An excerpt from Klassen's original article follows:

South Korea (henceforth Korea) faces a challenge quite distinct from any other: the world’s most rapidly ageing population. The speed of population ageing in Korea is unprecedented in human history. From a population profile that resembled a pyramid (with many younger individuals and few older individuals) in 1990, the profile is now diamond-shaped (with a large middle-aged population). In another couple of decades, the country’s population will be an inverse pyramid: few young people and many older ones.

By 2050, the median age of the population of Korea is projected to be 57 years, making it the most elderly nation in the world. In contrast, at present, Japan has the oldest median age at 43 years, while Korea’s stands at 37years.

Population ageing is not unique to Korea. Many European nations, and Japan, have faced it. However, as Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Director-General of the World Health Organization, noted: “While the developed countries became rich before they became old, the developing countries will become old before they become rich.” That is the dilemma for Korea, and for other rapidly ageing nations such as China.

For Korea, things were never meant to turn out this way. Its government and people never aimed for the distinction of the world’s most rapidly ageing country. Indeed, Koreans were not supposed to stop have babies, especially since there was never a one-child policy as in China. Rather, as the economy grew and consumption increased over the past several decades, couples making their individual choices began to opt for fewer and fewer children. By the mid-1980s, the fertility rate (the average number of births per woman) dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1, and by the mid 1990s below 1.5. For nearly the past decade, it has not exceeded 1.3 giving Korea the distinction of having the lowest fertility of any country.

Klassen's complete article is available on .

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

The post Professor Thomas Klassen: South Korea’s population targeted to be ‘most elderly’ by 2025 appeared first on UAP 2026-30.

91��ɫ's Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit produces clear-language research summaries that concisely communicate research results to non-academic audiences.

These summaries support research dissemination, allowing research findings to have a broader impact on decision-making, policy development and professional practice. This unique institutional capacity was recently featured in The Globe and Mail and was the subject of a presentation at the 2009 Congress of the Humanities & Social Sciences. There is a template of the research summary series, titled , available on the KMb Unit’s Web site.

The KMb Unit is currently creating a new batch of summaries for 2010. While summaries can be written to support any 91��ɫ research findings, the unit is focusing on research related to the priorities of the United Way of 91��ɫ Region, one of its major partners, for 2010.

These priorities include:

• helping youth to grow up strong;
• enabling individuals and families to achieve economic independence;
• improving the well-being of individuals and communities.

To be eligible for the research summary process, research must:

• be finished research, not projects in progress;
• be developed based upon a written output, such as a report, book or thesis;
• meet some form of peer review, such as a book or chapter in an edited book, peer-reviewed publication, such as a journal, publication, or thesis.
• have findings that can help inform public policy or professional practice.

Stan Shapson, vice-president research & innovation, invites interested researchers to participate in this project. Those interested should contact the KMb Unit at kmunit@yorku.ca with materials describing their research, such as a journal article, book chapter, poster or conference presentation.

A research assistant in the KMb Unit will use these materials and in some cases will conduct an interview to develop a brief, clear-language summary of the research project, which will be submitted for review and sign-off. The researcher will also be asked to give consent to having the summary shared on the Web site.

By Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

The post Knowledge Mobilization Unit seeks research to summarize and share online appeared first on UAP 2026-30.

Now there’s another kind of prowess achieved by women in their 40s that men peak at earlier in life, wrote the Toronto Star March 10.

Math.

Not only do female math students outperform men at Ontario’s community colleges, but it’s the 40-something female multi-taskers juggling jobs, families and mortgages who edge out their classmates of either sex at any age, new research shows.

Their secret? They simply might have mastered the time-management skills younger students lack, notes Graham Orpwood, professor emeritus in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Education. He is co-author of the College Mathematics Project, released Tuesday, which examined 31,000 first-year math students across the province’s 24 community colleges.

“Women in their 30s and 40s who go back to school have had to juggle so many roles that they can organize their time and study independently – life skills many young students haven’t mastered,” says Orpwood, who coordinated the joint tracking project by the 91��ɫ/Seneca Institute for Mathematics, Science & Technology Education.

While mature men do better than their younger male classmates – males scored the highest percentage of good grades in their 30s – at any age, they lagged behind women of the same age by 4 to 14 percentage points, wrote the Star.

Despite the old misconception that women don’t have “a head for figures”, nearly 72 per cent of females scored grades of A, B or C in first-year math compared with 64 per cent of males – with a whopping 86.9 per cent of women in their 40s landing the highest percentage of these good grades.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin, with files from the Toronto Star.

The post Education Professor finds 40-something women outperform classmates in math appeared first on UAP 2026-30.