theatlantic:

The Worldwide Gender Gap for Work in 1 Graph

The triumph of women in the American office place has been perhaps the greatest economic story of the last century. In 1900, only 19 percent of women participated in the labor force. In 112 years, that number has tripled, and just a few years ago, there were more officially employed women than men in the United States.

But the rise of working women has been much slower around the world. Here’s a graph, via the International Labor Organization, comparing the gap between youth male and female participation rates around the world in 1991, 2001, and 2011. Worldwide, the gap has barely budged. In South Asia, it’s still terribly high. In East Asia, the gap is totally inverted. 

What’s going on here?

Read more. [Image: International Labor Organization]

Report: U.S. Media Trends by Demographic

From Millenials to Boomers, males to females, and a variety of racial/ethnic groups, part two of Nielsen’s State of the Media: Advertising & Audiences Report presents an in-depth look at usage by demographic.  According to Nielsen, white TV viewers use their DVR twice as much as any other group on a daily basis, yet Asians watch the most timeshifted content as a share of overall TV time.  Among popular online destinations for TV content – Hulu, Netflix and YouTube – Hispanics were most likely to watch video on Netflix, while Asians were most likely to watch on Hulu and black viewers on YouTube.

Other findings include:

• Teens used a game console for eight minutes a night, on average, during primetime – more than twice as much as the general TV population.
• When watching TV and using their tablet simultaneously, male tablet users were more likely to look up information related to a TV program while females were more likely to up look info related to a TV ad.
• Females spend 61.2 percent of their timeshifted viewing during primetime watching Dramas.
• Online adults aged 25-54 are 23 percent more likely than the average U.S. Internet user to follow a brand via social networking and 29 percent more likely to purchase a product online that was featured on TV….(read more)

Tweets across #Africa.  I wonder how many of these were from mobile phones, versus computers?

mercycorps:

More at The Guardian.

The U.S.’s manufacturing and agrarian economic base has virtually disappeared.  Will the service sector be enough to sustain the country long term? I certainly hope so…

theatlantic:

Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph

President Obama’s State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: “Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there.”

It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years? Read more.

[Image: Brian McGill and Peter Bell/National Journal]

Apple in Education Launches Three New Digital Educational Tools

By Rusty Blazenhoff on January 19, 2012

Apple has unveiled three new tools to compete in the digital educational realm through their Apple in Education program: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The iBooks 2 app for the iPad will host digital textbooks, ones that are “an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive”……

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

~Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)