FTFA: the researchers analyzed each tweet for its happiness content based on the positive words, such as beauty and love, and negative words, such as boo and lied, that were used.

So according to them:
Happy tweet: I love rape!
Sad tweet: My son has never lied to me.

I'm surprised Maine is so happy.  Stephen King really sells them short.

Neat, my hometown (or at least the largest city near it) is the saddest in the country. I'm really not surprised since there's nothing here but swamps, chemical plants, and rednecks.

I was once ranked by the happy tweet.  It hurt.

For instance, Napa's relatively low use of the (sad) word "biatches" directly contributed to its status as the happiest and least-derogatory-towards-women city in the country.

It's like they did no research as to who lives where.

stonicus: FTFA: the researchers analyzed each tweet for its happiness content based on the positive words, such as beauty and love, and negative words, such as boo and lied, that were used.

So according to them:
Happy tweet: I love rape!
Sad tweet: My son has never lied to me.

Yeah, the methodology on this research is farking idiotic.

Hmm so all the more liberal/secular states are in happy happy land, and all the hardcore bible thumping conservative states are unhappy? Curious... why is that? You would think all those people loving Jesus, hating gays, loving their guns, and blaming Obama for the worlds ills would be happier?

Houma. I believe that's where a lot of Katrina refugees wound up. Them coming in as sad isn't shocking.

Battle Creek is in the bottom ten. We'll duh, isn't "battle" a negative word? All you have to do is say where you come from and you're already screwed!

Hey, no fair reading the tourist tweets!

Yes, "No one loves me" could be counted as a happy tweet, while "I'd hate to live anywhere else" could be counted as negative, but on average, these words are going to correlate with happiness or unhappiness. Coming up with specific examples that belie the usual context of the word does not mean the entire methodology is useless.

Heist: Yes, "No one loves me" could be counted as a happy tweet, while "I'd hate to live anywhere else" could be counted as negative, but on average, these words are going to correlate with happiness or unhappiness. Coming up with specific examples that belie the usual context of the word does not mean the entire methodology is useless.

Sure, not useless, but substantially flawed.  A word is meaningless without context, and there was no way to determine context.  So slightly better than throwing darts at a dartboard, but not much.

KawaiiNot: It is interesting how the more "liberal" states seem to rate happier. Need I say more? Nope.

Weed = false sense of well being?

Really? I'd be depressed if I lived in 'alarbama'.

Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: I can understand PA being ranked so low.  Most of our tweets are about how miserably gray the weather is and how we want to slit our wrists just to see color.

Plus the Amish are real shiatty tweeters.

and can't go anywhere because the roads are awful, and the casinos suck and you get no tax break for them

Abstruse: Neat, my hometown (or at least the largest city near it) is the saddest in the country. I'm really not surprised since there's nothing here but swamps, chemical plants, and rednecks.

I could argue with you...but we'd only wind up even sadder.

...so those surveys where religious people say how happy they are? Yeah. About that.

According to the article, Louisiana is one of the absolutely most sad places because folks here use a lot of curse words?  Lately I've read that people who swear are more trustworthy and have less pain.  Also, folks in Louisiana tweet curse words because we feel free to do so.  Let's see, feelings of being free, trustworthy and with less pain?  Also with good food and drinks. That study is farking ridiculous.

Survey is flawed because the happiest people are the ones free from the constant drivel and pointless AWing minutia that is Twitter.

Jackpot777: [sas-origin.onstreammedia.com image 600x344]

[img.gawkerassets.com image 850x478]

...so those surveys where religious people say how happy they are? Yeah. About that.

They're happy to berate and denigrate all the evil non-believers and are very angry about the Kenyan Muslim usurper currently holding the presidency.

Jackpot777: [sas-origin.onstreammedia.com image 600x344]

[img.gawkerassets.com image 850x478]

...so those surveys where religious people say how happy they are? Yeah. About that.

So basically the Mormons are the only ones who get it right.

But they don't count because they're ridiculously attractive aliens from another planet.

This thread has some of the worst troll attempts in recent memory.

Jackpot777: ...so those surveys where religious people say how happy they are? Yeah. About that.

Another interpretation is that black people are very unhappy.

The Beaumont/Texas City/Port Arthur area seems to be exceptionally unhappy, and this should surprise no one.

InmanRoshi: The Beaumont/Texas City/Port Arthur area seems to be exceptionally unhappy, and this should surprise no one.
[numerogroup.files.wordpress.com image 681x510]

That's about as scenic as the Golden Triangle area gets.

Cubicle Jockey: Jackpot777: ...so those surveys where religious people say how happy they are? Yeah. About that.

Another interpretation is that black people are very unhappy.

[www.statjump.com image 675x390]

Psssh, if that where true the "angry black man" would be a common stereotyooooooooooooooo...

The state pastime in Louisiana is biatching and complaining, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just how people communicate.

I'm going to move to Napa.  Give me six months.

I'll drag those farkers to the bottom of the list single-handedly, and I won't make even a single tweet.

*twirling mustache*

So the stereotype, fat people are happy is wrong? Unpossible!

Abstruse: InmanRoshi: The Beaumont/Texas City/Port Arthur area seems to be exceptionally unhappy, and this should surprise no one.
[numerogroup.files.wordpress.com image 681x510]

That's about as scenic as the Golden Triangle area gets.

It can't be good when the view outside your window is indistinguishable from the movie adaptation of The Road.

Yeah, the methodology on this study is pretty weak and I wouldn't take any of it as gospel, but it's still an interesting exercise and an example of the sort of thing that's possible now that services like twitter are around and established.

A colleague near me is doing some pretty neat research involving data mining 70 years of newspaper articles that were OCR'd for sentiment analysis about a bunch of topics. So you could see the general "tone" with which things like civil rights movement, military actions, different political issues and such were discussed in articles about them shifted over time. His work seems to be catching the interest of a lot of groups, although personally I just like it as a novelty and source of sliding commentary about our human condition.

His team was starting to dive into Twitter more rigorously to see what they could see, but as others pointed out above there's a slew of caveats and shortcomings given the modern quirks and colloquialisms (eg most swear words are ambiguously good or bad when used as adjectives and adverbs, etc) and it sounds like the researchers in TFA would've been well suited to implement even a modicum of phrase parsing to catch things like "the shiat" vs. just shiat.

But still, will be fun going forward to see data fall out of these sorts of "passive" services and how that compares to results Gallup gets from knocking on doors and asking questions. People answering questions more honestly than they ever would, just via their behavior on services like these, no actual asking necessary.

FTFA"... and negative words, such as boo and lied, that were used."

The idiots that did the survey apparently don't know "Boo" is a term of affection in Louisiana.

Ex: "@sluttyfriend:Hey boo! Did you get that rash checked?"
       "@dumbcoonasswhocantspeak: Hey Boo, I heard ya gurl walked on ya. Mind if I call her?"

Baelz: Hmm so all the more liberal/secular states are in happy happy land, and all the hardcore bible thumping conservative states are unhappy? Curious... why is that? You would think all those people loving Jesus, hating gays, loving their guns, and blaming Obama for the worlds ills would be happier?

Yeah, nothing says bible thumping and hating gays like New farking Orleans.  Or did you not see how miserable it lists LA?

thecpt: Angry Drunk Bureaucrat: I can understand PA being ranked so low.  Most of our tweets are about how miserably gray the weather is and how we want to slit our wrists just to see color.

Plus the Amish are real shiatty tweeters.

and can't go anywhere because the roads are awful, and the casinos suck and you get no tax break for them

And the booze is so expensive that you can barely afford to drink away the sadness.

/Philly represent

InmanRoshi: Abstruse: InmanRoshi: The Beaumont/Texas City/Port Arthur area seems to be exceptionally unhappy, and this should surprise no one.
[numerogroup.files.wordpress.com image 681x510]

That's about as scenic as the Golden Triangle area gets.

It can't be good when the view outside your window is indistinguishable from the movie adaptation of The Road.

Try living here. Hell, I don't even live in Beaumont or Port Arthur. I live in Orange, the crappiest of the three "cities" in the area. It's too hot to go outside for more than a few minutes 9 months out of the year and the other three it rains 3 out of every 7 days. All the bars here are dives (I don't mean hipster "dives", I mean crack/methheads live in the parking lot dives). All the restaurants are either chains like Chili's or complete crap. The movie theater (which hasn't been renovated aside from repairing hurricane damage since the 90s) has a policy not to show any R-rated films ever...unless they're torture porn staring Jesus, then it plays for 3 months straight. One out of every three buildings is a crumbling ruin after Hurricanes Ike and Rita and no one's bothering to clean them up. There's four restaurants where you sit down and order food from a waiter that aren't crappy cookie-cutter TexMex, and one of those is a Chili's.That's not counting the dozen or so crappy TexMex and Chinese buffets that have been shut down at least thrice each for health code violations. The only career paths in this town are work at the chemical plants, work at the underfunded hospital that treats all the long-term health problems the chemical plant workers tend to get, or lawyers to sue the chemical plants over the long-term health problems. Oh, and defend meth heads and crackwhores when they get arrested.

We don't even have a friggin' Starbucks! But there are eight liquor stores. Because you kind of have to stay drunk to keep your sanity living here.

LL316: Yeah, nothing says bible thumping and hating gays like New farking Orleans.  Or did you not see how miserable it lists LA?

Too bad there's more to Louisiana than Bourbon Street, or else that argument might work.

So what happens when people quote movie lines? Song lyrics? Sylvia Plath poems?

Beaumont? Really? FFS, get me out of here.

Abstruse: The only career paths in this town are work at the chemical plants, work at the underfunded hospital that treats all the long-term health problems the chemical plant workers tend to get, or lawyers to sue the chemical plants over the long-term health problems.

A sad existence we southeast Texans live, don't we?

I vowed from a very young age to never EVER work in one of those death traps. Living near them surely isn't much better though.