[Mark]

The following is from a video called "Shift happens" that I just watched.. I removed some of the useless facts, typed them all up, and corrected/added some extra bits. Some are quite technical, but I guess the main point is how different the world is going to be one day (and not that far away!) Scary!

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If you are one in a million in China - there are 1300 people just like you

The top 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ are greater than the TOTAL population of North America

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

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

Every fives minutes, 300 babies are born in India

Name this country.... Richest in the 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.

Nintendo invested more than $140 million in research and development in 2002 alone..... The US federal government spent less than half as much on research and development in education the same year.

1 out of every 8 couples married in the US last year met online

There are over 160 million registered users of MySpace. If MySpace were a country it would be the 6th largest in the world (between Brazil and Pakistan)

The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day. MySpace are making $30million (~£15m) a month in advertising revenue.

There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month, which is roughly 1000 searches a second.

The number of text messages sent and received every day worldwide exceeds the population of the planet (6,525,000,000+)

There are about 540,000 words in the English Language - five times as many as during Shakespeare's time.

More than 3000 new books are published daily.

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

The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. Therefore for students starting a 4 year technical college/university degree, half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.

Third generation fiber optics are currently being tested by NEC and Alcatel, that pushes 10 TRILLION bits per SECOND down ONE strand of fiber. That's the equivalent of 1900 CD's or 150 million simultaneous phone calls, every SECOND. 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.

47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year

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

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

By 2023, it will only take a $1000 computer to exceed the capabilities of the human brain.

And while predictions of greater than 15 years are hard to make.... predictions are that by 2049, a $1000 (~£500) computer will be able to exceed the computational capabilities of the human race.

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- Mark

[Lauren]

Are those facts predictions or reality now?!
If they're true to now (I think they might be predictions, I got confused, but they're still scary)

"1 out of every 8 couples married in the US last year met online

There are over 160 million registered users of MySpace. If MySpace were a country it would be the 6th largest in the world (between Brazil and Pakistan)"

Wow. The power of the internet!

[Bells]

That is actually pretty scary when you think about it...