Shift Happens. |
Shift Happens begins with a series of creatively-worded scare sentences
Picture taken from
magicdumpling.wordpress.com
magicdumpling.wordpress.com
such as, “The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America.” Notice how that
sentence does not specify a low-end cutoff point? Think about it – the “top 25%” of any population will just be 25% of whatever that population is. All this tells us is that 25% of China’s population is more than 100% of North America’s – it doesn’t make any claim whatsoever about their level of intelligence compared to ours. They might as well have said "The 25% of China's population with the lightest hair" or "The 25% fattest Chinese" or "The 25% with the largest collections of earthworms." Those are all greater than North America’s population too. For the entire first 1:12 of the video, no point is made other than “China and India have more people and higher birth rates than the United States.”
sentence does not specify a low-end cutoff point? Think about it – the “top 25%” of any population will just be 25% of whatever that population is. All this tells us is that 25% of China’s population is more than 100% of North America’s – it doesn’t make any claim whatsoever about their level of intelligence compared to ours. They might as well have said "The 25% of China's population with the lightest hair" or "The 25% fattest Chinese" or "The 25% with the largest collections of earthworms." Those are all greater than North America’s population too. For the entire first 1:12 of the video, no point is made other than “China and India have more people and higher birth rates than the United States.”
After harping on just how many Chinese and Indians there are,
Picture taken from
jobs.aol.com
jobs.aol.com
the video proceeds to speak about jobs in the United States. I’d love to see a citation of exactly who in the Department of Labor said that “today’s learner” will have 10 to 14 jobs by age 38. Even if that is true, we all know that the job market isn’t as stable as it used to be. There are a lot of reasons for this, both on the side of corporate greed (who have shipped jobs overseas like bushels of corn, eroded our entire manufacturing base, and pushed through “at-will” employment laws that let them dispose of unnecessary workers) and general culture (it’s highly unlikely that we’ll end up actually doing what we always dreamed of for a living, so we’re more likely to be dissatisfied and quit, plus there’s a terrible anti-intellectual attitude pervading our society with a bias against academic fields of study), but if there’s one thing this video is good at, it’s telling us what we already know without giving any suggestions about what we’re supposed to do about it. How are we supposed to train people to perform jobs that haven’t been created yet? (Incidentally, I’d love to see what Richard Riley thought the “10 most in-demand jobs” in 2010 were.)
I agree with the part about the U.S. needing to catch up to the rest of the world in broadband penetration,
Picture taken from whatsnewbuddy.com
but since it’s not profitable for AT&T and Verizon to lay fibre-optic cable in smaller markets, it won’t ever happen unless either Google
does it (which they’ve said they plan to) or unless the government subsidizes the heck out of it, like they had to do in the last half of the 20th century to finally get phone lines connected to everyone, in which case I hope that the government will nationalize the communications industry (since internet, at this point, should be a public utility like electricity), but that won’t happen either. In regards to the comment about Nintendo’s R&D budget, the whole “corporations have more money than the government” argument came up during the Budget Battle in Congress this past year, and really just speaks volumes on how corporations just don’t pay nearly enough in taxes.
does it (which they’ve said they plan to) or unless the government subsidizes the heck out of it, like they had to do in the last half of the 20th century to finally get phone lines connected to everyone, in which case I hope that the government will nationalize the communications industry (since internet, at this point, should be a public utility like electricity), but that won’t happen either. In regards to the comment about Nintendo’s R&D budget, the whole “corporations have more money than the government” argument came up during the Budget Battle in Congress this past year, and really just speaks volumes on how corporations just don’t pay nearly enough in taxes.
Then the video starts talking about MySpace.
Picture taken from dbadesigns.com
I’d like to reflect on the level of irony in a video meant to make a point about how quickly technology changes itself being five years old and fairly out-of-date, but I think this speaks for itself.
A few more mathematically creative claims come next, about halfway through the video:
“There are 2.7 searches performed on Google each month.”
In 2001, Nielsen calculated that 429 million people in the world have internet access. This averages out to less than two Googles per person per week.
“The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.”
Of course it does – according to Gartner, Inc., there are 5.6 billion cell phones in the world, meaning each person only needs to send one or two texts a day.
“There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about 5 times as many as during
Shakespeare’s time.”
Since Shakespeare’s time, English has become a global language and has acquired a great deal of loanwords – indeed, according to Language Monitor, the Hindi term “jai ho” (which gained popularity thanks to the movie Slumdog Millionaire) and the Chinese word “chengguan” (meaning a low-ranked government official) now count as English words – and recently, we’ve as a culture almost been on a race to invent new meaningless buzzwords and catchphrases, since it’s easier to reduce an entire concept to a single word than to actually teach anyone about it.
“More than 3,000 new books are published daily.”
First, like many of the claims in this video, there’s no source for this number. There’s no mention of what exactly constitutes a “book” (Do online-published things count? Self-published? New versions and editions? Magazines? Serials? Graphic novels? Webcomics?), and no indication of whether this is a significant change from the past.
“It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.”
Putting aside whether or not an 18th century dirt farmer would have really cared about who the father of Jennifer Aniston’s baby could be or how many starving children could have been fed with the amount of money Anne Hathaway spent on her Oscar dress, a lot more has changed since the 1700s than the advent of the newspaper. “A lifetime” is longer than 32 years, for one.
“It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this
year.”
And 1.4 exabytes of that will be Facebook updates and Twitter posts.
“The $100 laptop project is expecting to ship 50 to 100 million laptops a year to children in
underdeveloped countries.”
The program has shipped a grand total of about 2.5 million in the past five years, according to the project’s website.
Finally, the video speaks about computers that “exceed the capabilities” of the human brain. It never specifically mentions, though, how this is measured or exactly what capabilities said theoretical computers are exceeding.
In 2001, Nielsen calculated that 429 million people in the world have internet access. This averages out to less than two Googles per person per week.
“The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet.”
Of course it does – according to Gartner, Inc., there are 5.6 billion cell phones in the world, meaning each person only needs to send one or two texts a day.
“There are about 540,000 words in the English language, about 5 times as many as during
Shakespeare’s time.”
Since Shakespeare’s time, English has become a global language and has acquired a great deal of loanwords – indeed, according to Language Monitor, the Hindi term “jai ho” (which gained popularity thanks to the movie Slumdog Millionaire) and the Chinese word “chengguan” (meaning a low-ranked government official) now count as English words – and recently, we’ve as a culture almost been on a race to invent new meaningless buzzwords and catchphrases, since it’s easier to reduce an entire concept to a single word than to actually teach anyone about it.
“More than 3,000 new books are published daily.”
First, like many of the claims in this video, there’s no source for this number. There’s no mention of what exactly constitutes a “book” (Do online-published things count? Self-published? New versions and editions? Magazines? Serials? Graphic novels? Webcomics?), and no indication of whether this is a significant change from the past.
“It is estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.”
Putting aside whether or not an 18th century dirt farmer would have really cared about who the father of Jennifer Aniston’s baby could be or how many starving children could have been fed with the amount of money Anne Hathaway spent on her Oscar dress, a lot more has changed since the 1700s than the advent of the newspaper. “A lifetime” is longer than 32 years, for one.
“It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes of unique new information will be generated worldwide this
year.”
And 1.4 exabytes of that will be Facebook updates and Twitter posts.
“The $100 laptop project is expecting to ship 50 to 100 million laptops a year to children in
underdeveloped countries.”
The program has shipped a grand total of about 2.5 million in the past five years, according to the project’s website.
Finally, the video speaks about computers that “exceed the capabilities” of the human brain. It never specifically mentions, though, how this is measured or exactly what capabilities said theoretical computers are exceeding.
All in all, Shift Happens, with its fear-mongering, jingoism, and misleading numbers,
was a wonderful exercise in the ability to smell B.S. (Did you know that 40% of all sick days are taken either on a Monday or a Friday? Think about it.) There wasn’t a single verifiable fact in this article that wasn’t already common knowledge, and as mentioned before, no potential solutions to these issues are to be found throughout. I’m actually kind of worried about how it has five million views, and wonder just how many technology teachers still take it seriously.
The music was pretty cool, though. The Last of the Mohicans was a great movie.
The music was pretty cool, though. The Last of the Mohicans was a great movie.