Immigrants take the Canadian oath of citizenship during a ceremony in Toronto.
Publics divided on immigrants’ willingness to adopt host country’s customs.
Continue reading… “Around the world, more say immigrants are a strength than a burden”
The 15 American jobs where salaries are rising the fastest
For many Americans, wages have remained relatively stagnant in recent years, rising only between 2 and 3 percent per year since 2013, Pew Research Center reported in August. After accounting for inflation, today’s wages have around the same purchasing power they did 40 years ago.
But in certain professions, salaries have recently grown much faster. GOBankingRates analyzed data from Glassdoor, Salary.com and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 45 occupations across the U.S. to determine where wages rose the most between 2014 and 2018.
Here are the top 15 U.S. jobs where salaries are growing the fastest.
Continue reading… “The 15 American jobs where salaries are rising the fastest”
Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins
Michael Dimock, president of Pew Research Center
For decades, Pew Research Center has been committed to measuring public attitudes on key issues and documenting differences in those attitudes across demographic groups. One lens often employed by researchers at the Center to understand these differences is that of generation.
Generations provide the opportunity to look at Americans both by their place in the life cycle – whether a young adult, a middle-aged parent or a retiree – and by their membership in a cohort of individuals who were born at a similar time.
As we’ve examined in past work, generational cohorts give researchers a tool to analyze changes in views over time. They can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic and social shifts) interact with the life-cycle and aging process to shape people’s views of the world. While younger and older adults may differ in their views at a given moment, generational cohorts allow researchers to examine how today’s older adults felt about a given issue when they themselves were young, as well as to describe how the trajectory of views might differ across generations.
Continue reading… “Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins”
Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations
Over the past 50 years – from the Silent Generation’s young adulthood to that of Millennials today – the United States has undergone large cultural and societal shifts. Now that the youngest Millennials are adults, how do they compare with those who were their age in the generations that came before them?
Continue reading… “Millennial life: How young adulthood today compares with prior generations”
Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050
Tomorrow’s cities are reshaping almost every industry imaginable, and birthing those we’ve never heard of.
Riding an explosion of sensors, megacity AI ‘brains’, high-speed networks, new materials and breakthrough green solutions, cities are quickly becoming versatile organisms, sustaining and responding to the livelihood patterns of millions.
Over the next decade, cities will revolutionize everything about the way we live, travel, eat, work, learn, stay healthy, and even hydrate.
And countless urban centers, companies, and visionaries are already building out decades-long visions of the future.
Continue reading… “Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050”
Study of 657,461 children finds no link between vaccines and autism
Danish researchers followed children born over a 10-year period and found no connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
It only hurts for a second.
The vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella doesn’t cause autism, according to a massive, new study.
It’s yet another study that unravels any tie between vaccines and the developmental disability. A link between autism and the MMR vaccine has long been erroneously suggested, due to a controversial paper published in prestigious journal The Lancet over 20 years ago.
Continue reading… “Study of 657,461 children finds no link between vaccines and autism”
Why Futurism has a cultural blind spot
We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace
In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building permit. The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”
Such disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic, suggests William E. Jarvis in his book Time Capsules: A Cultural History. A headline from The Onion, he notes, sums it up: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.” Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.
In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.
Continue reading… “Why Futurism has a cultural blind spot”
The perfect pair of pants is just a 3D body scan away
LIKE SO MANY women, Meghan Litchfield dreaded shopping for jeans. There were the garden-variety complaints: inconsistent sizing between brands, the way back pockets stretched or sagged, the humiliation of walking into a dressing room with half a dozen options only to walk out empty-handed. Even the best candidates were ill-fitting. Most of the time, she’d buy jeans one size up to fit her hips, then ask a tailor take them in at the waist.
Litchfield, formerly a vice president at GoPro, figured there must be a way to shop that wasn’t so demoralizing. Instead of taking off-the-rack clothes to the tailor, what if she could buy her clothes tailor-made? And what if she could make that happen for other women, too?
A solution arrived late last year with Redthread, the startup Litchfield created to make bespoke clothing for anyone with a smartphone. Customers choose an item from Redthread’s website, fill out a “fit quiz,” and capture a series of full-body photos with their phone. Redthread pulls 3D measurement data from those photos and, combined with a customer’s fit preferences, creates a made-to-order item.
Continue reading… “The perfect pair of pants is just a 3D body scan away”
No, Data is not the new oil
“Data is the new oil” is one of those deceptively simple mantras for the modern world. Whether in The New York Times, The Economist, or WIRED, the wildcatting nature of oil exploration, plus the extractive exploitation of a trapped asset, seems like an apt metaphor for the boom in monetized data.
Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.
The metaphor has even assumed political implications. Newly installed California governor Gavin Newsom recently proposed an ambitious “data dividend” plan, whereby companies like Facebook or Google would pay their users a fraction of the revenue derived from the users’ data. Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes laid out a similar idea in a Guardian op-ed, and compared it to the Alaskan Permanent Fund, which doles out annual payments to Alaskans based on the state’s petroleum revenue. As in Alaska, the average Google or Facebook user is conceived as standing on a vast substratum of personal data whose extraction they’re entitled to profit from.
Continue reading… “No, Data is not the new oil”
Study finds listening to music has negative impact on creativity
A new study has found that listening to music may have a negative impact on creativity. This is contrary to the popular idea that music and creativity often go hand in hand. According to the researchers, the negative impact was found even in cases where the music had a positive impact on mood and was liked by the person listening to it. However, background noise didn’t have the same effect.
Music is often used for background noise while studying and as a way to help increase someone’s creativity while working on a project. The psychologists behind a new study have found this routine may have the opposite effect, actively impairing — rather than boosting — the individual’s creativity. The findings were based on three experiments.
Continue reading… “Study finds listening to music has negative impact on creativity”
Study suggests a key assumption of economic theory may be wrong.
The concept of equilibrium, one of the most central ideas in economics and one of the core assumptions in the vast majority of economic models, may have serious problems, concludes a study from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.
Continue reading… “Study suggests a key assumption of economic theory may be wrong.”
