March 2011, Vol. 12, No. 3

In this issue:

• Harvard Recommends Deemphasizing College Education
• Internet Nears 2 Billion Users, Worldwide
• Carbon Dioxide’s Impacts on Plant Evolution
• Cities Play Role in Wage Inequality
• What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Members Only)
• Understanding Technological Evolution and Diversity
• Health Care Special Feature
• Demographic Impacts on Climate Change
• What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Public)
• The Futurist Interviews Space Expert Edgar Choueri
• Future Active: News from the Futurist Community
• What Hath Hawking Wrought?

Harvard Report Calls For Less Emphasis on College Education

“College for all” has been the mantra of education reform for decades. A new report from Harvard Graduate School of Education argues that greater emphasis on vocational training, apprenticeships, and technical job training outside of a formal college setting would better serve America’s young people.

“Behaving as though four-year college is the only acceptable route to success clearly still works well for many young adults, especially students fortunate enough to attend highly selective colleges and universities. It also works well for affluent students, who can often draw on family and social connections to find their way in the adult world. But it clearly does not work well for many, especially young men,” say the researchers in their report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century.

They point to the fact that men make up only 43% of enrolled students on American college campuses, that 30% of African Americans and fewer than 20% of Latinos in their mid-20s have an associate’s degree. The United States now has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.

Most other advanced nations, notably Germany, place more emphasis on vocational training in high school. Structured programs that combine work and learning better enable adolescents to grasp how they’ll market and use their skills in the real world. “Consequently, these [vocational training] programs are not designed to serve those with a history of school failure.”

Read the full report here: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news_events/features/2011/Pathways_to_Prosperity_Feb2011.pdf

Internet Nears 2 Billion Users Worldwide

The Internet reached 1.97 billion users worldwide in 2010, according to market research by Internet World Stats. Among the chief areas of growth were Twitter and Facebook, which saw 100 million and 250 million new users, respectively.

According to Twitter’s internal data, 25 billion “tweets” were sent in 2010. Asia led the world in Internet users, with some 825 million people online compared with 266 million in North America. However, North America led in percentage of population online, with 77% of Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans having access to the Internet, versus 21% of Asians.

Almost 30% of the global population now uses the Internet, which grew 14% in 2010, putting it on track to exceed 2 billion users by the end of this year.

Sources:
Internet World Stats: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Twitter Blog: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/12/stocking-stuffer.html
Business Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-million-users-goldman-tells-clients-2011-1
RoyalPingdom: http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

Rising Carbon-Dioxide Levels Could Change Plant Evolution

Increased carbon-dioxide levels could alter what sorts of plants thrive, which plants die off, and how plants interact with insects in the future, according to scientists at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

The researchers studied how different species of milkweed responded to increased levels of CO₂. They found that the exposed plants tended to grow larger, but different species responded to elevated CO₂ levels in strikingly different ways.

For instance, most of the plants responded to the extra carbon dioxide by decreasing their levels of cardenolide, a toxin that works to fend off insects, but some milkweed strains increased their production of the poison. Many caterpillars that feed off of milkweed are very picky about the plants they eat and are likely to be more attracted to those with less poison, giving the more toxic milkweed strains a competitive advantage that could spread throughout the population, or cause other unforeseen effects.

Source: University of Michigan http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8268

Cities Play Role in Wage Inequality

The United States has a higher degree of wage inequality than almost any other Western industrialized country. The average American CEO brings in more than 10 times what he or she would have earned in the 1970s and 300 times more than the average worker. A new study from researchers at the University of Rochester and Brown provides a surprising explanation: City size is one the main drivers of wage inequality.

“Demographic groups and industries disproportionately located in larger cities experienced larger increases in their wage dispersion in larger cities than in smaller cities,” authors Ronni Pavan and Nathaniel Baum-Snow write in their study.

In cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, capital and technology are more readily available; the labor pool is larger; and markets are more accessible. In other words, it’s much easier to get incredibly rich in a big city than it is in the rural countryside. It’s also easier to command higher pay for higher skills, but harder to command average pay for mediocre skills.

“The skill premium has grown more in larger cities than in smaller cities and rural areas,” they write.

Source: University of Rochester http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3762

Read the paper: Inequality and City Size by Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Ronni Pavan, University of Rochester http://tinyurl.com/4rubmw6

What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.

Understanding Technological Evolution and Diversity

By Kevin Kelly

THE FUTURIST — March-April 2011

From the depths of the Amazon basin to the streets of Tokyo, technology is always evolving. Here, a Wired founding editor describes what technology wants — and what we can learn from observing the “technium,” the technological ecosystem. Read more.

Health Care Special Feature

THE FUTURIST — March-April 2011

From Hospital to Healthspital: A Better Paradigm for Health Care by Frank W. Maletz; Health Insurance in America After the Reform by Jay Herson and David Pearce Snyder; Could Medical Tourism Aid Health-Care Delivery? by Prema Nakra; Bike to the Future By Kenneth W. Harris

Demographic Impacts on Climate Change

By Aaron M. Cohen

THE FUTURIST — March-April 2011

Scenarios examine effects of population size, age, and migration on carbon emissions. Read more

What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Public)

The Futurist Interviews Space Expert Edgar Choueri

By Rick Docksai

Future Active: News from the Futurist Community

By Aaron M. Cohen

THE FUTURIST — March-April 2011

What Hath Hawking Wrought?

By Edward Cornish

THE FUTURIST — March-April 2011