Alison Craiglow Hockenberry

Compassion fatigue has an antidote. True, our increasing global interconnectedness makes us more aware of suffering than ever before, and we can become weary of the seemingly infinite number of problems plaguing our fellow humans.

But that same interconnectedness allows us do more than just learn about what's happening...

In our wonderfully convenient century, so many services are readily available without the long wait times or long trips of decades before. It's hard to believe now, but in the recent past we could only make bank deposits and withdrawals in an actual bank, and only on weekdays between 9...

For 60 grand a year at an elite private college, today's students are paying for a lot of things they could get elsewhere for cheap or free. So, is college worth it?

And the residential four-year model of lectures and directed study may not be preparing them for a changing...

A movie star, a yogi and an Iraq War veteran walk into a bar...

Ok, not a bar. But no joke, this unlikely group is getting together this weekend, along with about a dozen other movers and shakers, at Pixar Animation Studios for some very serious business.

It's called...

If you ask Vera Cordeiro, good health is within reach for everyone, even the poorest of the poor. But this requires radical rethinking of what health care is.

Health is not merely the absence of illness. If a patient is released from a hospital into a situation...

The lexicon of new technology is so casual, you'd be excused for thinking the whole world is doing nothing online but goofing off and LOL-ing about. We chat, we surf, we tweet, we tag, we're on a cloud. But this language belies the fabulously serious business that is happening on...

When you're sick, you see the doctor. When you get a medical test it goes to the lab. When you need medicine, you go to the pharmacy. Or not.

In many places in both the developing and developed world, these basic healthcare steps -- getting from point A to...

The threat level in the United States has been raised to yellow, but this time it's not the Department of Homeland Security raising the alarm. It's a private initiative that is monitoring the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations on behalf of corporations -- called The Occupy Movement Corporate Threat Advisory.

A...

All parents want a bright future for their kids. Which is why this history major, French-poetry minor, writer mom wants her kids to ditch the artsy, literary track I once held as the height of achievement and make stuff. Invent, design, discover, and build actual things.

This surprising revelation is...

We hear a lot these days about innovation and job creation. But when people talk about innovation and jobs, they're usually talking about innovations that may produce jobs -- as opposed to innovations in the way we increase employment.

Why not innovation in job creation?

Sure, cutting-edge technologies will open...

You wouldn't know it from the headlines, but people are getting hired, household incomes are rising, and Americans are pulling themselves and their families out of poverty.

It's happening in Minnesota: An innovative career development program for the chronically-unemployed, called Twin Cities RISE! (TCR!), gets state funding...

For all the debate about whether this is the year of the Twitter revolution and the Facebook riots, the much more interesting question is: What is not happening on the giant social media websites of the world?

The answer is: A lot.

About two billion people have been touched by...

When health innovation expert David Aylward is asked if the developing world can learn from the U.S. healthcare system, his answer is an emphatic yes -- "They should do the opposite!"

Aylward, senior advisor for Global Health and Technology at Ashoka, is not exactly joking. For all our...

We don't need more jobs.

It's true we need to "add jobs" to the economy. But more jobs is not the same as new jobs. We need new jobs.

Real job creation is about new jobs in expanding markets that provide products and services that are growing in demand....

From Angry Birds to roller coasters, from the Harry Potter films to viral YouTube explosions of Diet Coke and Mentos, your summer fun is made possible by science, technology, engineering, and math.

But the STEM subjects, as they're known, are in serious need of a public relations overhaul. Somehow...

Jürgen Griesbeck plays hard because of a murder. After his friend Andrés Escobar, a Colombian national soccer player, was killed for botching a goal in a 1994 World Cup game, Griesbeck set to work making sure the game itself -- football, as most of the world calls it...

Social entrepreneurship today enjoys the high regard it has long deserved -- fully 30 years after the organization that launched the movement was born.

When Bill Drayton started Ashoka, he knew that the old ways of dealing with social problems -- through the...

The hospitality industry is increasingly making things decidedly inhospitable for a certain kind of person: human traffickers.

Hotels, airlines and other travel-related companies are in a position to combat these criminals where they tend to operate. Whether transporting enslaved domestic workers into the country on a plane...

There's a growing green career in East Africa that owes thanks to an unlikely inspiration -- the Avon Lady.

Like their American counterparts of a century ago, shut out of most jobs by oppressive cultural standards, women in rural Rwanda and Uganda are going door-to-door, earning income, sharing wisdom, and...

If the global financial crisis taught us anything, it's that leaving the fate of our collective economic health in the hands of a select few members of an exclusive club with their own narrow agenda is no longer a credible way of doing business. That's true for almost every institution...