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A study, “Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity” discussed the impact the web has made on individuals’ “opinions”. With the immense popularity of the Web, humans have more access to information, beliefs, and ideas previously not made accessible. Arguably, before the Web, opinions were heavily shaped by the place a person was born, their parents and developments in their lives. With the introduction of the Web, and its role of expressing news, information, and ideas,  people’s opinions are being less shaped by their immediate surroundings. “The Web has dramatically changed the way that people express their views and opinions. They can now post reviews of products at merchant sites and express their views on almost anything in Internet forums, discussion groups, and blogs, which are collectively called the user-generated content” the study states. The web and its power to influence peoples opinions on a global scale may result in a more uniformed or divided planet. The second study “Text Analysis and Visualization” discusses the unhuman speeds of text analysis. Computers are able to read, analyze and find trends in thousands of texts at rates much higher than a human could. This is a massive breakthrough in terms of identifying social and political trends through texts such as books, articles, essays, and even speeches. Even being able to identify trends below the surface can contribute to understanding social changes over time. Syntax, use of language and tone are attributes which can be identified and contribute to data sets. HR reflected on the use of data mining. “I think it’s so interesting how that information is dealt with using these programs in order to extract the main topics out of texts with relative ease and maximum efficiency.” The ability for computers to recognize themes in a text at the same efficiency humans presents us the opportunity to learn more about the past, analyze the present and forecast the future in ways humans have never been able to before.