Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Where are the happy and the sad?

Big Data, like everything else, will not be an unmixed blessing.  David Brooks elaborates here.  A subset of Big Data is happiness data, and a subset of that involves the geography of happiness. Now there is twitter-based geography of happiness data (hat tip TMG).

The freedom to pursue happiness is a wonderful thing. But the advice of where and how to do it has morphed with the self-improvement genre.  Endless demand and, therefore, supply. Cosmo and Playboy (and such) feasted on offering a steady stream of advice on how to catch (and satisfy) that man or woman.

Unlike slippery happiness, being good is within almost everyone's reach.  In fact, it may even make one happy.