The Donald built an empire because he knew what every piece and process cost him. If you can't say the same for your software, you won't.

Programming is a practical application of abstract math combining esoteric theory with experiential practice. And learning it can be every bit as brain-scramblingly incomprehensible and front-row-seat-for-Celine-Dion tedious as the previous sentence suggests.

But, if you want to start a technology company, you should learn to code. And the reason is Donald Trump.

One warm night last February, I lay down to bed feeling like a lab mouse. A heat- and motion-sensing armband gauged my energy expenditure, another activity tracker clipped to my waistband recorded movement, a blood-pressure cuff connected to my iPad squeezed my right arm, and a brainwave-sensing headband would soon monitor my sleep. A scale linked by Bluetooth to an app on my iPad sat on the bathroom floor. With consistent use, these devices would provide a numeric picture of my general health and behaviors. They would give me intimate knowledge of my physical self, with all the information displayed neatly in graphs and charts.

Not too many years ago, you had to go to medical specialists to get this kind of biological data. Now, whether your problem is migraines or mood swings, you can keep track of your ailment with a consumer device that costs around US $100. As these health-and-wellness gadgets proliferate, a “quantified self” movement is gaining strength: It’s attracting athletes, fitness buffs, data lovers, hypochondriacs, and people just trying to lose some weight.

If it seems like the weather has been all kinds of crazy in your corner of the world in recent years, you probably aren't just imagining things.

So says the September 2012 edition of National Geographic Magazine. The storied publication takes a hard look at the extreme weather events that have at times frozen, baked or drowned various parts of the world over the last several years.

As The Scientist enters its 11th round of annual Best Places to Work surveys—including Postdocs, Industry, and Academia—we invite you to make it our best year yet.

If you are working in life science in an academic, industry, private or government institution, tell us about your workplace. The only way to nominate your institution for the ranking is to take the survey. An analysis of the results will be published in The Scientist’s April (postdocs), June (industry), and August (academia) issues. All those who respond to our survey by November 26, 2012 can enter in a drawing for a $100 gift certificate from Amazon.com. (Gift certificate will be provided in equivalent local currency if winner is outside the United States.)

A trio of Harvard Business School professors made a stop in Silicon Valley to warn that the economic competitiveness of the United States is lagging behind other countries. Their message was laced with hopes that entrepreneurship will save the country, but the facts they carried with them would depress members of any political party.

It’s no secret that the professors are raising the issue of competitiveness just before a presidential election. But their message, based on reports created over the past 18 months by 15 Harvard Business School professors, wasn’t partisan. In an October 2011 survey of 10,000 HBS alumni across the economy, about 71 percent of respondents expect U.S. competitiveness to decline over the next three years, with workers’ living standards under greater pressure. About 1,700 of the respondents had to personally make decisions about whether to leave the U.S. for jobs overseas.

After an investigation, GoDaddy claims that its major outage yesterday was “not caused by external influences” and that a DDoS attack or a hack weren’t to blame.

A member of hacker collective Anonymous, Anonymous Own3r, originally claimed responsibility for the outage. It’s possible this person claimed to facilitate the outage to heighten his or her Twitter profile which has more than doubled its follower count since yesterday.

A reliable source provided us with the official Apple Campus 2 blueprints yesterday, and these are just a few of the confidential images, which illustrate the mammoth building currently in development.

The spaceship-like building, called “Campus 2″, is nearly a mile in circumference. Apple bought the campus’ land from HP and other neighbors in Cupertino, Calif., for around $300 million. The company’s late cofounder, Steve Jobs, oversaw its design, and the project’s proposal was his last public appearance.

Bobby Dinkins admits his idea to build a playground for seniors wasn’t exactly original. “I actually just got the idea through Google,” says Dinkins, director of the Boyd Esler Senior and Community Center in Springfield Township, Ohio. “I went online and googled ‘exercise equipment for seniors’ and read about the Hyde Park playground in England. I realized they were really popular in Europe and Asia, but not over here.”

Dinkins is right: Playgrounds designed specifically for aging residents have popped up in England, Finland, Germany and throughout Asia. But the idea is just now taking off in the U.S. The parks feature low-impact exercise equipment designed to promote balance and flexibility, such as elliptical machines, static bikes and body flexors.

I recently read Ben Austen’s WIRED article about Steve Jobs, which prompted me to put together my thoughts about the tradeoffs of being a successful entrepreneur. Austen’s article draws a caricature of Jobs and puts forth a series of false choices. After reading it, you might be convinced that you can either be a jerk and successful or decent and mediocre. Let’s take a look at some of the examples that the article highlighted from Jobs’ life:

1. In 1975, Atari paid Jobs and Steve Wozniak to create the iconic game Breakout. Woz pulled four all-nighters to get it done—but Jobs pocketed the whole bonus that Atari paid for the game’s efficient design. Austen cites this to set up a choice between “pushing colleagues to extraordinary lengths” (implicitly, screwing them over) or being fair and honest. Pushing employees to excellence doesn’t mean you’re being unfair or screwing anyone over. On the contrary, people respond well to challenging but fair environments.

You want how much ownership in my business? It’s an emotion filled question I hear every time I meet an entrepreneur seeking money for his or her business.

Without a doubt, this very critical topic has significant ramifications for both the investor and founder.  Due to the nature of this crucial issue, I am pleased to share with you a high level overview of how each entity thinks about ownership and how this hot topic can be resolved harmoniously for all.

1. "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." -- Goethe

2. "Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." -- Helen Keller

3. "It's not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It's because we dare not venture that they are difficult." -- Seneca

Europe has failed to create the right "ecosystem" that would encourage the creation of new ICT companies and sub-sectors, holding back the continent's post-crisis recovery, says a new study from the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.

The problem in Europe does not appear to be a lack of generating new ideas, but rather problems in getting these ideas successfully to the market, according to the report titled: New ICT Sectors: Platform for European Growth?

"Among the barriers are the lack of a single digital market, fragmented intellectual property regimes, lack of an entrepreneurial culture, limited access to risk capital and an absence of ICT clusters," write the authors of the report.

Less than a quarter of European computer users say they use cloud services, even though cloud computing is amongst the fastest-growing segments in the global technology market, a new survey shows.

In a survey of nearly 4,000 people, the nonprofit trade association Business Software Alliance (BSA) has found that only 24% of the respondents access cloud applications, such as online email services or online word processing.

Globally, that number is 34%.

A majority of European computer users also say that they are unfamiliar with cloud computing and 65% have "never heard of it" or only "heard the name".

The exponential growth of technology and globalization combined with the increasingly widespread use of social media are turning the tables against established power and turning everyday citizens into the leaders of change. Technology and social media allow the rapid exchange of information and ideas, leading to shared knowledge and eventual action. For example, participants in the Arab Spring uprisings shared their experiences via Twitter, while the Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99% movements were referenced in nearly 4 million Facebook posts. As social networking sites reach 82% of the global population, they are used to demand change, organize for change and make changes happen. Check out this video to see how the Internet, technology and social media are affecting world politics.

Personal assistants such as Apple's Siri may be useful, but they are still far from matching the smarts and conversational skills of a real person. Researchers at the University of Rochester have demonstrated a new, potentially better approach that creates a smart artificial chat partner from fleeting contributions from many crowdsourced workers.

Crowdsourcing typically involves posting simple tasks to a website such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, where Web users complete them for a reward of a few cents. The tasks are often simple, repetitive jobs that are easy for humans but tough for computers, such as categorizing images. Crowdsourcing has become a popular way for companies to handle such tasks, but some researchers, including the group at Rochester, believe it can also be used to take on more complex tasks.

Republican criticism of federal government efforts to fund new energy technologies has spilled over to ARPA-E, the U.S. Department of Energy's popular program for backing high-risk innovations in energy. Republican vice president nominee Paul Ryan last year voted to slash ARPA-E's budget, and presidential candidate Mitt Romney's energy plan says the program should focus on basic research.

Such views could rule out giving money to companies like tiny, 35-person startup Envia Systems, located in Newark, California. Following a $4 million grant from ARPA-E, it says it's within sight of commercializing a high-capacity battery that would cut electric car battery prices in half.

I’m sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses that we should have taken. What’s more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that weren’t even offered, and more than a few students who graduate ill-prepared for the real world!

I won’t even try to cover here the ones you didn’t find for your personal life, like managing personal finances and credit. But on the business side, here is my list of useful courses that we wish existed, but as far as I know, still aren’t generally available:

Is the marketing industry’s increasingly imaginative use of social media the best way to recruit new customers – or is it just getting on people’s nerves?

ONE’S LEVEL of social engagement online is a very personal thing. Believe it or not, this journalist still knows quite a few people with no social network profile at all out of either sheer disgust or fears for privacy.

Whether you “like” a friend’s holiday snap or the fact that your favourite brand of Irish whiskey has told you to “Enjoy your day”, the decision to do so indicates more about your own personality than you might think.

California, Illinois and New York all boast their own health accelerators: Rock Health, Healthbox and Blueprint Health, respectively.

Now Minnesota is getting its own health accelerator — Inceptis LLC. Given the state’s historic strength in medical devices, it comes as no surprise that the accelerator is a medical technology accelerator primarily focused on Class II medical devices. The company founded by equal partners Daniel Sigg, a med tech executive with experience in R&D at Medtronic, and Devicix, a product development and engineering firm, will begin raising money in the fall with the goal of bringing in around $10 million to $14 million.

In a recent interview, Sigg, Inceptis’ CEO, said he believes that the “medical device market is huge, but the early stage pipeline is broken.” That is the problem that Sigg and Devicix hope to fix.

Over five terms as mayor of Boston, Tom Menino has earned a reputation and label that might appear to lack glamor -- "urban mechanic" -- but which stirs admiration among those who care about city-government operations. Getting the nuts and bolts of a city's day-to-day work done is a prerequisite for everything else.

These days, however, those who watch governance across the country are abuzz about something that Menino is doing that is changing those old-school perceptions of him: his Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. MONUM infuses technology, community participation and enhanced citizen responsiveness into the urban-mechanic model. Mayor Menino now stands at the forefront of urban innovation.