How Happy Is Your City? 'Selfies' Will Show
If you're like me, you pretty much check Twitter to see what your friends are up to, and what's going on in the world (that's how I knew exactly what was going on minute-by-minute during the Boston Marathon massacre). But what would you think if it could tell you how happy your city was? That's the new plan developed by the University of California, San Diego and The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). They're collecting and analyzing tweeted images of cities to measure just how happy people are in cities. According to newswise.com, the project will tackle a simple question: Is it possible to measure the overall happiness of metropolitan areas based on the study of images shared on Twitter? "Can visual characteristics of images shared on social media tell us something about the ‘moods’ of cities?” the Web site quotes principal investigator Mehrdad Yazdani, a data scientist with the Software Studies Initiative (SSI) at the Qualcomm Ins...