Adam Clare

You Won’t Regret Not Having Kids

kids

People with kids put a lot of pressure on couples without kids to procreate, which is obviously rude but happens anyway. This could lead to people thinking they want kids when really they don’t. In some places there is even social stigma around not having a child.

If you’re in the no kid camp then good for you! Don’t listen to the parents justifying their life decisions to make more of themselves. Indeed, you will not regret your decision to not have children later on. So go ahead and live the life you want to live.

Childfree individuals, who are also described as ‘childless by choice’ or ‘voluntarily childless’, have decided they do not want biological or adopted children. This is an important population to understand because its members have unique reproductive health and end-of-life needs, and they encounter challenges managing work-life balance and with stereotypes. Prior estimates of childfree adults’ prevalence in the United States, their age of decision, and interpersonal warmth judgements have varied widely over time and by study design. To clarify these characteristics of the contemporary childfree population, we conduct a pre-registered direct replication of a recent population-representative study. All estimates concerning childfree adults replicate, boosting confidence in earlier conclusions that childfree people are numerous and decide early in life, and that parents exhibit strong in-group favoritism while childfree adults do not.

Focus: Multitasking is a Myth

Think you’re bad at multitasking? You probably are, and if you think you’re good at it, well, you’re probably bad at it too. So why do we think multitasking is something we can do and why do we praise people who can? It has partly to do with sexism. There is a myth that women are better than men at multitasking and it needs to end. At workplaces women are given more work than men for cultural reasons and then told that they like the additional work.
How we got here is not good, but the solutions are already on the table and ready to be implemented. It all comes down to acknowledging this working myth and providing time for people to focus.

“These are usually shorter-term assignments that need to be done quickly. Can you help with that, cover for me here — these tasks are the interrupters, as opposed to the work you’re hired to do and is longer term and requires that depth,” said Weingart, who co-wrote The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work. “These tasks tend to be less tightly tied to the organization’s bottom line, and they tend to be behind the scenes and less visible. When you define it that way, it’s much more than office housework or taking notes or getting the birthday cake.”
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Now, after years of leaning into multitasking, many women are realizing that doing simultaneous tasks isn’t part of the promotion track. It’s the path to burnout. This awareness is the start of helping “women step back and figure out how to improve,” says Weingart.

Before committing to a task, Weingart suggests determining whether it’s of high value to your organization. If you still feel compelled to do it, try to understand your motivation for saying yes. Sometimes it’s guilt or fear of letting others down.

Canada Readies Beneficial Ownership Registry

Canada’s reputation has a good place to launder money may soon come to an end. A good step to preventing organized crime from using the Canadian economy to “clean” their money is tabled in parliament. The beneficial ownership registry will require companies to declare who or what organization benefits from a subsidiary or otherwise owned business. Such a registry exists in other countries and helps law enforcement and cornered organizations better track what companies are up to.

Canada’s announcement for a publicly accessible registry brings it in line with G7/G20 and Five Eyes’ strategies to advance national security goals and surpasses the new Financial Action Task Force standard on beneficial ownership registries. These registries have become more urgent as transnational criminal networks and foreign state actors seek to exploit liberal democracies to hide dirty money. Currently, 108 countries have made commitments to publicly accessible registries, and Canada can begin next steps in ensuring that all registry data is secure and useful to all FINTRAC reporting entities and law enforcement.

“Tax dodging and money laundering cost the public billions every year,” said Dr. DT Cochrane, economist with Canadians for Tax Fairness. “A publicly accessible registry will significantly improve tax compliance and enforcement for all levels of government.”

Puffinling Patrol Save Baby Puffins

In Iceland puffins get help from humans who volunteer on the Puffling Patrol to ensure that the little birds can thrive. When baby puffins, known as pufflings, hatch they usually head to the sea from their nests on shore, but when bright lights are nearby they’ll go towards the light. To get these pufflings away from dangerous lit areas like roads, factories, or other human made structures volunteers escort the birds to the water. It’s adorable and helpful.

They’re part of the Puffling Patrol, a Heimaey volunteer brigade tasked with shepherding little puffins on their journey. Every year during the roughly monthlong fledging season, kids here get to stay up very late. On their own or with parents, on foot or by car, they roam the town peeking under parked vehicles, behind stacks of bins at the fish-processing plants, inside equipment jumbled at the harbor. The stranded young birds tend to take cover in tight spots. Flushing them out and catching them is the perfect job for nimble young humans. But the whole town joins in, even the police.

No one knows exactly when the tradition started. Lifelong resident Svavar Steingrímsson, 86, did it when he was young. He thinks the need arose when electric lights came to Heimaey in the early 1900s. Saving the young birds likely began as “a mix of sport and humanity,” Steingrímsson tells me in Icelandic translated by his grandson, Sindri Ólafsson. Also, he says, people probably wanted to sustain the population of what was then an important food source.

Open Source, 3D Printed, Pollution Monitoring

Efforts to monitor pollution levels around the world aren’t new, but what is new is a system created by MIT’s Senseable City Lab that anyone can make. Called Flatburn, the system is designed to be put on a vehicle to monitor pollution levels throughout a city, which will provide more coverage than standard monitors. Flatburn can be 3D printed and assembled by people the world over so it will hopefully get more participation in the majority of the world.

The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab.

“We’ve been doing several pilots around the world, and we have refined a set of prototypes, with hardware, software, and protocols, to make sure the data we collect are robust from an environmental science point of view,” says Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the scanner’s testing process. The Flatburn device is part of a larger project, known as City Scanner, using mobile devices to better understand urban life.