Shift Happens

One of my friends sent me a link the other day to an extraordinary presentation that I wanted to share with you. At http://www.scottmcleod.org/didyouknow.wmv, you'll find a video titled "Did You Know?" that will change the way you think not only about the future, but about the things we do in the present that will shape it.

Over the course of six minutes, this video presents a range of eye-opening statistics and provides food for thought about where we are and where we're going. Here are a few examples:

• In the year 2002, the Nintendo Corporation invested more than $140 million in research and development...in the same year, the U.S. government spent less than half that amount on research and innovation in education.

• Each month, more than 2.7 billion Google searches are executed on the Internet. Who answered all these questions before Google was available? (And my own parenthetical question: are the Google-provided answers better, worse, or the same as might otherwise have been obtained? That's a question for a future blog post.)

• A week's worth of the New York Times contains more information than a person in the 18th century was likely to come across in his entire lifetime.

• The 25% of the population of China with the highest IQs is greater than the entire population of North America...which means that they may well have more honors children than we have children.

• And finally, name this country: richest in the world, with the largest military, strongest education system, and highest standard of living; the world center of business and finance, with a currency accepted as the world's standard of value, and the world's center of innovation and invention. The country is England...in 1900.

I urge you to invest six minutes of your day to watch this compelling presentation, and a bit more time to think about what it all means. You may not agree with all the statistics, or with the interpretation offered. But as the end of the video says, "shift happens." Things change. And if we aren't prepared to change with them, we could be the next dinosaurs.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo