

Where is the happiest city in the USA? - japhyr
http://onehappybird.com/2013/02/18/where-is-the-happiest-city-in-the-usa/

======
gavanwoolery
"With a score of 6.25, we found the happiest city to be Napa, CA, due to a
relative abundance of such happy words as “restaurant”, “wine”, and even
“cheers”, along with a lack of profanity."

I grew up in Napa so I know something was off here. While adults love it, most
kids find it boring or even hate growing up there.

Tweets about wine != happiness. Lack of profanity != happiness. Examples -
"The wine sucked" or "Vegas is f*cking awesome!" This is an interesting study
of vocabulary, but hardly a measure of happiness.

~~~
gavanwoolery
On that note, I think a more accurate measure would be to look for two
emoticons: ":)" and ":("

------
callmeed
My town (San Luis Obispo) was rated "happiest city in the USA" by author Dan
Buettner and was featured on Oprah in 2011.

I didn't see it on the list here, I'm assuming because the population was too
small.

[http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/story/2011/04/San-
Lu...](http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/story/2011/04/San-Luis-Obispo-
Its-the-happiest-place-in-the-USA-/45900412/1)

~~~
CyrusL
I have put up a cool tilt shift video of San Luis Obispo on <http://slo.com/>

~~~
callmeed
Nice work, you can almost see my office in the opening poster image.

How the heck did you get that domain?

------
Xcelerate
Meh... I can't really put my finger on it, but something just seems off (or
unrigorous) with this. I feel like if I wanted to come up with some kind of
metric to demonstrate that southern or northern states are the happiest (over
western), I probably could.

In other words, start with my results and then find some data to support them.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Counting profanity as unhappy is suspect, for one thing.

------
chime
The best part about this is how they calculated happiness from each tweet:
<http://arxiv.org/pdf/1101.5120.pdf>

> we avoid stemming words, i.e., conflating inflected words with their root
> form, such as all conjugations of a speci c verb. For verbs in particular,
> by focusing on the most fre- quent words, we obtained scores for those
> conjuga- tions likely to appear in texts, obviating any need for stemming.
> Moreover, while we observe stemming works well in some cases for happiness
> measures, e.g., havg(advance)=6.58, havg(advanced)=6.58, and
> havg(advances)=6.24, it fails badly in others, e.g., havg(have)=5.82 and
> havg(had)=4.74; havg(arm)=5.50 and havg(armed)=3.84; and havg(capture)=4.18
> and havg(captured)=3.22.

That is something I came across myself when I was working on a similar data
mining project. But this was a surprise:

> In terms of methodology, our hedonometer could be improved by incorporating
> happiness estimates for common n-grams, e.g., 2-grams such as `child abuse'
> and `sex scandal' as well as negated sentiments such as `not happy'

I can understand ignoring n-grams but a simple no-X or not-X is a necessity.
In common parlance, 'Peace' > 'No war' > 'No peace' > 'War'. If you assume the
simple happiness values of 'Peace' = 1, 'War' = -1, 'No' = -0.5, then the
scores end up: Peace=1, No War=-1.5, No peace=0.5, War=-1. Clearly 'War' is
worse than 'No War' yet the scores don't correspond. The correct order should
be something like: Peace=1, No War=0.5, No peace=-0.5, War=-1. To make this
work, 'No' shouldn't be a fixed negative value like -0.5. It should be -(next-
word/2). Then 'No Peace' = -0.5 + 1 = 0.5 and 'No War' = 0.5 + -1 = -0.5.

PS: I typed 'War' so many times in the above sentence that I had to check its
spelling to confirm it was a real word.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation> strikes again.

------
ekianjo
Judging positive/negative emotions by semantic analysis of 140 chains of
characters. Meh ? Call me unconvinced. Especially for people who tend to use
irony in their communications, semantic analysis can be easily misinterpreted.
Plus, who says that the people tweeting in a particular place are actually
living there and not just passing by ? Who says their tweets relate to their
environment and not to a particular news they reacted to ?

I think it can certainly be used as a "qualitative" analysis, but making it a
"measurement of happiness" is overdoing it.

------
flexie
Interesting, but wonder if the tweeting part of the population is
representative for the population as a whole.

~~~
thebear
On a similar note, one must wonder to what extent those who tweet are even
local. For Napa, CA, which is mentioned in a comment, that would probably not
be the case. Another example is Nevada, which, according to their map, must be
something like the second happiest state in the union. I live in Nevada, and I
am indeed very happy, but that's because I live in Tahoe, a rather atypical
corner of the state. For Nevada as a whole, I am sure the result is due to
things like tourists in Vegas going ga-ga over all Das Blinkenlighten, or
gamblers tweeting when they win but not when they lose, the latter being the
default.

------
oliao
Maybe the happiest people don't tweet

------
crusso
From my experience of living in lots of places, I'd say that methodology that
finds New York and Washington state as happy and Texas and Louisiana as sad is
fundamentally flawed.

Attempting to use tweeted words as indicators of happiness ignores context.

------
daleharvey
As a Scot, I find the attempt at correlating unhappiness with profanity
confusing but funny

------
gnosis
It would be interesting to see how the results would differ were this method
used with groups of adjacent words instead of just individual words.

Analysis based on idividual words might miss a lot of subtle context,
especially since English is such an idiomatic language. For instance, focusing
on individual words (or even small groups of adjacent words) may lead to
mistaking a morbid joke for sadness, while a sarcastic insult might be
mistaken for happiness.

Still, this is an ingenious way to measure happiness, and I'm looking forward
to reading future research that builds on this work.

------
eksith
I'm surprised New Yorkers aren't the bunch of miserable bastards I thought we
were. Also I realise money may not buy you happiness, but a lot of the
wealthier areas tended to show more happiness, although that may just be a
function of poverty creating sadness.

I can't imagine _“restaurant”, “wine”, and even “cheers”_ going with people
who can't afford any.

------
choko
If anything at all, this really only measures where the happiest twitter users
are located. I question this sampling methodology.

------
waterlesscloud
Places with a higher percentage of at least middle-class people on vacation
(Hawaii and Napa) are happy. Huh.

------
eevilspock
Interesting, but bullshit as titled and described.

Regional happiness may or may not correlate to usage of these "happy words" or
"unhappy words", especially across local cultures, circumstances (e.g. before
or after Obama's election, different regions will respond differently),
technology/twitter adoption, etc.

------
Aardwolf
Profanity does not mean unhappy! This is wrong!

