The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just published the results of a study on American's e-commerce habits. Among the findings: 58% of Americans say they perform online research on the products and services they're considering buying. That's up from 49% who performed online research in 2004.

If you look at that number in terms of Americans who say they're Internet users, that figure rises to 78% who research online before buying.

And it isn't simply the number of Americans doing online research that's grown. It's the frequency with which we're doing it. On any given day, 21% of adults are conducting this sort of research, up from 9% in 2004.

Craigavon, Northern Ireland-based Almac expects to fully occupy its new North American headquarters in Souderton, Pa., by the end of the year. The drug development services specialist will consolidate approximately 550 employees from its Clinical Services, Clinical Technologies and Sciences business units, currently located in Audubon and Yardley, Pa.

The US$120-million project, which began in summer 2008, involved two buildings. Building 1, a three-story, 74,250-sq.-ft. (6,897-sq.-m.) office building, will house administrative teams from Almac’s Clinical Services, Clinical Technologies and Sciences business units. Key functional areas, which the company says are designed to enhance employee performance and meet customer needs, are also located in Building 1, including a network operation center, meeting rooms, staff breakout areas, customer audit rooms, training rooms, learning lab, library and a packaging design room.

As if airlines needed any more reason to reduce fleet emissions, MIT reports this week that pollution from airplanes flying at cruise altitude (approximately 35,000 feet) contributes to 8,000 deaths globally each year.

Current emissions regulations only target planes flying up to 3,000 feet. In the past, regulators assumed that emissions above the 3,000 foot mark would be dumped into a part of the atmosphere with smooth air that couldn't send pollutants drifting toward the ground (the air is more turbulent at lower altitudes). But MIT has found that that's not true--and unfortunately for those of us on the ground, 90% of aircraft fuel is burned at cruise altitudes.

Economic development strategies for local government have gone through a number of cycles and trends in the United States since Congress in the 1930s first authorized tax-exempt bonds, legislation enacted primarily to assist southern states to attract industry. In the late 1940s, federal legislation authorized urban renewal financing as the post–World War II suburban boom created rising concerns of disinvestment and decline in the inner cities.

Early projects were focused on the elimination of blighted areas and the creation of neighborhood reinvestment through such programs as Model Cities. The decades of the 1970s and 1980s brought forward even more ambitious (and expensive!) projects centered around sports stadiums, upscale retail and festival centers, and large tax-incentive packages for corporate relocations.

One of the hardest things about being unemployed is worrying that you will not end up in a good job. People want to be picky, but that’s a mistake. You should take any job. It really doesn’t matter. You’re better off taking any job and then start trading up.

Here’s why:

1) Structure leads to achievement

People who add structure to their day are more likely to get other stuff done. There’s a ripple effect. This is probably why most highly successful people are early risers. It’s not that you can’t be a night owl to be successful. It’s that if you start your day with structure, you are more able to reach a wide range of goals. Happiness is about structure and self-discipline, not a good job.

YOU might not think an MBA is worth it, but judging by the number of applications received this year, a lot of other people believe otherwise. With the recession in full swing, MBA programs have never been more popular.

The nation's 476 MBA programs reportedly received 200,000 completed applications as of late June. The weakest schools received fewer than ten applications, but the strongest received upwards of 10,000.

Android has successfully destroyed Apple's dominance of consumer mindshare in the smartphone world, according to a new survey from ChangeWave Research about smartphone preferences.

ChangeWave found only 38% of the people it interviewed want iOS on their next smartphone. That's down 12 points from June when 50% of the people it surveyed said they wanted an iPhone.

San Francisco, Calif.--At the Renewable Energy Finance Forum-West, energy bankers said that clean technology segment leaders should be able to IPO successfully and that energy efficiency is an attractive sector. But they also predicted that oil companies will scale back their investments in wind energy and that the availability of capital will remain limited in the short term.

To attract growth equity in a difficult climate, bankers advised companies to pursue realistic valuations at which their existing and new venture capital and/or strategic investors will participate.

The reality is that Canada is not on the lips or radar screens of most people around the world. Clearly we have a huge job to even get noticed above the noise in key target regions around the world. To sustain a massive advertising campaign to gain awareness to attract foreign investments and talent is simply not possible for most communities.

While some cities in Canada are more recognizable than others due to past World Fairs and Olympics or the construction of a world famous tower, most cities in Canada are invisible at a global level. But imagine what we could do if most of Canada’s top cities got together and through the dynamic of a critical mass of over half of Canada’s population base, we took a collaborative approach to getting our consistent message out?

Animal feed in Zambia. Cookies in South Africa. Medical records systems in Botswana. Peanut processing in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

In regions scarred by intractable poverty, innovative programs to build new sources of wealth through these four businesses are providing lessons for entrepreneurs hoping to create new markets and economic opportunity. In a paper titled, "Business Models: Creating New Markets and Societal Wealth", leaders of Wharton's Societal Wealth Program (WSWP) outline the critical elements of entrepreneurial wealth building based on nearly 10 years of field research supported by Wharton alumni.

The WSWP initiatives are designed to move beyond a charitable aid model for combating poverty by creating economic enterprises that lead to self-sufficiency rather than dependency and that will have a major and lasting impact. "There are plenty of charities doing things for free. What we are attempting to do is create poverty reducing businesses," says James D. Thompson, director of the WSWP, who coauthored the paper with Wharton management professor Ian C. MacMillan.

The 2010 -2011 World University Rankings, published today by the Times Higher Education magazine uses a new methodology that places less importance on reputation and heritage than in previous years, giving more weight to measures of excellence in all three core elements of a university’s mission - research, teaching and knowledge transfer. In all, it includes 13 separate performance indicators, across five categories.

The result makes sobering reading for Europe’s universities as a whole, which fare less well in this ranking than in the QS World Universities Ranking published last week and the Shanghai ranking that appeared in August.

With the online population growing at far greater speed in developing and emerging markets than in North America and Western Europe, the opportunities for businesses and brands to prosper on an international scale are vast.

So how can businesses build an accessible, global brand? The old adage ‘to go global you have to think local’ still rings true, but with the digital revolution in full swing, borders have become blurred and the need for a more unified ‘global’ brand that’s relevant everywhere becomes greater.

Today, the speed with which a brand message circulates around the Web is staggering. While the words and points of reference may need to be tweaked for each country and culture, the brand itself needs to adhere to a single philosophy regardless of location – a global brand.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced it has more than 200 marketing summaries available on its Technology Commercialization Portal to help investors, entrepreneurs and companies seeking cutting-edge energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies available for licensing. The Technology Commercialization Portal is an online resource that serves as a tool to identify opportunities to invest in work being conducted by DOE laboratories and participating research institutions

. The use of this tool allows the Department to accelerate the process of moving discoveries from the laboratory to the private sector, ensuring that America's scientific leadership translates into new, high-paying jobs for America's families.

Before we talk about the size of this market through 2015, let's take a look at an updated version of our smart grid market taxonomy that first appeared last year in a free report that GTM Research published, titled The Smart Grid in 2010: Market Segments, Applications and Industry Players.

As part of a new, quantitative report we published last week, titled United States Smart Grid Market Forecast: 2010 - 2015, we decided to update the taxonomy in much greater detail, spelling out exactly where every player in the market is positioned. It's a very useful diagram to understand who's who and who does what in the larger smart grid universe. Take a look! (Click on the image below to see a larger version.)

Unlike yesterday's issue, this is the type of story I very much like sending you.

HOUSE PASSES SBIR/STTR/CPP EXTENSION THROUGH JANUARY 31, 2011

Borrowing the title of a song from My Fair Lady, "You Did It!" There was thunder on Capitol Hill today as hundreds of you responded to an emergency call to action (from many people and organizations) to save the SBIR program from lapsing, and that you did it!

Around 7:00pm this evening, Nydia Velazquez under pressure from her peers and the House leadership, accepted the Senate's SBIR and SBA extender bill, she and moved to suspend the rules to pass S.3839 without amendments. That has now happened and the SBIR program will be extended through January 31, 2011, pending signature of the President (virtually automatic), who supports the bill.

If you want to get to the bottom of indigenous innovation, the Chinese policy so deeply aggravating Western businesses and governments, look at the bottom of your DVD player. Most likely, the machine was made in China. For Beijing’s leaders, that is part of the problem: for every Chinese-made DVD player sold, the Chinese manufacturer must pay a large royalty fee to the European or Japanese companies that patented various components of the unit, such as its optical reader. These foreign firms reap substantial profits, but the Chinese take is extremely small -- and is shrinking further as energy, labor, and commodity prices rise. Policymakers in Beijing, looking to strengthen China’s economy, are no longer satisfied with the country’s position as the world’s manufacturer. Their solution is to break China’s dependence on foreign technology, moving from a model of “made in China” to one of “innovated in China.”

The Chinese phrase for indigenous innovation, zizhu chuangxin, was introduced in a 2006 state-issued report, “Guidelines on National Medium- and Long-Term Program for Science and Technology Development.” The paper contained a curious mix of top-down, state-directed policies alongside bottom-up efforts meant to foster technological innovation. The top-down measures echo China’s old state planning system. They include 20 state-driven megaprojects, including initiatives to develop nanotechnology, biotechnology and new drugs, high-end generic microchips, and aircraft. The bottom-up efforts seem to follow a Silicon Valley model and are centered on university-industry collaboration, small start-ups, and venture capital.

You palms sweat. Your pulse races. Your throat gets dry. You’re standing in front of a room full of people who can make or break your career, and you’re about to choke. For most people this sounds like the set-up for a terrible anxiety dream, but for University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock, high-pressure performance isn’t the raw material for nightmares but for brain science.

Specializing in what goes on in our brains and bodies during high-stakes performances, Beilock has spent her career learning something the anxious among us would love to know: why do we choke under pressure and how can we prevent it? After posting a bit about her new book on the topic, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, Entry-Level Rebel got in touch to ask for more tips on how to develop a cool head under stress.

There was a time when a job was a job for life. In countries like Japan it really was the case and still is, to a great extent. Even in America, it was never a guarantee, but back in the day, it was pretty much the way our parents or grandparents, depending on your generation, viewed employment.

Well, yesterday, German electronics giant Siemens signed a deal that guarantees its 128,000 German workers just that, a job for life. The move is unprecedented even in Germany, where employees have far more power and rights than in the U.S.

SINCE I AM IN HEIDELBERG, GERMANY SPEAKING AT THE TECHNOPOLICY CONFERENCE ON "BUILDING A WORLD CLASS KNOWLEDGE REGION", I THOUGHT THE ABOVE ARTICLE ABOUT GERMANY WOULD BE APPROPRIATE.....RICH BENDIS