This evening was the Opening Plenary, a collection of talks gathered under a "State of the World" banner. After the less than inspiring keynotes in Houston two years ago I wasn't wild about going and had made other plans. The blurb for one of the talks, Marvin Cetron's "Vital Signs and Generation X," only fuelled my doubts about the event as a whole (doubts the IAF session had done so well to temporarily dispel). It includes this sentence:
[Generation X] should be renamed "Generation E," for entrepreneurial, educated, e-mail, and English-speaking, characteristics they share around the globe.
Is the omission of what is, to me, the most obvious "E" a display of some odd irony or merely the chronic out-of-touchness that clings to the many grey-haired men at this event? After talking to friends who attended it sounds like the talk was more offensive than I'd imagined and I did well to avoid it in favour of a lovely dinner and my first ever sighting of fireflies.