Between October 1 and 17, the federal government ceased all nonessential operations because of a partisan stalemate over Obamacare. Although it is premature to declare this the greatest example of misgovernance in modern U.S. Congressional history, this impasse ranks highly.

One casualty of the showdown was any consideration of changes to lessen the impact of the across-the-board sequestration cuts that began on March 1. The cuts have caused economic and other distress across the nation, including serious impacts within the health care sector. Nearly eight months into sequestration, we can move beyond predictions and begin to quantify these effects.

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OFF THE COAST OF FUKUSHIMA, Japan — Twelve miles out to sea from the severely damaged and leaking nuclear reactors at Fukushima, a giant floating wind turbine signals the start of Japan’s most ambitious bet yet on clean energy. 

When this 350-foot-tall windmill is switched on next month, it will generate enough electricity to power 1,700 homes. Unremarkable, perhaps, but consider the goal of this offshore project: to generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity from 140 wind turbines by 2020. That is equivalent to the power generated by a nuclear reactor.

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You may fancy yourself king of the nerds — but are you all talk and no walk?

This Doghouse Diaries comic tests your nerd knowledge to see how many pop culture symbols you can properly identify.

A lot has happened in Open Innovation since Henry Chesbrough coined the term in his 2003 book.  The term appears to be well understood, many companies have implemented it and a lot has been published.  And yet…….

I have the impression that Open Innovation still does not get the chance its potential deserves.  There are many reasons for this. They range from overly generous definitions that enable companies to point to a small number of activities and then tick the Open Innovation box, to the success of Not Invented Here syndrome.  In between I know of several companies cutting back on dedicated Open Innovation resource.

You're familiar with the pain of a migraine--the intense throbbing concentrated mostly on one side your head and often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, or hypersensitivity to light and sound. You know that these recurring headaches can last a while and that a number of factors might trigger an attack. Here's what you might not know about migraines:

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute is providing $12 million to Partners HealthCare and its founding hospitals to create the Boston Biomedical Innovation Center to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into commercial products, Partners said on Thursday.

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The practice of economic development is like driving using only the side view mirrors – you can’t even see exactly where you’ve been, but you can see the edge of the path you’ve been taking.  We try to guide ourselves forward with tools that are built for where we’ve been. Part of this rear-view navigation results from using a lot of tools that were developed to fix the problems of the past.  But it is also because we have very little useful predictive information about the future.  The majority of economic data is old.  If we have any information about what happened even a month ago, it is somewhere between a guesstimate and an approximation of the actual conditions.  By the time we manage to collect and verify the best information we can get, it is still incomplete and its shelf-life is expired.  Despair.com makes a poster, “Economics:  The science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn’t come true today.”

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The Intelligent Community Forum today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2014. This select group of communities is now in contention for the prestigious designation of Intelligent Community of the Year in June 2014.

“Once again the cities and towns on the Smart21 list have impressed us with their ability to use innovative ideas, broadband resources and hard work to improve local economic and social conditions,” said Intelligent Community co- founder Louis Zacharilla. “Not surprisingly, there are many repeats on the list, which means that continuous and sustained improvements are taking place. Building great communities is a long process.” Only 126 communities around the world have been named an Intelligent Community over the past 16 years.

The angel investor market in Q1,2 2013 showed signs that a sustainable growth has taken hold since the market correction in the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. Total investments in Q1,2 2013 were $9.7 billion, an increase of 5.2% over Q1,2 2012, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. A total of 28,590 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in Q1,2 2013, a 4.8% increase from Q1,2 2012, and the number of active investors in Q1,2 2013 was 134,895 individuals, an increase of 2.9% from Q1,2 2012. The increase in total dollars and the matching increase in total investments resulted in a deal size of $337,850 in Q1,2 2013, essentially unchanged from the deal size in Q1,2 2012 of $336,390. These data indicate that angels remain major players in this investment class and at valuations similar to Q1,2 2012. While the market exhibited a pattern similar to Q1,2 2012, when compared to the market correction that occurred in 2008, these data indicate that the angel market has demonstrated a steady recovery since 2008.

The most motivated and productive people I’ve seen recently work in an older company on the American East Coast deploying innovative technology products to transform a traditional industry. To a person, they look astonished when I ask whether their dedication comes from anticipation of the money they could make in the event of an IPO.

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Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously asserted: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”  Understood one way — that there are no objective truths — his remark seems quite clearly false. However, if the statement is understood as a descriptive claim about human psychology, it’s not clear to me that it’s wrong. That is, if he means that people very often confuse their interpretations with the facts, then he’s onto something.

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With federal investment in university research flat-lining and China overtaking the United States as the top producer of Ph.D.s per year, Sandra Brown, vice chancellor for research at the University of California San Diego, said it’s time for a shift in higher-level vision at the university level, and UCSD is taking the lead.

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It's a study of rare quality that can aggravate chauvinists and feminists equally.

But the work of Peter J. Kuhn and Marie-Claire Villeval for the National Bureau of Economic Research may be able to do just that.

In their new paper, "Are Women More Attracted to Cooperation Than Men?," the economists found that, yes, women are--and it has to do with relative competence, the degree to which you think your ability matches up against that of your colleagues. In short, men tend to overestimate their abilities and downplay those of their coworkers, while women shortchange their skills and defer to their peers.

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Super-extreme freestyle mountain biking looks like a thrill. But it's also dangerous as all get-out, and something most of us are too scared (or smart) to try. So here's a solution: Take a virtual ride down a precarious mountain slope and even hit a soaring backflip off a clip via GoPro.

Halloween festivities have already started, which means you're behind on figuring out a killer conversation starter to complement your costume.

Luckily, HooplaHa rounded up 10 strange facts about Halloween that will make the perfect ice breaker at your next spooky gathering.

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.

Investment in new-capital machinery, equipment and software is the primary means through which innovation spreads throughout the economy.

As these innovations -- whether they are new PCs with touch screens and solid-state drives or new cotton harvesters with microwave sensors and wireless data communication capabilities -- diffuse through industries, they raise productivity, lower costs of production and improve the competitiveness of the American economy as a whole.

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Michael Lippert, CFA, J.D., Vice President Baron Funds, Portfolio Manager Baron Opportunity Fund

Michael Lippert: The Baron Opportunity Fund focuses on investing in businesses that are innovating and disrupting their industries.  What is innovation?  Innovation is the process by which an idea or an invention is turned into a good or service.  It’s more than just an idea.  It’s more than an invention.  It’s taking an idea and making a business out of it.

Yesterday, NPR had a feature on the copy machine’s 75th anniversary, celebrating this technology’s impact on the workplace.

Clayton Christensen, who coined the term ‘disruptive innovation,’ often uses the copy machine as an example of the innovator’s dilemma, such as in this 1995 Harvard Business Review article, and the 2011 interview excerpted below:

For example, when Canon disrupted Xerox, (Xerox’s) most important customers operated high-speed photocopy centers, and they needed even faster, ever more fully featured machines. These little tabletop copiers (from Canon) could do three or four copies a minute. They couldn’t collate; they couldn’t enlarge or reduce or do grayscale replication. But they made it so much simpler to make photocopies that many people actually had two copiers for a while. For the simple things, we had a little Canon around the corner from our office, and for the high-volume jobs, we still took the work to the corporate photocopy center.

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The entrepreneurial zeitgeist today is hard to ignore. Startup America regions have been launched in 32 states. MBAs are flocking to internet startups at an unprecedented clip — faster than during the original dot-com bubble. Even President Obama is calling our entrepreneurial job creators to arms. There’s a sense that it’s up to us to get the country back to work, and that’s driving entrepreneurs to Detroit, Baltimore, Providence, and any number of cities that have struggled with unemployment. And the numbers tell a similar story: startups are mushrooming up everywhere. From 2006 to 2011, the number of startups founded and funded outside of California, Massachusetts, and New York has grown by almost 65%.

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