http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-04/19/content_15085349.htm
This first article about the internet in China is not about censorship, but about increasing access to its citizens. It's a big reminder that although China is the most populated and on pace to have the largest economy in the world, it is still not considered a first world country. Geo Weijing brings the internet to Nanning, a rural village. Weijing has already established websites and newspapers for the village. Weijing also helped set up an online market so the local economy can benefit by selling their produce online. I think it is interesting how the internet is growing in China despite the large amounts of censorship and that each community has "cunguan" to help bring internet access to their area.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/apr/16/china-censorship-internet-freedom
  This article discusses the internet growth in China and how censorship will increasing become a problem. China, while having a largely capitalist economy, is still a dictatorship. A dictatorship which claims to allow freedom of speech but then blocks sites like Twitter and Facebook. They main reason the Chinese government blocks these sites is because they are an easy way to have one's voice heard by lots of people. This is still something the Chinese government is weary of. The article also discusses the economy and how censorship could hurt it. As the standard of living continues to improve for the Chinese citizens, many of them will want luxuries the United States has. One example cited in the article is the iPhone. Many Chinese nationals could potentially want an iPhone, but what's the point of iPhone if its purpose is expression and communication with the world; something the Chinese government does not want. Another example of how China's meddling could negatively impact the economy is evident by Google pulling out of China. China hacked Google and Google did not appreciate it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8727647.stm
  In this article, China defends its right to govern the internet within its borders. China claims its citizens have freedom of speech on the internet, but the government censors information that is illegal and could be harmful to the State, children, or public interests. I find that to be a pretty lame excuse. Facebook and Twitter are threats to the State's security? Is Hu Jintao scared that is birthday party pictures from last year will be posted?

To create this Wordle, I used the results from tweetfeel. The results were positive, with 84% of the tweets being considered positive.

This word cloud was created from the Twitter Sentiment results. The results were positive, but not as much as with tweetfeel. 77% of the tweets were deemed positive. I don't think the ratings tool are related to word count. I think they are much more related to key words in the tweets. Sometimes using key words as the method of rating yields false results. For example, I searched the movie Inglourious Basterds. One of the tweets said, "Inglourious Basterds sucks me in every single time." This was deemed to be a negative response by tweetfeel, presumably because of the word "sucks." However, I think it is clear that this should be considered a positive tweet about the movie.

ClickFox

ClickFox is a data management company that helps businesses capture, store, and analyze customer data. For most companies, there are many different channels between the business and the customer. The customer can interact with the company in several ways: web, voice self-service, CRM, email, chat, SMS, surveys, social networks, automated retail and others. Each interaction provides can provide useful insight into the customer. However, gathering information from each channel and organizing the data into one warehouse is often a difficult task. ClickFox helps to capture all this information and store it. One service ClickFox provides is called CEAi. CEAi is about analyzing customer behavior. The areas of analysis include: self-service effectiveness, first contact resolution, customer satisfaction, customer retention and loyalty trends which are identified for financial services, wireless/telecom, utility, insurance and healthcare. Specifically, ClickFox analyses Wireless OS Costs(Are non-working apps causing problems?), authentication(What is easiest for your customer?), self-service (Improving the self-service experience for the customer), and Repeat Contact Behavior by Geography (Where are customers calling from?).

I think ClickFox is something that would be useful that service customers all across the country. It helps the company obtain information which is needed to compete. The CEAi is particularly helpful because it helps the company realize where it is losing money. For example, the Wireless OS cost analysis helps the company define where mobile applications have problems and could be costing the company excessively.

This is an image taken from the ClickFox website. It is referring to the Repeat Contact by Behavior analysis.

Cloudera

1) Hadoop is a big deal because it helps companies handle the massive amounts of date most businesses must use to be competitive in today's market. Hadoop helps companies by providing reliable data storage and using MapReduce to help process all the data. MapReduce is a technique which helps companies to process lots of data different machines at the same time. Also Hadoop servers will still be able to deliver data when a system experiences server failure. 2) Cloudera is a software company which creates Apache-Hadoop products. Much of their expertise and products are in data management. 3) PIG is a sort of query language which works with Hadoop. It helps query databases and assist the MapReduce process. 4) HIVE is a type of data warehouse system which works with Hadoop. A HIVE warehouse can provide data summaries, analysis, and be queried. 5) Cassandra is a database management system. It does not use SQL, but instead mergers column-oriented and row-oriented storage. 6) Mahout allows for large data sets to be processed to be distributed over multiple machines using a simple programming model.

The first data set shows the change in percentage of population by state. I could only find one state that had a population decrease: Michigan. This is presumably due to the loss of many jobs in Detroit because of the poor sales of domestic automobiles. The largest increase any state had was 35.1% in Nevada. This is a visualization of the percentage of population over age 60 by state. As the baby boomers were such a large generation, one would expect each state's population of over sixty to increase. The largest, predictably, is Florida where many go to retire. The lowest is Alaska. This shows the divorce rate by state according to the 2000 census. Idaho and Arkansas have the highest divorce rates. New York and New Jersey have the lowest.

Comparing the US and China

This chart graphically shows the economic and environmental trends of the United States and China. The chart begins in 1960 and continues until 2010. Seeing the chart is this ways really shows the frighting trends and raises some serious questions of both countries environmental policies and China's economic policies. Beginning in 1960, the United States is one of only a handful of countries that are visible on the chart. Of the countries visible, it is well ahead of the pack. This really shows how far ahead the US was economically ahead of the world. It also shows that the United States has always been a high consumer of energy. As time goes on, the United States remains well ahead in energy consumption until China passes it in 2008. It also remains near the top GDP per capita. China was not visible at the beginning of the timeline in 1960. Like other countries whose standards of living increase, China's consumption of energy increases significantly until it became the highest consumer of energy in the world in 2008. However, China's GDP per capita remains near the bottom. This goes to show that while China's economy has boomed, the population's standard of living remains near the bottom. In the second chart, I again used GDP per capita. But in this chart I compared it to the amount each country invested in foreign markets. This chart tells a far different story than the first chart. The first chart showed the United States well separated from the rest of the world through the entire chart. In this chart, all the countries are together at the beginning in 1970. As time progresses, the United States shoots ahead of most of the world in terms of foreign investment. In general, the foreign investment increased in most countries. This supports the economic theory of the world being flat, meaning the world's economy is becoming increasingly more interdependent. Also, we see the United States' level of foreign investment fluctuate a lot. This is most likely due to recessions and times of economic growth. When the United States' economy is growing, foreign investment goes up. When it is struggling, we tend to keep our money here. China's bubble is more constant relative to the United States. The GDP per capita does not increase, but the level of foreign investment does. We see China's investments reach 50B and hold steady until the 2000's. Here, it really takes off. I think this clearly shows that when China's level of GDP increased, they began investing heavily in other countries such as the United States.

Exercise 7

This is my exercise 7. It doesn't work.

Pipe 2

This is my 2nd pipe. It gives me news pertaining to UGA and Athens.



Pipe 2

Movie

Inglorious Basterds

Inglorious Basterds, is a movie directed by Quentin Tarantino. The film takes place in Europe during World War II. A group of Jewish- American soldiers enter battle with the goal of killing every Nazi they find. While in Europe, the group kills many Nazi before being assigned to Operation Keno. In the mission, the group goes under cover as Nazis and attend a Nazi film premier which all the German leaders are attending. Their mission is to blow up the building, killing all inside. They set dynamite in place, but then are detected by a Nazi leader. He holds them captive, but then tells them he will let the operation continue if given American citizenship.They agree, and the theather is destroyed killing Hitler and the rest of the Nazi regime.

For more Information

IMDB- Inglorious Basterds

Presidential Pipe

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/mist5600pipe1rivalsi

Using yahoo pipes, I created a pipe which filters CNN's RSS feed. I want to keep up to date with all news pertaining to the upcoming Presidential election. I used the fetch site and filter modules. The filter only shows news feeds from CNN's RSS feed that contain one of the following tags in the description: Republican Primaries, Obama, Presidential election.

 

 

The Big Switch

 

1850: In this year Henry Burden built the largest water wheel in the world. With his new water wheel, he was able to generate more power which helped his business. With the increased power from this water wheel, Burden's company became the largest supplier of horseshoes to the United States Army.

1920: This is a picture of a dilapidated and out of use water wheel. Why was the world’s biggest waterwheel now out of commission? During those times, every business built and generated their own power. However, this stared to change. In 10 years 40 percent of power will be generated by centralized units, while 60% will be generated by traditional private generators. This trend will continue, with 95% of power today being generated by centralized generators. IT in businesses appears to be following the same pattern.

1960’s: Companies use mainframe computing. Takes a huge amount of space and capital with very low capabilities. Few employees work with mainframe computers. Not used for day-to-day work.

1990s:  PC is introduced. Every employee has their own computer which has its own software. This is extremely inefficient because every company has its own data centers. Data centers have huge amounts of overcapacity to handle times of heavy usage. 

Today: Companies begin to consider or already using cloud computing. 52% are already using it, the rest are considering it in some capacity. The biggest inefficiency in IT today is labor. 70% of IT labor is doing routine or maintenance work. The consumer side is already predominately using the cloud. Once, people would go out and buy new software and install it via a disc. Now, most people find data and applications on the Internet. Broadband and bandwidth speeds are catching up to the speed of computers. Due to this, companies can “virtualize” software rather than installing it and maintaining it on every single computer. With cloud computing, small businesses can utilize IT without hosting their own server or having their own IT staff. Some companies are centralizing their own data centers, while others outsource it.  The cloud allows more computing power to reach more people. This leads to innovation. It also frees up capital, which changes the business models of companies.

Electric Telegraph vs. The Internet

Similarities to the Internet

Both the Electric Telegraph and the Internet connected the world. They both allow people to receive information quickly from far-away places.
Both the Internet and the Telegraph are affected by the amount of people using them at once. When there is a high amount of traffic, both can take no longer to send and receive information.
3) Both the Telegraph and the Internet are used in business. The Telegraph was often often as important to businesses as the Internet is today.


Different from the Internet
The Telegraph was more controllable and easily censored than the Internet. Telegraph services were typically owned by the government.
 Users of the Telegraph paid by the amount of words in the Telegram they sent. Users of the Internet typically pay a set amount each month no matter how much they use it. Also, the Internet is free in many places   
The Telegraph was used to send and receive text messages while the Internet can send more than just words. Via the Internet, videos, recordings, and more can be sent to others.   



I was most surprised to discover that communication was much more regulated with the Telegraph than the Internet.