Earworms meet Big Data (on Twitter)

Back in 2008, Dr. Lassi A. Liikkanen [pictured] of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), University of Helsinki, Finland performed a formal scientific study to investigate INvoluntary Musical Imagery (INMI), a phenomenon more commonly known as an Earworm. Now Dr Liikkanen, along with Kelly Jakubowski and Jukka M. Toivanen have for the first time […]

Effect of climate and seasonality on depressed mood among twitter users

Everything in the world has every effect, though on different people, is one possible interpretation of the meaning of this study: “Effect of climate and seasonality on depressed mood among twitter users,” Wei Yang, Lan Mu [pictured here], and Ye Shen, Applied Geography, Volume 63, September 2015, Pages 184–191. (Thanks to Tom Gill for bringing […]

Disruptive technology: Twitter and marital breakups, maybe

If you enjoy fun, conceivably-partly-true tales about disruptive technologies (as some people do — see, for example, Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen‘s tidy tales of disruption), then pay heed to the scholarly studies from Russell B. Clayton. Clayton, at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has a new study about Twitter and marital breakups: “The Third Wheel: The Impact of Twitter Use on […]

Counting curses (on Twitter, in English)

Words can be tallied. Words were. This study gives details: “Cursing in English on Twitter,” Wenbo Wang, Lu Chen, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan [pictured here], and Amit P. Sheth, paper presented at CSCW’14 , February 15-19 2014, Baltimore, MD, USA. The authors, at Wright State University, explain: “In this paper, we examine the characteristics of cursing activity […]

Why do shrews twitter?

Shrews, along with scurrying, spend a great deal of time twittering. German scientists Bjorn M. Siemers, Grit Schauermann, HendrikTurni and Sophie von Marten tried to figure out why. For that they developed an artificial shrew: Shrews are very vocal animals. We tested behaviourally whether the high-pitched laryngeal ‘twittering’ calls of as-yet unclear function serve for […]