Venture Capitalists Are Making Bigger Bets on Food Start-Ups

By JENNA WORTHAM and CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

April 28, 2013

What if the next big thing in tech does not arrive on your smartphone or in the cloud? What if it lands on your plate?

Workers in the Plated warehouse in Brooklyn. The founders spent $15,000 on a warehouse in Queens that proved unsuitable.

That idea is enticing a wide group of venture capitalists in Silicon Valley into making big bets on food.

In some cases, the goal is to connect restaurants with food purveyors, or to create on-demand delivery services from local farms, or ready-to-cook dinner kits. In others, the goal is to invent new foods, like creating cheese, meat and egg substitutes from plants. Since this is Silicon Valley money, though, the ultimate goal is often nothing short of grand: transforming the food industry.

“Part of the reason you’re seeing all these V.C.’s get interested in this is the food industry is not only is it massive, but like the energy industry, it is terribly broken in terms of its impact on the environment, health, animals,” said Josh Tetrick, founder and chief executive of Hampton Creek Foods, a start-up making egg alternatives.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/business/venture-capitalists-are-making-bigger-bets-on-food-start-ups.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Waiting Until 70 for Social Security: How Long Must You Live to Make it Worth the Wait?

By Larry Kotlikoff

April 29, 2013

If you outlive your life expectancy, economist Larry Kotlikoff says you will want the highest possible Social Security check. If you don't, you won't need one.

Joe Ruthenberg -- Vista, Calif.: How many years will it take me to recover passed over benefits if I wait until age 70? At age 66, I will receive $1,512. At age 70, $2,119 per month.

Larry Kotlikoff: You seem to be thinking something like, "Gee, if it takes me 15 years to break even after waiting until 70 to start collecting and my life expectancy is only 82, it doesn't make sense to wait." This is not the right way to think about waiting to collect. The reason is that you won't die precisely at 82 or whatever your life expectancy happens to be.

Look at the actuarial tables used by Social Security (though they figure to underestimate longevity, since they date from 2007 and life expectancy has grown since).

Here are the 2007 projections for the ages at which you might make a Social Security decision, 62 to 69. The first column is age; the second, the odds of your dying in the next year at that age, if you're a man. The third column lists the number of years of life expectancy left, on average (again, for men). The next two columns provide the same data for women.

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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/04/waiting-til-70-for-social-secu.html

The Myth of America's Tech-Talent Shortage

And what it should mean for immigration reform.

by Jordan Weissmann

Apr 29 2013


So it turns out the United States is not, in fact, the educational wasteland tech industry lobbyists would have you think.

Companies like Microsoft often claim that America is suffering from an economically hobbling shortage of science, math, and computer talent. The solution, they argue, is to let employers fill their hiring gaps by importing tens of thousands of educated guest workers beyond what the law currently allows. Much as farmers want to bring in field workers from Mexico on short-term visas, software developers desperately want to bring in more coders from India.

The Senate's current immigration bill would grant their wish. As written, it vastly increases the annual limit on H1-B visas, which allow corporations to bring employees with a bachelor's degree to the U.S. from overseas for up to six years. Roughly half the guest workers who currently arrive through the program come for computer-related jobs. When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that he was forming a political action group to back the reform effort, it was in part seen as a move to ensure that the H1-B provision would make it to President Obama's desk intact.

There's just one problem. That whole skills shortage? It's a myth, as was amply illustrated (yet again) by a report this week from the Economic Policy Institute. It still might be the case that tech companies are having trouble finding specific skill sets in certain niches (think cloud software development, or Android programming), but there simply aren't any signs pointing to a broad dearth of talent.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-myth-of-americas-tech-talent-shortage/275319/?google_editors_picks=true

The Mind of a Con Man

By YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

April 26, 2013

One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early ’90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg’s door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.
Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.”

Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. And just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study indicating that eating meat made people selfish and less social.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

The Unluckiest Generation: What Will Become of Millennials?

Coming of age in a recession has set back Millennials for decades. The good news? In the age of abundance, they could turn out to be pretty great decades, anyway.

by Derek Thompson

Apr 26 2013

The nearly 3.7 million American babies born in 1982 weren't special, except to their families. But in the eyes of demographers, they were categorically different from the 3.6 million Americans born in 1981. They were the first members of a new club: Generation Y.

This so-called millennial cohort, the largest generation in American history, landed in the cradle during an awful recession, learned to walk during the Reagan recovery, came of age in the booming 1990s, and entered the labor market after the Sept. 11 attacks and before the Great Recession, the two tragedies of the early 21st century. They've survived an eventful few decades.

Yet nothing in those vertiginous 30 years could have prepared them for the economic sledgehammer that followed the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08. And the aftereffects, economists fear, may dog them for the rest of their working lives.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-unluckiest-generation-what-will-become-of-millennials/275336/?google_editors_picks=true

The Atlantic

Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Published: April 25, 2013 313 Comments

I used to believe that a mammogram saved my life. I even wrote that in the pages of this magazine. It was 1996, and I had just turned 35 when my doctor sent me for an initial screening — a relatively common practice at the time — that would serve as a base line when I began annual mammograms at 40. I had no family history of breast cancer, no particular risk factors for the disease.

So when the radiologist found an odd, bicycle-spoke-like pattern on the film — not even a lump — and sent me for a biopsy, I wasn’t worried. After all, who got breast cancer at 35?

It turns out I did. Recalling the fear, confusion, anger and grief of that time is still painful. My only solace was that the system worked precisely as it should: the mammogram caught my tumor early, and I was treated with a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation; I was going to survive.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on-breast-cancer.html?pagewanted=all

Charleston's Spoleto Festival rises to greater heights

By Andrew Alexander

 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

April 23, 2013

For 17 days each summer, the sleepy seaside town of Charleston, S.C., turns into a busy hive of cultural activity, with every possible venue, large and small, filled from noon to night with the sights and sounds of opera, jazz, theater, dance and more during the annual Spoleto Festival USA.

Considered one of the top such annual cultural events in the country, if not the world, the festival brings cutting-edge performers and artists from around the globe to the Southeast for an intense art marathon that's sure to give a jolt to even the most jaded culture vulture.

This year, festival organizers have crammed more than 120 performances between May 24 and June 9, making 2013 the largest and busiest Spoleto Festival yet. The fringe-style events of the concurrent side-festival Piccolo Spoleto, which announced its lineup at the end of March, will more than double the options.

Continued at:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/travel/vs-travel-spoleto-festival-20130423,0,7961075.story


The Orlando Sentinel