Special Blog Post #1

       
When I searched on WolframAlpha for "Compare Populations of India, China and the United States." I found many statistics. The statistics consisted of a comparison of India, China and the United States. In 2010, it was estimated that the United States was populated by 309 million people, China by 1.35 billion people, and India by 1.21 billion. By these statistics, you can see China was populated by the most people. This was not a surprising fact to me because I knew these cultures were highly more populated than the United States.

For my two example searches I searched for "Compare Vehicle use in the U.S. to vehicle U.S. in Japan." There are roughly  254.4 million vehicles in the U.S. while there are only about 88.2 million in Japan. Both countries predominately use passenger cars. My second example search was "Compare Alabama's population to Colorado's population." I found that Alabama has a population of 4.803 million people and Colorado has a population of 5.117 million people.

WolframAlpha is relatively new to me. I have always used Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. On Wolfram, you must be very specific with your searches. I discovered that Wolfram can be used to solve math problems. This search engine has lesson plans for educators to use, making it a useful tool in the classroom. I think WolframAlpha is useful because it shows statistics in various ways such as through the use of charts.

I was not surprised by the numbers on Gary Hayes' Social Media Count website because the world we live in today revolves around social media. There are many people who are essentially addicted to social media and feel they cannot survive without it. These are the people who post about every waking moment of their day. As technology goes through change and growth, we must adapt to it. If the numbers are changing this much now, I can only imagine what the numbers will look like a few years from now. The websites we use today will be different from those we use in the future. As new sites are created, old ones become less frequently used as popularity decreases. An example of one of these websites is MySpace.
As a future educator, I believe social media will become an even more helpful tool to explore the world around us. As a society, we rely heavily on the internet. This attachment will only grow as we progress into the future. I view the use of social media as an educational tool in a positive way. Social media has it's downsides, but it can also be used to educate such as in EDM 310.