Shift Happens

Someone sent me the link to this presentation, which you can watch at:
http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv

Or, if you're like me and prefer to read things rather than sit through a presentation, I had my assistant transcribe it -- see below.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of all of these statistics, but they're pretty sobering about the challenges our nation faces -- and further underscore the need to vastly improve our public schools:

The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of America.

In India, it’s the top 28%.

Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids.

And here's a piece of trivia:

Name this country:

• Richest in this world
• Largest military
• Center of world business and finance
• Strongest education system
• World Center of innovation and invention
• Currency the world standard of value
• Highest standard of living

It happened to them and, at the rate we're going, it will happen to us!
-------------------------

Did you know?

Size does matter.

If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you.

In India, there are 1,100 people just like you.

The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s is greater than the total population of America.

In India, it’s the top 28%.

Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids.

Did you know?

China will soon become the number one English-speaking country in the world.

If you took every single job in the U.S. today and shipped it to China, it would still have a labor surplus.

During the course of this presentation, 60 babies will be born in the U.S., 244 babies will be born in China, 351 babies will be born in India.

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10 to 14 jobs by the age of 38.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 1 out of 4 workers today is working for a company whom they have been employed less than a year.

More than 1 out of 2 are working for a company whom they have worked less than 5 years.

According to the former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top 10 jobs that will be on demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist; using technologies that haven’t yet been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

Name this country:

• Richest in this world
• Largest military
• Center of world business and finance
• Strongest education system
• World Center of innovation and invention
• Currency the world standard of value
• Highest standard of living

ENGLAND in 1900

Did you know?

The U.S is 20^th in the world in broadband internet penetration (Luxembourg just passed us).

Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone.

The U.S. Federal government spent less than half as much on research and innovation in education.

1 in every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.

There are over 106 million registered users of MySpace (as of September 2006).

If MySpace were a country, it would be the 11^th-largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico).

The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.

Did you know?

We are living in exponential times.

There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month.

To whom were these question addressed B.G. (before Google)?

The number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the population of the planet.

There are about 540,000 words in the English language about as 5 times as many as during Shakespeare’s time.

More than 3,000 new books are published daily.

It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Time’s contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18^th century.

It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 10 to the 18^th power) of unique information will be generated worldwide this year.

That’s estimated to be more than in the previous 5,000 years.

The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years.

For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

It is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.

Third-generation fiber optics have recently been tested by both NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits per second down one strand of fiber.

That’s 1,900 CD’s, or 150 million simultaneous phone calls, every second.

It’s currently tripling about every 6 months and is expected to do so for at least the next 20 years.

The fiber is already there. They’re just improving the switches on the ends, which means the marginal cost of these improvements is effectively $0.

Predictions are that e-paper will be cheaper than real paper.

47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year.

The $100 laptop project is expecting to ship between 50 to 100 million laptops a year to children in underdeveloped countries.

Predictions are that by 2013 a super computer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.

By 2023, when 1^st-graders will be just 23 years old and beginning their (first) careers it will only take a $1,000 computer to exceed the capabilities of the human brain.

And while the technical predictions farther out than about 15 years are hard to make predictions are that by 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.

What does it all mean?

Shift happens.

Now you know.