Did you know?
I would like to share some thought-provoking information with you. Did you know:
— China will soon become the country with the most English-fluent speakers in the world?
— The 25 percent of India’s population with the highest IQs is more numerous than the total population of the United States? This means that India has more “honors 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, using 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 student will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38?
— One in four workers have been with their current employer for less than a year. One in two has been there less than five years?
— One out of eight 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 fifth largest in the world?
— The country with the most extensive “Broadband Internet Penetration” is Bermuda? Nineteenth is the U.S.
We are living in exponential times:
— There are 31 billion searches on Google every month. In 2006, this number was 2.7 billion.
— The first commercial text message was sent in December of 1992. Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet.
— It took radio 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million, T.V. 13 years, the Internet four years, the iPod three years and Facebook two years.
— The number of Internet devices in 1984 was 1,000, in 1992 was 1,000,000 and in 2008 it was 1,000,000,000.
— There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about five times as many as during 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 eighteenth century.
— It is estimated that four exabytes (4.0 x 10^19) of unique information will be generated this year. That is more than what was produced in the previous 5,000 years.
— The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. For students starting a four-year technical degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.
— By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capacities of the human brain. Predictions are that, by 2049, a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capacities of the entire human species.
— In the last five minutes, 67 babies were born in the U.S., 274 babies were born in China, 395 in India and 640,000 songs were illegally downloaded.
Some things to ponder…
— Scott Riddle is an IC Columnist and a senior majoring in finance.
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