By: iPadfanzz staff on February 20, 2013
If you know a guy who’s really cheerful and happy then it is likely that he is coming from Napa, California or Hawaii. A new study conducted by scientists at the University of Vermont has used Twitter to establish that Hawaii is the happiest state in the union and Louisiana the saddest.
Vermont Complex Systems Center posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets to to arXiv.org and they call their creation a "hedonometer." The locations are ranked based on the frequency of positive and negative words using the Mechanical Turk Language Assessment word list.
The tweets were rated in a scale 1 to 10 according to how “happy” they are and on the lower side, with the use of negative words. The list placed Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont as the top five happiest states, while Louisiana, followed by Mississippi, Maryland, Michigan and Delaware, were found out to be saddest states. One reason for Louisiana’s low cheeriness ranking is its inhabitants fondness for profanity.
The study also looked at the happiest cities, which showed Napa, California as the happiest city, followed by Longmont, Colorado; San Clemente, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Santa Cruz, California; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Santa Rosa, California, Simi Valley, California, and Lafayette, Colorado.
The five most bummed-out cities according to word choices were Beaumont, Texas; Albany, Georgia; Texas City, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Monroe, Louisiana.
It was further found that coastal areas were livelier as compared to landlocked areas, and cities with a higher density of tweets tended to be less happy. The cities with high technology adoption, as compared to cities with less technology adoption, were likely to be less happy, the study said.
In addition, it was also revealed that wealthy areas tend to be happier as compared to location where people are more obese has lower happiness levels.
'The purpose to use web-scale text analysis was to remotely sense societal-scale levels of happiness using the singular source of the micro-blog and social networking service Twitter,' the study's introduction says according to The Atlantic.
For instance, the word ‘shit” and “ass” were used less in Napa as compared to Beaumont. In contrast, “lol”, “haha,” “nice” and “good” were most used in the city.
At the same time, the University of Vermont scientists identified people with Norwegian ancestry to be happier than African Americans, which could simply mean that Norwegian Americans use breezier language.
What was noticeable is that the data correlates with other existing measures of happiness, primarily surveys conducted by Gallup. They also show that their happiness data correlates with income and the prevalence of obesity in an area.
Overall, the data throws up interesting results, but do you agree with the results?
If you know a guy who’s really cheerful and happy then it is likely that he is coming from Napa, California or Hawaii. A new study conducted by scientists at the University of Vermont has used Twitter to establish that Hawaii is the happiest state in the union and Louisiana the saddest.
Vermont Complex Systems Center posted their new analysis of 10 million geotagged tweets to to arXiv.org and they call their creation a "hedonometer." The locations are ranked based on the frequency of positive and negative words using the Mechanical Turk Language Assessment word list.
The tweets were rated in a scale 1 to 10 according to how “happy” they are and on the lower side, with the use of negative words. The list placed Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Utah and Vermont as the top five happiest states, while Louisiana, followed by Mississippi, Maryland, Michigan and Delaware, were found out to be saddest states. One reason for Louisiana’s low cheeriness ranking is its inhabitants fondness for profanity.
The study also looked at the happiest cities, which showed Napa, California as the happiest city, followed by Longmont, Colorado; San Clemente, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Santa Cruz, California; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Santa Rosa, California, Simi Valley, California, and Lafayette, Colorado.
The five most bummed-out cities according to word choices were Beaumont, Texas; Albany, Georgia; Texas City, Texas; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Monroe, Louisiana.
It was further found that coastal areas were livelier as compared to landlocked areas, and cities with a higher density of tweets tended to be less happy. The cities with high technology adoption, as compared to cities with less technology adoption, were likely to be less happy, the study said.
In addition, it was also revealed that wealthy areas tend to be happier as compared to location where people are more obese has lower happiness levels.
'The purpose to use web-scale text analysis was to remotely sense societal-scale levels of happiness using the singular source of the micro-blog and social networking service Twitter,' the study's introduction says according to The Atlantic.
For instance, the word ‘shit” and “ass” were used less in Napa as compared to Beaumont. In contrast, “lol”, “haha,” “nice” and “good” were most used in the city.
At the same time, the University of Vermont scientists identified people with Norwegian ancestry to be happier than African Americans, which could simply mean that Norwegian Americans use breezier language.
What was noticeable is that the data correlates with other existing measures of happiness, primarily surveys conducted by Gallup. They also show that their happiness data correlates with income and the prevalence of obesity in an area.
Overall, the data throws up interesting results, but do you agree with the results?
