Data from a nationally representative sample of 5,404 community-dwelling Canadians ages 50 and older at baseline (1994/1995) was used to estimate the effects of alcohol drinking patterns on quality of life when subjects were aged =50 years and after a follow-up period. Health-related quality of life was assessed with the Health Utilities Index Mark 3 (HUI3). The authors report that most participants showed stable alcohol-consumption patterns over 6 years.

Detailed information was available on the participants alcohol consumption. Moderate drinkers were defined as those having 1 drinks per week with no more than 3 on any day for women and no more than 4 on any day for men. The repeated assessments allowed for the investigators to classify subjects according to changes over time in their drinking patterns, so that “persistent moderate drinkers” could be identified. 31.4% of the subjects decreased their intake over the follow-up period. The investigators also did secondary analyses among subjects who did not report any adverse health conditions (heart disease, cancer, stroke, or diabetes) during the first four years of follow up; these subjects were referred to as “consistently healthy.”

Big4.com, the premier social networking forum for professionals and alumni of Accenture, Andersen, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC, reports that a new quarterly study of private equity and venture capital investment activity in India, including further analysis by industry, region and stage of development shows while quarterly PE investments decreased 24 percent in the number of deals, the dollar value jumped 57 percent compared to the fourth quarter of 2011.

Big4.com notes that to the first-ever MoneyTree™ India Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers Pvt Ltd (PwC), based on data provided by Venture Intelligence also shows that Private Equity (PE) firms in that country invested US$1.8 billion in 91 deals in the first quarter of 2012.

Long gone are the days when billboards, print advertisements and direct mail alone were the only ways to reach an audience of our choice. Today, entrepreneurs can take advantage of the many avenues of the Internet — most of which are free or relatively inexpensive. Setting up a presence on social media platforms and testing out segmented email marketing campaigns are today’s most promising marketing initiatives for startups. Results are accurately tracked and leads are constantly captured — all without signing a big check or licking a single stamp.

Google’s policy of 20 percent time—giving employees plenty of free time work on whatever they want—is world famous for being the birthplace of innovative products— most famously, Gmail. But what would happen if schools gave students a similar amount of unstructured free time and allowed them to take control of their own learning? This spring Matthew Bebbington, a high school physical education teacher in the U.K., decided to find out. He organized a school-wide "Innovation Day" that let 80 students between the ages of 11-15 choose what and how to learn.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have become a major force in pushing forward China's science and technology innovation, an official said Friday. SMEs currently account for 65 percent of the country's all invention patents, 75 percent of corporate innovations and 80 percent of new product developments, Miao Wei, minister of industry and information technology, said at a seminar in Chengdu, the capital city of southwest China's Sichuan province.

I’ve noticed a great tendency among startup founders to ignore the essentials of business accounting in the early stages of their startup. Just because you are not profitable yet, doesn’t mean you can skip the record keeping.

In fact, just the opposite is true. When you anticipate losses for the first year or two, it is more important to properly document all expenses, including tricky ones like business travel, business meals, and your home office. Sloppy documentation and reporting of these expenses is an open invitation to an IRS audit, which is the last thing you need or can afford during the busy startup period.

It was only a matter of time before healthcare providers would start prescribing mHealth apps as soon as they proved to be as or more effective than prescription drugs. Happtique, a mobile health application store and app management solution startup will launch a trial of mRx. They claim this is the first program to enable doctors to prescribe mHealth apps to patients. mHealth pioneers are calling it an “app formulary” that complements (and competes) with a traditional drug formulary (i.e., the list of approved drugs a clinician can prescribe).

There has been much talk in recent times about how the advertising industry could (and should) use its considerable wealth of creativity (and wealth) to help change people’s behavior for the benefit of the world. That message was amplified yesterday when former President Bill Clinton addressed the ad world’s elite in Cannes. Invited to the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity by Brazilian media group Grupo ABC, Clinton called on the assembled to channel their creative energy toward coming up with world-changing ideas.

While Clinton’s message was simple--that those whose with the power to persuade could have great impact when those energies are focused on the greater good--his insight and global context made the point impressively.

If you're an entrepreneur today looking to start a company, there's a decent chance you've looked at an accelerator program.

The proposition is compelling: funding, access to resources, events, fellowship with other entrepenreurs, and introductions to venture capitalists who can fund your growth.

Given the popularity of accelerator programs, which are now popping up all over the world, Aziz Gilani, a director at VC firm DFJ Mercury, looked at 29 accelerators in North America as part of a study for the Kauffman Fellows program. His goal: evaluate them based on the number of exits they've produced.

All the focus on the Ellen Pao lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins for sexual discrimination aside, it’s fair to say that women fare better at venture capital firms in China than those on Sand Hill Road.

Women partners at China venture offices ‒ and to some degree India too ‒ are getting ahead faster and in greater numbers.

Anyone who travels in venture circles globally knows that men way outnumber women in this profession. In Silicon Valley, golf, private clubs and classmate connections from Stanford and Berkeley ‒ and even high school ‒ have contributed to this imbalance.

Recently, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company invited me to lunch at a very nice private club in Los Angeles to pose a rather interesting business question. After hearing me give a speech on the subject of small and big businesses helping each other, he wanted to explore how that entrepreneurial energy could be harnessed inside a multi-billion dollar company. That question was a thought provoking challenge to which lunch became the side dish! I've long felt that companies of all sizes need to have that can-do spirit at every level to survive, adapt and grow. Founders of businesses usually have it, but I say that reaching the peak and staying there requires employees that can show that sparkling and spunky side of themselves as well. The word I've adopted to describe this phenomenon is "intrapreneur." I know it's a new word because spell check always wants to change it, but soon I expect the dictionaries will have an official definition.

The Rise of the Paperless Office The media and economists have heralded the paperless office as the next step in business operations for decades. Cloud computing, off-site backups, digital document management systems, electronic signatures and other technology have helped to decrease the business world’s dependence on paper. Printed internal communications have been replaced with email and smartphones, work orders are digital and invoices are sent over the Internet in seconds. Trends in Office Paper Consumption In the past decade, paper consumption within the office has been on a slight but steady decline. Economist John Maine of World Graphic Paper attributes this to a shift in technologies, a growing movement toward eco-friendly office practices and effective digital document management platforms.

The idea of crowd funding shot to the top of the public consciousness this week with the story of Karen Klein, the 68-year-old bus monitor in upstate New York who had been bullied to tears by a group of teenagers.

When a video of the incident went viral, a Good Samaritan opened an account for her on Indiegogo, inviting people to contribute and hoping to raise $5,000 to give Klein a vacation.

The crowd-funded account has now surpassed $550,000 and may continue to rise.

In an effort to accelerate technology transfer from NASA into the hands of American businesses, industry and the public, the agency’s new Technology Transfer Portal is open for business.

NASA’s Technology Transfer Portal provides an Internet-based one-stop front door to the agency’s unique intellectual property assets available for technology transfer and infusion into America’s new technology and innovation-driven economy. NASA’s Technology Transfer Program allows research and development to transfer back into the U.S. economy via licenses, patents and intellectual property agreements that often result in new innovations, products and businesses. The use of NASA technology by American businesses spurs job growth and helps maintain U.S. economic competitiveness while improving our everyday lives.

To help you keep up with the innovation ecosystem in Boston and beyond, we’ve offered lists of entrepreneurs, VC’s and others in the community to read and follow. But today I thought I’d offer something a bit different. Below are nine people and/or organizations I follow to learn more about innovation as a process. I’m fascinated by the economics of how innovation actually happens, and while you can learn a lot about that from watching startups themselves, there’s a ton to be learned by following scholars, think tanks, and writers who focus on these questions specifically. My hope in writing this isn’t just to share my sources, but to get your feedback. It’s my job to keep up with this stuff, so if you have suggestions for who else I ought to be following, let me know!

The emergence of accelerators has been vital to spurring innovation and entrepreneurship over the last several years, and their continued expansion is essential to creating companies, jobs and market competitiveness. In evaluating the "success" of accelerators, it's important to consider a range of variables and not focus solely on the number of exits or whether their graduates raise money.

Entrepreneurs are a particular breed of people. They see holes in the marketplace that others have never seen; they compile practical solutions that can solve their future customers’ problems. Entrepreneurs can grow an idea into a vision worth implementing, recruit team members who believe in that vision, and truly create something that’s both innovative and profitable.

Despite such characteristics, entrepreneurs also feel like they can do everything themselves — and, at times, that they should. Pitching meetings and press presentations are one thing, but setting schedules and sending tweets may be another, especially if you’re already paying people to fill those roles. There’s a difference between keeping a close eye on your employees’ productivity and breathing down their throats to make sure they meet their deadlines.

The average length of a funding pitch to angel investors is ten minutes. Even if you have booked an hour with a VC, you should plan to talk only for the first fifteen minutes. The biggest complaint I hear from investors is that startup founders often talk way too long, and neglect to cover the most relevant points. Or they get sidetracked by a technical glitch due to poor preparation.

If you start by pitching your extended life story, that’s the wrong point. Equally bad is an extended pitch on your new disruptive technology. Investors are more interested in your solution and your business, rather than your technology. Here are some tips on the right approach and the right points to hit:

So you're not a nano-technologist. You don't know how to sequence the human genome. You confuse artificial intelligence with posing. Does this mean that you're useless — that you have no place in the 21st-century economy?

Cheer up. You don't have to be Einstein to disrupt paradigms. Well, actually, you do — Einstein himself said that his greatest asset was his imagination, not his knowledge. The point is, if you can think, you can innovate. If you can ask "why?" you can change the world. Let other people do the hard work of figuring out how to make an airplane fly and a TV screen thinner. You can be the one who figures out that putting the TV in everyone's airplane seatback could make for a great new airline. Here are a few examples where a simple twist on an existing paradigm changed everything — often in complicated technological businesses.

Call it vocational Darwinism: Seeing similarities between the Galapagos Islands and our recession-era ecosystem, Nacie Carson wrote The Finch Effect to help you be more like those titular birds--which adapted their beaks to environmental changes within a single generation--and less like the species that have perished around them.

Fast Company spoke with the author about the evolutionary benefits of owning your career, the intersecting axes of personal branding, and why natural selection is not survival of the strongest. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.