Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet: Good, Bad or Somewhere In-Between?

 by Marissa Wong, Slide Share

"500 million photos are uploaded every day. Sharing of digital information has grown 9 times in five years. And China is leading the digital charge. If you haven’t seen it already, “Queen of the ‘Net” Mary Meeker has uploaded her latest report on Internet trends.

Among the highlights: Emerging markets continue to lead in the 8% year-over-year growth in global Internet users, with China adding the most (264 million users from 2008-2012). And while 81% of users are outside of the U.S., 80% of the top 10 global internet properties were made in the U.S. (Google, Microsoft and Facebook are at the top of that list.) Another interesting international comparison: Americans are under sharers. Just 15% of Americans report that they share “everything” or “most things” online, compared to a world average of 24%. Saudi Arabians are the world’s biggest sharers and the Japanese share the least."

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It’s the Best Possible Time to Be Alive

Anne Boysen Doga and Paul Schumann

Arcadia is a 1993 play by Tom Stoppard concerning the relationship between past and present and between order and disorder and the certainty of knowledge. It has been cited by many critics as the finest play from one of the most significant contemporary playwrights in the English language

Arcadia is set in Sidley Park, an English country house, in both the years 1809–1812 and the present day (1993 in the original production). The activities of two modern scholars and the house's current residents are juxtaposed with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier.

In 1809, Thomasina Coverly, the daughter of the house, is a precocious teenager with ideas about mathematics well ahead of her time. She studies with her tutor Septimus Hodge, a friend of Lord Byron who is an unseen guest in the house. In the present, a writer and an academic converge on the house: Hannah Jarvis, the writer, is investigating a hermit who once lived on the grounds; Bernard Nightingale, a professor of literature, is investigating a mysterious chapter in the life of Byron. As their investigations unfold, helped by Valentine Coverly, a post-graduate student in mathematical biology, the truth about what happened in Thomasina's lifetime is gradually revealed.

The play's set features a large table, which is used by the characters in both past and present. Props are not removed when the play switches time period, so that the books, tortoise, coffee mugs, quill pens, portfolios, and laptop computers appear alongside each other in a blurring of past and present

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Anne and Paul will read an excerpt from Scene Four at the CenTexWFS meeting on May 21, 2013. It focuses on a discussion between Valentine Coverly and Hannah Jarvis.(http://ctxwfs.org/Default.aspx?pageId=544823&eventId=688232&EventViewMode=EventDetails)

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You can read an essay on this play at http://www.scribd.com/doc/38336576/Arcadia-A-Play-on-Complexity and an excellent summary on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28play%29

Anne and Paul are both bloggers. Their blogs are respectively “After the Millennials” (http://www.afterthemillennials.com/) and “Insights and Foresights” (http://insights-foresight.blogspot.com/).

How Money Walks

A fascinating way to look at the transfer of wealth within the US from 1995 to 2010. The map below shows Travis County, Texas (home of Austin) which has a net gain in wealth $2.72B. It gained that wealth from Harris County, Dallas County, Los Angeles County, Santa Clara County and Bexar County. It lost wealth to its neighboring counties of Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, Burnet and Caldwell.

http://www.howmoneywalks.com/web-app/