How Happy Are You?
What if we could measure our happiness as easily as we measure body temperature, or the stock market?
That’s the goal of a project called the Hedon-o-meter, as in hedonism meter. It’s an interactive, online graph created by scientists at the University of Vermont, and it basically measures our day-to-day happiness just by analyzing the words we use in our tweets.
How does it work? Each day, powerful computers take a random sampling of over 50 million tweets, which represents 10-percent of all the messages posted on Twitter in a typical day. Then, computers look for certain keywords linked to our mood. For example, happy words like “fun,” “party,” and “holiday,” and sad words like “hate,” “ugly,” and “dying.” And based on the words we use, the Hedonometer calculates an average “happiness score” for each date, ranging from one to 9, with 9 being the happiest. So basically, it acts like a virtual “thermometer,” taking our emotional temperature.
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That’s the goal of a project called the Hedon-o-meter, as in hedonism meter. It’s an interactive, online graph created by scientists at the University of Vermont, and it basically measures our day-to-day happiness just by analyzing the words we use in our tweets.
How does it work? Each day, powerful computers take a random sampling of over 50 million tweets, which represents 10-percent of all the messages posted on Twitter in a typical day. Then, computers look for certain keywords linked to our mood. For example, happy words like “fun,” “party,” and “holiday,” and sad words like “hate,” “ugly,” and “dying.” And based on the words we use, the Hedonometer calculates an average “happiness score” for each date, ranging from one to 9, with 9 being the happiest. So basically, it acts like a virtual “thermometer,” taking our emotional temperature.
Click Here to Read More