Some lunchtime discussion pump primers!

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


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


• The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ's is greater than the population of the United States.


• 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 US Department of Labor estimates that today's learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.


• 1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than a year.


• 1 in 2 has been there for less than five years.


• 1 out of 8 couples married in the US 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 (between Indonesia and Brazil).


• The number one ranked country in Brodband Internet Penetration is Bermuda. The United States is number 19 and Japan is number 22.


• 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.


• Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million:

Radio - 38 Years, TV - 13 Years, The Internet - 4 Years, iPod - 3 Years, Facebook - 2 Years

• The number of Internet devices in 1984 was 1,000. The number of Internet devices in 1992 was 1,000,000. The number of Internet devices in 2008 is 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 18th century.


• It is estimated that 4 exabytes (4.0x10^19) of unique information will be generated this year. That's more than the previous 5,000 years.


• The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4 year technical degree, this means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study.


• NTT Japan has successfully tested a fiber optic cable that pushes 14 trillion bits per second down a single strand of fiber. That's 2,660 CD's or 210 million phone calls per second. It's currently tripling every six months and is expected to do so for the next 20 years.


• By 2013, a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain. Predictions are that by 2049, a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities of the entire human species.

See here for what I think is the original source