It is widely believed that the solution to many of the world's ills goes through the empowerment of women and especially female children. By allowing girls the resources and freedom to grow up healthy and educated we can reduce the world population, increase entrepreneurialism and...
I Don't Know How She Does It All. GPS- supported access to caffeine-related refueling stations. That's how she does it! It turns out parents of the Homeland generation, i.e. the parent demographic who themselves tend to belong to younger Generation X parents and older Millennials,...
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When I asked my 8-year old daughter the other day what she wants to be when she grows up she gave me a metacognitive answer I did not expect from somebody her age. "Mom, you know how children my age often dream of becoming popstars, but they know that it's probably never going to happen? Well, I'm one of those children who have those dreams. So in my dream I will become a popstar, but in the "real world" I'm going to be an engineer and find ways to get more clean fresh water for the world. Maybe by taking the salt out of the seawater".
Of course at age 8 few people really know what they want to do with their lives. I probably changed my mind at least thirty times growing up, and so do children today. Yet I feel that the signals they pick up from their environment today will have an impact on their future choosing. My own children and many of their friends have been learning about water conservation and the perils facing the global climate pretty much from they learned how to talk. Today teaching children about environmental protection in preschool and elementary school seems as important as teaching them basic manners and academic pre-skills. And that is not even mentioning the lessons you learn from the increasingly severe summer droughts in central Texas!
Yet if current trends continue by the time this generation reach college, the best and brightest minds might very well be sucked up by Wall Street firms and big
Do you have a tween at home? A kid grown tired with your pre-packaged, PG rated stuff, yet who’s still too young to be allowed to choose products and entertainment for themselves? Well, guess what – they’re making their own choices and you’re not the only...
Compared to the countries we increasingly compete with in this globalized world, American educational test scores stink. Everybody knows it and everybody is getting busy looking for culprits and solutions. Which can only result in one thing: nobody can agree to what the cause is. We don’t challenge our kids enough! We challenge them too much! Teachers aren't held accountable enough! Teachers spend too much time with accountability standards, so student time suffers. We get frightfully wooed by ruthless Asian tiger mothers and we begrudgingly confess our kids are turning into lazy slobs because we don’t drill enough violin practice at an early age. And then we let out sighs of relief as soon as Finland becomes the country in vogue. Laid-back Finland, with their school kids loafing around their classrooms in slippers after entering school at the advance age of 7, all while making top PISA scores. And without even undergoing the rigor of standardized testings!
http://youtu.be/9c6W4CCU9M4 Although full Singularity may still be a while away, at least we have reasons to believe that augmented reality is finally getting nearer. The biggest optimists believe Project Glass will have Google Glasses available for use by the end of this year, while others display a...
When the New Silents look back on the month of January 2012, they might recall a few contradictory events that had bearings on how they handle digital information. On January the 5th Sweden officially recognized Det Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet (the Missionary "Copy-me" society) by granting it religious status, which in essence sanctifies the act of file sharing. This
political gift to file sharers can only be seen as endowing moral righteousness to an activity that usually is viewed as immoral and illegal. Contrarily, on January 18th websites like Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Mozilla and others blacked out their websites in protests of the anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA that were up for voting in the U.S.
Congress. Anti anti-piracy advocates argued the bills if enacted were flawed and would go far beyond preventing illegal file sharing, but in reality open the floodgates for internet censorship. After 4 million petition signatures and 250,000 messages to Congress, several legislators changed their minds and killed the bills. For now anyway. Yet the very next day FBI
"Kids nowadays! Hmpf!" Whether you're 5 or 85, at some point you might unwittingly have been dragged into a generational comparison in which your age cohort is made out to look ruder, lazier or more spoiled than the bygone youth of the spokesperson. The statement is often followed up with a sentence that starts with "In my days.." Usually we attribute this type of sentiment to the occasional hissy fits endured by otherwise beloved older relatives whenever the need to blow off some steam escalates to intolerable proportions. And often it is better respond with an approving nod than to go into a drawn-out and probably futile explanation about "how things have changed" and how the old ways of doing things simply won't work anymore. Or we reason that the curmudgeon is probably right anyway, that we're all degenerating under moral standards in free fall.
In Growing up with Princess Inc earlier this year I wrote about growing gender polarization. In the post I discussed the idea that shifts between androgynous and more overtly gendered fashion trends and body ideals are linked to social and economic fluctuations. Generational experts Strauss and Howe explained in The Fourth Turning that in eras when society struggles to recover from crisis, order, stability and traditional values gain momentum. From social science research we know socioeconomic lower classes tend to embrace traditional gender ideals to a greater degree than does the middle class. The middle class on the other hand, possesses economic and educational resources that allow them to push social boundaries without serious negative
Inspired by a string of generational reports from the PEW research center, NPR has recently focused on generational differences in politics and economics. All the stories in their “Generational Politics” segment follow the four generations that currently constitute the voting population. The series looks at typical economic situations given the economic downturn, political leanings, value systems and their projected political sympathies in the 2012 election.
The relationship between age and voter turnout has intrigued political scientists at least since 1960. Two rivaling theories are set out to answer the question of age and political alignment. The answer is likely to be a little bit of both.
