Trends
The world is full of change. Here are just a few things that are taking place.
There are more honor roll children in China than there are kids in North America. And China will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world.
The US Department of Labor estimates today’s learner will have 10 to 14 jobs by the age of 38. 25% of employees are working a job they have been with less than a year. 50% of employees are working a job they have been with less than five years. If you think employers are going to keep employees long term, then you are out of the ordinary.
We are currently training students for jobs which don’t exist yet for technologies that have not been invented yet.
Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development alone. The US government spent less than $70 million on research and innovation in education.
If MySpace.com were a country it would be the tenth or eleventh largest populated in the world tied with Japan. There are more text messages sent each day than there are people on the planet.
It is estimated that 1.5 exabites (1.5 x 1018) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That is more than have been invented in the last 5000 years. The amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. For a college student, half of what they learn their first year of study will be outdated by their junior year. Yet, this is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.
Third generation fiber optics has been tested by NEC and Alcatel that pushes 10 trillion bits of information per second down one strand of fiber. It is currently tripling every six months and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. The fiber is already there, they are just improving the switches at the ends, which means the costs of these improvements is effectively zero.
Forty-seven million laptops were shipped internationally last year. The $100 laptop project is expected to ship 50 million to 100 million laptops a year to children of undeveloped nations.
It is suggested that a supercomputer will be as powerful (exceeds the computation capacity) as the human mind by 2013. And by 2023 this computer will be less than a $1000. And while technical predictions more than 15 years out are hard to make, by 2049 a $1000 computer will have the computational power of the human race.
There are many more statistics out there, but I don’t want to dazzle you with the crazy world we have been born in. There are some trends that you can catch up with and with a little effort, capitalize on. I have written up on just a few, and more will be coming soon.
I hope you enjoy them.