INTERESTING STATISTICS

March 13, 2009 Blog

During the past week I came across several statistics that I jotted down on scraps of paper. At first glance, they didn’t seem to be connected, but I’ll let you be the judge. Here are the statistics:

In the past 5 minutes, 67 babies were born in the USA. In China, 274 were born and in India, 395.
In the past 5 minutes, 700,000 songs were downloaded illegally.
The English language has 5 times as many words today as there were in Shakespeare’s time.
There is more information in one week’s worth of the New York Times than a person was exposed to in a lifetime in the 18th century.
It is estimated that 4 exabytes of unique information will be generated in 2009. That is more than in the past 5,000 years.

The amount of new technical information is doubling every year.
More Chinese are presently learning English (300 million and growing) than there are English speaking Americans (250 million and shrinking).

Are the above figures somehow related?
China and India are racing to outdistance America in the realm of technology, and English is of utmost importance in this field.

I did a bit of research on the growth of technology and this is what I discovered.

Technological Growth
It took 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million by radio and 13 years for TV to accomplish that feat. The Internet had 50 million subscribers within 4 years of its conception. It took the iPod 3 years and Facebook 2 years to find 50 million users.

In 1984 there were 1,000 Internet devices. By 1992, there were a million and in 2008 a billion.

In 2008 there were 31 billion searches per month on Google, up from 2.7 billion in 2006.

Transmission speeds are tripling every 6 months. Japan has successfully tested a single fiber optic strand that transports 14 trillion bits per second. That is 2,660 full CDs per second.

The number one country in broadband penetration is Bermuda. USA is #19 and subscription prices for broadband are among the highest in the world.

Effect on the Workplace
The top ten jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not even exist in 2004. We are currently preparing youth for jobs that do not yet exist and which will use technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems we have yet to face. Half of what a student of technology learns in his first year of study will be obsolete by his third year.

The US Department of Labor states that the present learner will hold 10-14 jobs by age 38. Already, one in four laborers has been with his or her present employer less than a year, and half have been with their employer less than five years.

Effect on Society
The first commercial text message was sent in December, 1992. By 2001, 750,000 text messages per day were being sent. The number of text messages today well exceeds the population of our planet. The average young person sends around 20 messages per day or 600 per month, but not a few send thousands per month.

If MySpace was a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world – between Indonesia and Brazil. MySpace has over 200 million registered users.

One of eight American couples who married in 2008 met online. Since 2004, however, the majority of the nation's households are headed by unmarried Americans and two thirds of America’s unmarried adults are now cohabitating. In 1987, there were 2.3 million unmarried and 1.5 million same-sex cohabitating couples in the USA. These numbers tripled within 20 years.
 

The world is changing more rapidly than Obama promised it would, and he has no control over these changes. Thank God!

I will close this blog with a quote from the author of our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner.

"But let a Christian spirit be mingled into the mass of our population, till it pervades every neighborhood, and then where is the danger from within, or without that can harm us? ...and when our people thus walk with God, God Himself will be with them, and He will be their God, and they shall be His people..."  Francis Scott Key