Category Archives: Reading Responses

Happiness in where we live

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In the article they Discuss how twitter determined peoples happiness based on peoples tweets and the places they tweet from. ” By mapping the emotional content of New Yorkers’ tweets, they hope to build a real-time map of who’s happy and who’s bummed out across the five boroughs”. Researchers based peoples tweets by peoples use of key words, phrases and emoticons to determine the mood of each tweet. Happiness also correlates to leisure and wealth but not as much one thinks. The NECSI believes it can achieve a reasonably accurate portrait of where people are happy and where they’re miserable. According to the Article researchers determined that some of the most happiest places according to peoples tweets are:

Central Park

the Botanical gardens

and the most happiest place is Times square

Some of the most miserable places are:

Penn station

JFK Airport

LaGuardia Airport

I thought this article was very interesting because i got to see what places people were the happiest and what places made people miserable. it was surprising that the most happiest place was Times square because its very noisy and crowed over there but at the same time i can see where it may bring someone happiness because time square is very diverse. Its also interesting how social media Effects our daily lives. I also learned that Sometimes its not always how you live its where you live.

In Somerville they partnered with an organization to create an app geared toward generating and increasing happiness. the app is part of the happ(a)thon project, first the app starts with a survey then various activities to boost the users happiness. based on this app officials in somerville can determine their citizens happiness. i think this app can be useful and use less at the same time because one can determine their individual happiness but its not really useful for everybody because everyone’s happiness is different.

 

Happiness Results.

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Officials of Somerville Mass. wanted to see how happy the people who lived there were, so they asked the residents to fill out a census form which they were asked to rate their happiness with. On a scale of 1-10. Officials wanted to see what made their residents happy and do more of it.

In some cases many residents rated themselves a 7 on a scale of 1-10, their reason being because of things that can not be controlled. For example one resident rated himself a 6 because he wants to grow more.Many residents were happy that the officials were curious as to how they felt and that they were taking advantage of the new age of technology that is available to us.

Officials hope to be able to compare their results to other towns in the future. What they found was that if they change the surroundings and help out those less fortunate than people will be happier. In other places such as France there has been a riot of unhappy people in the streets which is exactly what the officials of Somerville Mass. want to avoid.

 

Revision for Thursday 9/12/13

In John Tierney’s article “How Happy Are You? A Census Wants to Know” it discussed how Officials of Somerville Mass. wanted residents to fill out a census which rated their happiness on a scale of 1-10. The idea was to find out what made people happy and do more of it. Many people had different opinions on it. Some of the residents were flattered that their feelings were being taken into consideration. The Officials hope to down the line be able to use their results to help better the community by using gentrification. Over all this experiment was useful to them because they were able to find out how people were feeling.

Reflection:

Before I had made any changes to my summary it was very long and it had a lot of detail that didn’t need to be there. Now my summary is very straight to the point yet it still touches base with things that are discussed in the article.