La Comisión Europea (CE) pide en un informe a España una reducción del déficit y de la deuda pública, y "profundas reformas" en el sistema de pensiones y sanitario para garantizar la sostenibilidad de las finanzas públicas a largo plazo. Según Bruselas, las cuentas del Estado español se encuentran en una situación de "alto riesgo" debido al impacto de la crisis económica y al creciente aumento del gasto público asociado al envejecimiento de la población, que será uno de los más elevados de la UE en los próximos años.

"Este ajuste puede llevarse a cabo a través de un aumento de los ingresos y del recorte de los gastos. Además, debe reformarse el sistema de protección social (en particular las pensiones públicas y la sanidad) para desacelerar el incremento previsto en el gasto relacionado con el envejecimiento", afirma el Ejecutivo comunitario en un informe sobre el impacto de la crisis y el envejecimiento de la población en las finanzas públicas de los Estados miembros. "No obstante, las reformas deben llevarse a cabo de forma que no amplifiquen las consecuencias de la actual crisis económica y financiera", resalta el documento.

España es uno de los países de la UE cuya situación ha empeorado más desde 2006, año del anterior informe de la CE sobre estos asuntos. La "brecha de sostenibilidad" en España, esto es, la diferencia entre la situación presupuestaria estructural y una situación presupuestaria sostenible, estaba en 2006 en un 3,2% del PIB, frente al 11,8% de la actualidad.

En 2006 ya se preveía un fuerte aumento del gasto en pensiones, pero las cuentas españolas se encontraban en una situación de superávit que permitía amortiguar este impacto. Con la crisis, el superávit se ha evaporado y el déficit y la deuda se están disparando. Y, según los últimos cálculos de Bruselas, de aquí a 2060 el gasto en pensiones en España subirá 6,7 puntos porcentuales del PIB, el sanitario 1,6 puntos y el de asistencia de larga duración 0,9 puntos. La subida total del gasto relacionado con las personas mayores será de 9 puntos.

El informe de la Comisión clasifica a los Estados miembros en tres grupos dependiendo del nivel de riesgo. Y España se sitúa en el grupo peor situado, junto con Reino Unido, Irlanda, Grecia, Eslovenia, Eslovaquia, República Checa, Chipre, Letonia, Lituania, Malta, Países Bajos y Rumanía. Los mejor situados son Bulgaria, Dinamarca, Estonia, Finlandia y Suecia. En el grupo intermedio se encuentran Bélgica, Alemania, Francia, Italia, Hungría, Luxemburgo, Austria, Polonia y Portugal.

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La estrategia que plantea el Ejecutivo comunitario para hacer frente a este problema se basa en tres pilares: ajustar las cuentas públicas, aumentar el empleo y reformar los sistemas de pensiones. En este sentido, la Comisión señala que es necesario retrasar la edad de jubilación efectiva en línea con el aumento de la esperanza de vida, y recuerda que algunos países como Países Bajos o Alemania ya han tomado medidas en este sentido.

Si no se cambian las políticas vigentes, la edad media de jubilación en la UE sólo aumentará un año -de 62 a 63 años- en 2060. Mientras, en ese año, la esperanza de vida a los 62 años habrá mejorado en seis, destaca Bruselas.

Alan Liu, chairman and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he researches the relation between literature and information culture:

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”

For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print.

(Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on.

My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate.

The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience:

To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens. The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. Frequent task switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read.

Maryanne Wolf, John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts:

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.

Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.

And that, of course, is the problem at hand. No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain. We do know a great deal, however, about the formation of what we know as the expert reading brain that most of us possess to this point in history.

In brief, this brain learns to access and integrate within 300 milliseconds a vast array of visual, semantic, sound (or phonological), and conceptual processes, which allows us to decode and begin to comprehend a word. At that point, for most of us our circuit is automatic enough to allocate an additional precious 100 to 200 milliseconds to an even more sophisticated set of comprehension processes that allow us to connect the decoded words to inference, analogical reasoning, critical analysis, contextual knowledge, and finally, the apex of reading: our own thoughts that go beyond the text.

This is what Proust called the heart of reading — when we go beyond the author’s wisdom and enter the beginning of our own.

I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.

For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

We can learn a great deal from a similar transition that the ancient Greeks made from orality (Socrates) to literacy (Aristotle). Socrates worried that the young would be deluded by the appearance of truth in seemingly impermeable text to think that they knew something before they had ever begun.

The habitual reader Aristotle worried about the three lives of the “good society”: the first life is the life of productivity and knowledge gathering; the second, the life of entertainment; and the third, the life of reflection and contemplation.

For me the formation of the “good reader” follows a similar course. I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Let us bring our best thought and research to preserving what is most precious about the present reading brain as we add the new capacities of its next iteration.

David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University:

The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.

But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles.

Of course there are great stylists writing in English today (take John Banville or Martin Amis). Of course, word processors could be the best thing that ever happened to prose, and “cloud” computing will soon offer readers the chance to consult any text in any library anywhere.

The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods," said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. "They're on their way up, or perhaps not college educated."

By contrast, Mancini said, "Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs," driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.

Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the microblogging site, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year.

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These social-networking divides are worrisome to boyd, who wrote "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics." Instead of allowing us to cross the boundaries that exist in our everyday lives, these online class differences threaten to carry those boundaries into the future.

"The social-network infrastructure is going to be a part of everything going forward, just like [Web] search is," boyd said. "The Internet is not this great equalizer that rids us of the problems of the physical world -- the Internet mirrors and magnifies them. The divisions that we have in everyday life are going to manifest themselves online."

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"I think it's fair to say that the Web has great potential to at least mitigate everyday tendencies towards self-segregation and social exclusion," Kaufman said. "In some ways, [Facebook] levels the playing field of friendship stratification. In the real world, you have very close friends and then there are those you just say "Hi" to when you pass them on the street.

"The playing field is a lot more level in that you can find yourself having a wall-to-wall exchange with just an acquaintance. If you pick up the unlikely friend, not of your race or income bracket, the network may [help you] establish a more active friendship than if you met them in real life."

But MySpace's users still find something appealing about MySpace that they don't about Facebook, and it may have nothing to do with class or race, blogger Perez said.

"It's not just the demographics that have people picking one over the other," Perez said. "It also comes down to what activities you like. If you like music, you'll still be on MySpace. If you're more into applications, then you might go to Facebook because you're addicted to Mafia Wars or whatever."

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If you're looking to branch out of your social network box, your best option may be Twitter. Nielsen's survey didn't find a dominant social class on Twitter as much as they found a geographical one: Those who use Twitter are more likely to live in an urban area where there's greater access to wireless network coverage, Mancini said.

"The simplicity of Twitter definitely creates less of a divide, because it's not a relationship like it is on MySpace or Facebook," Ostrow said. "If you live in the middle of nowhere or you live in a city, you can follow anyone about anything."

Como si se tratara de una competencia para determinar quién come más sano, a los habitantes de las costas del Mediterráneo -cuya gastronomía ha traspasado todas las fronteras por lo rica y saludable-, les han aparecido unos competidores que reclaman que su estilo de vida en la mesa es igual o incluso mejor: los habitantes de las costas europeas del Océano Atlántico y, más puntualmente, los de la Comunidad Autónoma de Galicia, España, en el extremo noroccidental de la Península Ibérica.

¿Cómo así que la dieta mediterránea está monopolizando la idea de lo saludable?, ¿acaso no existen otras formas de comer que también ayudan a prevenir enfermedades?, parecen cuestionar los gallegos. Y efectivamente, no se han quedado quietos y han comenzado a promover la llamada dieta atlántica, que promete alargar aún más la vida que la de sus vecinos mediterráneos.

La dieta atlántica se caracteriza por su variedad y sus técnicas culinarias sencillas, como la preparación a la plancha, al vapor o la cocción. Entre sus productos clave tiene el pescado, los mariscos, las legumbres, las hortalizas, los cereales y el vino blanco. Incluye carnes rojas como la de ternera y cerdo, pero deja por fuera al cordero, cuyas grasas no son precisamente las más benéficas. El pan, el aceite de oliva y la manteca también forman parte de ella, aunque en proporciones más bajas.

Su semejanza con la mediterránea radica en la variedad -ambas incluyen alimentos de todos los grupos-, así como en el consumo de pescado y vino -aunque la mediterránea se inclina por el tinto-.

Las diferencias más significativas son la mayor proporción de carnes rojas y el menor énfasis que la atlántica hace en el consumo de verduras y frutas.

Los defensores de la dieta atlántica comentan que ésta previene enfermedades cardiacas, metabólicas y algunos tipos de cáncer, y contribuye al desarrollo de los recién nacidos si se tiene en cuenta que las madres consumidoras de pescado conciben hijos con mayor coeficiente intelectual. Como expresa Manuel Torreiglesias, médico, periodista y promotor de esta dieta, "los que comemos como se come en Galicia somos los que más vivimos del mundo".