Sarah Allen's Weblog

what is a "normal" age?

In a comment to my last post, Phllip Kerman notes that plenty of "normal aged" people are using Facebook. It caused me to wonder, what age is normal? I rather think that any age where you are healthy of mind and body is normal, but perhaps he meant the age with the largest number of people. In the U.S. in 2000 that would be 40-49 year olds, if we look at the general population. (That's a actually a little older than me.)

It may be more relevant to look at the online population. Although facebook does allow you to register if you were born last year, the babies are toddlers are an unlikely audience. In any case, the stats I found were for online adults. If you are online and over 18, you are most likely to be 18-29 years old. If I were to find a more finely grained data of for online population, my guess is that facebook targetted the most populous demographic for online activity with its initial offering for the college kids.


btw: I found the source data in a ClickZ article then made a nifty graph using google spreadsheets (which is both really cool and fairly frustrating)

shift happens

Not so often these days do I see something on the web that really makes me think. This thought-provoking presentation was originally written by Karl Fisch, technology director for a high school, as a presentation for a faculty meeting. His original title was "Did you know?" Many thanks to Rashmi who highlighted the roots of this presentation which won a recent slideshare contest.

You should watch the whole slideshow, but in case you don't, here's my favorite part: We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist... using technologies that haven't been invented... in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

We live in exponential times.

linguistic profiling

Linguistic Profiling via hipteacher reminds me of a Swiss friend who asked me "What are your percentages?" She said all americans have percentages: 25% Brittish, 8% Scottish...

What Kind of American English Do You Speak? tells me that I'm

I don't know where the Dixie comes from but I'm not surprised my language shows my Yankee roots and I wonder if that upper mid-western comes from the folks who migrated to Boston from Chicago after the great fire.