Researchers Analyze Twitter To Find Happiest Parts of the United States 160
Nerval's Lobster writes "If you live in Hawaii, congratulations: according to a new study (PDF) by researchers at the University of Vermont, you live in the happiest state in the union — at least as far as Twitter sentiment is concerned. (Hat tip to The Atlantic for posting about the research.) The researchers — affiliated with the University's Department of Mathematics & Statistics, Complex Systems Center, Computational Story Lab, and Advanced Computing Core — collected 10 million geo-tagged Tweets from 373 urban areas across the United States in 2011 and ran them through a system designed to tag each on a scale from 1 (sad) to 9 (happy). According to the study, the five happiest states include Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont; the five saddest are Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Delaware and Georgia. In general, the West and Northeast seemed much happier than the Mid-Atlantic and South—with the exception of Florida, which shaded 'happier' than many of the surrounding states. While the researchers admitted their study's limitations, there are certainly a lot of opportunities for refining the model: for example, if Hawaii's status as a vacation state affects its rate of 'happy' Tweets, or if incorporating languages other than English into the dataset would affect the ultimate results."
Prison population (Score:5, Interesting)
Red states, Blue states (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else find it interesting that, in general, red states (Republican) are mostly blue (unhappy) on the map, while blue states (Democrat) are mostly red (happy) on the map?
Hot, Cold, Vice, Virtue (Score:5, Interesting)
Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah
Hot, cold, vice, and virtue.
Re:Hawaii (Score:3, Interesting)
Does not match up well with Gallup (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Red states, Blue states (Score:2, Interesting)
Conservatives don't value freedom. During the Bush administration, we lost a ton of freedom, especially during the period where the GOP controlled everything. The only thing that temporarily arrested the slide was that Bush managed to piss off SCOTUS enough that they started to say no.
Conservatives value certain freedoms like the 2nd amendment, but are pretty hostile towards the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendments.