Venture capital executives differ on whether the industry is due for its own disruption.

The value of venture capital exits peaked in 2014 at $80 billion, dropping to around $50 billion in 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to a private equity report by consulting firm Meketa Investment Group for the $349.3 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, Sacramento.

Image: DuPont Capital Management’s Kevin Campbell

In the past three weeks three harsh nor’easter storms have battered the northeastern U.S., bringing the total to five for the winter. A sixth may be forming this week, which is highly unusual. Four of the five storms were bomb cyclones, a legitimate technical term that means the atmospheric pressure within the nascent storms dropped rapidly and radically, causing them to “blow up” into raging beasts.

Scientists have been predicting these very circumstances. And now they have new data showing that the rapidly warming Arctic is at least partly to blame.

A Stony Brook University-based small-biz booster program is doubling down on federal Small Business Innovation Research award winners.

Through a $1.2 million Empire State Development Corp. incentives package administered by the university’s Small Business Development Center and the Research Foundation for SUNY, SBU has released the first set of matching grant funds to SBIR awardees in Nassau and Suffolk counties.

Image: http://www.innovateli.com

If there's one downside to powerful computers, it's that they're too damn big. 

Luckily, that's about to change. At least, if IBM has anything to say about it. 

March 19 is the first day of IBM Think 2018, the company's flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world's smallest computer. They're not kidding: It's literally smaller than a grain of salt. 

Image: IBM

While conflict and economic reasons are often the biggest factors for people moving within countries, climate change will soon have its own part to play.

By 2050, 140 million people could be forced to migrate internally as the effects of global warming exacerbate problems like water scarcity, crop failure, rising sea levels and storm surges, according to a new report.

I have two sons, ages 6 and 8. When I ask them what they want to be when they grow up, they say farmer, builder, artist, video game designer, YouTuber, store owner. The games they play, like Minecraft and Roblox, inspire some of their career goals, while the YouTube videos they watch (often in languages they don't speak), inform others. Every few weeks, they want to start a business — selling lemonade or their artwork, doing chores for the neighbors, their teachers, or me.

Tweeting has long posed a dilemma for scientists. There’s abundant evidence that widely sharing a research finding in just one or two simple sentences greatly increases its use and effectiveness.

But, ugh, that usually means Twitter — in the eyes of many, a low-attention-span cesspool of trolls, political partisans, and amateur comedians known more for braggadocio and snark than reason and facts.

Image: Michael Goldblatt, an entrepreneur and former official at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, came up with the Polyplexus concept, "the idea of trying to create research into digestible chunks to drive citations and drive understanding and learning."

When it comes to keeping or tossing the stuff in our kitchens, we tend to waffle: Do I need to get rid of that old cutting board? Is this leftover chicken still good? To get to the bottom of these debates once and for all, we reached out to Marianne Gravely, a senior technical information specialist at the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the USDA. Here, she points out 11 things you should really throw away ASAP.

Happy are the people of the Nordic nations — happier, in fact, than anyone else in the world. And the overall happiness of a country is almost identical to the happiness of its immigrants.

Those are the main conclusions of the World Happiness Report 2018, released Wednesday. Finland is the happiest country in the world, it found, followed by Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia. Though in a different order, this is the same top 10 as last year, when Norway was No. 1 and Finland was fifth.

For your business to continue to grow, there are really only two ways to get customers. One way is to take customers away from an existing player, and the other is to create a new market with a new product or service that didn’t exist before. Examples of recent “new market” big wins include Apple with iTunes for digital music, Uber for ride sharing, and Airbnb for renting a spare room.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that’s packed with meaning: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

Your attention determines the experiences you have, and the experiences you have determine the life you live. Or said another way: you must control your attention to control your life. Today, in a world where so many experiences are blended together — where we can work from home (or a train or a plane or a beach), watch our kids on a nanny-cam from work, and distraction is always just a thumb-swipe away —has that ever been more true?

Village Capital, a venture capital firm, and Kaiser Permanente have teamed up to address the needs of the aging population in America through a new program called Health: US 2018.

Last week, the organizations revealed the 10 startups that made the cut for the venture development program.

Here is the cohort:

Advocatia. Based in Chicago, the company gives hospitals tools that help their uninsured and underinsured patients. For example, one of its solutions lets health systems inform patients of their financial assistance policies.

The philanthropic efforts of nonprofits and foundations throughout Michigan are increasingly addressing bigger issues such as affordable housing, community revitalization and employment. 

While these initiatives traditionally fall under the economic development umbrella, the philanthropic sector has always been engaged in them on a smaller scale, according to industry sources.

“As the number of nonprofits in the state has continued to grow, we have a lot of foundations that have a couple of million a year generated by endowments and they’re looking around and not feeling the need for a public charity mission. It’s now about a cause,” said Jeff Williams, CEO of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants Inc. “Many of the foundations in Michigan are through that first cycle and are now looking at what else they can do.”

This article would have been much better if I hadn’t waited until the last minute to write it.

But then I wouldn’t have been able to claim that I did what so many procrastinators do regularly: I delayed work on a task to give myself an excuse if I happened to make a complete mess of it. It’s not that I’m lousy at my job, I could plausibly say. It’s just that I had so many other things to do at work and at home that I couldn’t give it my best effort.

It’s hard to deny that good mentors are important. The best workplaces have formal programs to develop mentoring relationships. LinkedIn has even launched a feature to help you find one. And how to be a good mentor is a topic of perennial interest.

One of the most important characteristics the good ones have in common is their ability to ask insightful questions, says Lisa Z. Fain, CEO of The Center for Mentoring Excellence, a mentoring consultancy and coaching organization.

If early birds catch the worms, it’s because the worm catching is rigged in their favor. According to board-certified sleep specialist Michael Breus, workplaces are typically built around people who thrive in the mornings, and night owls tend to lose out. “In the normal, everyday workforce, the late-night people are assumed to be lazy because they can’t get up and make it to early-morning meetings,” he explains. “They’re assumed to be undisciplined.”

Image: Flickr user Simon Thalmann

The start-up scene in Japan has historically lagged behind the Silicon Valley and China, but several investors told CNBC that things are changing.

Workers have traditionally seen starting a company as "kind of a Plan B," according to James Riney, head of 500 Startups Japan, which has total assets under management of near $50 million.

At halftime, with players locked in a surprising tie with the top-ranked men’s basketball team in the country, the Twitter feed of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s athletic department seized the spotlight to make a sales pitch.

Meet the Experts

Jennifer Lewis Priestley, Ph.D. is the Associate Dean of The Graduate College at Kennesaw State University. She oversees the Analytics and Data Science Institute, which houses one of the country’s first Ph.D. programs in Analytics and Data Science. Dr. Priestley has published dozens of articles related to the application of emerging methods in data science. She is a national speaker and frequent contributor to articles relating to the evolution and maturation of the discipline of data science. She earned a BS from Georgia Tech, an MBA from Penn State and a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from Georgia State University.

Sherrill Hayes, Ph.D. is the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Analytics and Data Science at Kennesaw State University. Dr. Hayes currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and is the coeditor of Atone: Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation (Lexington Books 2018). Dr. Hayes received his BS and MS in Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his Ph.D. in Social Policy from Newcastle University in the UK.

In the next few decades, nonprofits are expected to see an unprecedented level of donations coming into their organizations as accumulated wealth is handed down from baby boomers to the next generations. That shift presents a challenge for organizations to leverage that funding. William Meehan, director emeritus at McKinsey & Co., and Kim Starkey Jonker, president and CEO of King Philanthropies, have written a book to help leaders in the nonprofit sector. The authors, who are also lecturers at Stanford University, discussed their book —  Engine of Impact — which offers seven steps for strategic leadership, on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu