The Geography of Happiness According to 10 Million Tweets

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-geography-of-happiness-according-to-10-million-tweets/273286/



Red states are relatively happier. Blue states are relatively less happy. Gray states are neutral.
Sorry, Louisiana, you are the saddest state. And Hawaii (shocker!) you are the happiest.

That's according to a team at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, who posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets to to arXiv.org. They call their creation a "hedonometer."

They also found that the Bible belt stretching across the American south and into Texas was less happy than the west or New England. The saddest town of the 373 urban areas studied was Beaumont in east Texas. The happiest was Napa, California, home of many drunk people wine makers. The only town among the 15 saddest that was not in the south or Rust Belt was Waterbury, Connecticut. (Although Waterbury has appeared on several "worst places to live" lists, which seems like mean lists to make.)



The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). While the researchers admit their technique ignores context, they say that for large datasets, simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces "reliable" results.

[hlthe2b]

1. How idiotic that they chose to use red/blue dichotomies (without political correlation)

One might think they would have stayed away from the otherwise confusing choice of a red/blue dichotomy.



That said, I can't say much on this surprises me.

[ananda]

2. Utah ?? Nevada ??

I would be so miserable in those states.

As for Maine, I couldn't stand the cold.