Here’s an interesting video in the spirit of the Thirty-Six Youth Facts in One Hundred and Fifty-Nine Seconds video that I pointed to in an earlier blog entry: Shift Happens:
Here are some of the stats presented in the video, courtesy of the blog Where is Puck:
- 25% of the population in China with highest IQ is greater than the total population in North America
- The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 did not exist in 2004
- The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration (just behind Luxemburg)
- Nintendo invested $140 million research and development in 2002 alone. The US Government spent less than half as much research and innovation in education
- 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online
- There are 106 million registered users of MySpace. If MySpace were a country it would be number 11th largest in the world (between Japan and Mexico)
- It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year. That’s estimated to be more than in the last 5,000 years
I find the societal predictions in the presentation a little more credible than the ones about artificial intelligence and single computers that will be able to outpace the entrie human race by 2050. I remember the promise of fifth generation computing in the 80’s — that artificial intelligence was just a decade away and that we’d all be communicating with our computers in natural language.
Minor quibbles aside, I found the presentation fascinating.
[A tip of the hat to my father-in-law, who first saw the presentation at a conference he recently attended!]
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Joey- thanks for the pointer, interesting video.
You might also appreciate this BW article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_27/b4041401.htm
See, this bothers me because it represents something fundamentally wrong with amateur statisticians:
“25% of the population in China with highest IQ is greater than the total population in North America”
Uh, yeah, duh. 25% of China is 330,462,972 people, according to the latest Google-delivered estimates. Also according to Google, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico contain roughly 450,000,000 people – which includes the ~4% of people affected by mental handicaps – some 18,000,000. So the correct statistic to use here would be the smartest 330,462,972 North Americans vs. the smartest 330,462,972 Chinese.
So the next time you read a statistic like that, really think about what it means. Usually, it means a grand total of jack shit.
The user base of MySpace as a country would place it between Japan and Mexico? In which direction?
I always forget whether Japan or Mexico has a higher number of robots per capita. I want to say Japan.
Until context is conquered, there will be no intelligent computers.
Which is to say, when I tell a computer “A horse walks into a bar. The bartender looks at him and says, ‘hey, why the long face?’”, the computer should laugh, or give its honest opinion. If it doesn’t know how to respond, it is just pretending with programming.