“Did You Know 2019” English
READ ALL DIRECTIONS BEFORE AGREEING TO COMPLETE THE ASSIGNMENT. “Did You Know 2019” WATCH: Did You Know? 2019 link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTM06NZOyDQ WATCH: Introduction to Mini-Assignment #1 link: https://umd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=71c2f403-a4fe-4765-97ed-ac2400f99f72 I am sure at least some of you have seen one or more “Did You Know” videos on the web. They have been around for at least 10 years. This particular rendition by Jose Estevas link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTM06NZOyDQ He does a really nice job of focusing in on the world of big data especially as reflected in social media. The video contains lots of facts and figures about Internet usage, from how many of us are on the Internet, to the number of sites added per day and searches performed, and gives lots of statistics on daily or monthly volumes of various communications on Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc., etc. Your assignment is to research where the video may contain questionable statistics. Note that the video was published in 2019 – not that long ago – but it is not up to date for the first week of September 2020. There are two ways to think about the assignment: Find instances on other websites where the cited statistics purporting to be current for 2020 are inconsistent with what the Do You Know video cites for 2019, in a way that calls into question the 2019 numbers. For example, if the number of Facebook users in 2020 is said to be a number that is less than the number quoted in the video, that seems questionable given Facebook’s spectacular growth year over year. Just finding cites where the 2020 statistic is greater than the 2019 statistic doesn’t count – we would expect to see that and it doesn’t call into question the 2019 video. Find instances where there may be an explainable difference in stats between 2019 and 2020, but there is also a disagreement on what the current stats are themselves. In other words, if we can’t establish what’s “true” in 2020 (because websites disagree with each other on what constitutes the current statistic), how can we trust what the video said in 2019? Choose two from the following list of statistics cited in the video (you might have to watch it more than once because everything goes by very quickly): # of Internet users worldwide # of new websites added every minute # of Google searches per day # of tweets per day on Twitter # of Facebook users # of Instagram users # of data breaches per year In not more than two paragraphs, simply state (i) what the statistic says in the video; (ii) what statistics you found online that call into question the video, under either or both scenarios above. Please spell out your findings in a couple of sentences, and please also include the URLs or other citations that provide evidence of your findings. Do not feel you have to scour the web to find “all” instances of inconsistent statistics. Just try to get a feel for what’s out there.
