Saw some startling figures of where you will end up if you go for a job with your education.  If you work throughout your life as per stats, this is where you end up.

“The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing includes a chart that lists expected lifetime earnings per education level. The chart lists various education level and what people at those education levels can expect to earn throughout their lives (according to the U.S. Census Bureau.) The results:

• Some high school, no diploma - $1,000,000
• High school diploma or equivalent - $1,200,000
• Some college, no degree - $1,500,000
• Associate degree - $1,600,000
• Bachelor’s degree - $2,100,000
• Master’s degree - $2,500,000
• Doctoral degree - $3,400,000
• Professional degree - $4,400,000

Source: Career Intensity Blog - David V. Lorenzo

Looks all true and encouraging and little tempated to think about getting an advanced degree. Suddenly I realized, seriously, isn’t some thing else misssing? Another category? College drop outs. The category that makes Billions of dollars. The category that retires atleast 10-15 years earlier than these scholars. hhum. Some how, they did not make it to these stats, but as each of us know history is full of such college drop outs. I bet each one of us know atleast one from our own school or class or community, who surpassed our flashy income and made it to 10s of millions if not billions of dollars, though he/she is no where near your education level.

Not quite mean that education is useless. But some thing is totally missing out of the equation.

Again, these figures are average, if that is any solace. But it is very disturbing to see those figures. From the stats, it suggests that better your education level, better you earn. 4 Million dollars in earnings after a life long-job ? Good deal for a life?

If this is a reality show, and you are asked to work through out your life for a 4 Million dollar prize money, (and in the spirit of the game, and hard reality, not every one is guaranteed to win $4M) Will you take the challenge ??

Well, you have already accepted the challenge and right in the game, if you rely on the job. And there are your stats. Go and beat them. Good Luck.

Every other week there will be a document review meeting, with document size ranging from 20 pages to 140 pages. Every reviewer prints the whole document and after 30-45 minutes in review, we all usually throw away the document. More over, when author revises the document, above process just repeats.  Many of us don’t like to review the document online, as we all tend to prefer paper since we can mark, draw, underline, make a quick note etc. on paper, which is quite not possible online or not so intuitive. In the process we throw reams of printed paper to the trash and dry up toners pretty quick.

Well, not for long. Xerox is developing erasable paper, that can be recycled and reused in a matter of 16 hours without throwing away. Quite ideal for the above scenario of reviews. Also if you print out confidential documents, you don’t have to struggle with paper shredders to make information invisible. Information on erasable paper automatically disappear. Very interesting.

The researchers now have a prototype that will produce documents on a specially coated paper with a light yellow tint.

The process works without toner and produces a low-resolution document that appears to be printed with purple ink.

The printed information on the document “disappears” within 16 hours. The documents can be reused more quickly by simply placing them in the copier paper tray.

The researchers said that individual pieces of paper had been used up to 50 times, and that the only limit in the process appears to be paper life.

Source: Xerox developing ‘erasable paper’ system - Technology & Media - International Herald Tribune

As part of New Scientist’s 50^th anniversary celebrations, it asked over 70 of the world’s most brilliant scientists for their predictions for the next 50 years. Here are the topics of the predictions for future.

Life: Ageing, alien life, consciousness, ecology, embryology, environment, evolution, genetics, health, humans, language, neuroscience, oceans, psychology, sex and social science.

Space and technology: Artificial intelligence, communications, computing, cosmology, space and technology.

Physical sciences: Chemistry, energy, materials, maths and physics.

Source: Brilliant Minds on the Next 50 Years: Instant Expert - science-forecasts - 16 November 2006 - New Scientist

Here is a prediction on Search Engines by Peter Norvig of Google, talking about the realization of semantic web:

In 50 years the scene will be transformed. Instead of typing a few words into a search engine, people will discuss their needs with a digital intermediary, which will offer suggestions and refinements. The result will not be a list of links, but an annotated report (or a simple conversation) that synthesises the important points, with references to the original literature. People won’t think of “search” as a separate category - it will all be part of living.

Usability does not mean pouring in too many options. But providing the minimalistic set to achieve full functionality.  While many say, you must have explicit options to do different things, I agree with Joel, that all we need is one button to put the computer to rest. Everything else is implicit and can be done by Windows without confusing users. Less is More, just like 37signals say.

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items. The two icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to.

On many laptops, there are also four FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there’s an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of fifteen different ways to shut down a laptop that you’re expected to choose from.

Source: Joel on Software

Read recently about growth in online Ad Revenues here. However, the following conclusion from the post about decline in older media budgets doesn’t make sense to me.

Some of the growth is a reallocation of increased spending, but some of it is pure decline in older media, with broadcast, television, radio, and newspaper struggling in recent years. That is a trend that looks set to accelerate over the next twelve months, which will be financially painful indeed for such industries.

It is pretty clear that online Ad revenues are growing. But are they really making any dent in the traditional ads? I don’t think so. From the graphs below, I do not see any decline in Traditional ad revenues. I sure see an increase in overall Ad spending. Online Ads are still about 2% of total Ad Revenues. And while it may continue to grow, what we might see is an overall increase in ad spending rather than a decline in traditional media revenues. Because, the sales gained per each $ spent on online ads is substantially lower than the traditional media.

[ Source  ]

Traditional media like TV and News papers have also started leveraging internet for improving their share of penetration and viewing stats. That would directly mean, more ad revenue for traditional media than online ads.

Lost Remote has a press release from CBS reporting favorably on their YouTube experiment. CBS uploaded 300 clips that were seen by almost 30 million viewers (mostly clips from Letterman), but they also saw a spike in TV viewership, especially on Letterman.