Moment Of Awareness

Read this morning on the mailing list of the Learning Organization. Signed ChuckWallace

Speaking of awareness..... To be "net connected" is a privilege......

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following.


        There would be:


        _57 Asians

        _21 Europeans

        _14 from the Western Hemisphere, (both north and South) 

        __8 Africans

        _52 would be female

        _48 would be male

        _70 would be non-white

        _30 would be white

        _70 would be non-Christian

        _30 would be Christian

        _89 would be heterosexual

        _11 would be homosexual

        __6 people would possess 59% of the entire

        world's wealth

        and all 6 would be from the United States

        _80 would live in substandard housing

        _70 would be unable to read

        _50 would suffer from malnutrition

        __1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth

        __1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education

        __1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a perspective, the need for both acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.

As software developers, the bottom one is the only one that matters.

Hmm, the above formatting presents itself *extremely strangely* in my Netscape 3.0 browser. (I worked around the formatting--it was triggering the numeric list handling.)

/3 of the people in the US own a computer. So there has to be more

than 1% of the world who owns a computer. Perhaps these are old figures.

% homosexuals is too big. Perhaps that is the percent of people

who have performed a homosexual act. Some cultures have almost no homosexuals. Are there any cultures with 11% homosexuals? There must be some bisexuals.

Are we sure it's not that some cultures are so intolerant of homosexuals that they don't reveal themselves rather than be, for example, beheaded? -- KatieLucas

Actually ,statistically, about 10-11% of the world's population is homosexual. If one were to count everybody who had even a single homosexual experience as gay, that figure would move up to 50%.

White/non-white is imprecise. Usually someone who is half European is considered non-white. Or three-quarters. Or seven-eighths. I wonder how they counted South American cultures that are a mixture of Spanish and native american?

I don't believe that 70% of people can't read. China has a good literacy program, and it has one third of the population. Literacy in Africa is poor, but it doesn't have as many people. Literacy in India is poor, and it has more people. But I bet over half of all people over 8 can read. Maybe the literacy rate is so low because they are counting babies.

But this is all beside the point. You can't teach tolerance with statistics. You have to get to know people who are different from yourself. A South African once told me that the biggest force for racial unity in South Africa (during the time of apartheid) was the army, because it forced a lot of white men to work with, depend on, and get to know black men, and so ruined their stereotypes. Better communication and more interaction are what will help us get along better, not statistics. Statistics just make us start to argue about how they were gathered and whether they are accurate.

The world literacy rate, including kids, is probably 70-80%. I think 70 people would be able to read.

See http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/know/know_p/centre3.htm

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