Smile or Suffer the Consequences While Wearing the Happiness Hat

Posted by John Farrier in Arts & Crafts, Video Clips on October 28, 2009 at 10:26 pm


(Video Link)

Lauren McCarthy created the Happiness Hat – a gadget that detects whether or not you’re smiling. If you’re not, it drives a small metal spike into the back of your head to encourage to you resolve that problem quickly:

An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.

Link via Geekologie

UPDATE 10/29: The YouTube video’s status was switched to private, so I swapped it out for a Vimeo version.

 
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Using Facebook to Measure "Gross National Happiness"

Posted by John Farrier in Blog & Internet on October 10, 2009 at 12:56 pm


Image: Facebook

Jason Kinkaid writes at Tech Crunch that Facebook has developed a new application that aggregates the published emotional states of users over time. The relative contentment that users express constitutes “Gross National Happiness”:

Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.

Link via Fast Company

 
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How Medical Data Revealed Secret to Health and Happiness

Posted by Miss Cellania in Science & Tech on September 12, 2009 at 11:21 pm

The Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 and followed over 5,000 participants for decades. The volunteers made up 40% of the population of Framingham, Massachusetts.

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn’t care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members.

“They asked for follow-up purposes,” Christakis says. “If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down.”

Christakis and Fowler used the social data to study changes in the population over time. They constructed networks of the volunteers social connections to see how these connections affected any changes. The findings? Some behaviors are contagious. Social connections with up to three degrees of separation influence whether we quit smoking or become fat. And even happiness is contagious, both online and offline. The social connections of the Framingham volunteers are graphically illustrated at Wired. Link

 
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Analyzing National Moods Through Song Lyrics and Speeches

Posted by John Farrier in Blog & Internet, Music on August 4, 2009 at 10:57 am

Christopher M. Danforth and Peter Sheridan Dodds, statisticians at the University of Vermont, analyzed song lyrics, blog posts, and speeches for certain emotional keywords in order to discern the collective moods of the American people over time:

Still, the University of Vermont study presents what could be a complementary measure, and it provides a few decent cocktail-party nuggets along the way. Dr. Dodds and Dr. Danforth downloaded the lyrics to 232,574 songs by 20,025 artists released between 1960 and 2007, from the Web site hotlyrics.net. From another site, wefeelfine.org, they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009. They also analyzed State of the Union speeches going back to George Washington’s. They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25).

Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was predominant.

Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day.

Link via Hit & Run

Dodds and Danforth’s Peer-Reviewed Article

 
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Women Happiest at 28

Posted by Alex in Everything Else on June 27, 2009 at 1:25 pm

A survey of women by hair color products maker Clairol has pinpointed the age of maximum happiness for women:

A spokesman for home hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which carried out the study of 4,000 women, said: "Everything in life hits its peak at some point, and nearly reaching your thirties isn’t so bad now.

"The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.

"The security of your job, having a steady income, being in a relationship and having strong friendships all help create the perfect point in our lives when everything comes together. Reaching and surpassing your twenties no longer triggers the downward spiral of your looks and self-confidence.

Link

 
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The World's Happiest Places

Posted by Miss Cellania in Travel & Places on May 11, 2009 at 10:21 am

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development released a new study ranking the world’s nations by the happiness levels of their citizens. According to the published results, northern Europeans are the happiest people in the world. The top ten are:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. The Netherlands
4. Sweden
5. Ireland
6. Canada
7. Switzerland
8. New Zealand
9. Norway
10. Belgium

The US ranked above average. Link to article. Link to slideshow. -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Eddie Gerald/Alamy)

 
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What Makes You Happy?

Posted by Alex in Everything Else on April 30, 2009 at 8:09 pm

Neatorama regular SenorMysterioso started a thread on the Neatorama Forum that I hope you will participate in. It’s about what makes you happy:

We do a lot of bitching(maybe I’ll start a thread for that too) but lets have a little space dedicated to what’s made us happy lately. At least if nothing that great happens in my day I can read about everyone else’s little joys.

What makes you happy? Join the thread there (or if you don’t want to register a username, you can comment below): Link

And with that, let me congratulate Johnny Cat on the good news and wish seefish3 a Happy Birthday!

 
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The Secret to Happiness: Sisters!

Posted by Alex in Baby & Kids on April 15, 2009 at 3:38 pm

What’s the secret to happiness? According to a study by the University of Ulster, the answer is: having sisters!

Lead researcher Professor Tony Cassidy said: "Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families.

"However, brothers seemed to have the alternative effect. Emotional expression is fundamental to good psychological health and having sisters promotes this in families."

He said many of the participants had been brought up in families where parents had split and the impact of sisters was even more marked in these circumstances.

"I think these findings could be used by people offering support to families and children during distressing times. We may have to think carefully about the way we deal with families with lots of boys."

Link

 
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Everything is Amazing Yet Nobody is Happy...

Posted by Queuebot in Funny, Science & Tech, Video Clips on March 1, 2009 at 1:34 pm


[YouTube - Link]


Comedian Louis CK was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien explaining how amazing everything is, and yet nobody is happy. You’d think with all this technology and instant gratification, we would at least realize how lucky we are.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.

 
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