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Pedro Gonçalves

Twitter Drives New Insights in the Social Sciences - 0 views

  • a landmark 2009 study by Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard and James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego. The results suggested that a person’s decision to vote can influence hundreds of people linked through their social network to head to the polls. 
  • While highly regarded by social scientists, that study, as well as similar research by the same researchers concluding that obese people influence their friends to put on weight, faced the homophily question. Do your friends vote because you vote, or do people who have an interest in politics tend to associate with one another?
    • Pedro Gonçalves
       
      Nervermind the fact that looking only at the universe of twitter users inherently skews the results...
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  • Did your obese friends cause you to become overweight, or did you choose obese friends because they're similar to you?
  • In his own study, Macy analyzed words expressing mood in 500 million tweets sent between February 2008 and January 2010. He found that people’s mood, as measured by their tweets, tended to be elevated in the morning and to decline as the day progressed. Weekends tended to be “happier” days, although mood peak started later in the morning, possibly reflecting twitterers' tendency to sleep in. Most remarkable, Macy said in an interview with Science magazine, was that the tweets showed a similar pattern across the 84 countries where the tweets originated, suggesting that the daily mood curve is fundamentally human rather than cultural.
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