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As we address increasingly complex social problems like healthcare, we need to be more creative about solutions that will maximize the addressable market. Obesity alone costs the United States more than $150 billion in lost productivity a year. That's a huge market, and it skews heavily to lower income populations. We need a tool to change behavior across all demographics, and self-tracking products currently aren't doing it. Moreover, the demographics in the United States are rapidly changing: Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare and Silicon Valley diversity advocate, recently pointed out to me that, "By the year 2040, racial minorities will account for the majority of the United States population." The quantified self and accompanying mobile health revolution needs to puncture markets which are usually invited last to the party. If entrepreneurs in this space are serious about making a difference, and about staying relevant to an evolving population, they need to invite these demographics first. To wit, we need to innovate on our innovation.
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Why this might be the case and the implications for civic culture are the subject of debate among scholars. Briefly, in my view, there are a number of likely factors contributing to the decline in interest and participation in civic affairs generally and the environment specifically. These include:
1. Time Displacement
Young people are spending more time with social media and online entertainment content which displaces time spent doing other more civically oriented activities including news reading, time spent outdoors, and time spent interacting across community settings.
2. The Gossip Girl Factor
Youth oriented media inundates young people with narratives and messages that reinforce materialistic, consumerist, and narcissistic values. Past research has also shown that entertainment portrayals tend to reduce social trust and promote distrust of government. This last finding also likely applies to news programming such as The Daily Show and Colbert Report.
3. Political Polarization
Today's world of polarized politics and opinionated media likely reinforces disengagement among young people and moderates more generally. In a forthcoming paper reviewing a large body of studies on forms of media use, selectivity, and their effects in the context of politics, Wolfgang Donsbach and Cornelia Mothes suggest that media enable a spiral of political polarization and mobilization among the most politically engaged.
"This is the Gompertz law, in cartoon form: your body is deteriorating over time at a particular rate. When its “internal policemen” are good enough to patrol every spot that might contain a criminal 14 times a day, then you have the body of a 25-year-old and a 0.03% chance of dying this year. But by the time your police force can only patrol every spot 7 times per day, you have the body of a 95-year-old with only a 2-in-3 chance of making it through the year."
"This paper addresses the economic returns on tertiary degrees obtained in ages above 30 for individuals with upper-secondary schooling in light of current ideas on lifelong learning. Sweden is a case in point: Swedish tertiary education is open to older students, and labor market legislation supports employees who take a leave to study. The longitudinal data used for this analysis is based on annual population level registers from 1981 to 2007. Matching techniques are combined with fixed effect estimation to account for non-random selection. Late degrees were found to increase the employment rate by 18 percentage points and earnings while employed by 12 percent, which indicates strong employment effects and small effects on earnings while employed. The effects were absent in the higher parts of the earnings distribution, and females gained more than men. The estimated effects are largely stable across periods within a birth cohort."
"She was on top, straddling his hips, and she was not sitting still. He held her gently, his hands just above her waist. They were like the other couple lean and fit and deeply tanned and beautiful in outline, but they were also beautiful close up too. Not movie star beautiful or model beautiful or even professional athlete beautiful. Beautiful the way averagely good looking people will be for a relatively short period in their youth when a combination of good health, good spirits, genetic luck, and a suffusion of hormones cause them to blossom like gorgeous wildflowers. This happens to different people at different times. For some it occurs in their late teens or early twenties, for others it holds off until they are in their late twenties or even early thirties. These two, who I judged were twenty-one or twenty-two, were blossoming together.
I’ve always believed that couples who engage in prolonged public displays of affection have no other way of engaging with each other. They don’t talk because they have nothing to say. "
"As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally."
"Hypotheses about mean-level age differences in the Big Five personality domains, as well as 10 more specific facet traits within those domains, were tested in a very large cross-sectional sample (N = 1,267,218) of children, adolescents, and adults (ages 10–65) assessed over the World Wide Web. The results supported several conclusions. First, late childhood and adolescence were key periods. Across these years, age trends for some traits (a) were especially pronounced, (b) were in a direction different from the corresponding adult trends, or (c) first indicated the presence of gender differences. Second, there were some negative trends in psychosocial maturity from late childhood into adolescence, whereas adult trends were overwhelmingly in the direction of greater maturity and adjustment. Third, the related but distinguishable facet traits within each broad Big Five domain often showed distinct age trends, highlighting the importance of facet-level research for understanding life span age differences in personality."
"Dig it, find me the extropian who understands how we stand on the shoulders of every generation of parents who tried to raise better kids than themselves, or who ever speaks about the beauty of that chain of pay-forward generosity, the most tragic-poetic tale ever told. Or the noble honor we'll all have, even if we die, if we can only be one of the most important of the pay-forward generations. ALL I hear is paeans to how grand it will be to receive the end result. Never anything about the OBLIGATION that falls upon us, from that great chain.
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Part of an ongoing series of letters about staying and leaving, abiding and going.
This letter from a reader is in response to Joe's short essay "On Native Ground".
he SHiFT network supports people in mid-life who seek greater meaning in life and work.
in list: Twin Cities Stuff
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The answer was a pretty resounding no. Study after study after study found that the most productive scientists were those in middle age, not youth. Productivity is better predicted by career age than chronological age. One study suggested that middle-aged scientists aren't more productive as such, but have access to better resources, and that the age-productivity connection disappears once supervisory position is controlled for. Another argued that it was the need for social networking that led the middle-aged to be the most productive. So age, by itself, doesn't seem to affect scientific productivity much, right?
Well, there is one exception. Dietrich and Srinivasan found that paradigm-busting discoveries come primarily from relatively young scientists. They looked at different Nobel Prize winners and finding out the age when the winners had first had the idea that led them to the discovery. In total, 60% of the discoveries were made by people aged below 35 and around 30% were made by people aged between 35 and 45. The data is strongest for theoretical physics, which shows that 90% of all theoretical contributions occurred before the age of 40 and that no theoretician over the age of 50 had ever had an idea that was deemed worthy of the Nobel prize. Old scientists are certainly capable of expanding and building on an existing paradigm, but they are very unlikely to revolutionize the whole paradigm. Why is this so?
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