with an emergency hoodie kept nearby in case there's a need to bond with a rising social media entrepreneur.

Notable names: Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Mohr Davidow, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Canaan Partners.

Weekly roundup of other great stories we didn’t cover.

1. Similar to Y Combinator but for cleantech, Greenstart is a new “incubator and investment project that is looking to give seed funding and mentorship to the most promising young cleantech startups as they try to perfect their business plans and gain customers,” as GigaOM writes.
2. Google Inc and Citigroup Inc announced that they would each invest $55 million into Terra-Gen Power’s 102-megawatt wind power project, Alta IV, in California.
3. Upgrading the U.S. electrical grid (making it “smart”) would reportedly cost $476 billion but save $2 trillion in the next 20 years, according to new research by smart grid program manager Matt Wakefield at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

News that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has moved on from learning Chinese and is now trying his hand at getting closer to the land as part of an annual rethink of how he lives, is a great signal of how important the personal innovation lifestyle is becoming. Leaders who do new things, and who set an agenda of personal innovation, are reflecting a widespread desire for personal change. In fact Zuckerberg’s agenda is similar to that of millions of people: we are more interested in authenticity (Zuckerberg wants to kill the food he eats, which is a stretch for some); we are powering new collaboration businesses like couch surfing and local car sharing; and we seek out personal betterment as a matter or routine.

Greylock Partners, the well-known venture capital firm known for investing in companies like Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, and Pandora, is reportedly starting up a new venture fund valued at $160 million for startups in Europe and Israel.

The fund will be led by Lauren Bowden from London, according to TechCrunch. Bowden joined the firm in 2008 as a General Partner and has led the firm’s investments in Europe and Israel to date, including online credit-lending startup Wonga, takeaway-ordering service JustEat, and gift shop notonthehighstreet.

FOREWORD

The world has changed. Things are different than they were. Nothing is the same, except one thing: bad management, which is as eternal as death and taxes.

The sweeping changes in society and rumbling shifts in a globalized marketplace are giving the business world a massive tummy ache. What's needed to address this problem is a huge square "Alka-Seltzer" made out of paper.

And that's the reason for this book.

In today's world, we face challenges of many different kinds, ranging from "How should I order my coffee at Starbucks?" to "How can I get that damn 'Whip My Hair' song out of my brain?"

Pity the American parent! Already beleaguered by depleted 401(k)s and gutted real-estate values, Ponzi schemes and toxic paper, burst bubbles and bear markets, he is now being asked to contend with a new specter: that college, the perennial hope for the next generation, may not be worth the price of the sheepskin on which it prints its degrees.

As long as there have been colleges, there’s been an individualist, anti-college strain in American culture—an affinity for the bootstrap. But it is hard to think of a time when skepticism of the value of higher education has been more prominent than it is right now. Over the past several months, the same sharp and distressing arguments have been popping up in the Times, cable news, the blogosphere, even The Chronicle of Higher Education. The cost of college, as these arguments typically go, has grown far too high, the return far too uncertain, the education far too lax. The specter, it seems, has materialized.

The Swiss government just voted on Wednesday to abandon nuclear power in their country; their last reactor will finally go offline in 2034.