‘The Girl Effect’ is the term coined to describe the positive chain reaction that results from the way women invest their money. In the developing world, girls and women who earn an income reinvest 90% of it into their families (as compared to only 30-40% for a man). This leads to positive ripple effects, such as healthier babies and better quality of life for all. The Nike Foundation created The Girl Effect campaign in order to support adolescent girls who are proven to be the most likely agents of change, despite the fact they’re often invisible to their societies and mainstream media. Females were centre stage at this year’s Davos in a plenary session that included Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, managing director of the World Bank; Ann Veneman, executive director of Unicef; Melinda Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And at the U.N. in March, around International Women’s Day, the interagency task force on adolescent girls promised to increase efforts to include girls in development programs. Girls and young women are starrting to be seen as the centerpiece of sustainable economic recovery.


Thanks to Jon Miller for this story.


References:
Business Week

It’s a universal truth that gloomy novels don’t sell. There’s one exception, however. Take a wintery landscape, a dead body, add a depressed main character, and set it in a Nordic nation, and you have the recipe for an international bestseller. Stieg Larsson’s hugely popular Millennium Trilogy has become a visible example of the global mania for what’s being referred to as ‘Nordic Noir’. Running a close second, is Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, nine novels that combined, have sold more than 25m copies worldwide and spawned a British telly series plus several Swedish films. Now, publishers in the US and UK have jumped on the trend commissioning translations of Scandinavia’s most acclaimed mystery authors. The Bergmanesque Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, is another Nordic success that hints at people’s inner glumness being reflected in their cultural consumption. The abiding mystery of the Scandinavian crime-fiction boom is why it should have emerged from a place where real violent crime is so rare.


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References:
The Economist
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal

Have women decided they can’t have it all? According to new research, today’s generation of young women are turning their backs on high-powered careers and returning to the traditional values of family and home, the Daily Mail reports (along with other less biased reports like Grazia!). Leading sociologist Geoff Dench’s analysis of the British Social Attitudes Survey reveals a striking change in women’s values over the last decade. Back in 2002, the number of women who agreed that most women want a home and children fell to 15%. In 2006, this rocketed to 32%. By far the biggest leap came when women were asked whether they agreed that men and women should have different roles within the family. In 2002, the number who agreed was 2%, in 2006, that had shot up to 17%. Dench has said, “Women with young children are going back to the very traditional division of labour in which they want the husband as the breadwinner.” Obviously, opinions differ. The Equality and Human Rights Commission and equal pay pressure groups are convinced that women are often anxious to go back to work but are pressured into a caring role due to lack of flex working hours, a shortage of affordable daycare options and a reluctance of men to take over a share of the childcare.


Thanks to Paula Bjork for this story.


Image Credit:
Flickr

We’ve seen ‘intelligent’, grown-up women’s magazines come and go before (RIP Observer Woman), but what really excites us about the new biannual magazine The Gentlewoman is that as its title suggests, this is about the new concept of a distinguished woman, of womanhood today, something which seems to be capturing the cultural and fashion zeitgeist. The Gentlewoman is tellingly, created by the team behind Fantastic Man. Editor Penny Martin told The Scotsman, “A lot of people, when they first heard our title, thought of it as two separate words. It’s very easy to think of the values of a gentleman, yet people are kind of anxious about thinking about taste and style and wit and humour when it comes to women. So I guess what we’re trying to do is define a modern woman of the future as opposed to the past.” The first issue (it’s available online as well as in print) has just gone on sale featuring Phoebe Philo on its cover (the gentlewoman of the moment). The women profiled inside include an artist, an architect, a downhill mountain biker, a model, a winemaker and an ocean swimmer. Martin’s editor’s letter reads, “elegantly side-stepping the passive and cynical cool of recent decades, The Gentlewoman champions the optimism, sincerity and ingenuity that actually gets things done. These are the upbeat and pragmatic qualities defining gentlewomen of today.”


Thanks to Gentlewoman Amy Elderton for this story.


References:
The Scotsman


Image Credit:
www.ssense.com

Last week, a rogue piano player took our new favourite social networking site Chatroulette by storm, performing an impromptu concert to his chat partners. A user named Merton played his piano and improvised lyrics based on what each chat partner was doing, filming it all and posting them as 3 music videos on YouTube. Amazingly, his concerts have garnered over 4m views. Merton wears a green hoodie and a pair of glasses to disguise his appearance, which is fuelling speculation about his true identity. Fans have suggested Merton is Ben Folds in disguise. To add to the mystery, Ben Folds has just made a “Ode to Merton” video where he performs in front of 2000 fans live on Chatroulette wearing Merton patented green hoodie. Maybe Chatroulette could become a new way for musicians to communicate with fans, one Chatroulette after the other?


Thanks to Paddy Fraser for this story.

Many people have predicted the death of the printing press and to an extent this may be true, but put the printing press in the hands of the consumer and things can change. It’s this idea that drives the Newspaper Club, a London-based start-up run by our friend Russell Davies and designer Ben Terrett and their software coding friends. After deciding to print a newspaper of their friends’ best blog posts and photos, they decided why not turn this into a public on-demand newspaper service. The Newspaper Club allows members to print small runs of their own newspapers at a low cost, be it a newspaper to mark your wedding or a printed version of your morning’s Netvibes feeds. Brands who have used the service include the BBC, Wired UK and Last.fm. Penguin also used it to debut a preview of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Other companies, such as UK-based The Printed Blog, also allow people to create printed versions of their personal weblogs. Wired UK’s Ben Hammersley calls it stupidly exciting. “Newspapers are the last bastion of old media, they are almost the last thing standing. This creates a new industry, almost from the ashes of the old one.” The Newspaper Club hope to spread homemade newspapers across the world.


Thanks to Neil for coming to the rescue.


References
BBC
Russell Davies
Editors Weblog

A university education bubble has evolved, a result of distorted economics, bad government policy and social pressure. Government subsidised loans have made university attainable for many, but have created a debt for life culture in their wake. Obtaining a degree used to mean better wage and career prospects, but the reality is that most of us now have or could have degrees, rendering them a hygiene factor, rather than economic mileage. The market will eventually figure out that a degree doesn’t mean what it used to, leaving graduates with a depleting asset whilst their debt racks up interest. The US high-school drop-out rate is now 3 in 10, and less than a third of young people finished college, but what if these millions of so-called dropouts are onto something? As high schools and unis prepare the next generation for jobs that won’t exist, a dropout revolution could well be underway, sparking a new experiment in ways of learning and living.


Such new ways can be seen in the rise of ‘freeganism’ and in the small but growing ‘cage-free families’ who’ve abandoned their suburban lives for the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors taking gap years. We live in an age where there is a dearth of craftsmen— and as society evolves in the direction of renewable energy and rail transport, there will be plenty of jobs building windmills, installing solar panels, laying high speed rail. The world needs more skilled carpenters, painters, electricians, plumbers, glaziers, masons and auto-mechanics. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced to China or India and could become occupational choices for a huge number of our citizens. Master craftsmen can earn six figures. Even journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution.

The technological revolution has made degrees look increasingly irrelevant for many. Bill Gates didn’t graduate; neither did Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs for that matter. Such figures show that diverting from the standard school path doesn’t always lead to a dead end. If it leads you toward a trade where you can earn a living and be proud of your achievements surely it’s for the best. So as the higher-education industry continues to agitate for university for all employers are demanding actual evidence you are good at something. More and more, people are being judged by skills rather than a piece of paper. What this highlights more than anything is a failure on the part of universities that have become institutions churning out degrees and diploma’s with no real meaning, driven to perpetuate themselves and extend their budgets.


Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.


References
Business Insider
Time

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Science is at a cultural tipping point and we predict, will be for the 2010s what the dotcom era was for the 1990s. The revival of BBC1’s Doctor Who is a perfect example of science’s newly hip status, along with the rise of science mags, such as Eureka. “There are more scientists alive today than at any point in our history,” says Juan Enriquez, founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project. Degrees in science are on the rise, up 30% in Ireland alone. Pro-science governments are coming to power. It was under the new Obama administration that we saw cloned meat deemed safe to enter the food chain in the US. And for the first time, witnessed government funded stem cell research in Europe. There’s a more common sense approach to so-called ‘Weird Sciences’, which are starting to be reframed as Fantastic Science, spearheaded by synth-friendly ‘Zeno Youth’. Yxaiio, a pheromone drink is all the rage amongst Madrid clubbers. In this era of pervasive threat and crisis, there’s a yearning for visionary solutions and miracles which science seems to promise, responding to both our need for certainty and imagination. “The desired direction of science is more customisation and more open source,” says Phillip Torrone, senior editor of Make magazine, a home inventors’ bible. “I think people are more curious today about how things work.”


Thanks to sarah for this story.


Image Credit:
http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/z_Projects_in_progress/050418_Einstein/050405_einstein_tongue.widec.jpg

Pop neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield researches digital technology and how it affects the human brain. She has a really fascinating theory about how the internet is ‘infantilising’ our minds. “Humans will crave a more instant world; a literal world that is laden with senses, that is process driven rather than content driven, focused on the experience rather than the meaning; [a world that is] about the thrill of the moment, where there are no consequences because you can just go back and do it again. People will have shorter attention spans and perhaps higher IQs; they will have a shaky sense of identity; they may be more hedonistic and less reflective, and will take more risks. These are not altogether bad characteristics, they are simply different from the behaviour that guides society today.”


Thanks to sarah and Paula for this story.


References:
A report sarah once did
The Future Laboratory

Mother held its latest UnLtd brand clinics a few weeks ago. They’re always lively sessions and a number of interesting social enterprise projects grabbed our attention. One was the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, set up by rapper Akala. The company aims to encourage disengaged young people to develop new skills in the Performing Arts by linking hip-hop with the language of Shakespeare (not as cringey as it sounds). Such a project helps build self-confidence and unlock artistic abilities, giving young people a creative platform with support and guidance from leading music and theatre industry professionals.


Another project MOTIV, works with primary and secondary schools across the country to improve attendance and raise children’s aspirations – easily, effectively and sustainably. MOTIV challenge pupils to get to school on time, every day, all term and in return they receive exclusively designed badges at each half-term if they do so, and if they complete a full term every pupil receives a reward tailored to their year group and their school. Projects such as these realize young people are living in a fragmented society with more opportunities to disengage and no longer aspire to reach their full potential – these projects attempt to alter this through engagement in tune with young people and their interests. Furthermore, there is a growth in micro-funding sites with Pledge Bank in the UK and Kickstarter in the US. Both sites aim to empower people who want to do something ambitious by gathering a large group of people as a source of finance and encouragement to get that thing done.

Just last week saw David Cameron sign up to No More Business As Usual, which has some interesting facts to show that social enterprise is booming and an arena that offers great potential for brands who want to contribute and make a difference in the most positive way possible. Read more »