Well, if you're a regular Twitter user, there's a strong likelihood that you have been getting unhappier over the past couple of years. How do we know? New research published by U of Vermont researchers in the PLoS One journal has shown that the "happiness" content of tweets has been steadily decreasing.
I kid you not. Really. Here is one popular media source on this and related results: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-12-21/twitter-happiness/52142508/1 Of course, UVM has provided a press release on this research since it was done there and reflects "positively" on the institution: http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=12986&category=uvmhome And here is a link to the research article itself: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0026752 Of particular note: (1) See Figure 3 for the most important results. (2) See Figure 5 for daily variation of happiness levels over the course of the week. Imagine my surprise to find that happiness is low at the beginning of the week but goes up until it hits a peak on Saturday (Sunday is a bit of downer though). Hmmmm, I seem to remember a similar pattern concerning drug use but I can't remember where I saw it. Perhaps David Epstein remembers? ;-) (3) I was unaware of a service provided by Amazon called the "Mechanical Turk", that is, you can provide a task for people to do on the Amazon website and individuals can get paid for participating. See: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome Daily ratings of happiness by folks on the Turk is similar to those in Figure 3 but they don't appear to go down as much on Sunday (perhaps people who work on/for the Turk don't/do go to Sunday church/temple/whatever services). See Figure 6 for those daily variations. (4) There's much more to the article but I have only skimmed it looking for some juicy bits. I'm sure that there are more fascinating results to be found. Thank goodness for the Winter Break! ;-) In closing, perhaps we are entering a new age of social science. Quoting the article: |Finally, the era of big data social sciences has undoubtedly begun. |Rather than being transformed or revolutionized we feel the correct |view is that the social sciences are expanding beyond a stable core |to become data-abundant fields. In a data-abundant science, the |challenge moves first to description and pattern finding, with explanation |and experiments following. Instead of first forming hypotheses, we |are forced to spend considerable time and effort simply describing. |The approaches applicable for a data-scarce science still remain of |the same value but new, vast windows into social and psychological |behaviour are now open, and new tools are available and being |developed to enable us to take in the view. Busy, busy, busy. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=14985 or send a blank email to leave-14985-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
