Using Twitter to track people's moods

There's a lot you can read about on Twitter — including, it now appears, the patterns of human moods.
After analyzing two years' worth of tweets by 2.4 million people around the world, researchers at Cornell University have concluded that individuals wake up happy but that their mood deteriorates as the day progresses.
That discovery, among others reported Thursday in the journal Science, will interest researchers who are trying to understand how circadian rhythms and other natural influences shape our states of mind. But the study's primary significance may have more to do with its methods than its results.
"We now have the ability to view societies at a massive scale using the Internet," said study leader Scott Golder, a graduate student in sociology at Cornell. "This will open up opportunities for social scientists."
Golder said he intended to use Twitter to study behavior, not emotion. He and a fellow graduate student wrote a computer program that sampled all Twitter user accounts created between February 2008 and April 2009, collecting up to 400 messages from each account.
The program compiled more than half a billion Twitter messages, none longer than 140 characters. Most were written by English speakers and deemed good candidates for analysis with other software. The researchers looked at keywords in the tweets to figure out what people were doing and used timestamps embedded in the tweets to peg those activities to particular times of day and locations around the world.
They surmised that bacon is more popular than sausage (but eaten at the same time of day) and that a television show about someone named "Oprah" aired at 4 p.m. on weekdays. They estimated that it takes seven hours to become inebriated, based on the lag between tweets about "beer" and tweets about being "drunk."
They also figured out that they could search for mood-oriented keywords just as easily as they searched for behavior-oriented ones, Golder said.
The team employed a well-known text analysis program that is often used by researchers to sort words based on their emotional content; it seeks out words such as "happy," "awesome" and "fantastic" that have positive overtones as well as words like "afraid," "remorse" and "fury" that have negative ones. Sure enough, patterns emerged.
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California man is found alive by his children after wreck

David Lavau’s children drove slowly along the mountain road, stopping to peer over the dropoffs and call out for their missing father.
Then finally a faint cry: “Help! Help!” The voice not only let Lavau’s children find him, it may have resolved another missing-person case.
Six days after his car plunged 200 feet into a ravine, Lavau, 68, was rescued Thursday by his three adult children, who took matters into their own hands after a detective told them his last cellphone signal came from a section of the Angeles National Forest.
And near him they found a body in another car that belonged to a man reported missing 10 days earlier.
As Lavau lay injured in the woods next to his wrecked car, he survived by eating bugs and leaves and drinking creek water, a doctor said.
Lavau was in serious but stable condition Friday at a hospital with three rib fractures, a dislocated shoulder, a broken arm and fractures in his back.
Ranbir Singh, the hospital’s trauma director, said Lavau told him he was driving home on the evening of Sept. 23 when he was temporarily blinded by the headlights of an oncoming car. He braked but failed to gain traction. The car flipped and plunged down the embankment.
It landed near a car belonging to Melvin Gelfand, 88, whose family had reported him missing on Sept. 14. The body found inside could not be visually identified due to decomposition. Gelfand’s son-in-law Will Matlack said the family had been contacted by the coroner’s office, which was trying to match fingerprints or dental records to make a positive identification.
Lavau spent the night in his wrecked car and crawled out in daylight. He found a stream nearby and ate ants, the doctor said. He also found a flare in the other car and tried to light it, but it was expired. He also couldn’t find his cellphone.

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Ceremony honors old, new Joint Chiefs chairmen

With full military fanfare -- gun salutes, fife and drum corps, brass bands, a flyover and presidential praise -- the nation bid farewell to its top military man and honored his successor Friday.
Adm. Mike Mullen has been Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, the president's top military adviser, since October of 2007.
Army Gen. Marty Dempsey takes his place.
"As the new secretary of defense, I am confident of the future because we have the strongest military force in our history -- and it is strong because we can replace one great warrior with another," Leon Panetta said during the 90-minute Hail and Farwell ceremony on the Fort Myer parade ground across the river from Washington..
It wasn't just the October sun that brightened the day for Mullen. It was also the lengthy praise from the president and from the military he had served for 43 years, as well as the day's latest success in the terrorism fight -- the successful take-down of al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki.
Obama pointed to Mullen's leadership, from all the advice he provided in the Oval Office about the nation's two wars, to his crucial testimony to Congress that the country should end its ban on gays and lesbians serving open in the military. "Mike, as you look back at your four consequential years as chairman and your four decades in uniform, be assured: Our military is stronger and our nation is more secure because of the service that you have rendered."
Mullen, the son of a Hollywood publicist, is a master of self-deprecating humor. He drew laughter from the crowd when he told a story of how he had been mistakenly identified at a party as the former general, and now CIA director, David Petraeus. And he said that White House meetings went better if participants didn't criticize the president's baseball team, the Chicago White Sox.
"And he really likes it when you laugh at his jokes. It just makes the meeting go better." Mullen said.
Mullen never misses a chance to make a point, hammering a favorite theme, that the American public must become more connected to its military personnel when they come home, giving them a chance, a job, an education.
"Welcome them back to those places, not with bands and bunting or yellow ribbons, but with the solemn recognition that they have done your bidding, they have represented you well, they have carried the best of you and of this country into battle," Mullen said. "They have done things and seen things and bear things in their souls that you cannot know."
Panetta praised Mullen's hard work and dogged persistence. "His leadership, his influence, his honest candor, his compassion and his outspoken concern for our troops have set an exceptionally high standard for the responsibilities and performance of a chairman of the Joint Chiefs," Panetta said.
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Bilal Sharif Birthday Party

لاہور کے معروف بزنس مین اور ہاٹی ناٹی ویب ساٹس کے مالک اور ریکارڈ یافتہ رکشہ چیکر ڈیز مسٹر بلال شریف عرف بلا ھوشاری آج اپنے پیارے اور خیر خواہ دوستوں کے ہمراہ اپنی سالگرہ منایں گے۔ جس میں تمام زند دلان لاہور کو دعوت عام دی جاتی ہے کہ وہ آج  پانچ بجے گلشن پارک کے وسیع و عریض گھاس والے پلاٹ  میں جمع ہو جایں۔اور اپنے ساتھ تحفے تحاف ضرور لے کر آیں۔ لنگر کا وسیع انتظام ہو گا۔ مہمان خصوصی لاہور کے معروف فنکارطاہر چمٹے والا شرکت فرمایں گے اور اپنے جوشیلے انداز سے فن کا مظاہرہ کریں گے۔ وقت کی پابندی کا خیال رکھیں۔ اور یاد رہے اس پارٹی میں لاہور کے معروف بزنس مینز تشریف فرما رہے ہیں

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FBI's terrorism search goes undersea

They search the ocean depths hunting for evidence left by predators deadlier than great white sharks.
They are members of the FBI's Technical Dive Team, an elite group of special agents tracking terrorism underwater.
Starting next year, this 10-member team could be called on to search for evidence left behind by international terrorists in water contaminated by chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear waste.
"There have been enough scenarios recently," says team member Supervisory Special Agent James Tullbane, citing the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, which began when terrorists entered the port city by boat.
"If you look at Mumbai and you look at various international incidents that occurred where there's attacks on American civilians or attacks on American interests where water has been involved, ... we determined that we really do need to expand our capabilities."
A year ago, the FBI created the Technical Dive Team with a primary mission of gathering evidence after a terrorist attack to help find and prosecute those responsible.
The team's ability to operate in contaminated water and to dive at extreme depths sets these divers apart from the FBI's existing Underwater Search and Evidence Response Teams.
A large part of the Technical Dive Team's training is focused on diving in hazardous materials, Tullbane says. Instead of air tanks, the divers use a hose connected to a surface supply system.
"It not only provides the air, it collects the air that you exhale and brings it back to the surface," says Michael Tyms, the team's program manager.
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Two-faced cat claims Record

We all know cats have nine lives, but ... two faces?

Meet Frank and Louie, a rare cat known as a Janus who has earned a place in the 2012 Guinness World Records book as the oldest-living two-faced feline. 
Luckily for Frank and Louie's owner, who according to media reports lives in Worcester, Mass., the cat has only one stomach and one brain, so he doesn't require extra food to fill two bellies and has no split personality issues. He eats with just one of two mouths and does not have to worry about his three eyes making life confusing. Only two of them -- one on each face -- work, while the middle one just stares ahead, giving Frank and Louie perfect vision despite the somewhat cyclops-like appearance.
But love is blind, and Frank and Louie's owner loves him -- or them -- so much that she may have contributed to the cat's unusually long life.
When she rescued Frank and Louie from being euthanized 12 years ago, Marty -- who asked not to have her last name published for privacy's sake -- was warned that such cats rarely survive long because of problems linked to their condition, which is the result of a congenital defect, according to various media reports. But she "stood by the cat, and I'm really glad she did because this cat really has fewer problems than many cats that have very normal anatomies," said Armelle deLaforcade, head of the emergency services section at Tufts University's Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine, the Associated Press reported.

Marty was working there 12 years ago when the cat's owner brought the animal in to be euthanized. She brought him home and spent three months feeding him through tubes. As he grew, she said Frank and Louis developed a "very, very laid back" personality and is more dog-like than cat-like. He walks on a leash and loves riding in the car, she said while stroking the cat's silky coat. "Every day is kind of a blessing."
The technical term for the cat's condition is craniofacial duplication, or diprosopia, which can cause part or all of an individual's face to be duplicated. Such cats are called Janus, after the Roman god with two faces.
source: latimesblogs.latimes.com

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