Interesting - although I probably wouldn't bother with it if I was unhappy. I'd be concentrating on sorting my unhappiness (ie finishing work, getting home, whatever) and would come back when I had time / was happier (much like Twitter etc.).
As a side note, the favicon looks like the Chrome loading icon got stuck at the bottom :-)
Just taking a look at the map, everyone on there is either Happy, Very Happy or Extremely Happy. Without sounding like a pessimist, I have a feeling people have a tendency to say they are happy when they aren't, I'm not sure if any data this project collects will have any value at all, apart from portraying us Brits as a jolly happy bunch.
I'm the developer/researcher. Nobody but nobody reads captions... but if you did, you'd see this: "These are the places where mappiness users have most recently reported feeling happy."
I thought a miserableness map might be a bit morbid, so only happy responses get shown. I'm not certain this is the right choice, but it's how it works at present.
Could it be scaled by population density (or reporting density)? I have a feeling the map just shows there are more people in some cities than others; nothing about per-capita happiness.
There's possibly a selection bias in that people are being asked to download and install the app (maybe unhappy people are too listless to get involved?).
However, that doesn't mean the data collected will have no value. We've no idea what they may be comparing the data against so perhaps they'll be able to tackle the question of whether people are really happy, when they say they are.
Also, this is the first example I've seen of researchers trying to use existing devices to run large-scale experiments. I've heard of them but not seen one before. Just being able to complete something on this scale is a win as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, the response to this has been far beyond anything I dared hope before launch: over 3 million responses from almost 50,000 volunteers.
One of the key benefits of getting panel data using the app is that it doesn't necessarily matter if we get people who are more or less happy than the average. In the analysis, I generally use only the within-individual variation to estimate the effects of different things on happiness.
Sounds good. I was particularly interested since my grad studies were on (positive) emotion and decision making. You're probably aware of it already but I found the following ref interesting for my work.
As a side note, the favicon looks like the Chrome loading icon got stuck at the bottom :-)