Tuesday, March 30, 2010

It's a Numbers Game (and what a game!)

The factoids in that YouTube video (see link below), which were presented to the Board of Sony in 2008, include:

To be 1 in a million in China means there are 1,300 people in China just like you.

China is the #1 English-speaking country in the world

Top 25% (by IQ) in India is a group larger than the entire US population

There are more honors kids in India than kids in US

The top-10 in-demand jobs today did not exist in 2004

We are currently preparing students for jobs that do not yet exist, using technology that has not yet been invented in order to solve problems that (today) we don’t even know are problems

Today’s students will have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38

1 in 4 employees today have been with their employer less than a year – half have been with their employer less than 5 years

1 in 8 US couples who were married in 2008 met online

There were (in 2008) 200 million users on MySpace

If MySpace was a country, it would be the world’s 5th largest (between Indonesia and Brazil)

#1 Broadband-use (per capita) country in world is Bermuda – US is #19 and Japan is #22

In 2008, there were 31 billion searches on Google every month – in 2006, that number was 2.7 billion (where did people go before Google to find information?)

First text message was sent in 1992 – in 2008, on every day in 2008, there were more text messages sent than there are people alive on earth (roughly 6 billion)

Technology is penetrating the population at a greater rate than ever before. To reach 50 million in a market audience:

Radio took 38 years
TV took 13 years
Internet took 04 years
iPod took 03 years
Facebook took 02 years

In 1984 there were 1 thousand Internet devices
In 1992 there were 1 million Internet devices
In 2008, there were 1 billion internet devices

Today there are 540,000 words in the English language
In Shakespeare’s time, there were just 100,000 words in English

One week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than an 18th Century human would encounter in his entire life

4 extabytes of unique information (that’s 4x1019th) will be generated this year. That is more than all the unique bytes of information generated in the previous 5,000 years.

New technology information is doubling every 2 years – so for Tech students, half of what they learn in year-one will be outdated by year-three

NTT Japan has developed a new fiber optic cable that can push 14 Trillion bits/second – that’s 2,660 CDs or 210 million phone calls/second

This cable capacity is tripling every six months and will do so for the next 20 years

By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that will have more computational ability than the human brain.

By 2049, a single computer selling for about $1,000 will exceed the current combined computational ability of the entire human species (about 6 billion brains)

Every five minutes in 2008:

67 US babies are born
274 Chinese babies are born
395 Indian babies are born
694,000 songs are illegally downloaded

As fascinating as these facts are, they are two years out of date, and about as relevant as the newspaper headlines in Milwaukee on January 24, 1922. Still, they indicate the direction we’re all going.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY