Did you know? Interesting trivia...

A friend recently sent this to me. I thought it was very telling of the times we are living in.

• If you are one in a million in China, there are 1,300 of you
• China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world
• The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ...is greater than the total population of the United States --> India has more honor kids than America has kids
  
  
• The top 10 in demand jobs in 2010...did not exist in 2004
• We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist...to use technologies that haven't been invented...in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet
• The U.S> Department of Labor estimates that today's learner will have 10-14 jobs...by the age of 38
• 1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than a year
• 1 in 2 worker has been there less than five years
  
  
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online
• There are over 200 million registered users on MySpace. If MySpace were a country, it would be the 5th largest country in the world
• The #1 country in broadband internet penetration is...Bermuda. The U.S. is #19, and Japan is #22
  
  
• We are living in exponential times
• There are 31 billion searches on Goggle every month - in 2006, this number was 2.7 billion
• Who addressed these questions before Google?
• The first commercial text message was sent in December of 1992 - today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the population of the planet
• Years taken to reach a market audience of 50 million
  - radio, 38 years
  - TV, 13 years
  - Internet, 4 years
  - iPod, 3 years
  - Facebook, 2 years
• Number of Internet device in 1984 was 1,000
• Number of Internet device in 1992 was 1,000,000
• Number of Internet devices now is 1,000,000,000
• There are 540,000 words in the English language, about 5X as many as there were in Shakespeare's time
• It is estimated that a week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century
  
• It is estimated that 4 exabytes (4 x 10^18, or 4 billion gigabytes) of unique information will be generated this year - more than was generated in the previous 5,000 years
  
• The amount of new technical information in doubling every 2 years - for students starting a 4 year technical degree this means that...half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study
• NTT Japan has successfully tested a fibre optic cable that can transmit 14 trillion bits per second along a single strand of fibre. This is equivalent to 2,660 CDs or 210 million phone calls every second. This technology is tripling every 6 months and is expected to maintain this rate for the next 20 years
• By 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain -- predictions are that by 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capability of the human species
  
  
• During the time it took for you to read this, 67 babies were born in the U.S.; 274 babies were born in China; 395 babies were born in India; and 694,000 songs were downloaded illegally
  

Comment collection / collaboration tool

I stumbled across an innovative tool this week that may be very useful for us at the GPO. The tool is offered by Mixedink. MixedInk takes a fresh approach to collaborative writing. It's a fun, democratic and elegant way for people to weave their best ideas together. (Plus, it's free!)

I met with the founder of Mixedink Friday and got a complete demonstration of the tool. They are a small start up company that has developed this concept into a very user-friendly tool that is hosted in a cloud. This tool was used by Slate Magazine to allow the general public to create a proposed inauguration speech for President Obama (Mr. President, Give this Speech).

As the new administration moves to more open government, tools like this could play a big role.