• HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Monday, January 25, 2021
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
    • BIOENGINEERING
    • SCIENCE NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • FORUM
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Health

Penn interactive map shows community traits built from more than 37 billion tweets

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
July 5, 2017
in Health
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram
IMAGE

Credit: World Well-Being Project, University of Pennsylvania

It's no secret that communities across the United States differ greatly. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's World Well-Being Project sought a simple way to capture, explore and share such differences on a large scale. Their end goal: to provide individuals with valuable insights about where they live and offer comparisons to other communities.

The result is the Well-Being Map, an interactive, freely available tool based on the statistical language analysis of more than 37 billion publicly shared, geo-tagged tweets and on regional demographic data.

For every United States county, the map displays scores for a range of characteristics: well-being and personality traits like openness and extraversion, for example, plus government-reported health and socioeconomic factors such as heart-disease mortality and unemployment. Select a single trait to explore each county's measurements for that trait, or select two traits at once to compare how the traits differ across counties. Top 10 lists show the highest- and lowest-scoring counties in the nation and within every state for each characteristic, and a County Profiles page allows users to enter a county name and see how that county ranks in the nation for all reported characteristics.

If the project's scope sounds massive, that's because it was more than five years in the making, the long-term goal of the World Well-Being Project or WWBP itself, said Johannes Eichstaedt, a Penn postdoctoral fellow who co-founded WWBP, part of the University's Positive Psychology Center, and led the map's creation.

"The World Well-Being Project was established on the idea that we can measure psychological states of large populations in real time by analyzing their social media content," he said. "To get here, we collected huge data sets, built language-based prediction models, ran those models over tweets and demographic information and extracted language patterns associated with specific traits."

Such a process has proven successful in research to this point. In February 2015, Eichstaedt and colleagues published a study in the journal Psychological Science revealing that Twitter language can predict an area's rate of heart disease.

In the past half-decade, the 20 or so Penn scientists involved with the WWBP continue to promote significant research findings that come out of evaluating social media posts. But founding project member Lyle Ungar, a Penn professor with appointments in Medicine, Arts & Sciences, and at Wharton, said he wants the map to reach an even broader audience than did the academic work alone.

"I hope people will just want to play around with it. If I were considering moving somewhere in the U.S., I would want to know how happy people are there," Ungar said. "County-level psychological profiles are really, really important. What people are like in different areas affects economic and health outcomes as well as happiness."

Christie Versagli, WWBP's web development director who designed the map's web interface, said ideally the tool would influence policymaking, too.

She offers as an example a local government wanting to understand the effect of its policy decisions, such as the introduction of new exercise facilities. By analyzing local tweets to measure the well-being within that county before and after the investment, officials could determine its relative impact, such as changes in depression levels. Eichstaedt said the British government has already successfully field-tested similar evidence-based governing.

"The better you can measure," he added, "the better you can make these decisions."

Digging deeper within the map's data could also uncover "personality profiles" of communities, identifying places that need additional support, said Anneke Buffone, WWBP's lead research scientist. "We're looking for areas where we, as a country, can do better," she said. "By analyzing social media, we can get unexpected, in-depth insights into the processes that drive happiness and illness."

Though the map is now up and running, the WWBP team plans to keep adding enhancements. The ultimate goal is a live version showing real-time assessments of Tweets as they occur, especially during major events like a Presidential election, the Super Bowl, or a natural disaster.

"This event is happening right now. Everyone's tweeting about it. How are they feeling about it? Is one region responding differently than another? The map could reveal the immediate impact of an event in several different ways," Versagli said. "This is the type of modern measurement we're moving toward."

Staying true to its name, the World Well-Being Project plans to expand the map beyond the United States, partnering with groups in Spain, Mexico, Britain and China to uncover how social media can reveal well-being findings across the globe. Eichstaedt said he is also using the map's information to delve further into his own research. "We are looking around in the happy U.S. counties and comparing them to happy areas in other parts of the world, to understand how happiness unfolds across different cultures" he said.

Funding for the Well-Being Map was made possible by a grant from the Templeton Religion Trust.

###

Media Contact

Katherine Unger Baillie
[email protected]
215-898-9194
@Penn

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews

Original Source

https://news.upenn.edu/news/penn-interactive-map-shows-community-traits-built-more-37-billion-tweets

############

Story Source: Materials provided by Scienmag

Share12Tweet7Share2ShareShareShare1

Related Posts

IMAGE

To ward off cancer and other diseases we need to change our lifestyle and focus on innovation

January 25, 2021
IMAGE

Sport may fast-track numeracy skills for Indigenous children

January 25, 2021

New maintenance treatment for acute myeloid leukemia prolongs the lives of patients

January 22, 2021

Potential combined drug therapy for lung cancer

January 22, 2021
Next Post

Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation awards over $3.1M to top clinical investigators

Bowel cancer diagnosis delayed by other illness

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

POPULAR NEWS

  • IMAGE

    The map of nuclear deformation takes the form of a mountain landscape

    54 shares
    Share 22 Tweet 14
  • People living with HIV face premature heart disease and barriers to care

    68 shares
    Share 27 Tweet 17
  • New drug form may help treat osteoporosis, calcium-related disorders

    41 shares
    Share 16 Tweet 10
  • New findings help explain how COVID-19 overpowers the immune system

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Tags

Climate ChangeMedicine/HealthEcology/EnvironmentInfectious/Emerging DiseasesTechnology/Engineering/Computer ScienceBiologyChemistry/Physics/Materials SciencesPublic HealthMaterialscancerGeneticsCell Biology

Recent Posts

  • Identification of Oligo-DNA that promotes skeletal muscle differentiation
  • To ward off cancer and other diseases we need to change our lifestyle and focus on innovation
  • Sport may fast-track numeracy skills for Indigenous children
  • Highly efficient perovskite light-emitting diodes for next-generation display technology
  • Contact Us

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

© 2019 Bioengineer.org - Biotechnology news by Science Magazine - Scienmag.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In