Science Fair Proposal

1. What is your topic?
My topic is social media networking with an emphasis on viral journalism and communication. 


2. What is the driving problem behind your experiment and the quote by an expert to support that problem? (Expert citation must be MLA format.)
My driving problem with my topic is the level of censorship that, noticeably authoritarian or dictatorial governments, certain types of governments implement on their people. Rebecca MacKinnon, a CNN journalist as well as the cofounder of Global Voices online, supports this problem in a TED talk, 


Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's Take Back the Internet!" TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED, July 2011. Web. 25 Sept. 2012. <http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_let_s_take_back_the_internet.html>.

Rebecca MacKinnon "Let's take back the internet!"

3. What is your hypothesis? (Must be in If-Then form.)

• If a country uses a model of government similar to an authoritarian type of government, then censorship will correspond with the level of that specific country's income.

• If a word is blacklisted on the Chinese's (insert censorship tool) system, then it is likely that it is censored in another country. 

4. Write a paragraph summary of how you will perform the experiment.  Include the tools you plan on using.

• To conduct my experiment, I will first and foremost compile a reputable list of sources as research to determine what the economic nature, type of government, and level of censorship a country has. Some of these sources will include stock market reports, GPD reports, major events in selected country's current history, and a list of keywords that can be provided by organizations (such as Human Rights Watch or eff.org) that are mostly blacklisted. After a compilation of this research, I must organize the research and data and create a universal unit to convert all the country's economic natures, governments, and censorship. Then finally, after collecting data and organizing it in understandable tables and charts, I will create a graph of the level of censorship a selected country uses throughout a span of selected years and economic income of that country (which will be determined at a later date.)   I will record and evaluate any results and use them for the  conclusion of the experiment. 
• To conduct my experiment, I will first and foremost compile a reputable list of sources as research to determine a list of the blacklisted keywords in China by using search engines such as Google, The Great Firewall,  or a Human Right Watch group. After creating a list of keywords, I will then research on the top eleven countries with the most censorship while researching on the top eleven countries with the least censorship. This information can be done by Google or Human Rights Watch. After compiling two separate lists, I will organize the data per country and compare the countries all together to create a graph. Then, I will create the top 20, 50, or 100 blacklisted words and conclude my project by creating statistical data through comparisons of each graph. 
• Tools: Google, The Great Firewall, Human Rights Watch, other human right's groups, excel, math, paper, pencils, computer, Mrs. Pittman, my brain. 

5. Select one of the following Project Categories for your experiment:
Mathematics & Computer Science