People get advice all the time, but they rarely follow it even if they accept it as good advice.

Why does this happen?

Art Markman, Ph.D, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, explains the reason in a column at Psychology Today.

He cites a recent study in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which suggests that "advice givers and advice takers differ in how abstractly they think about situations."

Presenting to a group of people can be a daunting experience.  There are some basic psychological facts that you should know about how people react to presentations — including how your body language affects reception and how to increase the energy level in a room.  Behavioral scientist Dr. Susan Weinschenk gave us permission to publish the best advice from her new book, 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, based on posts from her blog, Whatmakesthemclick.net.

Arianna Huffington carries four BlackBerry phones with her everywhere she goes. But, why does she prefer a BlackBerry over an iPhone or Android device?  "Come on guys, you have to admit: typing on the iPhone is painful," said Arianna at Startup 2012 earlier this month. Arianna has, in fact, become so addicted to BlackBerrys that she tells us she's "very anxious at the fact that BlackBerrys may disappear." 

Economic mobility - the quintessentially American idea (ideal, really) that any one, no matter how humble their origins, can become wealthy - has taken some terrible hits in the last few years. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah notes that income heritability ("a measure of how determinative one generation’s relative income status - what we used to call ‘station in life’ - will be of the next generation’s relative income status') is much higher in the U.S. than in many of the countries that people once emigrated to America from, in search of greater opportunities. “Mobility in the United States has fallen dramatically behind mobility in other comparably developed democracies," he writes.

A 2007 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development combined a number of previous estimates and found income heritability to be greater in the United States than in Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and France. The United Kingdom, which had been far less mobile than the United States during the late nineteenth century, brought up the rear, but this time it was just a bit less mobile than the United States. Thanks to a 2012 recalculation by Miles Corak, an economist at the University of Ottawa, we can now add Switzerland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and Pakistan to the list of societies that are more mobile than the United States.

BlackBerry in hand, Tek Rimal counts the minutes as he rides the bus from his job at BNY Mellon to his Bellevue apartment. Like many young parents, Mr. Rimal and his wife, Chandra, tag-team the care of their son, Anuj, with precision timing. Mr. Rimal rushes home from his day shift so his wife can work a 4-to-midnight stint at Rivers Casino.

Like many Pittsburghers, they rely on family to fill in the occasional gaps. Two of Mr. Rimal's brothers and one of Chandra's live in their building. The extended family shops and socializes together, often taking the bus to a favorite ethnic food store.

Joseph Vranich, an Orange County-based business relocation specialist, offers these top 10 reasons why businesses are departing California:

#1 – Excessively Adversarial: For eight years in a row, Chief Executive magazine found California to be the worst state for business. Editors said the state appears to have slipped deeper into the “ninth circle of business hell,” a reference to Dante’s Inferno. “The economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms.” They’ve called California the “Venezuela of North America.”

AT&T has a problem in Chicago. The city was one of the first to be upgraded to the wireless carrier's next-generation LTE (long-term evolution) network, which packs more data into a radio signal and offers much faster download speeds. But independent tests published this month showed that AT&T downloads in Chicago are less than half the speed of those on Verizon's LTE network there. The reason? A lack of radio spectrum. AT&T's radio licenses allow it to use only a 10-megahertz chunk of the airwaves for its LTE network in Chicago, compared with the 20 megahertz it has in other cities

AT&T faces the same problem in Los Angeles, and it's just part of a challenge confronting the whole mobile communications industry: how to reconcile consumer expectations of forever faster, cheaper downloads on mobile Internet devices with limited room in the airwaves.

We can use The Innovation Matrix to help us understand how the innovation capability of firms evolves over time. A great case study in this regard is Procter & Gamble. Starting from the late 1990s, this is the path that they’ve travelled:

In the late 1990s, their innovation program had lost its way. Successful product innovation was at the centre of their competitive strategy, but their performance had been slipping. P&G had reviewed their Research & Development strategy and increased their budget for the five years leading up to 1999, even though they already had one of the largest R&D budgets in the world.

No matter what language you speak, when you look at a Web page, you can get a good idea of the purpose of the different elements on it—whether they're images, videos, text, music, or ads. It's not so easy for machines to do the same, though.

That's where Diffbot hopes to make a difference. The startup, based in Palo Alto, California, offers application programming interfaces that make it possible for machines to "read" the various objects that make up Web pages. This could enable a publisher to repurpose the contents of pages for a mobile app, or help a startup build a price-comparison site.

Fern Saitowitz’s advanced breast cancer was controlled for about a year by the drug Herceptin and a toxic chemotherapy agent. But her hair fell out, her fingernails turned black and she was constantly fatigued.

She switched to an experimental treatment, which also consisted of Herceptin and a chemotherapy agent. Only this time, the two drugs were attached to each other, keeping the toxic agent inactive until the Herceptin carried it to the tumor. Side effects, other than temporary nausea and some muscle cramps, vanished.

“I’m able to live a normal life,” said Ms. Saitowitz, 47, a mother of two young children in Los Angeles. “I haven’t lost any of my hair.”

The big economic question in much of the world today is usually framed as the fight between advocates of austerity and advocates of growth. But another way to view the debate is as a contest between those who think that 21st-century government can be effective and those who don’t.

Indeed, some of America’s most outspoken capitalists have begun to fight the “Buffett Rule,” which would set a minimum tax level for millionaires, and other calls to raise taxes for those at the very top, with the argument that money is best left in the bank accounts of the superrich because they are more effective at using it than the state is.

Hefei, the capital of historically poor Anhui province emerged as China's top growth center among major metropolitan areas over the past 10 years. Metropolitan areas from the interior, the Yangtze Delta and the central and northern coast were the fastest growing, displacing Guangdong's Pearl River Delta, long the growth center for the country.   (Figure 1).

China's Trends in Context: China's growth rate has fallen substantially and the United Nations has projected that the nation will experience population decline starting between 2030 and 2035. However, China's urban areas have grown strongly as people have continued to move to cities for better opportunities. According to World Bank research, China's economic progress since 1981 has lifted more people out of poverty than ever before in the world.

Pure Michigan Business Connect — a multibillion-dollar public-private initiative created last year by Gov. Rick Snyder and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation — is launching five new programs to aid business growth in the state.

The MEDC announced the initiatives at the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinaw Policy Conference this week.

The initiatives “significantly expand our economic gardening toolkit to grow our state’s economy” by providing ways for companies to collaborate and take advantage of growth opportunities, MEDC CEO Michael Finney said in a press release.

Greensboro, NC – The Alliance for Global Good (AFGG) today announced the opening of competition for its new Innovation Fund. Designed to increase the sustainability of medium-­‐sized, US-­‐based nonprofits that work on solving global problems, the Fund encourages action on mission-­‐relevant financing to support an organization’s revenues and to develop new programs to fulfill the nonprofit’s mission.

“As the past few years bear out, organizations heavily reliant upon traditional sources of nonprofit support such as government funding and individual donor contributions can too easily fall victim to the economic see-­‐ saw.” said David M. Brand, AFGG’s President & CEO. “There is growing awareness that a mix of traditional funding and self-­‐sustaining, earned revenue provides for greater resilience.”

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"Do you think you're creative?"

Ask this question of a group of second-graders, and about 95 percent of them will answer “Yes.” Three years later, when the kids are in fifth grade, that proportion will drop to 50 percent—and by the time they’re seniors in high school, it’s down to 5 percent.

Author Jonah Lehrer recently discussed the implications of these sobering statistics for education in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. In a talk and question-and-answer session he participated in at the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto, California, last month, Lehrer talked about why children lose their playful sense of creativity as they get older, and how we can help them hang on to it.

Many young entrepreneurs are itching to start their own ventures but find themselves biding time in the corporate world in the meantime. If you feel like you are wasting time, then you must change your perspective and attitude. Every experience you have in Corporate America has the potential to be a learning experience for you to gain and develop skills that will become invaluable assets when you’re ready to start your own business. Below are 5 ways to make the most of your corporate job…even if you hate it!

The Best Education is Real-World Education

You may currently be in a job that you hate, dislike or even tolerate, but you know it’s not what you want to be doing in five years. You must approach this job with the attitude and perspective that it’s on-the-job training for the business that you will one day create and lead. Be on the lookout for opportunities to develop vital financial skills, making sure you understand how to read profit and loss statements, balance sheets and cash flow reports. You can also seek out an opportunity to learn how product decisions are made. Within this opportunity, you can gain a tremendous vantage point to learn how to identify customer needs, competitive advantages, costs, ROI models and a product’s lifecycle. Lastly, market positioning, brand-building and the value of a customer (present, future and lifetime) are additional skills that always help, no matter the stage of the business.

Increasing investments in research should not be considered as making the debt or deficit higher - they are essential to generate more wealth and competitiveness. This will provide rapid returns and contribute to a better balance sheet, says Antonio Tajani.

The tomato, whose genome has just now been decoded, turns out to be one well-endowed vegetable, possessing 31,760 genes. This rich legacy, possibly a reflection of the disaster that killed off the dinosaurs, is some 7,000 more than that of a person, and presents a complex puzzle to scientists who hope to understand its secrets.

A consortium of plant geneticists from 14 countries has spent nine years decoding the tomato genome in the hope of breeding better ones. The scientists sequenced the genomes of both Heinz 1706, a variety used to make ketchup, and the tomato’s closest wild relative, Solanum pimpinellifolium, which lives in the highlands of Peru, where the tomato’s ancestors originated. Their results were published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

DAYTON, Ohio — As cities like this one try to reinvent themselves after losing large swaths of their manufacturing sectors, they are discovering that one of the most critical ingredients for a successful transformation — college graduates — is in perilously short supply.

Just 24 percent of the adult residents of metropolitan Dayton have four-year degrees, well below the average of 32 percent for American metro areas, and about half the rate of Washington, the country’s most educated metro area, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Like many Rust Belt cities, it is a captive of its rich manufacturing past, when well-paying jobs were plentiful and landing one without a college degree was easy.

Could exercise actually be bad for some healthy people? A well-known group of researchers, including one who helped write the scientific paper justifying national guidelines that promote exercise for all, say the answer may be a qualified yes.

By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease:blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterolortriglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.