A Canadian teenager's amazing discovery might go from an archaeological revelation to a cautionary tale in just 48 hours.

On Monday, May 9, the tabloid newspaper Journal of Montreal reported that 15-year-old student William Gadoury of Quebec had spotted an ancient Mayan city that was previously lost to history.

Using a map of Mayan constellations and satellite images in 2014, Gadoury found a correlation between the stars and the locations of 117 known ruins.

But one star, he noticed, had no matching city — so he used satellite imagery provided by the Canadian Space Agency and private company Ikonos to study that location in the Yucatan Peninsula.

He discovered a strange geometric shape — a rough square amid the vegetation. So this week Gadoury, geologist Armand LaRocque, and another Canadian scientist announced it was possibly a complex of 30-odd buildings of Mayan origin.

However, experts are now voicing skepticism about that idea.

George Dvorsky, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, reached out to two anthropologists— and both cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the site without on-the-ground confirmation.

Thomas Garrison, an expert in satellite imagery (also called remote sensing), told Dvorsky that it's probably an old cornfield: "I'd guess [the field has] been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands."

David Stuart, an archaeologist and director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin, took to Facebook to share a frank assessment.

"The whole thing is a mess -- a terrible example of junk science hitting the internet in free-fall," he wrote. "The ancient Maya didn't plot their ancient cities according to constellations. Seeing such patterns is a Rorschach process, since sites are everywhere, and so are stars."

Both scientists commend William on his efforts and enthusiasm, but say the media has run away with a specious story.

"To clarify, I don't want to critique the young man mentioned in the story. He's clearly smart and enthusiastic about archaeology and the Maya. It would be great to channel and develop that interest. What steams me most here is the irresponsibility of 'experts' who sought the media exposure," Stuart commented in his post.

Tech Insider contacted Goudary and LaRocque about the criticisms, but they did not immediately respond. We'll update this post if and when we hear back.

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NOW WATCH: A 15-year-old student may have just found an undiscovered Mayan city

A Canadian teenager's claim to what may be an amazing discovery — a lost Mayan city — has turned into confusion among scientists and satellite photo experts.

On Monday, the tabloid newspaper Journal of Montreal reported that 15-year-old student William Gadoury of Quebec had spotted an ancient Mayan city that was previously lost to history.

Using a map of Mayan constellations and satellite images in 2014, Gadoury found a correlation between the stars and the locations of 117 known ruins.

But he noticed that one star had no matching city — so Gadoury used satellite imagery provided by the Canadian Space Agency and the private company Ikonos to study that location in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Gadoury and geologist Armand LaRocque announced this week that a rough square they spotted in the vegetation was possibly a complex of 30-odd buildings of Mayan origin.

If confirmed, the site would match up exactly with the site Gadoury had hypothesized using the stars.

"[This image] clearly shows a manmade structure," LaRocque told Tech Insider. He said he has other images he believes show a network of roads.

But early reports of the claim sparked an intense controversy.

On Tuesday, George Dvorsky, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, reached out to several experts, who cautioned against jumping to any conclusions about the site without on-the-ground confirmation.

Thomas Garrison, who studies satellite imagery (also called remote sensing), told Dvorsky it was probably an old cornfield: "I'd guess [the field has] been fallow for 10-15 years. This is obvious to anyone that has spent any time at all in the Maya lowlands."

David Stuart, an archaeologist and director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin, shared a frank assessment on Facebook. (The post has since been taken down, but a screenshot of it is below.)

However, LaRocque said these and other criticisms stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding.

Most news outlets, including the BBC (shown in Stuart's Facebook post, above) and Tech Insider, shared the following image of a jungle in Belize, which the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) provided to media:

LaRocque said any conclusions drawn from this and other CSA-provided images, are incorrect.

"We do not know where this image is coming from but surely not from us," LaRocque told Tech Insider in an emailed statement.

"We also have other images showing lineaments that we interpreted as a road network," he added, and included a map of the correct location of the alleged Mayan city — in Mexico, not Belize — labeled "Cité Maya":

While LaRocque and others sort out the dispute, all of the experts seem to agree that Gadoury — the teenager who made the alleged discovery — is a bright young man with a promising future.

"To clarify, I don't want to critique the young man mentioned in the story," Stuart said in his now-deleted post. "He's clearly smart and enthusiastic about archaeology and the Maya. It would be great to channel and develop that interest. What steams me most here is the irresponsibility of 'experts' who sought the media exposure."

Tech Insider asked both Garrison and Stuart for their assessment of what LaRocque says is the correct image, but they did not immediately respond to our requests. (We'll update this post if and when they do.)

If one thing is for certain amid the controversy, it's this: Until archaeologists actually walk onto and explore the site identified by Gadoury and LaRocque, their lost Mayan city will remain an alluring possibility — not a fact.

SEE ALSO: Experts say a 'Mayan city' discovered by a teenager is ​probably​ just an old cornfield

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NOW WATCH: A 15-year-old student may have just found an undiscovered Mayan city

Every year, hundreds of migrants and failed refugee claimants in Canada are left to languish in jails as opposed to the holding centers designed to house migrants — even though they haven't committed any crime.

And new figures obtained by VICE News show that dozens of teens have also been in the same situation.

According to documents obtained by VICE News under an access to information request, 28 migrant teens detained by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) were held in Canadian jails from 2010 to 2015.

In addition, a 16-year-old detained for a week at the Toronto youth jail in 2013 appears to hold both Canadian and American citizenship.

One 17-year-old Korean male who was kept at the juvenile detention facility in Brampton, Ontario for 45 days in 2011 because CBSA determined he wouldn't appear for his next immigration proceeding. That same year, a 15-year-old Eritrean male was held at another youth jail in northern Ontario for 42 days for the same reason.

Like adult migrants held in jail, these migrant teens, aged 14 to 17, rub shoulders with criminal offenders, sometimes for more than a month even though they haven't been charged with any crime.

The Burnaby Youth Center in BC detained the highest number of migrants, 10, while the Roy McMurtry Youth Center in Brampton, Ontario held eight, according to the figures.

According to the documents, the overall number of migrant teens held in jails for juvenile offenders has declined, though this number might not provide the complete picture as the data is based only on the facilities that responded.

CBSA can detain migrants seeking status when it's believed they will not show up for their immigration proceedings, if their identity is in question, or if they are deemed a risk to public safety, or when there's not enough room in one of the three immigration holding centers in Canada — in Toronto, Vancouver, and Laval in Quebec.

The holding center in Vancouver is meant to house immigration detainees for up to 72 hours, whereas migrants have been kept in the other two centers for more than a year.

For Samer Muscati, director of the International Human Rights Program at the University of Toronto, these data further show the need for independent oversight of the CBSA.

"Children should be detained as only as a matter of last resort, and looking at the data, it's not clear that these cases merit detention," Muscati said. "From what we know about the conditions of these facilities, they are worse [than detention centers].

We have to keep in mind these children have not been convicted of a crime, that's not why they're there and they're being held in a criminal facilities"

"I'm not shocked unfortunately by CBSA practices anymore," he added. "But it's alarming we have children held in this way when there's no need for it when they don't pose a danger for anyone."

According to the CBSA statistics, only three teens were held in jail by CBSA in 2015; two in the Burnaby Youth Center and one at the Roy McMurtry Youth Center in Brampton.

In Burnaby, a 16-year-old male from Mali was held for 35 days for identity reasons, and a 17-year-old Chinese female was held there for 14 days on the grounds she wouldn't appear for her next immigration proceeding.

And according to numbers provided to VICE News from the BC Ministry of Family and Development, one family of four — a mother, father, daughter, and son — were housed separately at the Burnaby Youth Center from December 19, 2014 to March 26, 2015.

A family of two brothers were housed for just over a month there in 2015, separate from the juvenile offender population. And a family of two siblings were housed, also separately, for two weeks in March 2015.

CBSA spokesperson Line Guibert-Wolff told VICE News there are "exceptional circumstances, where an unaccompanied minor who may pose a security risk or a danger to the public may be detained in a youth facility," but in general, unaccompanied minors are not held in a detention facility, but released into the care of provincial child protection services.

When asked why the youth aren't transferred to immigration holding centers instead of jails, Guibert Wolff said that the CBSA does not "routinely transfer individuals between provinces."

Peter Spadoni, a spokesperson for Ontario's Ministry of Children and Youth Services in Ontario, told VICE News in an email that a youth may be placed in a jail "if their background or behavior means that they cannot be detained in a CBSA immigration facility." He added that "[a]t the end of the day, our top priority is the safety and well-being of any youth in the care of our youth justice system including those on an immigration detention warrant."

There's been a spike in young inmates assaulting each other at the Burnaby Youth Center in recent years, and it has also been accused of keeping its young inmates in solitary confinement, something that's only supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances.

The CBSA, one of the only law enforcement agencies in Canada that has no independent oversight, has been under renewed scrutiny after two migrants on immigration holds died suddenly in Ontario jails earlier this year. In February, the story of a Syrian teen being held in isolation at the Toronto immigration holding center also made headlines. Some 14 adult migrants have died in CBSA custody 2000.

Scott Bardsley, a spokesperson for the department of Public Safety told VICE News in an email the government is looking at "how best to provide the agency [CBSA] with appropriate review mechanisms."

According to CBSA policy documents also released under Access to Information, children under 18 years of age should be detained "for the shortest period of time." And for unaccompanied minors, "the preferred option is to release with conditions to the care of child welfare agencies, if those organizations are able to provide an adequate guarantee that the minor child will report to the immigration authorities as requested."

According to Statistics Canada, there were 1,019 young people in custody on any given day, resulting in a youth incarceration rate of 6 per 10,000 youth population.

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Kids are titans of innovation, from the way they play to the way they create. Despite their short tenure on Earth, we should respect their ability to generate great ideas.

In recent years, some of the brightest young minds have come up with cheap and effective ways to purify water, keep perishable medications cold without electricity, and keep elderly family members safe.

These inventions go way beyond macaroni art.

Kylie Simonds — Designed a backpack that lets kids feel stylish while they undergo chemotherapy.

When she was 8 years old, Kylie went to the doctor complaining of a sore throat. In the three years that followed, she received a cancer diagnosis, underwent chemotherapy, emerged as a survivor, and invented a backpack that gives kids like her an alternative to clunky, ugly IV poles.

The young inventor, now 13, has set up a GoFundMe campaign to bring the backpack, which she calls the "i-Pack," to life. The prototype features stabilizing internal rods, a pump, a controller, and a coil to hold the medicine bag.

Kylie received a patent in 2014 for the innovative design after attending the UCONN Invention Convention and winning the "Patent Award," the highest prize available.

Raymond Wang — Invented a cheap way to stop airborne pathogens from spreading on airplanes.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a person infected with the flu virus could spread the disease to up to 17 other people on an airplane, mostly through coughing and sneezing.

When Raymond Wang learned that fact in 2014, the high school junior got to work on a device that could minimize the virus' spread.

He's the inventor of the $10 Global Inlet Director — a curved piece of plastic that can redirect the flow of air inside an airplane cabin. When multiple units are installed, they can reduce disease transmission by up to 55 times.

The invention earned Wang the top prize at this year's Intel Science and Engineering Fair, the Gordon E. Moore Award.

Paige Brown — Developed a cheap and effective method for cleaning polluted streams.

Martin, a 17-year-old native of Bangor, Maine, created a device that captures phosphorus from water.

She spent just $3 on materials and managed to extract more phosphorus than would ever conceivably enter a water supply, she tells Tech Insider. The device is made up of a few parts: clumps of gel extracted from seaweed, known as "alginate," which are stuffed inside a claw hair clip, and a block of foam.

The invention earned Martin the the Global Good Prize and $150,000 in college tuition at this year's Intel Science Talent Search (STS). The overwhelming success of the device has inspired her to pursue further research into purification systems when she attends college in the fall.

You suck. Teens rule.

I know, I know. That's impossible. But unfortunately we have math to back it up. And at the ripe old age of 24, let me assure you I find this as depressing as you do — especially for those of us badass rule-breaking millennials who hoped the generation coming up after us would be as wild and crazy as we are. (Note: This reporter is neither wild nor crazy.)

But here are the facts: Modern teens are behaving better, doing drugs less, having safer and choosier sex, and even wearing seat belts more often. Goodbye to your bad-decision-making millennial youth. Hello goody-two-shoes Generation Z.

Sarah Kliff over at Vox spotted the trend in a report the federal government releases every two years called the "Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System."

Here are the key takeaways:

• Teens are being more careful when they have sex. Hormonal birth control use jumped 15% among teens between 2011 (when the government started counting) and 2015. Condom use has declined a little bit though.
• Fewer teens are having sex. In 1991, 54.1% of teens said they had ever had sex. In 2007, more than 47% said they'd ever had sex. In 2015, only 41.2% said the same.
• They're having sex less often. In 1991, 39.1% of teens said they'd had sex in the last three months. In 2013 that number fell to 34%. Then by 2015, teens nearly doubled the drop from the previous 12 years, bringing the percentage of teens who'd had sex in the past three months down to 30.1%. While we wouldn't want to take a stand that teens exploring their sexuality is inherently bad, the world is probably better off for them being choosier about it.
• Drug use is down across the board — with one major exception. Teens are drinking less, using less marijuana, consuming less ecstasy, and abusing less heroin. They're even using less meth. The big honking exception here? Vaping.
• 44.9% of teens said they'd used electronic cigarettes. There's some data to tell us that e-cigs are probably better than cigarettes, but some teens eventually move on to the old-fashioned kind. And vaping still poses major health risks on its own. We don't know how e-cigarette usage compares to previous years, because 2015 is the first time the government has asked.
• Teens are generally better behaved. In 2015, 22.6% of teens said they'd been in fights. Back in 1991, that number was 42.5%. Bringing weapons into school (itself a worrying statistic to even exist) dropped from 11.8% to 4.1% in the same time period. Meanwhile, seat belt use has risen dramatically, all the way up to 93.9%.

These prim and proper teacher's pet Gen-Z teens are making the rest of us look bad.

SEE ALSO: This teen brand is the future of Victoria's Secret

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Every two years years, the government releases a report on the state of the American teenager. And the most recent, released last Friday and using data from 2015, offers mostly good news. From sea to shining sea, American adolescents are having smarter sex, doing drugs less, and almost always using seat belts.

So they're a bunch of brown-nosing goody-two-shoes, basically.

However, there was one major spot of bad news in the report: The youths are vaping like crazy.

A full 44.9% of teens reported using electronic cigarettes ever, and 24.1% had done so in the last month. That's nuts — compare that stat to the 30.1% who had sex in the three months before the survey, 22.6% who had ever been in a fight, or 6.1% who drove without seatbelts. What's up Gen-Z? You were holding it together so well. And then came the nasty vapor clouds.

This is especially worrying because (a) we thought the whole get-kids-to-stop-using-nicotine-products effort was going pretty well and (b) this is the first time we've had solid numbers on this alarming trend. Though e-cigs hit stores as far back as 2007, 2015 was the first year the CDC though to ask all those folks born after 1996 about them.

I dived deep into the e-cig fracas back in May, when the FDA announced plans to regulate the industry and vape-makers (understandably) freaked out a little.

Here are the key facts about them:

• E-cigs heat and vaporize water with nicotine, flavoring, and other substances mixed in.
• The FDA has worried for a while that some of those flavorings target teen sweet tooths.
• Nicotine in e-cigs is addictive, just like it is in analog cigarettes.
• Teens who smoke e-cigs are also more likely to smoke regular cigarettes, according to a recent study, though scientists have not established a causal link between the two habits.
• Those other substances in e-cig cartridges range from "probably harmless" to "definitely bad for you" (more research is needed), and the ratio of one to the other can vary significantly from a local mom-and-pop vape shop to a big, professional purveyor.
• Because of that inconsistency, among other reasons, there's little data on exactly how bad e-cigs are for you.

Defenders of e-cigs, including some doctors, think vaping is a great way to quit smoking. E-cig makers can't legally claim this, but they pretty much do anyway.  Some studies have suggested though that vaping doesn't help smokers at all.

However, if millions of teens are encountering nicotine for the first time in e-cigarettes, rather than using e-cigarettes to wean themselves off tobacco, that's bad news for the pro-vape argument — and probably for those teens, too.

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"Social media is destroying our lives," a girl from Los Angeles said. 

"So why don't you go off it?" 

"Because then we would have no life."

Journalist Nancy Jo Sales spent 30 months traveling around the United States interviewing teenager girls and boys to find out what it's like to grow up as a teenager in a world saturated with social media.

In her book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, Sales highlights some interesting facts about today's American teenager technology, social media and dating habits. 

 It's a fascinating book that's worth reading in full. Here are a few thought-provoking findings:

SEE ALSO: Women are more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior after 3 drinks — and other data about booze and sex

A 2010 study found that 92% of American children have an online presence before the age of two.

Teenagers spend up to eleven hours a day staring at one screen or another.

The Pew Research Center found that 73% of teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen own smartphones.

Snapchat was built on the appeal of photos and messages that expire and disappear. But in April of this year, the app evolved to include a new revamped messaging system that's way more powerful than texting.

Now, it's become a core means of communication for some users, especially teens. 

While speaking with some members of Generation Z about what TBH really means and how to look cool on Instagram, we noticed a pattern: many of these teens were telling Tech Insider that they were using Snapchat as a primary means of communication.

And while some might be quick to wonder if it's due to the fact that Snapchat messages and photos can disappear — thereby hiding anything illicit that teens may not want prying eyes to see — the teens we spoke with had far more diverse reasons than that for relying on Snapchat's messaging system. Through interviewing a few teens by text, TI discovered why they might choose Snapchat over iMessage and texting, and while the specifics of the way each teen uses the app vary, they all had one thing in common: convenience. 

"[My friends and I] will normally converse using pictures, which seems silly at the moment, but I know sometimes I will have a whole conversation and the pictures are of our dogs," says Liam, 17, "I’ll take a random picture just to support the conversation." 

The quick back and forth nature of the app, in addition to the ability to use photos and messages in a non-clunky setting, is appealing to teens. 

They tell TI that they use the chat function interchangeably with the photo sharing aspect of the app. If a message is too long to fit across a photo or it's something easier to explain via chat, "I’ll just slide over and type it out there. Then sometimes we’ll go back to normal Snapchatting," 15-year-old Isabella explains to TI. 

"I guess I don’t see the point in switching to iMessage when we’re both already in the Snapchat app," she says. Liam agrees: "I think more people think it’s odd to be Snapchatting and texting at the same time," he tells TI.

The convenience in being able to "slide over" from photo to chat and back again extends to the ability to share news. "I do that when someone photo snaps me a question or something and I know my response is too long to fit into a photo snap, and I send news stories on chat too," Laura, 15, explains. 

Isabella is a fan of Cosmo and BuzzFeed's stories, and says she shares them with her friends in the app regularly.

Additionally, the app features "stories" that anyone added as a "friend" can see, which makes it less formal for teens — almost like a community, they say. The informality of a Snapchat stories also gives users choice: They can watch someone else's story, or not, with no pressure or obligation to reply like there would be with a message or photo sent directly.

These stories offer a view into what someone is doing, and users don't even need to interact with one another to stay up to date. Thomas, 14, says he uses Snapchat for exactly that purpose. "I use it every day to see what my friends are up to and to communicate," he tells TI.

What you add to your story determines what people think you're up to, and again, it offers a lack of formality because it's out there for everyone to see. 16-year-old Nora adds pictures or videos to her story when "it’s something that more than one person would like to see or I want to show people something without sending it to a specific group of people," she says. 

Nearly all of them agree that Snapchat is a more casual way of communicating. "I’d be more likely to message someone on Snapchat that I’m not close to," explains Laura. 

Ultimately, Snapchat offers things iMessage and texting can't — including a real-time video option — and as a result, has become the new way of communicating for teens who want more. 

"It’s almost like this odd progression," Liam says. "Phone calls were for serious calls while texting was more casual, and now texting has almost become more serious and Snapchat has become this informal way of communicating."

SEE ALSO: A terrible myth is surrounding millennials and entrepreneurship

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Screw the old-fashioned idea that women in their 40s are too old to have kids.

New British datashows that women over the age of 40 are becoming new moms at a higher rate than teens for the first time in seven decades. 

"The fertility rate for women aged 40 and over rose above the rate for women aged under 20 for the first time since 1947," according to a 2015 report by the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics. "The largest percentage increase in fertility rates was for women aged 40 and over (3.4%); this rate has more than [tripled] since 1981." 

Across the pond, many American women are waiting to start having kids until after 30 and giving birth long after 40. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the percentage of first-time mothers between the ages of 30 and 34 increased dramatically from 2000 to 2014.

Now, women over 35 are giving birth to a whopping 9.1% of American newborns, and the birth rate for women aged 40 to 44 reached 10.6 births per 1,000 women in 2014. 

These statistics reflect a clear demographic trend: Women are getting pregnant later in life, even though their fertility ostensibly decreases with age. Part of the reason for this has to do with improved fertility treatment technology, but it's not just that birth rates are rising among older women: it's that they are falling among younger women as well. 

In the United States alone, the birth rate for younger women fell 15% between 2007 and 2012, according to a study by the Urban Institute, largely because young women are postponing motherhood to focus on their careers and financial security. Reports from the Pew Research Center show that an increasing number of women are choosing to opt out of parenthood altogether. 

The rising birth rate among older women, coupled with the declining birth rate among younger women, shows a clear demographic shift: Women are increasingly refusing to listen to alarmist rhetoric about "biological clocks" and opting instead to have kids on their own schedules, if they even want to have kids at all.

All things considered, maybe it's time to stop associating fertility with youth and start framing it in the context of healthy family planning. 

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There have been a few milestones reached in our family this summer. We just returned from my son's first college visit, and my daughter turned 20.

With the start of his senior year of high school approaching and reflecting on her last days as a teen, I've done some thinking about my younger days, too.

I've thought about how decisions I made as a teen have influenced my life — rather than focusing on how I learned from my mistakes. (And yes, I made plenty of mistakes — and had a lot of learning to do, but that's another post!)

Today I want to focus on five good decisions I made, and how they helped make me rich.

But before we go on, let's clear up this idea of being rich. Even at FI (Financial Independence), I am not rich at all based on society's definition of the term — (as a matter of fact, I'd be FAR from rich by most people's standards). We don’t live in a big house or drive expensive cars, and our investment accounts are nowhere near seven figures. (And I've always said if someone breaks in our house, they will be very sad about what's not there!)

So I’ll side with author Harvey Mackay, that "Being rich isn’t about money. Being rich is a state of mind." And I think having a rich state of mind comes a lot easier when you’ve made a few smart decisions as a teen. It'll likely lead you to the kind of rich that everyone else thinks of, too …

So what did I do as a teenager that helped make me rich?

1. I worked different part-time jobs

I delivered papers, babysat, taught swim lessons, lifeguarded, bussed tables, and waitressed. Those jobs helped me learn to be responsible, to manage my time, and to work with people of all ages and backgrounds. And these were all things that helped me be successful in my first teaching job, too.

Having a variety of jobs as a teen helped me develop a rich state of mind, and the money I earned bought some freedom to make choices, too.

2. I worked with kids

Babysitting and teaching swim lessons were the introduction to my future career. If I had not spent those summers learning how to work with kids (even when they refused to do things and cried — and yes, there were many tears at that pool), I'm not sure that I would have found my passion for teaching.

The passion became my career, and my career financed my future!

3. I played different sports

I swam from first grade through college, but I didn't do what many kids do today — focus on one sport. I tried volleyball and tennis, softball and skiing. I was good at swimming, but I could play almost anything.

How does that help make me rich? I'm not afraid to try new things now. I'll hike and kayak, and I've even finished two marathons. (If you've ever thought of running a marathon, I highly recommend it as a "bucket list" goal – and I am not much of a runner at all!)

In addition to keeping healthy, I've also monetized my activities by doing things such as officiating and coaching.

Interesting side note: I coached swimming with Olympian Ryan Lochte's mom when Ryan was little! It is AMAZING to watch him swim and see his parents cheering in the stands! Go Ryan and Team USA!

Being active will grow your rich state of mind, but it can help grow your finances, too. Plus, you never know who you might meet along the way!

This teenager is making bank.

Benjamin Kapelushnik — who goes by Benjamin "Kickz"— is the wildly successful 16-year-old from Florida whose Instagram boasts a life of luxury.

He's the young entrepreneur behind the rare sneaker reselling website, Sneakerdon.com, Lauren Schwartzberg writes in a recent profile in New York Magazine.

He told New York Magazine that he's on track to make $1 million in sales this year. 

New York Magazine notes that he carefully researched both the sneaker and reselling businesses, and sold a pair of shoes that he bought a pair of LeBron X MVPs for $400...for $4,000. He was in the eighth grade. He then moved to buying shoes in bulk, and he soon got the attention of the rich and famous. When he met DJ Khaled and started appearing in his Snapchat videos, his career really took off.

Further, he's not just any sneaker reseller: he's a sneaker dealer to the stars, like Rick Ross — who performed at his bar mitzvah, New York Magazine notes.

Schwartzberg calls him their "sneaker broker."

He's frequently seen hanging out with famous rappers.

For a while, somepeople wondered who he was, because he frequently appeared in DJ Khaled's Snapchat story. He'd tell Khaled that business was "booming."

"That was just the thing that came to my head. It’s, like, a word, you know? It’s like, Boomin'. It’s just a boomin' word. It’s just boomin'," he said to New York Magazine.

And it is. On Sneakerdon.com, these covetable sneakers go for very high prices. He told New York Magazine that he makes more money from his sales than from any deals he procures with famous folks.

"What I make in one day on the website I can’t make in a month with the rappers," he said to the magazine.

He likes to network heavily to make connections.

"Go with a girl to the movies, go with your brother to the movies — that’s cool, but I have no interest in going out to parties and not networking with anyone. Not only does it get boring, you’re not getting ahead," he said to New York Magazine.

He's also very cautious with how he forms relationships with celebrities.

"I don’t look at rappers like, 'Wow, that’s a rapper," he said to New York. "If every time you’re like, ‘Oh my God, can I get a picture?'  you’ll never form a relationship

As for what's next for his business?

New York notes that he has a reality show potentially in the works, and that the goal to open up brick and mortar stores. 

In December, he told Complex that he had bigger aspirations.

"I’m not going to be 26, 27 years old selling sneakers on Instagram. I’m doing this as a 'kid thing' right now; it’s going to be a lot wider scale," he said to Complex.

For the full New York Magazine story, click here.

SEE ALSO: Teens want 3 things from stores today — and it's becoming a nightmare for Macy's and Nordstrom

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NOW WATCH: Teens reveal their favorite apps and the winner is clear

If you have kids, you're more likely to buy soda.

That might sound counterintuitive, given all that we know about how bad soda is for people — especially kids.

But according to retail-sales data collected by Nielsen over the last year, families with teenage children spent 27% more per household on soda than the average household.

The difference was even wider for nondiet soda — families with teenagers spent 40% more than the average.

"I definitely do see that households that have teenagers, and children in general but especially teenagers, [spend more] when it comes to soft drinks," Jordan Rost, Nielsen's vice president of consumer insights, told Business Insider. "More so than age, it really does have to do if there are children in the household."

Having children provides an immediate boost in a household's nondiet-soft-drink purchasing. Households with no children spend 9% less on soft drinks than the general population. A family with kids sees soda spending increase, on average, as the kids gets get older.

The higher-than-average consumption doesn't just apply to soda. In fact, households with teenagers drink more than their fair share of beverages across the board.

Households with teens drank 38% more energy drinks, 40% more enhanced water, and 25% more instant tea than could be expected for the group.

"There's so much greater choice that teenagers have," say Rost. "Everything from energy drinks to enhanced waters … all those things [are more popular] among those same households. I think it speaks more to the audience than even the beverage themselves."

Bottled, ready-to-drink beverages provide convenience to busy families with teenage children. Rost says that, increasingly, people are using beverages as substitutes for snacks, something that particularly appeals to parents attempting to keep up with teen appetites.

As soda sales overall continue to fall, the reliance on families with kids are becoming all the more important to giants like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Per capita soda sales have dropped 25% since 1998, and the total volume of soda consumed in the US dropped 1.2% in 2015. Both Coke and Pepsi are investing in beverages like tea, energy drinks, and juices — all drinks that families with teenagers are eagerly buying.

Households that make more than $100,000 a year are buying the least amount of nondiet soft drinks — only 75% of what could be expected. Households making under $20,000 a year spend 12% more on regular soda sales than the general population, and those making $20,000 to $29,999 spend 21% more.

It is nosecret that the soda industry targets black and Latino communities. But according to Nielsen's data, minority households actually buy less soda than white households. While white households buy 8% more soft drinks than the average expected amount in households across all races, Hispanic households buy 13% less and black households buy 29% less. Asian-American households only purchase about half of what could be expected, falling short by 47%.

SEE ALSO: Millennials reveal 100 brands they love

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NOW WATCH: Chipotle is giving away more free food and drinks — here's how to get some

Chipotle just made a cringeworthy attempt to appeal to its youngest generation of customers with a tweet referencing sex and marijuana.

The restaurant chain posted a poll on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon asking"How many burritos?" People were asked to vote between two numbers: 69 or 420.

The numbers are popular slang; 69 refers to a sex position, and 420 refers to so-called weed day, an annual holiday on April 20 — or 4/20 — celebrated by pot smokers.

The tweet started going viral Tuesday afternoon, gathering more than 1,700 retweets within a couple hours.

It appeared to be an attempt by Chipotle to seem cool and win back young customers, but it was mostly mocked on Twitter.

"You gotta chill," one Twitter user wrote, to which Chipotle replied, "Why?"

Another person wrote: "This is pretty inappropriate. It's like someone's dad trying to be cool."

A third person asked if the tweet was real, and Chipotle responded, "As real as this burrito I'm eating."

Chipotle has been trying to drive traffic to its restaurants lately with tons of free food offers after it took a nosedive in the wake of an E. coli outbreak that sickened customers in 14 states.

Here are some of the reactions from Twitter:

SEE ALSO: The hidden costs of running a McDonald's restaurant

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NOW WATCH: There's a 2,000-person wait list for these $125 leggings

Age is but a number, and you don't have to be a teenager to play one on TV or film.

While some actors are closer in age to their character counterparts, others can be two or even 15 years older than the characters they portray.

Here are 12 celebrities who are well-known for their teen roles, even though they weren't teens at the time.

Troian Bellisario was cast as Spencer Hastings on "Pretty Little Liars," an 18-year-old high school student.

In real life, Bellisario is 30. She was 24 when she was cast as the high school junior. The character has since graduated college after a five-year time jump.

Minka Kelly played high-school cheerleader Lyla Garrity in "Friday Night Lights."

With a population of just over 11,000, Dobbs Ferry, New York is your typical sleepy town, except for one thing.

When the first school bell rings, kids are wide awake.

Last September, Dobbs Ferry School District joined a small but growing cluster of schools around the US that have started pushing back their middle and high school start times in an effort to combat student grogginess.

Bolstered by a mountain of sleep science research that says pre-teens and teenagers are some of the most sleep-deprived people and would actually do better in school with more rest, these forward-thinking schools are finally cutting worn-out students a break.

They're letting kids sleep in.

What happens when you start later?

Dobbs Ferry Superintendent Dr. Lisa Brady tells Business Insider that prior to the 2015-2016 school year, middle schoolers started at 8:15 a.m. and high schoolers at 7:30 a.m. Under the new policy, each school now starts and ends 45 minutes later. Both schools have experienced tremendous benefits, Brady says.

Following a survey issued at the end of the last school year, Brady says "it was clear from both the parents and the kids, overwhelmingly, that the mornings were just less stressful."

Many of the kids reported having more time to eat breakfast and get ready for school, while parents said they didn't have to drag kids out of bed or yell at them to hurry up. Once students got to school, they felt more alert. At night, they tended to reported going to bed at the same time, even though the new schedule freed up an extra 45 minutes.

In Seattle, 85% of middle and high schools in the 2016-2017 school year swapped start times with the elementary schools. Now the older kids start at 8:45 while the youngsters start at 7:55.

Kira Hoffman, an eighth-grader at Jane Addams Middle School, tells KUOW that she "no longer feels super-rushed or worried about how much I've slept, or when I'm going to get to school, or if I'm going to be late."

In Pennsylvania, a new hope

The trend has been building steam for the past few years. At the advocacy group Start School Later, employees have been compiling an ongoing list of US schools and districts that have made the move to push back the first bell. So far, schools in 44 states have jumped onboard.

One of those is Solebury School, in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Director of Studies Rick Tony has pushed for a robust set of changes to the typical school schedule.

Beginning this academic year, kids at Solebury, a private boarding and day school, don't start until 8:30 a.m. On Wednesdays, it's 9:00 a.m. That's a full hour later than in years past, when the first bell sounded promptly at 8.

At the same time, the school also moved from six 50-minute classes to four 80-minute classes. With fewer teachers to assign homework, Tony says, kids can still enjoy their nights even if they get home slightly later.

"Every time we ask for feedback, the results come back 10 to 1, positive to negative," he tells Business Insider.

Tony is also a math teacher, and he says his students already produce better work on a more consistent basis, even though the schedule is just a month old. Around the campus, kids seem more relaxed now that they're not juggling as much work as early in the day.

"The freneticism is definitely reduced this year," he says, adding that in a few months he plans to follow up with teachers to get harder data about student achievement.

The downsides of delaying start times

Negative responses to later start times are rare, but they do happen.

Brady says some parents at Dobbs Ferry have found it harder to complete the necessary morning rituals and still get to work on time. Meanwhile, Tony says the issue at Solebury is finding enough buses for kids. In both cases, the officials say parents have the option to drop their kids off at school before the first bell so they can eat breakfast, charge their devices, or just hang out.

Brady has also found challenges with athletics and after-school clubs. In years prior, teams had no trouble getting to away games. Now they have less time to get there, and they have to deal with worse traffic.

"The kids feel really rushed," she says.

Once they finally get home, many say they have less time for all the homework they've been assigned. Brady says the school is brainstorming changes to the school day similar to those made at Solebury.

It takes a village

In districts where schools have yet to listen to the sleep science research, parents have begun to speak up.

A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times included voices from frustrated parents who were fed up with coaxing bleary-eyed adolescents to get dressed. "I have been saying for years that kids, especially high school students, should not be expected to be in their seats trying to learn anything in the early morning hours," a parent named Paula Del said.

When asked why more schools have yet to take her district's lead, Brady speculated it has something to do with generational pride. Even if the science is rock-solid, many administrators and parents simply don't pity the sleepy teen. Waking up is hard, but it's a part of life.

"I get that years ago we all walked 100 miles in the snow to school," Brady says. "But we know better now about the adolescent brain, and we know about their natural sleep rhythms being different than adults'."

SEE ALSO: Evidence suggests preschool is a waste of time and money

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here are the most elite boarding schools in America

My sister is 14 years old — and constantly glued to her phone.

She and I are both iPhone users, but the apps I can't live without don't seem to demand the same kind of time commitment as hers do. 

The apps my sister uses are all about communication. While Venmo, Google Maps and the Chase app are super important to me, my 14-year-old sister is far less concerned with convenience and far more concerned with getting in touch with people. 

Here are the apps this particular teenager — and many others like her — can't live without. 

SEE ALSO: The 11 iPhone apps I can't live without

Snapchat

Ever since Snapchat launched its streaks feature, having long streaks has gotten so important that my sister is constantly Snapchatting to maintain her streaks. Texting through the Snapchat app is also a popular option, especially since the messages disappear. My sister claims Snapchat is a great way to keep up with friends, especially her camp friends that live far away. Not only that, Snapchat's "Discover" page is her primary news source. 

FaceTime

Gone are the days of memorizing your best friend's phone number or racing to the ringing home phone before your parents could pick it up. It's all about FaceTime now and my sister seems to constantly talk to people on it. In fact, for a short amount of time, our Apple IDs got mixed up and my phone was blowing up with my sister's friends trying to contact her via FaceTime. She's a big fan of the app and claims she uses it to "study" with her friends. 

Facebook/Messenger

When my sister started high school back in September, she quickly learned she had to get on Facebook. But for her, it has nothing to do with posting pictures or status updates. My sister is on Facebook because many of the clubs she is part of, including Model United Nations and the high school newspaper, use Facebook and Facebook Messenger to communicate information about deadlines and meeting times. 

Kabul (AFP) - "I cannot do it without Viagra," the anonymous Afghan caller whispered into the phone, wary of being overheard by his family.

The voice on the other end of the line was soothing, professional and reassuring: "Dear brother, don't be embarrassed. Your problem is not uncommon. We'll help you find a solution without potency pills."

In Afghanistan's conservative, highly gender-segregated society discussing sexual problems publicly is not just culturally frowned upon but can easily be misconstrued as a sign of perversion.

But the country's youth have found a non-judgmental friend in a government helpline that offers advice on taboo subjects -- from ways to perk up virility to erectile dysfunction and even homosexuality.

"If you seek advice from friends or family members about treating impotence, you will be labelled immoral, shameless or unmanly," the caller, a young man in his 20s, told AFP after receiving expert advice.

"This helpline is a blessing," he added.

Set up in 2012 with the help of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the youth helpline is run by 10 call centre consultants in Kabul –- men and women trained by a professional sexologist –- who field hundreds of calls a day from distressed Afghans.

The consultants also offer advice to the lovelorn and field queries on dark subjects such as depression and forced marriage, but about 70 percent of the calls are about sexual dysfunction, said the centre's director Abdullah Shahed.

"Young men call to talk about issues ranging from masturbation to premature ejaculation," Shahed told AFP.

"And young women call to discuss contraception, broken hymens and the fear of facing their wedding night." 

Afghanistan's growing youth population –- the 9/11 generation, as it is known — is often torn between modernity and tradition, between their sexual cravings and their desire to be religious puritans.

More than 60 percent of the population is under 25, a staggering number in a country where sex education is non-existent in schools and sex counsellors are culturally dismissed as a Western concept.

Marriage is often the only outlet for pent-up sexual desires, as dating or any social co-mingling of the sexes is frowned upon. But many young people cannot afford the steep bride price, a sort of reverse dowry that men pay to the girl's family.

Sexual frustration and hormonal rage are silent but pervasive problems, with some experts linking them to the violent aggression tearing the country apart.

"Sex problems often lead to domestic abuse, second wives (polygamy) and separation," Shahed said. "We try to reassure young and women there is always a way out. They are not alone."

The Afghan health ministry also set up "youth friendly" clinics in the Afghan capital last year, which offer face-to-face sessions with counsellors on subjects including sex. That they are busting taboos is evident in the growing number of women visiting them.

"I was unable to talk about my problems to my mother or my sister," 21-year-old Rayhana told AFP at one such clinic in Kabul. "But here I can talk openly."

Among other things, the call centre and clinics seek to warn young Afghans about the dangers of sex addiction, unprotected intercourse and Viagra abuse.

The little blue pill –- known locally by myriad names such as "cobra", "rocket" and even "family boosting tablet"— was unknown to many Afghans before the US invasion in late 2001 that toppled the Taliban regime.

But it is now in high demand in the country.

Such is its popularity in post-Taliban Afghanistan that it was reported the CIA, in an unusual incentive, were offering the potency drug to win over Afghan warlords and chieftains in the war against insurgents.

"We advise our callers not to turn to Viagra or opium for their sexual problems," Shahed said. "Instead we ask them to treat their anxiety and adopt a healthy lifestyle."

Often, another forbidden subject comes up in the discussions –- homosexuality, which is demonised as a deviant sexual behaviour, prohibited in Islam.

An oft repeated query from callers is: "Is there a cure for homosexuality?"

"Once a lesbian called and complained of depression because her partner was getting married," Shahed said.

Abdullah said there was little his counsellors could do except try to help the callers find ways to think about and understand their predicament, with questions like "Do you think you can continue living as a lesbian in Afghanistan?"

The program is struggling against the prevalent cultural conservatism.

When Afghan health officials linked to the program recently visited Kabul University for a youth awareness campaign, a number of students angrily accused them of promoting immorality.

"We tried to explain to the students that the program is in accordance with sharia law and there is nothing un-Islamic about it," said Afghan health ministry official Sayed Alisha Alawi.

"We face an uphill task. Many people believe having a healthy discussion about sex is equal to spreading immorality," he told AFP.

SEE ALSO: Taliban tell Trump: 'It's time to leave Afghanistan'

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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows the best and worst states to raise your family

With a population of just over 11,000, Dobbs Ferry, New York is your typical sleepy town, except for one thing: When the first school bell rings, kids actually feel awake.

Prior to the 2015-2016 school year, Dobbs Ferry middle schoolers started at 8:15 a.m. and high schoolers at 7:30 a.m. Under the new policy, both schools now start approximately 30 minutes later and end 15 minutes later.

In making those changes, the Dobbs Ferry School District joined a small but growing group of middle and high schools around the US that have started pushing back their start times in an effort to combat grogginess.

The changes are bolstered by a mountain of sleep science research that says pre-teens and teenagers are some of society's most sleep-deprived people and would actually do better in school with more rest.

These forward-thinking schools are finally listening — and letting kids sleep in.

What happens when you start later?

A new study involving 30,000 high-school students across 29 schools in seven states found that graduation rates and attendance rates both went up in the two years after schools pushed start times to at least 8:30 a.m.

Dobbs Ferry Superintendent Dr. Lisa Brady tells Business Insider that the schools there have experienced tremendous benefits. Following a survey issued at the end of the 2015-2016 school year (the first full year with later start times), Brady says "it was clear from both the parents and the kids, overwhelmingly, that the mornings were just less stressful."

Many of the kids reported having more time to eat breakfast and get ready for school, while parents said they didn't have to drag kids out of bed or yell at them to hurry up. Once students got to school, they felt more alert. At night, they tended to reported going to bed at the same time, even though the new schedule freed up an extra 45 minutes.

Other schools have seen similar benefits. In Seattle, 85% of middle and high schools in the 2016-2017 school year swapped start times with the elementary schools. Now the older kids start at 8:45 while the youngsters start at 7:55.

Kira Hoffman, an eighth-grader at Jane Addams Middle School, told KUOW that she "no longer feels super-rushed or worried about how much I've slept, or when I'm going to get to school, or if I'm going to be late."

In Pennsylvania, a new hope

So far, hundreds of schools in 44 states have jumped on the late-start bandwagon, according to advocacy group Start School Later, which has been compiling a list of US schools and districts that have pushed back the first bell.

One of those is Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where Director of Studies Rick Tony pushed for a robust set of changes to the school schedule.

Kids at Solebury, a private boarding and day school, now start at 8:30 a.m most days, and 9:00 a.m. on Wednesdays. In years past, the first bell sounded promptly at 8.

The school also moved from six 50-minute classes per day to four 80-minute classes. With fewer teachers to assign homework, Tony says, kids can still enjoy their nights even if they get home slightly later.

"Every time we ask for feedback, the results come back 10 to 1, positive to negative," he tells Business Insider.

Tony also teaches math, and says his students are already producing better work on a more consistent basis, even though the schedule is just six months old. Around campus, he says, kids seem more relaxed since they're not juggling as much work early in the day.

"The freneticism is definitely reduced this year," he says, adding that he plans to follow up with teachers to get harder data about student achievement.

The downsides of delaying start times

Negative responses to later start times are rare, but they do happen.

Lisa Brady says some parents in Dobbs Ferry have found it harder to complete the necessary morning rituals and still get to work on time. Meanwhile, Rick Tony says the issue at Solebury is finding enough buses for kids. In both cases, officials say parents have the option to drop their kids off at school before the first bell so they can eat breakfast, charge their devices, or just hang out.

Brady has also found challenges with after-school athletics and clubs. In years prior, teams had no trouble getting to away games. Now they have less time to get there, and they have to deal with worse traffic.

"The kids feel really rushed," she says.

Many kids also say they have less time to do homework once they finally get home. Brady says the Dobbs Ferry schools are brainstorming potential changes to the school day similar to those made at Solebury.

It takes a village

In districts where schools have not started to take sleep science research into account, parents have begun to speak up.

An op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times in September 2016 included voices from frustrated parents who were fed up with coaxing bleary-eyed adolescents to get dressed. "I have been saying for years that kids, especially high school students, should not be expected to be in their seats trying to learn anything in the early morning hours," a parent named Paula Del said.

When asked why more schools have yet to take her district's lead, Brady speculated that it has something to do with generational pride. Even if the science is rock-solid, many administrators and parents simply don't pity the sleepy teen. Waking up is hard, but it's a part of life.

"I get that years ago we all walked 100 miles in the snow to school," Brady says. "But we know better now about the adolescent brain, and we know about their natural sleep rhythms being different than adults'."

SEE ALSO: Evidence suggests preschool is a waste of time and money

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here are the most elite boarding schools in America

This post from Sam Harris, an entrepreneur, engineer, and former data scientist at the U.S. Air Force, originally appeared on Quora as an answer to the question, "Is the United States on the brink of a political revolution?"

No. We don't have enough teenagers.

When I was an officer in the Air Force, I was a data scientist, and at one point we were tasked with determining what level of violence in Iraq could be considered "normal" so that we could declare victory and leave with dignity.

Obviously, the base level of violence in Iraq would be higher than in Sweden, but precisely how much higher and why? These were the questions.

We did analysis on hundreds of factors across centuries worth of data from hundreds of countries to determine what drove the levels of violence in a society. The worst violence levels are obviously during civil wars and government collapse.

We looked at wealth inequality, famine, disease, number of children per woman, infant mortality, median GDP, average GDP … literally hundreds of factors and their cross-dependencies that numbered in the quadrillions — think average GDP combined with median life expectancy combined with infant mortality combined with … you get the idea.

What we found was that the most significant factor was the number of individuals aged 13–19 relative to the number of individuals aged over 35. If the teenage group ever exceeded the over 35 group, violence increased to the point there was a very high chance of civil war. Furthermore, the opposite was true. If the 35+ year-olds outnumbered the teenagers, there was no chance of civil war.

Look at Democratic Republic of the Congo:

They have LOTS of teenagers relative to 35+ year-olds.

Now look at the United States:

Teenagers are drastically outnumbered by the 35+ year-olds in 2016. This was not the case in 1860, by the way. The US population pyramid looked a lot more like DRC at the start of our civil war.

These steep pyramids are caused by a combination of factors: high infant mortality, low life expectancy, and low female education. These factors combine to prevent women from using birth control and they "hedge" their losses of children by having a lot of them (too many, actually, even accounting for early deaths).

These numerous children then receive less attention, less affection, and less education. They don't have productive means of employment, and when they get hit with the wave of hormones we all experienced during our teenage years, they aren't in school, don't have a job, and don't have a mother to give them the love they need. All it takes is some charismatic leader to rally them behind a populist cause and boom the powder keg explodes.

The craziest part of my story was that we did this research in 2007. At the time, there were several countries that had the same population pyramid with tons of teenagers but low violence and no civil war: Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran (Tunisia wasn't as bad, actually).

The "bosses" said this was a real problem with our theory, and we tried to explain it away by saying maybe in the 21st century where dictators have access to fighter jets and tanks that they can hold the teenagers back from starting a civil war. Little did we know we had accidentally predicted the Arab Spring by nearly three years!

I love data. It lends measurability to beliefs. And the data says there is no way we are overthrowing our government in the United States through violence. There just aren't enough teenagers.

Author's note:

Based on all the awesome questions, I've noticed some themes and I'd like to add to my response:

1. Things really aren't that bad in the US

I would like to add an anecdote about how we tend to respond to people we disagree with: Right now, most people say nothing and just go about their day. A large minority go to the trouble of writing things on Facebook or Twitter in ALL CAPS. Still fewer actually go to the trouble of standing outside and holding a sign. And fewer still get into screaming matches. Even less than that will go so far as to physically hit someone they disagree with, and even less than that will actually kill those they disagree with.

In order to reach the levels of violence we saw during the US Civil War, at current population levels, there would have to be over 4,000 politically-motivated killings per day. And in order to reach the levels of violence seen during the DRC Civil War, at current US population levels, it would have to be nearly 25,000 politically-motivated deaths per day. So "there is no way we are overthrowing our government in the United States through violence."

2. I didn't really answer the question

BUT … to be fair … I didn't really answer the OP's question. The question was "Is the United States on the brink of a political revolution?" I talked about violence, how violence can be high during political revolution, and how violence is correlated to the teenagers-to-over-35 ratio. But that doesn't address the possibility of a political revolution without violence or a civil war that doesn't kill a huge amount of people.

Thank you, Kareem Elashmawy for pointing out all of these peaceful revolutions:

1968 Prague Spring
1989 Velvet Revolution
1989 Peaceful Revolution (Germany)
1989 Bulgaria
1991 Soviet Coup D'état
1974 Carnation Revolution
1979 Iranian Revolution
1986 Yellow Revolution
1990 Mongolian Revolution
2000 Bulldozer Revolution
2003 Rose Revolution
2004 Orange Revolution
2005 Cedar Revolution
2001 EDSA Revolution
2005 Ecuador Revolution

Lots of people are asking me about Ukraine's civil war with a population pyramid that doesn't have a lot of teenagers:

My response would be that the death toll is about 4,000 out of 45 million which is around 0.009%. For comparison, 2% of Americans died in our Civil War and 12% died in DRC. Ukraine is not having a very violent civil war by comparison, and many commenters from Ukraine have told me it is not really a civil war at all but rather an invasion made to look like a civil war. I don't know enough about Ukrainian/Russian politics to have an opinion on the subject. However, the correlation between violence and teenagers still holds true for this example.

The most fascinating counter-example was actually Iran in 2005. They had a HUGE bulge in teenage population at that time but a very low murder rate. Their teenage population has since stabilized, and was already significantly lower when the Arab Spring began in 2011.

3. Knowing what you don't know is knowledge

The question I actually answered was: What causes huge levels of violence? My answer was: Having too many teenagers.

People have been asking me all manner of related questions such as:

"So since you didn't answer the original question, what are the causes of political revolutions?"

"Is the violence caused by teenagers or just correlated to large teenage populations and a symptom of the other conditions that caused those large teenage populations in the first place?"

"X country has a lot of violence, why is there no revolution?"

"What can we do to fix this in the countries that are suffering or at risk?"

"Do high levels of teenagers lead to terrorism?"

"Are you sure it's the lack of a mother's love and not the lack of a father's role model that causes the violence?"

"What are the trends for age of population in more peaceful revolutions?"

My answer to these and dozens of others is: I don't know.

Knowing what you don't know is knowledge. One of the things you learn as a data scientist is that most of the things we think we know are actually illusions. You start with a hypothesis — a gut instinct about what you think is happening in the data — but then you try your hardest to prove that your gut instinct is wrong.

If you "fail to reject" that hypothesis with more than 95% confidence, then you can feel confident that know something about that one specific question. The second someone asks you a related but not identical question, you have to start over from scratch and do it all again.

These answers are very expensive. This was the work of a dozen well-paid men and women working off and on for months. It's not like I figured it out on my own one afternoon, so unfortunately, I can't easily answer all of your other questions.

I think this whole process will get much faster and much cheaper once machine learning algorithms become more ubiquitous. You can, for example, drag and drop workflows in Azure Machine Learning Studio and let the computer do the hard work. Things that used to take several people weeks to do can now be done in seconds. I encourage all of you who are curious to check it out. They have beginner videos — you don't have to be a professional data scientist to use the models. That is what so amazing about where this technology is going!

SEE ALSO: Lawmakers across the US are trying to make it easier for young people to vote — including lowering the voting age to 17

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NOW WATCH: Animated map of what Earth would look like if all the ice melted

Raising a kid is about teaching them the way the world works. If you shelter them from real life — and most every parent knows how tempting it is to do just that — they'll only have a harder time once they're on their own.

This is very logical, and very abstract, stuff. But when he visited the Business Insider office in May, marriage and family therapist Hal Runkel helped turn it into concrete advice.

It starts with understanding that you should "give [kids] more freedom than you're comfortable with, earlier than you're comfortable with." What's more, you should "give them choices before they actually ask for them."

Here's how that might play out. Let's say your teenager asks if he can go to a friend's party Sunday night and stay out until 2 a.m. Your best response, according to Runkel, would be: "Well, what do you think?"

(Runkel didn't use the specific example of a party, but this response should work for pretty much anything your kid asks your permission for.)

"Let them wrestle with that," Runkel said. In other words, let your kid put himself in your shoes — i.e. an adult's shoes — and evaluate the pros and cons of staying out all night at a party on a school night.

Because, eventually, that's exactly what your kid will have to do — when he's in college, or when he lands his first job.

"I always counsel parents," Runkel said, "to parent your child in such a way that by the time they're a [high-school] senior, they have no rules from you whatsoever."

It's "like a dress rehearsal for the year after that," Runkel said of senior year of high school. "You have no idea what they're doing from one minute to the next."

Everyone remembers those college freshmen who were so thrilled to be out from under their parents' thumb when they arrived on campus that they overdid it on drinking and partying and under-did it on studying. Presumably, you don't want your kid to be one of those students.

Of course, you should take Runkel's advice with a grain of salt. If your high-school senior decides to spend every school night at a party, for example, you might want to have a discussion with him about his values.

Ultimately, though, it's about guiding your kid through the transition to adulthood, rather than acting like their keeper until they turn 18, at which point you set them loose.

"I'm taking my emotion out of it," Runkel said. "Because I'm wanting you to taste the freedom and responsibility of life."

SEE ALSO: A family therapist says too many parents make the same mistake and end up with spoiled kids

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NOW WATCH: A family therapist says you are not 'responsible for your kids'