They have thirty or forty years before they need the money but they are using reactive short-term strategies rather than implementing proactive long-term strategies, yet 71% of employees under the age of 30 that have used our online financial assessment tool report having a general knowledge of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. The gap may be how to apply this knowledge to their personal situation. Only 23% in this age group (the lowest of all the age groups) report they are confident their investments are allocated appropriately. The reason they aren’t confident in their allocation is probably because they aren’t actually allocated properly.

The average Gen Y investor has 30% of their assets in cash, the highest of all demographic groups, according to the latest MFS Investing Sentiment Survey results. This would be fine for a Baby Boomer, or even a Gen X employee, but not for the young employee starting out. They might feel better today with a high cash balance but the risk is that they will feel worse down the road when their assets haven’t even kept up with inflation. To top it off, they are missing out on, possibly, a once in a lifetime opportunity to accumulate shares of growing companies during a bad economy at low share prices.

Here are some time-tested investment strategies that Gen Y (and the rest of us) can use:

Match your investment strategy to your goal: Simple but true. Every investment has a goal, such as providing future income in retirement, and the strategy needs to match that goal. The greatest investor of all time, Warren Buffet, said “If you don’t feel comfortable owning something for ten years, then don’t own it for ten minutes.” If you’ve done your research when you make your initial investment, volatility shouldn’t be the only reason to abandon the strategy. Volatility comes with the territory when investing in stocks. Investors who stuck with their investment strategy throughout the lowest months of the 2008-09 market downturn realized an average account balance increase of 50% through June 30, 2011, while investors who moved to cash during the downturn saw only a 2% increase over this same period of time, according to a new study by Fidelity Investments. Write down your goal for each investment, your investment philosophy and strategy, and be sure to review those notes before making any changes.

Invest in equities for long-term growth, especially the companies you do business with: If they pay attention to what products and services their peers are buying, Gen Y investors could pick up investment ideas. There are some great buys out there—companies that are doing well in today’s economy or poised to do well in a recovery but can be purchased today at rock bottom prices. The self-directed account in the 401(k) is a great place to accumulate shares in individual stocks or in mutual funds from the menu of funds provided by their employer.

However, the authors of the report interestingly note that performance in science did increase.

Scholars from the University of Houston studied programs with a substantial minority and low-income population in the southwestern United States, where since 2007 all 5th-grade students have been tested for eligibility to participate in gifted and talented programming.

The report – “Poor Results for High Achievers: New evidence on the impact of gifted and talented programs” – measured student progress from the 6th to the 7th grade.

Data was drawn from their Stanford Achievement Test scores and attendance rates. Using data on 2,600 students the study shows no statistically significant impact on performance in math, science, language, reading or social studies.

The gains in science cannot be clearly explained through the data. The authors of the report suggest that instruction in science may require especially qualified teachers with access to excellent science facilities, something that may be more available in other programs than in regular middle schools.

The authors’ report results from two separate studies:

One study looks at students who attended two magnet middle school programs that had an exclusive focus on high-achieving students. It found positive effects of attending the school on student performance on a science test. The effect was 0.28 standard deviations, approximately one extra year’s worth of learning.

The other study examines the effects of participation in a Gifted and Talented program offered within regular middle schools to students who were just barely deemed eligible to participate as compared to those who just missed becoming eligible, based on the “identification matrix” scores the district used.

The authors caution that test scores are not the only way in which programs for high-achieving students should be assessed and there might also be benefits that they are not able to study, such as the impact on graduation rates and college attendance.

While the analysis of the programs within regular schools focuses only on students who are on the margin of entering a gifted program, the report makes for an interesting read.

Using data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Safe Schools Online, policy analysts at the free-market think tank discovered that over the 2009-2010 school term these academically failing schools counted up more than:

100 indecent or sexual assaults

225 indecent exposures

nearly 2,600 assaults on students and staff

more than 330 cases of reckless endangerment

more than 500 weapons possessions and terroristic threats

On average, only 32 percent of students at these schools were able to reach proficiency in reading, 38 percent in math.

“When the ‘Three Rs’ have turned from reading, writing and arithmetic to run, report and recover, we don’t have a state of education, we have a state of emergency,” said Matthew J. Brouillette, President and CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation.

“As many adults debate whether a school rescue bill is needed in Pennsylvania, children trapped in these violent and failing public schools are forced to survive unconscionable, undeniable and unacceptable conditions.”

An important point: students currently attending all the schools identified in the analysis would be eligible for rescue under proposed legislation.

Philadelphia schools accounted for more than half of those on the academically failing list, including Germantown High School, where only 8 percent of 11th graders scored proficient in math, with only 17 percent in reading, writes the press release.

“To let children suffer in the status quo when successful and tax-saving alternatives abound is simply unjust,” said Brouillette, a former high school teacher, school board member and father of four children. “Giving parents and children options to choose a viable education in a safe environment isn’t just right because it saves kids, it will also save taxpayer money.”

The Commonwealth Foundation aims to support the expansion of school choice programs in Pennsylvania, including significant expansion of the state’s successful Education Improvement Tax Credit program, charter schools, and opportunity scholarships like those recently proposed by Gov. Tom Corbett.

At the same time, he admits that his new site, Canv.as, relies on Facebook as an identity authenticator in order to weed out “the trolls and spambots.” More on that below.

Poole complains that Facebook and Google+ are making identity “black and white,” forcing users to be the same person in all contexts — offline, online, at home, at work, etc. “We all have multiple identities. That’s not abnormal. It’s part of being human. Identity is prismatic,” he says. “We are multi-faceted. Google and Facebook would have you believe you are a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, one idea of self… but in fact we are more like diamonds. You can look at people from any angle and can see something totally different, but they are still the same.”

Essentially, Poole worries about an Internet which we navigate always with our Google or Facebook identity attached and identifying us by our real names. Increasingly, websites are partnering with these sites so that our Facebook identity, for example, becomes pervasive, associated publicly with much of our online activity; for example, music-listening site Spotify recently instituted a change so that people could only sign up for the site with a Facebook account, and then publicized the music they were listening to by default.

“What’s at stake is the ability to be creative and expressive on the Internet,” says Poole. “I especially worry about young people. Part of growing up is finding who you are, what you’re passionate about, what you’re interested in, and being an idiot, making mistakes. And now that we have a persistent, consolidated identity online — look at Timeline, that’s what it is — I fear that we’ve lost the ability for the youth to explore themselves and make these youthful indiscretions.”

Auto opponents fall into two categories. On one hand are the “greens” who dislike cars because they pollute and cause “urban sprawl.” On the other hand are a variety of businesses and government agencies that financially benefit from the war on the automobile. These businesses and agencies often provide grants and other support to the greens to make it appear that waging war on cars is somehow a noble cause.

Among the greens, I would include the nation’s 30,000 urban planners, most of whom work for government planning departments. These urban planners nearly all have universities degrees in their field, giving the war on the automobile an aura of academic respectability. But urban planning is far from a science; it is a best an art, and at worst a scam designed to give special interest groups undue power over property owners and taxpayers.

Planners often hold public meetings that they call charrettes that are supposedly designed to give people a say in the future of their communities. But the planners tightly control the agendas of the charrettes so that no one is allowed to build momentum against the planners’ agenda. No matter what people at the charrettes say, the planners will conclude that the community wants denser housing and more alternatives to driving.

Most urban planning schools are affiliated with architecture schools, and they teach what is known as the “design fallacy,” which is that human behavior can be shaped by urban design. Planners know that urban forms changed in response to new transportation technologies. When most transportation was on foot, people lived in high densities. When streetcars were developed, densities declined. When the automobile became dominant, densities declined even further. This much is true.

But planners fantasize that they can somehow reverse this process through land-use regulation. If they can increase densities to those of the streetcar era, they think people will suddenly stop driving and ride transit more. If they can increase densities to the pedestrian era, they think people will walk and bicycle more.

In reality, until you get to extraordinarily high densities–think Manhattan or Hong Kong–density has little effect on driving. Many planners are surprised to learn that the densest urban area in the United States is Los Angeles, which isn’t exactly known for its high rates of transit ridership or pedestrianism.

Another major supporter of the anti-auto agenda is the rail transit industry, which includes contractors and railcar manufacturers. Siemens Transportation is a German company that generously contributes to political campaigns for rail transit as well as to politicians who support rail transit. Siemens has also been a major force behind the high-speed rail movement.

The four-year deal will raise costs by $280 million this year and around $80 million per year after that, but the increases will be offset by higher factory efficiency, other wage and benefit changes, and by hiring more workers at lower wages, the executives told reporters and industry analysts.

Ford’s 41,000 union workers approved the contract Wednesday. They won’t get annual pay raises, but this year they will get $6,000 signing bonuses, about $3,750 in profit sharing, and another $1,500 for inflation protection.

The deal also sets Ford up for a credit rating increase to investment grade status, and it opens the door to a possible dividend on the company’s common shares, although Ford isn’t ready to announce anything, Chief Financial Officer Lewis Booth said. Investment grade status would cut the company’s borrowing costs with lower interest rates.

Ford lost its investment-grade rating in 2005, when it was deeply in debt. It borrowed $23 billion in 2006 to get through the recession and fund a huge restructuring plan. The company had $14 billion in debt as of June 30.

Also under the UAW agreement, Ford also expects to add 5,750 jobs, mainly with more shifts at factories that make cars and trucks that are selling well. New hires will get pay raises to $19.28 per hour, but they’ll still make far less than longtime UAW workers.

At present, the company has few workers at the lower wage rate. It expects that to rise to at least 8 percent of the factory work force by 2015. Under the contract, Ford can pay up to 27 percent of its factory workers at the lower rate, but reaching that level depends on how many new jobs are added and how many workers take early retirement offers. Ford hopes to replace retirees with lower-cost new hires. About 23 percent of Ford’s factory workers, or around 9,400 employees, are eligible to retire, but Ford doesn’t expect that many will leave.

Ford said its labor costs will rise this year because it must pay the signing bonuses and profit-sharing based on the company’s first-half performance, but the increase will be smaller in the final three years of the contract. The company would not disclose its total labor costs.

Currently, most Ford workers are on eight-hour shifts. If a plant runs around the clock on three shifts, there’s little time for maintenance, and the company has to pay overtime for weekend work to make more cars if sales are strong. Under the new contract, all factories can go to 10-hour shifts four days per week, so plants run 20 hours per day, seven days per week with three shifts, Fleming said. That means factories are at work more hours, yet there’s time for maintenance, and overtime costs are avoided, he said.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you know you’re going in for surgery in a few months to have your hip replaced. The surgeon says you may lose blood during the surgery, and recommends that you donate a pint of your own blood in advance in case you need it during the operation. The advantage of donating your own blood is that there’s no chance your immune system will reject that blood if it’s put back into you.

Cloning, or somatic cell nuclear transfer, as scientists prefer to call it, is a technique that allows you to make what is essentially a genetic copy of a living organism. Stem cells derived from a cloned embryo are made with one of your stem cells but will be genetic twins to all the cells in your body, so receiving a stem-cell transplant would essentially mean getting your own cells back.

Dieter Egli and his colleagues at the New York Stem Cell Foundation have taken an important step toward that goal. First they took an egg, removed its genetic material, replaced it with the genetic material from an adult skin cell, and coaxed the resulting embryo to grow. This is basically the same technique Scottish scientists used to create the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep.

But Egli says that just because something works in some mammals doesn’t mean it necessarily has to translate to human cells. And as others have found in the past, embryos made this way wouldn’t grow. Then Egli modified the Dolly technique. He left in the egg’s genetic material instead of removing it, and then added the genetic material from the adult cell. That did the trick. The embryo started growing.

But there was a problem. Leaving in the egg’s DNA meant each cell in the embryo now had three sets of chromosomes, instead of the two that are normally there. Transplanting stem cells derived from these embryos as a medical therapy wouldn’t work. Our bodies just wouldn’t know what to do with three sets of chromosomes.

But at least Egli has answered the question of whether it’s possible to make a cloned human embryo. “The clear answer of our paper to this is yes, and this is really the major finding of the paper,” he says. Egli says this result gives him the confidence to keep working with their approach, to see if they can make it work with just the two chromosomes that are supposed to be there.

But even if Egli perfects his cloning techniques, there are still many people morally opposed to this kind of research. Daley says a new kind of cell, called an iPS cell, may prove to be just as good as an embryonic stem cell, and iPS cells can be made without eggs or embryos.

“The jury is still out as to whether the iPS cells are going to be the gold standard in the long run. In the near term, it’s still the embryo-derived stem cells,” says Daley. So for now, he thinks work with cloned human embryos should continue.

Save on Airfare
Whatever the vacation spot, travelers are certain to notice increased air travel costs this year. Increasing oil prices and less capacity have compelled airlines to raise the price of tickets.

“Often airfare is the biggest component of traveling,” says Andrew Young, U.S.  Web site editor at Travelzoo. “How much you pay to fly can really vary.”

Travelers can cut as much as fifty percent off airfare by flying on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday because they are considered off-peak days. When you buy the tickets also matters. “A lot of airfare sales are lunched on Tuesday and many end on Thursday,” according to Young.

Another way to save on airfare: book early. According to Erik Halvorson, air inventory manager for Expedia.com, vacationers can get the best price on airfare by booking 60 days or more in advance.

Off-Peak Traveling
Lying on the beach during Christmas break and escaping Old Man Winter is as good as it gets, but it doesn’t come cheap By visiting destinations during the off-peak or shoulder season, travelers will often find cheap hotel deals and good airfare prices, not to mention fewer crowds, says Expedia’s Halvorson.

Even during off-peak season, attractions are often up and running, although maybe on a limited schedule, he noted.

So where are some ideal off-peak locations? According to Halvorson, check out Hawaii in mid-April through May and Barcelona in September.

Families looking to visit Disney World on the cheap should go during the summer months.Sure you’ll sweat more, but you’ll also save a lot of money on the trip.

Cut the Cost of Lodging  
The days of cheap hotel rates are quickly coming to an end. According to Bryan Hoyt, a spokesman for  Orbitz.com, the average daily rates at hotels “are up significantly” from last year.

To get around paying top dollar for hotel rooms, Hoyt suggests vacationers visit business travel cities like Chicago, New York and Boston. According to Hoyt, hotel rates in Boston only saw a 1% increase year over year, while cities including New York and Chicago saw a drop in rates.

“Blind booking” can also cut the cost of hotel stays dramatically. Through its Unpublished Rate Program, Expedia allows consumers to book hotels at a 50% discount, here’s the catch: You don’t find out the name of the hotel until after it’s booked.

Guided Tours
An escorted or guided tour vacation can offer a stress-free vacation while saving money.

According to Marc Kazlauskas, president of Insight Vacations, going with a tour operator can save vacationers 30% to 40% off the cost if they were to book a sightseeing vacation on their own.

Tour operators buy the hotel rooms, meals, attractions and even airfare in bulk and pass along the savings to the individual travelers. What’s more, going with a tour operator means participants won’t have to worry about blackout periods at hotels or higher rates because of an event going on in the particular city you’re visiting.  Plus, the guides do all the sight-seeing planning, relieving participants of the long hours of logistical planning.