Friday, February 20, 2009

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

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