As the recent flurry of articles about why portable electronic devices are restricted during air travel makes clear, the conclusion to be drawn from the information available is a very complicated: “We just don’t know.” For this reason alone airlines err on the side of caution, asking people nicely (and sometimes not so nicely) to turn off their gadgets during takeoff and landing.

Here’s what we do know, or at least here’s what makes sense and comes from reputable sources, including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA):

1.    Radio-frequency emissions from cell phones, laptops and other electronics can occur at the same frequencies used by aircraft communication, navigation and surveillance radio receivers. These emissions could cause fluctuations in navigation readouts, problems with other flight displays, and interference with air traffic communications.

Nikon’s 2011 Small World Competition For the past 37 years, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition has showcased some of the most breathtaking images ever captured under a microscope, and this year was no exception. The top three winners of this year’s competition were photographs of a turquoise-hued green lacewing, a blade of grass magnified 200 times, and the marine phytoplankton Melosira moniliformis, which was imaged while still alive.

Wellcome Image awards 2011 Each year, Wellcome Images—a freely available online repository of historical and contemporary images from biology and medicine—recognize the most memorable images acquired into the collection that year. This year’s picks included a confocal micrograph of a mouse retina, a confocal micrograph of wheat infected with ergot fungus, and a stunning scanning electron micrograph of a honeybee.

Today professional network LinkedIn released its top most shared stories. There are currently 130 million professionals on LinkedIn, and the most popular shared articles are about how to be a better worker. The number two and number three most shared stories were about Steve Jobs. The number nine most shared article was about how people look at your Facebook profile, and the number one article was written by digital marketer Ilya Pozin for Inc. magazine; it is called "9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money." So who are these LinkedIn users, anyhow?

An infographic from AdAge gives additional breakdown of LinkedIn by age, sex and location. It shows that the majority of LinkedIn users are U.S.-based men and women ages 35-54. There are no users ages 13-17.

It's that time of year again. We're about to embark on a new year, we're in the thick of the holiday season, and we're reflecting upon the past 12 months -- the same "woulda, coulda, shoulda" thoughts that pop into every inbound marketer's mind. With 2012 staring us in the face, let's take a fun look at some interesting infographics that will give you a boost of holiday cheer and make you smile.

The Value of Social Media in Gift Selection

Next time you say, "We don't need social media," take a look at this infographic from MrYouth.com. Two-thirds of respondents said they made a purchase based on an interaction via social media with recommendations leading to a purchase.

If you're contemplating a career change, you might want to consider one of these paths (via Utne).

Whether you prefer interacting with people, independence in the workplace, or a comfortable salary, there's something for you on this list of the jobs that keep employees most satisfied at work, compiled by University of Chicago researchers.

You'll find some sure bets — we've all had great teachers, for example, who insist no better occupation exists — and some surprises, too.

Tom Kinnear has been involved as an investor, board member, or founder in starting 11 companies -- five of them with a combined exit value around $700 million.

For 12 years, Kinnear has headed up the Samuel Zell and Ross H. Lurie Institute of Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan. There, he oversees three venture funds, in addition to serving as chairman of the $450 million Venture Michigan Fund.

We caught up with Kinnear to discuss what entrepreneurs should do to land big money from big investors. Here's his advice:

What should entrepreneurs be doing they're searching for funding?

The success of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), a networking group set up over two decades ago by Indian technologists in the Valley, has done much to boost the growing profile of Indians as angel investors in the US startup ecosystem.

Veteran investors such as Kanwal Rekhi who founded early-stage venture fund Inventus Capital Partners said the rising graph of Indian origin investors is a result of early gains recorded by TiE. "The US State Department brings delegations from across the world to us (TiE) and uses us as a role-model," he said.

Much of this attention is also due to the rise of India as a market for cutting edge technology. In 2009, when Nexus Venture Partners funded US-based start-up Cloud.com, founded by Sheng Liang, it provided the fledgling firm with access to the Indian market.

Most people think that the Peter Principle (employee rises to his level of incompetence) only applies to large organizations. Let me assure you that it is also alive and well within startups. There I see founders and managers who are stalled transplants from large organizations, and technologists trying to run the business.

Forty years ago, in a satiric book named “The Peter Principle”, Dr. Laurence J. Peter first defined this phenomenon. The principle asserts that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent, and there they remain, unless they start or join a startup to get the next level.

When you come to a fork in the road, how do you know which way to go? How do you decide? Do you have a way to tune in? To yourself? To your team? To your customers?

If you don't, its time to find out how to navigate the expontentially increasing number of options available to you without hurting yourself or anyone else. The good news? It doesn't require Six Sigma or overpriced consultants telling you what time it is with your own watch.

In the history of medical innovation, advances in technology have been inextricably linked to increases in cost. But we are at a unique moment in which the insular world of medicine is about to be penetrated by the remarkable digital infrastructure. Think about the cost of computing. Over the past two decades, cost has been relentlessly reduced while capacity and performance have dramatically increased. How and when can this trend reach the practice of medicine, where costs often go up with little real improvement?

Let's consider the icon of medicine—the stethoscope draped around the doctor's neck or in the pocket of a white coat. Invented by René Laënnec in 1816, the stethoscope didn't see routine use by the medical community for another 20 years. The lag in acceptance reflected the conservative nature of physicians, who objected to having to learn heart sounds and let an instrument get between their healing hands and the patient.

States are spending billions per year on corporate tax credits, grants and other economic development subsidies that often require little if any job creation and lack wage and benefit standards covering workers at subsidized companies. These are the key findings of Money for Something: Job Creation and Job Quality Standards in State Economic Development Subsidy Programs, a study published today by Good Jobs First, a non-profit research center based in Washington, DC. It is available at www.goodjobsfirst.org.

“With unemployment still so high, taxpayers have a right to expect that economic development investments create significant numbers of quality jobs,” said Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy. “If subsidies do not result in real public benefits, they are no better than corporate giveaways,” added Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, principal author of the report.

In his book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology”, the economist Henry Chesbrough created, in 2003, the term “open innovation” to explain how corporations can seek outside ideas to assist in their development as well as sharing the innovations themselves. These days, Chesbrough is the Executive Director of the Open Innovation Center at the Haas School of Business, at the University of Berkeley (USA) and travels all over the world to propagate his concepts. “The trend has taken off in the last few years”, he told Petrobras Magazine.

_Open innovation is a relatively new concept. But even before it appeared, various companies were already applying it, right?

Yes, open innovation already existed before I published my book. But many of the companies named in the publication admitted that my work had helped them to understand and articulate what they were doing, both for training purposes and for external communication. The trend has really taken off over these last eight years.

For a generation American manufacturing has been widely seen as a “declining sport.” Yet its demise has been largely overplayed.  Despite the many jobs this sector has lost in the past generation, manufacturing remains remarkably resilient, with a global market share similar to that of the 1970s.

More recently, the U.S. industrial base has been on a powerful upswing, with employment climbing steadily since 2009. Boosted by productivity gains and higher costs in competitors, including China, U.S. manufacturing exports have grown at their fastest rate since the late 1980s. In 2011 American manufacturing continued to expand, while Germany, Japan and Brazil all weakened in this vital sector.

Himalayan glaciers are melting and retreating at their edges because of global warming. But they also conceal a more ominous effect of climate change: they are deflating. They are losing internal ice mass to melting, which can substantially hasten their disappearance. Scientists have recently captured real-time video showing a glacier purging its own meltwater, and at rates far faster than the experts had imagined.

To obtain the video, Ulyana Horodyskyj, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, climbed to 5,000 meters on the Ngozumpa Glacier in Nepal

Interesting piece from thebusinessinsider.com:

Remember all that talk a while back about “green shoots” that were rebuilding the shattered economy?

Well, there certainly didn’t seem to be much sprouting, much less full blooms.

The early indications for 2012 may not look all that promising. There is still considerable marketplace volatility, a nearly global sovereign debt crisis and an ongoing impasse here in the U.S. over deficit reduction and revenue creation.

But in the spirit of the holiday season and the optimism many of us hold for the New Year, permit us to don rose-colored glasses for a moment.

NASA has selected 85 small business proposals to enter into negotiations for Phase II contract awards through the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.

The selected projects have a total value of approximately $63 million. NASA will award the contracts to 79 small high technology firms in 27 states. These competitive awards-based programs encourage U.S. small businesses to engage in federal research, development and commercialization. The programs also enable businesses to explore technological potential, while providing the incentive to profit from new commercial products and services.

I know of many organizations – companies, institutes, non-governmental organizations, public agencies and institutions – that are doing amazing work and charting new directions. I wanted to discuss a few that have come across my personal radar. I believe healthcare will be a core area of new strategies, technologies, and innovation next year. They certainly are fulfilling the criteria above and 2012 will likely be, at a minimum, a watershed year. Here are a few organizations to watch in 2012 for healthcare innovation:

• Organizations like the Cleveland Clinic, with an Innovation Center which identifies, incubates and often spins-off new companies based on new technologies. The Cleveland Clinic just received a large financial gift, and successfully sold a spin-off resulting in new funding and momentum.

In Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story, ordinary Americans are glued to superpowered iPhone-like devices while authority figures monitor their every move. Two newly released research papers on the Internet's future, it seems, prove the author did a good job of predicting things. One Pew study has found that text messaging is growing more quickly than anyone has imagined, while a new Brookings paper is predicting cheap and total monitoring of all electronic communications by authoritarian governments in the next few years.