One of the obstacles to bringing "adaptive learning" to college classrooms is that professors, administrators, and even those who make adaptive-learning systems don’t always agree on what that buzzword means.

That was a major theme of a daylong Adaptive Learning Summit held here on Tuesday. Several people interviewed at the summit, held by the education-innovation group National Education Initiative, noted that part of the problem is a proliferation of companies that make big promises based on making their technologies adaptive, yet all use the term slightly differently.

From the Nest to the Echo, the tech industry really wants to get in your house. Yet, while there are a number of connected home devices that can be genuinely useful today, in many cases their costs of entry are just too prohibitive for people to take the plunge.

Not so with the Belkin WeMo Insight Switch. Yes, $50 for a plug isn’t peanuts, and the device itself has been around for a couple of years now. But if you’ve been wanting to give home automation a try, it’s an easy, effective, and, relatively speaking, affordable way to get started.

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

In 2013, the US Air Force realised that over 20 percent of the nuclear officers at Malmstrom Air Force Base cheated on their certification exam. Many other officers knew about the problem but did not report it. The root cause for this dangerous behavior was a culture of fear that led launch officers to believe they had to receive perfect test scores to get promoted.

When co-founders get together to build a new venture one of the first and most important decisions they must make is who will do what in the new organisation. When co-founders have highly complementary skills relevant to their venture, this division of task roles is straightforward. However, founding teams rarely come together because of complementary expertise. In many cases individuals will meet at school or work and decide to plunge into a new venture together, thus co-founders often have overlapping skills making task division problematic.

Several megatrends such as accelerating urbanisation, technological change, demographic shifts, and climate change are reshaping our world. Cities are where these megatrends manifest themselves most clearly.

To respond to disruptive developments, cities around the world, their governments and organisations must rethink the way they deliver their products and services. Public bodies and organisations of the future, including cities and local government entities, will need to espouse characteristics and behaviours that are radically different from the models of the past.

Image: http://cities-today.com

The 9-to-5 job has been out of popularity for several years. Employers who want to attract the top talent know — and they’ve known for several years — that they’ve got to offer flexible schedules as much as possible in order to retain the most in-demand workers.

But the Uber business model is ushering in a new era of flexibility in work schedules, one that is actually fundamentally different from flexibility.

You learn a lot on the way to getting your MBA, but you can’t learn everything in school; there are plenty of men and women in business whose success came more from their ability to work with people and understanding how to adjust on the fly than anything they learned in a classroom.

In this presidential election, the debate on immigration has degenerated into implicit labeling of immigrants as security and economic threats to Americans. GOP candidates complain that we should secure the border first, and Democratic candidates would like to reform the broken system.

The partisan attempt for immigration reform died in the Congress.

When we set out to build this year’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, we didn’t begin with macroeconomic parameters. Instead our reporting team dug into details on thousands of companies around the globe. Our axiom has always been that whatever challenges may be buffeting business—political uncertainty, market instability, international unrest—there are always pockets of extraordinary achievement. That is what we were looking to uncover.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

For several years now the popular media has run headlines about “a war on science.” Reporters note that federal funding for research is down, campaigns to undermine climate science attract hundreds of millions of dollars and politicians routinely reject findings that are uniformly accepted by scientists. But a panel of scholars last weekend argued for the most part against calling these aversive movements a war, with two historians even scolding scientists who embrace the idea as out of touch with public concerns. 

Image: courtesy of Daniel Mayer on Wikimedia Commons.

First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman is a rock star in the Philadelphia startup scene. The venture capitalist recently joined the Technical.ly Slack AMA to discuss his investment vision, startup teams and “tech bubble small talk.”

Some of the selected questions below were from members of the Technical.ly team and others were from our Slack community.

Image: Josh Kopelman (right) running through West Philly with his woes in the latest First Round Capital holiday video. (Screenshot via YouTube)

In testimony to the U.S. International Trade Commission, Stephen Ezell explained why the biotech industry is a key driver of the U.S. economy and global life sciences innovation, and he argued that robust intellectual property standards in the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be critical to both. Ezell notes that the U.S. provides 12 years of IP protection for clinical test data, so it is disappointing that the TPP commits U.S. trading partners to provide eight at most.

There is much talk these days that startup valuations have decreased and may continue to do so and that the amount of time it takes to fund raise may take longer. As I have pointed out in previous posts, 91% of VCs surveyed believe prices are declining (30% believe substantially) and 77% believe that funding will take longer than it has in the past. This has led VC & entrepreneur bloggers alike to similar conclusions: start raising capital early and be careful about having too high of a burn rate because that lessens the amount of runway you have until you need more cash.

EU Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas has put flesh on his vision of creating a European Innovation Council (EIC), saying it should reward groups of companies and universities that are willing to work in multi-disciplinary teams on breakthrough technologies and adopt a venture capital-type approach to awarding grants, including interviewing applicants before awarding money.

Image: http://www.sciencebusiness.net 

Millennials are proving a somewhat slippery group for employers to hold onto.

A recent Deloitte survey found that two-thirds of millennials across the globe plan to leave their current organization by 2020 and one-quarter plan to change companies within the next year.

Image: Flickr/sunshinecity Many millennials are dissatisfied with their organization's sense of purpose, or lack thereof. 

At the moment, Facebook is being compared to the treacherous East India Company, and director Marc Andreessen is being accused of being anti-Indian, a racist, and worse.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Indian activists launch a “Quit India” movement to expel Facebook from India, modeled on Mahatma Gandhi’s efforts against the British in 1942. All of this is because of a failed effort by Facebook to provide Internet access to the poor.

Image: http://techcrunch.com

The Renaissance was the era of the Seigniors. These are individuals generally, but not exclusively, of noble lineage who centralize power to themselves, giving their subjects conditions of legal equality in return. In Italy, it is not only Florence, with the financially powerful House of the Medicis, which states, ‘We are on the side of the population’. The Seigniors become established in Milan, with the Visconti and then the Sforza; in Verona with the Scaligeri; the Este in Ferrara; the Gonzaga in Mantua; and other Houses in smaller centres. Seigniors are powerful magnets that attract artists, entrepreneurs and businesses. They will give way to modern States, only to reappear on the horizon of the globalized economy.

Giant tech companies are going to go after "unbelievable acquisition opportunities," according to Goldman Sachs' president, Gary Cohn.

In a recent Q&A with The Information's Jessica Lessin, Cohn said that "anything under $10 billion" could become an acquisition target.

Having a goal comes down to knowing where you want to be. And sometimes, that alone is enough to put people off from goal setting. For those of us who, for whatever reason, are allergic to goals, not knowing where we want to be later can feel liberating or just fend off the anxiety of falling short.

Image: Flickr user Kurt Bauschardt

Every four years, Americans engage in a great national debate about the future of our country. Candidates for highest office offer their visions of what the United States can be and roadmaps for how we get there.

Or at least that is the hope and ideal to which we aspire.

Now in the midst of that great season of debate, entrepreneurship merits a central place in the discussion.

Entrepreneurs are known to be the primary source of net new job creation. Their innovations challenge existing firms to improve and contribute to economic dynamism, which results in a faster growing economy that provides greater opportunities for upward mobility.