My 2012

It's been a while since I've posted on my blog, things have been busy and hectic on the lead up to Christmas with just three days to go now! 

For my latest post, I have decided to look back at 2012, and share with you my best memories for the year...

Race For Life with my auntie and my mum

Working backstage at Britain's Got Talent

Celebrating the Queen's Diamond Jubilee with the people I love

 Going on my first holiday with my boyfriend to Tenerife

The London 2012 Olympic Games - watching and volunteering

Trying out the Olympic White Water Centre for myself

Completing half of my second year at university with my amazing friends

My favourite films from 2012 have been:
The Hunger Games
The Amazing Spiderman
Pitch Perfect
Skyfall
21 Jump Street

My favourite songs included:
Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepson
What Makes You Beautiful - One Direction
I Knew You Were Trouble (her whole album 'Red') - Taylor Swift
Some Nights - Fun
Stay - Rihanna
Feel The Love - Rudimental


I hope you all have an amazing Christmas and a good New Year. I'll see you in 2013!

Gemma x

Twitter Map

My friend sent me an article about "London's Top Ten Languages" which has been worked out by looking at tweets sent within the city during summer 2012...

http://news.sky.com/story/1003113/twitter-map-shows-londons-top-10-languages

The article is very interesting, mainly the picture at the top which attracted my attention purely because it has lots of colours on it!... although it didn't actually make much sense to me until I read the actual article
The writer, Lulu Sinclair, explains how the map was formed by Ed Manley and James Cheshire, revealing a 'heat map' of languages used during the summer of 2012. This was obviously when the Olympics was going on, therefore a lot of different cultures and countries were bought together, and many people of different nationalities came across to the UK to watch the Games. 

English was the largest tweeting language, with over 3 million (93%) people using the language. The graph below (also seen on the article itself) shows the next top 10 languages that were commonly used through the summer:

As you can see, Spanish and French top the graph, most likely because they are close countries to the UK in terms of distance. 

The researchers found that an 'unknown' language also seemed to crop up a lot, which they later found out was English slang terms such as "lol," "ahhhhh" and "hahaha"- clearly these were some of the top phrases used during the Olympics?!

Have a read of the article and let me know what you think! 

Gemma x

Radio Podcast - 2012 Olympics

Before this year's Olympics, I made a radio podcast about the differences between the Olympics and Paralympics, and the issue surrounding the amount of awareness they both have. Even though both events have now ended, I think this is still relevant.

This was the first podcast I made, so any comments would be welcome!

http://soundcloud.com/gemmabee4/radio-documentary-olympics

Gemma x