Geography of Emotion: Where in a City Are People Happier? | Hacker News Reader

Geography of Emotion: Where in a City Are People Happier?

arxiv.org

22 pointssexbomb11 comments

Are people really happy if they have to do Check-ins and tweet?

I would argue that certain personality types are more likely to "tweet" and "check in" and therefore cannot be statistically representative of the general population. So to base your research on such a dataset could be skewing the result quite significantly.

While they analyzed Tweets from Los Angeles, they seem to have contributed nothing to the question of whether or not Disneyland is, in fact, the "happiest place on Earth".

This reminds me of the -- Chigago? -- city app where citizens could report the locations of potholes on the roads in Chicago and the city would send repair crews time permitting...

What happened? The upscale trendy neighborhoods were all pothole free and the lower economic class neighborhoods got bumpier.

Making jumps from foursquare and twitter to "valuable information about land use and utilization of services in urban areas" seems like a recipe for disaster.

Is this because the upscale neighborhoods were more likely to have phoned to do the reporting?

At that time I think it had to do with disproportionate smartphone penetration (since it was a smartphone app, not a phone number, you just tap it when you see a pothole and it sends your geodata).

But then and now, even close to 100% smartphone ownership, I think it's the same thing with disproportionate app penetration. What social groups actually use foursquare and twitter and with what frequency?

I believe this can be generalized to all minority oppression. Minorities' views / needs not being honored since they're in the minority, or have a minority level of access to valuable / high-utility resources.

Solution: high-level resource owners share in the _human experience_ of low-level owners, determining ad-hoc and with empathy how to extend support / normalize quality of life.

What?

I'm fairly positive this has nothing to do with oppression except in a wildly politicized worldview where somehow lower socioeconomic areas were actually prohibited access to the reporting functionality. As far as I'm aware this wasn't the case, it was a completely unintended side effect of a good idea: we can save money on pothole patrols by letting people report potholes and then fix them in a queue-like order from when they were reported thus lowering costs and improving response time...

And here they are trying to make city planning decisions with something that I think will probably suffer the same bias. It's not an intentional classist plan, it's just not fully thought out (although I don't know this, maybe if I read the paper they will talk about controlling for this effect).

And I don't see anything in your solution that would solve anything, you seem to have just thrown a ton of hotwords into a grammatical structure...

Has sentiment analysis successfully conquered sarcasm yet? Twitter is ripe with it.

I don't know about conquered, but there are certainly some attempts to at least partially account for it.

Though, perhaps that is why you specified conquered.

> data from the Twitter microblogging platform to analyze the properties of these areas. Specifically, we have extracted a large corpus of geo-tagged messages, called tweets

lol

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