Shenzhen, ChinaAt the Huaqiangbei Market in Shenzhen, you can build a smartphone from scratch in a couple of hours.

Spread over several floors and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet, the market is home to vendors selling the parts that make up your standard phone — cameras, motherboards, frames, screens and so on. All you have to do is buy the right bits and know how to put them all together.

Venture Capital funds are one of the primary ways that startup companies and small businesses can earn financing from accredited investors, including investment banks and other financial institutions.

While monetary investments are the primary form of venture capital, technical and managerial expertise can also be provided.

Why would investors choose to put their money into a company that’s only existed for a few years, even months?

Scan the newspaper headlines, or switch on cable news for a few minutes, and it’s easy to conclude that we are living through harsh, mean, divisive times. But a recent column in the Washington Post reminded me of a truth that is even easier to overlook: Just as bad behavior tends to spread, so too does good behavior. Kindness, it turns out, is contagious. The column highlighted the work of Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki, who documents what he calls “positive conformity.” In his research, “participants who believed others were more generous became more generous themselves.” This suggests that “kindness is contagious, and that it can cascade across people, taking on new forms along the way.”

Re “More Aid for College Students,” by Michael R. Bloomberg (Op-Ed, Nov. 19):

I applaud Mr. Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion gift to my alma mater, Johns Hopkins. But his Op-Ed stirred mixed feelings in me. Hopkins wrote to its alumni that Mr. Bloomberg’s gift will allow it to “realize the inspiring vision of a university that is open to, and supportive of, all high-achieving students regardless of their means or backgrounds.” This is a wonderful thing.

Researchers at RMIT University have engineered a new type of transistor, the building block for all electronics. Instead of sending electrical currents through silicon, these transistors send electrons through narrow air gaps, where they can travel unimpeded as if in space.

The device unveiled in material sciences journal Nano Letters, eliminates the use of any semiconductor at all, making it faster and less prone to heating up.

Image: RMIT UNIVERSITY

South Asia has the potential to become a hub of innovation in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR): with its young population well connected to new global technological developments; opportunities created by the growth of 4IR technologies; and a large, educated labour market.

Image: New world economies will be built on Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies Image: REUTERS/Beawiharta

My book The Happiness Project came out almost ten years ago—wow, that’s hard to believe.

One of the most important things I learned as part of doing that project, and an idea that I put into practice in my own life all the time, is that I can influence my happiness. Yes of course, sometimes terrible circumstances make it impossible for me to be happy, but it’s almost always possible to be happier, and often with just a few small steps, I can give myself a big boost.

I often wonder how many more startups would succeed if their founders could master the art and science of delegation. It seems inherent in the mind of most first-time entrepreneurs that it was their idea, and they must do all the work themselves to make it happen. In my role as mentor and advisor to many founders, I consistently fail in convincing them of the power in wise delegation.

Carnegie Mellon has one of the most successful technology transfer records in the country and invests heavily in helping its students and faculty bring research to the marketplace. Through vehicles like the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation and Project Olympus, an on-campus incubator, CMU is helping students blaze the notoriously treacherous path from thrilling research and bright idea to marketable product.

Although the United States gets a bad rap for having employees work the most hours of any industrialized nation, a new infographic from BambooHR says otherwise. According to the “Working Hours around the World” infographic, the US is averaging 34 hours per week, which is on the low-end side compared to many other countries. On the high-end of the scale, Colombia and Turkey have the top spots at 48 hours each.

We normally think of hackers as isolated and anti-social – like the hypothetical “genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer” whom Donald Trump surmised might have been behind the 2016 theft of Democratic Party emails. However, cybersecurity experts like myself know that while hackers may not mix well in polite company (at least not openly), their work is highly collaborative, even communal. Without the ability to interact with one another online, hackers would pull off much less cybercrime.

Our current education system is not set up for entrepreneurs.

Steve Strauss, a USA Today columnist who specializes in small business and entrepreneurship stated, "We have an education system that was created around the time of the Industrial Revolution when we needed to turn rural kids into urban employees capable of working in an assembly line, mass-market factories. As a result, we ended up with a school system focused on rote memorization and measurable, predictable results."

Image: Photo by: John Nacion, STAR MAX, IPx 2018. Daymond John at the 2018 Tribeca TV Festival in New York City.

For generations, people have been studying successful businesses to understand specifically what sets them apart from the competition. The 1982 classic book, “In Search of Excellence,” makes the case that exceptional businesses share a common set of characteristics, including proactive decision-making, an innovative spirit, and a hands-on, value-driven management philosophy. As I’ve read and analyzed these books through the years, it’s really gotten me thinking about whether exceptionally successful entrepreneurs also share a set of common characteristics.

During summer 2017 a large swath of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—normally a riot of electric oranges, reds and other colors—turned ghostly pale.

Unusually warm water temperatures, partly due to global warming, had caused the corals to expel from their tissues the symbiotic algae that provide them with food and give them their brilliant hues. It was the second mass-bleaching event to hit the reef in as many years. Together, the back-to-back events hit two thirds of the reef.

 Image: NASA

In the 50 and 60s humanistic thinkers such as Gordon Allport, Abraham Maslow, Karen Horney, Sidney Jourard, Carl Rogers, and Erich Fromm attempted to characterize the healthy personality. While there are some differences in their conceptualizations, there was a general consensus that the healthy personality consists of:

Thanksgiving is a time for gratitude, good-will and gluttony. While many people enjoy the holiday feast with abandon, some dieters and healthy eaters stress over the idea of consuming a huge number of calories in one sitting.

But is it worth the worry? Here’s what eating one enormous meal actually does to your body, according to experts.

Learning new things is a huge part of life -- we should always be striving to learn and grow. But it takes time, and time is precious. So how can you make the most of your time by speeding up the learning process? Thanks to neuroscience, we now have a better understanding of how we learn and the most effective ways our brains process and hold on to information.

Organizations are awash in data — from geocoded transactional data to real-time website traffic to semantic quantifications of corporate annual reports. All these data and data sources only add value if put to use. And that typically means that the data is incorporated into a model. By a model, I mean a formal mathematical representation that can be applied to or calibrated to fit data.

Image: https://hbr.org

One particular scene had people on the edge of their seats during the latest episode of BBC's latest David Attenborough nature documentary, Dynasties. 

It followed a group of emperor penguins trying to survive the brutal winter in Antarctica. When a particularly nasty storm blew some of the penguins down into a ravine with walls too steep for them to climb, things got almost too real. 

Image: BBC NHU

Normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, right? Not so. There is no baseline for humans, and even if there was, it would be closer to 97.7 °F. Temperature also varies across the day, peaking in late afternoon and bottoming out in early morning. It is slightly higher for women than for men as well. For two decades research has debunked the benchmark, set way back in 1868, yet it persists. One important ramification, says Jonathan S. Hausmann, a rheumatologist at Boston Children's Hospital, who led the latest study, is to redefine fever. Most doctors use 100.4 °F or higher, but if “normal” is lower, then the fever threshold should be, too. It also should vary with the daily pattern and be tailored to each individual, Hausmann says: “A child at 99.0 °F at 4 A.M. may be highly abnormal but at 4 P.M. could be within normal limits.”