User:Ryoung122

This user is a citizen of the United States of America.

This user is a skeptic.

This user believes that articles are useless without images.

This user has published peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

This user is interested in Botany.

This user is interested in Genealogy and has published their family tree online.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 19 years, 8 months and 27 days.

This user is of French ancestry.

This user enjoys singing.

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Born May 2, 1974, I have already made a small impact on this world in many small ways. I am currently the Senior Gerontology Consultant for Guinness World Records (since 2005, and a junior consultant since 2000) and the senior claims investigator for the Gerontology Research Group (www.grg.org)(since 1999). I also run the web group "World's Oldest People" at Yahoo groups (founded 2002). I work part-time for several organizations, including the New England Supercentenarian Study at Boston University, the Social Security Administration, the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. I am a founding member of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation, and I have been featured in hundreds of newspapers, including "The Wall Street Journal," "Tokyo Times," and "The New York Times". I have worked on several books, the first of which, the "Wisdom of the World's Oldest People," was out in bookstores in Oct 2005. I also worked on "Living in Three Centuries" by Mark Story (2006) and have a third book due for publication in 2008. I have been cited in scientific journals, including "The Gerontologist" and "Rejuvenation Research". I hold a certificate of gerontology from Georgia State University (2006) and a Master of Gerontology (2008) from Georgia State University. I have been featured in magazines including Science Magazine (Sept 26 2008 issue) and the Futurist Magazine (Nov 2008 issue). On November 22, 2008 I won the ESPO award for best interdiscplinary paper by a graduate student in gerontology, 2008...a national honor given to only one person a year. Truly my dreams are coming true.

I am also an editor at www.emporis.com, which is the #1 web resource for high-rise buildings.^{[citation needed]} I have contributed to the Guinness Book of Records (including the 1987, 1997, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2009 editions). I also contributed to the "World Almanac 2004".

I am also an historian. I hold three degrees in history, an Associate of Arts in History (honors) from Georgia Perimeter College (2004), a Bachelor of Arts in History (summa cum laude) from Georgia State University (2006), and a Master of Arts in History (world history concentration) from Georgia State University (2011). I believe that Wikipedia, while not the place for 'original' research, can move the 'chains of progress' forward (a reference to first downs in football). For some articles, such as William Potts and Myrtle McAteer, I have employed my genealogical skills to locate birthdates for long-forgotten persons who are suddenly notable again, as their once-unrecognized contributions have now come to light. Thus, I am melding gerontology, history, genealogy, and the frontier of Wikipedia to further the collective knowledge of humanity.

I have worked with a number of top names in the field of gerontology, including Stephen Coles, James Vaupel, Jean-Marie Robine, Greg Fahy, and Louis Epstein (supercentenarian tracker). I have met others such as S. Jay Olshanksy, Aubrey de Grey, and K. Warner Schaie and have been in e-mailed conversations with even the great Leonard Hayflick. My goal was and has been not simply to debunk the optimistics, but also the skeptics. True, a reaction to extreme/false age claims is to go the other way. But claims by skeptics that the 'maximum human life span' was '103' (in 1898), '107' (in 1951), or '110' (in 1981) have each fallen short of reality. My research has shown that people are consistently living to ages previously thought impossible. In 1951, for example, it was said the 'maximum human life span' was 107; had the mathematicians bothered to do any research, they would have known that humans already exceeded that age in the 1830's). Each prediction of a 'maximum' turned out to be wrong. Now, however, we have finally arrived at where I advocated: "let the theory fit the data, not the other way around." Recent efforts in the last decade have finally dispelled the notion of an 'exponential' death rate and recognized that, starting around age 97, the death rate begins to slow from an exponential prediction. Still unresolved, however, is how high the observed maximums will reach.

I also invented the idea of tracking 'maximum verified age by year of birth'. An analysis I did in 2002

[PDF] Workshop on Supercentenarians, May 8 2002 Atlanta, GeorgiaFile Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML May 8, 2002 at the Hilton Atlanta, Georgia, USA ... 9:45 a.m. --- Robert Young: “Problems with Supercentenarian Theory: How More Data ... www.demografie.de/calendar/files/15716.951751709-Workshop%20Program.pdf - Similar pages

Debunked the old idea that increases in observed life span was 'static' since Roman times and only began to take off with the Industrial Revolution. This idea, posited for over a century but not actually studied, was incorrect. For Europe, at least, a steady and almost constant increase in observed life span took place over a 700-year period (1250 to present). This accorded with Dr. James Vaupel's idea that observed life span increased and has been increasing almost constantly. Though Vaupel favors his ideas in mathematical terms, I would say that what it shows is that life span increase occurs due to the sum-total of the collective efforts of many interventions (also called 'progress').

In regards to 'supercentenarians,' we found a period of rapid increase in gains (1980-1999) but since 2000, there has been a levelling off in maximum ages, even as the total numbers increase. This accords with Dr. Coles's push of the idea of rectangularization of the mortality curve or that even as more people reach age 110, the result will be a higher death rate at age 110 instead of massive increases at 115 and above. This is postulated to result because those reaching 110 today are more frail, on average, because they were able to survive to an age that they would previously not been able to reach (due to modern medicine).

Yet Vaupel's optimistic observation that, since persons today aged 80 are in better health than 80-year-olds thirty years ago, we should see a translation of this into not simply a greater quantity of supercentenarians, but possibly a rising of the age maximums.

In 1999, British demographer Sir Roger Thatcher postulated that by the year 2070, the national record for the UK would rise from 115 to 123. Yet predicting that England would pass France might be a bit of a national-pride thing.

My ultimate goal is to further the education of the planet, through both small, incremental improvements as well as bold new ideas. Stay tuned for more!