Did You Know Your Tweets Get Sick, Too?
Did you know your tweets could get sick, too? Apparently, it turns out that they change when we ourselves are sick. According to newswise.com, opinion and emotion in tweets change when you're sick. "Opinions and emotions are present in every tweet, regardless of whether the user is talking about their health," says Svitlana Volkova, a data scientist at Richland, Washington's Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory ( PNNL) and lead author of a recent study. "Like a digital heartbeat, we're finding how changes in this behavior relate to health trends in a community." It takes health workers weeks to discover influenza trends the traditional way: by monitoring how many sick people visit clinics. By discovering trends in real time, social media could be the game-changing solution public health workers have been looking for. But can tweets replace a health exam for detecting a rise in the flu or other health threats? Vo...