It’s a week since Norway endured its bloodiest event(s) in modern times and the most serious national security violation since the Nazi occupation in 1940. Rightwing extremist Anders Breivik carried out the worst, and as far as I know, only terrorist attack ever on Norwegian soil. Following a bomb at the government building, which drew…
A former co-worker sent me this link a few days ago. A few years back when we did futures research and trend watching for a nutritional company, breast vs. bottle was a big issue. The trend is certainly a return to more natural forms of child rearing where breast-feeding (or providing breast milk in BPA…
In the future will we go to the doctor as much as we do now? Will pregnant women of the New Silents still have to schedule visits with ultrasound technicians to see their growing fetus? Maybe not. The latest fad in smart phone apps seems to be within medical information sharing and monitoring, enabling people to take…
Social change is often extremely slow, especially when deep seated norms are involved. Gender roles have demonstrated their staying power even in sociospheres where gender equality has long been the official mantra. Haven’t we all met the guy who speaks passionately about women’s rights all while parking the kids in front of the TV and leaving…
After numerous studies and reports mapping the Millennial generation and especially their attributes in the workforce, predictions about the post-Millennials are finally starting to pop up in news sources and in market research reports (here, here and here). At After the Millennials, we try not to let this type of fodder escape our radar!
Embedded video from CNN Video A blog post at Gen X Files ponders if parents today are ditching their tendency to over-parent. A short CNN clip and a sudden tide of blogs and books of the “bad-mom-confession” type suggest that the helicopter parents are beginning to slow down their propellers a bit. A Times article from 2009 strongly suggests…
Eight years to the day after George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished”, President Obama tells us tonight that one huge mission is indeed accomplished. And this time with more hard evidence than last time – and no embarrassing looking bomber jacket. A small U.S. team attacked and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and confirmed…
Remember Aldus Huxley’s ‘decanting bottles’? Or Gattaca? Well, that future is already here – kind of. Two methods of splicing human eggs during in vitro fertilization can rule out diseases linked to mutations in the Mitochondria, or the cellular structures that produce energy for the cell. Mitochondria mutations cause diseases like diabetes, deafness, blindness, and neurological problems. When chromosomes are…
Generational experts Strauss and Howe argue that the kids from the Silent generation (born 1924 -1942) were the most gender-polarized in the 20th century until they became radicalized in the early 1960s. From Shirley Temple’s sausage curls to eerie robotic wives in their squeaky clean Stepford homes, girls and women fit neatly into the gender stereotypes until they…
The file sharing police is doomed to lose against a generation of smug pirates. This is what Swedish research group Cybernorms concludes with after measuring social norms in the file sharing community. The researchers found that 75 percent of 15 – 25 year olds feel no remorse for downloading pirate material from sites like the…
