Life Expectancy: The difference between male and female

In this post on FlowingData, some interesting statistics are shown about life expectancy in the US.

Ever wondered why insurance companies have higher rates for men than women? The main reason is that on average, women live longer than men. In other words, the risk of dying for a man of, say 50, is higher than for a woman of that age.

Why is this? I have some ideas, but no means to prove them. What can be studied from the data is the evolution of life expectancy and the consequences of this evolution. When looking at US data for the last 20 years, simple (linear) extrapolation tells us that in 2047, men and women will have the same average age. Looking at the data for Belgium, the year is 2074.

I will probably be long dead by then, but according to this linear extrapolation, my grandchildren will have children that have life expectancies of 93 years!

I agree, linear extrapolation is an approximation. But the tendency is there: men's life expectancy is getter higher at a slightly faster pace than women's.

More about this topic (including some cool graphs) later.

How to cope with change: An alternative approach

CHANGE...

A lot of people are involved in change: Every project is a change, and every change should be a project. In project management, one is used to document risks of the project and think about how to mitigate those risks. Sometimes, mitigating the risks can be costly. But on the other hand, having the risks and the possibility that something goes wrong may cost more.

A risk that is often forgotten in projects (and thus also in processes of change) is the one of 'changing people's mind'. Letting a human being start working (or even thinking) differently is a great challenge.

In other words, there is a technological barrier and a mental barrier to any project or change process. Both generate their own set of risks to be taken into account. In many cases the mental barrier is forgotten or at least underestimated.

A technique that is widely adopted in situations like this is 'chunking' the technology: go step-by-step. Start small, but gradually extend the scope of the change. Doing this on a technical level usually also impacts the mental barrier.

Recently, I was talking to a project manager for a technology company involved in the 'people change' process in relation to nanotechnology and its applications in biomedicine. He told me that the mental aspect of the whole project, the fact that little things enter our body, or even remain there for years, is to a large extend not yet common ground in our society. This is a considerable risk for the development of new applications of nanotechnology.

In order to mitigate this risk, the project manager told me they sometimes developed a completely different product first (and freezed the other project) because this new product was easier 'to sell'. So basically, you develop something in parallel in order for people to feel comfortable with this change because it will make future changes easier.

"But this costs a lot of money!" Yes, obviously, but so does developing a product that has a high risk of not being adopted because the mental leap is too big.

Did you encounter situations where the parallel development approach might have been successful? Please share it with us in the comments.

A new project...

Long time ago... I used to blog every now and then. It used to be about technology.

I changed focus in my professional career and in the meanwhile started a few other projects that limit my time to spend blogging. It is not that I do not have any ideas anymore, quite the contrary, but they usually involve extensive thinking/writing.

One project recently started is the writing of a book. When people ask me where I got the idea of writing a book, I usually answer that it has always been there, I only needed a topic to write about. Chatting with my good friend Koen Vermeir (see for instance here) we came to the conclusion that we were talking a lot about the same things, from different perspectives. We decided it was time to note that down.

Don't expect a printed copy any time soon, we gave ourselves 5 years! Stay tuned for more info though...

Why Personal Productivity may be Hard and 'The Corporation' has the answer

Eli has drawn my attention to 'The Corporation'. Shame on me for not knowing and having seen this documentary before (1). One word struck me when I heard it, because it is a topic I wanted to discuss already for quite some time in a different context: Accountability.

What does it have to do with personal productivity then?

I'm involved in quite some thinking about IT and business processes lately. Defining the process is generally easy, the measurement of their performance both from a process as well as a quality/content point of view is much more difficult (2). One thing, though, that is a core component of every step in the process is defining the person who is accountable, which is usually different from the person who is responsible for doing the work. Usually, people use a so-called RACI diagram to define the respective roles for every step in a process or task.

Personal Productivity is all about processes (think GTD, for instance) and personal work flow. Similarly, it's not easy to measure the quality of the process or deliverable. But what really makes personal productivity hard is the fact that one person is both accountable and responsible, or in other words: we have to 'control' our own work.

Maybe that is why we need a personal assistent?


(1) No, I'm not going into the details of the documentary, and I am not commenting on the reasoning of Eli at this time.
(2) No, that is also not what I wanted to talk about now (but will do in the future).

Book Review: Personal Development for Smart People (Steve Pavlina)

On a sidenote: The past weeks have been completely unproductive when it comes to writing. That does not mean I don't have anything to blog about: My second child was born the end of September and I changed jobs during that period as well. Enough changes for now. Back to business...

Introduction

I managed to read Personal Development for Smart People (PDfSP) during nightly and early morning hours and I'm happy I did. PDfSP has a special meaning for me in two ways.

First of all, because years ago, when I started my own 'personal development project', I subscribed to a course about Louise Hay's book: 'You can heal your life'. Ten years later, PDfSP is published by Hay House, founded by the same Louise H. as before. That closes the cycle for the first time.

The second reason why PDfSP resonates so well (to use a verb often found in PDfSP) is the quest for the universal foundation of things. Looking for structure in the world that surrounds us. If you've read this post, you know what I'm talking about.

About The Book

I'm not going to review the book in a conventional way, this has been done by many others before me. I would like to connect Steve's book to something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

Let us start with a few questions and answers:

• Is the book any different from the myriad of self-help books and CDs around? - Yes it is.
• Is the book for everyone? - Probably not.
  
• Do you need to be acquainted with the subject in order to read it? - Not at all, but it helps.

Let me explain...

The reason why the book is probably not for everyone, is exactly the same as why not everyone likes the content of Steve's blog. Let me give an example. For some, 'oneness' is an obvious thing, no doubt about it. For others, being connected to other people sounds completely insane.

It helps to be acquainted with the subject, because at least you know that things like 'oneness', 'law of attraction', life purpose, etc. are a fundamental ingredient of most of quite a lot of books you find in this field.

Book classification

Some time ago, I started to think about a classification of personal development books. Intuitively, I've always thought 'You can heal your life' (by Louise Hay) as being more written towards woman: holistic, intuitive, not everything can be seen or proven, etc. On the other hand, 'The 7 Habits' (by S. Covey) seems to attract more to a male public: logical, analytical, no 'unfounded' messages, etc. For me, they are like prototype of two ways of expressing a personal development message. in other words, their form is different, the core message is often similar.

Coming back to PDfSP, I find it hard to classify it using the above types. (That probably proves that my classification is good!) PDfSP starts out as a male book, with a search for the foundations of personal development, but rather quickly mixes up with female aspects as mentioned earlier.

Final Remarks

If you ask me how I would describe the effect of PDfSP on me, suffice it to say that it hit me. That alone is an accomplishment only few writers have managed to achieve. If you're interested in personal development and looking for some more background and insight, you won't be disappointed. Just keep in mind that the book has 'male and female aspects'.