June 5, 2014 | New York Times

MASSIVE Open Online Courses — or MOOCs — are a snowballing revolution in education. Thousands of courses from some of the world’s finest institutions are available free online, covering everything from astrophysics to the arts. For each course, students, sometimes numbering in the thousands, take part from home — where they view video lectures, take tests and submit essays through a Web interface. It’s a digital classroom with no actual “room,” and where you can study more or less when you like.

June 5, 2014 | Kansas City Star

H-1B visa denials in 2007 and 2008 meant that as many as 230,000 spinoff tech jobs for American-born workers weren’t created in U.S. metro areas. That cost U.S.-born, college-educated workers in computer-related fields as much as $3 billion in aggregate annual earnings. The report said Kansas City, among more than 200 metropolitan areas studied, ranked in the top 25 for potential jobs lost because area employers didn’t hire high-tech immigrants whose employment would have been catalysts for other jobs.

June 7, 2014 | Los Angeles Times

Agriculture officials are hoping more young people heed the call to till the land, whether organically or conventionally, as the average age of California farmers continues to climb. It hit 58 in 2012, up by nearly two years from 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent census.

June 5, 2014 | c4trends

Crowdfunding is disrupting the relationship between entrepreneurs, the money raising ecosystem and investors. Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other sites are helping innovators to build businesses and leverage funding with more than 200 online crowdfunding platforms in the U.S. alone.